The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (45 page)

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Authors: Alexandra Popoff

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Nadezhda in the 1920s, soon after meeting Mandelstam. Both were penniless and “free as birds.”
Photo courtesy the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art
.

Nadezhda in the 1960s, when Mandelstam’s poetry was finally printed. “Now it is indestructible, and therefore I feel totally and absolutely free …”
Photo courtesy the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art
.

The Nabokovs in 1967, in Switzerland. Véra was Nabokov’s ideal listener: “I start to talk—you answer, as if rounding off a line of verse.”
Photo: Horst Tappe/Getty images
.

Elena in 1928, one year before meeting Bulgakov.
Photo courtesy the Russian State Library
.

The Bulgakovs in the late 1930s, during
The Master and Margarita
. “To me, when he is not … writing his own work, life loses all meaning.”
Photo courtesy the Russian State Library
.

The Solzhenitsyns in 2000. Solzhenitsyn, who found a devoted collaborator in Natalya, believed himself the luckiest among Russian writers.
Photo Pavel Kasin/Kommersant
.

Endnotes

1.	Grigory Baklanov, Russian writer. His novels include The Moment Between the Past and the Future (London: Faber and Faber, 1994) and Forever Nineteen (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1989).
2.	Stacy Schiff, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (New York: Random House, 1999), 52.
3.	Ibid., xiv.
4.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , trans. Beatrice Stillman (New York: Liveright, 1975), 364.
5.	Boris Pasternak, I Remember: Sketch for an Autobiography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 66.
6.	The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy , trans. Cathy Porter (New York: Random House, 1985), 42.
7.	Ibid., 41.
8.	Dostoevskys’ name and patronymic.
9.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 90.
10.	Ibid., 5–6.
11.	In the 1960s, Russian stenographer Poshemanskaia managed to crack her code. It took another three decades before the complete diaries appeared in a scholarly edition in Russia.
12.	Joseph Brodsky, “Nadezhda Mandelstam: An Obituary” in Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope , trans. Max Hayward (New York: The Modern Library, 1999), viii.
13.	Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 264.
14.	In another conversation, Natalya told me that she would never allow writing her biography as long as Solzhenitsyn was alive.
15.	Stacy Schiff, Véra , 73.
16.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 1.
17.	Osip i Nadezhda Mandelshtamy v rasskazah sovremennikov , ed. O.S. Figurnova (Moskva: Natalis, 2002), 453.
18.	The thirteenth-century Russian hero, patron saint of Russian warriors, and symbol of Russian nationalism.
19.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 5–6. Unless otherwise specified, all citations referring to Anna’s childhood and betrothal come from Reminiscences .
20.	Turku Cathedral (Åbo domkyrkha in Swedish), built in the thirteenth century, was the main Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland and the national shrine.
21.	Anna’s ancestors on her father’s side were landowners from Poltava province in the Ukraine. When they settled in Petersburg, their surname Snitko was altered to the Russian-sounding Snitkin.
22.	Aimee Dostoevsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky . (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), 127.
23.	At the end of 1850, a number of secondary schools for girls were opened. Mariinskaya Gymnasium opened in 1858, the year Anna became enrolled; she graduated it with a silver medal.
24.	The magazine was published by Dostoevsky and his brother.
25.	Petrashevsky, a follower of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, started a literary discussion group, participated in by writers, students, government officials, and army officers who opposed autocracy.
26.	http://art.thelib.ru/science/unusual/misc/kak_rodilsya_vokrug_sveta.html
27.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , ed. Zhitomirskaia (Moskva: Nauka, 1993). April (17?), 1867. This edition can be found on http://az.lib.ru/d/dostoewskij_f_m/text_0630.shtml . Zhitomirskaia was the first to point out that Anna had made significant changes to her original diaries. Unless otherwise specified, translation is by the author.
28.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 17.
29.	Nihilism, a new social phenomenon in Russia, emerged in the 1860s and became reflected in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done ? Dostoevsky portrayed Nihilists in Crime and Punishment and The Devils .
30.	Aimee Dostoevsky , Fyodor Dostoevsky , 139.
31.	Leonid Grossman, Dostoevsky (Moskva: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1965), 381. Translation is by the author.
