Svidrigailov Was Right!

I am most pleased to report that I have not spent a decade in a Siberian gulag, half my life on Devil’s Island, or even a night in the local lockup. Beyond a couple cuffings for hopping freight trains and a detainment in the Seattle airport for my purported resemblance to an arch evil-doer named Kruger, I’ve been mercifully free of incarceration. But memoirs and novels about prison have long intrigued me. Or perhaps, chilled me is a better explanation: The descriptions of another side of history, the lack of freedom, and of course the escapes all make for the most exciting vicarious reading I know.

Buried Alive—an early
translation of The House of the Dead

I just finished Dostoyevky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, and found it hard to put down.

The literary genre of prison writing has a long, strange history. Searching about on the web, I compiled this short and curious list of famous prison tales—or other works that may not have seen the light of day except for prison time.

Jail provided writing hours for many a famous memoir or philosophical musing. Roman philosopher Boethius wrote his treatise The Consolation of Philosophy during a one-year sentence while awaiting execution; his conversation with Lady Philosophy examines the nature of free will and bemoans humankind’s evil doings. Conversely, Napoleon Bonaparte dictated his memoirs will exiled on the island of St. Helena and Adolf Hitler penned his autobiography and call to arms, Mein Kampf, during his imprisonment following the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

Marco Polo finally found time to chronicle his travels to China while in jail back home in Genova. Similarly, during his incarceration John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German while locked in Wartburg Castle, and the Marquis de Sade used his eleven years in La Bastille as quality time to write prolifically. 

Errol Flynn, galley slave

Cervantes found inspiration for Don Quixote during his days as a galley slave during the years 1575-1580. Working the oars on galleys was of course a jail sentence for the times—and one which few were expected to survive. (One of my fave Hollywood visions of galley slavery is in the 1940 Michael Curtiz swashbuckler The Sea Hawk [the dastardly Spaniards!] with the insurmountable Errol Flynn [although the film bears no resemblance to Sabatini’s novel].)

For Dostoyevsky, his time in Siberia informed all of his being and his subsequent writings. He was arrested in 1849 as part of the Petrashevsky circle of political dissidents and sentenced to death for attempting to foment revolution. Taken to Semyonovsky Square in the heart of St. Petersburg to be shot by a firing squad, he was reprieved by Tsar Nicholas I moments before his execution—a reprieve that Dostoyevsky came to believe was planned all along as a punishment and ultimate mockery. He was sent to four years of hard labor in the prison fortress in Omsk in western Siberia, then released into compulsory military service for five more years in the Seventh Line infantry battalion at Semipalatinsk in southwestern Siberia.

Dostoyevsky’s years in the Omsk prison was the source for the thinly veiled novel, Notes from the House of the Dead. In these pages, he describes many events and encounters that would re-appear in Crime and Punishment, The Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. He learned prison slang that he used in his later books. But most of all, he overcame at least some of his nobleman status and worldview to better understand the muzhik, allowing him to write with verisimilitude about Russian life in a way of which Tolstoy could never truly conceive.

Reading Notes from the House of the Dead restoked my long-running fascination for prison tales, prompting me to list some of my favorite vicarious reads:

Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo has to be among the best—if also, the most fanciful. His descriptions of Edmond Dantès’ years in the Chateau d’If (now a tourist attraction!) are spine-tingling and make my palms sweat even now, thinking about it all again. And Dantès’ subsequent escape and revenge are of course the perfect ending—although how he could ever turn his back on the beautiful Mercédès as an act of punishment still is simply not possible in this book of impossibilities. (See the recent film version from 2002, which convincingly rights this wrong.) Dumas based the novel on the true story of one Pierre Picaud, but I remain curious where he uncovered the rich details about life within Chateau d’If. Perhaps other accounts of the day? Or his own chilled imagination?

Chateau d'If postcard to the beautiful Mercédès back home

Henri Charrière’s Papillon and the sequel Banco are his purported memoirs of his fourteen years sentenced to French Guiana and Devil’s Island as well as several thrilling escapes. True or not, it’s still stunning. (Stay away from the excreable film adaption with Steve McQueen, unless you want to be as bored as Papillon himself in solitary confinement.)

There are of course numerous more prison memoirs, but my other favorites include Brendan  Behan’s Borstal Boy (the dastardly English!), Oriana Fallaci’s A Man about Greek revolutionary Alexandros Panagoulis, Jean Genet’s novels, even Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (the dastardly Mexicans!). 

And then there’s Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962), based on the author’s imprisonment from 1945 to 1953 as a Soviet political “offender” in a labor camp at Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan. Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing a letter to a friend with less-than-complimentary remarks about Stalin—in particular, calling him “Old Man Whiskers”—and sentenced to an eight-year term. In describing just one simple day of prison life, Solzhenitsyn leaves it to your own imagination to stretch that sentence out for what seems to stretch away into eternity. 

