Who did Dostoevsky marry? Fyodor Dostoevsky - biography, personal life of the writer: Man is a mystery. Fyodor Dostoevsky - biography of personal life

Name: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Age: 59 years old

Place of Birth: Moscow

A place of death: Saint Petersburg

Activity: Russian writer

Family status: was married

Fyodor Dostoevsky - biography

At the very first meeting with his future wife, Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, Dostoevsky told her, a complete stranger and unfamiliar girl, the story of his life. “His story made a terrible impression on me: a chill went down my spine,” recalled Anna Grigorievna. “This seemingly secretive and stern man told me his entire past life in such detail, so sincerely and sincerely that I was involuntarily surprised. Only later did I understand that Fyodor Mikhailovich, completely alone and surrounded by people hostile to him, at that time felt a thirst to openly tell someone a biography about his life...”

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in 1821 into the once noble noble family of the Dostoevskys, whose family came from the Russian-Lithuanian gentry. The chronicles mention the fact that back in 1506, Prince Fyodor Ivanovich Yaroslavich granted his voivode Danila Rtishchev the family coat of arms and the vast estate of Dostoevo near present-day Brest, and from that voivode the entire large Dostoevsky family came. However, by the beginning of the century before last, only one coat of arms remained from the family inheritance, and the father of the future writer, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky, was forced to feed his family with his own labor - he worked as a staff doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital on Bozhedomka in Moscow. The family lived in a wing at the hospital, and all eight children of Mikhail Andreevich and his wife Maria Fedorovna were born there.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - childhood and youth

Fedya Dostoevsky received a decent education for noble children of that time - he knew Latin, French and German. The children were taught the basics of literacy by their mother, then Fyodor, together with his older brother Mikhail, entered the Moscow private boarding school of Leonty Chermak. “The humane attitude towards us, children, on the part of our parents was the reason that during their lifetime they did not dare to place us in a gymnasium, although it would have cost much less,” Fyodor Mikhailovich’s brother, Andrei Dostoevsky, later wrote in his memoirs about the biography.

Gymnasiums did not enjoy a good reputation at that time, and they had the usual and ordinary corporal punishment for any slightest offense. As a result, private boarding houses were preferred.” When Fedor turned 16, his father sent him and Mikhail to study at Kostomarov’s private boarding school in St. Petersburg. After completing their studies, the boys moved to the St. Petersburg Military Engineering School, which was then considered one of the privileged educational institutions for the “golden youth”. Fyodor also considered himself among the elite - primarily the intellectual one, since the money his father sent was sometimes not enough even for the most necessary things.

Unlike Mikhail, who did not attach much importance to this, Fyodor was embarrassed by his old dress and the constant lack of cash. During the day, the brothers went to school, and in the evenings they often visited literary salons, where at that time the works of Schiller, Goethe, as well as Auguste Comte and Louis Blanc, French historians and sociologists fashionable in those years, were discussed.

The brothers' carefree youth ended in 1839, when news of their father's death came to St. Petersburg - according to the existing “family legend,” Mikhail Andreevich died on his Darovoye estate at the hands of his own serfs, whom he caught red-handed stealing timber. Perhaps it was the shock associated with the death of his father that forced Fyodor to move away from evenings in bohemian salons and join socialist circles, which were then active in large numbers among students.

The circle members talked about the ugliness of censorship and serfdom, the corruption of officials and the oppression of freedom-loving youth. “I can say that Dostoevsky never was and could not be a revolutionary,” his classmate Pyotr Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky later recalled. The only thing is that he, as a noble man of feeling, could be carried away by feelings of indignation and even anger at the sight of injustices and violence committed against the humiliated and insulted, which was the reason for his visits to Petrashevsky’s circle.”

It was under the influence of Petrashevsky’s ideas that Fyodor Mikhailovich wrote his first novel, “Poor People,” which made him famous. Success changed the life of yesterday's student - the engineering service was over, now Dostoevsky could rightfully call himself a writer. The name of Dostoevsky in his biography became known not only in the circles of writers and poets, but also among the general reading public. Dostoevsky's debut turned out to be successful, and no one had any doubt that his path to the heights of literary fame would be direct and easy.

But life decreed otherwise. In 1849, the “Petrashevsky case” broke out - the reason for the arrest was the public reading of Belinsky’s letter to Gogol, prohibited by censorship. All two dozen of those arrested, and Dostoevsky among them, repented of their passion for “harmful ideas.” Nevertheless, the gendarmes saw in their “disastrous conversations” signs of preparation for “unrest and riots that threaten the overthrow of all order, the violation of the most sacred rights of religion, law and property.”

The court sentenced them to death by shooting on the Semyonovsky parade ground, and only at the last moment, when all the convicts were already standing on the scaffold in death row clothes, the emperor relented and announced a pardon, replacing the execution with hard labor. Mikhail Petrashevsky himself was sent to hard labor for life, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, like most “revolutionaries,” received only 4 years of hard labor followed by service as an ordinary soldier.

