Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

On March 21, 1878, Dostoevsky had lunch in the Winter Palace with the grand dukes and their tutors. K.R. was present and noted his impressions of the writer in his diary: “This is a sickly looking man, with a thin, long beard and extremely sad and thoughtful expression on his pale face. He speaks very well, as if reading a prepared text.”⁹

Judging by subsequent invitations to luncheons and dinners with the Romanov family circle, Dostoevsky’s “edifying” conversation with the grand dukes was considered a success. K.R. was delighted: “I love Dostoevsky for his pure, childlike heart, for his profound faith and observant mind.”¹⁰

Dostoevsky told his wife that the grand dukes “have kind hearts and not run-of-the-mill minds and can hold their own in a discussion, sometimes espousing still immature convictions; but they also know how to treat opposing views of their interlocutors with respect.”¹¹

This idyllic picture, “the great Russian writer instructs members of the ruling dynasty on questions of morality and piety,” might not have taken place. While the Romanov family loved Dostoevsky’s The Devils for its satirical depiction of “nihilists” and revolutionaries, they had read only a radically bowdlerized version.

Dostoevsky was unable to publish the most important chapter of The Devils (called “At Tikhon’s”), which contained “Stavrogin’s confession.” The demonic Nikolai Stavrogin, a central character in the novel, confesses a grievous sin to the monk Tikhon that has been tormenting his conscience: he had raped an underage girl.

The conservative Mikhail Katkov, an influential adviser of Alexander II and later of Alexander III, and editor of the journal Russian Herald, which published The Devils in installments, rejected that chapter as “too real”—the topic and the writing seemed shocking, verging on pornography. We can be sure that if “Stavrogin’s confession” had been printed in the journal, Dostoevsky would never have been invited to meet with the young Romanovs—he would have been a scandalous figure.

Dostoevsky was in despair from this literary vivisection at first: the most striking episode of the novel was gone. But then he accepted it, apparently—albeit with pain—and did not include the skipped chapter in a separate edition of The Devils. It was never published in his lifetime, appearing for the first time in 1922.

There is a theory that Dostoevsky dropped the chapter that was so dear to his heart because he feared a new wave of talk (there had been whispers for a long time) that the episode with the little girl had autobiographical roots. There is no question that Dostoevsky had a morbid fixation on the topic: there are similar occurrences in other novels—Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Raw Youth.

It is a very delicate issue. Contemporary Russian specialists speak cautiously about Dostoevsky’s possible nymphophilia.¹² His defenders foam at the mouth at this slander and gossip. But that “slander” was discussed by Turgenev and Tolstoy, which makes it at least a fact of the literary discourse of Dostoevsky’s era and therefore a fact of cultural history.

Dostoevsky wrote to his confidant, the poet Maikov, “Worst of all, my nature is vile and overly passionate, I always go to the last barrier everywhere and in everything, all my life I have crossed the line.” We know that Dostoevsky acknowledged his passion for gambling at roulette as one of his worst vices. He repented in his letters to his wife, Anna, calling himself every possible name: “feckless and base, a petty player”; “I’m worse than a beast”; and so on.

Dostoevsky’s “passion” is also recorded in his letters to his wife when it comes to sex. Despite the fact that she carefully excised (with an eraser) the most “indecent” passages when she prepared the letters for publication, a few things remain: “I kiss you every minute in my dreams, all of you, every minute, French kissing. I particularly love that about which was said: ‘and he was delighted and enthralled by that thing.’ I kiss that thing every minute in every manner and I intend to kiss it all my life.”¹³

When he got a letter from his wife with an innocent, even naive hint—“I have the most seductive dreams, and there is a lot in them of one very, very sweet and dear man, whom you know very well—guess who?”—he responded with a hot epistle in which she was later forced to erase twenty-eight lines from one page alone. Dostoevsky concluded his erotic outburst with a confession: “Anna, you can tell just from this page what’s happening to me. I’m in a delirium, I’m afraid I’ll have a fit. I kiss your hands and palms, and feet, and all of you.”¹⁴

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There is a story that Turgenev told, recorded by the writer Ieronim Yasinsky, that Dostoevsky came to Turgenev once and started “nervously” telling him how he bought sexual favors from a twelve-year-old girl for 500 rubles. Turgenev interrupted him and ordered him from the house immediately, and Dostoevsky allegedly confessed that he had made it up to “amuse” Turgenev.¹⁵

We know that Turgenev considered Dostoevsky to be the Russian Marquis de Sade from his letter to the writer Saltykov-Shchedrin dated September 24, 1882. Turgenev wrote with disgust that de Sade “insists with particular pleasure on the perverted voluptuous bliss that comes from imposing sophisticated torture and suffering” and added, “Dostoevsky also describes in detail the pleasures of one such connoisseur in one of his novels.”¹⁶

By this Turgenev clearly meant “Stavrogin’s confession” from The Devils. Turgenev had an account to settle with that novel. Besides the fact that he was caricatured in it as the pathetic Westernizer writer Karmazinov, he was envious of the book’s great success.

In 1862, Turgenev published Fathers and Sons, in which he first introduced the revolutionary “nihilist” character in his protagonist Bazarov. The author himself and the critics declared Bazarov “the new hero of our times,” and he was the subject of endless debate and controversy. This was the peak of Turgenev’s topicality for Russian readers.

Dostoevsky conceived his novel in great part as a polemical response to Fathers and Sons. Turgenev’s Bazarov was described by the author as “a grim, wild, big figure.” Dostoevsky’s nihilists are petty devils; he wanted to show how the Bazarov type had degenerated in post-reform Russia.

When he presented his Devils in 1873 to the future Emperor Alexander III, Dostoevsky explained in the accompanying letter that there was a straight line “from fathers to sons,” and that the Westernizers and liberals, like Belinsky and Turgenev, torn “from the native and unique sources of Russian life,” engendered contemporary terrorists.

Turgenev apparently was aware of Dostoevsky’s court maneuvers. In 1876, when Saltykov-Shchedrin asked why he wasn’t the tsarevich’s (that is, the future Alexander III’s) tutor, Turgenev responded proudly, although perhaps not quite sincerely, that he did not wish to be “the domestic author” of the Romanov family a la Dostoevsky: “You mention teaching the heir; but it was after Fathers and Sons that I distanced myself more than ever from the circle in which I basically never did have entree and writing or working for