ON LITERARY TRANSLATION: "Sympathy for the Traitor"

On Literary Translation

These remarks are based, largely, on Emily Wilson’s book review of Mark Polizzotti, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (MIT Press, 2018). The review appears in the New York Review of Books, May 24, 2018, p. 46-47.

Assuming that most of us are not bilingual or trilingual, without literary translation we cannot read novels, stories, poems written in foreign languages. But practically no one seems to agree on what makes for a good literary translation. The crucial question always seems to be how much leeway the translator is given. Must he/she (1) remain very close to the original, producing a literal translation that may not read well in the target language? (2) diverge from the original to produce a kind of imitation? (3) push the imitation so far that it amounts to a traducing of the original (even though it may read well and be a work of creative art in the target language)?

According to Emily Wilson, Translation Studies as an academic discipline is a phenomenon only of the past fifty years or so. Professors who are not themselves translators have made careers in “translation theory,” which, alas—like so many academic disciplines—involves “increasingly abstract discourse.” In fact, Polizzotti suggests that Translation Studies is “one of the few disciplines in which the study of a subject seems bent on demonstrating that very subject’s futility.”

According to Polizzotti, academic specialists on literary translation seem to be asserting that (1) it cannot really be done successfully; and (2) you should not even try to do it, if successfully means producing a fluent, readable, creative literary work in the target language. Being totally faithful to the original means, apparently, creating “unreadable, unidiomatic, clunky translations.”

This recalls Vladimir Nabokov’s attempt in the sixties of last century to translate the greatest narrative poem in Russian literature, Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin. After making herculean efforts to get the thing across into an English that maintained the creativity and literary form of the original, Nabokov finally gave up and said it could not be done. He published his four-volume translation into English, the first volume containing the original and a “pony” literal translation, and the other three volumes containing extensive academic commentary on the work. He also wrote a little poem, in commemoration of his new attitude toward literary translation:

What is translation? On a platter

A poet’s pale and glaring head,

A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,

And profanation of the dead.

Of course, only academics, who often make abstraction and obfuscation for its own sake a paramount virtue, could argue logically for bad—awkward, unreadable, “foreignized”—literary translations. Not an academic himself, but “a prolific translator of French experimental fiction into English,” Polizzotti argues for a commonsense approach to the issue. “He quotes approvingly the maxim of Dante Gabriel Rossetti that ‘a good poem [must] not be turned into a bad one.’”

Polizzotti asserts what should be apparent but what often is not: “the single most crucial requirement in producing a viable target version is to be a talented writer in one’s own language.” Emily Wilson continues, “It is never enough to ask if a translator knows the source language well enough to translate from it: we must also ask, always, whether she is a good enough writer of English to create something that will live on its own. In his blithe assumption that there is such a thing as literary value and that you know it when you read it, Polizzotti stands outside the fashions of the contemporary academy; he is quite willing to claim that some pieces of writing are simply better than others.”

Just try reading reviews of translated literature in practically any American periodical. Does the reviewer dwell upon the literary talents—or lack thereof—of the translator? Seldom. The reviewer is most often concerned with quibbling over how the translator failed to get this or that word right, or how the translator missed some single subtlety in the original. Reviewers “very rarely comment on how any new translation might enrich contemporary English literature, or on whether the translator is a thoughtful, well-read, or original writer of her own language.”

“Polizzotti meanders around the crucial question of whether a translator can go too far from the original and slip from translation into imitation, or betrayal. It depends on whether the result is any good, and we are given no general parameters by which to make this judgment. The implicit criterion is not whether this or that phrasing or syntax is preserved, but whether the overall result allows the text to speak as best it can ‘across nebulous cultural boundaries, and not lie mute and moribund on the page.’”

When I taught Russian literature in a university I would sometimes ask my students why anyone would want to read creative literary art. There are a variety of answers to that question. Unfortunately, the number one answer in the twenty-first century, I fear, is that no one, or practically no one, does want to read creative literature. But my best answer, back then, and even still now, is that you read literature for pleasure. 

It’s not a simple, easily attained pleasure, but it is pleasure nonetheless: the joy of communing with the aesthetics of art, which are contagious. You read great literature, you commune with it properly, and it infuses you with creativity; you end up making creative art in your own mind—and that’s a joyful business.

Polizzotti’s book “is in some ways a negative polemic, against the excesses and abstractions of contemporary translation theory.” Polizzotti argues for “making sure that literature is enjoyable, so that people actually want to read it . . . . . . The academic theorists often imply that clunky, unidiomatic, foreignized translations are good for us, no matter how stodgy they may be. By contrast, Polizzotti makes one feel that creating and reading translated literature can be a genuinely pleasurable experience.”

As for myself, it should be obvious by now that I’m on Polizzotti’s side. I have translated literary works by the Russian writer Ivan Bunin extensively. My book of Bunin’s stories and novellas appeared in 2006 (Ivan Bunin, Night of Denial, Northwestern University Press). I would like that book judged largely on whether the translated works read as literary art in English. 

Lately I have begun translating some Russian poetry, with the emphasis largely upon whether I can create an effective poem in English. This means translating not word for word, but “sense for sense.” I try to make a good poem in English, while retaining, to the extent this is possible, the same sense of the words in Russian. I try for the same atmosphere, the same mood, the spirit of the original—but not the exact words of the original.

Are my results not translation, but “imitation,” not translation, but even “traducement”? Some would say so. Most Russian poems are metered and rhymed. I try for the meter and the rhyme in the target version. This in itself places a huge burden on the text. Rhyme is especially tyrannical, in the way it has of forcing the translator into “imitation” to satisfy its ringing and jangling demands.

For years before he gave up on the possibility of literary translation, Vladimir Nabokov did his best at the same thing I’m trying to do now. Sometimes he was remarkably successful at producing an English version that remained, essentially, true to the spirit of the original, but also succeeded as a work of art.