Fyodor Dostoevsky served his term in Omsk. At first he worked in a brick factory, firing alabaster, and later worked in an engineering workshop. “For all four years I lived hopelessly in the prison, behind the walls, and only went out to work,” the writer recalled. - The work was hard, and sometimes I was exhausted, in bad weather, in wetness, in slush, or in winter in unbearable cold... We lived in a heap, all together, in the same barracks. The floor is dirty to an inch, the ceiling is dripping - everything is dripping. We slept on bare bunks, only one pillow was allowed. They covered themselves with short sheepskin coats, and their legs were always bare all night. You'll tremble all night. I count those 4 years as the time during which he was buried alive and closed in a coffin...” During hard labor, Dostoevsky’s epilepsy worsened, attacks of which later tormented him all his life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Semipalatinsk

After his release, Dostoevsky was sent to serve in the seventh Siberian linear battalion at the Semipalatinsk fortress - then this town was known not as a nuclear testing site, but as a run-of-the-mill fortress that guarded the border from raids by Kazakh nomads. “It was a half-city, half-village with crooked wooden houses,” recalled Baron Alexander Wrangel, who served as the prosecutor of Semipalatinsk at that time, many years later. Dostoevsky was settled in an ancient hut, which stood in the most bleak place: a steep wasteland, shifting sand, not a bush, not a tree.

Fyodor Mikhailovich paid five rubles for his premises, laundry and food. But what was his food like! A soldier was then given four kopecks for welding. Of these four kopecks, the company commander and cook kept one and a half kopecks for their benefit. Of course, life was cheap then: one pound of meat cost a penny, a pound of buckwheat cost thirty kopecks. Fyodor Mikhailovich took home his daily portion of cabbage soup. porridge and black bread, and if he didn’t eat it himself, he gave it to his poor mistress...”

It was there, in Semipalatinsk, that Dostoevsky first fell seriously in love. His chosen one was Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the wife of a former gymnasium teacher, and now an official in the tavern department, exiled from the capital to the ends of the world for some sins. “Maria Dmitrievna was over thirty years old,” recalled Baron Wrangel. - Quite a beautiful blonde of medium height, very thin, passionate and exalted in nature. She caressed Fyodor Mikhailovich, but I don’t think she deeply appreciated him, she simply took pity on the unfortunate man, beaten down by fate... I don’t think that Maria Dmitrievna was in any serious way in love.

Fyodor Mikhailovich mistook the feeling of pity and compassion for mutual love and fell in love with her with all the fervor of his youth.” Painful and fragile. Maria reminded the writer of his mother, and in his attitude towards her there was more tenderness than passion. Dostoevsky was ashamed of his feelings for a married woman, worried and tormented by the hopelessness of the situation. But about a year after they met, in August 1855, Isaev died suddenly, and Fyodor Mikhailovich immediately proposed marriage to his beloved, which, however, the widow did not immediately accept.

They got married only at the beginning of 1857, when Dostoevsky received an officer rank and Maria Dmitrievna gained confidence that he could provide for her and her son Pavel. But, unfortunately, this marriage did not live up to Dostoevsky’s hopes. Later he wrote to Alexander Wrangel: “Oh, my friend, she loved me infinitely, I loved her also without measure, but we did not live happily with her... We were positively unhappy together (according to her strange, suspicious and painful- fantastic character) - we could not stop loving each other; even the more unhappy they were, the more attached they became to each other.”

In 1859, Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg with his wife and stepson. And he discovered that his name was not at all forgotten by the public; on the contrary, the fame of a writer and a “political prisoner” accompanied him everywhere. He began writing again - first the novel “Notes from the House of the Dead”, then “Humiliated and Insulted”, “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”. Together with his older brother Mikhail, he opened the magazine “Time” - his brother, who bought his own tobacco factory with his father’s inheritance, subsidized the publication of the almanac.

Alas, several years later it turned out that Mikhail Mikhailovich was a very mediocre businessman, and after his sudden death, both the factory and the editorial office of the magazine were left with huge debts that Fyodor Mikhailovich had to take on. Later, his second wife, Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, wrote: “To pay these debts, Fyodor Mikhailovich had to work beyond his strength... How would my husband’s works benefit artistically if he, without these debts incurred, could write novels without rushing through, scanning and finishing before sending them to press.

In literature and society, Dostoevsky’s works are often compared with the works of other talented writers and Dostoevsky is reproached for the excessive complexity, intricacy and congestion of his novels, while others’ works are polished, and Turgenev’s, for example, are almost jewelry-honed. And rarely does it occur to anyone to remember and weigh the circumstances under which other writers lived and worked, and under which my husband lived and worked.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky - biography of personal life

But then, in the early 60s, it seemed that Dostoevsky had a second youth. He amazed those around him with his ability to work; he was often excited and cheerful. At this time, a new love came to him - it was a certain Apollinaria Suslova, a graduate of the boarding school for noble maidens, who later became the prototype for both Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot and Polina in The Player. Apollinaria was the complete opposite of Maria Dmitrievna - a young, strong, independent girl.

And the feelings that the writer experienced for her were also completely different from his love for his wife: instead of tenderness and compassion - passion and desire to possess. In her memoirs about her father, Fyodor Mikhailovich’s daughter Lyubov Dostoevskaya wrote that Apollinaria sent him “a declaration of love” in the fall of 1861. The letter was found among my father's papers - it is written simply, naively and poetically. At first impression, we see a timid young girl, blinded by the genius of the great writer. Dostoevsky was touched by Polina's letter. This declaration of love came to him at the moment when he needed it most..."

