Lectures on Russian literature

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

The torrent of "irrelevant" details (such as the bland assumption that "full-grown young pigs" commonly occur in private houses) produces such a hypnotic effect that one almost fails to realize one simple thing (and that is the beauty of the final stroke). A piece of most important information, the main structural idea of the story is here deliberately masked by Gogol (because all reality is a mask). The man taken for Akaki Akakievich's cloakless ghost is actually the man who stole his cloak.

But Akaki Akakievich's ghost existed solely on the strength of his lacking a cloak, whereas now the policeman, lapsing into the queerest paradox of the story, mistakes for this ghost just the very person who was its antithesis, the man who had stolen the cloak. Thus the story describes a full circle : a vicious circle as all circles are, despite their posing as apples, or planets, or human faces.

So to sum up: the story goes this way: mumble, mumble,

lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave,

mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into

the chaos from which they all had derived. At this

superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned

with pitying the underdog or cursing the upperdog. It

appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the

shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless

and soundless ships.

As one or two patient readers may have gathered by now,

this is really the only appeal that interests me. My purpose

in jotting these notes on Gogol has, I hope, become

perfectly clear. Bluntly speaking it amounts to the

following; if you expect to find out something about

Russia, if you are eager to/know why the blistered Germans

bungled their blitz, if you are interested in "ideas" and

"facts" and "messages," keep away from Gogol. The awful

trouble of learning Russian in order to read him will not be

repaid in your kind of hard cash. Keep away, keep away. He

has nothing to tell you. Keep off the tracks. High tension.

Closed for the duration. Avoid, refrain, don't. I would like to

have here a full list of all possible interdictions, vetoes and

threats. Hardly necessary of course—as the wrong sort of

The opening page of Nabokov's Turgenev notebook.

reader will certainly never get as far as this. But I do

welcome the right sort—my brothers, my doubles. My

brother is playing the organ. My sister is reading. She is my

aunt. You will first learn the alphabet, the labials, the Unguals, the dentals, the letters that buzz, the drone and the bumblebee, and the Tse-tse Fly. One of the vowels will make you say "Ugh!" You will feel mentally stiff and bruised after your first declension of personal pronouns. I see however no other way of getting to Gogol (or to any other Russian writer for that matter). His work, as all great literary achievements, is a phenomenon of language and not one of ideas. "Gaw-gol,"

not "Go-gall." The final "1" is a soft dissolving "1" which does not exist in English. One cannot hope to understand an author if one cannot even pronounce his name. My translations of various passages are the best my poor vocabulary could afford, but even had they been as perfect as those which I hear with my innermost ear, without being able to render their intonation, they still would not replace Gogol. While trying to convey my attitude towards his art I have not produced any tangible proofs of its peculiar existence. I can only place my hand on my heart and affirm that I have not imagined Gogol.

He really wrote, he really lived.

Gogol was born on the 1st of April, 1809. According to his mother (who, of course, made up the following dismal anecdote) a poem he had written at the age of five was seen by Kapnist, a well-known writer of sorts. Kapnist embraced the solemn urchin and said to the glad parents: "He will become a writer of genius if only destiny gives him a good Christian for teacher and guide. " But the other thing—his having been born on the 1st of April—is true.

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

IVAN TURGENEV (1818-1883)

Ivan Sergeievich Turgenev was born in 1818 in Orel, Central Russia,

in the family of a wealthy squire. His early youth was spent on a country estate where he was able to observe the life of the serfs and the relations between master and serf at their worst: his mother was possessed of a tyrannical nature and led her peasants and also her immediate family a miserable life. Though she adored her son, she persecuted him and had him flogged for the least childish disobedience or misdemeanor. In later life, when Turgenev tried to intercede for the serfs, she cut his allowance, obliging him to live in misery in spite of the rich inheritance that awaited him. Turgenev never forgot the painful impressions of his childhood. After his mother's death he did much to improve the peasants' circumstances, freed all his domestic servants, and went out of his way to cooperate with the government when the peasants were emancipated in 1861.

Turgenev's early education was patchy. Among his numerous tutors, indiscriminately engaged by his mother, there were all sorts of odd people, including at least one professional saddler. One year at the Moscow University and three at the Petersburg University, whence he was graduated in 1837, did not give him a feeling of having obtained a well-balanced education, and from 1838 to 1841 he attended the university in Berlin, filling out its gaps. During his life in Berlin he became intimate with a group of young Russians similarly engaged, who later formed the nucleus of a Russian philosophic movement highly colored by Hegelianism, the German "idealist" philosophy.

In his early youth Turgenev produced some half-baked poems mostly imitative of Mikhail Lermontov. Only in 1847, when he turned to prose and published a short story, the first of his series of A Sportsman's Sketches, did he come into his own as a writer. The story produced a tremendous impression and when later together with a number of others it was published as a volume, the impression only grew stronger. Turgenev's plastic musical flowing prose was but one of the reasons that brought him immediate fame, for at least as much interest was contributed by the special subject of these stories. They were all written about serfs and not only present a detailed psychological study, but go even further to idealize these serfs as superior in their human quality to their heartless masters.

From these stories some purple patches:

"Fedya, not without pleasure, lifted the forcedly smiling dog up into the air and placed it into the bottom of the cart."

("Khor' and Kalinych")

"... a dog, all his body a-quiver, his eyes half-closed, was gnawing a bone on the lawn." ("My Neighbor Radilov")

"Vyacheslav Illarionovich is a tremendous admirer of the gentle sex, and as soon as he sees a pretty little person on the boulevard of his country-town, he there and then starts to follow her, but —and this is the peculiar point—he at once begins to limp." ("Two Country Squires")

At sunset on a country-road:

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

"Masha (the hero's gypsy mistress who left him) stopped and turned her face to him. She stood with her back to the light —

and thus appeared to be of a dusky black all over, as if carved in dark wood. The whites of her eyes alone stood out like silver almonds, whereas the iris had grown still darker." ("Chertopkhanov's End")

"Evening had come, the sun had hid behind a small aspen grove ... its shadow spread endlessly across the still fields. A peasant could be seen riding at a trot on white horse along a dark narrow path skirting that distant grove; he could be seen quite clearly, every detail of him, even the patch on his shoulder—although he was moving in the shade; the legs of his horse flickered with a kind of pleasing distinctness. The setting sun flushed the trunks of the aspen-trees with such a warm glow that they seemed the color of pine-trunks." {Fathers and Sons)

These are Turgenev at his very best. It is these- mellow colored little paintings—rather watercolors than the Flemish glory of Gogol's art gallery—inserted here and there into his prose, that we still admire to-day. These plums are especially numerous in A Sportsman's Sketches.

Turgenev's presentation in the Sketches of his gallery of idealistic and touchingly human serfs stressed the obvious odiousness of serfdom, an emphasis that irritated many influential people. The censor who had passed the manuscript was retired and the government seized the first opportunity to punish the author. After Gogol's death Turgenev wrote a short article which was suppressed by the Petersburg censorship; but when he sent it to Moscow the censor passed it and it was published. Turgenev was put in prison for a month for insubordination and then was exiled to his estate where he remained for more than two years. Upon his return he published his first novel Rudin, followed by A Nest of Gentlefolk and On the Eve.

Rudin, written in 1855, depicts the generation of the 1840s, the idealistic idealistic Russian intelligentsia bred in German universities.

There is some very good writing in Rudin, such as ". . . many an old lime-tree-alley, gold-dark and sweet-smelling, with a glimpse of emerald light at its end," where we have Turgenev's favorite vista. Rudin's sudden appearance in Lasunski's house is fairly well done, based as it is on Turgenev's pet method of having a convenient fight at a party or dinner between the cool, bland, clever hero and some quick-tempered vulgarian or pretentious fool. We may note the following typical sample of the whims and ways of Turgenev's characters : "Meanwhile Rudin went up to Natalia. She rose, her face expressed confusion. Volyntsev, who was sitting next to her, rose too. '—Ah, I see a pianoforte,'—Rudin began softly and caressingly, as if he were a travelling prince.' " Then somebody else plays Schubert's Erlkonig. " '—This music and this night'

[a starry summer night which "seemed to nestle and to let one's soul nestle too"—a great exponent of the "music and night" theme was Turgenev], said Rudin,—'reminds me of my student years in Germany.' " He is asked how students dress.

"—Well, at Heidelberg I used to wear riding boots with spurs and a Hungarian jacket with braidings; I had let my hair grow, so that it almost reached down to my shoulders." Rudin is a rather pompous young man.

Russia in those days was one huge dream: the masses slept—figuratively ; the intellectuals spent sleepless nights—

literally—sitting up and talking about things, or just meditating until five in the morning and then going out for a walk.

There was a lot of the flinging-oneself-down-on-one's-bed-without-undressing-and-sinking-into-a-heavy-slumber stuff, or jumping into one's clothes. Turgenev's maidens are generally good get-uppers, jumping into their crinolines, sprinkling their faces with cold water, and running out, as fresh as roses, into the garden, where the inevitable meeting takes place in a bower.

Before going to Germany, Rudin had been a student at Moscow University. A friend of his thus tells us of their youth: "Half-a-dozen youths, a single tallow candle burning . . . the cheapest brand of tea, dry old biscuits . . . but our eyes glow, our cheeks are flushed, our hearts beat . . . and the subjects of our talk are God, Truth, the Future of Mankind, Poetry—we talk nonsense sometimes, but what is the harm?"

As a character, Rudin, the progressive idealist of the 1840s, can be summed up by Hamlet's answer "words, words, words."

He is quite ineffectual in spite of his being wholly wrapped up in progressive ideas. His whole energy spends itself in 46

Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

passionate streams of idealistic babble. A cold heart and a hot head. An enthusiast lacking in staying power, a busybody incapable of action. When the girl who loves him, and whom, he thinks, he loves too, tells him there is no hope of her mother consenting to their marriage, he at once gives her up, although she was ready to follow him anywhere. He departs and roams all over Russia; all his enterprises fizzle out. But the bad luck that haunts him and which at the outset was the inability to express the energy of his brain otherwise than by a flow of eloquent words finally shapes him, hardens the outline of his personality, and leads him to a useless but heroic death on the barricades of 1848 in remote Paris.

In A Nest of Gentlefolk (1858) Turgenev glorified all that was noble in the orthodox ideals of the old gentry. Liza, the heroine of this novel, is the most consummate incarnation of the pure and proud "Turgenev maiden."

On the Eve (1860) is the story of another Turgenev girl, Elena, who leaves her family and country in order to follow her lover Insarov, a Bulgarian hero whose sole object in life is the emancipation of his country (then under Turkish domination).

Elena prefers Insarov, who is a man of action, to the ineffectual young men who surround her in her Russian youth. Insarov dies of consumption and Elena continues bravely in his path.

On the Eve, in spite of its good intentions, is artistically the least successful of Turgenev's novels. Nevertheless, it was the most popular one. Elena, though a female character, was the type of heroic personality that society wanted: a person ready to sacrifice everything to love and duty, bravely surmounting every difficulty fate put in her path, faithful to the ideal of freedom—emancipation of the oppressed, freedom of the woman to choose her way in life, freedom of love.

After showing the moral defeat of the idealists of the 1840s, after making his only male active hero a Bulgarian, Turgenev was reproached for not having created a single positive active type of a Russian male. This he tried to do in Fathers and Sons (1862). In it Turgenev pictures the moral conflict between the good-meaning, ineffectual and weak people of the 1840s and the new strong revolutionary generation of the "nihilistic" youth. Bazarov, the representative of this younger generation, is aggressively materialistic; for him exists neither religion nor any esthetic or moral values. He believes in nothing but

"frogs," meaning nothing but the results of his own practical scientific experience. He knows neither pity nor shame. And he is, par excellence, the active man. Though Turgenev rather admired Bazarov, the radicals whom he thought he was flattering in the face of this strong active young man were indignant at the portrait and saw in Bazarov only a caricature drawn to please their opponents. Turgenev, it was declared, was a finished man who had expended all his talent. Turgenev was dumbfounded. From the darling of the progressive society he suddenly saw himself transformed into a sort of detestable bogey. Turgenev was a very vain man; not only fame, but the outward marks of fame, meant a lot to him. He was deeply offended and disappointed. He was abroad at the time and remained abroad for the rest of his life, making but rare short visits to Russia.

His next piece of writing was a fragment, "Enough," in which he declared his decision to give up literature. In spite of this he wrote two more novels and continued writing to the end of his life. Of these last two novels, inSmoke he expressed his bitterness against all classes of Russian society, and in Virgin Soil (Nov') he tried to show different types of Russians confronted with the social movement of their time (the 1870s). On one hand we have the revolutionaries trying hard to get in touch with the people: (1) The Hamlet-like hesitations of the hero of the novel, Nezhdanov, cultured, refined, with a secret yearning for poetry and romance, but devoid of all sense of humor, like most of Turgenev's positive types —

moreover, weak and hampered in everything by a morbid sense of inferiority and his own uselessness; (2) Marianna, the pure, true, austerely-naive girl, ready to die there and then for the "cause"; (3) Solomin, the strong silent man; (4) Markelov, the honest blockhead. On the other side we find the sham liberals and frank reactionaries, such as Sipyagin and Kallomeytsev. It is a very tame affair, this novel, with the author's fine talent struggling, and just failing, to keep alive the characters and the plot he had selected not so much because his art urged him, but rather because he was eager to air his own views upon the political problems of his day.

Incidentally, Turgenev, as most writers of his time, is far too explicit, leaving nothing to the reader's intuition; suggesting and then ponderously explaining what the suggestion was. The labored epilogues of his novels and long short stories are painfully artificial, the author doing his best to satisfy fully the reader's curiosity regarding the respective destinies of the characters in a manner that can hardly be called artistic.

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

He is not a great writer, though a pleasant one. He never achieved anything comparable to Madame Bovary, and to say that he and Flaubert belonged to the same literary school is a complete misconception. Neither Turgenev's readiness to tackle any social problem that happened to be a là mode, nor the banal handling of plots (always taking the easiest way) can be likened to Flaubert's severe art.

Turgenev, Gorki, and Chekhov are particularly well known outside of Russia. But there is no natural way of linking them.

However, it may be noticed perhaps that the worst of Turgenev was thoroughly expressed in Gorki's works, and Turgenev's best (in the way of Russian landscape) was beautifully developed by Chekhov.

Besides A Sportsman's Sketches and the novels, Turgenev wrote numerous short stories and long short stories or nouvelles.

The early ones are devoid of any special originality or literary quality; some of the later are quite remarkable. Among the latter "A Quiet Backwater" and "First Love" deserve particular mention.

Turgenev's personal life was not very happy. The great, the only true love of his life, was for the famous singer Mme.

Pauline Viardot-Garcia. She was happily married, Turgenev was on friendly terms with her family, he had no hope of personal happiness, but nevertheless he devoted all his life to her, lived whenever possible in their vicinity, gave a dower to her two daughters when they got married.

In general he was much happier living abroad than in Russia. There no radical critics gnawed the life out of him with their vigorous attacks. He was on friendly terms with Mérimée and Flaubert. His books were translated into French and German.

Since he was the only Russian writer of some stature known to the Western literary circles, he was inevitably considered not only the greatest but in fact the Russian writer, and Turgenev basked in the sun and felt happy. He impressed foreigners with his charm and graceful manners, but in his encounters with Russian writers and critics he at once felt selfconscious and arrogant. He had had quarrels with Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Nekrasov. Of Tolstoy he was jealous though at the same time he greatly admired his genius.

In 1871 the Viardots settled down in Paris and so did Turgenev. In spite of his faithful passion for Mme. Viardot he felt lonely and lacked the comforts of a family of his own. He complained in letters to friends of lonesomeness, his "cold old age," his spiritual frustration. Sometimes Turgenev longed to be back in Russia but he lacked the will power to make such a drastic change in his life routine : a lack of will power had always been his weak point. He never had the stamina to stand up under the attacks of Russian critics who, after the publication of Fathers and Sons, never ceased being prejudiced against his new publications. However, in spite of the hostility of the critics, Turgenev was extremely popular with the Russian reading public. The readers liked his books—his novels were popular even as late as the beginning of this century; and the humane liberal feelings he professed attracted the public to him, especially the younger part of it. In 1883 he died at Bougival, near Paris, but his body was brought to Petersburg. Thousands of people followed his coffin to the cemetery.

Delegations had been sent by numerous societies, towns, universities, etc. Countless wreaths had been received. The funeral procession was almost two miles long. Thus the Russian reading public gave a final demonstration of the love it bore Turgenev during his life.

Besides being good at painting nature, Turgenev was likewise excellent at painting little colored cartoons which remind one of those seen in British country clubs: consider, for instance, the cartoons Turgenev loved to make of the fops and lions of the Russian sixties and seventies: ". . .he was dressed in the very best English manner: the colored tip of a white silk handkerchief protruded in the form of a small triangle from the flat side-pocket of his variegated jacket; his monocle dangled on a rather broad black ribbon; the dead tint of his suede gloves matched the pale gray of his check trousers."

Then, too, Turgenev was the first Russian writer to notice the effect of broken sunlight or the special combination of shade and light upon the appearance of people. Remember that gypsy girl who, with the sun behind her, "appeared to be of a dusky black all over as if carved in dark wood" and those "whites of her eyes" standing out "like silver almonds."

These quotations are good examples of his perfectly modulated well-oiled prose which is so nicely adapted to the picturing of slow movement. This or that phrase of his reminds one of a lizard sun-charmed on a wall—and the two or three final words of the sentence curve like the lizard's tail. But generally speaking his style produces a queer effect of patchiness, just 48

Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

because certain passages, the artist's favorites, have been pampered much more than the others and, in consequence, stand out, supple and strong, magnified, as it were, by the author's predilection among the general flow of good, clear, but undistinguished prose. Honey and oil—this comparison may be well applied to those perfectly rounded graceful sentences of his, when he settles down to the task of writing beautifully. As a story-teller, he is artificial and even lame; indeed, when following his characters, he begins to limp as that hero of his did in "Two Country Squires." His literary genius falls short on the score of literary imagination, that is, of naturally discovering ways of telling the story which would equal the originality of his descriptive art. Being perhaps aware of this fundamental flaw, or else being led by that instinct of artistic self-preservation that keeps an author from lingering there where he is most likely to flop, he shuns action or, more exactly, does not expose action in terms of sustained narration. His novels and stories consist mainly of conversations in diverse settings charmingly described — good long talks interrupted by delightful short biographies and dainty pictures of the countryside. When, however, he goes out of his way to look for beauty outside the old gardens of Russia, he wallows in abject sweetness. His mysticism is of the plastic picturesque sort with perfumes, floating mists, old portraits that may come alive any moment, marble pillars, and the rest. His ghosts do not make the flesh creep, or rather they make it creep the wrong way. In describing beauty he goes the whole hog: his idea of luxury turns out to be ". . . gold, crystal, silk, diamonds, flowers, fountains"; and maidens bedecked with flowers but otherwise scantily dressed sing hymns in boats, while other maidens, with the tiger skins and golden cups of their profession, romp on the banks.