Think of good old Svidrigailov’s description of that spider-filled room—and shudder.

The Golovlyovs and the Snopes: Separated at Birth?

Call this comparative lit ad absurdum, but it remains an essential question for our times: Were Porfiry Golovlyov and Flem Snopes separated at birth?

Separated at birth? Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

William Faulkner

In this corner: Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlyov Family was crowned “the gloomiest novel in all Russian literature” by none other than Prince D. S. Mirsky, which of course must mean it’s one of the best. The book chronicles the all-consuming greed, hypocritical existence, and spiritual vacuity of Porfiry Golovlyov—known to all as simply The Bloodsucker—and his fine family of wastrels, cheats, alcoholics, and wanton women. Reading the book, I always wanted to wash my hands after setting it down. It has a pervading mood of gloom, unctuous smarm, and claustrophobic evil. Even Dostoyevsky can’t match it. Great stuff.

A tale told by a
sewing-machine salesman...

And in the other corner: William Faulkner’s The Hamlet remains one of my favorite novels of all time. In the Faulknerian universe, it’s one of his “easy” books, and thus I think doesn’t get the acclaim of the “difficult” ones, but that’s missing the point. The characters and the multiple plots that all tie together into one long chronicle are unforgettable. Enter the Snopes, led by Flem, who marries the beauty of Frenchman’s Bend, sells the townsfolk on his wild mustangs, and helps secure nothing less than the collapse and downfall of the proud old South. Contrary to The Golovlyov Family, The Hamlet is ripe with humor, and I literally laugh out loud every time I read the book.

So, separated at birth or not? 

Either way, The Golovlyov Family may just be the first book in a long and distinguished tradition of White Trash belles lettres.

Oblomovshchina, or Why I ♥ Oblomov

I met the woman who eventually became my darling wife thanks in part to a battered copy of Oblomov. No doubt this small book with the cryptic title impressed her immensely. Or, as she tells me these days, “I just couldn’t figure out what the heck it was.” Well, so much for Russian literature as a babe-catcher or aphrodisiac.

Truth is, I was then taking a college course on Dostoyevsky, where we were reading a heady and hearty survey of his works from Poor Folk through miscellaneous other short fiction, The Insulted and the Humiliated, and all of his major novels—all in one semester. And to add to the workload, for some crazy reason, I wrote my final paper on A Raw Youth.

Call me Dr. Love: Ivan Goncharov

So what was I doing touting around a copy of Oblomov as well? A fine question. Simply put, our Russian professor had mentioned the book, and I was hooked. I began reading Oblomov in my spare time, which was non-existent. Mine was sort of a strange, bizarre case of Oblomovshchina, or Oblomovitis, in reverse: Doing too much by reading Oblomov.

That Dostoyevsky seminar was so intense and exciting that the rest of my classes fell into the background. I carried all my Dostoyevsky reading, plus armfuls of notes on scads of loose sheets of paper, in a brown grocery bag. Things were a little out of control, which only seems right in retrospect, considering the course subject.

The fateful meeting with my future darling wife came one fine autumn day while I was digging through my bag o’ notes in front of our school’s union and spotted her walking across campus. Then, all of a sudden, she turned ninety degrees and came straight at me. Cool character that I was (and still am), I dropped the grocery bag, which spilled out onto the campus courtyard. As I bent over to rake up the papers, my copy of Oblomov in my back blue-jeans pocket also fell onto the ground. If she was unimpressed by this, she was also unfazed. So I asked her out to a flick (Casablanca), and the rest is history.

Somehow, the whole incident inspired my future darling wife’s interest in Oblomov too, and she began reading the book a couple weeks later. Since then, she’s read it twice and I just re-read it for the third time. It may be my favorite Russian novel of all time.

And we still have that same battered old copy from college days on the bookshelf. It’s the old Penguin Classic edition with the Mark Chagall painting on the cover, and it’s full of memories.

Note: I've always read the older David Magarshack translation, being a great lover of Penguin Classics. But I hear there are now two new recent translations of Oblomov out, one from Yale University Press, the other from Bunim & Bannigan. I’ll have to read them both.

A Lovely Autumn Weekend, Pilnyak, and Thou...

Leaving for an autumn getaway with my darling wife to the northwoods to see the fall colors: What book to bring? I got lucky at the library and chanced upon a copy of Gary Browning’s literary biography, Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter (Ardis, 1985)! I remember when the book was first published, but having just graduated from college at the time, I had no spare change to buy a copy; now it’s a valuable rarity. Still, I’m pretty certain I was the first and only one to ever check out the Minneapolis Public Library’s sole, lonely copy. And what a read! Part mystery, part detective story, Browning details Pilnyak’s amazing story and his stunning works.