Their relationship lasted three years. At first, Polina was flattered by the adoration of the great writer, but gradually her feelings for Dostoevsky cooled. According to Fyodor Mikhailovich’s biographers, Apollinaria was expecting some kind of romantic love, but met the real passion of a mature man. Dostoevsky himself assessed his passion this way: “Apollinaria is a great egoist. The selfishness and pride in her are colossal. She demands everything from people, all perfections, does not forgive a single imperfection in respect for other good traits, but she herself relieves herself of the slightest responsibilities towards people.” Leaving his wife in St. Petersburg. Dostoevsky traveled around Europe with Apollinaria, spent time in casinos - Fyodor Mikhailovich turned out to be a passionate but unlucky gambler - and lost a lot at roulette.

In 1864, Dostoevsky’s “second youth” unexpectedly ended. In April, his wife Maria Dmitrievna died. and literally three months later, brother Mikhail Mikhailovich died suddenly. Dostoevsky subsequently wrote to his old friend Wrangel: “... I was suddenly left alone, and I simply became scared. My whole life was turned in two at once. The one half I crossed had everything I lived for. and in the other, still unknown half, everything is alien, everything is new, and not a single heart that could replace both of them for me.”

In addition to mental suffering, the death of his brother also entailed serious financial consequences for Dostoevsky: he found himself without money and without a magazine, which was closed for debts. Fyodor Mikhailovich proposed to Apollinaria Suslova to marry him - this would also solve the issues with his debts, because Polina was from a fairly wealthy family. But the girl refused; by that time, not a trace remained of her enthusiastic attitude towards Dostoevsky. In December 1864, she wrote in her diary: “People are telling me about FM. I just hate him. He made me suffer so much when it was possible to do without suffering.”

Another failed bride of the writer was Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, a representative of an ancient noble family, the sister of the famous Sofia Kovalevskaya. According to the writer’s biographers, at first things seemed to be heading towards a wedding, but then the engagement was terminated without explanation. However, Fyodor Mikhailovich himself always claimed that it was he who freed the bride from this promise: “This is a girl of high moral qualities: but her beliefs are diametrically opposed to mine, and she cannot give them up, she is too straightforward. It’s unlikely that our marriage could be happy.”

From life's hardships, Dostoevsky tried to hide abroad, but creditors pursued him there too, threatening deprivation of copyright, inventory of property and debtor's prison. His relatives also demanded money - the widow of his brother Mikhail believed that Fedor was obliged to provide her and her children with a decent existence. Desperately trying to get at least some money, he entered into enslaving contracts to write two novels at once - “The Gambler” and “Crime and Punishment”, but soon realized that he had neither the moral nor the physical strength to meet the deadlines set by the contracts. Dostoevsky tried to distract himself by playing, but luck, as usual, did not favor him, and, losing his last money, he became increasingly depressed and melancholy. In addition, due to his undermined mental balance, he was literally tormented by epileptic attacks.

It was in this state that 20-year-old Anna Grigorievna Snitkina found the writer. Anna first heard the name of Dostoevsky at the age of 16 - from her father Grigory Ivanovich, a poor nobleman and petty St. Petersburg official who was a passionate admirer of literature and was fond of theater. According to her own recollections, Anya secretly took the edition of “Notes from the House of the Dead” from her father, read it at night and shed bitter tears on the pages. She was an ordinary St. Petersburg girl of the mid-19th century - from the age of nine she was sent to study at the School of St. Anna on Kirochnaya Street, then to the Mariinsky Women's Gymnasium.

Anyuta was an excellent student, voraciously read women's novels and seriously dreamed of reorganizing this world - for example, becoming a doctor or teacher. Despite the fact that already during her studies at the gymnasium it became clear that literature for her was much closer and more interesting than the natural sciences. In the fall of 1864, graduate Snitkina entered the physics and mathematics department of Pedagogical Courses. But neither physics nor mathematics were good for her, and biology became a torment: when the teacher in the class began to dissect a dead cat, Anya fainted.

In addition, a year later her father became seriously ill, and Anna had to earn money herself to support the family. She decided to leave her teaching career and went to study shorthand courses opened by the then famous Professor Olkhin. “At first I was completely unsuccessful at shorthand,” Anya later recalled, “and only after the 5th or 6th lecture did I begin to master this gibberish writing.” A year later, Anya Snitkina was considered Olkhin’s best student, and when Dostoevsky himself approached the professor, wanting to hire a stenographer, he didn’t even have a doubt about who to send to the famous writer.

Their acquaintance took place on October 4, 1866. “At twenty-five minutes past eleven I approached Alonkin’s house and asked the janitor standing at the gate where apartment No. 13 was,” Anna Grigorievna recalled. - The house was large, with many small apartments inhabited by merchants and artisans. It immediately reminded me of the house in the novel Crime and Punishment, in which the hero of the novel Raskolnikov lived. Dostoevsky's apartment was on the second floor. I rang the bell, and the door was immediately opened by an elderly maid who invited me into the dining room...

