Lyubov Dostoevskaya is best known for the book Dostoyevsky as Portrayed by His Daughter, originally published in Munich in 1920. The quotes below are from the 1922 translation and publication by Yale University Press. The title of the book is ‘Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Study‘ and the author is Aimee Dostoyevsky, which was the literary name of Lyubov.
“The emigration of my ancestors to Ukrainia softened their somewhat harsh Northern character, and awoke the dormant poetry of their hearts. Of all the Slav countries which form the Russian Empire, Ukrainia is certainly the most poetic. When one comes from Petrograd to Kiew, one feels oneself in the South. The evenings are warm, the streets full of pedestrians who sing, laugh, and eat in the open air, at tables on the pavement outside the cafes. We breathe the perfumed air of the South, we look at the moon which silvers the poplars; the heart dilates, one becomes a poet for the moment. Everything breathes poetry in this softly undulating plain bathed in happy sunshine.
Blue rivers flow serene and unhasting seawards; little lakes sleep softly, girdled by flowers; it is good to dream in the rich forests of oak. All is poetry in Ukrainia: the costumes of the peasants, their songs, their dances, and above all their theatre.
Ukrainia is the only country in Europe which possesses a theatre created by the people themselves and not arranged by the intellectuals to develop the taste of the masses, as elsewhere. The Ukrainian theatre is so essentially popular that it has not even been possible to make a bourgeois theatre of it. In early days Ukrainia was in close contact with the Greek colonies on the shores of the Black Sea. Some Greek blood flows in the veins of the Ukrainians, manifesting itself in their charming sunburnt faces and their graceful movements. It may even be that the Ukrainian theatre is a distant echo of the drama so beloved of the ancient Greeks.
Emerging from the dark forests and dank marshes of Lithuania, my ancestors must have been dazzled by the light, the flowers, the Greek poetry of Ukrainia. Their hearts warmed by the southern sunshine, they began to write verses. My grandfather Mihail carried a little of this Ukrainian poetry in his poor student’s wallet when he fled from his father’s house, and kept it carefully as a souvenir of his distant home. Later, he handed it on to his two elder sons, Mihail and Fyodor. These youths composed verses, epitaphs and poems; in his youth my father wrote Venetian romances and historical dramas. He began by imitating Gogol, the great Ukrainian writer, whom he greatly admired. In Dostoyevsky’s first works we note a good deal of this naive sentimental and romantic poetry. It was not until after his imprisonment, when he became Russian, that we find in his novels the breadth of view and depth of thought proper to the Russian nation, the nation of great genius and a great future. And yet it is not right to say that Dostoyevsky’s powerful realism is essentially Russian. The Russians are not realists; they are dreamers and mystics. They love to lose themselves in visions instead of studying life. When they try to be realists, they fall at once into Mongolian cynicism and eroticism. Dostoyevsky’s realism is an inheritance from his normanised ancestors. All writers of Norman blood are distinguished by their profound realism. It was not for nothing that Dostoyevsky admired Balzac so heartily, and took him as his model. The Dostoyevsky family was essentially a family of nomads. We find them now in Lithuania, now in Ukrainia, now domiciled in Moscow, now in Petersburg. This is not surprising, for Lithuania is distinguished from other countries by its curious class of “nomad intellectuals.” In all other countries it is the proletariat which emigrates. In Russia, the moujiks, who cross the Ural Mountains in hordes every year and are absorbed by Asia…
Until the age of forty Dostoyevsky’s relations were almost exclusively with Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Poles and natives of the Baltic Provinces. Grigorovitch, half Ukrainian, half French, was his earliest friend, and found a publisher for his first novel.
I have always regretted that Dostoyevsky’ s death prevented him from appearing as an actor. He would have created an original and memorable type. This, indeed, was not the first time that the Ukrainian passion for the theatre had manifested itself in Dostoyevsky. When he first came out of prison he wrote a comedy, An Uncle’s Dream, which he afterwards transformed into a novel. In one of his letters he says that he had laughed a good deal while writing this play. He declared that the hero. Prince K , was like himself, and indeed the naive and chivalrous character of the poor prince recalls that of my father. Later, when he returned to Petersburg, Dostoyevsky was fond of inventing speeches “in the manner of Prince K ,” and he would declaim them to his friends, assuming the voice and gestures of the poor degenerate. This amused him very much, and he was able to give life to his hero. It is curious that my father twice represented himself as a prince — in The Idiot and An Uncle’s Dream — and in each instance as a degenerate.”
