Prince Meshchersky claimed that Dostoevsky hated revolutionaries. Dostoevsky poured out this hatred in The Devils. He based it on the trial of a revolutionary group led by the fanatic Sergei Nechaev, who had executed their comrade, accused by Nechaev of being a traitor in 1869.
Dostoevsky avidly followed the trial in the press. The newspapers were, as usual, an important source of inspiration for him in those anxious days. In 1867, Dostoevsky wrote to a friend, “Do you subscribe to any papers? Read them, for God’s sake, you can’t do otherwise nowadays, not to be fashionable but because the visible connection among all public and private affairs becomes stronger and clearer.”
Dostoevsky’s marked interest in “despised” newspapers was innovative for Russia. The police blotter created a background for allegedly real, “Dostoevskian” characters with their exalted speechifying and mad deeds in a phantasmagorical atmosphere.
Dostoevsky’s prose moves, breathes, pulses like a living organism, pulling the reader into its cruel, paroxysmal world (Dostoevsky was an epileptic). His words, sometimes running off in all directions, then gathering into a thick, sticky mass, form a fabric that yields to translation with difficulty. People who have marveled at the originals of Van Gogh’s tight-sprung paintings in museums, acutely feeling the bite of each nervous stroke, and then looked at the same works in reproductions, even faithful ones, will understand what I mean. Dostoevsky should be read in Russian.
In early March 1877, the frigate Svetlana (named after the popular ballad by the poet Zhukovsky, Alexander II’s tutor) sailed into the port of Norfolk, Virginia. On board the ship an eighteen-year-old marine guard was reading Dostoevsky avidly. He began with The Devils (which shook him to tears) and then intended to move on to Crime and Punishment. His nineteen-year-old cousin had sent him both books, supervising his reading.
The books were not brand-new—Crime and Punishment came out eleven years earlier, The Devils, six—but they still had far to go to before taking a place in the cultural canon, so the emotionally charged reading by a young naval officer was interesting from a purely sociological point of view. More notably, the young seaman was Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, grandson of Nicholas I and nephew of the ruling tsar, and his cousin Sergei was Alexander II’s son.
Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich Romanov (1858–1915) was a remarkable figure. He was the only Romanov to become a well-known poet (signing his verse K.R.). His father was a liberal and an advocate of Alexander II’s reforms. Konstantin grew up a liberal too. He and his cousin Sergei were tall, slender, and handsome, with a dreamy gaze, and they were close friends. But their political views were diametrically opposed, which was probably a sign of the times.
In 1879, Grand Duke Konstantin noted in his diary,
I argued with Sergei, we talked about what if we have a revolution. What will we do, the Romanovs? Would we have to leave Russia? That would be the worst disaster for me. I tried to expound the idea to Sergei that revolutions bring harm only to those against whom they are directed but they have a beneficial effect on the country. I gave him France as an example. Sergei was horrified by my theory and said, “Tu es à plaindre avec de pareilles idées” (“You are pathetic with such ideas”).6
Subsequently, both cousins became important bureaucrats. Grand Duke Sergei (who married for the sake of decorum but was a homosexual) was appointed Moscow’s general governor in 1891 by his brother, Emperor Alexander III, who valued his strict conservative views and administrative zeal. In 1905, Sergei was killed by a terrorist, but few people regretted it, among them Leo Tolstoy, who exclaimed upon learning of the assassination, “A horrible thing!” adding perspicaciously, “And it will be worse.”
K.R., a model family man and father of seven children, died mourned by many, as general inspector of the country’s military schools and also president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. He was shattered by the death of his son, Oleg, twenty-three, also a gifted poet, in the First World War.
In 1918, after the victory of the Bolshevik revolution, three of his children who had been exiled to the Urals were executed together with the widow of Grand Duke Sergei (who had become a nun after her husband’s assassination): they were thrown down a mine shaft, and then grenades were thrown in after them. The victims did not die right away. Legend has it that even a few days later, feeble sounds of church hymns could be heard coming from the shaft.
In their letters, the great figures of Russian culture who knew him (Tchaikovsky, Fet, Dostoevsky) used the same words—“dear,” “charming,” “pleasant”—to describe the poetry and personality of K.R. His poems (love lyrics and religious meditations) are professional, traditional, sincere, and easily set to music, which many Russian composers did, including Tchaikovsky.
Amusingly, K.R.’s most famous work today is not his play King of Judea (with music by Alexander Glazunov), which he wrote on Tchaikovsky’s advice and which was very controversial in its time, nor his translation of Hamlet, long considered exemplary, but a simple poem he wrote in 1885, which begins with the words: “He’s dead, poor fellow! He lay a long time / In the military hospital …”
I remember the doleful song—whose authors no one knew; it was considered a folk song—being sung by Russian veterans begging in trains after World War II. It is still performed today, at tipsy parties, and now there is always some expert to inform the group that the words were written by Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov.
There is a curious episode in the complex history of Dostoevsky’s relationship with members of the Romanov family. In early 1878 the writer was visited by Admiral Dmitri Arsenyev, tutor of Alexander II’s sons, who came “in the name of the Sovereign, who would like Fedor Mikhailovich to have a beneficial effect with his conversations on the young grand dukes.”7
There is reason to assume that the flattering visit was prompted by a recent mini-scandal in the royal family. On December 25 the twenty-year-old Grand Duke Sergei recorded the following plaintive lines in his diary: “I recently had a very unpleasant story: Papa accused me of depravity and that Sasha V. aided me in it, and the slander insulted me bitterly. Lord help me! Amen!”8
We can only guess what the “unpleasant story” was and whether it was related to Sergei’s homosexuality, but it resulted in Alexander II’s wish, passed on by Admiral Arsenyev, for Dostoevsky to talk sense to his wayward son. Alexander II—and Alexander III after him—valued Dostoevsky’s loyalty to the ideals of autocracy and his oft-expressed idea that young people must be brought up in an Orthodox and highly moral spirit. Dostoevsky, in turn, was happy to influence the views of the Romanovs in a personal conversation.
On March 21, 1878, Dostoevsky had lunch in the Winter Palace with the grand dukes and their tutors. K.R. was present and noted his impressions of the writer in his diary: “This is a sickly looking man, with a thin, long beard and extremely sad and thoughtful expression on his pale face. He speaks very well, as if reading a prepared text.”9
Judging by subsequent invitations to luncheons and dinners with the Romanov family circle, Dostoevsky’s “edifying” conversation with the grand dukes was considered a success. K.R. was delighted: “I love Dostoevsky for his pure, childlike heart, for his profound faith and observant mind.”10