The following morning he wakes up in his room. His conversion is complete – he now vows to dedicate his life to preaching the Truth that he has seen: ‘The main thing is to love others as yourself, that’s the main thing, and that’s all, absolutely nothing else is necessary.’ The simple truth of Christ’s commandment has vanquished the darkness of rational positivism that enveloped the Ridiculous Man at the beginning of his tale. As he writes in the very last line of the story, he has found that little girl.
NOTES
1. Letter to his father, Mikhail Dostoyevsky, 23 March 1839, Complete Letters, vol. 1, tr. and ed. David Lowe and Ronald Meyer (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988), p. 48.
2. Letter to Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, 17 June 1866, Complete Letters, vol. 2, tr. and ed. David Lowe (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1989), p. 200. Dostoyevsky often complained that he did not have the same luxury of time as Turgenev or Tolstoy, who did not depend solely on their writings for their livelihood.
3. Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences, tr. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York: Liveright, 1975), pp. 14–15, 28.
4. Letter to Nikolay Strakhov, 18 September 1863, Complete Letters, vol. 2, p. 70.
5. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 172.
6. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, tr. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 170–71.
7. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Russian Point of View’, in The Common Reader: First Series, annotated edn, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1984), p. 178.
8. For an analysis of this first paragraph and its importance for the narrative as a whole, see Peter J. Rabinowitz, ‘ “A Lot Has Built Up”: Omission and Rhetorical Realism in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler’, Narrative, 9:2 (May 2001), pp. 203–9.
9. Letter to Mikhail Dostoyevsky, 20 September 1863 (New Style), Complete Letters, vol. 2, pp. 62–3.
10. In her memoirs Anna Grigoryevna recalls how she had managed to save up some money and sent her husband to Wiesbaden so that he might satisfy ‘his craving for risks, for gambling’, knowing that when he returned he ‘would settle down to his novel with new energy’. Dostoyevsky promptly lost the entire sum, and then gambled away the money that she sent for his fare home. In his letter to his wife, dated 28 April 1871, Dostoyevsky resolves never to gamble again: ‘I used to dream perpetually of winning … But all that is over and done with! This was really the last time. Can you believe it, Anya, that my hands are untied now? I was shackled to gambling, body and soul; henceforth I will think about my work and not dream for nights on end about gambling’. As she writes, ‘he had promised me many times not to gamble and had not had the strength to keep his word. But this happiness did come about and it was actually the last time he played’ (Reminiscences, pp. 165–6). For the complete text of Dostoyevsky’s letter, see Complete Letters, vol. 3, tr. and ed. David Lowe (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990), pp. 339–43.
11. The magical white nights in Petersburg begin in late May and continue through late July, but are particularly intense right before and after the summer solstice, when the sky never becomes completely dark.
12. See Elizabeth Valkenier’s discussion of the Perov portrait in Russian Realist Art. The State and Society, The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 79–81; the portrait is reproduced on p. 100. Commissioned by Pavel Tretyakov, the portrait now hangs in the Moscow museum of Russian art that bears his name.
13. The Gogolian intertext is pointed out by the editors of the Academy edition of Dostoyevsky’s works, vol. 21, p. 403.
14. Nikolay Gogol, ‘The Diary of a Madman’, in The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories, tr. Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 176.
15. See The Gambler, Chapter 2, note 1.
16. The subscription announcement for A Writer’s Diary, for the year 1876, in F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 22 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981), p. 136.
17. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 23 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981), p. 146.
18. In addition, 3,000 roubles is the bequest that Dunya, Raskolnikov’s sister, receives from Svidrigailov’s wife; the amount also plays a significant role in Dostoyevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
19. The writings of my Columbia University colleagues Robert Belknap and Deborah Martinsen have greatly shaped my understanding of the first-person narrator in these three works and Notes from Underground. See Robert L. Belknap, ‘ “The Gentle Creature” as the Climax of a Work of Art That Almost Exists’, Dostoevsky Studies, ns, 9 (2000), p. 35; and Deborah A. Martinsen, ‘Introduction’ to Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003) and her article ‘Peterburgskie odinochki Dostoevskogo: Rasskazy ot pervogo litsa’ [Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg Loners: Stories Told in the First Person], Dostoevskii i mirovaia kul’tura, 23 (2007), pp. 23–41.
