Russian Attitudes toward Humor and Irony: NIKOLAI GOGOL

Gogol in 1834

 This article originally published in JRL (“Johnson’s Russian List”), June 2, 2009

Russian Attitudes Toward Humor and Irony

(“Russian Mindsets Series,” No. 2)

                                                                               

                                Man Discovers He’s Afflicted with Comic Genius; Man Dies of It

                                                (The Case of Nikolai Gogol, 1809-1852)

“DEAD SOULS was the cenobitic cell where Gogol the monk floundered around, suffering travail and torment, until, finally, he was dragged, lifeless, out of that cell.”

                                                                                    P. V. Annenkov

What better proof is there than the life of Nikolai Gogol of the age-old Russian bias against laughter, especially against the laughter that criticizes, satirizes, or (horror of horrors) gets ironic? Who among Russian writers could, still can, make us laugh like Gogol does? Nobody. Who among Russian writers so invested his best creative fiction with the pure light play of humor? Nobody. Well, maybe the great Aleksandr Pushkin, but Pushkin did his best work in poetry, not prose.

Recently (spring, 2008) St. Petersburg unveiled a new monument to the Nose, central character of the Gogol story, about a nose that escapes from a man’s face and goes off on its own. Prior to this there was an unofficial nose monument, at the crossroads of Voznesensky Prospekt and Rimsky-Korsakov Street, but, true to the rambunctious carnival spirit that the nose story embodies, pranksters repeatedly absconded with that Nose. Do Russians have a sense of humor, do they love to laugh? You bet. But deep in their guts and their national culture they have powerful restrictions against laughter as well.[i]

What Russia once had and what it has long since lost is best described by M.M. Bakhtin in his book about Rabelais and the folk laughter of the Middle Ages. The implications of this book go far beyond Gogol, but we may restrict ourselves, for the time being, to him. Bakhtin’s major points are as follows: (1) Carnival laughter laughs at everything about life. Nothing is sacred. It transcends mere satire, which is didactic and, ultimately, sullen. (2) Gogol’s “positive,”  “bright,” and “elevated” laughter “arose on the basis of the folk culture of laughter.” (3) Deep in the soul of his artistic self the writer-genius Gogol understood the “universal nature of his laughter,” but he was fated to live at a time when somber readers and critics demanded that artistic literature reflect the social problems of the times.[ii]

For Russians the central problem of laughter (the unbridled laughter of freedom) is this: nothing is off limits. This kind of laughter laughs at everything, holds every human being and every human institution up to mockery. Now, even when you do not have a paranoiac thug like Stalin in power, such an attitude, to put it mildly, is dangerous. Of course, when you DO have a Stalin in power, he will slam his dictatorial fist down hard on laughter. The Stalins are not so much non-laughers; they just will not tolerate laughter aimed at themselves. Stalin had a wonderful sense of humor. He enjoyed laughing heartily while outwitting a political opponent, while having people tormented or killed.  

During the entire period of Gogol’s life as a writer another brute was in power: Tsar Nicholas I. Did he want anybody laughing at him or his institutions? Hardly. It is said that Gogol’s comedy, REVIZOR (THE INSPECTOR GENERAL) passed the censorship through the personal intervention of Tsar Nicholas. Maybe. Dictators sometimes like to appear magnanimous. So the story goes, Nicholas attended a performance of the play, laughed throughout it, then declared upon departing the theater: “Well, we all took it on the chin tonight, and me most of all.” Such a story is probably apocryphal. One can imagine Nicholas (or Stalin) attending such a play, then signing an order for the writer’s arrest and torture.[iii]

But the Russian imperative not to laugh is predicated not only on the fact that despots control the country (true, they frequently do). It is predicated, as well, on the whole history of Russian mentalities. It is also an established principle in the thousand-year history of Russian Orthodoxy. For the church, a grave and humorless institution that venerates, e.g., the “gift of tears,” laughter is associated with Russia’s long and formidable history of paganism. Pagans laugh; Christians don’t.

 Much of this is a subject for a separate article, but suffice it to say the following for now: mocking laughter, for Russians, is scary. The kind of laughter that says, “We can deride anything, anybody,” undermines the (always shaky) political and cultural system. It militates against the one thing that Russians have been seeking for a thousand years of their history: stability, or to use the favorite Russian word: poryadok (order). If you don’t have order, what do you have? The most fearful thing of all: anarchy. “Give us anything,” say the Russian people. “Give us, above all, a father figure we can rely on [Peter the Great, a martinet-brute, Nicholas I, a martinet-brute, Stalin, etc., etc.]. Why do we need leaders like this, those whose stature automatically insures their immunity to laughter and mockery? Because they, and only they, can bring us ORDER.”

What is the essence of great art? A difficult question. Great art sometimes amounts to pure unrestricted play as creativity. Not always, but often. In his brilliant book on play in human life, the Dutch historian Huizinga notes that poetry “lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter.” Huizinga goes on to mention that the eighteen century, bathed in the spirit of the Enlightenment, was an age full of lightness and playfulness. Soon this spirit was repressed. “Never had an age [the nineteenth century] taken itself with more portentous seriousness.”

As a result, anyone dancing, laughing, or having raucous fun was equated to the jugglers, mummers, tumblers: low-class marketplace entertainers (and pagans). Of course, the despots like this sort of thing, as long as they are in control of it. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, e.g., had their blasphemous institutions, their court buffoons and entertainer-dwarfs. Stalin even had a double who looked exactly like him. The spirited dictator sometimes used this man to mortify and freak out his subordinates, while Uncle Joe watched from behind a curtain, chuckling merrily.

In terms of Gogol, more to the point is what Huizinga says about how the renowned artistic talents of the eighteenth century DID NOT TAKE THEMSELVES OR LIFE TOO SERIOUSLY: “Even Bach and Mozart could hardly have been aware that they were pursuing anything more than the noblest of pastimes. . . And was it not just this sublime naiveté that enabled them to soar to the heights of perfection?”[iv]

Here is the main point of my article: Gogol HAD that sublime naiveté, then suppressed it within himself and perished. What led him to suppress it? His psychic imprisonment in the cultural and religious oubliette called “Don’t Laugh.”

Russia, unfortunately, missed, for the most part, the sparkling, witty lightness of literary art that came out of eighteenth-century Western Europe.[v] The great Russian tradition of nineteenth century literature, the pride of Russian culture, is, largely, dead serious. The British critic D.J. Richards once made an attempt to classify all Russian writers as either “wits” or “worshippers.” The witty ones, of whom Russia has few representatives, are characterized by playfulness, a lightness of spirit, by elegance of style, and by exhibitionist self-assertion. Wit, says Richards, “went into a rapid decline, however, in the late thirties and early forties” of the nineteenth century, “as control of the Russian intellectual world passed from the French-educated upper class into the hands of the predominantly middle-class and plebeian types. . . The mainstream of Russian literature became committed to the ideals of either religious revival or social progress; moral concerns took predominance over esthetic considerations.” Everything had to be serious and “earnest in tone,” while “self-confident and elegant aristocratic individualism was no longer valued…”

Richards notes that “the wittiest Russian writers of any stature to emerge in the twentieth century were an aristocratic émigré, Nabokov, and two Soviet heretics, Zamyatin and Sinyavsky.” He also, tellingly, mentions “the firmly felt association between wit and apostasy,” and goes on to say that “wit, like the individualism from which it springs, is fundamentally uncongenial to the Russian spirit.”[vi] Richards does not mention another telling fact: that Nabokov is looked upon by many Russians as somehow alien and foreign. They think that he sold out to American literature (because he switched over to writing in English while living in the U.S.), but their major objection is his artistic stance—he is a wit who loves irony, and irony makes them uncomfortable.[vii]

The major point of Richards’ article is that Russians tend to be “worshippers” rather than wits, and that Russian literature usually reflects this attitude. The “worshipper” is dead serious about life, morality, politics, religion. Among the Russian writers who are, primarily, “worshippers” are some of the greats: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Akhmatov, Pasternak, and many others. Richards declares that the outstanding poets Pushkin and Lermontov are undeniably wits, but he has trouble coming up with any more good examples. Both of these poets, furthermore, died before the middle of the nineteenth century (Pushkin in 1837, Lermontov in 1841).

Of those who don’t take life (or themselves) too seriously, I would definitely include Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), a Russian writer who has a sense of measure about everything. Having a sense of measure is not usually characteristic of the Russian writer-“worshipper,” and probably of Russians in general! Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the most famous of all Russian writers, the greatest prose writers, have talent, genius--but who would claim that they have a sense of measure? As for Nikolai Gogol, Richards waffles on this puzzling figure, but what follows below is my take on Gogol, the writer and the man.

               

In the first place, of all Russian writers, Gogol may be the most mysterious. He kept his personal life secret, confiding in practically no one. Once, in a letter, he wrote, “Dushi moej nikto ne mozhet znat’” (“No one can ever know my soul”).[viii] His biographers, who have trouble discovering the usual things biographers discover, seem to agree on one point: that Gogol was a strange character. Furthermore, they imply, or even illustrate (by the letters he wrote) that in his final years he was practically insane. On the background and early years see, e.g., Setchkarev. He provides some details about Gogol’s strange mother, Maria Gogol, who reported that when her future husband was fourteen, the Mother of God appeared to him in a vision and pointed out his future wife (who was her, Maria, then a seven-month-old child). Setcharev also repeats a detailed story told by Gogol to Aleksandra Smirnova, a close friend, about how the future writer drowned a cat when he was five years old. In his creative but outré biography of Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov plays up this sort of thing, although he sometimes goes overboard in embellishing Gogol’s eccentricities.[ix]

               

Central in Gogol’s life, undoubtedly, was the Eastern Orthodox religion; ultimately, it was his religious mania that led to his premature death. In the early years of his life, however, at the time he was developing as a writer, his creative comic genius operated largely unhampered by his religious concerns. Influenced most saliently in his mature period by Aleksandr Pushkin, who was not only a Russian nationalist, but also a creature of the French Enlightenment, Gogol sometimes defended the comic side of his works. This is not to say that he ever comprehended the vast implications of folk laughter (as explicated later by Bakhtin), even though his early works are heavily dependent on the raucous spirit of Ukrainian folklore.

A Ukrainian by birth, Gogol is perhaps the most intuitive artistic genius in the history of Russian literature. By this I mean that he just wrote his fiction, not knowing exactly what he was doing and (at least early on in his career) not anticipating the reaction of his future readers.[x] He enjoyed writing rather odd supernatural tales. He enjoyed writing comedy, making people laugh. Especially after the uproar over his comic play, THE INSPECTOR GENERAL, first staged in 1836, Gogol began to understand that comedy was a genre frequently denigrated, that a lot of people in Russia were offended by his play, and he began to fight back against his critics. In an article titled “After the Theatre” (1842), he asserts that “No one noticed the honest person who was in my play… this honest, noble person is laughter.” Later in the same article he goes on to say that “laughter is bright” and that his denigrators “do not hear the mighty force of such laughter. ‘That which is funny is base,’ says society. Only that pronounced in a severe and tense voice do they call elevated.”[xi]

In the body of his last, and perhaps greatest work of art, DEAD SOULS, Gogol includes a few more passages in defense of comedy and laughter. In one of them, e.g., he writes that “the judgment of contemporaneity does not acknowledge that lofty, rapturous laughter is worthy of taking its place beside the loftiest of lyrical exhalations, and that a huge abyss separates it from the grimacings of a marketplace entertainer!” (Chapter Seven).[xii] Gogol was adamant about calling his work not a novel, but a “poem” (poèma); on the title page of the first published edition “POEM” was the most prominent word.

