Dostoevsky and Suslova

 

Mixed Up Guy

From Dostoevsky’s notebooks for his novel The Devils: “Stavrogin [the central character], when he believes does not believe that he believes, and when he does not believe, does not believe that he does not believe.” Dostoevsky himself had the same problem.

 

Dostoevsky and Suslova

“One evening he stood at the edge of the Catherine Canal and peered into the dark water where the reflected flames of the gas lamps flickered dully, thinking of the best that still remained to him in life, of Apollinaria. He took out of his black moiré briefcase a large photograph of a young woman in a smart, light-colored dress with a Parisian cut. A sharp pang pierced his heart. He looked closely at the serious face. A young woman in a white blouse with a slightly open neck gazed at him from the dark background. The elongated oval of her face and her bright forehead were strikingly pure. The dark hair, parted smoothly and lifted high in a tight braid that encircled the head, shone like silk in the sun. Huge, reflective, deep-set eyes looked out with surprise and almost naivety, as if asking a question, or sympathizing with someone’s sorrow. The face was cloudlessly serene. Intense thought and, perhaps, secret suffering, had given the features a refined spirituality. Only the lips had a touch of the common people.”

Leonid Grossman biography of Dostoevsky

 

Immediately after this pensive scene in St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky stops staring at the photograph and rushes off to Western Europe to join Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova. Now Grossman, who has made this whole scene up and put things into Dostoevsky’s mind and soul—“A sharp pang pierced his heart,” give us a break—can also put down the picture, into which he has read so much, and go back to inventing more fictitious scenes from the life of a great writer. It appears, however, that, while contemplating the image of Polina’s face, Grossman has failed to see a lot of other traits that are apparent from what little we know of her: her immaturity, silly romantic inclinations, love of playing sadomasochistic games, and, probably most central of all: her basic stupidity.

 

The Redoubtable Polina

When she was a young woman the passionate Polina Suslova had a lot of fun tormenting Dostoevsky; this was when they travelled together in Europe in 1863. When she was forty she married the philosopher and gadfly Vas. Vas. Rozanov, who was twenty-four. Why did you do it, Vas. Vas.? How could you have been so thoughtless? Didn’t anybody warn you? She was said to have had one redeeming feature: she always kindly asked Vas. Vas. to remove his spectacles before slapping him about the head and face.

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]