Further Reading
Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, tr. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Catteau, Jacques, Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, tr. Audrey Littlewood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Dostoevsky, Anna, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences, tr. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York: Liveright, 1975).
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Complete Letters, tr. and ed. David Lowe and Ronald Meyer, 5 vols (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988–91).
—, A Writer’s Diary, tr. and ed. Kenneth Lantz, with an Introductory Study by Gary Saul Morson, 2 vols (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994).
Dostoevsky Studies, ns, 4 (2000), pp. 5–174. (A dozen articles on ‘The Meek One’ and ‘A Retrospective Bibliography’.)
Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849; Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859; Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865; Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871; Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976–2002).
Holquist, Michael, Dostoevsky and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
Jackson, Robert Louis, The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
Knapp, Liza, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,1996).
Leatherbarrow, W. J. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Miller, Robin Feuer, Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
Mochulsky, Konstantin, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, tr. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
Rabinowitz, Peter J., ‘ “A Lot Has Built Up”: Omission and Rhetorical Realism in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler’, Narrative, 9:2 (May 2001), pp. 203–9.
Savage, D.S., ‘Dostoevsky: The Idea of The Gambler’, in Dostoevsky: New Perspectives, ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1984), pp. 111–25.
Terras, Victor, The Young Dostoevsky, 1846–49: A Critical Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1969).
A Note on the Text and the Translation
The translations of the works in this volume were all made from the standard, authoritative text published in the ‘Academy’ edition of Dostoyevsky’s Complete Collected Works in Thirty Volumes (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90)). During my work on the translations and notes I benefitted greatly from the extensive and illuminating commentary found in this edition and wish to acknowledge my profound debt and gratitude to the editors.
Dostoyevsky’s frequent complaints about not having the luxury of time that the well-born Tolstoy and Turgenev took for granted, but instead always writing for a deadline, helped to promote the mistaken idea that he was a careless writer, particularly when measured against those same great stylis
ts. However, as his correspondence eloquently attests, Dostoyevsky preferred to miss these deadlines rather than submit something that he felt was not ready for publication. The numerous plans, revisions and drafts to be found in his notebooks further disprove this notion that Dostoyevsky was a slapdash writer. Constance Garnett, who singlehandedly introduced Dostoyevsky to the English-language public by translating twelve volumes of his works (1912–20), did nothing to contradict this opinion, when she called him an ‘obscure and careless writer’ who sometimes needed clarification to make him understandable (‘Russian Literature in English’, Listener, January 1947). Without in any way wishing to disparage Garnett’s monumental achievement, it is fair to say that now in the twenty-first century we are reading a different Dostoyevsky. The contemporary audience, for example, has grown accustomed to the repetitions and lengthy paragraphs that frequently exceed the limit of what was and is considered ‘good’ English prose. To take one simple example: Dostoyevsky’s favourite adverb ‘suddenly’ (vdrug) appears nineteen times in quick succession in the short chapter ‘The Scales Suddenly Fall’ in ‘The Meek One’, including the title, and another four times in the last paragraph of the preceding chapter. While at first glance it would appear that this might indeed be a case of the author’s slackness, this fevered repetition perfectly captures the Pawnbroker’s frantic state of mind and the quality of oral speech which Dostoyevsky was at pains to convey. I have reproduced all of the ‘suddenly’s; Garnett omits five of them.
A few words about the titles of two stories. The work I have rendered as ‘A Nasty Business’ has been previously translated as ‘A Nasty Story’ and ‘A Nasty Anecdote’. The Russian anekdot can indeed be translated as ‘story’ or ‘anecdote’, but I believe that Garnett came closer with her ‘An Unpleasant Predicament’, a solution of which she was quite proud (see her ‘Russian Literature in English’), as anekdot can also denote a disagreeable incident or event, precisely the meaning that fits the situation when Ivan IIyich’s coachman has disappeared and Shipulenko calls it ‘a nasty business’.