Quite possibly most of the Russian reading public even today has that same condescending view of humor. Notwithstanding that, anyone who understands artistic literature realizes that beneath the laughing veneer of any great comic work there lies a firm foundation of seriousness, even profundity. Perhaps the best example of this in world literature is Gogol’s DEAD SOULS. Even such a socially-minded critic as Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848), the great Westernizer, who is sometimes criticized for failing to appreciate the aesthetics of literature, understood this. In his review of the novel right after it was published, Belinsky writes that such a work of depth requires a second reading. “It also bears repetition [Belinsky went on] that “humor is accessible only to the deep and highly developed soul; the crowd [rabble] neither understands nor appreciates it. . . The ‘comic’ and ‘humor’ are understood by the majority in Russia as clownish, as caricature. . . I will only say that Gogol was not joking when he called his novel a ‘poem,’ and that by this he does not mean a comic poem. . . One could not look more erroneously on DEAD SOULS or understand it more crudely than to see in it a satire.”[xiii]

Certainly Gogol the artistic genius understood that he was writing something other than mere satire, but Gogol the man, it is apparent, often did not have a clue. When, under the influence of Pushkin (who gave him the plot about buying up dead peasants), Gogol began writing DEAD SOULS in 1835, he had quite a different idea of what it was to become than later on, during its composition: “I was going to begin writing without setting myself any detailed plan. . . I simply thought that the humorous project that Chichikov undertakes[xiv] would in itself lead me to varied persons and characters and that the very desire to laugh, originating within me, would itself create a multitude of humorous phenomena, which I intended to blend with touching ones.”[xv] The first mention of his writing the novel was in a letter to Pushkin (1835). In this letter Gogol promises his literary mentor that the book will be “sil’no smeshon” (hilariously funny).[xvi]

But even in the earliest stages of composing DEAD SOULS, Gogol had already begun to suspect that laughter was simply not sufficient. In his “Author’s Confession” Gogol writes that “After ‘The Inspector General’ I felt more than ever before the need to write a complete work, which would contain not only that which deserves laughter” (cited in Gippius materials, Norton Critical Edition, p. 490). Then again, these assertions may not be entirely believable, because the so-called “Author’s Confession” was written after DEAD SOULS had been published, and Gogol was notorious for presenting simplistic explanations of his complex literary works ex post facto.[xvii] Sometimes such interpretations (such as his explications of the intricate INSPECTOR GENERAL) can vie in their banality with those of the most simplistic teachers of artistic literature.

I have no doubt that many high school teachers in Russia today are still ponderously informing their dozing pupils that Gogol’s DEAD SOULS is a satire, and a realistic portrayal of the lives of Russian landowners in the 1830s. At least they were quite recently. Some of my students at Novgorod University (where I taught as a Fulbright Scholar in 1999-2000) were shocked to learn that the novel (or ‘poem’) was anything other than straight realism. This despite generations of the best critics, Russian and foreign, who have published a multitude of articles and books about the aesthetic genius and complexity of the book.

Of course, it is easy to go to the other extreme (as has Nabokov in his book on Gogol), asserting that DEAD SOULS reflects in no way Russian realities and real Russian types. The real types are there, and characters such as the landowners Sobakevich and Nozdryov are still walking the streets of the Russian realm even today. In fact, when you read about the bribe-takers and swindlers of the novel, you cannot help drawing parallels with similar types in modern Russia. At its basic mode of functioning Russia today still works the same way that the Russia of Gogol’s novel worked. If you would like to be totally cynical about things, you could even make a case that the Chichikovian spirit has taken over the country since the fall of Communism. It sometimes seems that practically everybody (like Chichikov) is out to GET, TO ACQUIRE material wealth: to fulfill the Chichikovian dream of acquisition.

But, then again, this is true of modern America too, oh yes; take a look at what has happened in America quite recently. Maybe it’s true of the whole world? Like any work of literary art, DEAD SOULS has relevance for human beings all over the face of the earth. It is not only about Russians; it is about PEOPLE. That’s one reason the whole world should read it.

Furthermore, swindlers buying up “dead souls” (dead peasants still on the tax rolls) actually existed before the novel was ever written (see the Gippius book, p. 137).[xviii] So DEAD SOULS is realism, but it, ultimately, is much more than that. If it were not it would not be numbered among the greatest creative works in all of world literature.

               

The closest parallel to what Gogol created in DEAD SOULS is Aleksandr Pushkin’s novel in verse, EVGENY ONEGIN (written 1825-1832). It teems with sparkling wit, word play, irony; it indulges itself in digressions, direct address to the reader, and so on. These are the same kinds of devices that Gogol utilized in his gamboling, scintillating novel/poem, and there is little doubt that Pushkin had an enormous influence on Gogol’s longest creation.  

At the time of Pushkin’s death in 1837 Gogol probably was already beginning to lose his own creative bearings. Unlike Pushkin, most of Gogol’s other friends had much more than aesthetics in mind when they spoke of high art. The Aksakovs, for example (not so much father Sergei, but sons Konstantin and Ivan) were affiliated with the Slavophile movement, and they hoped that Gogol would reflect the views of the Slavophiles in his fiction. The greatest critic of the times, Belinsky, on the other hand, was a Westernizer, who championed fiction that expressed views antithetical to those of the Slavophile movement. Belinsky was adamantly opposed to Gogol’s religious bent, but then, even Sergei Aksakov balked at the bizarre sanctimony in the letters he received from Gogol. Himself a man of literary talent, and one who was in close contact with Gogol the whole time he was writing DEAD SOULS, Aksakov became ever more convinced that the writer (in the decade of the 1840s) was succumbing to religious mysticism.

The story of his writing of DEAD SOULS encompasses the last seventeen years of Gogol’s life (1835-1852). The novel’s history encompasses a grand total of twenty years (if we take into account that the fragments of the second part of the book were published only in 1855). Gogol, who died in his early forties, devoted a large portion of his life to his preoccupation with dead souls and DEAD SOULS. It is generally assumed that he perished of his failed attempt to animate dead souls, to make something living out of them. How and why he perished, however, is a complicated issue. To put it simply, Gogol was ruined by (1) the tenor of the times in Russian intellectual circles, the imperative that literature be serious and morally edifying (2) the prevailing interdiction of laughter in a thousand years of Russian history (3) his own strong personal belief in the devil.

               

By the time that Nikolai Gogol lived (and especially later on, in the second half of the nineteenth century) probably the majority of Russian writers, thinkers, intellectuals were secular in their views. They were not actively practicing Christians, as was Gogol, a man whose piousness went (eventually) to extremes. Furthermore, as pointed out repeatedly by critics, the devil played a special role in Gogol’s life. Two examples: (1) Edmund Wilson: “It was always the Devil who appeared to him, never the Savior he hoped for” (Wilson article in Norton Critical Edition of DEAD SOULS, p. 546) (2) Vladimir Nabokov: “the Devil, in whose existence. . . Gogol believed far more seriously than he did in that of God” (Nabokov, NIKOLAI GOGOL, p. 73). Practically all of Gogol’s works are rife with mention of the devil, invocations of the devil, even appearances of the devil.

               

In the early years of his writing career, Gogol found ways to make the devil comic, to laugh off his influence. Throughout most of his career he did things in his art that Pushkin would find risible, but that church authorities would frown upon. For example, in his famous short story “The Overcoat,” Gogol gives his hapless lead character the name of an obscure Orthodox martyr, Akakij, whose saint’s day is celebrated on May 20. What’s more significant, he names Akakij after Akakij’s father. The character, consequently, became “Akakij Akakievich,” a name that is ludicrous and funny, a name, what’s more, that has strong scatological overtones (“kaka” or “kakashka”, in Russian, means “crap”). The religious believer in Gogol would never sanction taking a saint’s name and making a mockery of it, but the writer of comic fiction reveled in this sort of thing.

               

At his best Gogol, like Pushkin, was an ironist, not a satirist. For satire in Russian literature read Saltykov-Shechdrin (1826-1889). What’s the difference between satire and irony? The main difference is that the satirist, sphincter muscles tightly clenched, goes about castigating evil doers and evil institutions in no uncertain terms. When you read a satirist, you can tell the good guys from the bad. The ironist (or, to use Richards’ formula, the wit) takes nothing seriously, holds up all truths to doubt, laughs lightly, tolerantly at human foibles.

Some readers of the 1840s denigrated Gogol’s greedy landowner types, as portrayed in DEAD SOULS. Some of them protested that the author had depicted only negative, venal types. They called for some positive characters. Such readers, unfortunately, have always been around, and I suppose they always will be. They are the readers with little of no sense of humor.

Is a personage such as the bear-like Sobakevich to be taken as an accurate portrayal of a real grasping and greedy Russian landowner of the times? Only to a limited extent. Do you feel like spitting in disgust in the presence of Sobakevich? Not really. The laughter gets in the way. Sobakevich is so FUNNY that the reader comes to appreciate him. Furthermore, in a totally unexpected move, Gogol makes Sobakevich into a kind of poet, who goes into poetic raptures when he describes (and by so doing resurrects) the dead peasants who once lived on his estate.

As mentioned above, the ironist is a threat to established institutions. He who gets people laughing at EVERYTHING is a potential apostate and troublemaker. Throughout a thousand years of Russian history laughter has always been closely associated with FEAR, and fear of his own talent overwhelmed Gogol in the latter years of his life. As Donald Fanger writes, the late Gogol “seems to have half agreed with the popular Russian assumption that derision bespeaks sinfulness (U nas smekh prinimajut za grekh, sledovatel’no, vsjakij nasmeshnik dolzhen byt’ velikij greshnik [With us laughter is taken to be sinful; consequently, he who sneers and gibes must be a great sinner].”[xix] Gogol’s main personal problem was this: GOD does not appreciate irony. At least most true believers believe that, and Gogol was a true believer.

               

In the early years of his writing career Gogol was blithely unaware of what Mann (p. 8) has called his “problema ‘veselosti’” (problem of ‘merriment’). But soon after the clamor resulting from the premier of THE INSPECTOR GENERAL (1836), Gogol fled abroad. He did not like controversy, and he wanted to be left alone, to commune with his odd characters and his eccentric art. For years he travelled incessantly throughout Europe, skipping from city to city, from country to country. This, apparently, was the time period when he began pondering deeply on the influence his works had had on the Russian reading or viewing public. In a letter (1836) to his friend and fellow writer Zhukovsky, the messianic tone of so many later letters is already there: “I swear that I’ll do something the ordinary person cannot do. I feel the strength of a lion in my soul. . .” (cited in Mann, p. 27).

The rest of Gogol’s life consisted of his frenetic travels, from one European locale to another, while writing DEAD SOULS and while sending his friends grandiloquent letters: about his holy mission, about how he was an instrument of God, about how the completion of the book (in three volumes) would “solve the riddle of my very existence.”

               

In other words, even before Vol I. (actually, the only extant volume) of Dead Souls was finished and published (1842), Gogol was dreaming grandiose dreams of what he would accomplish in its sequels. In late drafts of the first volume he added lyrical digressions, in which an author-narrator persona dreams lofty dreams about the future of Russia. In the text of the novel (“poem”) itself, he promised his reader that great things were to be accomplished in future volumes. In a word, it wasn’t just going to be about humor any more, and the characters were no longer going to be venal and funny (the only kind of characters that Gogol knew how to write). The lofty and portentous question posed at the end of Vol. I, “Russian, whither dost thou hasten” (“Rus’, kuda zh neseshsja ty?”) would be answered in volumes to come.

Gogol spent the rest of his life trying (failing) to write Vol. II, while making promises (to himself, to his friends, his readers, to everybody) about how great it would be, even transformative, when he finally got it done.