Here is Nabokov’s version in English of one of Mikhail Lermontov’s most well-known poems.

Михаил Лермонтов

Парус

Белеет парус одинокой В тумане моря голубом.  Что ищет он в стране далекой? Что кинул он в краю родном?  Играют волны, ветер свищет, И мачта гнется и скрыпит; Увы! - он счастия не ищет И не от счастия бежит!  Под ним струя светлей лазури, Над ним луч солнца золотой:  А он, мятежный, просит бури, Как будто в бурях есть покой! написано в 1832 году (written in 1832, first published in 1841)

The Sail

Amid the blue haze of the ocean

A sail is passing, white and frail.

What do you seek in a far country?

What have you left at home, lone sail?

The billows play, the breezes whistle,

And rhythmically creaks the mast.

Alas, you seek no happy future,

Nor do you flee a happy past.

Below the mirrored azure brightens,

Above the golden rays increase—

But you, wild rover, pray for tempests,

As if in tempests there were peace!

Vladimir Nabokov, Verses and Versions, Edited by Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin (Harcourt, Inc., 2008), p. 287.

Notes to CRIME AND PUNISHMENT The Icon and the Axe

The Icon and the Axe

Among American scholarly works on Russian history and culture perhaps none ranks higher than James H. Billington’s monumental, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). Billington chose this title because for him “Nothing better illustrates the combination of material struggle and spiritual exultation in Old Russia than the two objects that were traditionally hung together in a place of honor on the wall of every peasant hut: the axe and the icon.”

Billington goes on to outline briefly the symbolic importance of these two objects throughout Russian history. Much of what he says has direct application to the plot and themes of Crime and Punishment. Pre-Christian tribes in what was to become Russia used axes for money and buried them ritually with their owners. Even after the coming to Russia of Christianity in 988 AD the axe remained important as the primary weapon in close-range fighting and the implement used by frontiersmen to fell trees and build structures.

Russian proverbs make frequent reference to the axe: “The axe is the head of all business; “You can make it through all the world with only an axe.” Here are a few more in Russian: “Мудер, когда в руках топор, а без топора не стоит и комара (roughly: he’s a real wise guy with an axe in his hands; take away his axe and he’s a buzzing mosquito);” “Без топора по дрова не ходят (Don’t go out chopping and leave your axe at home;” “Мужика не шуба греет, а топор (It’s not a fur coat warms a peasant; it’s an axe).”

When you are astounded by something someone has done or said you say, “Меня как обухом по голове (literally: It’s as if someone hit me on the head with the blunt end of an axe).” Which is exactly what the old usurer lady in C and P must have had ringing through her mind, since she was literally hit on the head with that blunt end.

As the Russians consolidated their new civilization in the Upper Volga region after the coming of Christianity and began spreading out to the eastern frontier, they used the axe to hack out clearings, to fell trees and build fortifications. Only in relatively recent times historically were nails widely used in building, let alone saws and planes. 

The peasants used axes for terrorizing the landed nobility in uprisings throughout early Russian history, and the tsars used axes to put down the uprisings.

The axe was also “the standard instrument of summary execution . . . . Leaders of the revolts were publicly executed by a great axe in Red Square, Moscow, in the ritual of quartering. One stroke was used to sever each arm, one for the legs, and a final stroke for the head” (Billington).

The axe was always associated with political rebellion, and here is where the instrument as used by Raskolnikov in C and P is especially appropriate. Several critics have pointed out that Raskolnikov’s act of murder is symbolically an act of political revolution. He chooses to kill someone who has no political significance, but he is inspired to do so by political ideals and rhetoric of the radical left of the times. 

In the early 1860s, at the very time that Dostoevsky was formulating his plans for the novel, the radical thinker Dobrolyubov was summarizing the Utopian Socialist program of his colleague and friend Chernyshevsky’s book, What Is To Be Done? as “Calling Russia to Axes.”

Both Notes from the Underground, the work of fiction published directly before C and P, and C and P itself are vehement polemics with Chernyshevsky’s ideas and principles. No doubt Crime and Punishment is in some respects a political allegory, suggesting the danger of radical ideas when some misguided someone decides to act upon them.

By the late 1860s the notorious revolutionary Sergei Nechaev had set up a “secret society of the axe.” Dostoevsky died in January, 1881, and in March of that year the terrorist group known as “People’s Will” achieved their greatest triumph when they succeeded in assassinating the “Tsar Liberator” Aleksandr II. They used bombs, however, rather than axes. 

This was already the sixth or seventh attempt on the tsar’s life, the first being in 1866. It was as if that murder were in the Russian air, and Russian history could not go on until it was achieved. Despite all of Dostoevsky’s writings—both fiction and nonfiction—about the wrongheadedness of radical left dogma, the dangers of putting such dogma into practice, the ideas had a momentum of their own, moving almost inevitably along until the October Revolution of 1917.

If you read the testimony at the trial of one of the perpetrators of the assassination in March, 1881—a man named Andrei Zhelyabov—it sounds as if one of Dostoevsky’s characters were talking, spewing out revolutionary slogans but throwing in a love for Jesus Christ in the bargain. Later on, in the early years of the Russian Revolution, the great poet Aleksandr Blok put Christ at the head of a group of marauding revolutionary sailors, in his controversial poem, “The Twelve.” [On Zhelyabov, see Norton Critical Ed. of C and P, p. 559]

Written at the dawn of the twentieth century, Anton Chekhov’s play, The Cherry Orchard, emblematic of the end of the landed nobility in Russia, and even foreshadowing the end of Imperial Russia itself, concludes with the sounds of an axe, chopping down the trees in the orchard. The image of the axe carries over into Soviet times, since in 1940 the most brilliant of the men who made the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky, was assassinated in Mexican exile. He was hit over the head with an ice axe, which remained implanted in his skull.

