Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Idiot (1868)

Translation: David Magarshack, 1955
Edition: Penguin, 1973
Review number: 1301

Humour is not a quality usually associated with the nineteenth century Russian novel. Generally, people in the West think that they are lugubrious and depressing, if such universal works of literature could be said to express a single emotion. The name most likely to be cited as an exception is Gogol, and certainly not Dostoyevsky, even though the younger author greatly admired and imitated the older in his early years. Yet there is considerable amusement to be had from The Idiot, in which the author pokes fun at society manners in a way that is hardly stereotypically Russian. Indeed, there is one passage, where a mother laments that her daughters remain unwed only to torment her, that a reader encountering it out of context might well assume that it had been written by Jane Austen. Of course, there is also the major irony that the man condemned by polite society as an idiot is the only character that the reader feels they can look up to.

Naturally, humour is not the main, or even an important part of The Idiot. It is, on the other hand, the most surprising - particularly since this is the third time I have read the novel, and it is not an aspect I remember from earlier readings (though they were, admittedly, quite some time ago). Another point to make is that the humour comes through in David Magarshack's translation; it is very easy to lose this when creating a version of a novel in another language. (Apparently the early translations of Dickens into Russian are a case in point.) Magarshack translated many Russian stories and plays into English (as well as non-fiction), including just about all the Russian literature that appeared as Penguin Classics, like this one, and any of his versions can be recommended despite now being quite elderly.

While it is true that in general Dostoyevsky's mature novels are concerned with the psychology of the central character, this is true in The Idiot in an indirect manner. The novel is not about the development of Prince Myshkin himself (which is minimal except for the final crisis), but about how his personality affects those around him. The Prince has grown up in a Swiss sanatorium, under treatment for his periodic epileptic fits. At the beginning of the novel, he returns to Russia, penniless, for the first time since early childhood, and almost immediately inherits an unexpected fortune. While not really the idiot that many think him, his illness has left the prince with a strange diffidence, which allied to his virtuous, simple and open personality makes him stand out as completely different to the polite society around him; in a supposedly Christian country, he is a truly Christlike individual, yet is almost completely alien to those around him - a satirical point if ever there was one, yet not something strongly emphasised by Dostoyevsky. Despite the author's strong political convictions, he does not seem to want to write about the shortcomings of the Russia of his day.

Instead, as I have indicated, The Idiot is about Prince Myshkin's impact on the worldly upper class in St Petersburg and Moscow. Initial reactions include bafflement, rejection and amusement, and through the whole novel most characters regard him with either indignation or affection, often alternating in a single individual throughout. This is one reason why the Prince's character cannot develop, for he is the novel's only stable reference point, the reverse of a much more common literary structure where the background characters remain static and the main ones evolve in the foreground. (This makes The Idiot sound experimental, and it is far more mainstream for that to be a way to categorise it. It does in fact feel very finished, more so than, say, The Devils, and this is an amazing feat, considering the rapidity with which it was written and the motivation behind the composition, as hack work to pay off pressing gambling debts.)

As with all Dostoyevsky's central characters, Prince Myshkin has an autobiographical feel to him, and it is true that the writer shared the suffering of epileptic fits with his creation. Additionally, he was also something of an outsider and certainly an idealist, but there were many aspects to his personality not shared by his creation, such as the compulsive gambling that led him to write the novel so fast and which is documented in the more clearly autobiographical The Gambler. I don't know what it is that Dostoyevsky does, by the way, but he is one of the best writers at the trick of making central characters seem to be the author himself, rivalling the Dickens of Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, or Great Expectations.

The novel is not entirely even in standard. The second half of Part Three is not so good, with the tedious confession and attempted suicide of Ippolit, and the correspondence between two women who admire the Prince. Things pick up again in the final part, but to my mind this must be the most disappointing fifty pages in any of Dostoyevsky's mature novels.

The "holy fool" is not a particularly frequent central character in modern fiction, perhaps because they are a type which it is hard to give a believable internal life, and because they seem rather passive. Outside of Dostoyevsky's writing, the examples that come most easily to mind are from medieval stories or work derived from these (such as the opera Parsifal). Dostoyevsky used the type again, to a certain extent, in Alexey Karamazov, but the only clear literary example I can think of taking a central role is Mervyn Peake's Mister Pye; Forrest Gump might be one from film. I suppose that they are not characters who occur frequently in real life either, and I suspect that if they did they would be just as disconcerting to meet as Prince Myshkin is depicted as being. The hermit is something associated with the true spirit of (pre-Communist) Russia, the solitary monastic life being much more important to the Orthodox Christian tradition than to the Catholic, so it may be that in Prince Myshkin Dostoyevsky idealised himself into a tradition that idealised Russia. Whether he is autobiography or symbol, or both, isn't really important; this is a great novel whatever you decide.

Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls (1842)

Translation: David Magarshack, 1961 (Buy from Amazon)
Edition: Penguin, 1961
Review number: 1081

Gogol's novel is better known because of its history than because of its content. Only part one and a few fragments of a draft of part two exist of the three planned; this is not in itself particularly unusual, but in fact Gogol completed the second and destroyed it, and died as the result of fasting to prepare himself for writing the third.

The story that remains in the first part was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin, as was his play The Government Inspector. The central character, the minor nobleman Chichikov, travels around a backward district of Russia buying up "dead souls". When serfdom was in existence in Russia (and it wasn't abolished until after Gogol's death), wealth was reckoned in souls, the number of serfs owned by an individual, and this also determined the amount of tax paid. Each census would reassess the number of souls owned by a landowner, and this figure would determine the level of tax they paid until the next one. Chichikov was buying the right to the names of the serfs who had died since the last census, just a liability to the owner since tax had to be paid but no work could be got out of them. It is quite a way into the novel before the purpose Chichikov has for these useless paper souls is revealed, but it is clear that it is going to be some kind of swindle. When the first part was submitted to the censors, they insisted that the title be changed, as they felt that Dead Souls sounded as though the novel was an attack on the church's doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

This kind of (to us bizarre) brush with the censor was routine for a nineteenth century Russian novelist, and was not the cause of the burning of part two. Gogol fell under the influence of a fanatically strict priest, who convinced him that the novel was sinful. This may have been a general prohibition on fiction, novels often being condemned as immoral, but it could also have been something specific to Dead Souls. After completion of the first part, Gogol decided that what he wanted to write about was the redemption of Chichikov, and he convinced himself that his work would bring a transformation in Russian society. This could well have been seen by a zealot as something prejudicial to the interests of the church. The information I have doesn't go into details of the reasons for the priest's opposition to the work; all that is certain about it is that it led to the eventual burning of the manuscript, after considerable (and understandable) agonising by Gogol. All that remains are fragments and a description of parts of the work in the journal of a friend to whom it had been read. It is clear that the destruction deprived us of some remarkable writing, especially given the quality and breadth of the first part, which Gogol considered to contain his best work. He must have been very sure that the arguments of the priest were right, for them to overcome his emotional attachment to what he had created. Indeed, the attachment was abnormally strong in this particular case: the fasting which brought Gogol's death only weeks after the destruction was motivated by the feeling that he could only really write about the reformation of Chechikov if he reformed himself too.

Gogol's writing is considerably more satirical than that of the other major Russian writers of the nineteenth century, and what is left of Dead Souls consists of a series of portraits making fun of provincial Russia, particularly of the stupidity of the small scale landowner. (And, in fact, I've now realised that I missed part of the point - these nobles are the truly "dead souls" in the novel.) These are written in a knowing way, with Gogol continually addressing a reader (as when, for example, he ridicules the fashionable habit of using a great deal of French by first describing the habit as admirable and then saying that it has no place in a Russian novel so that such phrases will be translated into that language). It is a novel full of humour, not at all a quality normally associated with Russian fiction, and would be a classic even without the strange history associated with it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (1881)

Translation: David Magarshack, 1958
Edition: Penguin, 1969
Review number: 329

The Brothers Karamazov is often described as Dostoyevsky's masterpiece. It is certainly his longest novel. It unites themes from his other novels: the psychology of murder from Crime and Punishment, the "holy fool" from The Idiot; and, as his last novel, can be seen as a culmination of his treatment of these themes.

The Karamazovs are a supreme example of that currently fashionable object, the dysfunctional family. The consist of the father Fyodor, a drunken scoundrel, and three sons by two (dead) wives, Dmitri (Mitya), Ivan and Alexei (Alyosha). Through a grotesque love triangle in which Dmitri and his father are both courting the same woman, bad feelings come to a head, with Dmitri telling all who will listen how much he hates his father (who has also cheated him of the inheritance due him from his mother) and wants to kill him. Then Fyodor is found dead, in circumstances which point to Dmitri as the murderer.

This plot summary makes Dmitri seem much more important than his younger brothers, and this is the case to the extent that it is his relationship with his father which motivates the plot. Yet both Ivan and Alyosha play vital roles: Ivan plotting to exploit the situation for his own benefit, Alyosha constantly - as the holy fool - seeking to reconcile the rest of his family.

Like all the characters who interested Dostoyevsky, the Karamazovs are passionate, even melodramatic. They seem very Russian, partly because our ideas of Russianness in the West are strongly influenced by the nineteenth century novelists and dramatists. As the events of the novel progress, the two elder brothers become more and more unstable, until driven virtually to insanity. Only Alexei is able to deal with this side of his nature, through the external moral guidance provided through his faith in the church.

The larger than life side of the elder brothers to my mind distorts the novel somewhat. I found Dmitri and Ivan rather difficult to believe in for the first half of the novel, the first seven books. But it is necessary to have them like this in character to motivate their dissolution during the murder trial, just as the lengthy sermonising from Orthodox monks is necessary to make us understand how Alexei escapes the dissolution. The contrast between his piety and the brothers' atheism is made stronger by the incredible scene in which Ivan hallucinates a conversation with the Devil in which they argue about his existence: one of the most powerful scenes, to my mind, in all literature.