By this time Nikolai Gogol was no longer a mere writer in his own mind; he was God’s servitor, a kind of ascetic and monk, bent on fulfilling “khudozhnicheskij podvig” (an artistic feat of religious import—these are Mann’s words, p. 32). As for laughter, that light ironic laughter characteristic of his best writing, well, that just would not do any more. In his “Author’s Confession” Gogol writes, tellingly, “I saw that I was laughing in vain and to no purpose in my works, without knowing why myself. If one is to laugh, then it’s better to laugh powerfully, and at something that is really worthy of universal ridicule” (Cited in Norton Critical Edition, p. 482-83; the original Russian may be found in COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 6, 442-43.)

In other words, “Let me be a satirist,” said Gogol (to himself). His comic genius, however, dug in its heels: “No! You’re an IRONIST.”

Even after the writer had firmly resolved to be a preacher of morality and a castigator of human depravity, the comic genius was still alive in him. Just read his description (in a letter to P.A. Pletnyov, Jan. 7, 1842) of the meeting of the Moscow censorship committee, whose members had come together to decide whether the first volume of DEAD SOULS could be printed (for the Russian, see Mann, p. 111-114; for the English, see Norton Critical Edition, p. 427-430). One censor declares that the manuscript must be prohibited because “the soul is immortal.” It cannot, consequently be “dead.” In selecting such a title for his book, the blasphemous author denies the religious truth of immortality. Another censor is certain that the book is an attempt to bring down the whole system of serfdom. A third censor fulminates that if we let this book be printed, why, people will get bad ideas: they’ll start going out and buying dead souls themselves [they already, by the way, were doing so! See above], while a fourth declares that the sum charged for dead souls in the book is minuscule; after all, these are human souls that once lived, existed! We depict people selling them for two and a half rubles, and after that not a single foreigner will ever want to visit our benighted country again!

               

Some critics suspect that such a meeting of the censors was never even held (see Mann, p. 114), and that Gogol let his comic genius run wild when describing that nonexistent meeting in his letter to Pletnyov. I believe it. This is just too good, too much like a scene out of  THE INSPECTOR GENERAL. Gogol made it all up in his febrile imagination.

               

Gogol’s last great work, DEAD SOULS (Vol. I) is a novel written while making promises about a still better novel, while already straining ahead, making notes and plotting out scenes for that BETTER novel, the one that would turn the whole universe up on its ear and would, as Gogol said, “solve the riddle of my existence.” The first volume was published in 1842. After that, Gogol spent years wandering around Europe again, trying to write a sequel. During this time it became obvious (probably even to Gogol himself, who was awash in delusions of grandeur) that he had made too many grandiose promises about where he would take his dead souls. Now he even began criticizing the only published volume of DEAD SOULS, declaring that he could have got the thing right, had he worked it over to his satisfaction.

               

As the impossibility of his religious mission became ever more apparent, Gogol’s health declined. No one has ever clearly diagnosed his ailments. He often complained of problems with his stomach, of hemorrhoids and digestive disorders. For years he acted like a hypochondriac. It seems obvious that some chronic nervous condition contributed to his physical illnesses. He could only feel well if his writing was going well, and, unfortunately, after the publication of Vol. I of his “poem,” the writing seldom went well. The nervous illness flared up in June, 1840, then again in the winter and spring of 1845. At that time, in the midst of another frantic flurry of travel around Europe, Gogol wrote (May, 1845) to I.I. Bazarov, the Father Superior of the Russian Orthodox Church in Germany, as follows: “Come to me and give me the sacrament; I’m dying.” Shortly after this he burned the manuscript for the second volume of his novel. There were several burnings, and each was associated with emotional problems (see, e.g., Mann, p. 85-86, 219-220).

               

Since May, 1842, Gogol had been writing his friends about his intention to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to the Holy Sepulcher of Jesus Christ. At first he thought he would put this off until he finished the second volume of DEAD SOULS. The pilgrimage would be the crowning event of his personal life, after the triumph of his life as a writer. Eventually he went anyway (early 1848), aware probably that he would never finish the “poem.” He derived little religious inspiration, however, from his visit to the Holy Land, and he returned to Russia disillusioned.

Gogol wrote a series of admonitory letters to friends in the last ten years of his life. Some of these were eventually published in SELECTED PASSAGES FROM LETTERS TO FRIENDS (1847). In reading many of these letters today, you sense an air of derangement. They manifest none of the Gogolian lightness of tone, none of the comic genius that shows up, almost automatically, in his best fiction. These are letters composed by a sort of monk, a writer who had come to believe that his own genius for comedy was of the devil.

               

The definitive act came on the night of Feb. 11, 1852, in Moscow. In the fireplace at his quarters (in the house of  Count A.P. Tolstoy, today a museum devoted to Gogol), the writer burned his whole manuscript for Vol. II of DEAD SOULS. Then, returning to his room, he crossed himself, lay on the sofa and burst into tears. By this time he was keeping the Orthodox fast periods religiously, eating no meat during the Lenten Fast, seldom eating fish. At some point he seems to have made the decision that if the poem could not be completed, then it was time to die. He stopped eating practically anything, and, in effect, he committed suicide by starving himself to death. Nikolai Gogol died on Feb. 21, 1852. He was just shy of forty-three years old.

               

What did he leave us, those who still read him two hundred years after the year of his birth? To enumerate just the high points: he left us the greatest play in the history of Russian literature and one of the greatest comic plays ever written anywhere: THE INSPECTOR GENERAL. He left us one of the greatest short stories of world literature, “The Overcoat.” Some consider this the greatest story in Russian literature. And then there is that one volume of what, eventually, was supposed to be three, the book within which he waged war with himself and (inevitably) lost that war: DEAD SOULS.

               

After the final burning in 1852, after his death, friends of Gogol found some drafts stuffed back in a cabinet. These chapters were eventually published as Part II of DEAD SOULS (in 1855). But it is a mistake to take drafts left behind and publish them as the genuine thing. All we really have of DEAD SOULS is Vol. I. We should call this (and only this) DEAD SOULS. The uncompleted drafts should be left for the lucubrations of literary scholars. The reader, even the most intelligent reader, will do better to concentrate only on DEAD SOULS.

Of course, Gogol failed in his effort to write a work of fiction that would explain the meaning of life. No work of fiction can do that. But DEAD SOULS (Vol. 1, the only volume) is not a failure; it is a creative masterpiece, the work of a comic genius. What makes it a masterpiece? Ah, there’s the rub. We cannot give a definitive answer to that question, because artistic literature resists being defined. Artistic literature expands out in all directions, opens itself up to a variety of interpretations. Here, however, are a few questions posed by hypothetical puzzled readers. My answers are based on the spirit of the book itself and on the opinions of various critics.

                                                                                FAQ

(1)     What is the plot of DEAD SOULS?

Well, it’s about this swindler, Chichikov, who is traveling around provincial Russian buying up the rights to dead peasants, and then he ends up driving into a certain town, where two “Russian muzhiks,” who are lollygagging outside a tavern, take note of the wheel on his chaise as he drives in. “You reckon that wheel, with a little bit of luck, would make it to Moscow?” says one of the peasants. “Yeah, I figure it would,” replies to other. “But, way I see it, it wouldn’t make Kazan,” said the first, and the other agreed: “Not Kazan, no way.” This scene has no relevance until hundreds of pages later, when Chichikov is in a panic to flee the town, and the chaise (including that bad wheel) is in no shape to travel. As for the provincial town itself, well, everybody who lives there (I mean everybody) is double-dealing, corrupt, vacuous. In the first chapters Chichikov makes a series of visits to local landowners, buying up their dead souls. One of them (Korobochka), by the way, had a blacksmith who died of spontaneous combustion, and then, much later, back in town, the public prosecutor, who is notable only for one beetling brow and a blinking eye, suddenly dies of fear (over all the wild crescendo of gossip generated by Chichikov’s interest in dead souls), and then we find out (for the first time) that the prosecutor himself had a soul (now that he has “given up the ghost”), since he certainly manifested no evidence of a soul before he died, plus which an old shameful episode, long swept under the rug, comes to light again, concerning some merchants from Solvychegodsk, who had come to town for a fair, then had thrown a party for some friends, merchants from Oostsysolsk, and, of course the whole thing ended up in a knock-down-drag-out brawl, and all the poor Oostsysolsk merchants ended up dead, but not before their outsized fists had inflicted enormous damage on the Solvychegodsk merchants (one of whom had his “kisser smashed all out of kilter),” etc., etc., etc.

So much for the plot. Gogol’s method sometimes recalls that of Sterne in his masterpiece of digression and irrelevant detail, TRISTRAM SHANDY. “Gogol’s prose seems ripe to bursting with too many other preoccupations to bother about plot.”[xx]

(2)     What is the theme of DEAD SOULS?

“The theme at its broadest is the amorphousness, characterlessness, purposelessness, senselessness, alternately ludicrous and ominious, of life—specifically Russian life in the first place—as material for a novelist.”[xxi]

(3)     Huh? You mean THAT’S what the book is about?

Well, the book is metafiction: a book about itself, “a book written about how it is written.”[xxii] The author gets in a brichka (traveling chaise) with his main character Chichikov, and they travel around Russia. The reader of the book tags along with them as well. Chichikov buys dead souls, while the author describes nature, gets into lofty moods, soars off into the ether in an attempt to escape the muck and mud puddles of Russian reality (but his character, Chichikov, keeps grabbing him by the leg and pulling him back down to earth), sentimentalizes over lost youth (or is this a parody of such sentimental passages?), exalts his country and its future (is he serious about this, in a book full of grotesquely negative characters and Russian sleaze, all presented in wildly comic prose?), talks about how he’s writing his book, while, simultaneously, promising his reader that the next volume, and the one after that, will be much better than the one he’s writing now. Then, at the end of the book, not knowing what else to do, the author and Chichikov rise up in the air in their troika (they leave room for the reader in that brichka too). They/we all fly like birds, out of the book, in a swirl of exalted rhetoric, while foreigners stand by open-mouthed and gape, flabbergasted, at whatever this is (the future glory of Russia?).

(4)     Yeah… Okay… But what does the title mean? What are dead souls?

The title is all-expansive, and dead souls are just about anything you may want to make them. One creative critic (Nabokov, p. 73) says that Chichikov is a traveling salesman from Hades. Satan employs him to journey around the Russian realm, buying up or collecting human souls. He takes both living souls and dead souls, but then, Gogol makes it clear that there’s no real way of distinguishing a living soul from a dead soul. In fact, the most ALIVE characters in the novel, the most vibrant, are the dead peasants (souls) that are reanimated in (first) Sobakevich’s imagination and (later) in Chichikov’s. Who’s dead and who’s alive? What’s really real and what is fictional about this life we live? God knows. After all, how can anybody claim that he/she has a grip on “life,” when we don’t know where we came from, and we don’t know where we’re going (and when), and we don’t really even have more than a tentative grasp on what we’re supposed to do while we’re here! And, speaking of God, YOU, reader, are a dead soul too, so it’s time to think about getting right with the Lord!

(5)     Why does Gogol insert the story about Captain Kopeikin? You know, the tale that the postmaster tells near the end? About this veteran of the fight against Napoleon? Who returns to Russia minus one arm and one leg and tries to get some kind of pension and then, when they refuse him his pension, he becomes a one-armed, one-legged highwayman, and who is, in the opinion of the postmaster, none other than Chichikov himself (until somebody mentions that Chichikov has two arms and two legs, and the postmaster slaps himself on the forehead and calls himself a goose). Others in the town, meanwhile, have decided that Chichikov is really Napoleon in disguise, or the Antichrist. Hoping to learn the truth about Chichikov, and nothing but the truth, the town officials finally decide to consult the most unreliable source around, the compulsive liar Nozdryov, who lies and does nothing but lie, for the sheer joy of fabrication.

Why Kopeikin? Well, I don’t know, but Gogol did insist on leaving this part in the book when the censors wanted it out; his artistic side knew that we couldn’t do without Kopeikin. I don’t think that Gogol himself knew why, though. Anyway, “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” is wonderful!

