Dostoevsky in Love by Alex Christofi

Author:Alex Christofi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472964700
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

EIGHT

The Gambler

1866–1867

I’m exceedingly anxious about Stellovsky, and I even see him in my dreams.276 It was now the end of September and Fyodor still had not begun work on the new novel, which meant that he had just one month to write the whole thing, or his past and future works would be forfeit.

On 1 October, Fyodor wrote to his friend Miliukov asking him to visit after 9 p.m., when he might sneak home without fear of being hounded by creditors. He found Fyodor pacing the room, distraught.

‘Why so dejected?’ asked Miliukov.277

‘You’d be dejected if you were on the brink of ruin,’ Fyodor replied. He took the contract with Stellovsky out of his desk drawer and handed it to Miliukov, who read it while Fyodor paced up and down.

‘Have you written much of the new novel?’ Miliukov asked.

Fyodor stopped pacing and spread his arms wide.

‘Not a line.’

Miliukov was shocked.

‘But what is to be done? Something must be done!’

‘What can I do when I have only a month until the deadline? It is already too late. It is impossible to write two hundred pages in four weeks!’

Miliukov sat down at the desk while Fyodor resumed his pacing, and the two fell into silent rumination.

‘Listen,’ Miliukov said eventually, ‘You can’t enslave yourself for all time. We must find a way out.’

‘What way out? I don’t see any way out.’

‘You know what? You wrote to me, from Moscow I think, that you already had a finished plan for the novel, didn’t you?’

‘I have, but I’m telling you I haven’t written a single line.’

‘Let’s get a few friends together. You tell us the plot of the novel. We’ll outline the sections, divide it into chapters and write it up. Then you go over it and smooth out the rough spots and inconsistencies. Working together we can get it done on time.’

‘No,’ Fyodor said emphatically. ‘I will never sign my name to someone else’s work.’

Then Miliukov suggested an entirely different idea: a stenography school had started recently in St Petersburg, and they were training secretaries that could transcribe at the pace of normal speech. Perhaps instead of writing the novel, he could dictate it?

So it was that on 4 October 1866, at 11.28 a. m. (Fyodor had specified ‘neither earlier nor later’ than 11.30), the twenty-year-old stenographer Anna Grigorievna Snitkina rang the bell of Flat 13 of Alonkin’s House on Stoliarny Lane. When the maid answered the door, Fyodor was wandering through the apartment in an unbuttoned shirt and slippers. As he locked eyes with the graduate standing there in her headscarf, holding sharpened pencils and a smart little portfolio, he cried out in embarrassment and flung himself behind a door.

He buttoned his shirt and threw on an old blue jacket, combed his hair, and asked for strong black tea to be brought into his study. (The world can go to hell as long as I get my tea.)278 It was deeply unusual to have a young woman in his study alone with him. She sat on the old brown sofa, looking at a couple of large Chinese vases he’d brought from Siberia.

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