The volume of Poems in Prose (1883) is his work that dates most of all. Their melody is all wrong; their luster looks cheap and their philosophy is not deep enough to justify pearl-diving. Still they remain good examples of pure well-balanced Russian prose. But the author's imagination never rises above perfectly commonplace symbols (such as fairies and skeletons); and if, at its best, his prose reminds one of rich milk, these prose poems may be compared to fudge.

It is perhaps A Sportsman's Sketches that contains some of his best writing. In spite of a certain idealization of the peasants, the book presents Turgenev's most unaffected, most genuine characters, and some extremely satisfying descriptions of scenes, people, and, of course, nature.

Of all Turgenev's characters, the "Turgenev maiden" has probably achieved the greatest fame. Masha ("A Quiet Backwater"), Natalia (Rudin), Liza ( A Nest of Gentlefolk) vary but little among themselves and are undoubtedly contained in Pushkin's Tatiana. But with their different stories they are given more scope for the use of their common moral strength, gentleness, and not only their capacity but, I would say, their thirst to sacrifice all worldly considerations to what they consider their duty, be it complete resignation of personal happiness to higher moral considerations (Liza) or complete sacrifice of all worldly considerations to their pure passion (Natalia). Turgenev envelops his heroines in a kind of gentle poetical beauty which has a special appeal for the reader and has done much to create the general high concept of Russian womanhood.

Fathers and Sons (1862)

Fathers and Sons is not only the best of Turgenev's novels, it is one of the most brilliant novels of the nineteenth century.

Turgenev managed to do what he intended to do, to create a male character, a young Russian, who would affirm his—that character's—absence of introspection and at the same time would not be a journalist's dummy of a socialistic type.

Bazarov is a strong man, no doubt—and very possibly had he lived beyond his twenties (he is a graduate student when we meet him), he might have become, beyond the horizon of the novel, a great social thinker, a prominent physician, or an active revolutionary. But there was a common debility about Turgenev's nature and art; he was incapable of making his masculine characters triumph within the existence he invents for them. Moreover, in Bazarov's character there is behind the brashness and the will-power, and the violence of cold thought, a stream of natural youthful ardency which Bazarov finds difficult to blend with the harshness of a would-be nihilist. This nihilism sets out to denounce and deny everything, but it fails to dismiss passionate love—or to reconcile this love with his opinions regarding the simple animal character of love. Love turns out to be something more than man's biological pastime. The romantic fire that suddenly envelops his soul shocks him; but it satisfies the requirements of true art, since it stresses in Bazarov the logic of universal youth which transcends the logic of a local system of thought—of, in the present case, nihilism.

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

Turgenev, as it were, takes his creature out of a self-imposed pattern and places him in the normal world of chance. He lets Bazarov die not from any peculiar inner development of Bazarov's nature, but by the blind decree of fate. He dies with silent courage, as he would have died on the battlefield, but there is an element of resignation about his decay that goes well with the general trend of mild submission to fate which colors Turgenev's whole art.

The reader will notice —I will direct his attention to those

passages in a moment—that the two fathers and the uncle

in the book are not only very different from Arkadi and

Bazarov, but also different from each other. One will also

note that Arkadi, the son, is of a much gentler and simpler

and more routine and normal nature than Bazarov. I shall

look through a number of passages that are especially vivid

and significant. One will mark, for instance, the following

situation. Old Kirsanov, Arkadi's father, has that quiet,

tender, altogether charming mistress, Fenichka, a girl of

the people. She is one of the passive types of Turgenev's

young women, and around this passive center three men

revolve: Nikolay Kirsanov, and also Pavel, his brother, who

by some twist of memory and imagination sees in her a

resemblance to a former flame of his, a flame that colored

his entire life. And moreover there is Bazarov, who is shown

flirting with Fenichka, a casual flirtation that brings on a

duel. However, not Fenichka but typhus will be the cause of

Bazarov's death.

One will observe a queer feature of Turgenev's structure.

He takes tremendous trouble to introduce his characters

properly, endowing them with pedigrees and recognizable

Nabokov's chart of the journeys in Fathers and Sons.

traits, but when he has finally assembled them all, lo and

behold the tale is finished and the curtain has gone down

whilst a ponderous epilogue takes care of whatever is supposed to happen to his invented creatures beyond the horizon of his novel. I do not mean there are no events in this story. On the contrary, this novel is replete with action; there are quarrels and other clashes, there is even a duel—and a good deal of rich drama attends Bazarov's death. But one will notice that all the time throughout the development of the action, and in the margin of the changing events, the past lives of the characters are being pruned and improved by the author, and all the time he is terribly concerned with bringing out their souls and minds and temperaments by means of functional illustrations, for instance the way simple folks are attached to Bazarov or the way Arkadi tries to live up to his friend's new-found wisdom.

The art of translation from theme to theme is for an author the most difficult technique to master, and even a first-rate artist, as Turgenev is at his best, will be tempted (because of the kind of reader he imagines, a matter-of-fact reader accustomed to certain methods) to follow traditional devices in this passing from one scene to another. Turgenev's transitions are very simple, and indeed even trite. As we go through the story, and stop at various points of style and structure, we shall gradually accumulate a small collection of these simple devices.

There is first of all the introductional intonation: "Well, anything in sight . . . was the question asked on May 20, 1859, by a gentleman of a little over forty"—et cetera, et cetera. Then Arkadi arrives; then Bazarov is introduced:

"Nikolay Petrovich turned around quickly and, going up to a tall man in a long, loose, rough coat with tassels, who had only just got out of the carriage, he warmly pressed the ungloved rough hand, which the latter did not at once hold out to him.

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

" T am heartily glad,' he began, 'and very grateful for your kind intention of visiting us. . . . May I ask your name, and your father's?'

'Eugene Vasilievich,' answered Bazarov in a lazy but manly voice; and as he turned down the collar of his rough coat Nikolay Petrovich could see his whole face. Long and lean, with a broad forehead, a nose flat at the bridge but pointed at the tip, large greenish eyes, and sandy drooping side whiskers, it was lighted by a tranquil smile and showed self-confidence and intelligence.

" T hope, dear Eugene Vasilievich, you won't be bored at our place,' continued Nikolay Petrovich.

"Bazarov's thin lips moved just perceptibly, though he made no reply, merely taking off his cap. His long thick dark blond hair did not hide the prominent bumps on his head."

Uncle Pavel is introduced in the beginning of chapter 4: "... at that instant a man of medium height, dressed in a dark English suit, a fashionable low cravat, and kid shoes, entered the drawing room. This was Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov. He looked about forty-five: his close-cropped gray hair shone with a dark luster, like new silver; his face, yellow but free from wrinkles, was exceptionally regular and pure in line, as though carved by a light and delicate chisel, and showed traces of remarkable good looks; especially fine were his clear, black, almond-shaped eyes. The whole mien of Arkadi's uncle, exquisite and thoroughbred, had preserved the gracefulness of youth and that air of striving upward, of spurning the earth, which for the most part is lost after the twenties are past.

"Pavel Petrovich took out of his trousers pocket his exquisite hand with its long tapering pink nails, a hand which seemed still more beautiful because of the snowy whiteness of the cuff, buttoned with a single big opal, and gave it to his nephew.

After a preliminary handshake in the European style, he kissed him thrice after the Russian fashion, that is to say, he touched his cheek three times with his fragrant mustache, and said, 'Welcome.' "

He and Bazarov dislike each other at sight, and Turgenev's device here is the comedy technique of each confiding his feelings separately and symmetrically to a friend. Thus Uncle Pavel, talking to his brother, criticizes the unkempt appearance of Bazarov, and a little later, after supper, Bazarov in talking to Arkadi criticizes Pavel's beautifully groomed fingernails. A simple symmetrical device, which is especially obvious because the ornamentation of the conventional structure is artistically superior to the convention.

The first meal together, the supper, passes quietly. Uncle Pavel has been confronted by Bazarov but we have to wait for their first clash. Another person is introduced into Uncle Pavel's orbit at the very end of this chapter 4: Pavel Petrovich "sat in his study until long past midnight, in a beautifully made, roomy armchair before the fireplace, on which the coals were smoldering into faintly glowing embers. . . . His expression was concentrated and grim, which is not the case when a man is absorbed solely in recollections. And in a small back room [of the house], a young woman in a blue, warm, sleeveless jacket, with a white kerchief thrown over her dark hair, was sitting on a large trunk. This was Fenichka. She was now listening, now dozing, now glancing at the open door through which one could see a child's crib and hear the regular breathing of a sleeping baby."

It is important for Turgenev's purpose to tie up in the reader's mind Uncle Pavel with the mistress of Nikolay. Arkadi finds he has a baby brother, Mitya, a little later than the reader does.

The next meal, breakfast, begins without Bazarov. The ground has not yet been prepared, and Turgenev sends Bazarov away to collect frogs while he has Arkadi explain to Uncle Pavel about Bazarov's ideas:

" 'What is Bazarov?' Arkadi smiled. 'Would you like me, Uncle, to tell you precisely what he is?'

"If you will be so obliging, Nephew.' 'He's a nihilist. . . .'

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" 'A nihilist,' Nikolay Petrovich managed to say. 'That's from the Latin, nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who—who recognizes nothing.'

" 'Say, "who respects nothing," ' put in his brother, and he set to work on the butter again.

'Who regards everything from the critical point of view,' observed Arkadi.

" 'Isn't that the same thing?' inquired the uncle. 'No, it isn't. A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith no matter what an aura of reverence may surround that principle.'. . .

" 'So that's it. Well, I see it's not in our line. . . . There used to be Hegelists, but now you have nihilists. We shall see how you will exist in a void, in a vacuum. And now please ring, brother Nikolay Petrovich—it's time I had my cocoa.'

Immediately after this Fenichka appears. Note her admirable description: "She was a young woman of about three-and-twenty, all dainty whiteness and softness, with dark hair and eyes, red, childishly plump small lips, and delicate little hands.

She wore a neat print dress; a new blue kerchief lay lightly on her soft shoulders. She was carrying a large cup of cocoa and, having set it down before Pavel Petrovich, she was overwhelmed with confusion; the hot blood rushed in a wave of crimson over the delicate skin of her endearing face. She dropped her eyes and stood at the table, leaning a little on the very tips of her fingers. Apparently ashamed of having come in, she at the same time felt she had a right to come."

Bazarov, the frog hunter, returns at the end of the chapter, and in the next one the breakfast table is the arena of the first round between Uncle Pavel and the young nihilist, both men scoring heavily:

" 'Arkadi was telling us just now that you do not acknowledge any authorities whatsoever—that you do not believe in them?'

" 'But why should I acknowledge them? And what should I believe in? When anyone talks sense, I agree, and that's all.'

" 'And all the Germans [scientists] talk sense?' asked Pavel Petrovich, and his face assumed an expression as impassive, as remote, as if he had withdrawn to some empyrean height.

" 'Not all,' replied Bazarov with a short yawn. He obviously did not care to continue the debate. . . .

"'For my own part,' Pavel Petrovich began again, not without some effort, 'I am so unregenerate as not to like Germans. . . .

My brother, for instance, is very favorably inclined toward them. . . . But now they've all turned chemists and materialists—'

" 'A chemist who knows his business is twenty times as useful as any poet,' broke in Bazarov."

On a collecting expedition Bazarov has found what he and Turgenev call a rare specimen of beetle. The term of course, is not specimen, but species, and that particular water-beetle is not a rare species. Only people who know nothing about natural history confuse specimen with species. In general Turgenev's descriptions of Bazarov's collecting are rather lame.

One will notice that despite Turgenev having prepared the first clash rather carefully, Uncle Pavel's rudeness strikes the reader as not very realistic. By "realism," of course, I merely indicate what an average reader in an average state of civilization feels as conforming to an average reality of life. Now in the reader's mind Uncle Pavel has already been imprinted as an image of a very fashionable, very experienced, very well groomed gentleman who would hardly take the trouble to heckle so viciously a chance boy, his nephew's friend and his brother's guest.

I have mentioned that a curious feature of Turgenev's structure is the spreading of antecedents over the action part of the story. An illustration comes at the end of chapter 6, "And Arkadi told Bazarov the story of Uncle Pavel." The story is passed on to the reader in chapter 7 and conspicuously interrupts the flow of the story which has already started. We read here 52

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about Uncel Pavel's love affair with the fascinating and fateful Princess R. back in the 1830s. This romantic lady, a sphinx with a riddle who finally found its solution in organized mysticism, around 1838 leaves Pavel Kirsanov and in 1848 she dies.

Since then, till now, 1859, Pavel Kirsanov has retired to his brother's country seat.

Now further on we discover that Fenichka has not only replaced his [dead] wife Mary in the affections of Nikolay Kirsanov but has also replaced Princess R. in the affections of Uncle Pavel, another case of simple structural symmetry. We are shown Fenichka's room through Uncle Pavel's eyes:

"The small low-ceiled room in which he found himself was very clean and cozy. It smelt of the freshly painted floor, of camomile and melissa. Along the walls were ranged chairs with lyre-shaped backs, bought by the late general [as far back as the campaign of 1812]; in one corner was a high, small bedstead under a muslin canopy, near an ironbound chest with a rounded lid. In the opposite corner a little image-lamp was burning before a big dark icon of St. Nikolay the Wonder-Worker, a tiny porcelain egg hung by a red ribbon from the protruding gold halo down the saint's breast; on the window sills stood greenish glass jars of last year's jam, carefully tied and with the light green showing through them; on their paper tops Fenichka herself had written in big letters Gooseberry —Nikolay Petrovich was particularly fond of this jam.

Near the ceiling, on a long cord, hung a cage with a bobtailed siskin; it was constantly chirping and hopping about, and the cage was constantly shaking and swinging, while hempseeds fell with a light tap on the floor. On the wall, just above a small chest of drawers, hung some rather poor photographs of Nikolay Petrovich in various poses, taken by some itinerant photographer; there, too, hung a photograph of Fenichka herself, which was an absolute failure: an eyeless face wearing a forced smile, in a dingy frame—one could make out nothing more. And above Fenichka, General Yermolov, in a Circassian felt cloak, scowled menacingly upon the Caucasian mountains in the distance, from beneath a little pincushion in the form of a shoe, which came down right over his eyebrows."

Now look at the way the story pauses again to allow the author to describe Fenichka's past:

"Nikolay Petrovich had made Fenichka's acquaintance three years before when he happened to stay overnight at an inn in a remote district town. He was agreeably struck by the cleanness of the room assigned to him, by the freshness of the bed linen. . . . Nikolay Kirsanov had at that time just moved into his new home and not wishing to keep serfs in the house, was on the lookout for hired servants; the landlady for her part complained of the small number of transients in the town, and the hard times; he proposed to her to come into his house in the capacity of housekeeper; she consented. Her husband had long been dead, leaving her an only daughter—Fenichka . . . who was at that time seventeen . . . she lived ever so quietly, ever so unassumingly, and only on Sundays did Nikolay Petrovich notice in the parish church, somewhere off on the side, the delicate profile of her small white face. More than a year passed thus."

Nikolay treats her for an inflamed eye, which was soon well again, "but the impression she had made on Nikolay did not pass away so soon. He was forever haunted by that pure, delicate, timorously lifted face; he felt on his palms that soft hair, and saw those innocent, slightly parted lips, through which pearly teeth gleamed moistly in the sun. He began to watch her with great attention in church, he tried to get into conversation with her. . . .

"By degrees she began to get used to him, but was still shy in his presence, when suddenly Arina, her mother, died of cholera. Which way was Fenichka to turn? She inherited from her mother a love for order, common sense, and sedateness; but she was so young, so lonely. Nikolay Petrovich was himself so good and modest. There is no need to relate the rest."

The details are admirable, that inflamed eye is a work of art, but the structure is lame and the paragraph concluding the account is lame and coy. "There is no need to relate the rest." A strange and silly remark implying that some things are so well known to readers that they are not worth describing. Actually the gentle reader should not find it very difficult to imagine precisely the event which Turgenev so prudently and prudishly masks.

Bazarov meets Fenichka—and no wonder her baby falls for him. We know already about that way Bazarov has with simple little souls—bearded peasants, urchins, maid-servants. We also hear, with Bazarov, old Kirsanov playing Schubert.

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The beginning of chapter 10 well illustrates another typical Turgenev device — an intonation that we hear in the epilogues of his short novels, or, as here, when the author finds it necessary to pause and survey the arrangement and distribution of his characters. Here is how it goes—it is really a pause for station identification. Bazarov is classified through the reactions of other people toward him:

"Everyone in the house had grown used to him, to his careless manners and his monosyllabic and abrupt speech. Fenichka in particular had become so used to him that one night she sent to wake him up. Mitya had had convulsions. And Bazarov had come and, half joking, half yawning after his wont, had stayed two hours with her and relieved the child. On the other hand Pavel Kirsanov had grown to detest Bazarov with all the strength of his soul; he regarded him as proud, impudent, cynical, and plebian. He suspected that Bazarov had no respect for him—him, Pavel Kirsanov. Nikolay Petrovich was rather afraid of the young "nihilist," and entertained doubts whether his influence over Ar-kadi was for the good, but he willingly listened to him and was willingly present at his scientific and chemical experiments. Bazarov had brought his microscope with him and busied himself with it for hours on end. The servants, too, took to him, though he poked fun at them; they felt that, after all, he was one with them under the skin, that he was not a master. . . . The boys on the farm simply ran after the 'doctor' like puppies. The old man Prokofyich was the only one who did not like him; he handed him the dishes at table with a surly face. . . . Prokofyich in his own way was quite as much of an aristocrat as Pavel Kirsanov."

Now for the first time in the novel we have the tedious Eavesdropping Device, which has been so well described in regard to Lermontov:

"One day they had lingered rather late before returning home; Nikolay Petrovich went to meet them in the garden, and as he reached the arbor he suddenly heard the quick steps and the voices of the two young men. They were walking on the other side of the arbor and could not see him.

" 'You don't know my father well enough,' Arkadi was saying. 'Your father's a good fellow,' Bazarov pronounced, 'but he's a back number; his act is finished.'

"Nikolay Petrovich strained his ears. Arkadi made no answer.

"The 'back number' remained standing motionless for a couple of minutes and then slowly shuffled off home.

'The day before yesterday I saw him reading Pushkin,' Bazarov went on in the meantime. 'Explain to him, please, that it's of no earthly use. For he isn't a little boy, after all; it's time to drop all such rubbish. The very idea of being romantic at this time of day! Give him something useful to read.'