This is enough to give those who have not read DEAD SOULS the incentive to begin. Among the readers who have NOT yet read DEAD SOULS, by the way, are most Russians, who have the book foisted upon them in school, where it is most often presented by unimaginative and deadly boring teachers of Russian literature. A good palliative to such pedagogues is provided by the best critics who have studied the intricate novel/poem. Many of them are mentioned in my endnotes, but I would like to make special mention of the great Yury Mann, who has spent over forty years writing articles and books on Gogol, and, as far as I know, is still at it.

For all that, however, you have to do it by yourself, reader. You have to get in there and engage with the Master, Nikolai Vasil’evich. Don’t worry if you can’t read Russian. True, Gogol’s skewed style is almost impossible to translate with exactitude, but enough of the skewiness, and the artistic genius, comes through in a good translation.[xxiii]

You’ll have to read slowly. Gogol’s style is not exactly modern or minimalist. Try reading Melville’s MOBY-DICK first; that would be good preparation. One last thing: don’t forget to laugh while you’re at it. Gogol, the real Gogol (the artistic genius) wanted his reader laughing as he/she rode through an imaginary Russia with the author/narrator and Chichikov in a brichka. Though he himself may not have been totally aware of this, Gogol (at least one side of him) even wanted his reader laughing the unbridled, soul-bracing folk laughter that Bakhtin has described.

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[i] There is a picture of the new Nose Monument in Russian Life (Mar.-Apr., 2009); see contents page. This statue is located on the grounds of St. Petersburg University. As of this writing the original nose monument (a bas relief consisting of a pair of huge nostrils and labeled “Mayor Kovalyov’s Nose”) is still there on the street corner in St. Petersburg. It is, apparently, the work of V. Bukchaev, and was first stuck up on the façade of a building in 1994 or 1995.

[ii] Bakhtin’s book is TVORCHESTVO FRANCOIS RABELAIS i NARODNAJA KULTURA SREDNEVEKOV’JA i RENNESSANSA (Moscow, 1965). There is an English translation by Helene Iswolsky, RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD (M.I.T. Press, 1968 and Indiana University Press, 1965). I have quoted here from an excerpt, “Verbal Art and the Folk Culture of Laughter,” in Nikolai Gogol, DEAD SOULS (Norton Critical Edition, 1985), p. 569-577.

[iii] Another of Stalin’s favorite games was to leave a writer on tenterhooks. Instead of arresting him immediately, he played games with him, leaving him to sweat in the sleepless nights, never knowing when they were coming for him. Mikhail Bulgakov, one of whose plays Stalin liked, was such a writer.

[iv] Johan Huizinga, HOMO LUDENS: A STUDY OF THE PLAY ELEMENT IN CULTURE (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950), p. 119, 192, 189.

[v] Some of this spirit came into Russia by way of pictorial art and architecture, e.g., the Russian Baroque. A good example of lightness and irony in St. Petersburg architecture is the pseudo-Gothic Chesmenskaja tserkov’ (Çesme Church), a small airy structure built 1777-1780.

[vi] D.J. Richards, “Wit and Worship—Two Impulses in Modern Russian Literature,” Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 14 (Winter, 1976), p. 8, 10-11.

[vii] Ivan Bunin, the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1933), is very much (in Richards’ formulation) a “worshipper.” Bunin once called Nabokov, his younger émigré colleague, “the red-headed clown in the circus.” See Ivan Bunin, NIGHT OF DENIAL, translated by R. Bowie (Northwestern University Press, 2006), p. 682, 704.

[viii] Cited in Yu. Mann, V POISKAKH ZHIVOJ DUSHI: “MERTVYE DUSHI” [IN SEARCH OF A LIVING SOUL: “DEAD SOULS”] (Moscow: “Kniga,” 1984), p. 253.

[ix] Vsevolod Setchkarev, GOGOL: HIS LIFE AND WORKS, translated from the German by Robert Kramer (New York University, 1965), p. 5, 8. Vladimir Nabokov, NIKOLAI GOGOL (N.Y.: New Directions, 1944). On the way Nabokov purports to write a book about Gogol, while simultaneously espousing his own artistic principles, see Robert Bowie, “Nabokov’s Influence on Gogol,” JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE, 13 (July, 1986), p. 251-66.

[x] When I say he was an intuitive writer, I am not implying that the words just flowed out on the page, from some magic spot in Gogol’s brain, and what flowed out was already art. Gogol the artist was a perfectionist; he wrote and rewrote his fictions over and over, altering, polishing, re-writing, polishing.

[xi] Cited in the Bakhtin excerpt, “Verbal Art and the Folk Culture of Laughter,” in Norton Critical Edition of DEAD SOULS, p. 572.

[xii] It is axiomatic in Russian literary criticism to point out the oddness (sometimes even incorrectness) of Gogol’s style. In the passage I cite here lofty laughter is compared to the actions of a medieval folk jester who is pulling silly faces. This is a stylistic solecism: comparing apples to oranges. Russian émigrés have often stressed the impossibility of translating Gogol’s skewed Russian. The above passage reads as follows in Russian: “ibo ne priznayot sovremmennyj sud, chto vysokyj vostorzhennyj smekh dostoin stat’ rjadom s vysokim liricheskim dvizhen’em i chto tselaja propast’ mezhdu nim i krivljan’em balagannogo skomorokha!” (from COLLECTED WORKS IN SEVEN VOLUMES, Vol. 5, Moscow, 1967, p. 157).

[xiii] V.G. Belinsky cited in Norton Critical Edition of DEAD SOULS, p. 455. For the Russian, see Mann, p. 156.

[xiv] For those who have not read the novel: the plot centers upon a kind of picaresque. The anti-hero Chichikov, a swindler, shows up in a provincial town. He is journeying around Russia, seeking to buy up the legal rights to peasants who still exist on paper (until the next census is taken), but who have died (who are dead peasants, called “dead souls”). He hopes to take out a mortgage on some property in a remote province, using the dead souls as collateral.

[xv] V.V. Gippius cited in Norton Critical Edition, p. 490. Vasilij Gippius is one of the most perceptive critics of Gogol. His book, GOGOL’, originally printed by the “Mysl’ Press (Leningrad, 1924) was reissued in the Brown University Slavic Reprint Series in 1963, 1966 (in Russian).

[xvi] Cited in Juryj Mann, V POISKAKH ZHIVOJ DUSHI, p. 7.

[xvii] “An Author’s Confession” (Avtorskaja ispoved’) is an arbitrary title for a document published posthumously (1855). The original manuscript was untitled. Gogol’ wrote these materials in May-June, 1847, at the time early comments on his SELECTED PASSAGES FROM CORRESPONDENCE WITH FRIENDS had begun appearing. See COLLECTED WORKS IN SEVEN VOLUMES, Vol. VI (Moscow, 1967), p. 588.

[xviii] Gippius is especially good at showing the novel as more than word play and scintillating wit. He discusses in some detail the satire and the topical themes. See, e.g., the Norton Critical Edition, p. 494, 506-07.

[xix] Donald Fanger, THE CREATION OF NIKOLAI GOGOL (Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 231. The citation in Russian is from a letter that Gogol’s friend Zhukovsky wrote to Aleksandra Smirnova, January 4, 1845.

[xx] John Bayley, “Under the Overcoat,” NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, March 18, 1999, p. 24.

[xxi] Donald Fanger, THE CREATION OF NIKOLAI GOGOL.

[xxii] Andrej Sinjavksij, V TENI GOGOL’JA [IN GOGOL’S SHADOW] (Paris: 1975).

[xxiii] The Norton Critical Edition of DEAD SOULS (edited by George Gibian, translation by George Reavey) is especially valuable for the reader of English, in that it includes background sources (among them, some of Gogol’s wackiest letters) and selections from many of the best critics.

Book Review: DAVID BEZMOZGIS, "The Betrayers"

BOOK REVIEW

David Bezmozgis, The Betrayers (NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2014)

The book begins with a Russian expression on a young woman’s face. A pretty blonde woman working as hotel clerk in Yalta is berated by a young woman from Israel, who insists she be given a room. The clerk “endured the assault with a stiff, mulish expression. A particularly Russian sort of expression, Kotler thought. The morose, disdainful expression with which the Russians had greeted their various invaders. An expression that denoted an irrational, mortal refusal to capitulate—the pride and bane of the Russian people” (3).

The author fails to explain that this mask of moroseness is the default look of any Russian walking any street, in Russia or elsewhere, and whether under immediate attack or not. And, as the rest of this book demonstrates, Russians—and Ukrainians, basically the same thing—have a thousand years of bloody and brutal history, during which time they have learned that adversity is always near at hand, which adversity must be kept at bay with that morose face. At one time I was innocent enough to believe this to be a Soviet face. Not so. It was there long before Lenin and his henchmen came along, and it remains the same now that the Great Experiment is dead and buried.

The main protagonist of the story, an Israeli, Baruch Kotler, knows Russia and Russian adversity well, since he was born in the Soviet Union under the name Boris Solomonovich Kotler. Almost all of the Russian Jews in this novel have new names now, in accord with their having attained to what at one time they thought of as the promised land of Zion (which, when they arrived, turned out to be not quite Zion after all). But that is one big message of the book: that there is no promised land. You can change your name, you can emigrate to another country, but the Russianness is still in your blood. Can you take that look off your face? Go to Israel and get on a bus. The look will be there in a seat or hanging from a strap, at least if there is one Russian Jew on the bus.

The novel’s title is especially appropriate, since the story line treats betrayals of various sorts. The reader is unware at the beginning, but by the end of the novel the author has made clear that even a person steeped in rectitude is hard put to get through life without betraying someone or something. Prominent is the story of Kotler and his betrayer, Vladimir Tankilevich—who now goes by “Chaim,” and who once was Vladimir Tarasov, courtesy of the KGB. Kotler lived in the USSR for years as a refusenik, denied permission to emigrate to Israel. His wife Miriam was allowed to emigrate, but he remained. Then his roommate Tankilevich, in an attempt to save his own scapegrace brother, gave in to KGB pressure and denounced Kotler as a traitor. He was arrested and spent thirteen years imprisoned, before finally being released. Greeted in Israel as a national hero, Kotler made a new life for himself there as a political operative, an famous politician. He and Miriam achieved the dream of having children who “dream their dreams in Hebrew” (190).

As the book begins, however, another betrayal is in the works. Kotler, now a bald, pot-bellied man in his sixties, has fallen for a young woman (once Lena, now Leora) and betrayed his wife. At the very moment that he is embroiled in a controversial political fight over withdrawing Israelis by force from the settlements—Kotler is opposed to giving these lands back to the Palestinians—politicians on the other side attempt to compromise him with photographs of Kotler in the company of Leora.

The more things change the more they stay the same. This is another theme of The Betrayers. The intelligence agent who meets with Kotler in an attempt to blackmail him, identified only as Amnon, uses pure KGB tactics (28-31). The political scene in Israel “at the best of times is no place for gentle souls” (27). Himself an ironist, Kotler is constantly aware of the irony implicit in his situation. As the book opens he and Leora, in an attempt to flee the personal scandal and the political turmoil, fly to Yalta for something of a vacation. Meanwhile (one more irony) Kotler’s son Benzion, doing his military service, is forced to evacuate the settlers, which puts him at odds with his conscience. Near the end of the novel he turns out to be one of the non-betrayers in the story, when he deliberately wounds himself to avoid herding out the settlers.

Upon their arrival in Yalta, Kotler and Leora walk into the biggest irony of all. By pure coincidence they take rooms in the house of the very man responsible (in a roundabout way) for their being together: Tankilevich the betrayer. At one point Tankilevich’s wife Svetlana—one of the few main characters who is not Jewish; she is an Orthodox believer—makes much of how God, possibly in answer to her prayers, has arranged for this meeting of the old antagonists. A believer in the Zionist dream (or at least once he was), Kotler is not much of a believer in God, and his present predicament rather suggests the old story about God’s nasty brother. Once in a while, so the tale goes, God needs a vacation, so he leaves things in control of his evil finagling brother while He is away.