The title of ‘The Meek One’, which Garnett rendered as ‘A Gentle Spirit’, subsequently became better known as ‘A Gentle Creature’ in the translation of David Magarshack, another key figure in the history of translating Dostoyevsky into English. Both ‘spirit’ and ‘creature’ add something to the title that is not there in Dostoyevsky’s original – ‘Krotkaya’ in the Russian. The word is an adjectival noun – Russian is extremely flexible in this respect – which literally means ‘meek’, but with the added information that the gender of this noun is feminine. Adding ‘spirit’, ‘creature’ or ‘maiden’ to the title cannot but change the reader’s perception; ‘one’ seems a neutral solution. Finally, and most importantly for Dostoyevsky’s story, the English title ‘The Meek One’ reproduces for the English reader the associations the Russian reader involuntarily makes with Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am greatly indebted to a number of people who helped me during the course of my work on The Gambler and Other Stories. First and foremost, to the late Robert Maguire, who was translating Dostoyevsky’s Demons when I began my work on this volume. Bob was enormously generous with his experience as a translator – I greatly miss our conversations. In addition to sharing her expertise as a Dostoyevsky scholar, Deborah Martinsen read my translation of ‘The Meek One’ with a critical eye. Mary Ann Szporluk helped me untangle some of the rhetorical flourishes in ‘White Nights’. Sessions devoted to ‘The Meek One’ and ‘Bobok’ with students in my translation seminar at Columbia University contributed to my understanding of these works. Keith Garrod and Helena Goscilo helped in ways that are difficult to express. Peter Carson of Penguin Classics has been encouraging and helpful from the very beginning – and arranged for me to take some time off from Gambler so that I might prepare Robert Maguire’s Demons for publication. Finally, I wish to thank Lindeth Vasey of Penguin Classics, who provided invaluable support during my work on Demons, for her sound advice, criticism and friendship throughout our work on this second project together. It is no exaggeration to say that the book has benefitted enormously from her insight and experience.
WHITE NIGHTS
A Sentimental Love Story
(From the Memoirs of a Dreamer)
… Or was his destiny from the start
To be but just one moment
Near your heart? …
– Ivan Turgenev1
THE FIRST NIGHT
It was a wonderful night, the kind of night, dear reader, which is only possible when we are young. The sky was so starry, it was such a bright sky that looking at it you could not help but ask yourself: is it really possible for bad-tempered and capricious people to live under such a sky? That is also a young person’s question, dear reader, a very young person’s question, but may the Lord ask it of your heart more often! … Speaking of capricious and sundry bad-tempered gentlemen, I could not help but recall my own commendable conduct throughout the whole day. From early morning an astonishing melancholy had started to torment me. It suddenly seemed that I, so alone, was being abandoned by everyone – that everyone was deserting me. Well, of course, anyone is entitled to ask: who is ‘everyone’? Because I’ve been living in Petersburg eight years now and I’ve hardly been able to make a single acquaintance. But what do I need acquaintances for? I’m acquainted with all of Petersburg as it is; that’s why it seemed to me that everyone was abandoning me when all of Petersburg suddenly up and left for their dachas.2 I was terrified of being left alone, and for three whole days I wandered about the city in a state of deep melancholy, not understanding in the least what was happening to me. No matter whether I went to Nevsky Prospekt,3 or the park, or wandered along the embankment – there wasn’t a single person of those whom I have been accustomed to meet for a year now in the same place, at a certain time. Of course, they don’t know me, but I know them. I know them intimately; I have practically learned their faces by heart – and I admire them when they are cheerful, and I’m crestfallen when they grow sad. I almost struck up a friendship with a certain little old man, whom I meet every blessed day, at a certain hour on the Fontanka.4 His face is so dignified and thoughtful; he’s always whispering under his breath and gesticulating with his left hand, while in his right hand he holds a long gnarled walking-stick with a golden knob. He’s even noticed me and shows a cordial concern for me. Should it happen that I’m not at the same place on the Fontanka at a certain hour, I’m positive that he would be crestfallen. That’s why we sometimes almost greet each other, particularly when we’re both in a good mood. The other day, when we had not seen each other for two whole days and met on the third day, we almost reached for our hats, but, thank goodness, we came to our senses in time, lowered our hands and passed each other by in sympathy. I also have houses that are my acquaintances. As I walk, it’s as if each one I come to runs out into the street in front of me, looks out at me with its windows wide open and almost says: ‘Hello, how do you do? And I, thank God, am well, but in May they’re going to add a floor to me.’ Or: ‘How do you do? And I’m having some repairs done tomorrow.’ Or: ‘I almost burned down and I was so scared’, and so forth. I have favourites among them, some are intimate friends; one of them intends to be treated by an architect this summer. I’ll make it a point to drop by every day so that, God forbid, they don’t kill it in the process! … But I will never forget what happened to a certain very pretty, light-pink little house. It was such a sweet little stone house; it looked at me so cordially, and so haughtily at its ungainly neighbours, that my heart would rejoice when I chanced to walk past. Suddenly, last week, I was walking down the street and upon turning to look at my friend – I heard a plaintive cry: ‘But they’re going to paint me yellow!’ The scoundrels! Barbarians! They spared nothing: neither the columns, nor the cornices, and my friend had turned as yellow as a canary. I almost had an attack of jaundi
ce myself, and to this day I do not have the strength to see my poor disfigured friend who was painted the colour of the Celestial Empire.5
So now you understand, reader, how I am acquainted with all of Petersburg.