While researching demographics and health issues in the Soviet Union, the American scholar Murray Feshbach discovered that the most common murder weapon in the country was still the axe. There had always been strict gun-control laws, and Soviet society was still quite rural, so the axe tended to be the weapon most accessible to the average Russian. 

As for the modern Russian Federation, I have not seen statistics about murder weapons. One thing for sure: firearms in Russia are still tightly controlled. If the Russian Federation had the kind of gun laws that the U.S. has, the whole country probably would have been wiped out by now.

Billington’s other overriding symbol of Russia, the icon or religious image, is also directly relevant to Raskolnikov and major themes of C and P. Raskolnikov’s inner struggle, the dominant theme of the novel, is really a struggle between the icon and the axe. After he kills the old pawnbroker he throws down the icons or crosses on her body, symbolically rejecting the Russian Orthodox Christian tradition that was so important to him in his childhood. Of course, if we are to believe the rays of brightness that shine into the epilogue, the saintly Sonya will eventually win Raskolnikov over, turning him from the path of the axe back to that of the icon.

Notes to CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Sophie's Choice

Sofie’s Choice

Throughout the action of C and P Dostoevsky’s religious message is that Raskolnikov must follow the path of Sonya towards salvation, rather than the path of Svidrigailov towards perdition. For a short time after Svidrigailov kills himself, Raskolnikov seems himself to be on the verge of suicide. Eventually, with the help of some serious nudging in the ribs by his creator Dostoevsky, Raskolnikov seems to choose—in the epilogue of the novel—Sonya’s path of self-sacrifice and renunciation of the ego.

One of the central religious and philosophical questions of the book is the question Raskolnikov puts to Sonya (Part 5, Ch. 5). “If you had to choose who was to die, Luzhin or Katerina Ivanovna, which one would you choose?” Sonya answers that this is God’s business: “Who made me a judge over my fellow human beings?” Of course, Raskolnikov has already judged and chosen whom to kill, has already played God when he committed murder. Sonya is telling him that human beings have no right to make such choices.

But in a way Dostoevsky is begging the question here, since Sonya is made to choose only hypothetically; she is not really forced to choose between a dead Luzhin and a dead Katerina Ivanovna. In reality the question is not so easily resolved as Dostoevsky suggests. In the film “Seven Beauties” by the German filmmaker Lina Wertmuller the German woman commandant in a prison camp forces the Italian prisoner Pasqualini to pick six of his fellow prisoners to be shot. If he refuses to pick six, then the whole barracks will be shot. What would Sonya do?

In refusing to make a choice you may be simultaneously making a choice. This is the central issue in William Styron’s twentieth century novel Sophie’s Choice. Note that the female characters in this novel and in C and P have the same name: Sofya. Sonya is a nickname in Russian for Sofya, and the character’s full name is Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova. In choosing this name for his main heroine Styron certainly must have had Sonya Marmeladova and the question Raskolnikov put to her in mind.

Styron’s Sophie arrives with her two children, a boy and a girl, at a German concentration camp during WW II. One of the guards tells her that she must choose which of the children is to die. She can save one of them, but not both; if she refuses to choose, both children will die. Sophie chooses to send her little daughter to the crematorium, thereby saving her son. Then she spends the rest of her life in agony over the choice she made. This to some extent parallels the way Raskolnikov suffers over his choice to commit murder. Sophie is forced to answer the hypothetical question posed by Raskolnikov to Sonya, and she ends up taking Svidrigailov’s way out: suicide.

                                         

                             Dostoevsky Monument in Moscow, Sergei Merkurov, 1913

Notes to CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Dostoevsky's Insights into the Dark Side of Humanity

Ernst Neizvestny Painting 

Dostoevsky as Psychologist: Insights into the Dark Side of the Human Soul

Some of Dostoevsky’s insights into the darker side of our nature are hard for us to accept; he often sees things we would prefer not to look at. Here are some examples from Crime and Punishment.

      On the morbidity of the human psyche as a relative conception. Dr. Zosimov: “All of us are frequently more or less deranged, with the slight difference that the ‘sick’ are a little more deranged than we, and therefore we must inevitably draw the distinction. But a completely harmonious person, it is true, is hardly to be found; in tens, or perhaps hundreds of thousands you will meet with only one, and then not a very good specimen” (Part 3, Ch. 3).

(

     On Schadenfreude (злорадство), the taking of joy in the misfortunes of others. After the dying Marmeladov—run over by a carriage and trampled by horses—is carried back to his miserable lodgings, all of his fellow miserable lodgers gather around to watch the spectacle, which stars, as usual, the frenetic Katerina Ivanovna. “The lodgers, one after another, began to press back towards the door, with the strange inward glow of satisfaction that is always there, even among his nearest and dearest, when disaster suddenly strikes our neighbor, and from which not one of us is immune, however sincere our pity and sympathy” (Part 2, Ch. 7).

(

      On masochism. Svidrigailov is telling Raskolnikov how he hit his wife, Marfa Petrovna, with a riding switch, and how she reacted with righteous indignation, ordering the carriage to be made ready, so that she could spread her sad tale about the town. “The first thing she did was to order the carriage… Not to mention the fact that it sometimes happens that women are highly gratified at being insulted, in spite of their apparent indignation. It happens with everybody; mankind in general loves to be affronted, have you noticed? But especially women. You might almost say it’s their only amusement” (Part 4, Ch. 1).

