PILES and punishment
After months in a Siberian prison eating cockroach soup, Russian novelist Dostoevsky faced a firing squad — but was reprieved as the soldiers took aim. BOTH his wedding nights ended in disaster ... and if that wasn’t bad enough, he was plagued by haemorrh
n BOOK OF THE WEEK DOSTOEVSKY IN LOVE: AN INTIMATE LIFE by Alex Christofi (Bloomsbury £20, 238pp)
ThE really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth,’ said Fyodor Dostoevsky. As we discover from Alex Christofi’s luminous biography, he certainly remained true to his word.
‘I have never experienced happiness. I have always been waiting for it,’ was another of the novelist’s cheerful pronouncements.
They always made a meal of things, the russians. Bigger beards, longer novels, more frightful afflictions. During a typical 15-day period, Dostoevsky’s haemorrhoids ‘were so bad he could neither sit nor stand’. What did he do? Float?
Christofi informs us of his subject’s ‘anxious and unhappy’ existence — the way 19th-century russia was ‘a huge network of thieves’ and how the average lavatory was a hole in a plank under which ‘the filth lay thick and slippery’.
If Dostoevsky, in his feverish books, wrote about ‘the humiliated, the sick and the silenced’; if he examined the psychology of ‘the drunken man, the dissolute man, the man marked for death’, then this was because everything, in a sense, was autobiographical.
Dostoevsky himself, ‘an exasperating man’, was constantly on the dangerous brink of physical and mental ruin.
he was born in 1821, the son of an impoverished doctor. he was an ‘energetic, curious child, constantly talking to strangers’. Fyodor’s mother died from TB when he was 15. his father was found dead in a ditch soon after — whether killed by his serfs or from an accident always remained a mystery.
Dostoevsky was sent by relatives to the Military Engineering Institute in st Petersburg, where he studied fencing, dancing, singing, military drill, geometry and field cartography. he enjoyed reading medical textbooks and mugged up on mental illnesses and the nervous system.
In his spare time, he began writing short stories.
A promising literary career was impeded when a newspaper critic, Valerian Maikov, who was planning to bring out an article that would make Dostoevsky ‘the most significant writer of his generation’, went for a walk in the countryside, ‘caught sunstroke and died’. Everyone Dostoevsky met seems a bit cartoonish, for example rafael Chernosvitov, ‘an ex-army officer turned siberian gold prospector with a wooden leg’.
In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested and charged, along with a bunch of poets and clubmen, with the ‘distribution of printed works directed against the government’.
Dostoevsky was ‘given a thick grey prison robe and stockings and the door was shut’. he spent eight months in solitary confinement, before being led out to be executed.
he was shown a cart, on which lay a coffin covered with a cloth. Dostoevsky was tied to a pillar; the soldiers took aim — and, at the very last minute, it was announced the Tsar had granted a reprieve. Instead of a bullet, he was to receive four years’ hard labour.
It was an experience that would drive most people off to the asylum. Dostoevsky, however, only ‘suffered from haemorrhoids and nervous throat spasms’.
The prison regime was nevertheless hell, with no washing facilities or sanitation, and the food was cabbage soup, ‘thickened with an immense number of cockroaches’. The guards were sadists: ‘If you put one foot out of line — the lash!’
Finally released, he lived in Omsk, a town later used by the soviets as a nuclear-testing facility. here, the novelist fell heavily for the wife (soon widow) of a local excise officer. Madame Isaeva’s rebuffs only prompted Dostoevsky to reflect that ‘the joy of love is great, but its sufferings are so intense, it would be much better never to love at all’.
YOu can’t fault his reasoning. Especially as, when he did marry Maria Isaeva in 1857, he got as far as the bedroom on their wedding night then had an epileptic fit, falling on the floor, ‘his body pulsing to an imperceptible rhythm, racked into unholy
forms’. Were this not tragically off-putting enough, sexually speaking Dostoevsky liked kissing feet and caressing stockings and shoes.
The epilepsy ‘scared my wife to death’ and, as Christofi says, ‘the marriage never really recovered after that first night’. It was a relief to all concerned when she died of consumption.
