The Sensitive Genius and the Practical Woman

In October 1866 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, with Crime and Punishment still appearing in serialized installments, owed his publisher, Fyodor Stellovsky, a new novel by November 1, and he had not even begun it. He was deep in debt and needed the money. On the death of his brother Mikhail he had taken the brother’s debts upon himself, and what little money he had kept he had lost at the German gaming tables. Worse, the contract he had signed with Stellovsky in 1865, to escape his debts, was a brutal one. Stellovsky received the right to publish an edition of his collected works together with the new novel. Should the novel not be delivered on time, Stellovsky could publish whatever Dostoyevsky wrote for the next nine years without paying him anything. He would be working for the publisher for nothing while still carrying his debts. Russia still had debtors’ prisons, and a writer with no income from his own work could expect to see the inside of one.

Dostoyevsky was close to losing everything while one of his masterpieces was still unfinished, and he had about four weeks in which to write an entire novel. It was at this point that Anna Snitkina, twenty years old, completed a six-month course in stenography and began to look for work. Her teacher, Pavel Olkhin, proposed that she help Dostoyevsky, who needed a stenographer. She had heard of him. Her father was a great admirer of what Dostoyevsky had published, and Anna had made a habit of stealing her father’s magazines and reading them all. She agreed with him: the man had talent. On October 4 she rang his doorbell. On October 29, after only twenty-five days, The Gambler was finished and the crisis was averted. In December Crime and Punishment was finished too, and in the following year the two would get married and she would become Anna Dostoyevskaya. Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevskaya, in her memoirs, tells the story of a man of forty-four who, without her help, would have been imprisoned and would have lost everything. It is the story of a young woman without whom humanity would have been deprived of one of its greatest cultural treasures. It is also an account of what draws a man and a woman together, and of the complementarity of the sexes.

Anna was a serious young woman. She defied the “patriarchy” of her father’s house and was fascinated by the novels and magazines he brought home. She loved and respected him, and when he fell mortally ill in the summer of 1865 she gave up her high school studies to spend as much time with him as she could. There were, it turned out, evening classes in stenography, then a novel technique for taking down speech as fast as it was spoken. This suited her. She wanted, she says, to become an independent woman who could earn her own keep and be a burden to no one, least of all to her mother, and least of all after her father’s death, which came on April 28, 1866.

Six months later she stood at Dostoyevsky’s door to begin the first employment of her life. She was eager to meet the famous novelist whose works she already knew, and proud that Olkhin had recommended her to such a man. On the way she wondered what he would be like: fat, bald, and old, perhaps, or tall and thin; strict and ill-tempered, probably. Whatever he was, she meant to do the work well, impatient to become the “self-sufficient person” she meant to be.

The first day did not go well. He looked old to her at first, though once he began to speak he seemed much younger, perhaps thirty-five. He was not a man to sweep a woman off her feet with his looks. He was of average height, sickly and weak, and one of his pupils was permanently enlarged, which gave him the look of a “riddle.” Almost immediately upon meeting her, he did what no man hoping to make a good impression would do, and unburdened himself to a stranger. He told her that he suffered from epilepsy, that he might fall down at any moment, and that the dictation would have to go slowly. Anna was shocked at how freely he spoke of an incurable illness, but she made no comment.

A trial came first. He dictated a passage from a magazine, had her transcribe her shorthand into ordinary script, and checked it for mistakes. He found some. She had missed a period and had formed certain letters less clearly than he liked. He was angry and scolded her. He asked Anna for her name and forgot it straight away, as he would go on doing every day.

Then Dostoyevsky decided that he was unwell and incapable of dictating anything, and he sent the young woman home. On the doorstep he told her that he was glad she was not a man, since a man would probably drink, and that he hoped she did not. Anna wanted badly to laugh and did not move a muscle. She assured him that she would not drink, and left. They agreed to try again in the evening.

Anna did not like this irritable man at all, and she began to fear that her dream of independence was behind her. Yet she came back at eight all the same, and was seated at the desk at which Crime and Punishment was being written. Dostoyevsky showed little interest in dictating. He asked her name again only to forget it immediately, and asked where she had been to school and why she had taken up stenography. She answered every question gravely and to the point, without any show of feeling. Dostoyevsky said later that the way she answered had impressed him deeply. Anna was a practical woman with no nonsense about her, and he compared her favorably with the so-called nihilists, the young radicals of the 1860s. She was serious and diligent, and they were not. Nor, by his own account, was he.

The hours passed and nothing had yet been laid down to paper. They drank tea, and Dostoyevsky went on confiding his troubles to her. He told her how in 1849 he had been condemned to death for radical activity against the tsar; how he and some twenty comrades were brought out to be shot, the first three already bound to the posts; how badly he had wanted to live, how much he felt he still had to give the world, and how he would have given anything to have his life over again; and how, at the last second, word arrived that the sentence had been changed to four years of forced labor. He was saved, and he had never in his life known such happiness and relief.