( 

      On flattery. Svidrigailov explains how he went about attempting to seduce Dunya. “I put the blame for everything on my destiny, made out that I was avid and greedy for light, and finally brought into play the greatest and most reliable means of subjugating a woman’s heart, which never disappoints anybody and always produces a decisive effect on every single woman, without exception. I mean, of course, flattery. There is nothing in the world harder than straightforwardness, and nothing easier than flattery. In straightforward dealing if there is one hundredth part of a false note, the result is immediate dissonance, and, in consequence, trouble. But in flattery every single note can be false and the effect will be agreeable, and it will be listened to with some pleasure. The pleasure may indeed be somewhat crude, but it is still pleasure for all that. And however gross the flattery may be, at least half of it will certainly seem to be true. This holds for every stage of development and every social level. Even a vestal virgin can be seduced by flattery, not to mention ordinary people” (Part 6, Ch. 4).

(

          On human “broadness of mind.” Svidrigailov again is speaking. “The minds of the Russian people in general are broad, Avdotya Romanovna, like their country, and extraordinarily inclined to the fantastic and chaotic; but it is disastrous to have a broad mind without special genius” (Part 6, Ch. 5). The idea is that human beings can hold both noble and perverse impulses simultaneously in their souls. You may, for example, feel sympathy for the sufferings of your neighbor, while, simultaneously wallowing in Schadenfreude (see # 2 above). In a famous passage from The Brothers Karamazov, Mitya K. declares that “Man is too broad; I’d have him narrower.”

Notes on CRIME AND PUNISHMENT The Petersburg Spirit, the Exultation of Slime

Staircase in St. Petersburg

The Atmosphere of Crime and Punishment: the Decadence of the “Petersburg Spirit”

I find it interesting that C and P is set in mid-summer, a time of bounteous sunlight and warmth in St. Petersburg. When I’m reading this somber novel I always have the feeling that I’m trekking through the St. Petersburg of autumn, with its chill, its cold rain and darkly oppressive air.

“It is possible to speak if not of a school then surely of a Petersburgian genre in Russian literature, of which Dostoevsky is in fact the leading practitioner. Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman is doubtless the outstanding poem in that genre, as Gogol’s “The Overcoat” is the outstanding story and C and P the outstanding novel.” In Russian literature the Petersburg Spirit embodies, largely, gloom, angst, the uncanny and macabre.

“Dostoevsky describes the metropolis in somber colors, taking us into its reeking taverns and coffin-like rooms, bringing to the fore its petty bourgeois and proletarian types, its small shopkeepers and clerks, students, prostitutes, beggars and derelicts. True as this is, there is also something else in Dostoevsky’s vision of Petersburg, a sense not so much of romance as of poetic strangeness, a poetic emotion attached to objects in themselves desolate, a kind of exaltation in the very lostness, loneliness and drabness which the big city imposes on its inhabitants.”

                         Philip Rahv, “Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment”

Dostoevsky was always fascinated by the Haymarket District, one of the slummiest parts of the city in the mid-nineteenth century, with its center on Haymarket Square (Сенная площадь). Here is where Raskolnikov went down on his knees and kissed the earth on his way to confess the murder. In the 1860s Dostoevsky lived in this area, on the corner of Carpenter’s Lane and Little Tradesmen Street. His daughter Lyubov—who was in her own right a character out of a Dostoevsky novel—later described him as roaming about Petersburg in the 1840s, “through the darkest and most deserted streets . . . . . He talked to himself as he walked, gesticulating and causing passersby to turn and look at him.” This makes a good story, but Lyubov probably relied mostly here on the idle rovings of characters out of her father’s works.

In Dostoevsky’s time the Haymarket area had the highest population density in the city. “A local landmark nicknamed the Vyazemsky Monastery was a great block of slums owned by Prince Vyazemsky, which served as the location of the Crystal Palace tavern in C and P” [Adele Lindenmeyr article in Dostoevsky: New Perspectives, p. 100]. There were eighteen taverns on Raskolnikov’s small street [Srednaya Meshchanskaya Street (Little Tradesmen St.)]. In 1865 an official government commission was established to investigate the overcrowding, disease, drunkenness and immorality of the Haymarket District.

After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 peasants migrated to the city, looking for work. This influx strained he city’s already inadequate water supply and health services. Sanitation was bad. There were cholera epidemics. Into the Soviet period, and even after, the city had a reputation for bad drinking water. After one of Raskolnikov’s fainting spells (Part 2, Ch. 1) he comes around to find himself “sitting in a chair, supported by some person on his right, with somebody else on his left holding a dirty tumbler filled with yellowish water.” Yellow, incidentally, is one of Dostoevsky’s favorite colors in C and P, emblematic of the psychic malaise that pervades the novel.

You can still get a pretty good idea of the way things looked in the 1860s if you wander today around the so-called достоевские места (places associated with Dostoevsky, located mostly in close proximity to the Griboedov Canal). Certainly most of the taverns and dives are gone, as are the houses of prostitution, but there is still that same grimness of atmosphere, which has nothing in common with the architectural splendor of the area down by the Neva River, with its Russian baroque or neoclassical buildings. As late as the Soviet period you could still visit the prototype for Raskolnikov’s little coffin of a room, although I doubt if this is possible anymore. A photo taken out of that window provides the cover art on the Norton Critical Edition of C and P.

In Part 6, Ch. 3, Svidrigailov lectures to Raskolnikov on the Petersburg Spirit: “I am sure lots of people in St. Petersburg talk to themselves as they walk about. It’s a town of half-crazy people. If we had any science in this country, the doctors, lawyers and philosophers could conduct very valuable research in St. Petersburg . . . .  There are few places that exercise such strange, harsh and somber influences on the human spirit as St. Petersburg. What can be accomplished by climate alone!”

