Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 by Joseph Frank

Author:Joseph Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

11. V. N. Maikov. A portrait from the 1840s

Dostoevsky probably met Maikov early in the spring of 1846 (we know that the latter sent Dostoevsky to visit Dr. Yanovsky later that spring), and the friendship flourished in the succeeding months. Traces of Dostoevsky’s intimacy with Maikov soon begin to turn up in his letters. “Grigorovich has written a remarkably good little story,” he tells Mikhail in September 1846. “Through the efforts of myself and Maikov–who incidentally wants to write a big article about me for Jan. 1st–the story [The Village] will be printed in the Notes of the Fatherland.”10 Maikov never wrote the long article that Dostoevsky hoped for; but he did praise him fervently, and was the only voice raised to defend him against Belinsky’s criticisms. Several months later, Dostoevsky informs Mikhail that the Belinsky pléiade is spreading the rumor “that I am infected with vanity, have a terribly inflated opinion of myself, and have sold out to Kraevsky because Maikov praises me.”11 A note of Dostoevsky’s from the beginning of 1847, referring to a theater party including Maikov and Shtrandman, reveals his participation in the social life of the inner Maikov set.

The death of Valerian Maikov a few months later was a terrible blow to Dostoevsky, and deprived him of the one person in the Petersburg literary world thoroughly in tune with the writing he had been producing after Poor Folk. But the memory of Valerian Maikov did not fade for Dostoevsky, and was kept alive by the close ties he had now established with the Maikov family. His affection for Valerian was transferred to Apollon, a slightly older brother, who had already obtained some reputation as a poet and was to remain the most loyal of Dostoevsky’s few intimates in later years. The head of the Maikov family was a well-known academic sculptor, the mother a gifted and temperamental woman with literary ambitions herself; their home was the center of a literary-artistic salon at which Dostoevsky, despite his notorious explosiveness, was a frequent and welcome guest. On one occasion, after exchanging unpleasant words with other visitors (probably members of the pléiade), he fled the scene without taking leave of his hostess rather than risk an abusive outbreak, and felt called upon to write a letter of apology. At the time of his arrest in 1849, a manuscript copy of Valerian Maikov’s essays (which remained unpublished in book form until the end of the century) was found among his papers. He would scarcely have been lent this treasured memento if the family had not considered him a confidant; and just before departing for Siberia, he could still remember to ask, in the midst of his other woes, whether the manuscript had been returned to the inconsolable mother of his dead friend.

Valerian Maikov was more or less forgotten after his death, and his name vanishes from sight for the next twenty or thirty years. It is only fitting that one of the few references to Maikov, during this period of oblivion, should have come from Dostoevsky’s pen.

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