I am really pleased with my novel. It is a serious and well-constructed work. But it has terrible shortcomings, too. Seeing it in print will make up to me for everything else. Now, while I have as yet no new ideas, I should rather like to write something that would introduce me to the public, or even for the mere money’s sake; not that I should at all wish to write rubbish, but for anything really serious I need a lot of time.
It is getting near the time, my dears, that I had hoped to spend with you all. But I shall not have the means, that is the money, for it. I have decided to stay on in my old abode. For here I have, at any rate, a contract with the landlord, and need not worry myself about anything for six months. It’s simply a case of my novel covering all! If I fail in this, I’ll hang myself.
I should like to have saved at least three hundred roubles by August. I can have the book printed for that. But the roubles run about like crabs in every direction. I had about four hundred worth of debts (including the new expenses and clothes); now I’m decently dressed for at least two years. But I really will come to you, anyhow. Write as soon as possible and say what you think about my staying on here. It is a crucial question. But what else can I do?
You write that you are terrified of the resourceless future. But Schiller will set right all that, and, besides, my novel may bring in something. Write soon. By the next post I’ll tell you all my decisions.
Kiss the children from me, and greet Emilie Fyodorovna. (Michael Dostoevsky’s wife.) I often think of you all. Perhaps it will interest you to know what I do when I’m not writing — well, I read. I read a great deal, and it has a curious effect on me. When I re-read anything that I knew years ago, I feel fresh powers in myself. I can pierce to the heart of the book, grasp it entire, and from it draw new confidence in myself. Of the writing of plays I don’t want to know anything.
To do one I should need years of repose and hard study. It is easy enough, indeed, to write plays today; the drama is more like melodrama. Shakespeare disappears in the fog. He looks, amid the fumes of our wretched modern drama, like a god, or a spectre of the Brocken. In the summer I shall, nevertheless, perhaps try again to write one. Just let us wait two or even three years! Brother, in literary matters I am not the same person that I was a couple of years ago. Then it was all childishness and folly. These two years of hard study have taken much from me, and brought much to me.
In the Invalide lately I read in the feuilleton about the German writers who died of hunger, cold, or in a mad-house. They were twenty in all — and what names! Even still it gives me the creeps. It’s better to be a charlatan, really….
VII. To his Brother Michael
May 4, 1845.
DEAREST BROTHER,
Forgive my not having written for so long. I have, as usual, had such a confounded lot to do. My novel, which I simply can’t break loose from, keeps me endlessly at work. If I had known beforehand how it would be, I should never have begun it at all. I decided to do it all over again, and, by God! that has improved it a lot: Now I’m ready with it once more, and this revision is really the last. I have given myself my word not to touch it again. After all, it’s the fate of all first books to be altered over and over again.
I don’t know whether Châteaubriand’s “Atala” was his first book, but I do know that he re-wrote it seventeen times. Pushkin did just the same with quite short poems. Gogol used to polish away at his wonderful works for two years at a time, and if you have read the “Sentimental Journey,” that witty book by Sterne, you’ll very likely remember what Walter Scott, in his article on Sterne, says with reference to Sterne’s servant, La Fleur.
La Fleur declared that his master had filled about two hundred quires of paper with the description of his journey through France. Now, the question is, What became of all that paper? The result was a little book, for writing which a parsimonious person (such as, for example, Plyushkin – A character in Gogol’s “Dead Souls” — the incarnation of avarice.) would have used half a quire. I can’t understand at all how that same Walter Scott could turn out such finished works as “Mannering” in a few weeks. Perhaps only because at that time he was forty years old.
I don’t in the least know, brother, what will become of me! You judge me falsely when you maintain that my situation doesn’t trouble me a bit. It worries me frightfully, and I often cannot sleep for nights and nights because of my tormenting thoughts. Wise folk tell me that I shall come to the ground if I publish the novel as a book. They admit that the book will be a very good one, but say that I am no business man… and that the booksellers are usurers; that they will rob me as a matter of course, and I, as sure as death, shall let them.
For these reasons I have resolved to bring out the novel in a journal — for example, the Otetchestvennia Zapiski. That has an edition of 2,500 copies, consequently it is read by at least 100,000 people. If I let the novel appear in this journal, my literary career and my whole future life are assured. I might easily make my fortune by it. And thus I shall gain a firm footing in the paper, and shall always have money; and if my novel appears in the August or September number, I can bring it out as a book on my own account in October, and that with the certain prospect that everyone who buys novels at all will get it. Moreover, the advertisement will cost me nothing. Well, so things stand!
Until I have arranged for the novel, I cannot come to Reval; I don’t want to waste any of my time. I must not flinch at any amount of hard work. I have, besides, a lot of new ideas, which will make a name for me in literature as soon as my first book has forged a path for me. These are, in short, my only views for the future.
But as to money, I have none, alas! The devil knows where it’s gone to. But, at all events, I have few debts….
When once I have produced the novel, I shall easily be able to arrange for your Schiller translation also, as true as I live! The “Juif Errant” isn’t bad. But Sue strikes me as very limited in range.
I don’t like to speak of it, dear brother, but your situation and the fate of your Schiller worry me so much that I often forget my own anxieties. And I really have not an easy time of it.
If I can’t publish the novel, I shall probably go into the Neva. What else should I do? I have thought of every single thing. I could not survive the death of my fixed idea.
Write to me soon, for I am sick of myself.
VIII. To his Brother Michael
October 8, 1845.
DEAREST BROTHER,
Until now I have had neither time nor spirits to write you anything about my own affairs. Everything was disgusting and hateful, and the whole world seemed a desert. In the first place, I had no money all the time, and was living on credit, which is most unpleasant, my dear and only friend. In the second, I was in that wretched mood wherein one loses all courage, yet does not fall into dull indifference — rather, which is much worse, thinks a great deal too much about one’s self, and rages uncontrollably.
At the beginning of this month Nekrassov (Nikolay Alexeyevitch Nekrassov (1821-77), a noted writer of Liberal tendencies; he edited from 1846 to 1866 the monthly magazine established by Pushkin, Sovremennik (=The Contemporary).) came to me and paid me back part of his debt; the rest I am to have in a few days. I must tell you that Bielinsky (Vissarion Grigoryevitch Bielinsky, a most distinguished Russian critic, of extreme Liberal tendency.) gave me, a fortnight ago, a comprehensive lesson on how to live in the literary world.
As a conclusion he told me that, for my soul’s sake, I must not ask less than two hundred roubles a printed sheet. In that case my “Goliadkin” (“The Double.”) would bring me in at least fifteen hundred roubles. Nekrassov, who was evidently conscience-stricken, anticipated him, and promised me on January 15 a hundred roubles more for