Sometimes you wonder how much of the malaise belongs to the spirit of the city, and how much of it is Dostoevsky’s own malaise, which he imposes on the city. Here is a description of Raskolnikov out on the streets, greedily breathing “the dusty, foul-smelling, contaminated air of the town,” listening to street singers (Part 2, Ch. 6):

“’Do you like street singing?’ asked Raskolnikov of a passerby, no longer young, and with the look of an idler, who had been standing by him near the organ-grinder. The man looked oddly at him, in great astonishment. ‘I do,’ went on Raskolnikov, with an expression as though he had been speaking of something much more important than street singing; ‘I like to hear singing to a barrel organ on a cold, dark, damp autumn evening—it must be damp—when the faces of all the passersby look greenish and sickly; or, even better, when wet snow is falling, straight down, without any wind, you know, and the gas-lamps shine through it.” 

Here we have an aesthetic exultation in slime, something about Raskolnikov’s sick soul that recalls what he once said about his strange fiancée: “I probably would have loved her even more, had she been lame or hump-backed.”

Among Russian writers Dostoevsky is probably best at describing how something in the human soul can derive artistic inspiration, not only from the beautiful, but also from the deformed and perverse. With the Decadent and Symbolist literary movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries came a lot of writers who portrayed this artistic exaltation of the squalid. Dostoevsky was their precursor, although he was officially still part of the school of Russian Realism.

Notes on CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: The Contrived Scenes, The Emotional Hysteria, The Melodrama

Sonya

Crime and Punishment: The Contrived Scenes, The Emotional Hysteria, The Melodrama

What bothers me most about reading Dostoevsky’s fiction are the melodrama, the overblown hysteria, and the hyper-theatrical staging of the scenes. As the critic Mochulsky has stated, “The principal intrigue is tragic; the accessory intrigues are melodramatic.”

Things are often staged in such a way that key characters are thrown together for key scenes. Certain liberties are taken to make sure that the central personages are properly placed. The well-off Luzhin, e.g., stays in the same lodgings as the Marmeladov family, although it is more than doubtful that even a skinflint such as he is would choose to live in such a low-class tenement. Svidrigailov takes a room right next to Sonya, and this puts him conveniently in a position to sit by the door and eavesdrop, as Raskolnikov pours out his soul to her.

Typical of Dostoevsky’s theater is the scandal scene, involving confrontations between characters, the building of tension in crescendos of hysteria, followed often by a dramatic entrance, which builds the tension still more. Interspersed with all this are a series of explosive incidents, each usually more explosive than the previous one; a final dramatic entrance usually precipitates the loudest and most devastating explosion.

Dostoevsky uses this technique in all of his novels. The best example in C and P is the funeral dinner for Marmeladov (Part 5, Ch. 2 and 3; p. 319-42 in the Norton Critical Edition). The crescendo of hysteria is interrupted by the next chapter, Ch. 4, the climactic scene of the whole novel, in which Raskolnikov confesses to Sonya that he is a murderer, while perverse Svidrigailov sits on the other side of the door, listening and chuckling to his evil self. Then Lebezyatnikov appears, to inform Raskolnikov and Sonya that Katerina Ivanovna has gone mad, and we’re off to the races again. Next comes the wild scene of the crazy woman out on the streets of St. Petersburg, bewailing her fate and forcing her small children to beg.

In the scene of the funeral dinner Dostoevsky brings in squalid background characters—poverty-stricken people who come to the funeral dinner largely because they are starving, and others who are there to gloat over Katerina Ivanovna’s misfortune—thereby providing a background chorus of squabblers, drunks and laughers for the main action, which involves, largely, Katerina Ivanovna’s incessant efforts to retain at least a glimmer of dignity. Dostoevsky is often taken as the most dead serious of writers, but there is always a comic side to the scandal scenes. Dark comedy it is, yes, but comedy nonetheless.

Of course, the main melodramatic intrigue here involves despicable Luzhin’s attempt to frame Sonya, an episode that is worthy of inclusion in the worst pulp fiction of that time. Or, to use another parallel, this is a scene out of a sentimental soap opera today. Here is what Nabokov says about sentimentality in his Lectures on Russian Literature: “Remember that when we speak of sentimentalists, among them Richardson, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, we mean the non-artistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader.”

Therefore, a big problem for me, and not only for me, is Dostoevsky’s frequent overindulgence in emotion, combined with flashy, cheap theatrical effects. With FMD using poor starving children to squeeze out the reader’s tears is a common occurrence. This is what we get with the scene of Katerina Ivanovna and her children on the street. Dostoevsky was already using these kind of effects in his first published novel, Poor People, and he never got completely away from the device.

Another scene that parallels—for sheer melodrama—the scene in which Luzhin accuses Sonya of stealing his money is the confrontation between Svidrigailov and Dunya in Svidrigailov’s room (Part 6, Ch. 5). Here Dunya ends up pulling a gun and shooting at her tormentor, grazing his scalp. This grazing of the scalp thing reminds me of the old Western movies I watched on Saturday afternoons as a child, and frankly, this whole scene is too overblown to be taken seriously.

So much for the weak side of Dostoevsky. But let’s backtrack a bit now. The fact that melodrama and sentimentality lessen the artistic quality of many of FMD’s scenes does not mean that all of his scenes are weak and ineffective. For me the mare beating scene is one of the most hideously effective scenes of violence in all of Russian literature. While horrifying, it is devoid of melodramatic license, as is the scene describing Raskolnikov committing murder—another piece of writing that ranks high in the pantheon of world literature.

Note that these two scenes of violence are central to the main plot, the story of Raskolnikov’s plight. Most of the melodramatic excess comes in scenes more directly concerned with subplots of the novel, where Dostoevsky is much a lesser creative artist. To repeat what Mochulsky wrote: “The principal intrigue is tragic; the accessory intrigues are melodramatic.”

Of course, a big weakness of the novel as a whole is the lack of verisimilitude in the over-sentimentalized prostitute/nun Sonya. She is simply never very believable as a character.