That mean little brother, sometimes it appears that he is in charge nearly all the time, while the weary Lord perpetually vacations.  The brother laughs and grins his evil grin as he goes about his scheming, screwing things up right and left, both in the personal lives of people and in the political fortunes of countries. The biggest swindle of all depicted in The Betrayers is, in cosmological terms, what came out of the collapse of the Soviet Union: the new “free and democratic” Russia, the new “free and democratic” Ukraine, and so on fifteen times in all (for the fifteen “new, free and democratic” countries left over from the Soviet republics). As always in the broad scope of Russian history, a few swindlers are in like Flynn, but a huge percentage of the common people are screwed. “From one grand deception to another was their lot. First the Soviet sham, then the capitalist. For the ordinary citizen these are just two different varieties of poison. The current variety served in a nicer bottle” (97). But, of course, for Russians the Soviet sham was not the first. In the grand schema of Russian history there were a plethora of shams long before Communism came along.

The author’s description of Crimea could be the description of practically anywhere in post-Soviet provincial Russia or Ukraine: “cement bus shelters and the blank-eyed men who sat on their haunches beside them” (60). The only thing missing in this book is the alcohol, which, for some reason, Bezmozgis fails to feature. At least half of those blank-eyed men on their haunches (smoking, always smoking) will be drunk. The Russian reality: lots of things have changed in the past thousand years, but, essentially, nothing has changed. This revelation comes on page 4, but the whole rest of the book demonstrates its truth. Of course, the Russian Jews depicted in Yalta and Simferopol are no better off than the Russians or the Crimean Tartars there, but oppressed people are spiteful to extremes, so the oppressed Russians, naturally, hate the oppressed Jews and Tartars, who, naturally, hate the oppressed Russians and Jews, etc. Since this book was published Crimea has gone back to Russia, but you can bet that the people of the Crimean Peninsula are living with the same problems as always.

“What does a Jew do? A Jew gets by” (cited in Hebrew on p. 208). What does a Russian do? Same thing. The novel is full of fine descriptions of ordinary people, getting nowhere, pushing on with their lives. We have the Russians on vacation in Yalta, taking the sun and waters “with conviction and diligence” (179). Back in the day Kotler and his parents had been there sunbathing among those Russians in Yalta, standard citizens of Sovdepia. What does a human being do? Same thing. Kotler’s father, fast in his day, trains his son, who is hopelessly slow, as a sprinter, while sarcastic neighbors chant the age-old taunt: жид, жид, на веревочке бежит (to get the rhyme, something like, “Kike, Kike, riding on a bike” but the literal meaning is “Kike, kike, running on a string”).

A stick with two ends, палка о двух концах, the Russian expression for something that cuts two ways. Except that life, as this novel so amply expresses, cuts all different sorts of ways. Who is guilty and who is innocent? It depends. On a lot of things. Tankilevich the traitor is, perhaps, more to be pitied than reviled, given the circumstances of his betrayal, and given how egregiously he has had to pay for that act over a lifetime. At one point Leora herself, certainly aware of her guilt in betraying her friend, Kotler’s daughter, as well as the whole Kotler family, confesses that in similar circumstances she may not have been able to hold out any better than Tankilevich did.

“After all, guilt and innocence were not fixed marks. There were extenuating circumstances. Wasn’t this the governing logic of the times? That cause and effect could not be easily disambiguated? That all was up for revision and nobody durst speak of an absolute truth?”(170)

So make a choice, people, even when the alternatives may be equally bad. That’s what the KGB forces Tankilevich to do, and after he makes his choice he has a lifetime to live with it. Kotler chooses to betray his wife, later chooses to flee with his mistress. Bad choices. The choices of the Jews always seem to end with suitcases. This crosses Kotler’s mind as he and Leora, near the end of the book, “picked their way through the vacationers toward the Internet café” (180), pulling their suitcases behind them.

Tankilevich the compromiser is the last Jew in Crimea. “Capricious fate had cast him as the final link in the long chain of Crimean Jewry. A chain that stretched back more than a thousand years to the Khazars, the last Jewish warriors and emperors, if legend was to be believed. The Khazars, the Krymchaks, the Karaites. And, in the past century, the doomed farming colonists and Yiddish poets who had imagined a homeland in Crimea, a New Jerusalem to supplant the Old. Now it was coming to a close, like all Jewish stories came to a close, with suitcases.”

Today the suitcases are out again, e.g., in France, where, fearing for their lives in face of Islamic terror, the Jews are on the move again. Recently Vladimir Putin publicly commented on the sad state of affairs. “They can’t even walk the streets with a yarmulke on their heads. Let them come back home to us, we are prepared to receive them.” Duh.

The prominent message of The Betrayers is that things are always going to be more complicated than they seem, and every choice one makes in life is more complicated than it should be. Wins can end up losses and losses wins. God in his wisdom can often be a practical joker; either He or His brother, that is. But even if God is basically altruistic, a Good Lord, can we ever forgive him for that brother of his? Kotler is put on trial twice, the first time in the Soviet Union (accused, unjustly, of treason), the second time in Israel (accused, unjustly, by his own co-dissidents) of spying for the KGB. In the USSR he is convicted but comes away invigorated, the heroic refusenik, who basks in his glory upon reaching the home of the Jews. In Israel he is acquitted but comes away wounded, having somehow been deprived of his former heroic gloss. Nobody, so it seems, is a hero for long. The refusniks have their downside: “There were nearly as many deviations in their ranks as there had been among the Marxists at the time of the revolution. Not to mention the purely personal rivalries and antagonisms. . . . Dissidents were by nature contrary” (148). A stick with two ends.

Bezmozgis presents characters from several different cultures here: Israelis, Russian Jews, Ukrainians, Russians. He presents no Palestinians, but they are there, looming in the background of the action. At one point a Crimean Jewish character expresses a one-sided view, held by Jews all over (but not all Jews). The speaker is one Podolsky, who has lived in Israel but has mysteriously returned to Crimea.

“What do Arabs do? They throw rocks. They attack innocent women and children. They shoot rockets. If they pay a few shekels in tax, where does the money go? To their crooked Palestinian officials, who, if such a thing is possible, are more corrupt than our Ukrainian ones” (65). There is no spokesman for the Palestinians in the book, but the Palestinian problem, for Israel, is one more big stick with two ends. Jews, with their conscript soldiers (like Benzion), “more scholars than warriors” (182), are forced to be what they do not wish to be, what goes against their very nature as Jews: brutal oppressors. Fate forces them to choose violence, sometimes even violence against their own kind.

Bezmozgis astutely pinpoints the problem without ever mentioning Palestinians. “And it was all to do with land. A measure of earth under your feet that you could call your own. Was there a more primitive concept? But nobody lives in the ether. Man is a physical being who requires physical space. And his nature is a prejudicial nature of alike and unalike. That was the history of the world. How much earth can you claim with another’s consent? How long can you hold it if you haven’t consent? And is it possible to foster consent where none exists? Kotler didn’t know the answers to the first two questions, but the essential question was the last, and the answer to that was not favorable” (196-97).

You take land away from a whole people, the Palestinians, you drive them off their land in the name of a grand ideal. Then you are faced with the consequences. You sit on the land you have taken, trying to find a way to pacify those from whom you have taken it. They will not be pacified. Probably never. So sits Israel, not in Resplendent Zion, but in The Land of the Gray, on the stick with two ends.

What about America? Well, as most Americans know, we are the exceptional country, the place where dreams come true and no one is beaten by the stick with two ends. Except that, if we step back and take a good long look at our country, we will see that stick flailing away here as well. Near the end of the book Bezmozgis gently inserts a bit of criticism of the American way. On the plane out of Crimea back to Israel all varieties of Jews are passengers, including American Jews, “carefree, heedless, and a little dim, cushioned from history and entrusted with too much” (224). “A little dim.  Cushioned from history. Entrusted with too much.” This is a common European view of Americans; I’ve heard Russians express it many many times. We naïve Americans, who want to see the world in black and white terms, have not yet learned the sad sad tale of the Land of the Gray. And yet, then again, aren’t we naïve Americans lucky? To have done without the thousand years of blood and brutality that is Russian history—and Yugoslavian history, and the history of peoples all over the world, who have not made one iota of progress despite the rivers of blood in which they, and all their ancestors, have been forced to swim. Aren’t we lucky?

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book in which this Land of the Gray (both in personal terms and in terms of international politics) is better presented. David Bezmozgis is a real writer, a grasper and presenter of the ambiguities with which we all wrestle. His name is brainless (from the Russian bez, without, and mozg, brain), but having written this book full of insights into human nature, he deserves a better name. Maybe we should re-christen him “David Smozgami,” the man with brains.

Samples of Quality Writing, ALETHEA BLACK, "You On a Good Day"

ALETHEA BLACK

“You On a Good Day,” by Alethea Black

Published in “One Story,” #163, April 23, 2012

This is a story written totally in second person, about all the things you do, and don't, on a good day.

Excerpt

You don’t give the finger to the black pickup truck that tailgates and passes you aggressively, then let go of the wheel to give it two fingers when you see a rainbow-tinted peace sticker on the bumper. You do not call the friend—the one who was in the hospital a few weeks ago, and whom you did not visit or call—you do not call her today because today you need something from her. You do not consider dousing your refrigerator with gasoline and setting it on fire because of the sound its motor makes while you’re trying to work. You do not wish the earth would just ignite and everyone would die in a ball of flame simply because it has been hot for a few days. You do not conjure up, in as vivid detail as possible, every time anyone has ever wronged you in any way. You do not think: We’re a ruined, useless lot, and we deserve everything we get. You do not say under your breath, while forgoing a pack of cigarettes: It’s either pain in the body or pain in the mind, take your pick.

Here’s what I, U.R. Bowie, wrote on the blog for “One Story” in 2012:

This strikes me as the best story I’ve read since I’ve been subscribing to One Story–that covers about twenty stories.

I find myself marking up passages, even writing things down (my best compliment to a writer). So many wonderful passages, so much despair, but leavened with hope and optimism.

“Hurt people hurt people.” I suppose this expression has been around for awhile, but I never had heard it: wonderful.

I laugh all the way through this story, although the humor is dark.

About the ending: in the Q and A session, the ending is described as “unabashedly hopeful and happy” or something like that. I wouldn’t describe it that way. I think that the ending is happy/sad, like the rest of the story, like life.

The ending moves me.

Postscript, January, 2018:

In "The Missouri Review," Fall, 2017, Alethea Black published another story with a you narrative (told in second person), titled "A Place in the World." I don't like this one as much as "You on a Good Day," but it has some nice passages:

Your father dies and you don't want to look at his dead body. "You don't want to see his body without him in it."

Fellow workers are like family; they make fun of you, "but it's always in that friendly, stab-you-with-love way that family members have." [Of course, all too often family members can stab you in earnest, and so can co-workers and best friends.]

The note with the picture at the end of the story in "The Missouri Review" mentions that "A Place in the World" "is part of a new collection of true stories--You've Been So Lucky Already--forthcoming in 2018." I find myself wondering if someday there may be a whole collection of these second-person pieces, titled simply You.

Russian Folk Ditty (Частушка) "Веселая"

Russian folk ditty with English translation:

Я веселая, веселая, 

веселая всегда,

Не болит мое сердечко

Ни о ком и никогда.

I'm happy, happy, oh so happy,
Happy as can be,
Loving no one, no one--nope--
That's the life for me.

ЧАСТУШКА: A Russian Folk Ditty, with Translation into English

Russian folk ditties with translations: (частушки)

Я бы вышла за Хрущева,
Но боюсь я одного.
Говорят, что вместо х...
Кукуруза у него.