Socialist realism page-turner

Boris Pilnyak is largely dismissed as a Soviet apologist, primarily based on his late social realist novel The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea (translated and published in the USA by Cosmopolitan Press, 1931). It’s easy to see things in black and white when viewing Stalinist Russia from the remove of fifty-plus years and the easy freedom of the United States, but Pilnyak’s life and times were much more complicated and shadowy, as Browning describes.

Pilnyak’s early works, such as The Naked Year, published in 1921, made him a literary star and was a prime influence on other Russian writers of the day, including Evgeny Zamyatin, Andrei Bely, and more. Everyone wanted to write like him at the time, Browning explains. To me, Pilnyak’s prose in The Naked Year is like an Eisenstein film with its short, clipped sentences that create a montage of dramatic images. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin didn’t screen until 1925, and I wonder if he was inspired in part by Pilnyak’s writing?

Never judge a book just by it's cover...

Pilnyak’s prose also reminds me of Mayakovsky’s graphic design of the time, with its incredible use of sans-serif fonts and dizzying cubist angles that shout out the author’s message. I have an early translation of The Naked Year, published by Payson & Clarke Ltd of New York in 1928 that features cover and title-page typography reminiscent of Mayakovsky’s graphics, albeit in a much tamer fashion. It’s a gorgeous publication, and this is the only copy I’ve ever seen.

Mayakovskian graphic typography, circa 1928

With the layering of multiple voices as well documents, news reports, and such, The Naked Year is a novel of sounds as well as images. The cacophony of voices reminds me of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922, Faulkner and Dos Passos, or from decades later, William Gaddis’ The Recognitions and JR.

I dream of reading Pilnyak’s Machines & Wolves from 1924, but as far as I know the novel has not be translated into English. Alas. 

My favorite work by Pilnyak, however, is the novella, Mother Earth. It’s a much easier read than The Naked Year, and succinctly captures his great theme of the wild heart of Russia that he viewed as untamable by revolution or progress.

Gary Browning’s biography was excellent. He explains aspects of Pilnyak’s personality—as well as his writings—that played a role in his fall from favor in Stalin’s eyes. Pilnyak was arrested on October 28, 1937 on charges of  spying for the Chinese and was tried in 15 minutes on April 21, 1938. Sent to Siberia, he disappeared. According to Browning, a small yellow slip of paper was found decades later in his file that read: “Sentence carried out.”

A Prolegomena Toward Any Future Russian Literary Dialectics

in which the story is told of a certain worthy personage,

his intellectual games and the ephemerality of existence

—Andrei Bely, Petersburg, 1916

I am an obsessed man...I am a possessed man—to  paraphrase, mistranslate, or simply rip off Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. My obsession is Russian literature.

There’s no special reason for this obsession. I’m a middle-aged, painfully normal, seemingly well-adjusted honky dude from Minneapolis, of all thrilling places. I claim no Russian ancestry, although I like ice-cold vodka and piroshkis, but not to an inordinate degree. I don’t pretend to be sophisticated, urbane, or even particularly smart: my tastes are rather boringly proletarian, from puppy dogs to rockabilly music, swashbucklers (Sabatini! Dumas!) to Westerns (The Searchers!). I’ve never misplaced my nose, run into the devil’s kitty cat in a dark alley, or plotted a good ax murder.

Perry Mason in Petersburg

Russian horse opera

No, my obsession with Russian literature is not a mid-life crisis (although that could be entertaining—and perhaps undiagnosticable). In fact, I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know about Russian literature. That’s because I began reading all the greats when I was about seven years old, thanks to my dad’s collection of Classics Illustrated comicbooks, which included Gogol’s “The Cossack Chief” (Taras Bulba, #164) and Dostoyevksy’s Crime and Punishment (#89), not to mention Homer, Eugene Sue, and even some good solid horse operas. Call it a solid schooling at the College of Comic Book Knowledge.

But it wasn’t until much later that my obsession truly took hold due to a true college class in Dostoyevsky taught by an impassioned and inspired Russian professor. Now, even today, reading Pushkin or Pilnyak gives me a thrill I can’t quite describe. Or understand.

Thus, this blog will be an opportunity to try to get to the bottom of this obsession, blab about my favorite books and authors, and simply ramble on. And on. It will not be critical (hence, we’ll not bother mentioning Elif Batuman’s The Possessed ever again). And I will no doubt toss out numerous broad, silly, untenable, and downright wrong theories about something I don’t really know that much about.

So, let us begin.