The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (2 page)

Both women have meticulously documented their own and their husbands’ lives through their diaries, memoirs, and correspondence. But Anna Dostoevsky was far more guarded than Sophia: she kept stenographic records and, in addition, used her own code, inaccessible even to another stenographer. Unlike Tolstoy, Dostoevsky could not read his wife’s diaries, a wise arrangement given his suspiciousness and volatility. Anna transcribed her notes thirty years later when preparing her diary for publication. She did not want readers to know her actual experiences and, furthermore, tried to create an improved portrait of Dostoevsky as a private man. To accomplish this, she had to sacrifice accuracy and even rewrite some episodes. None of this was known until the end of the twentieth century, when a Russian expert managed to crack her code and her surviving original notebooks were published.
11
This new biographical material gives insights into her character and the couple’s relationship during their first and most trying year together.

Sophia Tolstoy’s and Anna Dostoevskys’ inspired collaboration with Russia’s most prominent writers have undoubtedly influenced literary marriages in the twentieth century. But in the age of Stalin’s political dictatorship, free expression ceased to exist and writing could be ruled a crime punishable by death. For these women, assisting genuine writers required extraordinary courage.

When Osip Mandelstam, a major twentieth-century poet, was sent to the gulag in 1938, his wife, Nadezhda, barely escaped the same fate. But she took the risk of concealing his illicit archive: if his poetry were confiscated and destroyed, this would also result in his spiritual demise. For decades, she led a nomadic life, hiding from the authorities and supporting herself with teaching. What kept her alive was her mission to publish Mandelstam’s works and tell his story. Nadezhda memorized much of his verse and prose, making her memory an additional storage. After Stalin’s death in 1953, she committed to paper Mandelstam’s works, along with background information, and began to struggle for posthumous publication.

Some of the best twentieth-century Russian literature survives today only because these women had the courage to preserve it.
Elena Bulgakov married the ingenious and tormented satirical writer to whom Stalin personally denied publication. Mikhail Bulgakov’s only play that could be staged in the 1930s was
The Days of the Turbins
, inexplicably Stalin’s favorite. The tyrant, however, refused publication of his subsequent plays, and Elena witnessed the continual banning of Bulgakov’s productions.

In her diary, which she courageously kept during the purges of the 1930s, Elena chronicled Bulgakov’s harassment and the arrests of their friends—actors, writers, directors, and military officers. Through Bulgakov’s depression, their penury, and his debilitating kidney disease, she remained a source of hope and strength. Elena was the inspiration for a principal character in
The Master and Margarita
, also a writer’s wife, who allies with supernatural forces to save the novel of her beloved master.

In 1940, when dying from the kidney disease and by this time almost blind, Bulgakov dictated to Elena his revisions for
The Master and Margarita
. Now published worldwide, this final masterpiece reached the reader only because she preserved the archive and tenaciously pursued publication, achieving her goal twenty-five years after Bulgakov’s death.

Many writers in history relied on their wives for moral and practical support. Nora Joyce was the “rock” of James Joyce’s life as well as his model, but although she inspired Molly Bloom in
Ulysses
, she never read the book nor did she take interest in his creativity. Unlike Nora, Russian literary wives actively helped produce literature. These women became so much a part of it that they commonly used the word “we” to describe the progress of their husbands’ work.

The writers’ dependence on their wives, from inspiration to technical help, is surprising. Tolstoy could have hired a scribe to copy his novels, but he wanted Sophia to do the work because she was his first audience. His literature united them: Sophia would even refer to
War and Peace
as their child. Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Mandelstam, and Bulgakov wanted their wives to take dictation, so they could receive instant responses to their writing. Nadezhda Mandelstam intimated that the poet did not write a single line
on his own, because she recorded his verse as she watched him compose. Mandelstam expected her to even hold variations of his poems in her memory—and this “technicality,” in Joseph Brodsky’s words, strengthened the bond of their marriage.
12
When Mandelstam died in a camp, Nadezhda survived “for the joy breathed by his verse.” Theirs was a relationship between two intellectuals and artists (she was a painter), but Nadezhda adapted her intellect to serve her husband.