Anna was shocked by the story of how the author of Crime and Punishment had nearly been shot, and also by his openness. She considered herself hardly more than a child, a child whose name he could not keep in his head, and yet this deepest of thinkers had not hesitated to lay before her the central experience of his life. The man did not only write books; he was himself an open book. Later she came to understand why he had been so eager to tell it. He was profoundly lonely. His family cared only for what could be had from the great writer, his publisher was trying to have him imprisoned, his friends seldom visited, and his stepson, the child of his first wife, took little interest in him. He had no one else.

His openness, Anna writes, made the best of impressions on her. The contrasts in him, between the genius and his inwardness, between the ill temper and the depth of feeling, between the aged exterior and the childlike interior, engrossed her completely. When she had left at two in the afternoon she thought all was lost: no work had been done, he had scolded her for a mistake, and she had given up on independence. But she had little reason to despair. She had answered his questions diligently, had impressed him by her gravitas, and had been the listener he needed far more than he needed a stenographer. At ten in the evening there was still no work done and he noticed, at last, that the lack of work was making her anxious, which she did not yet feel free to say. Prompted by a desire to alleviate Anna’s anxiety, Dostoyevsky began to dictate the opening of The Gambler.

She transcribed her notes and handed him the page. He stopped at the name Roulettenburg and asked whether he had really said it. She wondered whether she was to be scolded again, and answered that he had just dictated the word. He denied it. She asked whether a town of that name appeared in his novel. It did, he said; it was the town where the gambling took place. “Then how was I supposed to know the name of the city? If it appears in the novel, it must have come from you,” she retorted. “You’re right,” said Dostoyevsky, “I must have confused things.” Anna had stood her ground, and she was well pleased with herself.

On the next day, October 5, he began to tell her about his money troubles: the debts taken over from his brother, the terrible contract, the prospect of prison. She was indignant on his behalf that anyone should so exploit a good and sensitive soul. The day was not productive. They talked of all kinds of things, and the conversations soothed him. He asked her name again and forgot it at once. In time he grew used to her way of working, and her willingness to listen to his troubles somehow restored his power to concentrate. She came to see, she says, that he was a deeply sad man, and she felt only the greatest pity for him. She noticed that no one called while they worked. She noticed how his stepson mistreated him. She noticed that the costly vases were disappearing from the apartment one by one, and that a day came when he had only wooden spoons left—the silver ones having been sold. All of this made her all the happier to see the pages pile up. Each day she showed him how much less of the novel remained. Slowly but surely, he began to recover his faith in himself and grew more and more productive. The deadline could be met.

Anna was immensely proud. She saw how much his getting anything done depended on her. She was the medium through which his energy was turned into structure, and through her the genius could become actual and more than mere potential. Anna knew his promise before she knew him. She had read the first two parts of Crime and Punishment, and she knew every character in Poor Folk. The talent was undeniable, even without The Brothers Karamazov to confirm it. What she had not known was that he was an intelligent, kind, and unhappy man. Her heart filled with pity. He needed help, and in the first instance the help of a stenographer.

On her own initiative she asked her mother to consult a lawyer, so that Stellovsky could not, once the manuscript was finished, pretend that the deadline had been missed and seize a life’s work for nothing. On October 29 the manuscript was done. It was taken to a police station and stamped, so that there could be no doubt that the book had been finished before the deadline. The impossible had been accomplished, and after twenty-five days she was duly paid. Dostoyevsky confessed later that only in the last days before the deadline had he finally remembered her name.

On November 2 Dostoyevsky asked to see Anna’s mother to thank her for all the work her daughter had done. The prospect alarmed Anna. She was certain that she and her mother could not entertain so great a mind and would bore him to death, and she prepared several subjects of conversation in advance and read up on them, so that they might keep pace. None of it mattered. He came, the evening was a happy one, and he stayed until midnight. Not one of her subjects was discussed. The next day she visited her sister, who had noticed that Anna now talked of nothing but Dostoyevsky, and who warned her to give him up: “Netotchka (her nickname), you should give up on this Dostoyevsky. You won’t be able to fulfill your dreams with this man. Thankfully—he is a sick, old man and he would burden any family with his debt!”

Anna disagreed. She was not in love with him at all, and was merely glad to talk with so kind and gifted a man. On the way home she asked herself whether her sister was right, whether she had in fact fallen in love with him, and whether she was ready to leave her family for so hard a life. She could not, in any case, bring herself to leave him alone when he so badly needed help. And there was, she reflected, no better or more punctual stenographer to be had.

