by Tim Parks
When not falling into quotation, Dostoevsky’s underground voice invents neologisms and syntactical tics all its own. Language is either private to the point of excluding the listener or so worn out and public as to be meaningless. This puts the translator under considerable pressure. In his introduction to the most recent translation of Notes (1993) Richard Pevear attacks the tendency of other translations to normalise the book’s style, claiming that he and his translation partner Larissa Volokhonsky have done all they can to reproduce its idiosyncrasies. The problem with such an approach is that the idiosyncrasies of the original arose from the Russian language and in a Russian context. Their meaning, or undermining of meaning, depended on the readers’ recognition of a quotation, on the perceived distance between a specific tic and normal usage. Where context is all, translation is arduous. Pevear’s aims are admirable and his text always intriguing, but there are times when its oddly shifting registers seem more to do with literal translation than creative prose. If nothing else, however, the problem alerts us to Dostoevsky’s anticipation of modernism. When a writer’s voice could be confidently public without seeming parodic such difficulties did not arise.
Aside from the roulette table, another form of gambling Dostoevsky indulged in was that of the hazardous publishing contract. Two years after finishing Notes from Underground and while working on Crime and Punishment he took an advance to write a novel of more than 160 pages. If he failed to deliver by November of the same year he would have to pay a huge fine and if he didn’t finish by December, the publisher could have all his work for the next nine years completely free. Why had Dostoevsky agreed to such mad terms? Why did he wait till six weeks before the deadline to begin writing?
The answer, as with his roulette playing, seems to have been his need to feel that he was chosen, that he was a great and not an ordinary man. This, after all, is Raskolnikov’s obsession in Crime and Punishment. If Dostoevsky won at roulette, if he finished his book in time, then God had chosen him, he had an identity. If not, then he could cease to struggle, he was nothing. The book he wrote, or rather, for speed’s sake, dictated, was The Gambler, which is to say, the man who risks in order to become someone.
The narrator of Notes also dreams of being a writer. Once, in the past, he did actually write something, but the publishers turned it down. ‘I was bitterly disappointed. – Sometimes my rage positively choked me.’17 Denied recognition, his dreams became vaguer: ‘… at that time I blindly believed that by some miracle … all this [his squalid life] would be drawn aside like a curtain, and a wide horizon would open out before me, a field of suitable activity, philanthropic, noble and above all ready-made … and I would emerge into God’s sunlight, practically riding a white horse and crowned with laurel.’18
But the great transformation never occurs. Unlike his creator, the narrator is not chosen and does not go on struggling to be so; denied ‘God’s sunlight’, he remains underground, unknown, secret, multiple. The question that the second part of Notes poses is: in the world of individuals ‘cut off from the soil’, which is to say from the obvious roles offered by traditional communal relationships, what becomes of the proud and ambitious ego if denied the redemption of celebrity? ‘I couldn’t even conceive of playing a secondary part,’19 the narrator tells us, ‘and that is why in actuality I quite contentedly filled the last of all. Either a hero or dirt, there was nothing in between.’
While the first part of Notes is all argument, the second is all narrative. The story is simple and schematic. Going back to a time when the narrator was twenty-four, we are given, one by one, his encounters with an anonymous army officer, with his boss, with his old school friends, with his servant and with a woman. In each case, our anti-hero tries to establish a relationship that would offer the gratification of recognition and identity, or, failing that, at least the exercise of power.
The army officer, a man of superior social status, casually shoves the narrator aside at a billiard table without paying him any attention. Insulted, the narrator pathetically and comically seeks to contrive a situation where he can bump into the man and force him to fight a duel, something that would amount to a recognition of equality. When he does finally pluck up the courage to bump into him, the officer still pays no attention. But at least our anonymous sufferer can pride himself on having acted in some way.