Discharged from the army in 1859 ‘on account of his haemorrhoids’, Dostoevsky returned to St Petersburg to resume a literary life.
Notes From A Dead House, his novel about the harshness of Siberian prison life, was a popular success and, suddenly in funds, the novelist was able to travel. He was unimpressed by Paris (‘an exceedingly boring city’) and he said of London, ‘Everyone is in a hurry to get blind drunk’, which is still true today in my circle.
It was at the gambling tables of Wiesbaden that he met his nemesis — the rolling of the dice, the turning over of the card.
Convinced he’d mastered a system combining ‘luck with logic’, Dostoevsky lost the modern equivalent of £27,500 in a single evening.
He borrowed heavily, pawned his possessions, got his friends to pawn theirs. He was obsessed, his behaviour and mood dramatically surging between joy and despair. The odd win only encouraged him to make further losses.
Freud probably wasn’t being helpful when he said ‘addiction to gambling is a substitute for masturbation’, but when Dostoevsky married his stenographer, Anna, in 1866, she may have wondered if the old Viennese witch-doctor had some kind of a point, as regards the dissipation of energies.
Playing for high stakes, Dostoevsky dug himself into vast pits of debt. He was always begging Anna for forgiveness, saying he was ‘not worthy of her’ — yet then immediately expecting her to pawn her wedding ring and the furniture. He couldn’t pay restaurant or hotel bills or train fares. He squandered the advances for unwritten books on crazy bets. There was often nothing left in the house but wooden spoons. On the sexual front, Dostoevsky again had a fit on his honeymoon night ‘and screamed in pain for the next four hours’.
WHEN he came to, he could speak only in German. By some means, nevertheless, Dostoevsky fathered children, but when Anna went into labour, he was the one emitting ‘awful animal cries’. The midwife had to throw him out.
Christofi says Dostoevsky had what today is called Geschwind Syndrome, a neurological condition explaining the mania for writing or gambling, the volubility — the way everything was over-intensified.
This is the atmosphere of Crime And Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, The Devils, and so forth: lurid stories about ghosts, imposters and assassins, full of ‘repetitions and digressions’, like Charles Dickens if he’d gone round the bend.
Anna sorted the finances, helped her husband find publishers, edited the tangled texts and was responsible for the organisation of Dostoevsky’s final years, which were blighted by bladder infections, emphysema and nose bleeds.
In Russia, he was ‘hailed as a national prophet’ and the Tsar invited him to dinner at the Winter Palace — not bad for a former convict. When he died in January 1881, thousands thronged the streets to watch his funeral procession.
My favourite detail in this quick-moving book: Dostoevsky and Anna kept a cow in their upstairs apartment, ‘so their children could have fresh milk’.
BIOGRAPHY
THE DUKE: 100 CHAPTERS IN THE LIFE OF PRINCE PHILIP by Ian Lloyd (The History Press £15.99, 320pp)
ROLAND WHITE
Which member of the Royal family fits the following description? he reads poetry, and is especially fond of T.S. Eliot. he is interested in spiritual matters, religion and the environment. he can design jewellery.
he has suffered racial abuse and been criticised for Left-wing views. he ran into fierce opposition for trying to shake up the Palace ‘old guard’. he suffered a lonely, difficult childhood, and is spoken of as ‘kind’ and ‘sensitive’.
in case you need a clue, the nation breathed a great sigh of relief earlier this week when he was released from hospital.
can this really be bluff, outspoken, short-tempered Prince Philip? Yet this is the picture that emerges from this book by a former member of the Royal press corps who was once ordered to ‘get off the f ***** g grass’ by Philip in Windsor Great Park.
The Duke gave a speech to journalists in 1973 — when he and the Press were still on speaking terms — in which he considered his public image. ‘The trouble with reputations is that they cling much more tenaciously than the truth,’ he said. ‘if anyone can offer me any advice about how i can improve this reputation, or even offer any reason why i have it, i shall be more than grateful.’
Even then he realised that his reputation for rudeness and saying the wrong thing would overshadow everything he has ever done. he once told a friend, rather poignantly: ‘i don’t seem able to say nice things to people, though i’d like to. Why is that?’