' 'Such as what?' asked Arkadi.

" 'Oh, I think Buchner's Stoff und Kraft for a start.'

" 'That's what I think,' Arkadi observed approvingly, 'Stoff und Kraft is written in popular language.'

It would seem that Turgenev is casting around for some artificial structures to enliven his story: "Stoff und Kraft" (Matter and Force) provides a little comic relief. Then a new puppet is produced in Matthew Kolyazin, the cousin of the Kirsanovs, who had been brought up by Uncle Kolyazin. This Matthew Kolyazin, who happens to be a governmental inspector, checking on the activities of the local town mayor, will be instrumental in permitting Turgenev to arrange matters in such a way that Arkadi and Bazarov will take a trip to town, which trip in its turn will provide Bazarov with his meeting with a fascinating lady, not unrelated to Uncle Pavel's Princess R.

In the second round of the fight between Uncle Pavel and Bazarov they come to grips at evening tea two weeks after their first fight. (The intervening meals, of which there have been perhaps as many as fifty—three per day multiplied by fourteen

—are only vaguely imagined by this reader.) But the ground must be cleared first:

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The conversation turned to one of the neighboring landowners. 'Trash; just a miserable little aristocrat,' indifferently remarked Bazarov, who had met the fellow in Petersburg.

" 'Allow me to ask you,' began Pavel Petrovich, and his lips began to tremble, 'according to your conceptions the words

"trash" and "aristocrat" signify one and the same thing.'

"'I said "just a miserable little aristocrat," ' replied Bazarov, lazily swallowing a sip of tea. . . .

"Pavel Petrovich turned white.

'That's an entirely different matter. I'm under no compulsion whatever to explain to you now why I sit twiddling my thumbs, as you are pleased to put it. I wish to tell you merely that aristocracy is a principle, and in our time none but immoral or frivolous people can live without principles.' . . .

"Pavel Petrovich puckered up his eyes a little. 'So that's it!' he observed in a strangely composed voice. 'Nihilism is to cure all our woes, and you, you are our heroes and saviors. So. But why do you berate others—even those same denunciators, say?

Don't you do as much chattering as all the others?' . . . 'Our argument has gone too far; it's better to cut it short, I think. But I'll be quite ready to agree with you,' Bazarov added, getting up, 'when you bring forward a single institution in our present mode of life, either domestic or social, which does not call forth complete and merciless repudiation. . . .

'Take my advice, Pavel Petrovich, give yourself a couple of days to think about it; you're not likely to find anything right off.

Go through all our classes and think rather carefully over each one, and in the meantime Arkadi and I will-'

'Go on scoffing over everything,' Pavel Petrovich broke in. 'No, we will go on dissecting frogs. Come Arkadi. Good-by for the present, gentlemen.' "

Curiously enough, Turgenev is still engaged in describing the minds of his characters, in setting up his scenes rather than in having the protagonists act. This is especially clear in chapter 11 where the two brothers Pavel and Nikolay are compared, and where occurs incidentally that charming little landscape ("Evening had come, the sun had hid behind a small aspen grove which lay a quarter of a mile from the garden; its shadow spread endlessly across the still fields. . . .") The next chapters are devoted to Arkadi's and Bazarov's visit to town. The town appears now as a middle point and a structural link between the Kirsanov country seat and the Bazarov country place, which is twenty-five miles from the town in another direction.

Some rather obvious grotesque personages are shown. Mme. Odintsov is first mentioned in a conversation at the house of a feminist progressive lady: 'Are there any pretty women here?' inquired Bazarov, as he drank up a third glass of wine.

'Yes, there are,' answered Eudoxia, 'but then they're all such empty-headed creatures. Mon amie Odintsov, for instance, isn't at all bad-looking. It's a pity that her reputation is sort of . . .' " Bazarov sees Mme. Odintsov for the first time at the Governor's ball.

"Arkadi turned and saw a tall woman in a black dress standing at the door of the room. He was struck by the dignity of her carriage. Her bare arms lay gracefully along her slender waist; gracefully some light sprays of fuchsia drooped from her gleaming hair on to her sloping shoulders; her clear eyes looked out from under a somewhat overhanging white brow, with a tranquil and intelligent expression—tranquil, precisely, and not pensive—and a scarcely perceptible smile hovered on her lips. Her face radiated a gracious and gentle force. . . .

"Bazarov's attention, too, was directed to Mme. Odintsov.

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" 'Who in the world is she?' he remarked. 'She's different from the rest of the females here.' " Arkadi is presented to her and asks her for the next mazurka.

"Arkadi made up his mind that he had never before met such an attractive woman. He could not get the sound of her voice out of his ears; the very folds of her dress seemed to hang upon her differently from all other women—more gracefully and amply—and her movements were peculiarly smooth and natural."

Instead of dancing (he was a bad dancer) Arkadi chats with her during the mazurka, "permeated by the happiness of being near her, talking to her, looking at her eyes, her lovely brow, all her endearing dignified, clever face. She said little, but from some of her observations Arkadi concluded that this young woman had already contrived to feel and think a great many things.

'Who was that you were standing with,' she asked him, 'when M'sieu' Sitnikov brought you to me?'

" 'Oh, so you noticed him?' Arkadi asked in his turn. 'He has a splendid face, hasn't he? He's a certain Bazarov, a friend of mine.'

Arkadi fell to talking about this "friend" of his. He spoke of him in such detail, and with such enthusiasm, that Mme.

Odintsov turned toward him and gave him an attentive look. . . .

"The Governor came up to Mme. Odintsov, announced that supper was ready, and, with a careworn face, offered her his arm. As she went away, she turned to give a last smile and nod to Arkadi. He bowed low, followed her with his eyes (how graceful her waist seemed to him, the grayish luster of black silk apparently poured over it!). . . .

'Well?' Bazarov questioned him as soon as Arkadi had rejoined him in the corner. 'Have a good time? A gentleman has been telling me just now that this lady is—my, my, my! But then the gentleman himself strikes me as very much of a fool. Well, now, according to you, is she really—my, my, my?'

T don't quite understand that definition,' answered Arkadi.

'Oh, now! What innocence!'

'In that case, I don't understand the gentleman you quote. Mme. Odintsov is indisputably most endearing, but she behaves so coldly and austerely, that — '

"'Still waters—you know!' Bazarov put in quickly. 'She's cold, you say. That's just where the taste comes in. For you like ice cream, don't you?'

"'Perhaps,' Arkadi muttered. T can't judge about that. She wishes to make your acquaintance and asked me to bring you to see her.'

T can imagine how you've painted me! However, you did the right thing. Take me along. Whatever she may be—whether she's simply a provincial lioness, or an "emancipated woman," à la Kukshina [Eudoxia], the fact remains that she's got a pair of shoulders whose like I've not set eyes on for a long while.' "

This is Turgenev at his best, the delicate and vivid paintbrush (that gray gloss is great), a marvelous sense of color and light, and shade. The my-my-my is the famous Russian exclamation oy-oy-oy —still preserved in New York City among Armenian, Jewish, and Greek groups stemming from Russia. Note the first revelation when the following day he is presented to her that Bazarov, the strong man, may lose his confidence. " Arkadi presented Bazarov, and noticed with secret wonder that he seemed embarrassed, while Mme. Odintsov remained perfectly tranquil, as she had been the night before. Bazarov himself was conscious of his embarrassment and was irritated by it. 'Of all things! Frightened of a petticoat!' he thought, and, 56

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sprawled out in an armchair just like Sitnikov, began talking with an exaggerated unrestraint, while Mme. Odintsov kept her clear eyes fixed on him." Bazarov, the confirmed plebian, is going to fall madly in love with the aristocratic Anna.

Turgenev now uses the device which is beginning to pall—the pause for a biographical sketch where the past of the young widow Anna Odintsov is described. (Her marriage to Odintsov had lasted six years until his death.) She sees the charm of Bazarov through the rough exterior. An important observation on Turgenev's part is: Vulgarity alone repelled her, and no one could have accused Bazarov of vulgarity.

With Bazarov and Arkadi we now visit Anna's charming country seat. They will spend a fortnight there. The estate, Nikolskoe, is situated a few miles from the city, and from there Bazarov intends to travel on to his father's country place. It will be noted that he has left his microscope and other belongings at the Kirsanov place, Maryino, a little trick carefully prepared by Turgenev in order to get Bazarov back to the Kirsanovs so as to complete the Uncle Pavel-Fenichka-Bazarov theme.

There are some splendid little scenes in these Nikolskoe chapters, such as the appearance of Katya, and the greyhound:

"A beautiful greyhound bitch with a blue collar on ran into the drawing room, tapping on the floor with her nails, immediately followed by a girl of eighteen, black-haired and swarthy, with a somewhat round but pleasing face and small dark eyes. She was carrying a basket filled with flowers.

' 'And here's my Katya,' said Anna, indicating her with a motion of her head. Katya made a slight curtsy, settled down beside her sister, and began sorting the flowers. . . .

"When Katya spoke, she had a very endearing smile, timid

and candid, and looked up from under her eyebrows with a

sort of humorous severity. Everything about her still had

the greenness of youth : her voice and the bloom on her

whole face, and her rosy hands with the whitish circles on

the palms, and her shoulders just the least bit narrow. She

was constantly blushing and breathing rapidly."

We now expect from Bazarov and Anna a few good

conversations, and indeed we get them: conversation

number one in chapter 16 ("Yes. That seems to surprise

you—why?"—that kind of thing), conversation number two

in the next chapter, and number three in chapter 18. In

conversation number one Bazarov expresses the stock

ideas of progressive young men of the time, and Anna is

calm and elegant and languid. Notice the charming

description of her aunt:

"Princess Kh., a wizened little woman with a pinched-up

face that looked like a small clenched fist, and staring

malicious eyes under a gray scratch wig, came in, and

scarcely bowing to the guests, she sank into a roomy

velvet-covered armchair upon which none but she had the

right to sit. Katya put a footstool under her feet; the old

A page from Nabokov's lecture on Fathers and Sons with his

woman did not thank her, did not even glance at her, her

map of Bazarov's travels.

hands merely stirred under the yellow shawl, which

practically covered her whole wizened body. The Princess

was fond of yellow; her cap, too, had bright yellow ribbons."

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We had Schubert played by Arkadi's father. Now Katya plays Mozart's Fantasia in C minor: Turgenev's detailed references to music were one of the things that irritated so dreadfully his enemy Dostoevski. Later they go botanizing and then we pause again for some additional characterization of Anna. That doctor is a strange man, she reflects.

Shortly Bazarov is horribly in love: "His blood was on fire directly if he merely thought of her; he could easily have mastered his blood, but something else had gotten into him, something he had never admitted, at which he had always jeered, at which all his pride revolted. . . . Suddenly he would imagine that those chaste arms would one day twine about his neck, that those proud lips would respond to his kisses, those clever eyes would dwell with tenderness—yes, with tenderness—

on his, and his head would start spinning, and for an instant he would forget himself, until indignation flared up in him again. He caught himself in all sorts of 'shameful' thoughts, as though some fiend were mocking him. Sometimes it seemed to him that a change was taking place in Anna as well; that a certain something was emerging in the expression of her face; that perhaps—But at that very point he would stamp his foot or gnash his teeth and shake his fist in his own face." (I have never cared much for that gnashing and fist-shaking.) He decides to leave, and "she paled."

A pathetic note is introduced with the appearance of the Bazarovs' old steward whom they have sent to see if Eugene is coming at last. This is the beginning of the Bazarov family theme, which is the most successful one in the whole novel.

We are now ready for conversation number two. The summer night scene is indoors, with a window playing a well-known romanticist role:

" 'Why leave?' asked Anna, dropping her voice.

"He glanced at her. She had thrown back her head on the back of her easy chair, and had crossed her arms, bare to the elbows, on her breast. She seemed paler in the light of the single lamp covered with a perforated paper shade. An ample white gown hid her completely in its soft folds; the tips of her feet, also crossed, were hardly visible.

" 'And why stay?' Bazarov countered.

"Anna turned her head slightly.

" 'You ask why? Haven't you enjoyed yourself here? Or do you think you won't be missed?'

" 'I'm sure of it.'

"Anna was silent a while. 'You're wrong in thinking so. However, I don't believe you. You couldn't have said that seriously.'

Bazarov still sat immovable. 'Eugene Vasilyich, why don't you say something?'

'Why, what am I to say to you? It isn't worth while missing people, as a general thing—and surely not me.'

..." 'Open that window—I feel half stifled somehow.'

"Bazarov got up and gave the window a push. It flew open noisily and suddenly. He had not expected it to open so easily; besides, his hands were shaking. The dark soft night peered into the room with its almost black sky, its faintly rustling leaves, and the fresh fragrance of the pure open air. . . .

" 'We've become such friends—' Bazarov uttered in a stifled voice. 'Yes! For I'd forgotten that you wish to leave.'

"Bazarov got up. The lamp burnt dimly in the middle of the dark, fragrant, isolated room; from time to time the blind shook, and the insidious freshness of the night flowed in; one could hear the mysterious whisperings of that night. Anna did not stir a single limb; a secret emotion was overcoming her little by little. It was communicated to Bazarov. He suddenly became aware that he was alone with a young and lovely woman.

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'Where are you going?' she asked slowly.

"He made no answer and sank into a chair. . . . 'Wait a little,' whispered Anna. Her eyes rested on Bazarov; it seemed as though she were examining him intently.

"He strode across the room, then suddenly went up to her, hurriedly said 'Good-by !,' squeezed her hand so that she almost cried out, and left the room. She raised her crushed fingers to her lips, breathed on them, and suddenly, impulsively getting up from her low chair, she went with rapid steps toward the door, as though she wished to bring Bazarov back. . . . Her braid came loose and like a dark snake slithered down on her shoulder. The lamp burned long in Anna's room, and for long did she sit without moving, only running her hands from time to time over her arms, nipped at by the chill of the night.

"Bazarov went back to his bedroom two hours later, his boots wet with dew; he was all muffled up and glum."

In chapter 18 we have the third conversation, with a passionate outburst at the end, and again the window:

"Anna held both her hands out before her, but Bazarov was leaning with his forehead pressed against the window pane. He was gasping; his whole body was visibly trembling. But it was not the tremor of youthful timidity, it was not the delectable dread of a first declaration of love that possessed him; it was passion struggling in him, strong and painful—passion not unlike rancor, and perhaps akin to it. Anna became both afraid of him and sorry for him.

'Eugene Vasilyich!' she said, and involuntarily there was the ring of tenderness in her voice.

"He turned quickly, devoured her with his eyes, and snatching both her hands, he drew her suddenly to his breast.

"She did not free herself from his embrace at once, but within an instant she was standing in a distant corner and watching Bazarov from there. He rushed toward her.

'You have misunderstood me,' she whispered hurriedly, in alarm. It seemed that were he to make another step she would scream. Bazarov bit his lips and left the room."

In chapter 19 Bazarov and Kirsanov leave Nikolskoe. (The arrival of Sit-nikov is for comic relief, and artistically is too pat and not satisfying.) We will spend now three days—three days after three years of separation—with Bazarov's old people:

"Bazarov leaned out of the coach, while Arkadi craned his head over his companion's shoulder and caught sight on the steps of the little manor house of a tall, gaunt man with rumpled hair and a thin aquiline nose; his military coat was unbuttoned. He was standing, his legs wide apart, smoking a long pipe, and his eyes were puckered up from the sun.

"The horses stopped.

"'So you've favored us at last,' said Bazarov's father, still going on smoking, though his student pipe was fairly dancing up and down in his fingers. 'Come, get out, get out; let me kiss you.'

"He put his arms around his son. "'Gene, Gene,' they heard a woman's trembling voice. The door was flung open, and a roly-poly, short little old woman in a white cap and a short striped jacket appeared on the threshold. She 'oh'd,' swayed, and would certainly have fallen if Bazarov had not held her up. Her plump little arms were instantly twined round his neck, her head was pressed to his breast, and there was a complete hush. The only sound to be heard was her broken sobs."

It is a small estate; the Bazarovs have only twenty-two serfs. Old Bazarov, who had served in General Kirsanov's regiment, is an old-fashioned provincial doctor, hopelessly behind the times. In their first conversation he indulges in a pathetic monologue which bores his emancipated, nonchalant son. The mother wonders how long Eugene will stay—after three 59

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years. Turgenev closes the chapter with a description of Madame Bazarov's origins and mentality, a device we now know well: the biographical pause.

A second conversation takes place, this time between old Bazarov and Arkadi (Eugene having got up early and gone for a ramble—one wonders if he collected anything). The conversation is permeated on old Bazarov's part by Arkadi's being Eugene's friend and admirer: it is this admiration of his son that the old man touchingly basks in. A third conversation takes place between Eugene and Arkadi in the shade of a haystack, in which we learn a few biographical details concerning Eugene. He had lived there two years on end and from time to time elsewhere; his father being an army doctor, he had led a roving life. The conversation turns philosophical but ends in a slight quarrel.

The real drama begins when Eugene suddenly decides to leave, even though he promises to return in a month's time.

Old Bazarov, "after a few more moments of bravely waving his handkerchief on the steps, sank into a chair and let his head drop on his breast.

" 'He's forsaken us, he's forsaken us!' he babbled. 'He's forsaken us; he became bored here. I'm all alone now, all alone like this!' And each time he said this he thrust out his hand, with the index finger sticking up. Whereupon Arina Vlasievna drew near him and, putting her gray head close to his gray head, said :

" 'There's no help for it Vasya! A son is a slice off the loaf. He's like the falcon—he felt like it, and he winged back to the nest; he felt like it, and he winged away. But you and I are like bumps on a hollow tree, sitting side by side and never budging.

Only I shall remain the same to you forever, even as you to me.'

"Vasili Ivanovich took his hands away from his face and embraced his wife, his friend, his mate, harder than he had ever clasped her even in youth: she had consoled him in his grief."

On Bazarov's whim the two friends make a detour to Nikolskoe where they are not expected. Having spent four unsatisfactory hours there (Katya remaining in her room), they go on to Maryino. Ten days later Arkadi returns to Nikolskoe. The main reason is, Turgenev has to have him out of the way when the expected quarrel between Bazarov and Uncle Pavel takes place. There is no explanation why Bazarov remains: he could have conducted his simple experiments quite as successfully in the home of his parents. The theme of Bazarov and Fenichka now starts, and we have the famous scene in the lilac arbor, complete with the Eavesdropping Device:

"'I like it when you talk. It's just like a little brook murmuring.'

Fenichka turned her head away.

" 'How you talk!' she said, running her fingers over the flowers. 'And why should you listen to me? You've conversed with such clever ladies.'

" 'Ah, Theodosia Nikolaievna! Believe me, all the clever ladies in the world aren't worth the dimple on your little elbow.'