I'd sure like to wed Nikita,
One thing makes me ponder, though,
Word's got out in place of Peter
He's got corn cobs down below.

Bits and Pieces of Good Fiction Writing: GEORGE SAUNDERS

Bits and Pieces of Good Writing: George Saunders

The story is “Mother’s Day,” in The New Yorker, Feb. 8 and 15, 2016, p. 84-92. It’s a funny story, lots of great humor, but—as with all quality humorous writing—the fiction is anchored in the serious.

“Sweeping like a banshee in front of that same tiny former carriage house she’d lived in since she was a girl. With her oddball parents. Mandy and Randy. Both had limps. Different limps. When they walked down the street it was like a freaking dance party.”

Note what some might consider offensive writing here. Let them. If you want to write good fiction do not concern yourself with political correctness. Good fiction describes Life, and Life has no truck with political correctness. Is it sin to laugh at a descriptions of limping people? No. Go ahead and laugh. God will absolve you of your sins.

[appearing at the pearly gates]: “she didn’t exactly love the idea of showing up at the pearly gates or whatnot and having St. Whoever look her up in his book and go, Whoa, hey, I was just sitting here tabulating the number of guys you had in your life, and, yikes, can you wait here a second while I go check with God on what the limit is?”

[caught in a hailstorm]: “The hail-thingies bouncing off Debi’s black umbrella looked like sweat flying off a cartoon-guy’s head when he was supposed to be worried. Paul, Sr., had once shown her a porn like that. A cartoon porn. The one Paulie later found. Guy so worried, watching his wife have at it with a big sailor…”

[heart attack]: “Alma got hold of a fence slat. To pull—pull herself out. Of this. Pain. Something new was happening now. The tightness in her chest was worse. Jesus. Like labor with Paulie. Then it went past that, to labor with Pammy, and she was giving birth to something bigger than Pammy, out her chest.”

Funny, the best story I ever read by George Saunders was also in “The New Yorker,” years ago. It was about a man caught up in a bank robbery. Don’t remember the title. As I recall it, the man in the bank kept making jokes, and the bank robbers did not take kindly to that. Can’t recall what else happened, but it sure was a dang good story!

Book Review: Vladimir Nabokov, LETTERS TO VERA

BOOK REVIEW

Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra

NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015

[Note: for ease in typing I have throughout omitted the diacritical mark over the “e” in the name Véra]

These are probably the last of Nabokov’s letters to be published.  For those who have not read the earlier collections it is worth pointing out here that they are more interesting, more full of insights into the literary works of the great master. See (1) The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence Between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971, edited by Simon Karlinsky (NY: Harper and Row, 1979) and (2) Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977, edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989).

This latest volume of letters, edited and translated from the Russian, with extensive end notes, by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd, is personal in nature, consisting of missives to Nabokov’s wife Vera over a lifetime of their marriage. Even if Vera’s letters were available (she destroyed them) the correspondence would be excessively one-sided. Nabokov wrote roughly five letters to his wife for every one she wrote to him, and a persistent refrain is his plaintive cry, “How come you’re not writing me?”

The one surviving letter by Vera printed here (written about June 1, 1944—see p. xxxvii) is strictly business. Its matter of fact tone is in stark contrast to much of her husband’s correspondence, which is full of playfulness, affection, passion. This, along with Nabokov’s infrequent appeals for her to ease up on him, stop berating and complaining, suggests that, perhaps, Vera’s end of the conversation would not show her in a positive light, but several times there are hints to the contrary. For example, in a letter of 1924 Nabokov  writes, “You know, we are terribly alike . . . For example, in letters: we both like 1) to slip in foreign words unnoticed, 2) to quote from favourite books 3) to translate impressions from one sense (for example, vision) to another (for example, taste), 4) to apologize at the end for imaginary nonsense; and much more” (16). At one point Nabokov in Paris mentions reading parts of Vera’s postcard to colleagues who “said they understood now who writes my books for me” (xxxix).

What stands out over fifty-four years of correspondence is Nabokov’s steady love and affection for his wife. In fact, these letters must rank among the greatest literary love letters ever written. It is notable that Nabokov uses the familiar you (ты) in the very first letter, although at that time they had met only once. The young writer was hardly over his recent breakup with the seventeen-year-old beauty Svetlana Siewert, but already in that first letter to Vera he writes, “Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought—and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds” (4).

You sometimes get the feeling that Nabokov assumed the gods had delivered to him his own personal muse embodied in this young woman who knew his poetry by heart, and that he must marry her and stay with her at any cost. Later on in his life he would have cause to apply all his skills as a fiction writer to keep Vera written into his life, and to write out of his life her main rival for his affections.

The marriage took place on April 15, 1925, and the first batch of letters dates to the twenties, when the two were living in Berlin. These early letters are the lightest in tone, the most full of fun, and of all the letters in this collection, here is where we find best samples of the artist at work, collecting imagery for his fiction. A few examples follow.

(1)    “I am becoming more and more firmly convinced that art is the only thing that matters in life. I am ready to endure Chinese torture to find a single epithet—and in science, in religion, what excites and engages me is only the colour, only the man in side-whiskers and a top-hat, lowering—on a rope—the smoke-pipe of the first funny locomotive passing under the bridge and dragging behind it the little cars full of ladies’ exclamations, the movements of tiny coloured parasols, the rustle and squeaking of crinolines…” (30).

(2)    “The down of flowers was fluttering above the glades like soft sparse snow, grasshoppers stridulated and golden cobwebs—wheels of sunlight—stretched across the trail, clinging to my face . . . And a lush soughing ran through the trees, and the shadows of clouds glided along distant slopes . . . It felt very free, and light, and like my love for you” (35).

(3)    “Shura and I went to the swimming establishment on Krumme Strasse. There was a man without an arm (cut off right at the shoulder, so he was like the statue of Venus. I kept thinking his arm was hidden somewhere. Looking at him, I felt a kind of physical unease: just a smooth place with a fringe of armpit hair), while another man had the most detailed tattoos all over his body (by his left nipple he had two little green leaves that transformed the nipple into a disgusting pink floweret)” (54-55).

(4)    “Last night around nine I went out for a stroll, feeling through my whole body that thunderstormy tension that’s the harbinger of a poem. Back home by ten, I clambered inside myself, as it were, rummaged about, tormented myself for a little, and wriggled out with nothing. I turned the light off—and suddenly an image flashed by—a little room in a poorish Toulon hotel, the velvet-black depth of the window opened into the night, …” (60: this description of the birth of a poem goes on for a whole page).

(5)    “The weather this morning was so-so: dullish, but warm, a boiled-milk sky, with skin—but if you pushed it aside with a teaspoon, the sun was really nice, so I wore my white trousers” (68; note: Vera has instructed her husband to write every day, telling her what he wore and what he ate, so uxorious Vladimir dutifully fills his letters with eggs, sausage and trousers).

(6)    “Where did I put the matches? Things seem to have some sort of survival instinct. If you throw a ball in a huge room without any furniture, except for one armchair—nothing at all except that—the ball will roll under it without fail” (69).

What we have here is an artist out recruiting—“Recruiting” is the title of one of his early stories— scrounging up detail and character for his works. Everything is of interest to him. Twice in these letters he mentions smells that recall “the stink between the toes,” and we can imagine the young artist paring his toenails and absorbing olfactory information as he pares. Yes, that smell too is part of life.

You can also imagine the young Vera enjoying a goodly part of these early letters, eating up the significant detail, including the affection, but, especially in the summer of 1926, when she was convalescing in a German health resort, Vera probably was not in the mood to appreciate all the joking around, the puzzles he provided for her, the silly pet names that he invented in profusion. Even the professions of love, the lyricism can be, at times, too much. Take this, for example.

“I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it—and can’t recall a single trifle I’ve lived through without regret—so sharp!—that we haven’t lived through it together—whether it’s the most personal, intransmissible—or only some sunset or other at the bend of a road—you see what I mean, my happiness?

“And I know: I can’t tell you anything in words—and when I do on the phone it comes out completely wrong. Because with you one needs to talk wonderfully, the way we talk with people long gone, do you know what I mean, in terms of purity and lightness and spiritual precision—but I—je patauge terribly. Yet you can be bruised by an ugly diminutive—because you are so absolutely resonant—like seawater, my lovely” (7, letter of Nov. 8, 1923). Too much. The French: “I’m floundering about.”

What we have in this collection of letters is a kind of narrative, the story of a marriage, with its ups and downs. Interspersed are a variety of other sub-themes, all of them of at least ancillary interest in Nabokov’s biography. For example, there is the sub-theme of homosexual brother Sergey, with whom Vladimir always had a troubled history. Notwithstanding the homosexuality in his own family, Nabokov was generally intolerant of what he saw as sexual deviance. Among the many examples of the intolerance is this passage from a letter of 1936: “I went to Nina’s [Berberova]. . . She says that all the pederasts were up in arms when they found out she was writing a life of Tchaikovsky, their bum-buddy” (249). As for Sergey, the torment that his gay life caused him is manifest in several parts of the book, but is particularly grievous as reported in a letter of 1926: “You know my whole life for the last ten years has been terrible, not only a sinful life, but a crime against itself.” Sergey goes on to report that in a desperate effort to transcend his own nature he is joining the Catholic church. “I will take communion every day to kill the sin in me, so God can give me strength, energy, and will. I will live alone (77). Sad, especially in light of what was to come during the war, when he was murdered by the Nazis.

The letters of the twenties present, most prominently, the narrative of Vera’s illness; she was suffering from anxiety and depression, recuperating in a German spa. The missives build in a kind of crescendo, to the point when the long-awaited meeting of the young lovers is at hand after their lengthy separation (153). Then there is a gap in the text, and we, the readers, are left feeling let down. All the talk of her convalescence in Schwarzwald, all the drama, and then we aren’t told—in any letters, since they are together again, not writing letters—exactly how it came out. This is comparable to watching CBS news as rebroadcast on the BBC without the interruptions for commercials. You’re left with the feeling that you’ve missed something. In the case of Vera and Vladimir, we know each time (from biographical facts) how the story comes out, but it would still be nice if there were a little narrative summation at the end of every epistolary drama.

The letters of 1932 present a stark contrast in tone and content to the light and airy missives of the twenties. Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd, editor of this volume, had in the eighties repeatedly requested access to the personal letters, but Vera was reluctant to release them. Finally, in December of 1984 and January of 1985 she read out the letters into his cassette recorder, omitting parts she considered too private. Later he gained access to the originals, all but those for the year 1932, which somehow vanished without a trace. So what we have here transcribed, for the year 1932, are only the versions read for the tape recorder.

For reasons known only to her, the very private Vera omits certain things as she reads aloud, including all the endearments that are such a part of Nabokov’s style, so that for 1932 we get the impression of someone altogether different writing letters. The cutesiness, the lovey-doving, all the passion and the play is gone. At one point, when Nabokov begins describing what appears to be a Lolita-type situation (200/613), party-pooper Vera cuts the scene off short, informing Boyd, “All of that is if no interest to you.” When she comes to mention of Ivan Lukash, whom Nabokov once called “a good friend and a remarkable writer,” she says, “I will omit everything about Lukash” (613).

Throughout the thirties, and even on into the forties, the main theme of these personal letters is “I need a job; we need a place to be.” Notwithstanding the fact that, by the mid-thirties, he was generally acknowledged the best Russian writer of the emigration—probably the best Russian fiction writer in the whole world— Nabokov could not find a way to make a living. For years he networked around, looking for a position as an editor in a newspaper, as a lecturer in a university, even, at one point, in British intelligence, and all to no avail. His letters back to Vera in Berlin tell the tale of constant visits to people looking for help, of constant appeals to any number of individuals, primarily in Paris and London. This chasing around incessantly left him little time to write, and even the literary merit of his letters suffers in comparison to the letters of the twenties. He was simply too worn out much of the time to notice the dove-blue shadow on the wall of twilight, or at least to report its glimmer to his wife. Much of what he reports is detail about the people he is forced to appeal to for help. Incidentally, it is nothing short of astonishing how much so many people tried to do for him. And even more astonishing that after years of effort everything came to naught.