The maid asked me to sit down, saying that the master would come now. Indeed, about two minutes later Fyodor Mikhailovich appeared... At first glance, Dostoevsky seemed quite old to me. But as soon as he spoke, he immediately became younger, and I thought that he was unlikely to be more than thirty-five to seven years old. He was of average height and stood very erect. Light brown, even slightly reddish hair, was heavily pomaded and carefully smoothed. But what struck me were his eyes; they were different: one was brown, in the other the pupil was dilated throughout the entire eye and the iris was imperceptible. This duality of the eyes gave Dostoevsky’s gaze a kind of mysterious expression...”

However, at first their work did not go well: Dostoevsky was irritated by something and smoked a lot. He tried to dictate a new article for Russkiy Vestnik, but then, apologizing, he suggested that Anna come over in the evening, around eight o’clock. Arriving in the evening, Snitkina found Fyodor Mikhailovich in much better condition, he was talkative and hospitable. He admitted that he liked the way she behaved at the first meeting - seriously, almost sternly, she did not smoke and did not at all resemble modern girls with bobbed hair. Gradually they began to communicate freely, and unexpectedly for Anna, Fyodor Mikhailovich suddenly began to tell her the biography of his life.

This evening conversation became the first pleasant event for Fyodor Mikhailovich in such a difficult last year of his life. The very next morning after his “confession” he wrote in a letter to the poet Maikov: “Olkhin sent me his best student... Anna Grigorievna Snitkina is a young and rather pretty girl, 20 years old, of good family, who completed her gymnasium course excellently, with an extremely kind and clear character. Our work went great...

Thanks to the efforts of Anna Grigorievna, Dostoevsky managed to fulfill the incredible terms of the contract with the publisher Stellovsky and write the entire novel “The Player” in twenty-six days. “At the end of the novel, I noticed that my stenographer sincerely loved me,” Dostoevsky wrote in one of his letters. -Although she never said a word to me about it, I liked her more and more. Since my life has been terribly boring and hard for me since the death of my brother, I asked her to marry me... The difference in years is terrible (20 and 44), but I am more and more convinced that she will be happy. She has a heart, and she knows how to love.”

Their engagement took place literally a month after they met - November 8, 1866. As Anna Grigorievna herself recalled, when making the proposal, Dostoevsky was very worried and, afraid of receiving an outright refusal, first spoke about the fictional characters of the novel he supposedly conceived: they say, do you think that a young girl, let’s say her name is Anya, could fall in love with someone who loves her tenderly? , but an old and sick artist, also burdened with debts?

“Imagine that this artist is me, that I confessed my love to you and asked you to be my wife. Tell me, what would you answer me? - Fyodor Mikhailovich’s face expressed such embarrassment, such heartache that I finally realized that this was not just a literary conversation and that I would deal a terrible blow to his vanity and pride if I gave an evasive answer. I looked at the excited face of Fyodor Mikhailovich, so dear to me, and said: “I would answer you that I love you and will love you all my life!”

I will not pass on the tender, love-filled words that Fyodor Mikhailovich spoke to me in those unforgettable moments: they are sacred to me...”

Their wedding took place on February 15, 1867 at about 8 pm in the Izmailovsky Trinity Cathedral in St. Petersburg. It seemed that Anna Grigorievna’s joy would have no end, but literally a week later the harsh reality reminded itself of itself. Firstly, Dostoevsky’s stepson Pavel spoke out against Anna, who regarded the appearance of a new woman as a threat to his interests. “Pavel Alexandrovich formed a view of me as a usurper, as a woman who forcibly entered their family, where hitherto he was the complete master,” Dostoevskaya recalled.

Unable to interfere with our marriage, Pavel Alexandrovich decided to make it unbearable for me. It is very possible that with his constant troubles, quarrels and slander against me to Fyodor Mikhailovich, he hoped to quarrel us and force us to separate.” Secondly, the young wife was constantly slandered by other relatives of the writer, who feared that she would “cut” the amount of financial assistance that Dostoevsky distributed to them from his fees. It got to the point that after just a month of living together, constant scandals made the life of the newlyweds so difficult. that Anna Grigorievna was seriously afraid of a final break in relations.

The catastrophe, however, did not happen - and mainly thanks to the extraordinary intelligence, determination and energy of Anna Grigorievna herself. She pawned all her valuables in the pawnshop and persuaded Fyodor Mikhailovich to go abroad, to Germany, secretly from his relatives, in order to change the situation and live together at least for a short time. Dostoevsky agreed to escape, explaining his decision in a letter to the poet Maikov: “There are two main reasons. 1) Save not only mental health, but even life in certain circumstances. .. 2) Creditors.”

It was planned that the trip abroad would take only three months, but thanks to Anna Grigorievna’s prudence, she managed to snatch her loved one out of her usual environment for four whole years, which prevented her from becoming a full-fledged wife. “Finally, a period of serene happiness came for me: there were no financial worries, there were no persons standing between me and my husband, there was a complete opportunity to enjoy his company.”

