Years ago, in high school, I took a course called “Literature of Other Cultures.” The class project was to read three books from one country and give a report. I chose Russia. The former Cold War enemy always held an attraction for me, and ninety percent of the reason for this was the sound of the language itself. Those who criticize Russian as harsh are completely wrong, and are confusing it with the legacy of dictatorial regimes or unforgiving winters. Russian sounds strong, but that’s not the same as harsh. And like the famous wooden lace architecture of Siberian houses, it’s equally colorful and delicate. The other ten percent of my fascination with Russia was a mixture of onion domes, spy movie villains and mysterious eastern mysticism.
The first two books I read were Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. I liked both, but the third, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, opened up a whole other world. The passionate, seething of the unnamed narrator was far more engrossing than the petty schoolboy envy of A Separate Peace. It put Holden Caulfield to shame. The macho stoicism of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea had nothing on the pathetic angst of a nobody functionary in St. Petersburg. Notes from Underground led to Crime and Punishment, House of the Dead, and The Idiot. I have loved other writers, but Dostoevsky will always be my number one.
That’s why visiting his former residence in St. Petersburg was something of a pilgrimage. The last place he lived before he died is the same place he dreamed up Dmitri Karamazov’s romantic self-destruction and Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor in his best novel The Brothers Karamazov.
Inside his former residence you can see the stand where he hung his hat, the desk where he wrote, and the packet of cigarettes on which his daughter wrote, “Papa died today.”
Below the residence is a museum with a collection of old letters, and photos of him and his contemporaries. My favorite exhibit was on the writer’s thoughts of the various places he’d visited in Europe (he praised London, dismissed Zurich).
The exoticism of Russia was originally part of its appeal. But the more time I’ve spent with Dostoevsky, and inside his home, the exoticism has changed to a familiarity, which fictitious though it may be, has a much stronger appeal.