" 'Why, what won't you think of!' murmured Fenichka, and put her hands under her. . . .

" 'Then I'll tell you; I want—one of those roses.'

"Fenichka broke into laughter again and even clapped her hands, so amusing did Bazarov's request seem to her. She laughed, and at the same time felt flattered. Bazarov was looking at her intently.

" 'By all means, by all means,' she said at last and, bending down to the seat, began picking over the roses. 'Which will you have—a red or a white?'

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" 'Red—and not too large.' . . .

"Fenichka stretched her little neck forward and put her face close to the flower. The kerchief rolled down from her head on to her shoulders; a soft mass of dark, shining, slightly ruffled hair became visible.

" 'Wait, I want to sniff it with you,' said Bazarov. He bent down and kissed her hard on her parted lips.

"She was startled and thrust him back with both her hands on his breast, but her thrust was weak, and he was able to renew and prolong the kiss.

"There was a dry cough behind the lilac bushes. Fenichka instantaneously moved away to the other end of the seat. Pavel Petrovich appeared, made a slight bow, and having dropped with a sort of malicious despond 'You here?,' he went out of the arbor. . . .

" 'That was wrong of you Eugene Vasilyich,' she whispered as she went. There was a note of unfeigned reproach in her whisper.

"Bazarov remembered another recent scene, and he felt both shame and contemptuous annoyance. But he immediately tossed back his head, ironically congratulated himself 'on his formal induction into the ranks of the Lotharios,' and went on to his own room."

In the duel that follows Uncle Pavel aims directly at Bazarov and fires but misses. Bazarov "took one more step and, without taking aim, pressed the trigger.

"Kirsanov gave a slight start and clutched at his thigh. A thin stream of blood began to trickle down his white trousers.

"Bazarov flung aside his pistol and approached his antagonist. 'Are you wounded?' he asked.

'You had the right to call me up to the barrier,' said Pavel Petrovich, 'but this wound is a trifle. According to our agreement, each of us has the right to one more shot.'

'Really, you'll excuse me, but that will wait till another time,' answered Bazarov, and he put his arm around Kirsanov, who was beginning to turn pale. 'Now I'm no longer a duelist but a doctor, and I must examine your wound before anything else. . . .

'That's all nonsense—I don't need anyone's aid,' Kirsanov declared jerkily, 'and—we must—again—' He tried to pull at his mustache, but his hand failed him, his eyes rolled up, and he lost consciousness. . . . Kirsanov slowly opened his eyes.

"... 'All I need is something to bind up this scratch and I can reach home on foot, or else you can send a droshky for me. The duel, if you are willing, won't be renewed. You have behaved nobly—today, today, you will note.'

'No use raking up the past,' rejoined Bazarov. 'And as for the future, it's not worth racking one's head about that, either, for I intend clearing out without any delay. ' " Actually Bazarov would have behaved still more nobly if he had coolly discharged his pistol in the air after enduring Uncle Pavel's fire.

Turgenev now starts his first mopping-up operation when a conversation takes place between Uncle Pavel and Fenichka, and another between Uncle Pavel and his brother —and Uncle Pavel solemnly asks Nikolay to marry Fenichka. A little moral is stressed, not very artistically. Uncle Pavel decides to go abroad: his soul is dead within him. We shall meet him for a last glimpse in the epilogue, but otherwise Turgenev has done with him.

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Now for the mopping-up of the Nikolskoe theme. We move to Nikolskoe where Katya and Arkadi are sitting in the shade of an ash tree. The greyhound Fifi is there, too. The light and shade are beautifully rendered:

"A faint breeze stirring in the leaves of the ash kept pale-gold flecks of light wavering to and fro over the shady path and over Fifi's tawny back; an even shade fell upon Arkadi and Katya, save that now and then a vivid streak would flare up in her hair. Both were silent, but the very way in which they were silent, in which they were sitting together, was expressive of a trustful rapprochement; each of them seemed to be not thinking of his companion, yet secretly rejoicing at the other's proximity. Their faces, too, had changed since we saw them last; Arkadi seemed calmer, Katya more animated, more spirited."

Arkadi is getting out and away from Bazarov's influence. The conversation is a functional one —summing up matters, giving results, stating a final situation. It is also an attempt to draw differences between Katya's character and Anna's character. It is all very weak and belated. The moment Arkadi almost proposes marriage but walks away, Anna appears. A page later, Bazarov is announced. What activity!

We are now going to get rid of Anna, Katya, and Arkadi. The final scene is set in the arbor. During another conversation between Arkadi and Katya, the Bazarov-Anna couple is heard discoursing. We have sunk to the level of a comedy of manners. The overhearing device is with us, the pairing device is with us, the summing up device is with us. Arkadi resumes his courtship and is accepted. Anna and Bazarov reach an understanding:

" 'You see,' Anna Sergeievna continued, 'you and I have made a mistake; we're both past our first youth—especially I; we have seen life, we are tired; we're both—why be falsely modest?—clever; at first we aroused each other's interest, our curiosity was stirred, but then — '

" 'But then I became flat,' Bazarov put in. 'You know that that was not the cause of our misunderstanding. But be that as it may, we had no need of each other, that's the main thing; there was too much —how should I put it? —similarity in us. We did not realize this immediately. . . . Eugene Vasilyich, we have no power over—' she began; but a gust of wind swooped down, set the leaves rustling, and bore her words away.

" 'Of course, you are free—' Bazarov declared a little later. Nothing more could be distinguished; their steps retreated; everything was stilled." The next day Bazarov blesses his young friend Arkadi and departs.

We now come to the greatest chapter in our novel, chapter 27, which is the one before the last. Bazarov returns to his family and engages himself to medical activities. Turgenev is preparing his death. Then it comes. Eugene asks his father for some lunar caustic:

" 'Yes, what do you want it for?'

" T need it—to cauterize a cut.'

" 'For whom?'

" 'For myself.'

" 'What—yourself? How is that? What sort of a cut? Where is it?'

" 'Right here, on my finger. I went to the village today—you know, where they brought that peasant with typhus from. They were about to perform an autopsy on him for some reason or other, and I've had no practice on that sort of thing for a long while.'

" 'Well?'

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" 'Well, so I asked the district doctor to let me do it; and so I cut myself.'

"Vasili Ivanovich suddenly turned all white and, without uttering a word, rushed to his study, from which he returned at once carrying a bit of lunar caustic. Bazarov was about to take it and leave.

" 'For dear God's sake,' said his father, 'let me do this myself.'

Bazarov smiled.

" 'What a devoted practitioner!'

" 'Don't laugh, please. Let me see your finger. The cut isn't so great. Doesn't that hurt?'

" 'Press harder; don't be afraid.'

"Vasili Ivanovich stopped. "'What do you think, Eugene—wouldn't it be better to cauterize it with a hot iron?'

'That should have been done sooner; but now, if you get down to brass tacks, even the lunar caustic is useless. If I've been infected, it's too late now.'

" 'What —too late — ' Vasili Ivanovich could scarcely articulate the words.

" 'Of course! It's more than four hours ago.'

"Vasili Ivanovich cauterized the cut a little more.

" 'Why, didn't the district doctor have any lunar caustic?'

" 'No.'

'My God, how is it possible? A doctor—and he hasn't got such an indispensable thing as that!'

" 'You ought to have a look at his lancets,' Bazarov observed, and walked out."

Bazarov has become infected, falls ill, has a partial recovery, and then a relapse that brings him to the crisis of the disease.

Anna is sent for, arrives with a German physician, who tells her there is no hope, and she goes to Bazarov's bedside.

'Well, thanks,' Bazarov repeated. 'This is a regal action. They say that monarchs visit the dying, too.' 'Eugene Vasilyich, I hope—'

'Eh, Anna Sergeievna, let's speak the truth. It's all over with me. I'm caught under the wheel. And now it turns out it was useless to think of the future. Death is an old trick, yet it strikes everyone as something new. So far I have no craven fear of it—and later on a coma will come, and—' he whistled and made a feeble nugatory gesture. 'Well, what am I to say to you?

That I loved you? There was no sense in that even before, and less than ever now. Love is a form, and my own form is already decomposing. I'd do better to say how fine you are! Even now you're standing there, so beautiful—'

"Anna gave an involuntary shudder.

" 'Never mind, don't be upset. Sit over there. Don't come close to me — after all, my illness is contagious.'

"Anna swiftly crossed the room and sat down in the armchair near the divan on which Bazarov was lying.

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" 'Magnanimous one!' he whispered. 'Oh, how near and how young and fresh and pure ... in this loathsome room! . . . Well, good-by! Live long, that's the best thing of all, and make the most of it while there is time. Just see, what a hideous spectacle: a worm half crushed, but writhing still. And yet I, too, thought: I'd accomplish so many things, I wouldn't die, not me! If there were any problem—well, I was a giant! And now all the problem the giant has is how to die decently, although that makes no difference to anyone either. Never mind; I'm not going to wag my tail.'. . .

"Bazarov put his hand to his brow.

"Anna bent down to him. 'Eugene Vasiliyich, I'm here—'

"He at once took his hand away and raised himself. 'Good-by,' he said with sudden force, and his eyes gleamed with a last gleam. 'Good-by. Listen—you know I didn't kiss you that time. Breathe on the dying lamp and let it go out—'

"Anna put her lips to his forehead. 'Enough!' he murmured, and dropped back on the pillow. 'Now . . . darkness—'

"Anna went softly out. 'Well?' Vasih Ivanovich asked her in a whisper. 'He has fallen asleep,' she answered, barely audible.

"Bazarov was not fated to awaken. Toward evening he sank into complete unconsciousness, and the following day he died.

. . .

"And when finally he had breathed his last, and a universal lamentation arose throughout the house, Vasili Ivanovich was seized by a sudden frenzy.

" 'I said I would rebel,' he screamed hoarsely, with his face flaming and distorted, shaking his fist in the air, as though threatening someone, 'and I will rebel.'

"But Arina Vlasievna, all in tears, hung upon his neck, and both prostrated themselves together.

" 'Side by side,' Anfisushka related afterward in the servants' quarters, 'they let their poor heads droop, like lambs at noonday — '

"But the sultriness of noonday passes, and evening comes, and night, and then follows the return to the calm refuge, where sleep is sweet for the tortured and the weary."

In the epilogue, chapter 28, everyone is marrying, in the pairing-off device. Notice here the didactic and slightly humorous attitude. Fate takes over but still under Turgenev's direction.

"Anna has recently married, not of love but out of conviction, one of the future leaders of Russia, a very intelligent man, a lawyer, possessed of strong practical sense, firm will, and remarkable eloquence — still young, good-natured, and cold as ice. . . . The Kirsanovs, father and son, live at Maryino; their fortunes are on the mend. Arkadi has become zealous in the management of the estate, and the 'farm' is now yielding a rather good revenue. . . . Katya has a son, little Nikolay, while Mitya runs about ever so lively and talks beautifully. ... In Dresden, on the Bruhl Terrace, between two and four o'clock—the most fashionable time for walking—you may meet a man about fifty, by now altogether gray, and apparently afflicted with gout, but still handsome, exquisitely dressed, and with that special stamp which is gained only by moving a long time in the higher strata of society. That is Pavel Petrovich. From Moscow he had gone abroad for the sake of his health, and has settled down in Dresden, where he associates for the most part with Englishmen and Russian visitors. . . . Kukshina, too, found herself abroad. . . . With two or three just such young chemists, who don't know oxygen from nitrogen, but are filled with skepticism and self-respect, Sitnikov is knocking about Petersburg, also getting ready to be great, and, according to his own assertions, is carrying on Bazarov's 'work.' . . .

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"There is a small village graveyard in one of the remote nooks of Russia. Like almost all our graveyards, it presents a woebegone appearance. . . . But among these graves there is one untouched by man, untrampled by beast; the birds alone perch thereon and sing at dawn. An iron railing runs around it; two young firs are there, one planted at each end.

"Eugene Bazarov is buried in this grave. Often, from the little village not far off, an old couple, decrepit by now, comes to visit it—man and wife. Supporting each other, they move to it with heavy steps; they come close to the railing and get down on their knees. And long and bitterly do they weep, and long and intently do they gaze at the mute stone, under which their son is lying; they exchange some brief phrase, brush the dust from the stone, and set straight a branch on one of the firs, and then pray again, and they cannot forsake this place, where they seem to feel nearer to their son, to their memories of him."

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FYODOR DOSTOEVSKI (1821-1881)

Nabokov's discussion of sentimentalism in his lecture on Dostoevski.

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Belinski from "Letter to Gogol" (1847): "... you have not observed that Russia sees its salvation not in mysticism, not in asceticism, not in pietism, but in the successes of civilization, of enlightenment, of humanitarianism. It is not preachments that Russia needs (she has heard them), nor prayers (she has said them over and over), but an awakening among her common folk of a sense of human dignity, for so many centuries lost amid the mire and manure, and rights and laws, conforming not with the teachings of the Church but with common sense and justice, and as strict fulfillment of them as is possible. But instead of that Russia presents the horrible spectacle of a land where men traffic in men, not having therefor even that justification which the American plantation owners craftily avail themselves of, affirming that the Negro is not a man; the spectacle of a land where people do not call themselves by names but by ignoble nicknames Jack and Tom (Vankas, Vaskas, Steshkas, Palashkas); the spectacle of a country, finally, where there are not only no guarantees whatsoever for one's person, honor, property, but where there is even no order maintained by the police, instead of which there are only enormous corporations of various administrative thieves and robbers. The most pressing contemporary national problems in Russia now are: the abolition of the right to own serfs, the abrogation of corporal punishment, the introduction as far as possible of a strict fulfillment of at least those laws which already exist. This is felt even by the government itself (which is well aware of what the landowners do with their peasants and how many throats of the former are cut every year by the latter), which is proved by its timid and fruitless half-measures for the benefit of our white Negroes. . . ."

My position in regard to Dostoevski is a curious and difficult one. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me —namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. From this point of view Dostoevski is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one—with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov for some reason or other kills an old female pawnbroker and her sister. Justice in the shape of an inexorable police officer closes slowly in on him until in the end he is driven to a public confession, and through the love of a noble prostitute he is brought to a spiritual regeneration that did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. My difficulty, however, is that not all the readers to whom I talk in this or other classes are experienced. A good third, I should say, do not know the difference between real literature and pseudo-literature, and to such readers Dostoevski may seem more important and more artistic than such trash as our American historical novels or things called From Here to Eternity and such like balderdash.

However, I shall speak at length about a number of really great artists—and it is on this high level that Dostoevski is to be criticized. I am too little of an academic professor to teach subjects that I dislike. I am very eager to debunk Dostoevski. But I realize that readers who have not read much may be puzzled by the set of values implied.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski was born in 1821 in the family of a rather poor man. His father was a doctor in one of the public hospitals in Moscow, but the position of a doctor of a public hospital in contemporaneous Russia was a modest one and the Dostoevski family lived in cramped quarters and in conditions anything but luxurious.

His father was a petty tyrant who was murdered under obscure circumstances. Freudian-minded explorers of Dostoevski's literary work are inclined to see an autobiographic feature in the attitude of Ivan Karamazov toward the murder of his father: though Ivan was not the actual murderer, yet through his lax attitude, and through his not having prevented a murder he could have prevented, he was in a way guilty of patricide. It seems, according to those critics, that Dostoevski all his life labored under a similar consciousness of indirect guilt after his own father had been assassinated by his coachman.

Be it as it may, there is no doubt that Dostoevski was a neurotic, that from his early years he had been subject to that mysterious sickness, the epilepsy. The epileptic fits and his general neurotic condition worsened considerably under the influence of the misfortunes which befell him later.

Dostoevski received his education first at a boarding school in Moscow, then at the Military Engineers' School in Petersburg. He was not particularly interested in military engineering, but his father had desired him to enter that school.

Even there he devoted most of his time to the study of literature. After graduation he served at the engineering department just as long as was obligatory in return for the education he had received. In 1844 he resigned his commission and entered upon his literary career. His first book Poor Folk (1846) was a hit both with the literary critics and the reading 68

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public. There are all sorts of anecdotes concerning its early history. Dostoevski's friend and a writer in his own right, Dmitri Grigorovich, had persuaded Dostoevski to let him show the manuscript to Nikolay Nekrasov, who was at that time publisher of the most influential literary review Sovremennik (The Contemporary). Nekrasov and his lady friend Mrs. Panaiev entertained at the office of the review a literary salon which was frequented by all the worthies of contemporaneous Russian literature. Turgenev, and later Tolstoy, were among its constant members. So were the famous left-wing critics Nikolay Cherny-shevski and Nikolay Dobrolyubov. Being published in Nekrasov's review was enough to make a man's literary reputation. After leaving his manuscript with Nekrasov, Dostoevski went to bed full of misgivings: "They will poke fun at my Poor Folk," he kept telling himself. At four in the morning he was awakened by Nekrasov and Grigorovich, who made an irruption into his apartment and smothered him with smacking Russian kisses: they had begun to read the manuscript in the evening and could not stop until they had read it to the end. Their admiration had been so great that they decided to wake up the author and tell him what they thought of him at once. "What matter that he sleeps: this is more important than sleep," they said.

Nekrasov took the manuscript to Belinski and declared that a new Gogol had been born. "Gogols seem to grow like toadstools with you," remarked Belinski dryly. But his admiration after reading Poor Folk was unbounded too and he asked immediately to be introduced to the new author and showered upon him enthusiastic praise. Dostoevski was transported with joy; Poor Folk was published in Nekrasov's review. Its success was enormous. Unfortunately it did not last. His second novel, or long short story, The Double (1846), which is the best thing he ever wrote and certainly far above Poor Folk, met with an indifferent reception. In the meantime Dostoevski had developed a tremendous literary vanity, and being very naive, unpolished, and but poorly equipped where manners were concerned, contrived to make a fool of himself in his dealings with his newly acquired friends and admirers and eventually to spoil completely his relations with them. Turgenev dubbed him a new pimple on the nose of Russian literature.

His early inclinations were to the side of the radicals; he leaned more or less toward the Westernizers. He also consorted with a secret society (though apparently did not actually become its member) of young men who had adopted the socialistic theories of Saint-Simon and Fourier. These young men gathered at the house of an official of the State Department, Mikhail Petra-shevski, and read aloud and discussed the books of Fourier, talked socialism, and criticized the government. After the upheavals of 1848 in several European countries, there was a wave of reaction in Russia; the government was alarmed and cracked down upon all dissenters. The Petrashevskians were arrested, among them Dostoevski. He was found guilty of "having taken part in criminal plans, having circulated the letter of Belinski [to Gogol]

full of insolent expressions against the Orthodox Church and the Supreme Power, and of having attempted, together with others, to circulate anti-Government writings with the aid of a private printing press." He awaited his trial in the Fortress of St. Paul and Peter, of which the commander was a General Nabokov, an ancestor of mine. (The correspondence which passed between this General Nabokov and Tsar Nicholas in regard to their prisoner makes rather amusing reading.) The sentence was severe—eight years of hard labor in Siberia (this was later commuted to four by the Tsar)—but a monstrously cruel procedure was followed before the actual sentence was read to the condemned men: They were told they were to be shot; they were taken to the place assigned for the execution, stripped to their shirts, and the first batch of prisoners were tied to the posts. Only then the actual sentence was read to them. One of the men went mad. A deep scar was left in Dostoevski's soul by the experience of that day. He never quite got over it.

