Love Life of a Genius

THREE LOVES OF DOSTOEVSKY (300 pp.)--Marc Slonim--Rinehart ($4).

"Note Dostoevsky's helplessness when confronted with love," said Freud. "He understands either coarse animal desire or masochistic submission, or else love out of pity." In his readable, reasonable, slice-of-love-life study of the great Russian novelist, Author Slonim, Russian-born teacher and critic, documents this Freudian analysis in detail. Avoiding sweeping generalizations, Slonim suggests that some of the grit in the oyster of Dostoevsky's genius was put there by women.

Sweet Tea in Siberia. As a youngster, Fyodor was never allowed out with girls, and at his first sniff of a perfumed beauty in a St. Petersburg salon, he keeled over in a dead faint. He did better with the town doxies (later he even hinted darkly that he once raped a little girl), but it was not until after he had been jailed and exiled to Siberia as a subversive that he met his first major love.

Maria Isaeva was blonde, thin, neurotic and married. Her drunken clod of a husband was controller of the distillation and sale of liquor in Semipalatinsk, the Siberian border town to which Dostoevsky was sent as an army private after his release from prison. Soon the smitten 33-year-old soldier and the sensitive lady were holding hands and crying into each other's sweet tea while hubby sprawled in a drunken stupor on the divan. After Isaev died, they were married. But Maria was frigid, and Dostoevsky was soon complaining: "We're living so-so . . . The heart will wither. I am quite alone."

He was soon not so alone. A redheaded "she-nihilist" with blue spectacles, bobbed hair and romantic ideas threw herself at the feet of the literary master, and tripped him. Apollinaria Suslova was a 22-year-old intellectual spitfire of the New Woman breed. Chasing after her to Western Europe, Dostoevsky was desolated to learn that within less than a month she had taken up with and been thrown over by another man. He begged to travel with her "like a brother." Apollinaria agreed, and vengefully parried all his advances. Years later, she described how the nightly sexual tragicomedy would end: "Fyodor Mikhailovich again turned everything into a joke and, as he was leaving me, said that it was humiliating for him to leave me like that (this was at 1 in the morning; I was lying undressed in bed). 'For Russians have never fallen back.' "

After months of this, Dostoevsky fell all the way back to Russia, in time to see his wife waste away and die of TB. An ash-blonde, 20-year-old stenographer named Anna Snitkina, who came to take dictation for The Gambler and Crime and Punishment, stayed on to become the second Mrs. Dostoevsky, and his last and greatest love.

The almost demonic role that sex played in Dostoevsky's private life stands in fantastic contrast to the idea of renunciation and Christlikeness which he presented in his Alyoshas and Prince Myshkins. His great sinners, like Stavrogin, Dostoevsky could research from himself; for his saints he could only desperately search. In his own eyes, the closest thing to a saint he knew was Anna. She seemingly never shuddered before the jealous rages of an epileptic more than twice her age, nor before the acts of sadism and foot-fetishism which had horrified Maria and disgusted Apollinaria. Turning to Anna during his final illness, he asked her to read to him at random from the Bible. She obeyed: "And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness."

"There, you hear that," said Dostoevsky. " 'Suffer it to be so now'--that means I am going to die," That evening, Jan. 28, 1881, the life of a genius came to an end.

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