I have already said that for three whole days I was tormented with anxiety until I guessed the reason for it. And on the street I was in a bad way (this one’s gone, that one’s gone, where’s so-and-so got to?) – and I wasn’t myself at home either. For two evenings I tried to put a finger on what it was I found wanting in my room. Why was I so uncomfortable staying there? And with bewilderment I examined my green, sooty walls, and the ceiling from which hung a cobweb that Matryona had been cultivating with such resounding success; I looked over all my furniture, examined every chair, wondering if that was the problem (because I’m not myself if even one chair isn’t in the same place as it was the day before); I looked out the window, but it was all in vain … I didn’t feel any better. I even took it into my head to summon Matryona and give her there and then a fatherly reprimand for the cobweb and for her slovenliness in general; but she merely looked at me in amazement and walked away without a word in response, so that the cobweb hangs there safe and sound to this day. It was only this morning that I finally guessed what the matter was! Oh! Why, they’re all making off to their dachas and leaving me behind! Forgive the trivial style, but I’m not up to lofty turns of speech … because, you see, everybody in Petersburg had either moved or is moving to their dacha; because after hiring a cab, every venerable gentleman of a solid appearance was immediately transformed before my eyes into a venerable father of a family, who after his daily official duties sets off without luggage to the bosom of his family, at the dacha; because every passer-by now has a quite special air about him, which all but says to every person he meets: ‘Gentlemen, I’m only here in passing, but in two hours I’m leaving for my dacha.’ If a window opens, upon which slender fingers as white as sugar had just drummed, and out leans the head of a pretty girl, who calls to a pedlar with jugs of flowers – I immediately, there and then, imagine that these flowers are being bought not simply so as to take pleasure in the spring and flowers in a stuffy city apartment, but because everybody is moving to their dacha and they’ll be taking the flowers with them. Moreover, I had already made such strides in my new, special sort of discovery that I could already unerringly identify on the basis of appearance alone where their dacha was located. The residents of Kamenny and Aptekarsky islands or the Peterhof Road were distinguished by the studied elegance of their movements, their foppish summer suits and the handsome carriages that brought them to the city. The inhabitants of Pargolovo and further out at first glance ‘inspired’ one with their prudence and respectability; the visitor to Krestovsky Island6 was distinguished by his unruffled, cheerful air. Whether I managed to run into a long procession of carters holding the reins as they lazily walked alongside their carts, loaded with whole mountains of furniture of every description – tables, chairs, couches both Turkish and non-Turkish – and other household goods and chattels, on which, on top of everything, frequently would be sitting at the very summit of the load, the wizened cook, keeping watch over her master’s goods as the apple of her eye; whether I looked at the boats, heavily laden with household utensils, as they glided down the Neva or Fontanka to Chernaya River7 or the islands – the carts and boats increased tenfold, a hundredfold before my very eyes, it seemed as though everything had up and left, that whole caravans had moved to the dacha; it seemed that all of Petersburg threatened to turn into a desert, so that in the end I became ashamed, hurt and sad: I had absolutely nowhere to go and no reason to go to a dacha. I was ready to leave with every cart, to drive off with every gentleman of venerable appearance who was hiring a cabbie, but no one, absolutely no one invited me; it was as if I indeed was a stranger to them!
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