             D. Shmarinov, 1936, Illustration to C and P: Katerina Ivanovna and Her Children

Simon Karlinsky, and Russian Writers, on THE DOWNSIDE OF DOSTOEVSKY: ДОСТОЕВЩИНА

Simon Karlinsky, and Russian Writers, on The Downside of Dostoevsky

Despite my admiration for Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (FMD) as a psychologist and philosopher, there are things I do not appreciate about his fiction. Far from all Russian writers accept Dostoevsky’s greatness. Well-known figures such as Chekhov, Bunin, Tsvetaeva and Nabokov are often contemptuous in their disdain of FMD.

For a thorough account of objections to Dostoevsky’s writings, a good place to start is the article by Simon Karlinsky, “Dostoevsky as Rorschach Test” [originally published in "The New York Times," June 13, 1971; reprinted in The Norton Critical Edition of Crime and Punishment, p. 629-36]. Here are a few quotations from that article.

“All accepted standards of literary criticism and textual analysis tend to break down when applied to Dostoevsky. His prose has always been a magnet for the kind of reader (and commentator) who does not give a hoot about the art of literature, who mistrusts sober observation of reality, and who primarily looks for a reflection of his own self and for a possible vehicle of self-expression in every book he reads.”

Often “neither his biography, nor his general views are familiar to those who modishly bandy his name about. Someone ought to translate the set of disgustingly chauvinistic, jingoist and anti-Semitic poems (yes, poems) that Dostoevsky wrote in the late 1850s, urging that Russia conquer other countries, calling down God’s blessing on Russian conquests and denouncing the Jews as leeches who torture Russia; copies of these poems should be handed out to all the starry-eyed champions of the progressive, revolutionary Dostoevsky. Of course, a simple reading of The Possessed [The Devils] and of The Diary of a Writer might also help.”

“There somehow has to be room for a more balanced appraisal that takes into full cognizance Dostoevsky’s obscurantist, reactionary ideology, the excessively nagging and hysterical tone of his narrators, the cheap and flashy effects with which he stages some of his dramatic confrontations, and the occasional but undeniable sloppiness of his plots and of his Russian style.”

“One of the best kept secrets in Western criticism is that Dostoevsky does not happen to be everyone’s cup of tea. Many intelligent, compassionate, sensitive people find his overheated universe of stormy passions, gratuitous cruelty, tormented children and hysterical women definitely uncongenial.”

“Russian dictionaries list a common noun, derived from the writer’s name, достоевщина (dostoevshchina), which is a derogatory term describing an undesirable mode of behavior. A person guilty of dostoevshchina is being deliberately difficult, hysterical or perverse. Another possible meaning of this word is excessive and morbid preoccupation with one’s own psychological processes. The word, incidentally, is part of the normal Russian vocabulary.”

“Tolstoy tried to reread The Brothers Karamazov in 1910, the year of his death. ‘I’ve started reading it,’ he wrote to one of his correspondents, ‘but I cannot conquer my revulsion for its lack of artistic quality, its frivolity, posturings and wrong-headed attitude toward important matters.’”

“First reading Dostoevsky at age twenty-nine, Anton Chekhov wrote to his publisher Suvorin: ‘It’s all right but much too long and lacking in modesty. Too pretentious.’ In Chekhov’s stories and personal letters, the name of Dostoevsky usually occurs in passages condemning some high-strung, hysterical or hypocritical female.”

During his lifetime Vladimir Nabokov qualified Dostoevsky as “a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar,” “a prophet, a claptrap journalist, and a slapdash comedian,” and “a much overrated sentimental and Gothic novelist.”

But “it was none other than Nabokov who in Lolita gave the world a full-scale treatment of a subject around which Dostoevsky circled like a cat around a saucer of hot milk in novel after novel, only to recoil from it in horror.” Pedophilia.

Notes on CRIME AND PUNISHMENT The Issue of Sensuality:Pedophiles and Perverts

Dostoevsky's Morbid Characters, Representatives of "The Sick World" of FMD

The Issue of Sensuality: Pedophiles and Perverts

Dostoevsky, to put it mildly, writes fiction about the dark side of the human soul. Dostoevsky’s fiction is often sick, and reading too much of it at a time can have a deleterious effect on the reader. If you read Crime and Punishment, thoroughly digest it, take some time off before diving into another long and gut-wrenching Dostoevsky novel.

As one critic, Geir Kjetsaa, has pointed out, “in his [Dostoevsky’s] eyes sexuality was the fundamental condition for the relationship between man and woman.” Kjetsaa quotes from a letter that Dostoevsky wrote to his second wife Anna late in his life: “You think perhaps that this is only one aspect of the matter, the coarsest one even. But there is nothing coarse about it; everything else is dependent on it.”

Pedophilia and the sexual designs of older men on young women are prominently featured in Dostoevsky’s fiction from the very beginning. In his first novel, Poor People, the heroine Varvara breaks the heart of the narrator Devushkin when she makes a marriage of convenience with a man named Bykov. This is much the same situation as that of Dunya and Luzhin in C and P, although Luzhin’s designs on Dunya are foiled and the marriage does not take place. 

Bykov, like Luzhin, is attracted by the idea of exerting sexual control over a young female. The fatuous socialist Lebezyatnikov has similar proclivities. While professing to be selflessly interested in “educating” Sonya Marmeladova in socialist doctrines, while pretending to be interested in her as a representative of the oppressed masses, he also has prurient designs on her.

Probably the most negative character in C and P, Luzhin, a money grubber, incipient capitalist and social climber, is perversely attracted to the idea of possessing Dunya, a proud and attractive girl (she is eighteen). He will pull her, along with her family, out of poverty, so he thinks, and after their marriage she will be his love slave, totally submissive and grateful to him.