The four years of penal servitude Dostoevski spent in Siberia in the company of murderers and thieves, no segregation having been yet introduced between ordinary and political criminals. He described them in his Memoirs from the House of Death (1862). They do not make a pleasant reading. All the humiliations and hardships he endured are described in detail, as also the criminals among whom he lived. Not to go completely mad in those surroundings, Dostoevski had to find some sort of escape. This he found in a neurotic Christianism which he developed during these years. It is only natural that some of the convicts among whom he lived showed, besides dreadful bestiality, an occasional human trait. Dostoevski gathered these manifestations and built upon them a kind of very artificial and completely pathological idealization of the simple Russian folk. This was the initial step on his consecutive spiritual road. In 1854 when Dostoevski finished his term he was made a soldier in a battalion garrisoned in a Siberian town. In 1855 Nicholas I died and his son Alexander became Emperor under the name of Alexander II. He was by far the best of the nineteenth-century Russian rulers. (Ironically he was the one to die at the hands of the revolutionaries, torn literally in two by a bomb thrown at his feet. ) The beginning of his reign 69

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brought a pardon to many prisoners. Dostoevski was given back his officer's commission. Four years later he was allowed to return to Petersburg.

During the last years of exile, he had resumed literary work with The Manor of Stepanchikovo (1859) and the Memoirs from the House of Death. After his return to Petersburg, he plunged into literary activity. He began at once publishing, together with his brother Mikhail, a literary magazine Vremia (Time). His Memoirs from the House of Death and yet another work, a novel, The Humiliated and the Insulted (1861), appeared in this magazine. His attitude toward the Government had completely changed since the days of his youthful radicalism. "Greek-Catholic Church, absolute monarchy, and the cult of Russian nationalism," these three props on which stood the reactionary political slavophilism were his political faith. The theories of socialism and Western liberalism became for him the embodiments of Western contamination and of satanic sin bent upon the destruction of a Slavic and Greek-Catholic world. It is the same attitude that one sees in Fascism or in Communism — universal salvation.

His emotional life up to that time had been unhappy. In Siberia he had married, but this first marriage proved unsatisfactory. In 1862-1863 he had an affair with a woman writer and in her company visited England, France, and Germany. This woman whom he later characterized as "infernal" seems to have been an evil character. Later she married Rozanov, an extraordinary writer combining moments of exceptional genius with manifestations of astounding naivete. (I knew Rozanov, but he had married another woman by that time.) This woman seems to have had a rather unfortunate influence on Dostoevski, further upsetting his unstable spirit. It was during this first trip abroad to Germany that the first manifestation of his passion for gambling appeared which during the rest of his life was the plague of his family and an insurmountable obstacle to any kind of material ease or peace to himself.

After his brother's death, the closing of the review which he had been editing left Dostoevski a bankrupt, and burdened by the care of his brother's family, a duty which he immediately and voluntarily assumed. To cope with these overwhelming burdens Dostoevski applied himself feverishly to work. All his most celebrated writings, Crime and Punishment (1866), The Gambler (1867), The Idiot (1868), The Possessed (1872), The Brothers Karamazov (1880), etc., were written under constant stress: he had to work in a hurry, to meet deadlines with hardly any time left to re-read what he had written, or rather what he had dictated to a stenographer he had been obliged to hire. In his stenographer he at last found a woman full of devotion and with such practical sense that by her help he met his deadlines and gradually began to extricate himself from his financial mess. In 1867 he married her. This marriage was on the whole a happy one. For four years, from 1867 to 1871, they had achieved some financial security and were able to return to Russia. From then on to the end of his days Dostoevski enjoyed comparative peace. The Possessed was a great success. Soon after its publication he was offered the editorship of Prince Meshcherski's very reactionary weekly, the Citizen. His last work, The Brothers Karamazov, of which he wrote only the first volume and was working on the second when he died, brought him the greatest fame of all his novels.

But even more publicity fell to the lot of his address at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow in 1880. It was a very great event, the manifestation of the passionate love Russia bore Pushkin. The foremost writers of the time took part in it. But of all the speeches the most popular success fell to Dostoevski. The gist of his speech was Pushkin as the embodiment of the national spirit of Russia, which subtly understands the ideals of other nations but assimilates and digests them in accordance with its own spiritual setup. In this capacity Dostoevski saw the proof of the all-embracing mission of the Russian people, etc. When read, this speech does not explain the great success it enjoyed. But if we consider the fact that it was a time when all Europe was allying itself against Russia's rise in power and influence, we can better understand the enthusiasm Dostoevski's speech provoked in his patriotic listeners.

A year later, in 1881, and but a short time before the assassination of Alexander II, Dostoevski died, enjoying general recognition and esteem.

Through French and Russian translations, Western influence, sentimental and gothic-Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), Dickens (1812-1870), Rousseau (1712-1778), Eugène Sue (1804-1857)-combines in Dostoevski's works with a religion of compassion merging on melodramatic sentimentality.

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We must distinguish between "sentimental" and "sensitive." A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mother's Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at the Traviata. A whole century of authors praised the simple life of the poor, and so on. Remember that when we speak of sentimentalists, among them Richardson, Rousseau, Dostoevski, we mean the non-artistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader.

Dostoevski never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. When after his return from Siberia his essential ideas began to ripen — the idea of salvation to be found through transgression, the ethical supremacy of suffering and submission over struggle and resistance, the defence of free will not as a metaphysical but as a moral proposition, and the ultimate formula of egoism-antichrist Europe on one side and brotherhood-Christ-Russia on the other—when these ideas (which are all thoroughly examined in countless textbooks) suffused his novels, much of the Western influence still remained, and one is tempted to say that in a way Dostoevski, who so hated the West, was the most European of the Russian writers.

Another interesting line of inquiry lies in the examination of his characters in their historical development. Thus the favorite hero of the old Russian folklore, John the Simpleton, who is considered a weak-minded muddler by his brothers but is really as cunning as a skunk and perfectly immoral in his activities, an unpoetical and unpleasant figure, the personification of secret slyness triumphing over the big and the strong, Johnny the Simpleton, that product of a nation which has had more than one nation's share of misery, is a curious prototype of Dostoevski's Prince Myshkin, hero of his novel The Idiot, the positively good man, the pure innocent fool, the cream of humility, renunciation, and spiritual peace.

And Prince Myshkin, in turn, had for his grandson the character recently created by the contemporary Soviet writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, the type of cheerful imbecile, muddling through a police-state totalitarian world, imbecility being the last refuge in that kind of world.

Dostoevski's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity—all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of "sinning their way to Jesus" or, as a Russian author Ivan Bunin put it more bluntly, "spilling Jesus all over the place."

Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret no ear for Dostoevski the Prophet. The very best thing he ever wrote seems to me to be The Double. It is the story—told very elaborately, in great, almost Joycean detail (as the critic Mirsky notes), and in a style intensely saturated with phonetic and rhythmical expressiveness—of a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. It is a perfect work of art, that story, but it hardly exists for the followers of Dostoevski the Prophet, because it was written in the 1840s, long before his so-called great novels; and moreover its imitation of Gogol is so striking as to seem at times almost a parody.

In the light of the historical development of artistic vision, Dostoevski is a very fascinating phenomenon. If you examine closely any of his works, say The Brothers Karamazov, you will note that the natural background and all things relevant to the perception of the senses hardly exist. What landscape there is is a landscape of ideas, a moral landscape. The weather does not exist in his world, so it does not much matter how people dress. Dostoevski characterizes his people through situation, through ethical matters, their psychological reactions, their inside ripples. After describing the looks of a character, he uses the old-fashioned device of not referring to his specific physical appearance any more in the scenes with him. This is not the way of an artist, say Tolstoy, who sees his character in his mind all the time and knows exactly the specific gesture he will employ at this or that moment. But there is something more striking still about Dostoevski. He seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia's greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels. The novel The Brothers Karamazov has always seemed to me a straggling play, with just that amount of furniture and other implements needed for the various actors: a round table with the wet, round trace of a glass, a window painted yellow to make it look as if there were sunlight outside, or a shrub hastily brought in and plumped down by a stagehand.

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Let me refer to one more method of dealing with literature—and this is the simplest and perhaps most important one. If you hate a book, you still may derive artistic delight from imagining other and better ways of looking at things, or, what is the same, expressing things, than the author you hate does. The mediocre, the false, the poshlust—remember that word*—can at least afford a mischievous but very healthy pleasure, as you stamp and groan through a second-rate book which has been awarded a prize. But the books you like must also be read with shudders and gasps. Let me submit the following practical suggestion. Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.

When an artist starts out on a work of art, he has set himself some definite artistic problem that he is out to solve. He selects his characters, his time and his place, and then finds the particular and special circumstances which can allow the developments he desires to occur naturally, developing, so to say, without any violence on the artist's part in order to compel the desired issue, developing logically and naturally from the combination and interaction of the forces the artist has set into play.

The world the artist creates for this purpose may be entirely unreal—as for instance the world of Kafka, or that of Gogol—

but there is one absolute demand we are entitled to make: this world in itself and as long as it lasts, must be plausible to the reader or to the spectator. It is quite inessential, for instance, that Shakespeare introduces m Hamlet the ghost of Hamlet's father. Whether we agree with those critics who say that Shakespeare's contemporaries believed in the reality of phantoms, and therefore Shakespeare was justified to introduce these phantoms into his plays as realities, or whether we assume that these ghosts are something in the nature of stage properties, it does not matter: from the moment the murdered king's ghost enters the play, we accept him and do not doubt that Shakespeare was within his right in introducing him into his play. In fact, the true measure of genius is in what measure the world he has created is his own, one that has not been here before him (at least, here, in literature) and, even more important, how plausible he has succeeded in making it. I would like you to consider Dostoevski's world from this point of view.

Secondly, when dealing with a work of art we must always bear in mind that art is a divine game. These two elements —

the elements of the divine and that of the game—are equally important. It is divine because this is the element in which man comes nearest to God through becoming a true creator in his own right. And it is a game, because it remains art only as long as we are allowed to remember that, after all, it is all make-believe, that the people on the stage, for instance, are not actually murdered, in other words, only as long as our feelings of horror or of disgust do not obscure our realization that we are, as readers or as spectators, participating in an elaborate and enchanting game: the moment this balance is upset we get, on the stage, ridiculous melodrama, and in a book just a lurid description of, say, a case of murder which should belong in a newspaper instead. And we cease to derive that feeling of pleasure and satisfaction and spiritual vibration, that combined feeling which is our reaction to true art. For example, we are not disgusted or horrified by the bloody ending of the three greatest plays ever written: the hanging of Cordelia, the death of Hamlet, the suicide of Othello give us a shudder, but a shudder with a strong element of delight in it. This delight does not derive from the fact that we are glad to see those people perish, but merely our enjoyment of Shakespeare's overwhelming genius. I would like you further to ponder Crime and Punishment and Memoirs from a Mousehole also known as the Notes from Underground (1864) from this point of view: is the artistic pleasure you derive from accompanying Dostoevski on his excursions into the sick souls of his characters, is it consistently greater than any other emotions, thrills of disgust, morbid interest in a crime thriller? There is even less balance between the esthetic achievement and the element of criminal reportage in Dostoevski's other novels.

*

"English words expressing several although by no means all aspects of poshlust are, for instance: 'cheap, sham, smutty, pink-and-blue, high-falutin', in bad taste.' " See Nabokov's lecture on "Philistines and Philistinism."

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Thirdly, when an artist sets out to explore the motions and reactions of a human soul under the unendurable stresses of life, our interest is more readily aroused and we can more readily follow the artist as our guide through the dark corridors of that human soul if that soul's reactions are of a more or less all-human variety. By this I certainly do not wish to say that we are, or should be, interested solely in the spiritual life of the so-called average man. Certainly not. What I wish to convey is that though man and his reactions are infinitely varied, we can hardly accept as human reactions those of a raving lunatic or a character just come out of a madhouse and just about to return there. The reactions of such poor, deformed, warped souls are often no longer human, in the accepted sense of the word, or they are so freakish that the problem the author set himself remains unsolved regardless of how it is supposed to be solved by the reactions of such unusual individuals.

I have consulted doctors' case studies* and here is their list classifying Dostoevski's characters by the categories of mental illnesses by which they are affected:

I. EPILEPSY

The four well-marked cases of epilepsy among Dostoevski's characters are: Prince Myshkin in The Idiot; Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov; Kirillov in The Possessed; and Nellie in The Humiliated and Insulted.

1) Myshkin's is the classic case. He has frequent moods of ecstasy ... a tendency to emotional mysticism, an extraordinary power of empathy which permits him to divine the feelings of others. He shows meticulous attention to detail, particularly in penmanship. In childhood he had had frequent paroxysms, and had been given up by the physicians as a hopeless "idiot".

. . .

2) Smerdyakov, the bastard son of old Karamazov by an imbecile woman. As a child Smerdyakov showed great cruelty. He was fond of hanging cats, then burying them with much blasphemous ceremony. As a young man he developed an exaggerated sense of self-esteem, verging at times on megalomania . . . had frequent paroxysms . . . etc.

3) Kirillov, the scapegoat character in The Possessed, is an incipient epileptic; though he is noble, gentle, and high-minded, he has a markedly epileptoid personality. He describes clearly the premonitory symptoms which he had often experienced.

His case is complicated by suicidal mania.

4) The case of Nellie is unimportant . . . adds nothing of consequence to what the first three cases have revealed of the inward consciousness of the epileptic.

II. SENILE DEMENTIA

The case of General Ivolgin in The Idiot is one of incipient senile dementia, complicated with alcoholism ... he is irresponsible . . . borrows money on worthless IOUs to procure drinks. When accused of lying, he is nonplussed for a moment, but soon regains his assurance and continues in the same vein. It is the peculiar character of this pathological lying which best reveals the state of mind which goes with this senile decay . . . accelerated by alcoholism.

III. HYSTERIA

1) Liza Khokhlakov in The Brothers Karamazov, a girl of fourteen, partially paralyzed, the paralysis presumably hysterical and curable by miracles. . . . She is extremely precocious, impressionable, coquettish, and perverse; is subject to nocturnal fevers—all symptoms in precise accord with classic cases of hysteria. Her dreams are of devils. ... In her day-dreams she is

*

Nabokov's discussion of the categories of mental illness is interpolated from S. Stephenson Smith and Andrei Isotoff, "The Abnormal From Within: Dostoevsky," The Psychoanalytic Review, XXII (October 1939), 361-391.

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preoccupied with ideas of evil and destruction. She loves to dwell in her thoughts on the recent patricide with which Dmitri Karamazov is charged; and thinks that everyone "loves him for his having killed his father," etc.

2) Liza Tushin in The Possessed is a borderline case of hysteria. She is exceedingly nervous and restless, arrogant, yet capable of unusual efforts to be kind. . . . She is given to fits of hysterical laughter, ending in weeping, and to strange whims, etc.

In addition to these definitely clinical cases of hysteria, Dostoevski's characters include many instances of hysterical tendencies: Nastasya ... in The Idiot, Katerina ... in Crime and Punishment, who is afflicted with "nerves"; most of the women characters, in fact, show more or less marked hysterical tendencies.

IV. PSYCHOPATHS

Among the principal characters in the novels are found many psychopaths: Stavrogin, a case of "moral insanity"; Rogozhin, a victim of erotomania; Raskolnikov, a case ... of "lucid madness"; Ivan Karamazov, another half lunatic. All these show certain symptoms of dissociation of personality. And there are many other examples, including some characters completely mad.

Incidentally, scientists completely refute the notion advanced by some critics that Dostoevski anticipated Freud and Jung. It can be proved convincingly that Dostoevski used extensively in building his abnormal characters a book by a German, C. G.

Carus, Psyche, published in 1846. The assumption that Dostoevski anticipated Freud arose from the fact that the terms and hypotheses in Carus' book resemble those of Freud, but actually the parallels between Carus and Freud are not those of central doctrine at all, but merely of linguistic terminology, which in the two authors has a different ideological content.

It is questionable whether one can really discuss the aspects of "realism" or of "human experience" when considering an author whose gallery of characters consists almost exclusively of neurotics and lunatics. Besides all this, Dostoevski's characters have yet another remarkable feature: throughout the book they do not develop as personalities. We get them all complete at the beginning of the tale, and so they remain without any considerable changes although their surroundings may alter and the most extraordinary things may happen to them. In the case of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, for instance, we see a man go from premeditated murder to the promise of an achievement of some kind of harmony with the outer world, but all this happens somehow from without: innerly even Raskolnikov does not go through any true development of personality, and the other heroes of Dostoevski do even less so. The only thing that develops, vacillates, takes unexpected sharp turns, deviates completely to include new people and circumstances, is the plot. Let us always remember that basically Dostoevski is a writer of mystery stories where every character, once introduced to us, remains the same to the bitter end, complete with his special features and personal habits, and that they all are treated throughout the book they happen to be in like chessmen in a complicated chess problem. Being an intricate plotter, Dostoevski succeeds in holding the reader's attention; he builds up his climaxes and keeps up his suspenses with consummate mastery. But if you re-read a book of his you have already read once so that you are familiar with the surprises and complications of the plot, you will at once realize that the suspense you experienced during the first reading is simply not there any more.

Crime and Punishment (1866)

Because he can spin a yarn with such suspense, such innuendoes, Dostoevski used to be eagerly read by schoolboys and schoolgirls in Russia, together with Fenimore Cooper, Victor Hugo, Dickens, and Turgenev. I must have been twelve when forty-five years ago I read Crime and Punishment for the first time and thought it a wonderfully powerful and exciting book.

I read it again at nineteen, during the awful years of civil war in Russia, and thought it long-winded, terribly sentimental, and badly written. I read it at twenty-eight when discussing Dostoevski in one of my own books. I read the thing again when preparing to speak about him in American universities. And only quite recently did I realize what is so wrong about the book.

