Just What Is Not

They’re having lunch in a restaurant, their third time in a month, and he asks her what she’s been reading. She gives the titles of two books, “both of which I don’t think you’d like or even want to be seen with. They’re almost escape fiction, which for the past week I’ve needed to escape to because of all my work. But they’re light and easy to follow and with no big words to look up and they also help me to get through my own writing, when I have time for it. I don’t have to stop to understand another writer’s complicated entanglements of plot and profundities of thought. What have you been reading?” and he says “Anna Dostoevsky’s Reminiscences. Also, Joseph Frank’s biography of Dostoevsky. The abridged and condensed edition, as the jacket flap copy says, down to around nine hundred and seventy pages from what I think was around three thousand pages in four to five volumes. But I can’t part from one chapter in both books, rereading them over and over again because I love that particular time in their lives so much: how Feodor Mikhailovich and Anna Grigoryevna got engaged. Can I tell you it? It’s not too late?” She says “I have to pick up the kids in half an hour, but it’s only ten minutes away. So if you can give me the condensed-abridged version, I think we’ll make it.” “Anna was twenty and Feodor was forty-five or -six. He’d hired her—this was in Saint Petersburg, 1866—as a stenographer for his new novel, a short one, The Gambler. He’d dictate it and she’d write it down in shorthand and later at home transcribe it in longhand and next day he’d go over it. I think I have that right. No typewriters, then. You see, if he didn’t get it done in a month and turn it in to this very unscrupulous publisher he had a contract with, he could lose the rights to all his past books and maybe Crime and Punishment too, which he’d put aside for The Gambler and was being published serially and to great success in a magazine. Not his own: Time. Did you know he and his older brother Mikhail published a magazine called Time?” “No,” she says, “but go on. All this other stuff is interesting, but we haven’t that much time.” “They completed it in a month and turned it in. During that time he’d become more and more enchanted with her—in love, really—but didn’t think she’d be interested in marrying an old and sick man. You have to understand that nothing happened between them yet. So, in one of their many tea breaks—they took them between hour-long sessions of dictation—he said to her, and I’ve read this part so often I can almost quote their exact words—‘I have three possible paths to take.’ That’s Dostoevsky talking. ‘One is to go to the East—Jerusalem and Constantinople—and stay there, possibly forever. The second is to go abroad to play roulette—a game that mesmerizes me,’ he says. ‘And the third is to marry again’—he had a very sad first marriage, and his wife died—‘and seek joy and happiness in family life. You’re a smart girl,’ he said. ‘Which do you think I should choose?’ She said ‘Marriage and family happiness is what you need.’ Then he said ‘Should I try to find a wife, should she be an intelligent or a kind one?’ and Anna said ‘Intelligent.’ I forget her reason, and I don’t know why she didn’t say both. But Dostoevsky said he’d prefer a kind one ‘so that she’ll take pity on me and love me.’ After they completed their work on The Gambler, he asked her to stay on and help him with Crime and Punishment. And during one of their tea breaks from this book, he...