Fyodor Dostoevsky

The first journey out, 1862

Dostoevsky left St Petersburg for Berlin on 7 June 1862, by the Russian calendar then in use — the older Julian calendar, which in the nineteenth century ran twelve days behind the Western one, so that Russian dates of this period always look a little earlier than the same day elsewhere in Europe. He was forty. It was the first time he had been outside Russia, a late first journey for a European writer, and one he made after four years in a Siberian prison camp and four more of enforced provincial service. In roughly two and a half months he covered Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, Paris, London, Geneva, Genoa, Florence and Vienna. He wrote from Paris to Nikolai Strakhov, the critic who wrote for his magazine, in a letter dated 26 June by the Russian calendar, 8 July by the Western one. In London that July he met Alexander Herzen, the exiled Russian writer and publisher whose anti-government journal was smuggled back into Russia by the thousand.

The book came out of an editorial request. His brother Mikhail, who was co-editor with him of the magazine Vremya, wrote on 18 June 1862 suggesting he send back travel impressions, and Dostoevsky took the idea up warmly. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions appeared in Vremya the following year, across the February and March numbers of 1863, signed with his own name.

What Winter Notes actually says

The book is short and structured as eight chapters, and it is worth being exact about which city gets which. Chapter V is titled Ваал — Baal, the idol the Old Testament condemns people for worshipping in place of God — and it is about London, not Paris: the crowds, the Crystal Palace (the vast iron-and-glass exhibition hall then standing in south London), the Haymarket at night with its prostitutes, a mass of people so large that Dostoevsky reads it as a civilisation bowing down to the fact of itself. Paris is the subject of the three chapters that follow — Chapter VI, An Essay on the Bourgeois, meaning the propertied French middle class; Chapter VII, which continues it; and Chapter VIII, Bribri and Mabishe, named after the pet names bourgeois husbands and wives used for one another. Writers summarising the book often describe the Baal chapter as though it were about Paris. It is not: Baal is London. The distinction matters, because what Dostoevsky says about Paris is different, and worse.

His London is a nightmare of scale. His Paris is a comedy of respectability. The Parisian bourgeois, in Dostoevsky's account, has made the accumulation of money into a moral system and then dressed it as virtue. He puts it directly: to pile up a fortune and own as many things as possible has become the chief code of morality, the catechism of the Parisian — a catechism being the list of questions and answers a child is drilled in at church. A Parisian, he adds, does not value himself at a penny if he feels his pockets are empty, and is entirely sincere about it. Everything in the city must be seen to shine with virtue, and so it does — the need for virtue in Paris, he writes, is unquenchable.

What is liberté? Liberty. What liberty? An equal liberty for everyone to do whatever they like within the limits of the law. When can you do whatever you like? When you have a million. Does liberty give everyone a million? No.

Что такое liberté? Свобода. Какая свобода? Одинаковая свобода всем делать всё что угодно в пределах закона. Когда можно делать всё что угодно? Когда имеешь миллион. Дает ли свобода каждому по миллиону? Нет.

That passage is the centre of the book. Dostoevsky takes the three words of the French republican motto — liberté, égalité, fraternité: liberty, equality, brotherhood — carved on public buildings all over the city, and asks what each is worth in practice. He finishes the thought as brutally as it can be finished: a man without a million is not the man who does whatever he likes, but the man to whom whatever others like is done.

The last Paris chapter goes after bourgeois marriage. Its title, Bribri and Mabishe, is taken from the endearments a middle-class husband and wife use for each other — ma biche, 'my doe', from him, and bribri, a nonsense pet name with no meaning at all, back from her — and Dostoevsky uses them as evidence. He argues that the husband has arranged control of his wife's money thoroughly in his own favour, and that the tenderness is a decoration on a financial arrangement. He also notes, without kindness, that a Parisian may live and trade in Paris his whole life and never once see the sea.

1863: the second visit

He came back in the late summer of 1863, and a letter of his survives written from Paris on 20 August by the Russian calendar, 1 September by the Western, describing a run of luck at the roulette tables of Wiesbaden, the German spa town with the casino where he gambled. He was travelling with Apollinaria Suslova, a young writer some twenty years his junior with whom he was involved, and the trip did not go as he had planned it. They went on into Italy, and from Rome, on 18 September by the Russian calendar, he wrote to Strakhov setting out the plot of a new story about a Russian abroad who has poured all his life, force and daring into the roulette wheel.

That story became The Gambler, published in 1866. The scholarly commentary to his collected works states plainly that the novel's central relationship, the narrator's tormented love for Polina, the general's stepdaughter, repeats in many respects the difficult history of Dostoevsky and Suslova, and that specific plot elements, including Polina's infatuation with the Frenchman De Grieux and her wish to return money to him, are artistically transformed facts from Suslova's life, as her own diary attests. His two European journeys thus produced both the essay against the West and the novel about a man destroyed abroad.

The angle, stated plainly

Dostoevsky has no Paris address, no café, no circle and no plaque. He passed through twice in the space of about fourteen months and never returned to the city. He belongs in an atlas of Paris for one reason: he wrote the most sustained hostile account of the place that any major novelist produced in the nineteenth century, and it is an account built on observation rather than ignorance. He noticed the fountains, the theatres, the shop counters, the wording on the public buildings and the names husbands call their wives, and he assembled them into a case. Readers who love the city have been arguing with Winter Notes on Summer Impressions ever since, which is the surest evidence that the book landed.

He went home to write the novels the book had cleared space for. Notes from Underground followed in 1864, Crime and Punishment in 1866, and The Brothers Karamazov in 1880. He died in St Petersburg in 1881.