Anna Grigorievna also weaned her husband from his addiction to roulette, somehow managing to evoke shame in his soul for the lost money. Dostoevsky wrote in one of his letters to his wife: “A great thing has happened to me, the vile fantasy that tormented me for almost ten years has disappeared (or, better, since the death of my brother, when I was suddenly depressed by debts): I dreamed of winning everything; dreamed seriously, passionately... Now it's all over! I will remember this all my life and bless you, my angel, every time. No, now it’s yours, yours inseparably, all yours. Until now, half of this damned fantasy belonged to me.”

In February 1868, in Geneva, the Dostoevskys finally gave birth to their first child - daughter Sophia. “But we were not given long to enjoy our cloudless happiness. - wrote Anna Figorievna. - In the first days of May, the weather was wonderful, and we, on the urgent advice of the doctor, took our dear baby to the park every day, where she slept in her stroller for two or three hours. One unfortunate day during such a walk the weather suddenly changed, and apparently the girl caught a cold, because that same night she developed a fever and a cough.” Already on May 12, she died, and the Dostoevskys’ grief seemed to know no bounds.

“Life seemed to have stopped for us; all our thoughts, all our conversations were focused on memories of Sonya and that happy time when she illuminated our lives with her presence... But the merciful God took pity on our suffering: we soon became convinced that God had blessed our marriage and we could hope again have a child. Our joy was immeasurable, and my dear husband began to take care of me just as carefully. just like during my first pregnancy.”

Later, Anna Grigorievna gave birth to her husband two more sons - the eldest Fedor (1871) and the youngest Alexei (1875). True, the Dostoevsky couple once again had the bitter fate of surviving the death of their child: in May 1878, three-year-old Alyosha died from an attack of epilepsy.

Anna Grigorievna supported her husband in difficult times, was both a loving wife and a spiritual friend for him. But besides this, she became for Dostoevsky, in modern terms, his literary agent and manager. It was thanks to his wife’s practicality and initiative that he was able to finally pay off all the debts that had poisoned his life for years. Anna Grigorievna started with that. What. Having studied the intricacies of publishing, she decided to print and sell Dostoevsky’s new book herself - the novel “Demons”.

She did not rent a room for this, but simply indicated her home address in newspaper advertisements and paid the buyers herself. Much to her husband’s surprise, literally within a month the entire circulation of the book had already been sold out, and Anna Grigorievna officially established a new enterprise: “F.M. Book Trade Store.” Dostoevsky (exclusively for nonresidents).”

Finally, it was Anna Grigorievna who insisted that the family leave noisy St. Petersburg forever - away from obsessive and greedy relatives. The Dostoevskys chose to live in the town of Staraya Russa in the Novgorod province, where they bought a two-story wooden mansion.

Anna Grigorievna wrote in her memoirs: “The time spent in Russa is one of my most beautiful memories. The children were quite healthy, and throughout the entire winter they never had to call a doctor to see them. which did not happen when we lived in the capital. Fyodor Mikhailovich also felt good: thanks to a calm, measured life and the absence of all unpleasant surprises (so frequent in St. Petersburg), the husband’s nerves became stronger, and epileptic seizures occurred less frequently and were less severe.

And as a result of this, Fyodor Mikhailovich rarely got angry and irritated, and was always almost good-natured, talkative and cheerful... Our daily life in Staraya Russa was all distributed by hour, and this was strictly observed. Working at night, my husband got up no earlier than eleven o'clock. When he went out to drink coffee, he called the children, and they happily ran to him and told him all the incidents that happened that morning, and about everything they saw on their walk. And Fyodor Mikhailovich, looking at them, rejoiced and maintained the liveliest conversation with them.

Neither before nor since have I seen a person who could do it as well as my husband. enter into the worldview of children and thus interest them in your conversation. In the afternoon, Fyodor Mikhailovich called me into his office to dictate what he had managed to write during the night... In the evening, Fyodor Mikhailovich was playing with the children, to the sounds of an organ (Fyodor Mikhailovich himself bought it for the children, and now they are also having fun with it his grandchildren) danced with me the quadrille, waltz and mazurka. My husband especially loved the mazurka and, to be fair, he danced it wildly and enthusiastically...”

Fyodor Dostoevsky - death and funeral

In the fall of 1880, the Dostoevsky family returned to St. Petersburg. They decided to spend this winter in the capital - Fyodor Mikhailovich complained of poor health, and Anna Grigorievna was afraid to entrust his health to provincial doctors. On the night of January 25-26, 1881, he was working as usual when his fountain pen fell behind a bookcase. Fyodor Mikhailovich tried to move the bookcase, but from the intense tension his throat began to bleed - in recent years the writer suffered from emphysema. For the next two days, Fyodor Mikhailovich remained in serious condition, and on the evening of January 28 he died.

Dostoevsky's funeral became a historical event: almost thirty thousand people accompanied his coffin to the Alecheandro-Nevsky Lavra. Every Russian experienced the death of the great writer as national mourning and personal grief.

For a long time Anna Grigorievna could not come to terms with the death of Dostoevsky. On the day of her husband’s funeral, she made a vow to devote the rest of her life to serving his name. Anna Grigorievna continued to live in the past. As her daughter Lyubov Fedorovna wrote, “Mom did not live in the twentieth century, but remained in the 70s of the nineteenth. Her people are the friends of Fyodor Mikhailovich, her society is a circle of departed people close to Dostoevsky. She lived with them. Everyone who works on the study of the life or works of Dostoevsky seemed like a close person to her.”

Anna Grigorievna died in June 1918 in Yalta and was buried in a local cemetery - far from St. Petersburg, from her relatives, from Dostoevsky’s grave, dear to her. In her will, she asked that she be buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, next to her husband, and that a separate monument not be erected, but just a few lines cut out. In 1968, her last wish was fulfilled.

Three years after the death of Anna Grigorievna, the famous literary critic L.P. Grossman wrote about her: “She managed to melt Dostoevsky’s tragic personal life into the calm and complete happiness of his last time. She undoubtedly extended Dostoevsky's life. With the deep wisdom of a loving heart, Anna Grigorievna managed to solve the most difficult task - to be the life companion of a neurotic person, a former convict, an epileptic and the greatest creative genius.”

Eroticism of Dostoevsky

We find vivid manifestations of Dostoevsky's eroticism in his love dramas, in the intensity of the passions of his intimate relationships, in his successes and defeats with women, as well as in the depiction of heroines and heroes in novels and stories. In all his works, Dostoevsky depicted the failures of love, associated with sacrifice and suffering. At the same time, he could not or did not want to describe love as triumphant, joyful and confident as a man. The intensity of his eroticism and sexual tension are explained by his unfettered imagination and forced periods of abstinence from communicating with women. Abstinence occurred, for example, during the period of hard labor, due to illness, suspiciousness, and melancholy.

By temperament, Dostoevsky was a man of great passions, deep sensuality and insatiable voluptuousness. After a long accumulation of intimate relationships with women, he came to the conclusion that the power of sex over a person is very great and that a person’s will can be subordinated to the physical arousal of passion, and the mental incitement of sexual desire (in our time - masturbation) is worse than the “sin” itself. , i.e. intimate relationships. This can be explained by the fact that in his youth Dostoevsky was well aware of this mental (mental) kindling of the flesh, this game of erotic imagination, and he also knew the direct satisfaction of sexual need, which, having accumulated experience in intimate relationships with women, he called “sin.”

The combination in a woman’s character of childish and feminine principles, fragility and grace in the figure aroused in Dostoevsky an acute physical attraction, awakened his erotic fantasy, and then such a woman seemed extraordinary and desirable to him. Moreover, if this woman suffered, then this attracted his attention even more, struck his imagination and evoked a sensual impulse, which led to complex experiences that Dostoevsky could not and did not always want to understand. This is explained by the fact that sensitivity to someone else’s grief, a woman’s, increased his erotic excitability.

Therefore, in Dostoevsky’s eroticism, sadistic and masochistic desires were intertwined in the most bizarre way: to love meant to sacrifice oneself and respond with one’s whole soul and whole body to the suffering of others, even at the cost of one’s own torment.

But to love also meant for Dostoevsky to torment oneself, to cause suffering, to painfully wound a beloved being. Not every woman could share with Dostoevsky either his voluptuousness or his sensuality, given his heightened sexuality, his complexes of masochism and sadism. As in life, so in love, he was a difficult and strange person. His love was not easy - with contradictions of tenderness, compassion, thirst for physical attraction, fear of causing pain and an uncontrollable desire for torment. He didn't know simple feelings. His love tore both body and soul apart. At the same time, the great writer, who knew how to unravel and imagine all the twists of the mind and heart of his numerous and complex heroes, did not find words when he had to talk about his own experiences.

Dostoevsky had a special kind of erotic quality - a feeling that both men and women sometimes experience in relation to those who had intimate relations with their partners. Dostoevsky had this feeling towards the teacher Vergunov, the constant lover of his first wife Marya Dimitrievna. He took care of him even after marriage and said that Vergunov “is now dearer to me than my own brother.”

Dostoevsky's eroticism is built on the fact that in his imagination, feelings and dreams, voluptuousness is inseparable from torment. For all his heroes, as the main motive of their sexuality, the thirst for power over sex or the thirst for victimization of sex comes to the fore. This eroticism of Dostoevsky survived him for many, many years. Today we see in American films about love that the basis of their plots is Dostoev’s sexuality, i.e. “the thirst for power over sex or the thirst for the victim of sex.” Let’s compare the love drama in an American film with the words of the hero of Dostoevsky’s “The Gambler”:

“And wild, unlimited power - even over a fly - is also a kind of pleasure. Man is a despot by nature and loves to be a tormentor.”

Scenes of violence and physical sadism are found in almost all of Dostoevsky's novels. In the novel “Demons,” Stavrogin, with bated breath, watches as a girl is flogged with rods because of him: he will then rape her.

More than a hundred years have passed since the death of Dostoevsky, and today the best detective novels and action films are only built on “scenes of violence and physical sadism.”

Pain, suffering, as an undivided part of love, physical torment associated with sexual intercourse, and mental torment associated with the entire sensual sphere of intimacy between a man and a woman - such was Dostoevsky’s eroticism in the years of his maturity.