The genuine pedophiliac in the novel is Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, who is sexually obsessed with Dunya, and, even worse, involved with very young girls from impoverished families. His first appearance in C and P is foreshadowed by a scene in Part 1, Ch. 4 (p. 39-43 in the Norton Critical Ed.), in which Raskolnikov sees a young drunken girl staggering down the street. She is followed by a plump fop with a lecherous gleam in his eye. Raskolnikov yells at him, “Hey, Svidrigailov, what do you want here?”

Svidrigailov’s actual appearance in the novel comes much later, at the very end of Part 3, when he almost seems to have been conjured up out of one of Raskolnikov’s violent nightmares. Raskolnikov dreams that he is striking the old woman—whom he has already murdered in the waking world—on the head with repetitive blows of the axe, but she just sits there laughing at him. He tries to run, wakes up, but “the dream seemed strangely to be continuing: his door was wide open and on the threshold stood a complete stranger, looking fixedly at him.”

This appearance of Svidrigailov as if out of the hero’s dream suggests that in some weird way he may be an extension of Raskolnikov’s personality, a part of his psyche. As has been emphasized by critics of Dostoevsky’s works, there are frequent doublings of characters. Svidrigailov and Sonya are both something of alter egos of Raskolnikov, she representing his good side, and he representing his evil side.

But in terms of sensuality Svidrigailov and Raskolnikov appear, at first glance, to have nothing in common. Svidrigailov is the supreme sensualist, who can find nothing to believe in except the flesh. He tells Raskolnikov at one point, “I have no confidence in anything but anatomy.” He has come to the conclusion that spirituality, morality, religion, and everything that most people cling to as a justification for living and behaving decently are mere abstractions. Debauchery is, in his ironic view, of positive value, as he tells Raskolnikov.

--Why should I give up women, if I have an inclination for them? It’s something to do, at any rate…

--So all you hope for is a spell of debauchery?

--Well, why not? Debauchery if you will! You seem to like the word! . . . . In ‘debauchery’ there is at least something constant, based on nature, indeed, and not subject to fantasy, something that exists in he blood as an eternal flame, always ready to set one on fire, and not to be readily extinguished, for a long time to come, perhaps for many years. You will agree that in its way it is an occupation (Part 6, Ch. 3).

As sometimes happens in a Hollywood film, a character actor steps into the narrative and begins stealing all the scenes. Svidrigailov steps into C and P very late in the action and almost steals all the attention from the main character Raskolnikov. Dostoevsky here has created probably the most in-depth and complex pedophile in the history of world literature.

Svidrigailov is aware that he is sick. “I agree that it [his pathological sensuality] is a disease.” In his past he is apparently responsible for the death of a deaf and dumb girl, whom Madam Resslich has procured for him, and whom he has abused (see p. 252, 429). He mentions to Raskolnikov his patronage of a thirteen-year-old girl and her mother, and, in the final part of the novel, he has become engaged to a fifteen-year-old. The description of how he visits his bride to be, then takes her up on his lap to fondle, are among the most perversely sensual of Dostoevsky’s writings, and they certainly provided Vladimir Nabokov with some of the material for his own treatment of pedophilia in Lolita. Even worse is Svidrigailov’s dream about a five-year-old girl whom he undresses, and who smiles lewdly at him.

Then again, Svidrigailov is not entirely a negative character. There is something even appealing about him at times. He finally has Dunya, after whom he lusts immeasurably, in his clutches, having lured her to his room with promises to tell her brother’s secret. But then, suppressing his own overwhelming feelings [“In the end I couldn’t bear even to hear the rustle of her dress. Really, I thought that I’d have a fit or something”], he lets her go. 

He provides money to help the Marmeladov orphans; he helps Sonya break free from prostitution. Then, as if realizing that there is no other way out for one whose amorality is an oppressive burden, he shoots himself.

But why do critics consider Svidrigailov a kind of double of Raskolnikov, who is extremely ascetic and appears almost non-sexed? You could approach this question by considering the character of Dunya, who is shown to be very similar to her brother. Svidrigailov tells Raskolnikov, “Avdotya Romanovna is terribly chaste, to a positively unheard-of degree . . . . . She is perhaps even morbidly chaste, and it will do her harm” (Part 6, Ch. 4). The implication is that morbid chastity, the obverse of morbid sensuality, represents another extreme condition. 

Complete renunciation of sexuality, Dostoevsky seems to suggest, is itself a kind of sexual impulse, and there is perhaps something perversely erotic in Dunya’s noble impulse to sacrifice herself by marrying the despicable Luzhin.

What about Raskolnikov, who is also “morbidly chaste”? In the first place, there are indications that Raskolnikov’s suppressed sexuality is not so dissimilar to Svidrigailov’s openly professed sexuality. This is especially apparent in brief mention of his one-time prospective bride, a sick and homely girl, daughter of his landlady. At one point Raskolnikov tells his mother that he “fell in love and wanted to be married.” But the impetus for this so-called “love” is sick and perverse, as only Dostoevsky’s characters seem capable of being.

“She was .  .  . very plain. I don’t really know what attracted me to her; I think it may have been that she was always ill… If she had been lame as well or hump-backed, I might very likely have loved her even more… (He smiled pensively). It was just because… Some kind of vernal delirium…”

So much for true love. There is something here fully as perverse in Raskolnikov’s morbid “love” as in Svidrigailov’s open profession of pathological sensuality and pedophilia. Lust is expressed in many ways, and the bottled-up libido will find an outlet. Some critics see the murder of the two women as a kind of rape, and act of subconscious sexual aggression on Raskolnikov’s part.

What about the love of Raskolnikov and Sonya? Not credible. In the first place, Sonya, the prostitute/nun in C and P is a character with little flesh on her bones. She is much less believable as a character than the lecherous Svidrigailov. And even much less interesting. What she is is Dostoevsky’s representative of the Christian message in the book. But Christian love is sexless, and there is never even a hint of sexuality between “the lovers” Raskolnikov and Sonya. They are, at some point we assume, to be married, but what kind of marriage will this turn out to be? Will Raskolnikov find an outlet for his own perverse sexuality by marrying, in effect, a nun?

