JOHN UPDIKE ON: Charles D'Ambrosio ("Up North"), Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts ("Closer"), Woody Allen ("Match Point"), literary fiction, fluency in Russian, Philip Roth, Zuckerman, Zuckerman's prostate gland, etc.

In 2006 I wrote a letter to John Updike on a whim. Here is his answer:

Dostoevsky's Greatest Line (from "Operation Shylock")

From Operation Shylock, p 111-12 of the paperback edition.

Smilesburger has just given Philip Roth a check for a million dollars, and Roth hands the check to his friend, the writer Aharon Appelfeld:

"That makes me think," I said, . . . . "of Dostoevsky's very greatest line."
"Which line is that?" . . . .
"Do you remember in Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov's sister, Dunya, is lured to Svidrigailov's apartment? He locks her in with him, pockets the key, and then, like a serpent, sets out to seduce her, forcibly if necessary. But to his astonishment, just when he has her helplessly cornered, this beautiful, well-bred Dunya pulls a pistol out of her purse and points it at his heart. Dostoevsky's greatest line comes when Svidrigailov sees the gun."
"Tell me," said Aharon.
"'This,' said Svidrigailov, 'changes everything.'"


It's not surprising that Dostoevsky is quoted, in a novel that owes so much to his themes and to the manic intensity of his plots, but it's odd that this line is declared his greatest. Here's how it goes in the original Russian:

--Ага! Так вот как! --вскричал он в удивлении, но злобно усмехаясь,--Ну, это совершенно изменяет ход дела! (Book Six, Ch. 5)

"Aha, so that's how it is!" he screamed in amazement, but smirking maliciously. "Well, that completely changes the way things are going!"

The Jessie Coulson translation has it, "Well, that entirely changes matters!" Not much here in the nature of a great line.

Another interesting thing about the passage cited here. It is a perfect illustration of the kind of scene that so put off so many Russian writers when they read Dostoevsky (Chekhov, Bunin, Nabokov). They could not take seriously a writer whose works were roiling with such incessant melodrama.Then again, the scene has another problem. Given her fiery but masochistic nature, self-abnegating Dunya would be much more likely to yield to Svidrigailov, if she had to do this to save her brother.

Roth's "Operation Shylock" and the Usurping Self

CHURCH OF THE SYNAXIS OF THE GODMOTHER, Kostroma, 1552

(photo taken May, 2003)


Philip Roth's Operation Shylock is all about the "imposturing other" and the "usurping self."

"The law says that a person's identity is his private property and can't be appropriated by somebody else" (from Ch.3, titled "We). The novel was published in 1993, before "identity theft" on the Internet became a tangible, palpable swindle. The identity theft in the novel is ontological, as it is in the Russian writers who worked out the theme of the double in the nineteenth century.

In Gogol a nose separates itself from a man's face and takes on an independent existence, gallivanting merrily about town as if he (Mr. Nose) really existed. Heavily influenced by Gogol's writing, Dostoevsky, early in his career writes "The Double," the story of a man and his rather nasty alter ego in the flesh.

In the Dostoevsky novella a big issue is that of sanity/insanity. The critic James Rice once commented that Dostoevsky was not in his right mind when he wrote this phantasmagorical thing, so the book is both about insanity in fiction and insanity in fact.

At least in the way Operation Shylock is told, by Philip Roth, who describes the coming apart of Philip Roth under the influence of the drug Halcion, and later the discovery, by Philip Roth, that there is another Philip Roth impersonating him in Jerusalem, whereupon the "Philip Roth" narrator goes to Israel to confront his double--in the way all this is told we have another book about insanity in fiction and insanity in "reality," if there is any such thing as real "reality."

And with that we take a big step toward the writer who proclaimed that the word "reality" should always be written in quotes--Vladimir Nabokov.

Smilesburger's Russian Antecedents

American literature is full of Russian literature. I don't know if anyone has written about how much Philip Roth's Operation Shylock owes to Russian lit, in particular to Crime and Punishment. The most interesting character, Smilesburger, is a reincarnated Porfiry Petrovich, the police investigator.

Woody Allen's film "Match Point" also borrows heavily from Dostoevsky, periodically re-staging scenes from Crime and Punishment, but the movie is superficial, even negligible in comparison to the Roth novel, which is written in a kind of white heat (so typical of Dostoevsky), bordering on insanity.

All sorts of Russian themes show up in Roth's novel; prominent among them is the theme of fathers and sons. Turgenev wrote the novel (actually the title is Fathers and Children in the original), but he, of course, has no patent on the theme.

At one point (p. 245) the action is stated to be "unconvincing," and the narrator suggests that the story has been conceived as a prank, "and a nasty prank at that." See also, p.361, "the sacrosanct prank of artistic transubstantiation." Probably the greatest "prank" story in all of world literature is Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose."

But Roth, first and foremost, had Dostoevsky in mind when he wrote this book teeming with red-hot tirades. The book recalls Porfiry Petrovich's telling Raskolnikov how no fact can really be grasped, because everything "cuts both ways." In Russian the expression is "a stick with two ends."

In Dostoevsky's great novels he allows an airing to all sorts of opinions. In fact his spokesmen for the Christian point of view (ostensibly his own view) often take a back seat in the dialectic to others who make a convincing case for atheism. The same sort of dialectic is operative in Operation Shylock, in which a Jewish author goes out of his way to let characters spout anti-Israeli and even anti-Jewish messages. "Did the Six Million Really Die" (p.253-60) is the most flagrant example of this.

The critic Bakhtin famously called Dostoevsky's novels "polyphonic," meaning that competing voices rage and roil throughout the books, propagating competing messages. The struggle is never resolved in favor of one voice or another. Roth's Operation Shylock is precisely such a novel.