Here is a typical passage: “I was at Osorgin’s: a youthful-looking slender man with the hint of a mane, in some kind of belted velvet jacket and an unbuttoned tennis collar. Our conversation was not very interesting, he hates Khodasevich. . . Remizov is mortally offended by me. They have tons of Jewish friends, but, at the same time, Zaytsev likes to savour, now and then, a Jewish accent. . . I had tea with them and went to Lolly, who happens to have a very likeable young wife with a hairdo in the mode of a Pushkin miss. I saw Mme Rachmaninov there and the Pohl couple. It was hellishly boring. But then Rachmaninov took me home in her car. And I was simply collapsing from fatigue, since I also had supper at the Kyandzhuntsevs’ and the Portnovs’”(letter of Nov. 11, 1932, p. 217).

Nabokov’s social doings with the Russian émigré community abroad (Paris, mostly, then London) in the thirties is of some interest now, but probably only to specialists in Russian literature. Big names constantly appear (Bunin, Remizov, Aldanov, Zamyatin, Khodasevich), and particularly of note is in what high regard the young and haughty Nabokov was held among the most famous writers of the emigration. See, e.g., p. 254: “Aldanov cried out that 1) ‘you despise us all, I can see through you’ 2) ‘you’re our leading writer’ 3) ‘Ivan Alekseevich [Nobel prize winner Bunin], give him your ring.’ Ivan, however, stood his ground, ‘No, there’s still some life left in us,…’” (254, letter of Feb. 10, 1936).

The hassles with looking for work, looking for a place to be, went on and on. If it weren’t enough of a problem to make all the connections, to ask friends, famous scholars and writers, well-wishers to write him testimonials,” Nabokov had to run here and there in search of bureaucratic documentation. “Now imagine me twice visiting government departments, twice waiting there for three hours each time, then putting together a request with Raisa’s help, then twice visiting (an hour each time) the prefecture and finally receiving the return visa to Paris. I was twice at the Belgian consulate too, where at long last they gave me only a transit visa…”, etc., etc., etc. (letter of Feb. 17, 1936, p. 259).

The only consolation was that Nabokov was highly regarded in all walks of literary life, and his readings were always well received: “the audience was good, simply wonderful. Such a big, sweet, receptive, pulsing animal, grunting and chuckling in the places I needed, and then obediently dying down again. It finished at half past eleven, and again—rapture. A handshake, Fondik’s wonderful smile. In a word, all a vainglorious man could ask for” (letter of Nov. 16, 1932, p. 223). But meanwhile, back in Berlin, his Jewish wife and child remained as the Nazi menace grew more and more virulent. Vera, minus her letters, sometimes comes across as querulous, unsympathetic: “I’m running around all day long, my tongue, red as a slice of ham (writes her bedraggled husband), hanging out, and you say to me: ‘Blunderer’” (letter of Nov. 3-4, 1932, p. 209).

Then came the absolutely horrendous year of 1937. Only in the Soviet Union could it have been worse for the Nabokovs. Brian Boyd’s treatment of 1937 in his biography, The Russian Years does not begin to suggest how utterly enervating and horrible that year was. Read these letters to get a feel for the horror. Troubles followed one after the other, the next trouble barking and nipping at the heels of the one before. There was a constant shortage of money, Vera’s health was not good, nor was that of Nabokov’s widowed mother, who was living in Prague, almost in poverty. In the Russian emigration Nabokov the writer, who “had shot to not-quite-starving stardom” (Boyd, p. xx),  continued his desperate search for a way to make a living.  Read Pnin, the story of an exile searching for discreteness—a defense against Fate’s buffeting forces—searching for a place to be. How well Nabokov understood his Pnin.

Then, as its pièce de résistance, Fate served up for Nabokov another woman to fall in love with. In late January of 1937 he began an affair with a young Russian woman in Paris, Irina Guadanini.  His letters to Vera maintained the same tone of affection, the endearments were the same, but, increasingly more often, a tone of desperation slips in. Apparently exacerbated by the emotional pressure, Nabokov’s chronic psoriasis drove him to distraction, and in February he even contemplated suicide (so he later admitted).

In his letters to Vera in Berlin he began insisting that she and their son join him in Paris, but she, having learned of the affair from a poison-pen letter, dug in her heels and refused to come. An epistolary chess game began, and went on for months—he insisting that she join him in the south of France, she constantly suggesting alternatives. An interesting sidelight is this: as early as 1932 Vera appeared to be resisting the move to Paris (see p. 210), and you wonder if she was already leery then of his many female fans in France.

Throughout the early months of 1937 the writer Nabokov is writing hard, trying desperately to convince himself that he must not write Vera out of his life. “There’s no power in the world that could take away or spoil even an inch of this endless love,” he tells Vera (and himself hopefully) on March 19 (326). “My dear love, all the Irinas in the world are powerless…,” he tells Vera and himself a day later (329). In a letter in which Nabokov mentions “giving English lessons to Irina G.,” he admits that “never in my whole life have I been so utterly miserable (319). In another (May 12, 1937), he writes, “I cannot tell you how utterly miserable I am and how I long to see you, my life. . . . all of this is so senseless and so painful, as if fate prend plaisir in torturing us. . . . This hell must end soon, I suppose” (374).

Although Brian Boyd has had access to Nabokov’s correspondence with Irina Guadanini during this same time period, he is not very forthcoming about their content, other than to say that even with Irina the writer stressed his happy life with his wife. It would be interesting to compare, say, a letter send to Vera and another sent to Irina on the same day. Not for prurient, but for literary purposes.  But, as far as I known, the letters to Guadanini have never been published.  Nabokov makes no secret of her existence to his wife, but writes as if she were merely an acquaintance.  Sometimes a passage is rather suggestive. For example, this one: “Once, sitting in La Coupole, in Paris, with Irina G., I suddenly noticed that the little cap of my pen, a present from Granny, was missing; after agonizing searches under the tables I found it in my coat pocket” (letter of Feb. 27, 1937, p. 313). Freudians might perk up at this mention of the pen, but there is also a hint here that, in carrying on with Irina, the writer jeopardizes the thing most important to him—his relationship with his muse. If he is to go on writing he desperately needs the cap on that pen.

Of course, there is no mention of the Nazi threat in these letters mailed to Germany, but you wonder just how aware the Nabokovs were of the danger of remaining in Berlin. One of the men responsible for the murder of Nabokov’s father had received an important government post, and Vera feared that her husband would not be safe in Germany. But what did she feel about her own situation, as a Jew? Would Vera have dug in her heels for quite such a long time had she had known what an imminent threat the Nazis presented to herself and her son?

The Nabokovs seem to have hated Germany from the beginning of their residence in the country. Here is a passage from a letter of 1926, in which Nabokov expresses his desire “to leave Berlin, and Germany, to move to Southern Europe with you. The thought of yet another winter here fills me with horror. German speech makes me feel sick—you can’t live only on reflections of street lamps in the asphalt—apart from these reflections, and blooming chestnuts, and angelic little dogs guiding local blind men, there’s also all the squalid vileness, the coarse tiresomeness of Berlin, the aftertaste of rotten sausage, and the smug ugliness” (117). It’s as if the writer were storing up all his animosity in advance, for the time (soon to come) when he and Vera would really have reason to experience that bitter aftertaste of German sausage. After the long chess game finally ends and Vera leaves (with son Dmitri) for Prague, Nabokov heaves a huge sigh of relief and writes, “how glad I am that you’ve got out!. . . I’m so pleased that we have finally done with Germany. Never, never, never will I return there. Damn them, those foul scum. Never” (371-72).

After the couple finally reunite there is another big narrative gap in the text, another letdown for the reader. You almost feel like writing a few scenes to fill in the missing part. The bittersweet meeting, the fights, the decision that has to be made. Whom will the writer choose, which of the two women he loves? How will he get himself out of this dilemma? We of course know what happened. He continued writing letters to Irina in Paris, continued trying to have it both ways. He eventually admitted to Vera that he was in love with another woman, and she told him, “All right. If that’s a fact you better go to her in Paris.” Then he waffled. There was, after all, the issue of his beloved son to consider. Plus (maybe even worse) he would be giving up his muse, the woman he had made the inspiration for his fiction ever since they met in 1923.

Almost from the very beginning Nabokov had written his muse Vera into existence. He had continued writing her as they lived together, making her what he wanted her to be. Now he chose to write Irina out of his life and keep Vera written into it. Irina G., of course, chose to fight rather than to meekly recede into his past, like a discarded draft of a character in a story. She came to Cannes, where the writer and his family were enjoying the beach. He sent her away. In the midst of all the horror of 1937 he wrote one of his best stories, “Cloud, Castle, Lake.” He first mentions how  it is girding itself up in his mind in a letter of May 1, 1937, he mentions it again twice more (see p. 366, 369), but it was not finally composed until he was back with wife and son, in Marienbad, June 25-26.

You look at this wonderful story and you wonder. How would it have been different if not for all the turmoil of 1937, if not for the psoriasis, if not for the affair, if not for the bureaucratic hassles, the endless and enervating networking, the threat of sinister Germany and the long-distance chess game with Vera? Would it have come out as magnificent as it did? I don’t know if any critic has done this yet (probably someone has), but if not, it would be worth considering this tale of a Russian exile’s search for an ideal spot of peace and joy in art, and his failure to be allowed that spot, in light of the personal tribulations of 1937. One thing is certain: the story’s apostrophes to an ideal love are skillfully and craftily done, so as to encompass either (or both) of the women in the writer’s life at that time.

“a spot so enchanting—a lawn, a terrace—such perfect expression of tender well-meaning beauty—that it seemed that if one could stop the train and go thither, forever, to you, my love [Irina/Vera]… But a thousand beech trunks were already madly leaping by, whirling in a sizzling sun pool, and again the chance for happiness was gone.”

“But suddenly at some station all climbed out, and it was already dark, although in the west there still hung a very long, very pink cloud, and farther along the track, with a soul-piercing light, the star of a lamp trembled through the slow smoke of the engine, and crickets chirped in the dark, and from somewhere there came the odour of jasmine and hay, my love [Vera/Irina].”

“It was a pure blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle. Of course, there are plenty of such views in Central Europe, but just this one—in the expressible and unique harmoniousness of its three principal parts, in its smile, in some mysterious innocence it had, my love, my obedient one! [Vera, Irina, my muse!]—was something so unique, and so familiar, and so long promised, and it so understood the beholder that Vasili Ivanovich even pressed his hand to his heart, as if to see whether his heart was there in order to give it away.”

The Nabokovs finally got over the year 1937, but they never found a place to be in Europe. At least not until after the major success of the novels written in America. Floundering around for two more years, they finally found a safe haven in the United States, arriving from Europe on May 28, 1940, just a month before the Nazis invaded Paris. But even in the U.S. the perennial problem of how to make a living was not immediately solved. As for the letters to Vera, during their American years the couple was seldom apart, so the portion of the book devoted to the years 1940-1977 suffers from a dearth of letters.

In 1942, in another attempt to generate some cash, Nabokov  took several lecture tours around the U.S. Of particular interest to me are his descriptions of the American South (my homeland). In October, 1942, e.g., he describes his Pninian misadventures in South Carolina, as he attempts to make it to a lecture. “I set out (after the lavatory, where I had awful diarrhoea) to a barber’s. They shaved me horribly, leaving my Adam’s apple all bristly, and since in the next chair a wildly screaming five-year-old child was fighting with the barber who was trying to touch the back of his head with the clippers, the old man shaving me was nervous, hushed the child, and finally cut me slightly under the nose” (463).