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The flaw, the crack in it, which in my opinion causes the whole edifice to crumble ethically and esthetically may be found in part ten, chapter 4. It is in the beginning of the redemption scene when Raskolnikov, the killer, discovers through the girl Sonya the New Testament. She has been reading to him about Jesus and the raising of Lazarus. So far so good. But then comes this singular sentence that for sheer stupidity has hardly the equal in world-famous literature: "The candle was flickering out, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had been reading together the eternal book." "The murderer and the harlot" and "the eternal book"—what a triangle. This is a crucial phrase, of a typical Dostoevskian rhetorical twist. Now what is so dreadfully wrong about it ? Why is it so crude and so inartistic ?

I suggest that neither a true artist nor a true moralist—neither a good Christian nor a good philosopher—neither a poet nor a sociologist—should have placed side by side, in one breath, in one gust of false eloquence, a killer together with whom? — a poor streetwalker, bending their completely different heads over that holy book. The Christian God, as understood by those who believe in the Christian God, has pardoned the harlot nineteen centuries ago. The killer, on the other hand, must be first of all examined medically. The two are on completely different levels. The inhuman and idiotic crime of Raskolnikov cannot be even remotely compared to the plight of a girl who impairs human dignity by selling her body. The murderer and the harlot reading the eternal book—what nonsense. There is no rhetorical link between a filthy murderer, and this unfortunate girl. There is only the conventional link of the Gothic novel and the sentimental novel. It is a shoddy literary trick, not a masterpiece of pathos and piety. Moreover, look at the absence of artistic balance. We have been shown Raskolnikov's crime in all sordid detail and we also have been given half a dozen different explanations for his exploit. We have never been shown Sonya in the exercise of her trade. The situation is a glorified cliché. The harlot's sin is taken for granted. Now I submit that the true artist is the person who never takes anything for granted.

Nabokov's notes on Crime and Punishment with his

The opening page of Nabokov's lecture on Crime and

denunciation of the novel's "moral and artistic stupidity. . . ."

Punishment.

Why did Raskolnikov kill? The motivation is extremely muddled.

Raskolnikov was, if we believe what Dostoevski rather optimistically wants us to believe, a good young man, loyal to his family, on the one hand, and to high ideals on the other, capable of self-sacrifice, kind, generous, and industrious, though 75

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very conceited and proud, even to the point of entirely retiring into his inner life without feeling the need of any human heart-to-heart relations. This very good, generous, and proud young man is dismally poor.

Why did Raskolnikov murder the old money-lending woman and her sister?

Apparently to save his family from misery, to spare his sister, who, in order to help him get through college, was about to marry a rich but brutal man.

But he also committed this murder in order to prove to himself that he was not an ordinary man abiding by the moral laws created by others, but capable of making his own law and of bearing the tremendous spiritual load of responsibility, of living down the pangs of conscience and of using this evil means (murder) toward attaining a good purpose (assistance to his own family, his education which will enable him to become a benefactor of the human kind) without any prejudice to his inner balance and virtuous life.

And he also committed this murder because one of Dostoevski's pet ideas was that the propagation of materialistic ideas is bound to destroy moral standards in the young and is liable to make a murderer even out of a fundamentally good young man who would be easily pushed toward a crime by an unfortunate concurrence of circumstances. Note the curiously fascist ideas developed by Raskolnikov in an "article" he wrote: namely that mankind consists of two parts—the herd and the supermen—and that the majority should be bound by the established moral laws but that the few who are far above the majority ought to be at liberty to make their own law. Thus Raskolnikov first declared that Newton and other great discoverers should not have hesitated to sacrifice scores or hundreds of individual lives had those lives stood in their way toward giving mankind the benefit of their discoveries. Later he somehow forgets these benefactors of humanity to concentrate on an entirely different ideal. All his ambition suddenly centers in Napoleon in whom he sees characteristically the strong man who rules the masses through his daring to "pick up" power which lies there awaiting the one who "dares."

This is a fast transition from an aspiring benefactor of the world toward an aspiring tyrant for the sake of his own power. A transformation which is worth a more detailed psychological analysis than Dostoevski, in his hurry, can afford to make.

The next pet idea of our author happens to be that a crime brings the man who commits it that inner hell which is the inevitable lot of the wicked. This inner solitary suffering, however, for some reason does not lead to redemption. What does bring redemption is actual suffering openly accepted, suffering in public, the deliberate self-abasement and humiliation before his fellow-humans—this can bring the sufferer the absolution of his crime, redemption, new life, and so on. Such actually is to be the road which Raskolnikov will follow, but whether he will kill again is impossible to say. And finally there is the idea of free will, of a crime just for the sake of performing it.

Did Dostoevski succeed in making it all plausible? I doubt it.

Now, in the first place, Raskolnikov is a neurotic, hence the effect that any philosophy can have upon a neurotic does not help to discredit that philosophy. Dostoevski would have better served his purpose if he could have made of Raskolnikov a sturdy, staid, earnest young man genuinely misled and eventually brought to perdition by a too candid acceptance of materialistic ideas. But Dostoevski of course realized too well that this would never work, that even if that sort of a sturdy young man did accept the absurd ideas which turned neurotic Raskolnikov's head, a healthy human nature would inevitably balk before the perpetration of deliberate murder. For it is no accident that all the criminal heroes of Dostoevski (Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, Fedka in The Possessed, Rogozhin in The Idiot) are not quite sane.*

Feeling the weakness of his position, Dostoevski dragged in every possible human incentive to push his Raskolnikov to the precipice of that temptation to murder which we must presume was opened to him by the German philosophies he had accepted. The dismal poverty, not only his own but that of his dearly beloved mother and sister, the impending self-

*

VN deleted the next sentence : " It is further no accident that the rulers of Germany's recently fallen regime based on the theory of Superman and his special rights were, too, either neurotics or ordinary criminals, or both." Ed.

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sacrifice of his sister, the utter moral debasement of the intended victim—this profusion of accidental causes shows how difficult Dostoevski himself felt it to prove his point. Kropotkin very aptly remarks: "Behind Raskolnikov one feels Dostoevski trying to decide whether he himself, or a man like him, might have been brought to perform personally the act as Raskolnikov did. . . . But writers do not murder."

I also entirely subscribe to Kropotkin's statement that "... men like the examining magistrate and Svidrigailov, the embodiment of evil, are purely romantic invention." I would go further and add Sonya to the list. Sonya is a good descendant of those romantic heroines who, for no fault of their own, were to live a life outside the bounds established by society and were made by that same society to bear all the burden of shame and suffering attached to such a way of life.

These heroines were never extinct in world literature ever since the good Abbé Prévost introduced to his readers the far better written and therefore far more moving Manon Lescaut (1731). In Dostoevski the theme of degradation, humiliation, is with us from the start, and in this sense Raskol-nikov's sister Dunya and the drunken girl glimpsed on the boulevard, and Sonya the virtuous prostitute, are sisters within the Dostoevskian family of hand-wringing characters.

The passionate attachment of Dostoevski to the idea that physical suffering and humiliation improve the moral man may lie in a personal tragedy: he must have felt that in him the freedom-lover, the rebel, the individualist, had suffered a certain loss, and impairing of spontaneity if nothing else, through his sojourn in his Siberian prison; but he stuck doggedly to the idea that he had returned "a better man."

"Memoirs from a Mousebole" (1864)

The story whose title should be "Memoirs from Under the Floor," or "Memoirs from a Mousehole" bears in translation the stupidly incorrect title of Notes from the Underground. The story may be deemed by some a case history, a streak of persecution mania, with variations. My interest in it is limited to a study in style. It is the best picture we have of Dostoevski's themes and formulas and intonations. It is a concentration of Dostoevskiana. Moreover it is very well rendered in English by Guerney.

Its first part consists of eleven small chapters or sections. Its second part, which is twice the length, consists of ten slightly longer chapters containing events and conversations. The first part is a soliloquy but a soliloquy that presupposes the presence of a phantom audience. Throughout this part the mouseman, the narrator, keeps turning to an audience of persons who seem to be amateur philosophers, newspaper readers, and what he calls normal people. These ghostly gentlemen are supposed to be jeering at him, while he is supposed to thwart their mockery and denunciations by the shifts, the doubling back, and various other tricks of his supposedly remarkable intellect. This imaginary audience helps to keep the ball of his hysterical inquiry rolling, an inquiry into the state of his own crumbling soul. It will be noticed that references are made to topical events of the day in the middle of the 1860s. The topicality, however, is vague and has no structural power. Tolstoy uses newspapers too—but he does this with marvelous art when, for example, in the beginning of Anna Karenin he not only characterizes Oblonski by the kind of information Oblonski likes to follow in the morning paper but also fixes with delightful historical or pseudo-historical precision a certain point in space and time. In Dostoevski we have generalities substituted for specific traits.

The narrator starts by depicting himself as a rude, waspish man, a spiteful official who snarls at the petitioners who come to the obscure bureau where he works. After making his statemnt, "I am a spiteful official," he retracts it and says that he is not even that: "It was not only that I could not become spiteful; I did not know how to become anything: either spiteful or kind, either a rascal or an honest man, either a hero or an insect." He consoles himself with the thought that an intelligent man does not become anything, and that only rascals and fools become something. He is forty years old, lives in a wretched room, had a very low rank in the civil service, has retired by now after getting a small legacy, and is anxious to talk about himself.

I should warn you at this point that the first part of the story, eleven little chapters, are significant not in what is expressed or related, but in the manner it is expressed and related. The manner reflects the man. This reflection Dostoevski wishes to 77

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fix in a cesspool of confessions through the manners and mannerisms of a neurotic, exasperated, frustrated, and horribly unhappy person.

The next theme is human-consciousness (not conscience but consciousness), the awareness of one's emotions. The more aware this mouseman was of goodness, of beauty—of moral beauty—the more he sinned, the deeper he sank in filth.

Dostoevski, as so often happens with authors of his type, authors who have a general message to deliver to all men, to all sinners, Dostoevski does not specify the depravity of his hero. We are left guessing.

After every loathsome act the narrator commits, he says he crawls back into his mousehole and proceeds to enjoy the accursed sweetness of shame, of remorse, the pleasure of his own nastiness, the pleasure of degradation. Delighting in degradation is one of Dostoevski's favorite themes. Here, as elsewhere in his writing, the writer's art lags behind the writer's purpose, since the sin committed is seldom specified, and art is always specific. The act, the sin, is taken for granted. Sin here is a literary convention similar to the devices in the sentimental and Gothic novels Dostoevski had imbibed. In this particular story the very abstractness of the theme, the abstract notion of loathsome action and consequent degradation is presented with a not negligible bizarre force in a manner that reflects the man in the mousehole. (I repeat, it is the manner which counts.) By the end of chapter 2 we know that the mouseman has started writing his memoirs in order to explain the joys of degradation.

He is, he says, an acutely conscious mousey man. He is being insulted by a kind of collective normal man—stupid but normal. His audience is mocking him. The gentlemen are jeering. Unsatisfied desires, the burning thirst of parching revenge, hesitations—half-despair, half-faith—all this combines to form a strange morbid bliss for the humiliated subject.

Mouseman's rebellion is based not upon a creative impulse but upon his being merely a moral misfit, a moral dwarf, who sees in the laws of nature a stone wall which he cannot break down. But here again we flounder in a generalization, in an allegory, since no specific purpose, no specific stone wall is evoked. Bazarov {Fathers and Sons) knew that what a nihilist wishes to break is the old order that among other things sanctioned slavery. The mouse here is merely listing his grudges against a despicable world that he has invented himself, a world of cardboard instead of stone.

Chapter 4 contains a comparison: his pleasure, he says, is the pleasure of a person with a toothache realizing that he is keeping his family awake with his moans—moans that perhaps are those of an imposter. A complicated pleasure. But the point is that the mouseman suggests he is cheating.

So by chapter 5 we have the following situation. The mouseman is filling his life with bogus emotions because he lacks real ones. Moreover, he has no foundation, no starting point from which to proceed to an acceptance of life. He looks for a definition of himself, for a label to stick upon himself, for instance a "lazy-bones," or a "connoisseur of wines," any kind of peg, any kind of nail. But what exactly compels him to look for a label is not divulged by Dostoevski. The man he depicts lives only as a maniac, as a tangle of mannerisms. Dostoevski's mediocre imitators such as Sartre, a French journalist, have continued the trend to-day.

At the beginning of chapter 7 we find a good example of Dostoevski's style, very well rendered by Guerney revising Garnett:

"But these are all golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously, that is, fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, beaten another difficult, absurd path, 78

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seeking it almost in the darkness? So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage."

The repetition of words and phrases, the intonation of obsession, the hundred percent banality of every word, the vulgar soapbox eloquence mark these elements of Dostoevski's style.

In this chapter 7 the mouseman, or his creator, hits upon a new series of ideas revolving around the term "advantage."

There are, he says, cases when a man's advantage must consist in his desiring certain things that are actually harmful to him. This is all double talk, of course; and just as the enjoyment of degradation and pain have not been easily explained by the mouseman, so the advantage of disadvantage will not be explained by him either. But a set of new mannerisms will be arrayed in the tantalizing approximations that occupy the next pages.

What exactly is this mysterious "advantage"? A journalistic excursion, in Dostoevski's best manner, first takes care of

"civilization [which] has made mankind, if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty." This is an old idea going back to Rousseau. The mouseman evokes a picture of universal prosperity in the future, a palace of crystal for all, and finally there it comes—the mysterious advantage: One's own free unfettered choice, one's own whim no matter how wild. The world has been beautifully rearranged, but here comes a man, a natural man, who says: it is merely my whim to destroy this beautiful world —and he destroys it. In other words, man wants not any rational advantage, but merely the fact of independent choice—no matter what it is—even though breaking the pattern of logic, of statistics, of harmony and order. Philosophically this is all bunkum since harmony, happiness, presupposes and includes also the presence of whim.

But the Dostoevskian man may choose something insane or stupid or harmful—destruction and death—because it is at least his own choice. This, incidentally, is one of the reasons for Raskolnikov's killing the old woman in Crime and Punishment.

In chapter 9 the mouseman goes on ranting in self-defence. The theme of destruction is taken up again. Perhaps, says he, man prefers destroying to creating. Perhaps it is not the achievement of any goal that attracts him but the process of attaining this goal. Perhaps, says Mouseman, man dreads to succeed. Perhaps he is fond of suffering. Perhaps suffering is the only origin of consciousness. Perhaps man, so to speak, becomes a human being with the first awareness of his awareness of pain.

The palace of crystal as an ideal, as a journalistic symbol of perfect universal life in aftertime, is again projected on the screen and discussed. The narrator has worked himself into a state of utter exasperation, and the audience of mockers, of jeering journalists he confronts, seems to be closing in upon him. We return to one of the points made in the very beginning: it is better to be nothing, it is better to remain in one's mousehole—or rat hole. In the last chapter of part one he sums up the situation by suggesting that the audience he has been evoking, the phantom gentlemen he has been addressing, is an attempt to create readers. And it is to this phantom audience that he will now present a series of disjointed recollections which will, perhaps, illustrate and explain his mentality. Wet snow is falling. Why he sees it as yellow is more emblematic than optical. He means, I suppose, yellow as implying unclean white, "dingy," as he also says. A point to be noticed is that he hopes to obtain relief from writing. This closes the first part, which, I repeat, is important in its manner, not matter.

Why part two is entitled "Concerning Wet Snow" is a question that can be settled only in the light of journalistic innuendoes of the 1860s by writers who liked symbols, allusions to allusions, that kind of thing. The symbol perhaps is of purity becoming damp and dingy. The motto—also a vague gesture—is a lyrical poem by Dostoevski's contemporary Nekrasov.

The events our mouseman is going to describe in the second part go twenty years back to the 1840s. He was as gloomy then as he is now, and hated his fellow men as he does now. He also hated his own self. Experiments in humiliation are mentioned. Whether he hated a fellow or not, he could not look into a person's eyes. He experimented—could he outstare 79

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anybody? — and failed. This worried him to distraction. He is a coward, he says, but for some reason or other every decent man of our age, he says, must be a coward. What age? The 1840s or the 1860s? Historically, politically, sociologically, the two eras differed tremendously. In 1844 we are in the age of reaction, of despotism; 1864 when these notes are set down is the age of change, of enlightenment, of great reforms as compared to the forties. But Dostoevski's world despite topical allusions is the gray world of mental illness, where nothing can change except perhaps the cut of a military uniform, an unexpectedly specific detail to meet at one point.

A few pages are devoted to what our mouseman calls "romantics," or more correctly in English "romanticists." The modern reader cannot understand the argument unless he wades through Russian periodicals of the fifties and sixties. Dostoevski and the mouseman really mean "sham idealists," people who can somehow combine what they call the good and the beautiful with material things, such as a bureaucratic career, etc. (Slavophiles attack Westerners for setting up idols rather than Ideals.) All this is very vaguely and tritely expressed by our mouseman, and we need not bother about it. We learn that our mouseman, furtively, in solitude at night, indulged in what he calls filthy vice, and apparently for this purpose he visited various obscure haunts. (We recall St. Preux, the gentleman in Rousseau's Julie who also visited a remote room in a house of sin where he kept drinking white wine under the impression it was water, and next thing found himself in the arms of what he calls une créature. This is vice as depicted in sentimental novels.)

The "out-staring" theme is then given a new twist: it becomes the out-jostling theme. Our mouseman, apparently a small slender chap, is thrust aside by a passerby, a military man over six feet high. Mouseman keeps meeting him on Nevski Avenue, which is Petersburg's Fifth Avenue, and keeps telling himself that he, mouseman, will not give way; but every time he would give way, would step aside, letting the gigantic officer stalk straight past. One day Mouseman dresses up as if for a duel or funeral, and with heart going pit-a-pat tries to assert himself and not step aside. But he is flung aside like an india rubber ball by the military man. He tries again—and manages to retain his balance—they run into each other full tilt, shoulder to shoulder, and pass each other on a perfectly equal footing. Mouseman is delighted. His only triumph in the tale is here.

Chapter 2 starts with an account of his satirical day-dreams and then the story at last is launched. Its prologue has occupied forty pages in Guerney's translation, counting part one. On a certain occasion he visits a certain Simonov, an old schoolfellow. Simonov and two friends are planning a farewell dinner in honor of a fourth schoolfellow Zverkov, who is another military man in the story. (His name is derived from "little beast" zveryok.) "This Zverkov, too, had been at school all the time I was there. I had begun to hate him, particularly in the upper grades. In the lower grades he had simply been a pretty, playful boy whom everybody liked. I had hated him, however, even in the lower grades, just because he was a pretty and playful boy. He was always poor at his lessons and got worse and worse as he went on; however, he left with a good certificate, since he had influential people interested in him. During his last year at school he came in for an estate of two hundred serfs, and as almost all of us were poor he took to swaggering among us. He was vulgar in the extreme, but at the same time he was a good-natured fellow, even in his swaggering. In spite of superficial, fantastic and sham notions of honor and dignity, all but very few of us positively groveled before Zverkov, and the more he swaggered the more they groveled. And it was not from any interested motive that they groveled, but simply because he had been favored by the gifts of nature. Moreover, it was, as it were, an accepted idea among us that Zverkov was a specialist in tact and the social graces. This last fact particularly infuriated me. I hated the abrupt self-confident tone of his voice, his admiration of his own witticisms, which were often frightfully stupid, though he was bold in his language; I hated his handsome but stupid face (for which I would, however, have gladly exchanged my intelligent one), and the free-and-easy military manners in fashion in the forties."

