7 - The writer at work

Summary

I go to matins and there is always a light in his study. He is at work.

The merchant Alonkin

The night writer

The venerable merchant Alonkin owned the apartment in Petersburg at the corner of Carpenter Street and Little Meshchanskaya, which Dostoyevsky rented in 1866. Since the penniless writer was a diligent worker (velikiy trudolyubets) before the Lord, Alonkin forgave him his slowness in paying the rent.

If Dostoyevsky needed night, with its mystery, its living silence, its shadows dancing in the candle-light, it was not to summon the powers of darkness, or to enjoy the romantic shadows which sometimes influence his descriptions, but to be free of daily hindrances and material worries, and to continue his concentrated and lonely struggle with the plans he had been forming all day. Night was the time for experiment, for testing the fruits of the laborious idleness of the day by writing. Night was the chosen time not for the Dostoyevskian universe, where the solar sun and night coexist, but for the creation of the novels and the creative process.

His preference for working at night was a habit he formed at the Engineering School. In the midnight hours, when everyone else was asleep, the officer on duty, Savelyev, used to find the clerk Dostoyevsky at his desk, with a blanket over his shoulders.