On November 8 Dostoyevsky told her that he had an idea for a new novel. She asked who the hero was. An old artist, he said, a man of about his own age, and she told him to go on. He talked at length, and the more he described the character, the more Anna saw that the artist’s history was close to his own: a terrible illness that had paralyzed his right arm, debt, poverty, gambling, a gloomy and irritable temper, an inability to show what he truly felt. He supposed that she did not find such a man sympathetic, but Anna felt otherwise:

Oh no, I certainly do. He has a wonderful heart. You have to take into account how unlucky he was, what horrible things he had to endure; if someone else had to go through all that, they would certainly have hated the world. But your hero still loves humanity. No, your main character deserves sympathy!

Dostoyevsky went on. “At a certain point in this artist’s life, he meets a young woman. Around your age. Maybe two years older. Let’s call her Anya.” Anna, forgetting for the moment that this was her own name, concluded that he had another woman in mind. The heroine, as he described her, was everything he was not: gentle, clever, forgiving, young, and healthy, strict and yet full of life. Anna objected that he had idealized her. He replied that he had “studied her deeply!” Then he posed his question: had this old, sick artist anything to offer such a young and healthy woman, and would loving him not be a heavy burden for her? He needed a young woman’s opinion; for the novel, of course. She should imagine that he was the artist, that he had confessed his love to her, and say how Anya would answer. That is when Anna realized who this “Anya” really was and said: “I would love this man until the end of my life!”

Soon after, they were engaged. A few days later he came to her house without his winter coat, and she was furious at the way his relatives manipulated a sick man: a young woman of twenty scolding a fiancé of forty-five for his failure to stand up for himself. She had not known that she had that side to her. In December, still engaged, they finished Crime and Punishment together. She notes that in all three months of their engagement Dostoyevsky did not permit himself a single dirty word, let alone to touch her.

Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina married Dostoyevsky in February 1867. Soon after the wedding, they left on a long journey to Europe, where Dostoyevsky lost everything they had, Anna’s clothes included, at the roulette tables of Baden-Baden, a real-life Roulettenburg. They returned to Russia in 1871, and Anna took over his affairs entirely. She made all the financial decisions, negotiated the publishing rights to his work, and published Demons herself.

In 1878 Dostoyevsky began writing one of the great treasures of literature, The Brothers Karamazov. Thanks to Anna’s business acumen, the family had been freed from the loan sharks, and the old man had at last the breathing room in which to write his masterpiece. He dedicated it, naturally, to his wife. Its hero, Alyosha, was named after their youngest son, who had died of an epileptic seizure. Alyosha is a naive, pure-hearted young man who never loses his faith in the sublimity of humanity and of the divine. He is, in other words, Dostoyevsky’s inner child.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the physical, moral, and spiritual complementarity of the sexes. Beyond the teaching that the union of marriage should issue in a child, however, we are seldom shown what this complementarity might look like in concrete terms. The marriage of Fyodor and Anna Dostoyevsky gives us a hint. Though aging, ill, epileptic, and neurotic, Dostoyevsky was the genius from whom world-changing works of literature kept pouring. But the genius was chaotic and gave way under pressure. The need to complete The Gambler at all costs paralyzed him. The book itself merely sublimated his own life, for he was a gambling addict. He was easily exploited by those around him, and would pawn his winter coats to find money for his importunate relatives. There was in him an inexhaustible creativity longing to exist, and he needed someone who could bring it out through structure and discipline.

Anna Dostoyevskaya was not repelled by the weaknesses, the struggles, and the poverty of this sick, old, epileptic man. She saw in him the genius who needed an anchor for his artistic vision, someone who could compensate for his flaws, keep him on the right path, and provide the structure and the home through which he could become the man he was always meant to be. At a time when domestic life and femininity are often said to smother masculine vitality, energy, and innovation, it is too easy to forget that without a home such production has nowhere to go. A marriage that works is truly complementary. The greatest works are often created in the mediation between a boundless masculine vitality and what Goethe invokes at the end of Faust: “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan” (“the eternal feminine draws us upward”).

The world needs to cherish men like Dostoyevsky: men who may be profoundly flawed but who can nonetheless transform the world into something new, men whose brokenness can be a source of novelty and originality, as the gambling was for The Gambler. Such men bring excitement into life. And the world needs more women like Anna Dostoyevskaya, who can use their skill and intelligence to give that energy its shape and its meaning.

Dostoyevsky died in February 1881, a few months after the publication of Karamazov, when Anna was only thirty-four. She never remarried. She ran his estate, collected and edited all his works, kept his photographs in order, and managed the room dedicated to him in Moscow’s State Historical Museum. Her husband’s work earned her business more than five million dollars in today’s money, and she used it to build a school that educated a thousand peasant girls.