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| Dostoevsky |
Dostoevsky's last relatives live in poverty
Literary giant's great-granddaughter suffers in penury as acute as that of the characters in his novels
Amelia Gentleman in St Petersburg
Sun 1 Oct 2000 01.19 BST
Confined by her illness to a shabby, sparsely decorated room, the great-granddaughter of one of Russia's greatest novelists believes the poverty she faces would have shocked even her ancestor, Fyodor Dostoevsky, champion of the deprived and destitute.
Tatyana Vysokogorets-Dostoevskaya, 63, never leaves her second-floor flat, within an ageing concrete block, which was assigned to her a few years ago when she could no longer meet the rent on her old home.
She has done what she can to make the room bearable. A fraying blanket has been thrown on the floor in place of a carpet. Rows of plastic pill containers and medicine bottles are lined tidily on the shelves alongside two sepia postcards of the novelist and sickly geraniums. Orthodox icons made from paper have been placed in the corner.
The view from the window shows identical, greying apartment buildings stretching deep into this faceless suburb, far beyond the last Metro station to the north of St Petersburg. The distressing sound of a neighbour's consumptive cough comes through the walls.
Every month she receives an invalid's pension of 865 roubles (£21) from which she has to pay rent and bills, feed herself and support her unemployed son and teenage grandson. She has stopped buying meat and fruit and sometimes cannot even afford bread and milk.
Although she has not read Dostoevsky since she was a teenager, Tatyana is conscious of the painful similarities between her situation and the lives of the poverty-stricken people of nineteenth-century St Petersburg who are described by him in Crime and Punishment .
'Dostoevsky wrote beautifully about the poor, and it's obvious he really felt for them. But I think even he would have been horrified to see how his descendants are living,' she said, dropping ash from a strong Russian cigarette into an empty sardine tin.
Recently she appealed for help in an open letter to a Russian weekly newspaper which prompted public dismay and a flurry of small personal contributions from Dostoevsky-lovers - many of them equally impoverished pensioners - totalling around 2,000 roubles (£50). But there was no official response.
While moved by these gestures, Tatyana feels the Russian government - which she says has indirectly benefited from her great-grandfather's work - should keep her off the breadline. 'It isn't just our family. All over the city people are living with just as much difficulty now as they did in Dostoevsky's time. What he described has returned in a horrible new form. He foresaw it all.'
Hunched in her chair, wearing layers of darned clothes to keep out the cold, Tatyana makes a convincing Dostevskian figure: defenceless and despairing, an ordinary person bewildered by how society has treated her.
There are just six direct descendants of Dostoevsky still alive: Tatyana, her son and grandson, her brother Andrei Dostoevsky (who scrapes together a living as an unregistered taxi driver), his son and granddaughter. All of them live in St Petersburg, struggling to survive.
For most of her early life Tatyana was oblivious to the status of her great-grandfather. With the tightening of ideological controls in the 1930s, his writings were excluded from the school curriculum and his novels published rarely until the 1970s. The anti-revolutionary and deeply religious convictions at the heart of his philosophy were deemed unconstructive. 'He was considered an obscure writer. Even before I got married and took my husband's name, people rarely commented on my surname,' she said.
She developed no particular interest in literature and studied at a technical college before working first as a telephone engineer and then as a state central heating official. 'When we were children, our father used to read the books aloud to us, but I found it much harder when I started reading them myself. He has a very difficult style,' she said.
Throughout the 1960s her father campaigned to have Dostoevsky's reputation restored and helped to persuade officials to open a museum in the building where the writer died. Just before her father's own death, she helped him to take those heirlooms which were not lost along with the family property and savings in the Revolution - a few pieces of furniture and clocks - from their flat to be displayed in the new state museum.
In her more desperate moments, she fantasises about the price they might have got if they had sold these belongings instead. In this same mood, she feels envious of Leo Tolstoy's offspring, who made themselves rich in the West; she wonders why no one has ever invited her to attend a Dostoevsky literary conference; she wants to know why the money still being generated by his writing never filters back to help her family.
Natalia Ashimbaeva, the Dostoevsky museum's new director, is sympathetic. 'We know how much she needs help,' she said, adding that staff had done what little they could to support her, given their own battle against underfunding.
But she was perplexed by the idea that the state had a moral obligation to support the writer's relatives. 'She needs an increase to her pension - but if the state helps her just because she is Dostoevsky's great-granddaughter it would create a dangerous precedent. They'd have to start helping Chekhov's relatives and then Glinka's - there would be no way of stopping.'
When she is feeling more rational, Tatyana concedes that her problems are common to everyone her age. Russia's pensioners are a neglected generation. Having spent most of their lives working for a system which collapsed dramatically in their old age, they have been left without the social support the old regime would have guaranteed them. Stripped of their savings in the financial crises of the 1990s, those who do not have families to look after them find their pensions utterly inadequate. Many go on the streets to sell their possessions or trade cigarettes. Some 12 million pensioners across Russia are thought to be battling poverty.
'People of my age are no longer living, they are simply existing,' she said. 'Old people are hungry and can't afford to buy themselves medicines.'
She is ashamed she only developed an interest in Dostoevsky late in life, but says she was guided by other priorities.
'My father used to say, "Never forget you are the great-granddaughter of a great writer". But I forgot. I married a sailor and became a worker. I believed in the socialist goal. I believed we were working to build a wonderful future. The reality has turned out to be nightmarish.'
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