Today's subject is Apollinaria Suslova, the passion of two great Russian writers.


Suslova was born in 1839 and by the time she graduated from a higher institute for noble girls in St. Petersburg, the feminist was already known to political police as "belonging to the party of nihilists and emancipators."


Dostoevsky first met her when she was 21, when they both were regular contributors to the monthly Vremya. In 1862 she and the writer, then 41, became lovers and the next year he followed her to Paris. Notwithstanding her "difficult temper," her refusal to marry him and her fling with a Spaniard, Dostoevsky spent most of the next two years with her while traveling through Europe.


"Apollinaria is a sick egoist," he wrote in 1865. But though Dostoevsky later married another woman, he could never forget his "bitter happiness" and "greatest passion" and used her as a prototype in many of his novels, starting with Polina in "The Gambler."


Two months before Dostoevsky's death, Suslova, at 42, married a 25-year-old student and devotee of Dostoevsky -- Vasily Rozanov, who later became one of the most famous essayists and thinkers of the 20th century. Six years later, she left him.


"Her character," wrote later Rozanov, "has certain greatness of temperament that forced me to love her blindly and timidly in spite of all the torment."


A hardcover book about Suslova, who died in 1918, has been put together by the well-known author Ludmila Saraskina: "Dostoevsky's Beloved. Apollinaria Suslova: A Biography in Documents, Letters and [other] Materials," Soglasiye, 450 pages, for the ruble equivalent of $4.