Unable to live in a completely solipsistic world ‘for more than three months at a time’,20 he goes to visit his boss who ‘lived in four tiny low-ceilinged rooms, economically furnished and jaundiced-looking … The host usually sat in his study, on a leather sofa in front of the table, with one of his elderly guests … The talk was about excise duties, arguments in the Senate, salaries, promotion … I would sit there dumb, almost paralysed, and sometimes breaking into a sweat; but it did me good. Returning home, I was able to lay aside for a time my desire to embrace all mankind.’21
This is barely more satisfactory than the encounter with the officer. But the narrator has an old school acquaintance, Simonov, whom he sees and occasionally borrows money from. One day at Simonov’s he meets two other schoolmates, who are arranging a small farewell dinner party at a hotel for a fourth acquaintance, Zverkov. Irritated that he hasn’t been invited, the narrator insists on inviting himself.
The evening is a comic masterpiece and, for the narrator, an unmitigated disaster. Zverkov, in his small way, is a celebrity, an army officer with a modest fortune. Despite his mediocrity, his three friends worship him. He is someone. Immediately, the only relation that the narrator of Notes can imagine with Zverkov is one of competition; he must force his friends to grant him the same status. He gets drunk, insults them, challenges Zverkov to a duel and is laughed at and finally ignored. When the others set off to end the evening in a brothel, the narrator borrows money to chase after them, alternating fantasies of self-abasement in which he begs forgiveness, with equally crazy plans to slap Zverkov’s face and force him to a fight. Arriving at the brothel, he finds that his friends have disappeared. At once it is clear that this development was just an excuse to bring our narrator into the presence of a woman.
One day, recounts Leonid Grossman in his biography of the author, while Dostoevsky was dictating The Gambler to his young copyist, he told her that he was at a crossroads in life and had three choices: ‘to go east, to Constantinople or Jerusalem and remain there forever; to go abroad for roulette and give himself up entirely to gambling; or to seek happiness in a second marriage. Anna advised him to take the last course.’22 Not long afterwards Dostoevsky proposed to the girl.
What do these three choices signify? ‘Constantinople or Jerusalem’ would appear to be the way of renunciation, sainthood; gambling abroad, the way of debauchery. But in the middle, for the man who, however hard he struggles, can choose neither of those extremes, lay a form of salvation, another way of being chosen and achieving identity: the love of a woman.
As Notes approaches its climax, the reader now witnesses a distressing instance of the right ideas coming from the wrong mouth. Waking from a drunken stupor beside the girl he has paid for and used, the narrator proceeds to persuade her that she must leave the brothel at once. She is beautiful, she could have love and respect and marriage and children. Instead, what awaits her as a prostitute are contempt, disease, poverty, death by consumption. Using trite words that ‘sound just like a book’, he creates a heartbreaking picture that soon has the girl sobbing with regret. This is precisely the result he was aiming for. With no intention of helping, he has demonstrated his power to wound, something he couldn’t do to his less vulnerable friends. ‘It was the game that carried me along, the game itself.’ However, he then adds: ‘but not only the game …’23
Here is the key to the whole book. Dostoevsky is interested in the way ready-made visions adhere, or fail to adhere, or worst of all, half adhere to the mind. The narrator plays a hideous trick on the young prostitute. But his ‘game’ is only successful because he starts to believe in it. He is attracted t
o the girl. The hackneyed idea of saving a prostitute has got the better of him. His rhetoric becomes more convincing and dangerous. He gives her his address … Somebody is now in a position to step into his solipsistic world and make it real.