The first of the other two schoolfellows is Ferfichkin, a comedy name; he is of German extraction, a vulgar swaggering fellow. (It should be noted that Dostoevski had a kind of pathological hatred of Germans, Poles, and Jews, as depicted in his writings.) The other schoolfellow is yet another army officer, Trudolyubov, whose name means "diligent." Dostoevski here and elsewhere has the eighteenth-century comedy tendency to apply descriptive names to people. Our mouseman, who as we know likes to court insult, invites himself.

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" 'It's settled then—the three of us, with Zverkov for the fourth, twenty-one rubles, at the Hôtel de Paris, at five o'clock tomorrow,' Simonov, who had been asked to make the arrangements, concluded finally.

" 'How do you figure twenty-one rubles?' I asked in some agitation, with a show of being offended. 'If you count me it won't be twenty-one but twenty-eight rubles.'

"It seemed to me that to invite myself so suddenly and unexpectedly would be positively graceful, and that they would all be conquered at once and would look upon me with respect.

" 'Do you want to join, too?' Simonov observed, with no appearance of pleasure, seeming to avoid looking at me. He knew me through and through.

"It infuriated me that he knew me so thoroughly. "'Why not? I'm an old schoolfellow of his, too, I believe, and I must own I felt hurt at your having left me out,' I said, boiling over again.

" 'And where were we to find you?' Ferfichkin put in rudely.

" 'You never were on good terms with Zverkov,' Trudolyubov added, frowning.

"But I had already grabbed at the idea and would not give it up.

" 'It seems to me that no one has a right to form an opinion upon that,' I retorted in a shaky voice, as though something tremendous had happened. 'Perhaps that is just my reason for wishing it now, that I have not always been on good terms with him.'

" 'Oh, there's no making you out—with all these refinements,' Trudolyubov jeered.

" 'We'll put your name down,' Simonov decided, addressing me. 'Tomorrow at five o'clock at the Hôtel de Paris.' "

That night the mouseman dreams of his school days, a generalized dream that would not do in a modern case-history. Next morning he polished his boots after his servant Apollon had cleaned them once already. Wet snow is symbolically falling in thick flakes. He arrives at the restaurant and learns that they had changed the dinner hour from five to six and nobody had troubled to inform him. Here begins the accumulation of humiliations. Finally the three schoolfellows and Zverkov, the guest, arrive. What follows is one of the best scenes in Dostoevski. He had a wonderful flair for comedy mixed with tragedy; he may be termed a very wonderful humorist, with the humor always on the verge of hysterics and people hurting each other in a wild exchange of insults. A typical Dostoevskian row starts:

" 'Tell me, are you ... in a government office?' Zverkov went on being attentive to me. Seeing that I was embarrassed, he seriously thought that he ought to be friendly to me, and, so to speak, cheer me up.

"'Does he want me to throw a bottle at his head?' I thought, in a rage. In my novel surroundings I was unnaturally ready to be irritated.

" 'In the N------office,' I answered jerkily, with my eyes on my plate.

" 'And ha-ave you a goo-ood berth? I say, what ma-a-de you leave your original job?'

'What ma-a-de me was that I wanted to leave my original job,' I drawled more than he, hardly able to control myself.

Ferfichkin went off into a guffaw. Simonov looked at me sarcastically. Trudolyubov left off eating and began looking at me with curiosity.

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"Zverkov winced, but he tried not to notice anything.

" 'And the remuneration?'

" 'What remuneration?'

" T mean your sa-a-lary?'

'Why are you cross-examining me?' However, I told him at once what my salary was. I turned horribly red.

'It's not very handsome,' Zverkov observed majestically. " 'Yes, you can't afford to dine at cafes on that,' Ferfichkin added insolently.

"'To my thinking it's very poor,' Trudolyubov observed gravely. " 'And how thin you have grown! How you have changed!'

added Zverkov, with a shade of venom in his voice, scanning me and my attire with a sort of insolent compassion.

"'Oh, spare his blushes,' cried Ferfichkin, sniggering. " 'My dear Sir, allow me to tell you I am not blushing,' I broke out at last:

'Do you hear? I am dining here, at this cafe, at my own expense, not at other people's—note that, Mr. Ferfichkin.'

'Wha-at? Isn't everyone here dining at his own expense? You seem to be------' Ferfichkin turned on me, becoming as red as a lobster and looking me in the face with fury.

"'We won't go into tha-at,' I mimicked in answer, feeling I had gone too far. 'And I imagine it would be better to talk of something more intelligent.'

"'You intend to show off your intelligence, I suppose?'

"'Don't upset yourself; that would be quite out of place here.'

"'Why are you jabbering away like that, my good Sir? eh? Have you gone out of your wits in your office?'

" 'Enough, gentlemen, enough!' Zverkov cried authoritatively.

'How stupid all this is!' muttered Simonov. " 'It really is stupid. We've met here, a party of friends, for a farewell dinner to a comrade, and you carry on a fight,' said Trudolyubov, rudely addressing himself to me alone. 'You invited yourself to join us, so don't disturb the general harmony.'

"... No one paid any attention to me, and I sat crushed and humiliated.

"'Good Heavens, these are not the people for me!' I thought. 'And what a fool I have made of myself before them! . . . But what's the use! I must get up at once, this very minute, take my hat and simply go without a word—with contempt! The scoundrels! As though I cared about the seven rubles. They may think. . . . Damn it! I don't care about the seven rubles. I'll go this minute!'

"Of course I remained. I drank sherry and Lafitte by the glassful in my discomfiture. Being unaccustomed to it, I was quickly affected. My annoyance increased as the wine went to my head. I longed all of a sudden to insult them all in a most flagrant manner and then go away. To seize the moment and show what I could do, so that they would say: 'He's clever, though he's absurd,' and . . . and ... in fact, damn them all! . . .

" 'Why, aren't you going to drink the toast?' roared Trudolyubov, losing patience and turning menacingly to me. . . .

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" 'Lieutenant Zverkov, Sir,' I began, 'let me tell you that I hate phrases, phrasemongers, and men who wear corsets—that's the first point, and there's a second one to follow it.'

"There was a general stir.

" 'The second point is: I hate loose talk and loose talkers. Especially loose talkers! The third point: I love justice, truth, and honesty.' I went on almost mechanically, for I was beginning to shiver with horror myself and had no idea how I had come to be talking like this. T love thought, Monsieur Zverkov; I love true comradeship, on an equal footing and not—h'm! I love—but, however, why not? I'll drink your health, too, Monsieur Zverkov. Seduce the Circassian girls, shoot the enemies of the fatherland, and—and here's to your health, Monsieur Zverkov!'

"Zverkov got up from his seat, bowed to me, and said:

" 'I'm very much obliged to you.' He was frightfully offended and had turned pale.

" 'Damn the fellow!' roared Trudolyubov, bringing his fist down on the table.

" 'Well, he ought to get a punch in the nose for that,' squealed Ferfichkin.

" 'We ought to turn him out,' muttered Simonov.

" 'Not a word, gentlemen, not a move!'cried Zverkov gravely, checking the general indignation. T thank you all, but I am able to show him myself how much value I attach to his words.'

" 'Mr. Ferfichkin, you will give me satisfaction tomorrow for your words just now!' I said aloud, turning with dignity to Ferfichkin.

" 'A duel, you mean? Certainly,' he answered. But probably I was so ridiculous as I challenged him, and it was so out of keeping with my appearance, that everyone, including Ferfichkin, was prostrate with laughter.

" 'Yes, let him alone, of course! He's quite drunk,' Trudolyubov said with disgust. ... I was so harassed, so exhausted, that I would have cut my throat to put an end to it. I was in a fever; my hair soaked with perspiration, stuck to my forehead and temples.

" 'Zverkov, I beg your pardon,' I said abruptly and resolutely. 'Ferfichkin, yours, too, and everyone's, everyone's; I have insulted you all!'

" 'Aha! A duel is not in your line, old man,' Ferfichkin got out venomously through clenched teeth.

"It sent a sharp pang to my heart.

" 'No, it's not the duel I'm afraid of, Ferfichkin! I'm ready to fight you tomorrow, after we're reconciled. I insist upon it, in fact, and you cannot refuse. I want to show you that I am not afraid of a duel. You'll fire first and I'll fire into the air.' . . .

"They were all flushed; their eyes were bright; they had been drinking heavily.

T ask for your friendship, Zverkov; I insulted you, but—' 'Insulted? You insulted we? Understand, Sir, that you never, under any circumstances, could possibly insult me.'

'And that's enough for you. Out of the way!' concluded Trudolyubov. . . .

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"I stood there as though they had spat upon me. The party went noisily out of the room. Trudolyubov struck up some stupid song. . . . Disorder, the remains of the dinner, a broken wineglass on the floor, spilt wine, cigarette ends, fumes of drink and delirium in my brain, an agonizing misery in my heart and finally the waiter, who had seen and heard all and was looking inquisitively into my face.

"'I'm going there!' I cried. 'Either they'll all go down on their knees to beg for my friendship or I'll give Zverkov a slap in the face!'

After the great chapter 4 the mouseman's irritation, humiliation, etc., become repetitious, and soon a false note is introduced with the appearance of that favorite figure of sentimental fiction, the noble prostitute, the fallen girl with the lofty heart. Liza, the young lady from Riga, is a literary dummy. Our mouseman, to get some relief, starts the process of hurting and frightening a fellow creature, poor Liza (Sonya's sister). The conversations are very garrulous and very poor, but please go on to the bitter end. Perhaps some of you may like it more than I do. The story ends with our mouseman emitting the idea that humiliation and insult will purify and elevate Liza through hatred, and that perhaps exalted sufferings are better than cheap happiness. That's about all.

The Idiot (1868)

In The Idiot we have the Dostoevskian positive type. He is Prince Myshkin, endowed with the kindness and the capacity to forgive possessed before him by Christ alone. Myshkin is sensitive to a weird degree: he feels everything that is going on inside other people, even when these people are miles away. Such is his great spiritual wisdom, his sympathy and understanding for the sufferings of others. Prince Myshkin is purity itself, sincerity, frankness; and these qualities inevitably bring him into painful conflicts with our conventional artificial world. He is loved by everyone who knows him; his would-be murderer Rogozhin, who is passionately in love with the heroine Nastasya Filipovna, and is jealous of Myshkin, winds up with admitting Myshkin into the house where he has just murdered Nastasya, and seeks under the protection of Myshkin's spiritual purity to reconcile himself to life and to appease the storm of passions in his own soul.

Yet Myshkin is also a half-imbecile. Since his early childhood he has been a backward child, unable to speak until he was six, a victim of epilepsy, constantly threatened with complete degeneration of the brain unless he leads a quiet relaxed life.

(Degeneration of the brain eventually overtakes him in the wake of the events described in the novel.) Unfit to marry anyway, as the author takes care to make clear, Myshkin is nevertheless torn between two women. One is Aglaia, the innocently pure, beautiful, sincere young girl, unreconciled to the world or rather to her lot as daughter of a wealthy family destined to marry a successful and attractive young man and "live happily ever after." What exactly it is that Aglaia wants, she does not know herself; but she is supposed to be different from her sisters and family, "crazy" in the benevolent Dostoevskian sense of the word (he very much prefers crazy people to the normal ones), in a word a personality with a "quest" of her own, thus with a God's spark in her soul. Myshkin (and to a certain extent Aglaia's mother) are the only people who understand her; while her intuitive and naive mother is only worried by her daughter's unusualness, Myshkin feels with Aglaia the hidden anxiety of her soul. With the obscure urge to save and protect her by blazing for her a spiritual path in life, Myshkin agrees to Aglaia's desire to marry him. But then the complication begins: there is also in the book the demoniac, proud, wretched, betrayed, mysterious, adorable, and, in spite of her degradation, incorruptibly pure Nastasya Filipovna, one of those completely unacceptable, unreal, irritating characters with which Dostoevski's novels teem. This abstract woman indulges in the superlative type of feeling: there are no limits either to her kindliness or to her wickedness. She is the victim of an elderly playboy who, after having made her his mistress and enjoyed her company for several years, has decided to marry a decent woman. He blandly decides to marry Nastasya Filipovna off to his secretary.

All the men around Nastasya know that at bottom she is a decent girl herself; her lover is alone to blame for her irregular position. This does not prevent her fiancé (who is by the way very much in love with her) from despising her as a "fallen"

woman and Aglaia's family from being profoundly shocked when they discover that Aglaia has established some clandestine communication with Nastasya. In fact, it does not prevent Nastasya from despising herself for her 84

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"degradation" and from deciding to take it out on herself by turning into an actual "kept woman." Myshkin alone, like Christ, sees no fault in Nastasya for what is happening to her and redeems her with his profound admiration and respect.

(Here again is a hidden paraphrase of the story of Christ and of the fallen woman.) At this point I shall quote a very apt remark by Mirsky about Dostoevski: "His Christianity ... is of a very doubtful kind. ... It was a more or less superficial spiritual formation which it is dangerous to identify with real Christianity." If we add to this that he kept throwing his weight about as a true interpreter of Orthodox Christianity, and that for the untying of every psychological or psychopathic knot he inevitably leads us to Christ, or rather to his own interpretation of Christ, and to the holy Orthodox Church, we shall better understand the truly irritating side of Dostoevski as "philosopher."

But to come back to the story. Myshkin at once realizes that of the two women who claim him, Nastasya needs him more, being the more unfortunate. So he quietly leaves Aglaia to save Nastasya. Then Nastasya and he try to outdo each other in generosity, she trying desperately to release him in order that he can be happy with Aglaia, he not releasing her so that she would not "perish" (a favorite word of Dostoevski's). But when Aglaia upsets the apple cart by deliberately insulting Nastasya in her own house (going there on purpose), Nastasya sees no further reason for sacrificing herself for her rival's sake and decides to carry off Myshkin to Moscow. At the last moment the hysterical woman changes her mind again, feeling incapable of allowing him to "perish" through her, and runs away, almost from the very altar, with Rogozhin, a young merchant who squanders upon her the inheritance to which he has just succeeded. Myshkin follows them to Moscow. The next period of their life and doings is cunningly covered with a veil of mystery. Dostoevski never betrays to the reader what exactly happened in Moscow, only keeps dropping here and there significant and mysterious hints. Some great spiritual sufferings are endured by both men because of Nastasya, who is growing more and more insane, and Rogozhin becomes Myshkin's brother in Christ by exchanging crosses with him. We are given to understand that he does this to save himself from the temptation of murdering Myshkin out of jealousy.

Well, eventually Rogozhin, being the most normal of the three, cannot bear it any longer and kills Nastasya. Dostoevski furnishes him with extenuating circumstances: Rogozhin while committing his crime was running a high fever. He spends some time in a hospital and then is sentenced to Siberia, that storeroom for Dostoevski's discarded waxworks. Myshkin, after spending the night in the company of Rogozhin by the side of the murdered Nastasya, suffers a final relapse into insanity and returns to the asylum in Switzerland where he had spent his youth and where he ought to have stayed all along. All this crazy hash is interspersed with dialogues destined to depict the respective points of view of different circles of society upon such questions as capital punishment or the great mission of the Russian nation. The characters never say anything without either paling, or flushing, or staggering on their feet. The religious aspects are nauseating in their tastelessness. The author relies completely on definitions without bothering to support them with proofs: e.g., Nastasya, who is, we are told, a paragon of reserve and distinction and refinement of manner, behaves occasionally like a furious bad-tempered hussy.

But the plot itself is ably developed with many ingenious devices used to prolong the suspense. Some of these devices appear to me, when compared to Tolstoy's methods, like blows of a club instead of the light touch of an artist's fingers, but there are many critics who would not agree with this view.

The Possessed (1872)

The Possessed is the story of Russian terrorists, plotting violence and destruction, and actually murdering one of their own number. It was denounced as a reactionary novel by the radical critics. On the other hand, it has been described as a penetrating study of people who have been sidetracked by their ideas into a bog where they sink. Note the landscapes:

"A mist of fine drizzling rain enveloped the whole country, swallowing up every ray of light, every gleam of color, and transforming everything into one smoky, leaden, indistinguishable mass. It had long been daylight yet it seemed as though it were still night." (The morning after Lebyadkin's murder.)

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"It was a very gloomy place at the end of the huge park. . . . How sinister it must have looked on that chill autumn evening!

It lay on the edge of an old wood belonging to the Crown. Huge ancient pines stood out as vague sombre blurs in the darkness. It was so dark that they could hardly see each other two paces off. . . .

At some unrecorded date in the past a rather absurd-looking grotto had for some reason been built here of rough unhewn stones. The table and benches in the grotto had long decayed and fallen. Two hundred paces to the right was the bank of the third pond of the park. These three ponds stretched one after another for a mile from the house to the very end of the park. " (Before Shatov's murder.)

"The rain of the previous night was over, but it was damp, grey and windy. Low, ragged, dingy clouds moved rapidly across the cold sky. The tree-tops roared with the deep droning sound and creaked on their roots; it was a melancholy day."

I mentioned before Dostoevski's method of dealing with his characters is that of a playwright. When introducing this or that one, he always gives a short description of their appearance, then hardly ever refers to it any more. Thus his dialogues are generally free from any intercalations used by other writers—the mention of a gesture, a look, or any detail referring to the background. One feels that he does not see his characters physically, that they are merely puppets, remarkable, fascinating puppets plunged into the moving stream of the author's ideas.

The misadventures of human dignity which form Dostoevski's favorite theme are as much allied to the farce as to the drama. In indulging this farcical side and being at the same time deprived of any real sense of humor, Dostoevski is sometimes dangerously near to sinking into garrulous and vulgar nonsense. (The relationship between a strong-willed hysterical old woman and a weak hysterical old man, the story of which occupies the first hundred pages of Tbe Possessed, is tedious, being unreal.) The farcical intrigue which is mixed with tragedy is obviously a foreign importation; there is something second-rate French in the structure of his plots. This does not mean, however, that when his characters appear there are not sometimes well written scenes. In The Possessed there is the delightful skit on Turgenev: Karmazinov, the author à la mode, "an old man with a rather red face, thick grey locks of hair clustering under his chimney-pot hat and curling round his clean little pink ears. Tortoise-shell lorgnette, on a narrow black ribbon, studs, buttons, signet ring, all in the best form. A sugary but rather shrill voice. Writes solely in self-display, as for instance in the description of the wreck of some steamer on the English coast. 'Look rather at me, see how I was unable to bear the sight of the dead child in the dead woman's arms etc.' " A very sly dig, for Turgenev has an autobiographical description of a fire on a ship—incidentally associated with a nasty episode in his youth which his enemies delighted in repeating during all his life.