As Nadezhda remarked, Mandelstam had made her “a complete partner in his life.”
13
When her brother remarked that she had become the poet’s echo, Mandelstam replied: “That’s how
we
like it.” Nadezhda’s loss of identity resembles Véra Nabokov’s: both women were their husbands’ invisible creative partners and seemed to prefer it that way.

When, in 2002, I met Natalya Solzhenitsyn in Moscow, I asked her whether she knew of any biographer writing about her life. She replied, in the manner of a Véra Nabokov: “I would never allow that.”
14
Natalya did not regret abandoning her own career as a mathematician, since she considered her collaboration with Solzhenitsyn far more important.

Natalya met Solzhenitsyn at twenty-eight, when she was studying for her doctorate in the late 1960s. He needed a reliable helper to type
The First Circle
but keep their collaboration secret. His dissident friends recommended Natalya, who had worked as a literary assistant to none other than Nadezhda Mandelstam. Natalya, of course, knew Solzhenitsyn from his earlier novella,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, which, as the first published account of Stalin’s crimes, rocked the entire country. Upon meeting its author, she took up his literary work and his struggle against the Communist state.

In 1974, when Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported, Natalya masterminded the smuggling of his illicit archive to the West. The writer needed all his material to go on working, and Natalya said she would only join him when all of his papers were saved. By then, the couple had had three small children together, the youngest still
a toddler. She risked her own and her children’s safety by organizing a secret network of allies. Acting with steely resolve, Natalya connected with foreign correspondents and diplomats who could transport suitcases of Solzhenitsyn’s documents. When the archive was safely distributed, Natalya crossed the Soviet border with her children and their bulky luggage, which included Solzhenitsyn’s writing desk.

Natalya Solzhenitsyn would surprise visitors in the West with the amount of labor she invested to assist her husband. Aside from handling massive research for his historical novels, Natalya edited and typeset Solzhenitsyn’s collected works. In addition, there were secretarial duties because Solzhenitsyn, like Nabokov, rarely picked up the phone. Always keen to give his wife credit, Solzhenitsyn called himself the luckiest among Russian writers to have found such a devoted collaborator.

As Véra Nabokov remarked during the first decade of her marriage, “Someone should write a book on the influence a woman bears on her husband, in other words on stimulation, and inspiration.”
15
However, she did not write this book or any other on her own. At the age of eighty-two, still spending full days at her writing desk translating Nabokov’s fiction, Véra believed she lacked epistolary gifts. Elena Bulgakov never wrote a book of reminiscences about her husband, although it was something she wanted to accomplish. Anna Dostoevsky penned brilliant memoirs, but insisted that she was “utterly lacking in literary talent.”
16
And although Sophia Tolstoy wrote fiction, she did not live to see it published.

The picture was different in the West where women, as early as the eighteenth century, established themselves as successful novelists and competed with male writers. The Fitzgeralds’ marriage is a good example of such rivalry. Zelda had no intention of submitting her ideas and themes to her husband or of “being a footnote in someone else’s life,” to use Martha Gellhorn’s famous words.

When Gellhorn visited Nadezhda Mandelstam in Moscow, she spoke casually about her former husband Ernest Hemingway: “Why do they like this chatterbox in your country?”
17
Gellhorn resented
her fame as Hemingway’s wife, an attitude that surprised Nadezhda, since Russian writers’ wives were usually their ambassadors.

There is no simple explanation why in Russia these gifted women did not pursue independent writing careers. One needs to know, however, that until the mid-twentieth century Russian literature was predominantly male. Writing prose was not yet a province of women—the majority found a niche writing memoirs, letters, and diaries. This made an impact on how the women told their stories—they often spoke to the world through their husbands’ genius.

