Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky

Chapter Five - The “Secret Vice” of Mariia Kroneberg: A Writer’s Diary

Chapter Five The “Secret Vice” of Mariia Kroneberg: A Writer’s Diary 80 WHEN DEALING WITH issues of sexuality, Dostoevsky shows himself to be both a product of his nineteenth-century milieu who subscribes to many of the stereotypes and misconceptions of his day and an independent thinker capable of dispensing with stereotype when it is contradicted by his own empirical observations. We have seen how in A Raw Youth he creates a homosexual character who to some extent conforms to the stereotypical image of the “pederast” found in the contemporary medical literature , but who ultimately transcends that image, probably as a result of Dostoevsky’s own direct experience with homosexuality during his prison years. In this chapter I will discuss another instance in which Dostoevsky sees human sexual behavior more clearly than most of his contemporaries, in his treatment of the Kroneberg child abuse case, published in the February 1876 issue of A Writer’s Diary (Dnevnik pisatelia), a case that centers around the supposed sexual sins of a seven-year-old girl. In his introduction to Kenneth Lantz’s translation of A Writer’s Diary, Gary Saul Morson points out that the Wrst monthly issue of the Diary is devoted to the theme of children: “In the January 1876 issue, children are obviously a central focus. But instead of speciWc recommendations or programs , we are presented with a Weld of possibilities, an interaction of perspectives, and the beginnings of inconclusive dialogues.”1 One of those inconclusive dialogues is without doubt a dialogue on the question of childhood innocence. It begins in the third part of the second chapter of the January 1876 issue, with Dostoevsky’s account of his visit to a colony for juvenile delinquents, and is continued in the second chapter of the February issue, with his response to the Kroneberg case. Dostoevsky’s visit to the juvenile colony in December 1875 was arranged by the legal ofWcial A. F. Koni (22:326). Early in his visit, Dostoevsky asks the director of the colony, Pavel Apollonovich Rovinskii, whether the young inmates, who range in age from ten to seventeen, are subject to “certain depraved childish habits” (izvestnye detskie porochnye privychki, 22:19). He is assured that this is impossible, because the boys are constantly observed. Dostoevsky notes, “But this seemed improbable to me.” Some of the inmates had earlier been housed in the Lithuanian Castle prison in St. Petersburg along with adults: I had been in that prison three years before and had seen those boys. Later I learned with complete certainty that unusual debauchery reigned in the Castle, that those vagrants who entered the Castle and were not yet infected with this debauchery, and at Wrst were repelled by it, later submitted to it willy-nilly, because of the mockery of their comrades at their chastity [tselomudriem ]. (22:19–20)2 It is not clear whether Dostoevsky is referring here to homosexuality or masturbation (most likely the former), but a later reference is clearly to masturbation . Rovinskii tells Dostoevsky about a boy, earlier housed in the Lithuanian Castle, who was constantly getting in trouble, trying to escape, and ending up in solitary conWnement. After a serious conversation with Rovinskii , the boy Wnally broke down: “He Xung himself on me in tears, all shaken and transformed, began to repent , to reproach himself, began to tell me things that had happened to him before, things that he had hidden from everyone up to that time: he told me as a secret that he had long been given to a certain most shameful habit which he could not get rid of, and that it was tormenting him—in a word, it was a full confession. I spent about two hours with him,” added P. A——ch. “We talked; I advised him about certain measures for overcoming his habit, etc., etc.” (22:24)3 Dostoevsky says that Rovinskii Wrmly refused to elaborate on what he and the boy had talked about, but, Dostoevsky says, “You must agree, there is such a thing as a real skill at penetrating the sick soul of a deeply embittered young criminal who had never known the truth up to that time” (22:25). Dostoevsky’s Wnal word on this case is telling: “I admit, I would really like to Wnd out the details of this conversation” (22:25). Dostoevsky’s curiosity is probably not simple prurience, but a continuation of his lifelong interest in the souls and personalities of children, who seem to...