A Man of My Acquaintance

He was born on the thirtieth of October, 1821, in the left wing of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, on Bozhedomka Street in Moscow. His father, Mikhail Andreevich, was a staff physician at the hospital. His mother, Maria Fyodorovna, née Nechayeva, was a merchant's daughter — gentle, pious, fond of reading aloud to the children in the evenings. She would be dead of tuberculosis before the boy turned fifteen.

The hospital was a formative address. The poor came there to suffer, and the young Dostoevsky grew up watching them do so — through the windows of the family apartment, in the gardens where the patients walked on fine days, in the corridors where they did not walk because they could not. He would later say that his sympathy for suffering humanity did not arise from books or theories. It arose from those corridors. I believe him.

He began to read early and voraciously: the Bible, Karamzin's history of Russia, Pushkin — always Pushkin — and then the Gothic novels, Schiller, Hoffmann, Walter Scott. His father read to the children from Homer. He remembered this all his life.

He was arrested on the twenty-third of April, 1849. He was twenty-seven years old. He had been attending the Petrashevsky Circle, a discussion group of young radicals who read forbidden French utopian literature and talked about the liberation of the serfs. He had read aloud, at one of these meetings, Belinsky's letter to Gogol. This was enough.

Eight months he spent in the Peter and Paul Fortress, in solitary confinement, awaiting trial. He was found guilty of conspiring to distribute anti-government literature. The sentence: death by firing squad.

On the twenty-second of December, 1849, the prisoners were taken to Semenovsky Square. It was winter. They were dressed in white execution shirts. The first three were tied to posts. He was in the second group. He would have perhaps five minutes to watch the first group die before it was his turn.

A rider arrived on horseback. The execution was a mock one — a deliberate theatrical cruelty, ordered by Tsar Nicholas, intended to break the men psychologically before commuting their sentences to hard labor in Siberia.

He wrote about this night exactly once, in a letter to his brother Mikhail, written the same evening: "Brother, I do not feel despondent and have not lost spirit. Life is life everywhere, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people next to me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to be despondent, and not to fall — this is what life is, herein lies its task."

I will not comment on this. It does not require comment.

Four years in the labor camp at Omsk. Common criminals, murderers, thieves — not the educated political prisoners he might have expected, but men who had killed their fathers, who had burned villages, who had committed acts he struggled to name in print. He lived among them. He learned their language, their hierarchy, their particular code of honor, which was more intricate than anything the Petersburg intelligentsia had produced.

He was ill much of the time. His epilepsy, which had perhaps been latent before, manifested fully in Siberia. He fell in the snow. He was kicked by guards. He was cold for four years in a way that does not entirely leave the body.

And yet. Something happened in Omsk that he would spend the rest of his life trying to articulate. He encountered the Russian people — not as an abstraction, not as the peasantry of political rhetoric, but as individual men with individual dushi, souls of particular weight and texture. One of them, a peasant named Marey, had comforted him as a child when he was frightened in a forest, and he had forgotten it entirely until Omsk, when the memory returned with the force of revelation.

He came out of Siberia believing in the Russian people with something close to religious conviction. Whether this belief was earned or compensatory, I cannot say. Perhaps it was both.

Let me speak plainly about the gambling, because others have been less than plain.

He gambled at roulette in Wiesbaden, in Baden-Baden, in Hamburg, in Saxon-les-Bains, and in Geneva. He gambled his own money and money borrowed from friends and money borrowed from publishers against books not yet written. He wrote letters to his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, that read like the dispatches of a man drowning in slow stages. He would arrive in a city, win a modest sum, convince himself he had discovered a system, lose everything, pawn his coat, pawn her earrings, beg her for more money by telegram, receive it, lose it, write her another letter.

She sent him the money. Every time. She understood — I believe she is the only person who fully understood — that the gambling was not about money. It was about something else he could not name and she could not cure, and that the only way through it was through it. He stopped, finally, in 1871. He never gambled again.

Bozhe moi, what those years cost her.

And now I speak for myself. No more third person.

St. Petersburg was my city and it was terrible. I want you to understand this. Not the postcard Petersburg, not the white nights and the Neva and the golden domes. The other one: Raskolnikov's Petersburg, the one where the staircases smell of cabbage and cheap vodka, where the ceilings are so low you can touch them with your palm, where the summer heat brings hallucinations and the winter cold brings despair and there is no middle season in which to recover from either.

I loved it. I could not have written anything in a pleasant place. The city was my collaborator.

I died there on the twenty-eighth of January, 1881. I was fifty-nine years old. I had completed The Brothers Karamazov four months before. I had intended a second volume. It did not happen. Perhaps it is better this way. Perhaps Alyosha's story was always meant to be a promissory note — a novel that points forward, toward a conclusion the reader must write.

If you have read this far, you are that reader. The task is yours now. I wish you courage.