Shortly after this Nabokov had his first encounter with American beautyberry: “one bush here is in bright berries, as if dyed in a cheap Easter purple—an utterly shocking chemical hue” (465). So entranced is he by the bush that he later sends a sample of the berries to his son Mitya (476/712). Arriving in Valdosta, Georgia, he meets the flora and fauna of my home state, Florida, exactly a year before I myself arrived there. My family moved from New Jersey to Florida, along with three-year-old me in the fall of 1943.

Compared to the letters of the twenties and those of 1937, the letters written in the U.S. are of much less interest. For those interested in information about Nabokov’s American works of fiction this is not the place to look. Refer instead to the two other published collections (see beginning of this review). Even one spectacular incident, a bout with food poisoning on D-Day, June 6, 1944 (see p. 488-89) is much better described—is in fact hilariously described—in a letter to Edmund Wilson. See Boyd, The American Years, p. 73-76.

Summing up, there is much of interest for Nabokov lovers in this long collection. I love, for example, his description of a Siamese cat: “what a cat they have! Something perfectly stupendous, Siamese, in colour dark beige, or taupe, with chocolate paws . . . and wonderful, clear-blue eyes, turning transparently green towards evening, and the pensive tenderness of its walk, a sort of heavenly circumspection of movement. An amazing sacred animal, and so quiet—it’s unclear what he is looking at with those eyes filled to the brim with sapphire water (192).

Or take this outburst of authorly pride, when, angry with Vera for, as usual, failing to write him, he rails at the gods and then, in a wonderful transition, speaks of eating goose: “No—not on your life! I’ll show myself so that the gods will flinch, covering themselves with their elbows . . . Either my head will burst open or the world will—one or the other. Yesterday I ate goose” (xiv).

Or this description of a hippy woman: “his wife with beautiful loving eyes and in general, to her waist (from the top down), quite pretty, but then all of a sudden her hips begin to burgeon; she guiltily hides them in the shifting planes of her gait, like a package of dirty laundry” (245).

The editors of this volume have gone to painstaking extremes to identify passages, allusions, and persons mentioned in the letters. They are to be commended for performing what, at times, must have been a thankless and tedious task. They have even labored, with the help of Prof. Gennady Barabtarlo, to solve all the puzzles and riddles that Nabokov sent for Vera’s delectation in the twenties (525-537).

I am intrigued by the many faceless persons who poke their noses into the life of Vladimir Nabokov and then disappear for all time from human history. Some of them the editors have (impressively) identified. For example, the strange lover of flagpoles whom Nabokov encounters in Illinois ( 480) turns out (713) to be Elmer Kneale (1885-1944). Others you wish you had a chance to meet: (1) Col. Likhoshertsov, “one of the most charming people on earth” (324) (2) The importunate Nef, unidentified (395) (3) a man known only as Shpunt (405), unidentified.  Another thing that is intriguing: how often Nabokov likes people, is charmed by them and they by him—despite his reputation for touchiness and arrogance.

In terms of Nabokov’s literary works one thing that stands out, as early as the letters of the twenties, is his love of playing games with words, sounds of words, puns, puzzles. After his arrival in the U.S. he began inventing new Russian words based on English. Some of them are so good that you wish the Russian language would embrace them. Little hints: хинтики. I caught a glimpse of: глимснул. He was warned by such luminaries as Edmund Wilson that in the family of belles-lettres the pun is the crossed-eyed stepchild, but he never stopped punning. Here, in the letters to Vera, he describes himself as tormented by “tiny word nightmares”: “Popes pounced on poplars, the port where Rappaport rapped out a report” (Letter of June 22, 1926, p. 91).

Just as in, e.g., his critical biography of Gogol and his novel Bend Sinister, we see sibilants sometimes running amuck. Here is the beginning of a letter dated June 4, 1926, in which he plays with pet names and sounds in the salutation: “Mousch, mouse-sh-s-ch-sch-sh” (54). The Russian letters here, all hissers and hushers, are ш,с,ч,щ,ш. Later on in the same letter he describes a man with a strange stammer, who throws in—something like the English filler “like,” or the modern-day Russian filler “blin”—the sound “obli”: “In German literary circles they are interested in Oblimary [Nabokov’s first novel, Mary] and the short stories as well, and so they want to translateobli both Mary and the oblistories, and that ifobli I agree, etc., etc.” (55). Блин!

Much influenced by Joyce’s Ulysses, Nabokov in one letter (Feb. 24, 1936) parodies Joyce in inventing reams of sparkling word play.  One example is a proverb prominently featured (in French) in Anna Karenina: “Strike while the iron is hot.” Nabokov’s macaronic version is “Куй железо пока aurait chaud,” in which the French words approximate горячо, but even better (as the editors point out) approximate the Russian word for “good,” хорошо (267/641).

Nabokov was aware that “tiny word nightmares” could be deleterious to the quality of his fiction. In his introduction to Bend Sinister he writes that “Paronomasia is a kind of verbal plague, a contagious sickness in the world of words.” In a book written at roughly the same time as BS, Nikolai Gogol, the cavorting hushers and hissers get out of control, running amuck in the “nightmare index,” which Nabokov later toned down in the British edition of the book. In reference to the Gogol work, Edmund Wilson wrote Nabokov, “in some connections you’ve gone out of your way to be rather silly and perverse about the subject” (Nab.-Wilson Letters, p. 139).

Nabokov learned to play, somewhat to his detriment, the game of silly from Joyce, who probably learned it from Sterne (Tristram Shandy). Read some of the letters of the twenties to Vera, and you can imagine her gritting her teeth at the excesses of play, at the pet names, the plethora of endearments, at the hushers and hissers and the many puzzles. It is my contention—and I’ve never met a Nabokov scholar who agrees with me—that the spirit of the frolicking sibilants finally caught up with the writer in the final years of his life. Try as I might, I cannot get past the first few pages of the game-playing in Ada. Just too silly by half. But I still love the great Nabacocoa, and I’ve mightily enjoyed reading his letters to Vera.

Literary Sparks from Deirdre McNamer, "MY RUSSIAN"

LITERARY SPARKS THAT FLARE UP INTO FLAMES: DEIRDRE MCNAMER

You read something, the words flash at you; they spark creativity in your brain. Deirdre McNamer’s writings often do this to me. Here are some examples from her novel My Russian. The ones in direct quotations are (I think) totally Ms. McNamer’s. The ones not in quotations are what my creative mind came up with when reading her creativity.

(1)    [the main character, Francesca, having disguised herself to look older, is chagrined at people’s new take on her] “Had I been a dog, I think he would have glanced at me. It’s a revelation—the invisibility of old age.”

(2)    You’re outside a house looking in. The family room, flashes of blue television light, the faint drone of an announcer at the football game, some tiny cheers from a tiny crowd.

(3)    That horrific lunch when Laura broke all the rules of social etiquette was wiped out, off the map, never discussed again, but it still sits there at the edges of our days , the mute residue of the thing, lethal and irremediable.

(4)    The feeling I always get when watching standup comedians on TV. “I feel desperate to usher the performer offstage, desperate to wipe the leer off his face and keep the next joke unsaid, because even the best of all jokes won’t be enough to compensate for such stark public vulnerability.”

(5)    She was one of those intensely ebullient people who are great at the right kind of party but wear mightily on the nerves in a small tight space.

(6)    Lies get installed. They skitter into place like a panting child late for the first day of class, unsure she has the right room. Heads turn. Where did she come from in all her blonde-haired dishevelment? A half-hour later, yellow head bent, tongue protruding, scribbling away, she’s always been there, she’s never been absent—she’s not a lie anymore.

Really nice stuff here. Don’t you agree?

CREATIVE SPARKS, FROM VLADIMIR NABOKOV

MORE CREATIVE SPARKS, FROM VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Sometimes when you’re reading a creative writer, just a few words set off the sparks in your mind. Here’s an example. Lately I’ve been reading Nabokov’s Letters to Vera (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), which, like everything Nabokov has written, is full of sparkling passages. At one point he mentions Joyce and Proust:

“Joyce met Proust just once, by chance; Proust and he happened to be in the same taxi-cab, the window of which the first would close and the second would open—they almost quarreled. On the whole it was rather tedious” (267). On this same page Nabokov gets into some fascinating macaronic word play, taking off on Joyce.

Here is my embellishment of that passage, which I recently inserted into a long novel I am preparing for publication:

“Joyce and Proust ended up by chance in the same taxi-cab one day. They had never met before. Joyce would open the window, Proust would ask him to close it. Drafts. This opening and closing and opening again and closing again went on for the whole of their life together (ten minutes). Then they climbed out of the taxi, thoroughly disillusioned with each other—and went their separate ways for all time.”

Is this plagiarism? No, this is creative borrowing plus embellishing. A pedantic reader might also object: but are you sure you have the facts right? Is this what actually happened? Aren’t you, to some extent, making up this scene between two great writers?

Yes, I am making up the scene, embellishing upon two great writers. But I’m not writing a scholarly work. I write fiction. I can make up Joyce and Proust if I like in my fiction. I can even make up Nabokov. I’ve already made him up once, in my short story called “Hobnob.” It’s a wonderful life, being a fabricator! "Эх ты, ужасный выдумщик!"

PICKING UP CREATIVE SPARKS FROM HILLARY MANTEL

PICKING UP SPARKS, THEN SPARKING NEW SPARKS

A story by Hillary Mantel, “The Present Tense,” London Review of Books, Jan. 7, 2016

In what is otherwise a realistic story, about teaching in a third-world country, the teacher injects a bit of fantasy in making up a tale to tell her students. About a man whose head got turned around backwards. The fantasy infects the reader, grows inside him, so that we end up with something like this, part Hillary and part Hillary+reader:

“A man went off to work one day and came home to his wife with his head turned backwards on his shoulders.  His bare feet were as long as his calves, his toes were fat, arthritically so, and he wriggled his fat arthritic toes as he walked, grinning from ear to ear out of his bassackwards-fitting head, exposing blockish teeth like gravestones.”

This is writing with verve. Don’t you think so? Doesn’t it beat the run-of-the-mill thing about middle class Americans and their tribulations, told in a style that is dull and pedestrian? You can find the original Mantel story online if you wish, and you can compare what she wrote to the embellished paragraph above.

But the point I make here concerns, precisely, the embellishments. You read something that has a certain creative frisson. Then that spark ignites something inside you, and you become creative, creating new flame out of someone else’s creative spark. So goes the creative process down through the ages: art inspiring new art that inspires new art, ad infinitum. Thanks, Hillary.

FICTION WORKS PUBLISHED IN THE PAST YEAR, U.R. BOWIE

За последний год я напечатал 4 произведения худ. прозы (over the past year I’ve published four works of creative literary fiction):

(1)    Nov., 2014: Anyway, Anyways, a collection of short stories (А все-таки, собрание коротких рассказов).

(2)    Mar., 2015: Disambiguations: Three Novellas on Russian Themes (Дисамбигуации: три повести на русские темы).

(3)    May, 2015: Own: the Sad and Like-Wike Weepy Tale of Wittle Elkie Selph (Оун: грустнейший и блин-да печальненький сказ молодого Элькина Сельфа.

(4)    Nov., 2015: The Tale of the Bastard Feverfew (a novel) (Повествование сафлора красильного, роман).

"THE TALE OF THE BASTARD FEVERFEW," new novel by U.R. Bowie

Novel published November, 2015, available at Amazon as paperback or e-book:

http://www.amazon.com/Tale-Bastard-Feverfew-Journey-Collected/dp/1517569109/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1450027702&sr=1-1&keywords=u.r.+bowie+the+tale+of+the+bastard+feverfew