"The next day . . . was a day of surprises, a day that solved past riddles and suggested new ones, a day of startling revelations and still more hopeless perplexity. In the morning ... I was, by Varvara Petrovna's particular request, to accompany my friend Stepan Trofimovich on his visit to her and at three o'clock in the afternoon I had to be with Lizaveta Nikolavna in order to tell her—I did not know what—and to assist her—I did not know how. And meanwhile it all ended as no one could have expected. In a word, it was a day of wonderful coincidences."

At Varvara Petrovna's the author, with all the gusto of a playwright tackling his climax, crams in, one after the other, all the characters of The Possessed, two of them arriving from abroad. It is incredible nonsense, but it is grand booming nonsense with flashes of genius illuminating the whole gloomy and mad farce.

Once collected in one room, these people trample on each other's dignity, have terrific rows (which translators insist on rendering as "scandals," misled by the Gallic root of the Russian "skandal" term) and these rows just fizzle out as the narrative takes a sharp new turn.

It is, as in all Dostoevski's novels, a rush and tumble of words with endless repetitions, mutterings aside, a verbal overflow which shocks the reader after, say, Lermontov's transparent and beautifully poised prose. Dostoevski as we know is a great seeker after truth, a genius of spiritual morbidity, but as we also know he is not a great writer in the sense Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov are. And, I repeat, not because the world he creates is unreal—all the worlds of writers are unreal—but because it is created too hastily without any sense of that harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is 86

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bound to comply with (in order to be a masterpiece). Indeed, in a sense Dostoevski is much too rational in his crude methods, and though his facts are but spiritual facts and his characters mere ideas in the likeness of people, their interplay and development are actuated by the mechanical methods of the earthbound and conventional novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

I want to stress again the fact that Dostoevski was more of a playwright than a novelist. What his novels represent is a succession of scenes, of dialogues, of scenes where all the people are brought together—and with all the tricks of the theatre, as with the scène à faire, the unexpected visitor, the comedy relief, etc. Considered as novels, his works fall to pieces; considered as plays, they are much too long, diffuse, and badly balanced.

He has little humor in the description of his characters or their relations, or in the situations, but sometimes he displays a kind of caustic humor in certain scenes.

"The Franco-Prussian War," a musical piece composed by Lyamshin, one of the characters in The Possessed:

"It began with the menacing strains of the Marseillaise, Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons. There is heard the pompous challenge, the intoxication of future victories. But suddenly mingling with the masterly variations of the national hymn, somewhere from some corner quite close, on one side, come the vulgar strains of 'Mein lieber Augustin.' The Marseillaise goes on unconscious of them. It is at the climax of intoxication with its own grandeur; but Augustin gains strength.

Augustin grows more and more insolent, and suddenly the melody of Augustin begins to blend with the melody of the Marseillaise. The latter begins, as it were, to get angry; becoming aware of Augustin, at last, it tries to brush him off as a fly.

But Mein lieber Augustin holds his ground firmly, he is cheerful and self-confident —and the Marseillaise seems suddenly to become terribly stupid. She can no longer conceal her mortification. It is a wail of indignation, tears and curses, with an appeal to Providence, pas un pouce de notre terrain, pas une de nos forteresses.

But she is forced to sing in time with Mein leiber Augustin. Her melody passes foolishly into Augustin. She yields and dies away. And only in snatches it is heard again qu'un sang impur. . . . But suddenly it passes over into the vulgar waltz. She submits altogether. It is Jules Favre sobbing on Bismark's bosom and surrendering everything. . . . Here Augustin grows fierce. Hoarse sounds are heard. There is a suggestion of countless gallons of beer, of a frenzy of self-glorification, demand for millions, for fine cigars, champagne and hostages. Augustin becomes a wild yell."

The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

The Brothers Karamazov is the most perfect example of the detective story technique as constantly used by Dostoevski in his other novels. It is a long novel (more than 1,000 pages), and it is a curious novel. The things that are curious about it are numerous; even the chapter headings are curious. It is worth noting that the author not only is well aware of this quaint and weird nature of his book but he even seems to be all the time pointing to it, teasing his reader, using every device to excite the reader's curiosity. Let us look, for instance, at the index of chapters. I have just mentioned how unusual and how puzzling: a man, unfamiliar with the novel, could be easily misled into imagining that the book offered him is not a novel but rather the libretto of some whimsical vaudeville. Chapter 3: "Confession of a Fiery Heart, Expressed in Verse." Chapter 4: "Confession of a Fiery Heart, Expressed in Anecdotes." Chapter 5: "Confession of a Fiery Heart, 'Upside Down.' " Then in the second volume, Chapter 5: "Nerve Storm in a Drawing Room." Chapter 6: "Nerve Storm in a Peasant Hut." Chapter 7:

"And Outofdoors." Some headings surprise us by their odd diminutives: "A Cozy Little Chat Over Brandikins" (Za kon'yachkom: kon'yak - brandy; kon'yachok - diminutive form), or an elderly lady's aching little foot (nozbka - diminutive of noga). Most of these titles do not hint even ever so slightly at the contents of the chapter, as "One more reputation destroyed" or "The third and indisputable thing," headings that are meaningless. Finally a number of headings with their flippancy and their bantering choice of words read actually like an index to a collection of humorous stories. Only in part six, in fact, incidentally the weakest part of the book, are the names of chapters in agreement with their content.

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In this taunting and teasing way the cunning author quite deliberately entices his reader. However, this is not the only way in which he does it. He is constantly preoccupied with various means for keeping and whetting the reader's attention throughout the book. Take for instance the manner in which he finally discloses the name of the town where the action has been taking place from the very start of the novel. This revelation of the town's name does not occur until close to the end: "Skotoprigonyevsk [place towards which cattle herds are driven, clearing place for cattle, something like oxtown], Skotoprigonyevsk," he says, "such alas is the name of our town, I have been long trying to conceal it." This over-sensitivity, over-concern of the writer in regard to the reader—when the reader is thought of simultaneously as the victim being drawn into a trap by the writer and as a hunter before whose path the writer keeps crossing and recrossing like a fleeing hare—this consciousness of the reader on the part of the writer derives partly from the Russian literary tradition. Pushkin in Evgeniy Onegin, Gogol in Dead Souls, often apostrophize, address themselves to the reader in a sudden aside, sometimes with an apology, sometimes with a request or with a joke. But it also derives from the tradition of the Western detective story, or rather from its predecessor, the criminal novel. It is in accordance with this latter tradition that Dostoevski uses an amusing device: with deliberate frankness, as if he were putting down before you all his cards, he comes out at the very beginning with the statement that a murder has been committed. "Aleksey Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Karamazov, a landowner of our county, who became so famous for a time . . . through his tragic and unclarified death." This apparent sincerity on the part of the author is nothing but a stylistic device, the object being to inform the reader from the first of the fact of this "tragic and unclarified death."

The book is a typical detective story, a riotous whodunit—in slow motion. The initial situation is the following. We have the father Karamazov, a lecherous, hideous old man, one of those unlamentable victims neatly prepared for murder by every farsighted writer of detective fiction. And we also have his four sons—three legitimate and one illegitimate—each of whom might be his murderer. The youngest son, the saintly Aleksey (Alyosha) is definitely a positive character, but if for once we accept Dostoevski's world and its rules, we may consider it a possibility that even Alyosha may kill his father, whether for the sake of his brother Dmitri in whose way the old man most deliberately stands, or in a sudden rebellion against the evil which his father represents, or for any other reason. The plot is presented in such a way that for a long time the reader keeps guessing who the murderer is; moreover, when the alleged murderer goes on trial it is the wrong man who is being tried, the eldest son of the murdered man, Dmitri, whereas the actual murderer happens to be the illegitimate son, Smerdyakov.

In accordance with Dostoevski's purpose to entangle the credulous reader in the guesswork that goes with the enjoyment of detective fiction, the author carefully prepares in the reader's mind the necessary portrait of the possible murderer, Dmitri. The pattern of deception begins when Dmitri after feverish and vain attempts to secure the three thousand rubles he desperately needs, seizes on the run a copper pestle seven inches long, shoves it into his pocket, and rushes off. "Oh Lord, he sure wants to murder someone," a woman exclaims.

The girl Dmitri loves, another of those Dostoevskian "infernal" women, Grushenka, has also caught the fancy of the old man, who has promised her money if she pays him a visit, and Dmitri is persuaded that she has accepted the offer.

Convinced that Grushenka was with his father, he leaped over the fence into the garden, from where he could see the lighted windows of his father's house; then "he stealthily approached and hid in the shadow, behind a bush. One half of the bush was lit by the lighted window. 'A bush with berries, how red they are,' he whispered, not knowing why." When he went up to the bedroom window, "the whole bedroom of Fyodor Pavlovich, a small chamber, lay before him as if in the palm of his hand." That little room was divided in two by red screens. Fyodor, the father, stood there, beside the window,

"in his new striped silk dressing gown belted with a silk cord with tassels. From under the collar of the dressing gown appeared clean smart linen, a shirt of fine Holland cloth with golden studs. . . . "The old man almost climbed out of the window while trying to see the garden door which was further on the right side. . . . Dmitri was looking from the side and stood motionless. The whole detested profile of the old man, with its sagging skin on the Adam's apple, his lips smiling in voluptuous anticipation, all of it was obliquely lit on the left side by the lamp. A terrible boundless fury arose in Dmitri's heart," and losing all self-control, he suddenly snatched the copper pestle he had in his pocket.

Here follows an eloquent line consisting of asterisks, this again in compliance with the technique of entertaining novels built around bloody deeds. Then, as if after catching his breath, the author attacks it again from a different angle.

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Providence, as Dmitri himself used to say later, "seems to have watched me at the time." This might mean that something stayed his hand at the last moment; but no, immediately after this sentence comes a colon and then a sentence which seems to be there as if to elaborate the previous statement: At that very time Grigori, the old servant, woke up and came out into the garden. So that the sentence about God instead of meaning, as it seemed at first, that some guardian sign stopped him in time on his evil path, may also merely mean that God woke up the old servant to allow him to see and identify the fleeing murderer. And here comes a curious maneuver: from the moment of Dmitri's flight to that when the authorities come to arrest him for murder in the small market town where he is having a drinking bout with Grushenka (and there are seventy-five pages from murder to arrest), the author arranges things in such a way that garrulous Dmitri never once betrays his innocence to the reader. What is more: whenever he remembers Grigori, the servant whom he hit with the pestle and maybe has killed, Dmitri never mentions the man he hit by name but merely describes him as "the old man," so that it actually could have applied to his father. This device may be too crafty; it betrays too much the author's desire to keep Dmitri's speeches confusing enough to deceive the reader into taking him for the murderer of his father.

Later, at the trial, an important angle is whether or not Dmitri is saying the truth when he claims that he had his three thousand rubles with him before he went to the old man's house. Otherwise he may well be suspected of having stolen the three thousand rubles the old man had prepared for the girl, which in turn would serve to prove that he entered the house and committed the murder. And there, at the trial, Alyosha, the younger brother, suddenly remembers that Dmitri when he saw him last—and that was before Dmitri went on his nocturnal expedition to his father's garden—kept slapping himself on the chest and proclaiming that he had right there what was necessary to help him out of his difficult situation. At that time Alyosha had thought that Dmitri meant his heart. But now he suddenly remembered that even then he had observed that the place Dmitri kept slapping was not where the heart would be but much higher. (Dmitri had it in a little bag on a string around his neck.) This observation of Alyosha became the only proof, or rather a hint of proof, that Dmitri actually had obtained the money before and thus had not necessarily murdered his father. Incidentally, Alyosha was wrong: Dmitri meant a charm he had on a chain.

Yet the following circumstance, which would easily have settled the question and saved Dmitri, is completely disregarded by the author. Smerdyakov has confessed to Ivan, another brother, that he was the real murderer, and that in committing his crime he had used a heavy ashtray. Ivan is going all out to save Dmitri; yet this essential circumstance is never mentioned at the trial. Had Ivan told the court about the ashtray, not much skill would have been needed to establish the truth if the ashtray was examined for blood and its shape was compared with the shape of the mortal wound. This is not done, a bad flaw in a mystery novel.

This analysis will suffice to show the characteristic development of the novel's plot where it concerns Dmitri. Ivan, the second brother, who goes away from the town in order to allow the murder to be completed (by Smerdyakov whom he has been actually coaching for murder in a sort of metaphysical way), Ivan who thus becomes so to say an accomplice of Dmitri, Ivan is much more closely integrated in the plot of the book than is the third brother Alyosha. Where Alyosha is concerned, we constantly gain the impression that the author was torn between two independent plots : Dmitri's tragedy on the one side and the story of the almost saintly youth Alyosha. Alyosha is again an exponent (the other was Prince Myshkin) of the author's unfortunate love for the simple-minded hero of Russian folklore. The whole lengthy limp story of the monk Zosima could have been deleted from the novel without impairing it; rather, its deletion would have given the book more unity and a better balanced construction. And again quite independently, sticking quite obviously out of the general scheme of the book, stands the, in itself, very well written story of the schoolboy Ilyusha. But even into that excellent story about the boy Ilyusha, another boy Kolya, the dog Zhuchka, the silver toy cannon, the cold nose of the puppy, the freakish tricks of the hysterical father, even into this story Alyosha introduces an unpleasant unctuous chill.

Generally speaking, whenever the author busies himself with Dmitri his pen acquires exceptional liveliness. Dmitri seems to be constantly illumined by strong lamps, and so do all those who surround him. But the moment we come to Alyosha, we are immersed in a different, entirely lifeless element. Dusky paths lead the reader away into a murky world of cold reasoning abandoned by the spirit of art.

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LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910)

The opening page of Nabokov's lecture on Anna Karenin.

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Anna Karenin* (1877)

Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev.† This is rather like grading students' papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.

The ideological poison, the message—to use a term invented by quack reformers—began to affect the Russian novel in the middle of the last century, and has killed it by the middle of this one. It would seem at first glance that Tolstoy's fiction is heavily infected with his teachings. Actually, his ideology was so tame and so vague and so far from politics, and, on the other hand, his art was so powerful, so tiger bright, so original and universal that it easily transcends the sermon. In the long run what interested him as a thinker were Life and Death, and after all no artist can avoid treating these themes.

Count Leo (in Russian Lev or Lvov) Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a robust man with a restless soul, who all his life was torn between his sensual temperament and his supersensitive conscience. His appetites constantly led him astray from the quiet country road that the ascetic in him craved to follow as passionately as the rake in him craved for the city pleasures of the flesh.

In his youth, the rake had a better chance and took it. Later,

after his marriage in 1862, Tolstoy found temporary peace

in family life divided between the wise management of his

fortune—he had rich lands in the Volga region—and the

writing of his best prose. It is then, in the sixties and early

seventies, that he produced his immense War and Peace

(1869) and his immortal Anna Karenin. Still later, beginning

in the late seventies, when he was over forty, his

conscience triumphed: the ethical overcame both the

esthetical and the personal and drove him to sacrifice his

wife's happiness, his peaceful family life, and his lofty

literary career to what he considered a moral necessity:

living according to the principles of rational Christian

morality—the simple and stern life of generalized

humanity, instead of the colorful adventure of individual

art. And when in 1910 he realized that by continuing to live

on his country estate, in the bosom of his stormy family, he

still was betraying his ideal of a simple, saintly existence,

he, a man of eighty, left his home and wandered away,

heading for a monastery he never reached, and died in the

waiting room of a little railway station.

I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers

The beginning of Nabokov's discussion of Tolstoy's life.

and I hate Tom-peeping over the fence of those lives—I

*

"Translators have had awful trouble with the heroine's name. In Russian, a surname ending in a consonant acquires a final 'a' (except in the case of such names as cannot be declined) when designating a woman; but only when the reference is to a female stage performer should English feminize a Russian surname (following a French custom: la Pavlova, 'the Pavlova'). Ivanov's and Karenin's wives are Mrs. Ivanov and Mrs. Karenin in England and America—

not 'Mrs. Ivanova' or 'Mrs. Karenina.' Having decided to write 'Karenina,' translators found themselves forced to call Anna's husband 'Mr. Karenina,' which is about as ridiculous as calling Lady Mary's husband 'Lord Mary.' " Transferred from VN's commentary note. Ed.

†

" When you read Turgenev, you know you are reading Turgenev. When you read Tolstoy, you read just because you cannot stop." Bracketed note elsewhere in the section. Ed.

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hate the vulgarity of "human interest," I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time—and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life; but this I must say. Dostoevski's gloating pity for people—pity for the humble and the humiliated—this pity was purely emotional and his special lurid brand of the Christian faith by no means prevented him from leading a life extremely removed from his teachings. On the other hand, Leo Tolstoy like his rep resentative Lyovin was organically unable to allow his conscience to strike a bargain with his animal nature—and he suffered cruelly whenever this animal nature temporarily triumphed over his better self.

And when he discovered his new religion and in the logical development of this new religion—a neutral blend between a kind of Hindu Nirvana and the New Testament, Jesus minus the Church—he reached the conclusion that art was ungodly because it was founded on imagination, on deceit, on fancy-forgery, he ruthlessly sacrificed the giant of an artist that he was to a rather pedestrian and narrow minded though well-meaning philosopher that he had chosen to become. Thus when he had just reached the uppermost peaks of creative perfection with Anna Karenin, he suddenly decided to stop writing altogether, except for essays on ethics. Fortunately he was not always able to maintain in chains that gigantic creative need of his and, succumbing once in a while, added to his output a few exquisite stories untainted by deliberate moralizing among which is that greatest of great short stories, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."

Many people approach Tolstoy with mixed feelings. They love the artist in him and are intensely bored by the preacher; but at the same time it is rather difficult to separate Tolstoy the preacher from Tolstoy the artist—it is the same deep slow voice, the same robust shoulder pushing up a cloud of visions or a load of ideas. What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna's white neck. But the thing cannot be done : Tolstoy is homogeneous, is one, and the struggle which, especially in the later years, went on between the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds, and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral—this struggle was still confined within the same man. Whether painting or preaching, Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenin, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth — this truth was he and this he was an art.

What troubles one, is merely that he did not always recognize his own self when confronted with truth. I like the story of his picking up a book one dreary day in his old age, many years after he had stopped writing novels, and starting to read in the middle, and getting interested and very much pleased, and then looking at the title—and seeing: Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy.