Release and Return

In February, 1854, Dostoevsky was released from prison. On the morning that his chains were finally cut from his legs, he experienced a powerful sense of resurrection. But he was not entirely free. The release from prison initiated the second part of his sentence, which he would serve in military exile in the far reaches of Siberia, not far from the Chinese border.

His several months of exile were difficult. Dostoevsky was reduced to the rank of private. He found himself once again living in close quarters with (mostly) the peasant class. Accordingly, he had no sympathy from his fellow soldiers. One wrote of Dostoevsky:

None of us soldiers in the barracks ever saw a real smile on his face...He never said a word about his past. In general he talked very little. The only book he had was the New Testament, which he looked after carefully and clearly valued very highly. In the barracks he never wrote anything; and of course a soldier then had very little free time. Dostoevsky rarely left the barracks, and mostly sat by himself sunk in thought.
[Frank 177-178]

Two things happened to change Dostoevsky's circumstances and to give him hope that the future would be brighter. First, in February 1855, Tsar Nicholas I died. Because the death of a tsar usually brought pardons to all criminals, Dostoevsky was hopeful that he would be pardoned and would be able to return to life in Petersburg. Second, Dostoevsky made the acquaintance of the local public prosecutor, Alexander Wrangel. Ironically, Wrangel had as a young man been a witness to Dostoevsky's mock execution. He was also a fan of Poor Folk, and so was disturbed when the promising writer had been sent into exile. When Wrangel received his post in Siberia, he contacted Dostoevsky's brother in order to bring Dostoevsky letters and books. The two struck up a friendship, and eventually moved into a dacha with a garden and horses. These they rode at every opportunity, exploring the wild and lovely steppe, and discussing the "eternal questions." Dostoevsky's life in exile became tolerable.

At this time that Dostoevsky met and fell in love with his first wife, Maria Dmitrievna Isaev, a woman who was married, although very unhappily. Maria's husband was an abusive alcoholic whose illness had caused his wife and son to live in extreme poverty. Maria herself was consumptive, and between the abuses of her marriage and her ravaged health, she suffered terribly. Still, she was a woman very much in love with life's joys, and the combination of joy and suffering drew Dostoevsky to her. She was also, in her illness, disturbingly beautiful. Soon, Dostoevsky was consumed by the torments of his first love.

Their relationship was a complicated one - not simply because Maria was married, but because the love was one-sided. Maria felt compassion for the young artist who had been treated so badly by fate, but she was not in love. Indeed, when her husband, whose alcoholism had left him for two years without a job, finally found employment four hundred miles away, Maria agreed to go with him. Dostoevsky was shattered but could do nothing to stop her. On the day they left town, he and the prosecutor Wrangel rode out of town with the Isaev's carriage. Wrangel got the husband drunk so that Dostoevsky and Maria could take a long ride in the moonlight. Wrangel writes that when the two lovers returned, and the coach finally rode away, "Dostoevsky stood...as if rooted to the spot, speechless, his head bowed, tears rolling down his cheeks. We did not get home until daybreak." (Wrangel's letter, quoted by Grossman in his biography)

But the relationship did not end there. Dostoevsky and Maria kept up a tormented correspondence until August 1855, when Maria's husband died. Maria and her son were in terrible financial difficulties, and though he was in dire straights himself, Dostoevsky devoted himself to trying to arrange her affairs. But still Maria did not fall in love with him. Instead, her attentions turned to a young teacher who would become a serious rival for Maria's heart. Dostoevsky was obsessed with anxiety that she would get married before his exile ended, and that he would lose her forever. He tried to torment Maria with the same jealousy that he felt, telling her about parties he had attended and women he had danced with. The tactic worked, and the two entered into the kind of mutual torment that is so common among the lovers of Dostoevsky's later novels.

The details of this convoluted courtship are hard to sum up briefly. It is enough to say here that Dostoevsky persisted and eventually prevailed. He was eventually able to persuade Maria that, though he was still in exile and his future was uncertain, an alliance with him promised a future brighter than any she might have with her beloved schoolteacher. Finally, Maria agreed to marry him. Dostoevsky was, until the very last minute, worried about his rival. In fact, he went so far as to obsess that perhaps the teacher would come and kill Maria, ending their happiness forever. But his worry came to nothing. In February 1857, after several years of tormenting each other, the two were married in a small ceremony in Siberia. Dostoevsky felt that his happiness was complete.

Unfortunately, this happiness would not last long. Maria proved a difficult, capricious wife, and domestic drudgery in exile proved a real challenge to Dostoevsky. He turned his attention to other matters and spent his remaining time in exile with three aims: he worked to rehabilitate himself; he strategized to re-ignite the writing career that had been interrupted by his arrest; and he continued to ponder the "eternal questions" of God and man.

Somehow, for Dostoevsky, all of these issues depended on his spiritual regeneration. Dostoevsky believed that finding and living spiritual truth would return him both to Petersburg and to his life as a writer. However, complicating the spiritual questions was the matter of Dostoevsky's epilepsy - a type of epilepsy that apparently begins with spells of incredible exhilaration before bringing on a fit so bad that the sufferer loses consciousness. These spells of exhilaration are often mystical in nature, and Dostoevsky's experience was no exception. Frank describes an episode in Volume Two of his biography, in which Dostoevsky was arguing with a friend about the existence of God, and the "'cursed questions' of human life:"

Just at the moment when Dostoevsky was proclaiming, in a pitch of feverish exaltation, his belief in the existence of God, "the bells of the neighboring church began to sound the matins for Easter. The atmosphere began to vibrate and to dance. 'And I had the sentiment,' Dostoevsky continued, 'that the heaven had come down to earth and swallowed me up. I really apprehended God and felt him in every fibre of my being. I then cried: Yes, God exists. I remember nothing after that.'"
[Frank 197]

Dostoevsky was not sure what to make of these experiences. Like Ivan Karamazov, he would not be able to believe absolutely that what he experienced in these spells was truly God. But, as Frank says so eloquently "Neither could he accept a world in which the reality of these gleams of the absolute, no matter how treacherous and dangerous, was simply negated or denied." (Frank, Volume Two, 198)

Though his time in exile did not resolve Dostoevsky's spiritual questions, it did make him sure of a few basic principles. First, he came to believe in the power of Russia, and to admire the faith of the Russian people. He yearned to return to Petersburg as a real Russian - not as a Europeanized intellectual. Most important, he came to understand that repentance was the key to his regeneration and his return. Frank includes in his biography the following poem, which illustrates this belief. In the poem, Dostoevsky addresses the ex-Empress, consoling her for the loss of her husband, Nicholas I:

Forgive me, forgive my wish;
Forgive that I dare to speak with you.
Forgive that I dare nourish the senseless dream
Of consoling your sadness, lightening your suffering.
Forgive that I, a mournful outcast, dare
Raise his voice at this hallowed grave.
But God! Our judge from all eternity!
Thou sent me thy judgment in the disturbed hour of doubt,
And with my heart I discovered that tears are - expiation.
That again I was a Russian, and - again a man!
[Frank 199]

Read on: Beginning the Writing Life

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