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DOSTOEVSKY WITH THE EYES OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES
AND DESCENDANTS
A man of genius, a creative person is always very attractive
both to his contemporaries and descendants. What kind of man
was he? How did the unusual natural gifts imprint in his looks?
How do they differ, those selected ones, from the ordinary
people among whom they live? What is the connection between
the character of a great person and his works? These question
have been and will be put by various people, from ordinary
readers to scientists, specialists on psychology of creative
work and artists of the next generations who experienced the
effect of the creative work of their great predecessor.
The works by Dostoevsky have been enjoyed by a great number
of readers all over the world. The deeper we penetrate into
his mighty artistic cosmos, the more frequently we fall to
thinking about the author of the genius works himself.
Dostoevsky's contemporaries left numerous memoirs
about his character, his habits, his appearance beginning
from his young days and till the last years of his life. Being
put together these memoirs are sometimes strikingly contradictory.
Thus, A. E. Riesenkampf recollected that Fyodor Mikhailovich
"….was in his young years a little round plump blond man with
a rounded face and slightly turned-up nose". However, A. Ya.
Panayeva who was familiar with Dostoevsky in those years wrote
that he "was skinny, small and fair-haired". And doctor S.
D. Yanovsky remembered him as follows: "his height was shorter
than medium, with big bones, and he, in particular, was broad
in shoulders and chest…". It is difficult to explain such
difference in the perception of one and the same person by
different people. It is possible that the general impression
of the physical appearance of Dostoevsky was influenced by
his not being a man of the world, by his nervousness, shyness,
especially in his young years.
From many reminiscences one can see that the first impression
on meeting Dostoevsky was sometimes almost disappointing:
his appearance was not loud, not aristocratic, there was something
ailing in his face, this peculiarity was marked by almost
all memoirists.
Such intricate and not very good impression was produced
by Dostoevsky on Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevskaya (Snitkina)
when on October 4, 1866 she first came to him to do some shorthand
job. To a twenty-year-old girl Dostoevsky seemed old and sick.
He immediately confirmed the impression telling her that he
suffered from epilepsy and had had a fit. Besides he was absent-minded
and several times asked his future assistant what her name
was. "I left Dostoevsky's place feeling very sad. I didn't
like him and had a very distressing impression," recollected
Anna Grigoryevna her first meeting with her husband many years
later.
However, both in his young and mature years those first impressions
of his interlocutors from his appearance were forced out when
they came over to a deeper communication. Then the inner significance,
the unique character of Dostoevsky's personality opened up
and his looks were perceived in a new way. Thus, S. D. Yanovsky,
one of the most devoted friends of his youth, wrote: "His
big, compared to the entire head, forehead, sharply pronounced
frontal sinuses and the prominent edges of the eye-sockets,
without any eminences in the bottom part of the occipital
bone, made the head of Fyodor Mikhailovich look like Socrates'.
" The contradiction between an outward "plainness" and deep
spirituality of Dostoevsky's appearance is emphasized in the
reminiscences of Vs. Solovyov: "Before me was a man of a small
height, slender but quite broad-shouldered, who seemed to
be younger than his fifty two years, with a thin fair beard,
high forehead with thin but not gray soft hair, with small
light brown eyes, with a homely and common, at first sight,
face. But this was only the first and instantaneous impression,
this face once and forever stamped up in one's memory, it
bore an imprint of an exclusive, spiritual life". This description
complies with the portrait descriptions by other memoirists
(A. E. Vrangel, N. N. Fon-Foht, V. V. Timofeyeva-Potchinovskaya
and others).
Dostoevsky's contemporaries who knew him personally observed
his features closely trying to read the secret of the personality
of the great man. The descendants look intently at the remained
photo portraits, they read the lines of memoirs using them
to study his appearance, habits, the way he spoke, recited
poems, they look intently at his manuscripts trying to penetrate
into the mystery of the creative process studying his rough
note-books and the peculiarities of his handwriting.
In Dostoevsky's lifetime the artists K. Trutovsky, V. Perov
and Dmitriev-Kavkazsky painted his portraits. Together with
his photographs they give us an idea about the writer's appearance
and, at the same time, open up his complex and intense inner
world.
These lifetime images (photographs and artistic portraits)
together with memoirs have always been a basis of creating
the writer's portraits by artists and sculptors of many generations
up to our days. However, although these works are often called
Dostoevsky's portraits, they are actually not such (as, for
instance, a classic portrait made by V. Perov), in the strict
sense of this word. In the works of many artists of XX century
Dostoevsky's image often acquires a generalized symbolic meaning.
Thus the portrait made by V. Falileev (1921) emphasizes the
inner strain of thought of the master, the author of The Karamazovs
Brothers, the prophet and thinker: his face being recognizable,
has the predominant features that can not be rendered by a
photograph. Such symbolic presentation of the writer's image
can be also found in the works of E. Neizvestny, G. Glikman,
Yu. Seliverstov, G. Nemenova and others. Many portraits of
Dostoevsky made by artists and sculptors of XX century are
an integral part of his creative world; sometimes he appears
surrounded by his characters, sometimes his image is represented
by a few personages (an auto lithography by V. Mishin). An
individual treatment of the writer's fate is marked by a graphic
sheet by Yu. Brusovany, a wooden relief made by I. Knyazev,
a bronze model of the monument to Dostoevsky by P. Shevchenko.
The work made by V. Golubev "Dostoevsky and Gogol love Russian
people" and a series of drawings by Yu. Nikitin from the book
"The Harmsiade" feature an ironic "anti pathetic" approach
of the certain layer of the contemporary art. The artists
still have a desire to comprehend the writer's personality
through the conventional but inexhaustible formulas ("the
one who glorifies the humiliated and outraged (?)", "the very
Petersburg writer"). In this semantic field a great many of
various works were created in the spirit and style of various
art schools (portraits by I. Ivanov, Sotnikov, Semenov).
One can often hear that a portrait of Dostoevsky tells more
about the artist than the subject of his work. This fact is
quite significant: only those things that produce a strong
and deep impact in a creative mind can stimulate an artist
to self-expression.
Pictorial, graphic and sculpture portraits of Dostoevsky
being put together give us a possibility to have a fresh look
at the multi-formity of the Dostoevsky perception existing
in the artistic mind for more than one hundred years.
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