Dostoevsky lives
'Grady, Desmond O
DOSTOEVSKY LIVES APOSTLE OF INTERIOR FREEDOM he tea in Dostoevsky's glass is still brewed daily, as if it had to sustain him through a strenuous night of writing. Even the doorbell is...
...That made his work subversive but the novels were such classics that Soviet authorities kept them in print...
...the end came on the next morning...
...But local reminders of Dostoevsky are not the only or prime reasons why he still means so much to those he has influenced...
...till 5 a.m., acting out all the dialogue to get the tone right, sipping tea, stubbing endless cigarettes into an empty sardine tin...
...In the same street as the ocher-colored, four-story apartment block are the city's largest market and the Orthodox church he attended, reopened only in 1991 after being closed for decades...
...the apartment at number 104 on Griboedova Canal where the fictional Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) committed his crime...
...The room used by his devoted wife, Anna, is businesslike: it was she who looked after the budget, dealt with Dostoevsky's publisher, paid off the debts of her late brother-in-law Mikhail...
...He'd also lived there twenty-three years earlier, in 1846...
...In Saint Petersburg, though, there is proof that Dostoevsky lives on, and not only in libraries and bookshops but also in people who were led to Christianity by his writings during the Communist regime...
...He depicted nihilists memorably as well: one of his recurrent themes is that unless people believe in God they are capable of any abomination, for self-interest inevitably overrides good intentions...
...With others, 6 REPORT FROM SAINT PETERSBURG he was imprisoned for eight months in Saint Petersburg's notorious Saints Peter and Paul fortress, and then condemned to death...
...In 1993 he became director of an Orthodox-linked human rights organization in Saint Petersburg...
...Of his fifty-three years, Dostoevsky lived almost thirty in Saint Petersburg, the last three in this second-floor apartment, which has been restored in keeping with photographs taken immediately after his death, along with descriptions in the memoirs of his widow, Anna...
...A gambler and a grumbler, Dostoevsky was no plaster saint—but, to judge from the kind of influence he still wields, he might be a real one...
...On his desk he kept the work of his favorite poet, Pushkin...
...Dostoevsky played a key role in this evolution...
...on January 28, 1881, the hemorrhage began...
...As a novelist, he created characters who live on the page, who know they are God's children but feel they are living in hell...
...In the apartment, the clock is stopped at 8:38 a.m., the moment on a January day in 1881 when Fyodor Dostoevsky died from a throat hemorrhage caused by emphysema...
...Benjamin Novick, now vice-rector of the Orthodox Theological Academy, was once a computer specialist...
...desmond O'GRADY Desmond O 'Grady is a reporter, essayist, and short-story writer who covers Vatican and Italian affairs for a number of publications...
...Grib's own academic career had suffered when his beliefs were discovered...
...On the bottom of a tobacco box containing some cigarette cartridges, twelve-year-old Liuba wrote, "Daddy died today...
...Sergei Grib, an astrophysicist of the Academy of Science, found in Dostoevsky an effective counter to his conventional atheistic secondary education...
...Reading Dostoevsky, and meeting Christians, convinced him of the truth of Christianity...
...In that spacious apartment Dostoevsky wrestled with angels and demons to write The Brothers Karamazov, working from about 10:30 p.m...
...The reprieve was not a pardon: Dostoevsky was banished to Siberia for four years of penal servitude and five of military service...
...Since his conversion Sergei Grib has written extensively on Russian religious philosophy...
...Even the doorbell is unchanged since the time Dostoevsky would slowly climb the steep stairs to his second-floor apartment in Saint Petersburg, pausing for breath because of lung trouble...
...He completed only the first volume of what was to have been a trilogy, and had other works planned...
...he may have been too busy with The Brothers Karamazov...
...Much else in Saint Petersburg recalls Dostoevsky: the grubby, interconected courtyards of large apartment blocks, where babushkas (grandmothers) sit gossiping...
...Then they slipped notes under the door...
...Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer execution...
...Under Communism we desperately wanted to be freed...
...Seconds before the firing squad was to carry out the sentence, a reprieve arrived from His Imperial Majesty Nicholas I. One of the other men condemned and then reprieved was taken from the scene insane, and never recovered...
...Moreover," he added, Dostoevsky "dramatized the corollary, that only a free man can be a Christian...
...It was, of course, a temptation for Communists as well and during their era Dostoevsky's exposure of the corruptions of power struck a chord...
...A handsome brown rocking horse stands in the room of the two children, Fyodor and Liuba...
...Dostoevsky recounted his experience in a letter to his younger brother Mikhail: They made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to death...
...Each evening Dostoevsky would read to them from Pushkin's "Fairy Tales" or other books...
...To judge by The Brothers Karamazov, he saw power as one of the ultimate temptations for Christians...
...There is, of course, much more in Dostoevsky's novels that resonated with his countrymen a century after he died, and his life under the czars included scarifying experiences of a kind well known to the subjects of Stalin and his successors...
...Perhaps he had in mind his own words: "Some good, sacred memory preserved from childhood is perhaps the best education...
...Christianity means interior freedom," he said in an interview...
...recently he founded a Christian studies association named for the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev...
...Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me...
...But at 3 p.m...
...He also helped his children with their lessons in history, Russian, and geography (there is a map of the world on the wall of the children's room...
...But at times he closed himself away in his study...
...By the time he moved to his last apartment, he was financially secure...
...at the age of thirty-five, he began reading his way into Christianity, and, eventually, the priesthood...
...he was baptized at age twenty-five, joined a Christian study group, which brought him imprisonment...
...How he responded we do not know...
...In 1849, already a literary success, he was arrested for his membership in a Utopian socialist discussion group...
...These converts are of interestingly varied backgrounds...
...That was one of Dostoevsky's messages, and it counted a lot in an oppressive society...
...Doctors were called but could do nothing...
...Above the desk is a reproduction of Raphael's Sistine Madonna...
...Dostoevsky also convinced us that each man has his own particular path to God: that life is a personal relationship with God...
...I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss Pletcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell...
...Not till 1873, when he became editor of a Saint Petersburg weekly, The Citizen, did he leave debts behind...
...Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared our lives...
...In 1865 his first wife, Maria, their child, and his brother Mikhail died, and he himself had to flee abroad to escape debtor's prison...
...At seventeen, Vladimir Poresch, brought up in an atheistic household, thought of religion as a compensation for fear of the forces of nature, believed life itself was senseless, and was tempted to suicide...
...After his return to Saint Petersburg in 1860 he fought a long and exhausting battle against poverty...
...Part of the time he was in chains and was subject to frequent attacks of epilepsy...
...It was in this troubled period that he wrote Crime and Punishment...
...One from Fyodor reads, "Daddy, give me a candy...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 19