It was not only beauty and charm that attracted Dostoevsky in the women he loved or desired, they excited and captivated him with something else. This was different - absolute defenselessness, which promised complete submission, humility and passivity of the victim, or, on the contrary, sharp power, which promised humiliation and pleasure from the pain caused by the woman he loved. Between these two poles lay all the fluctuations and contradictions in Dostoevsky’s relations with all his lovers.

Much of Dostoevsky’s sadistic and masochistic inclinations confused him, although he was sure that cruelty, love of torment, as well as the voluptuousness of self-abasement are in human nature, and therefore natural, like other vices and instincts of people.

Dostoevsky was always attracted to very young women, and he transferred his sexual fantasies to young girls. And in his works, he repeatedly described various loves of a mature or old man with a young girl. Regardless of how fair it is to assume that Dostoevsky himself knew such temptations, he perfectly understood and masterfully described the physical passion of a mature man for teenagers and girls.

Imagination played a large role in Dostoevsky's eroticism. Just as in creativity one cannot assume that the writer depicts in his works only what really happened to him, so in Dostoevsky’s eroticism one cannot see only his personal experience. In the creative imagination one should distinguish between thoughts and deeds and experience. Unfulfilled desires and thoughts also feed artistic imagination. Dostoevsky in his eroticism has many sexual fantasies - torture, rape and others that did not happen to him in reality, but were described by him with stunning realism. And this fantasy already seems like a reality to anyone who has entered the world of voluptuousness and perversion created by the imagination of Dostoevsky - this brilliant tormentor and martyr.

In Dostoevsky's eroticism, an insatiable curiosity for all the tricks and varieties of vice, for variations and combinations of passions, for the deviations and oddities of human nature found its place. This curiosity explained why he showed interest in “fallen creatures”, became friends with street women and among them with hardened, cynical professionals - their crude eroticism had an irresistible effect on him. However, Dostoevsky’s intense interest in his youth in “lost personalities” and the St. Petersburg slums dwindled in the mid-sixties, and he rarely visited nightlife establishments. By 1865, after a love drama with the young girl Apollinaria, his passions had noticeably subsided and a lot of things in him had burned out. His erotic characteristics and desires of these years did not become a habit for the rest of his life, at some point they reached their maximum height, then burned out, and others were reborn - they lost their intensity, the heat of the blood subsided and most of them surrendered to the heavy burden of memories that manifest themselves in sexual fantasies. By this time - by 1865, Dostoevsky's masochism and sadism, his complexes associated with minors, his sexual fervor and curiosity, that is, the entire pathological side of his erotic life, lose the character of frenzy and mania, become dulled, and he consciously strives for to what might be called the “normalization of his sexual activity.” Perhaps this is where his dreams of marriage and his attraction to young girls of marriageable age intensify. He knew his nature well: only in the company of young girls did he have the joy of being and hope for happiness. In a young girl, the combination of childishness and femininity for Dostoevsky turned into a source of erotic attraction. Youth excited him and promised physical pleasure. He found all this in his second wife of twenty years, Anna Grigorievna. The Dostoevskys, from intimate intimacy, revealed the best sides of their nature, and Anna Grigorievna, who fell in love and married the author of “The Gambler,” saw that he was a completely extraordinary, brilliant, terrible, difficult person, and he, who married his secretary-stenographer, discovered that not only is he “the patron and protector of the young creature,” but she is his friend and support.

At sixty years old, Dostoevsky was just as jealous as in his youth, but he was also just as passionate in the manifestations of his love for Anna Grigorievna. Sexual tension was explained not only by the sexual habit of marriage with a young wife, but also by the intensity of Dostoevsky's eroticism and his imagination and the consciousness that the young woman, who had already lived with him for a whole decade, not only loved him, but was also physically satisfied. Dostoevsky's sensuality remained as heightened as in his youth; the years of old age changed little in his character and temperament. Towards the end of his life he was unusually thin and emaciated, tired easily, suffered from his emphysema and lived solely on his nerves.

Dostoevsky's eroticism knew no bounds, and one can only imagine all the indomitable passions in the fire of which this extraordinary, frantic and mysterious man burned.

DOSTOEVSKY AND WE

Dostoevsky and we are modern people of human society at the end of the twentieth century. In what connection do Dostoevsky’s ideas affect us, modern people? Do we live “according to Dostoevsky”, do we experience the same feelings, do we have the same thoughts as his heroes of the 19th century?

Dostoevsky, by his own admission, spent his whole life studying the “secret of man” - he explored the spiritual life of man. He wrote:

“They call me a psychologist, which is not true, I am only a realist in the highest sense, that is, I depict all the depths of the human soul.” There are no landscapes or pictures of nature in Dostoevsky's novels. He depicts only man and the human world. Its heroes are people of modern urban civilization who have fallen out of the natural world order and have become disconnected from “living life.” And the people of the late twentieth century, that is, we, moved even further away from nature and became even more detached from “living life.”

In his works, Dostoevsky plunged into the depths of the subconscious and explored the mental life of children and adolescents; he studied the psyche of madmen, maniacs, fanatics, criminals, murderers and suicides.

Modern people mainly read detective books, watch thriller films, where the main characters are those whose souls Dostoevsky studied - murderers, criminals, madmen and maniacs. And modern man himself in his life increasingly experiences the hardships of life created by Dostoevsky’s heroes - maniacs (for example, Hitler), criminals and murderers.