The denouement is as painful as it is farcical. Some days later the narrator is engaged in a comic argument with his servant when Liza arrives. He is refusing to pay the servant his salary, trying to force him to recognise a relationship of subservience that goes beyond the exchange of cash. The servant is having none of it. He will only work if paid. Into the room steps the woman who has been selling herself for money, but is now asking for a recognition that goes beyond money. Terrified by this reality, the narrator tells her he was only joking in the brothel. He breaks down in hysterics. Despite his disgraceful behaviour, the girl responds to his suffering. She comforts him. She is offering love. He has been chosen. This is his moment, his chance to come out from the autism of the underground. But he is not equal to the responsibilities involved. He has sex with the girl then thrusts money into her hand, pushes her out. She rejects the money and leaves. Totally confused, he runs after her to beg forgiveness. ‘Never before had I endured so much suffering and repentance; but could there have been even the slightest doubt, as I went running out of the apartment, that I would turn back halfway?’24
In any event, Liza has gone. Without a self, the narrator is left with a few roubles in his hand and a mind doomed to raking these moments back and forth for decades to come. In a distinctly Beckettian conclusion he tells us he has had enough, he must stop his pointless reflections. In his authorial voice Dostoevsky adds the postscript: ‘This is not the end, however, of the notes of this paradoxical writer. He could not help going on …’25
But if the narrator of Notes is in an ugly, perverse and potentially dangerous relation to the fantasies and the rhetoric he practises on others, what about Dostoevsky himself? His wife died of consumption in the apartment the couple shared while he was writing the second part of Notes. What were his thoughts as he penned the following passage where the narrator is terrifying Liza with the vision of her inevitable destiny in the brothel?
No, Liza, it will be lucky, lucky for you if you die quickly of consumption, someplace in a corner, in a basement … In a hospital, you say? If they take you there, fine, but what if your madam still needs you? Consumption is that sort of illness; it’s not a fever. A person goes on hoping till the last moment, saying he’s well. It’s just self-indulgence. But there’s profit in it for the madam. Don’t worry, it’s true; you’ve sold your soul, you owe money besides, so you don’t dare make a peep. And when you’re dying, they’ll all abandon you, they’ll all turn away from you – because what good are you then? They’ll even reproach you for uselessly taking up space and not dying quickly enough. You’ll have a hard time getting a drink of water, they’ll give it to you with a curse: ‘Hurry up and croak, you slut; you’re moaning, people can’t sleep, the clients are disgusted.’ It’s true; I’ve overheard such words myself. They’ll shove you, on the point of croaking, into the stinkingest corner of the basement – dark, damp: what will you go over in your mind then, lying there alone? You’ll die – they’ll lay you out hurriedly, strangers’ hands, grumblingly, impatiently – and no one will bless you, no one will sigh over you, all they’ll think is how to get you off their backs quickly.26
‘I’m in a frightening state,’ Dostoevsky wrote to his brother, six days before Maria Dimitrievna coughed her last, ‘nervous, morally ill.’27 He then goes on to outline the story of these last chapters of the Notes …
Is there a sense in which writing fiction, for Dostoevsky, allowing himself to be carried away by such rhetoric and to describe all sorts of ugliness, involved a perverse indulgence and hence was experienced as a sin? Or was it rather a form of expiation? ‘I’ve felt ashamed all the while I’ve been writing this story’ the narrator of Notes tells us on the penultimate page: ‘so it’s no longer literature, but corrective punishment.’28 Or could it even be that Dostoevsky was unable to make up his mind what it was, crime or punishment, or even, given its implied moral condemnation of the narrator’s perversions, a moral act perhaps? In any event, the reader is bound to feel something of the same ambiguity about his own engagement with fiction that flaunts negative behaviour, that is dense, as Turgenev put it, with ‘smelly self-laceration’.29 There are few works that combine laughter and disgust as powerfully as Notes from Underground.