What a good question. Other members of his family are occasionally a bit tetchy, but Philip is a repeat offender. This very readable book — set out in 100 chapters to mark the Duke’s 100th birthday in June — contains a list of 100 so-called gaffes, and 12 times that he has sworn at people.
ThE famous remark about ‘slitty eyes’ and china is there — of course it is — and one of his remarks was apparently so jaw-droppingly awful that nobody has felt able to reproduce it in print. Yet, as the author ian Lloyd notes: ‘The majority are actually very funny, said with a twinkle in the royal eye and, more importantly, well received by those he’s talking to.’
The book doesn’t gloss over any criticism of its subject, but reminds us that Philip has lived an extraordinary life that, in many ways, has been far from easy.
he was born into the Greek royal family in corfu in 1921, on a dining room table. his family — who were Danish and German — were driven into exile after the Greco-Turkish war and went to live in Paris.
At the age of nine, Philip was sent on a picnic to get him out of the way while his mother Princess Alice — who suffered from religious mania and schizophrenia — was removed from the house by men in white coats and taken to a Swiss sanatorium. There she was visited by Sigmund Freud, who recommended that her ovaries be X-rayed to cure an excessive libido. he would, wouldn’t he.
Philip’s father reacted to these events by leaving almost immediately for the south of France with his mistress. From that moment on, Philip was pretty much homeless until his marriage.
When he wasn’t at school or, later, in the Navy, he lived with a series of aristocratic relatives, one of whom remarked: ‘he gave the impression of a huge, hungry dog — perhaps a friendly collie who had never had a basket of his own and responded to every overture with eager tail-wagging.’
The Queen had her eye on Philip from an early age, but they began to take more interest in one another when, in 1943, he was invited to Windsor to see Princess Elizabeth play the principal boy in a production of Aladdin. Four years later, they were engaged.
Even then, the Palace didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet. he was referred to by friends of the King as ‘charlie Kraut’ and the Queen Mother called him ‘The hun’. Tommy Lascelles, the King’s private secretary and star turn of The crown, said Philip was ‘rough, ill-tempered, uneducated and would probably not be faithful’.
Despite all that, the King took to Philip. he taught his future son-in-law how to shoot, and — noticing that his clothes were rather worn — arranged a visit to the Royal tailor.
Philip was no stranger to grand houses, but this was definitely a step up. When he stayed at Windsor, he would get up in the night and wander down the corridors with a torch, gazing at the Gainsboroughs and Van Dycks of the Royal art collection.
HE IS occasionally accused of being a distant father, yet he made sure to read bedtime stories to his children. And as the new Prince consort, he tried to modernise life at the Palace. he introduced a training programme for footmen, abolished their powdered wigs, started a review of working practices and even introduced automatic dishwashers. he was the first member of the Royal family to give a television interview. Oh, and he preferred Double Diamond brown ale to wine. ‘The old boys here hadn’t had anything quite like it before,’ he once noted.
They’d certainly seen nothing like the incident at Broadlands when the Duke chased the Queen up the stairs, pinching her bottom as she shouted ‘Stop it, Philip! Stop it!’ he has a romantic streak where the Queen is concerned, and once wore a tie covered in love hearts to mark a reunion after a long foreign trip. Who’d have thought the iron Duke would be such an old softie?
Does he also have a wandering eye? it’s occasionally suggested that Philip has enjoyed affairs during his long marriage. The book names 11 likely candidates, but concludes that there is no substance to the rumours.
Other members of his family haven’t been so steadfast.
As a child, Philip spent time living with his aunt, Princess George of Greece, who was such an enthusiastic collector of sexual partners that, in 1918, she wrote an unpublished memoir called The Men i have Loved.
Perhaps it was Philip’s unusual family background that has made him so — how can we put this politely? — robust. he was sailing off the isle of Wight one year during cowes Week when the skipper of another boat hailed him as ‘Stavros’ and asked him to move out of the way.
‘it’s not Stavros,’ retorted Philip, ‘and it’s my wife’s f ***** g water, so i’ll do what i f ***** g well please.’ Sometimes it’s very handy to be married to the Queen.