Dostoevsky, as we have seen, gravitated towards young girls. His first love - Apollinaria and his wife Anna - were young innocent girls. In the company of a young girl, he perked up, “soared in spirit,” and forgot about his age.

The phenomenon, so to speak, of Dostoevsky’s “young girl” was that, on the one hand, she, a girl, has a stronger and deeper effect on a person, on the other, on her face, in her figure, gestures, words, exclamations, Laughter conveys her feelings, moods, and movements of the soul faster and more clearly, more accessible to strangers. And in this case, Dostoevsky, as a very sensitive nature, preferred to deal with girls than with mature women, in whom, due to their experience, silent voice and sometimes a thick layer of fat on their bodies, it is difficult to discern sincere emotional impulses.

In the 19th century, Dostoevsky loved and communicated with young girls. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, we all “love” young girls - advertising takes full advantage of young girls. We see them in almost all commercials, on television screens, etc. Why isn’t life “according to Dostoevsky”?

Dostoevsky, a single man, had an increased interest in young children, in their spiritual life, in their psyche. This phenomenon has become noticeable in our time: many publications are devoted to child molestation. There are many reports of girls being raped by their fathers in their families. Child prostitution has developed in the countries of Southeast Asia, especially in Thailand, where there are many children's brothels. Underage child sex work is developed in the United States. And this “phenomenon” is growing.

What explains it? If Dostoevsky had heightened sensitivity, and he used it to explore the area of ​​\u200b\u200bmental life, as a means of understanding the human spirit in order to protect the dignity, personality and freedom of man, then modern man has dulled sensitivity, he has the consciousness of a “hunted mouse”, and In order to get out of it, he molests a minor or “shows off” a minor prostitute for money, feeling like a “strong personality” to whom “everything is allowed.”

All of Dostoevsky's works are dedicated to crimes and punishments. When he wrote them, he was addressing us, the people of the late twentieth century. It seems that humanity after Dostoevsky and up to the present day has been busy inventing more and more new crimes, and not only against an individual, but also against humanity (fascism, for example).

Dostoevsky individualized and dissected the external influence on a person - on his soul, in order to understand it deeper and better. And in this we follow him. But today we do not strive to understand the human soul, but strive to influence it in order to receive greater profit from this influence.

An example of this is modern music (pop music, ensembles, all kinds of groups, recording discs), which affects listeners not with the content of the songs, not with the melody, but with the sound - low, high, percussive, sharp. Thus, if earlier one talent, one genius (Dostoevsky) achieved the highest results of influencing a person’s soul, today his experience is transformed and used as an instrument of influence on the human psyche through advertising (young girls), through modern pop music, erotic films and so on.

Dostoevsky passionately believed in the “great general harmony,” “the unity of humanity.” Humanity in our time has already come close to this milestone. People have become almost identical both in appearance and in the development of their souls. Dostoevsky wrote that if people are only natural beings, if their souls are not immortal, then they should settle down most happily on earth, submit to the principles of profit and reasonable egoism. Hence, according to Dostoevsky, the “herding” of humanity or the transformation of people into a “human herd” and the destruction of the human soul.

And in this Dostoevsky turned out to be right for our time. All this has already happened, and not because man has only submitted to the “principles of profit and reasonable egoism,” but because man in our time lives “in the crowd.” In other words, there are a lot of people, so many that we live, as it were, “in a crowd”

And this “crowd” affects every person, his state of mind, his desire to “grab his piece of life” as soon as possible. The “crowd” increases crimes, lowers the threshold of morality, and crowds out such spiritual concepts as kindness, mercy, decency, sincerity, and honesty from life.

And “herding” in these conditions is not the physical state of the “crowd”, but its way of behavior. We are all exposed to advertising and buy the same things. “What the neighbor has, I should have.” This is the most immutable law of our “crowd”. Hence the destruction of spiritual values.

Dostoevsky was wrong about one thing. The theme of parricide in his works today has most likely transformed into “maticide.” In Russia, children are more likely to hate and kill their mothers. Fathers leave their families - children blame their mother for all troubles, and it comes to killing her.

And lastly, there can no longer be a writer like Dostoevsky in our time. Compared to Dostoevsky, modern writers have a very poor inner world. It’s barely enough for simple everyday writing. For example, there were writers who went through Stalin’s concentration camps, but none of them wrote a work like Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead. All of them limited themselves to writing about everyday life, albeit terrible, but writing about everyday life. Why is this happening? There are no new ideas in the souls of the writers; they suffered physically and mentally, but they could not convey it. Not the same feelings, not the same emotions today that Dostoevsky had before. Nowadays, a writer writes more or less interesting works when he is influenced by a strong external impulse (for example, war). The meager inner world of a modern writer blocks his path to a work of genius.

The international public organization "Club of Rome", uniting several hundred people who are part of the elite of the modern world, has come to the conclusion that in its development, humanity has entered the final part of its existence. In other words, if previously it was developing, now it is moving towards its death. It is difficult to say how long this stage will last, but one thing is certain - a person’s feelings, emotions, and sensuality are reduced and dulled in this process of dying. This also prevents the emergence of a new Dostoevsky among us modern people.