C
HAPTER
O
NE

Anna Dostoevsky: Cherishing a Memory

F
ew writers describe their day of birth as a festive event, but for Anna it portended her later mission of being married to Dostoevsky. She was born in St. Petersburg on August 30, 1846, the feast day of St. Alexander Nevsky,
18
near the monastery built in his name. When a cheerful procession, which included the Emperor himself, began to move out of the monastery gates to the tolling of church bells and holiday music, Anna set out on her life’s road. Being born on a feast day was believed a good omen. “The prophecy came true,” Anna writes. “Despite all the material misfortunes and moral sufferings it has been my lot to bear, I consider my life to have been one of exceptional happiness, and I would not wish to change anything in it.”
19

She was christened in a parish church of Alexander Nevsky Monastery, the place where her parents had been wed; Dostoevsky would be buried in the monastery cemetery thirty-five years later. In her mind’s eye, the two great names were interrelated: Alexander
Nevsky, a national hero and a saint, flared at her dawn and sunset, while Dostoevsky was, in her words, the sun of her life as well as her god.

Anna came from a family whose parents became drawn to each other at first sight. They did not even speak the same language when they met: Anna’s mother was Swedish and her father Ukrainian. Maria Anna Miltopeus grew up in a Swedish community in Finland, in the ancient city of Turku (Åbo in Swedish). Some of her prominent ancestors, clerics and scholars (one was a Lutheran bishop), were buried inside the Cathedral of Turku,
20
the Westminster Abbey of Finland. At nineteen, Maria Anna became engaged to a Swedish officer, but he was killed in action in Hungary. For ten years after his death, she did not consider marrying—even though her strikingly good looks and fine soprano voice (she had dreamed of a stage career) had attracted suitors. Later, her relatives in Petersburg, with whom she was staying, hosted a party with several young bachelors. Grigory Ivanovich Snitkin
21
, an unimposing civil servant of forty-two, was not considered a possible match (he simply came with one of the guests), but he alone impressed the young Swede. As Maria Anna told her family, “I liked the old fellow better—the one who kept telling stories and laughing.” Because their different faiths presented an obstacle to marriage, Maria Anna, a Lutheran, decided to enter the Orthodox Church. (After converting, she took the name Anna Nikolaevna.) Later, she integrated Orthodox rites with her Lutheran prayer book.

Although occupying a modest rank, Snitkin was a well-educated man who had graduated from a Jesuit school and worshiped literature and the arts. A theater connoisseur since youth, he revered a prominent tragic actress, Asenkova. When Anna and her sister were small, he took them to Asenkova’s tomb and asked them to kneel and pray “for the repose of the soul of the greatest artist of our time.”
22
This incident made a deep impression on Anna, who would revere Dostoevskys’ talent as her father had admired the late actress.

Anna’s family lived “without quarrels, dramas, and catastrophes.” Her parents’ characters were well matched: a strong-willed and practical mother and a romantic and timid father. Snitkin accepted his wife’s authority, only reserving one liberty for himself—collecting curios and antique porcelains. The family’s friendly atmosphere generated Anna’s balanced and cheerful character, which would enchant Dostoevsky, who himself was tempestuous and grim. Anna—a middle child with an older sister and a younger brother—was her father’s favorite. Like Snitkin, she would live for a month under the spell of the opera and ballet performances the family attended on holidays.

For a girl of her time, Anna received an excellent education. She studied in a primary school where most subjects were taught in German, the language her mother spoke at home. (Anna would become Dostoevskys’ translator in Germany and in Switzerland, where they traveled shortly after marrying.) Enrolling in the newly opened Petersburg Mariinskaya Gymnasium,
23
a secondary school for girls, she graduated with a silver medal, a distinction that, in her eyes, would justify her marriage to the brilliant writer.

Dostoevskys’ name was familiar to her in childhood: her father called him the greatest among living writers and subscribed to his literary magazine
Time
.
24
Fresh issues of this magazine with installments of Dostoevskys’ novel
Insulted and Injured
were fought over in their family; his characters’ names became household words. Anna was dubbed Netochka Nezvanova, after the heroine of Dostoevskys’ novel of the same title. At fifteen, she cried over
Notes from the House of the Dead
, an account of Dostoevskys’ life in the Siberian prison camp he was sent to for dissident activity. In the late 1840s, with European revolutions in the air, Dostoevsky had briefly participated in the Petrashevsky circle
25
, an intellectual group that discussed socialist utopian ideas. Anna was three years old when in 1849 Dostoevsky was convicted and sentenced to exile with hard labor.