If the nineteenth century was the time when it became clear that any political future lay in the collective choice of the people, it naturally became necessary to discover who these people really were. This was the great task of realism and the novels of the period. Yet the more the modern individual was losing, in the impersonal throng of the industrialised city, those traditional roles imposed by the old rural, communal life, the more the suspicion arose that perhaps character was not so easily defined, that perhaps it was infinitely malleable. From the rented tenement rooms of the big European and American cities the most disturbing texts began to appear. In Berlin in 1844 Max Stirner wrote The Ego and his Own, in which he taught that there was no need to be morally bound by old promises you no longer wished to adhere to, nor rules you didn’t agree with: the only thing that mattered was how much power you had to do as you wanted, now and now and now. In 1853 Melville invented a character who took a strange form of power by simply responding to every order and invitation with the refrain ‘I would prefer not to.’ In 1868 the nadir of negativity was attained when Lautréamont published his Chants de Maldoror which celebrates with utter complacency the atrocious crimes of a serial killer. Like Notes from Underground the text is disconcerting for its juxtapositions of quite different styles, so that it becomes hard to sense a consistent identity behind the overall production. This was Pulp Fiction over a century before Tarantino.
But it was in the monologue Dostoevsky created for Notes from Underground (1864) that the characterless character found his proper literary form, the man who talks endlessly of himself because there is no self, who imagines his listeners because he has none, internalising the whole world and fantasising impossible successes from the safety of complete non-engagement. Imitations, adaptations and ambitious developments of this voice produced some of the finest works of the twentieth century from Celine to Beckett and Bernhard. But at the time Notes was written few were impressed.
There is a reflection to be made here on a profound split in modern consciousness. To take on board the implications of Notes from Underground is to undermine any political debate predicated on the existence of people with stable selves who can make responsible decisions. Officially, ideas such as those Dostoevsky advanced in Notes must never be accepted. In reality, the amount of money spent pushing people from one political camp to another with inane slogans and meaningless manifestos suggests that those who enjoy power know all too well that identity is unstable at best. In any event, we can take the date of the publication of Notes as the moment when ready-made visions and packaged ideals are declared absolutely necessary, but only as a means of manipulation, or a form of mental comfort:
Even then I comforted myself with these ideas, as I do still. That’s why we have so many generous spirits who even in the last degradation never lose their ideals; and although they won’t lift a finger for their ideals, although they are declared thieves and gangsters, they are still tearfully devoted to their original ideals and extraordinarily pure of heart.30
If a world of the ‘pure of heart’ who behave exactly as they choose is in any way recognisable to the modern reader then the polarities that tense Dostoevsky’s narratives are still very much with us, even if the struggle against this state of affairs was long ago abandoned.
The Illusionist
* * *
[Benito Mussolini]
FROM THE THREE great architects of the Italian Risorgimento in the mid-nineteenth century – Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour – to the rule of Mussolini from 1922 to 1943, it would
be hard to find a single figure in Italian politics whose biography is in print in English today, this despite the country’s colonial expansion in Libya and participation in World War One. A fluid parliamentary system of shifting alliances between fragmented parties largely in thrall to the whims of an interfering and mediocre monarchy meant that those who held power did so only by dint of interminable compromise and ad hoc administration. Much the same, minus the monarchy, could be said of Italian leaders since World War Two, at least until Berlusconi. Biographers find it difficult to have such men emerge from an elusive and very Italian context.
With Mussolini, on the other hand, the literature is extensive and the reader spoilt for choice. It is the nature of a totalitarian dictatorship that the psychology of a single, usually charismatic, individual is superimposed over a nation’s destiny for an extended period. Thus it may seem that the story can be grasped without too much context. Then in Mussolini’s case the psychology in question was neither simple nor stable. Indeed, we might say that for every action and declaration of Il Duce, as he liked to be called, there was, as it were, a shadow action or declaration which complicated or straightforwardly contradicted the first. As a result, regardless of the damage he did to Italian democracy and the ruin he brought upon Italy through his alliance with Hitler, historians can continue to argue about what his real intentions and achievements were. Here was a man who both saved Jews from Hitler’s Holocaust yet passed anti-Semitic laws in Italy, who talked about modernising his country and, simultaneously, of returning to the mentality of Roman imperialism, who fomented a European war then desperately sought to postpone it, who spoke of wishing to be hated and feared while giving money anonymously to charitable organisations.