Maybe so. We can only assume that in the years of the Russian Civil War Red soldiers—warriors for the cause of atheism—took great voluptuous pleasure in raping nuns. By that time Dostoevsky was no longer alive to write about such things, but had he still been alive he certainly would have been capable of expressing, in fictional art, the feelings of such men. Most important of all, he would have dared to write about such feelings, which more timid literary artists prefer not to touch.

In another novel, The Idiot, Dostoevsky attempted to portray the ideal man, a Christlike innocent devoid of sensuality. But at the end of that novel the hero fails utterly in his attempt to interact with his fellow man and woman; he degenerates into idiocy. There is no place for a sexless man in a world dominated by passion.

Want to see a good example of Dostoevsky’s influence on writers worldwide? Try reading Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” the story of a bible salesman in Georgia with perverse, Dostoevskian inclinations.

                   "Crime and Punishment" Beating a Horse to Death and Killing an Old Woman

ALEKSANDR BLOK, translation into English of "Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека" "Night. Street. Lamplight. Pharmacy"

                                        

                                          Blok's Poem on a Wall in Leiden, Netherlands

Literal Translation

Night, street, streetlight, pharmacy,

A senseless and dim light.

If you live on even a quarter century more

All will be the same. There’s no way out.

You’ll die, and start all over from the beginning,

And everything will be repeated, just as before:

Night, the icy ripple of the canal,

The pharmacy, the street, the streetlight.

d

                                                              Literary Translation/Adaptation

Night. Street. Lamplight. Pharmacy. 

A dim senseless glow all about.

Live twenty more years, look around, what’s to see?

Nothing will change. No way out.

Then die—and all begins over to breathe and to be,    

And the same bleary haze hovers over the damp

Night, icy ripples on canal, floating debris,

The pharmacy, the street, the lamp.

                                                                   Translated by U.R. Bowie, July, 2018

Aleksandr Blok

(1880-1921)

Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,
Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.
Живи еще хоть четверть века -
Все будет так. Исхода нет.

Умрешь - начнешь опять сначала
И повторится все, как встарь:
Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,
Аптека, улица, фонарь.

                                                                                  Oct. 10, 1912

Translator’s Note

According to Korney Chukovsky, Blok had a real Petersburg setting in mind for this poem: the beginning of Officer Street (Офицерская улица, later renamed ул. Декабристов, Decembrist St.), next to the Marinsky Theatre. The pharmacy was that of a man named Vinnikov, and the canal was the Kryukov Canal. Blok himself lived at the other end of Officer/Decembrist Street.

The apartment where he lived, at No. 57, is now a museum dedicated to Blok’s life and works. 

He had moved into this apartment on Oct. 6, 1912, only four days before he wrote this poem. On Oct. 10, 2012, exactly one hundred years after the poem was written, workers at the museum laid out the manuscript, plus the printed version, on the same desk where Blok wrote the poem. The desk belonged originally to his grandmother, the well-known translator Elizaveta Beketova.

Scholars, literary critics and lovers of Blok’s poetry have argued over exactly which pharmacy in St. Petersburg was the prototype for the one in the poem. There is (1) Chukovsky’s variant, the Vinnikov Pharmacy on Blok’s own street (see above), but you cannot see the canal from this location; (2) a pharmacy on the embankment of Krestovsky Island, which, some object, is too far away; and (3) a pharmacy just opposite the Marinsky Theater, which is still there to this day.

Here's another take on the poem, by the famous academician D.S. Likhachev (taken from the Facebook site (in Russian) "Best Poems of Beloved Poets"):

Вот что писал об этом произведении академик Дмитрий Лихачев:

 «В аптеке на углу Большой Зелениной и набережной (ныне набережной Адмирала Лазарева, дом 44) часто оказывалась помощь покушавшимся на самоубийство. Это была мрачная, захолустная аптека. Знаком аптеки служили большие вазы с цветными жидкостями (красной, зеленой, синей и желтой), позади которых в темную пору суток зажигались керосиновые лампы, чтобы можно было легче найти аптеку.

 Берег, на котором стояла аптека, был в те времена низким (сейчас былой деревянный мост заменен на железобетонный, подъезд к нему поднят и окна бывшей аптеки наполовину ушли в землю; аптеки тут уже нет).

 Цветные огни аптеки и стоявший у въезда на мост керосиновый фонарь отражались в воде Малой Невки. «Аптека самоубийц» имела опрокинутое отражение в воде; низкий берег без гранитной набережной как бы разрезал двойное тело аптеки: реальное и опрокинутое в воде, «смертное».

 Стихотворение «Ночь, улица…» состоит из двух четверостиший. Второе четверостишие (отраженно-симметричное к первому) начинается словом «Умрёшь». Если первое четверостишие, относящееся к жизни, начинается словами «Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека», то второе, говорящее о том, что после смерти «повторится всё, как встарь», заканчивается словами, как бы выворачивающими наизнанку начало первого: «Аптека, улица, фонарь». В этом стихотворении содержание его удивительным образом слито с его построением. Изображено отражение в опрокинутом виде улицы, фонаря, аптеки. Это отражение отражено (я намеренно повторяю однокоренные слова — «отражение отражено») в построении стихотворения, а тема смерти оказывается бессмысленным обратным отражением прожитой жизни: «Исхода нет»».

 Лихачев Д. С. , Литература — реальность — литература. Л., 1984. С. 149-155

 

                                                     Smolensk Cemetery, St. Petersburg

Declamation of the Blok poem by Egor Fyodorov

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRtRyVKe9H0


Declamation by Ivan Shtompel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc9Njqr29lE