32.	As Dostoevsky told Anna, he himself freed Korvin-Krukovskaya from her pledge. But according to Joseph Frank, it is uncertain whether she even accepted Dostoevskys’ proposal. Joseph Frank, The Miraculous Years , (1865–1871) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 23.
33.	Quoted in Joseph Frank, The Miraculous Years , 161–62.
34.	Apollinaria’s famous sister, Nadezhda Suslova, was Russia’s first woman to become a medical doctor in 1867.
35.	Suslova’s second and last novella is entitled Chuzhaya i Svoi ( Estranged and Own).
36.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , October 12 (31), 1867.
37.	Quoted in Joseph Frank, The Miraculous Years , 23.
38.	Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters , ed. and trans. David A. Lowe (Ardis: Ann Arbor, 1990), vol. 2, 211.
39.	Ibid.
40.	Ibid., 217.
41.	Ibid., 219.
42.	Ibid., 235.
43.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 121
44.	The Diary of Dostoevskys’ Wife , trans. Madge Pamberton (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 7. This chapter employs two editions of Anna’s diaries—the complete one, available in Russian online, and the translated version.
45.	Now Vilnus, the capital of Lithuania.
46.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , April (17?), 1867.
47.	The Diary of Dostoevskys’ Wife , 29.
48.	Ibid.
49.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , September 21/9, 1867.
50.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 118.
51.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , August 18 (6), 1867.
52.	Ibid., April (19?), 1867.
53.	Ibid., June 26, 1867.
54.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 117.
55.	The Diary of Dostoevskys’ Wife , 56.
56.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , June 6 (May 25), 1867.
57.	Ibid., April 21 (May 3), 1867.
58.	Ibid., April 29 (May 11), 1867.
59.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 125.
60.	The Diary of Dostoevskys’ Wife , 64.
61.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , April 27 (May 9), 1867.
62.	Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters , vol. 2, 227.
63.	Ibid., 235.
64.	Ibid., 232.
65.	Ibid., 236.
66.	Ibid., 241.
67.	Ibid., 237.
68.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , May 8 (20), 1867.
69.	Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters , vol. 2, 239–40.
70.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , May 11 (23), 1867.
71.	Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters , vol. 2, 243.
72.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 130.
73.	Ibid., 131–32.
74.	The Diary of Dostoevskys’ Wife , 227.
75.	Ibid., 264.
76.	Ibid., 306.
77.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , August 8 (July 27), 1867.
78.	Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters , vol. 2, 252.
79.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , August 23 (11), 1867.
80.	Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sobranie sochinenij v pyatnadtsati tomah (Peterburg: Nauka, 1996), vol. 15, 319.
81.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 137.
82.	Nikolai Strakhov’s expression quoted in Joseph Frank, The Miraculous Years , 305.
83.	Dostoevskys’ notebooks for The Idiot . Joseph Frank, The Miraculous Years , 274–75.
84.	Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters , vol. 2, 297.
85.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , October 11 (September 29), 1867.
86.	Ibid., September 18 (6), 1867.
87.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 137–38.
88.	Ibid., 140.
89.	Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years (1865-71), 277.
90.	A.G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda , October 1 (September 19), 1867.
91.	Dostoevskys’ letter to Dr. Stepan Yanovsky, Dec. 31, 1867 (January 12, 1868). Joseph Frank, The Miraculous Years , 244.
92.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 141.
93.	Ibid, 142.
94.	Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters , vol. 3, 36.
95.	Ibid., 53.
96.	Ibid., 63.
97.	Ibid., 67.
98.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 147.
99.	Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters , vol. 3, 88.
100.	Ibid., 104.
101.	Ibid., 99.
102.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 153.
103.	Ibid.
104.	Dostoevskys’ letter to Nikolai Strakhov. Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences, 153.
105.	Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters , vol. 3, 174.
106.	Ibid., 185.
107.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 182.
108.	Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters, vol. 3, 193.
109.	Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , 162.
110.	Nechaev escaped to Switzerland, where he continued subversive activities. In 1872, he was arrested in Zurich and handed over to the Russian police.

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