For a good time, call Grushenka

In Dostoevsky's "Brothers Karamazov" polyphonic novel, there are many routes that one can take through the narrative. Think of running a knitting needle through a tangled skein, and there you have it. Grushenka is the fascinating fallen angel, a "provincial haetera" of unusual charm (504). She is seduced at seventeen by a Polish officer, and then is taken up a "protector," an ugly, old merchant in a small town. She waits in a provincial backwater, scheming her revenge and/or restoration with the Polish officer, meanwhile fascinating many men of the town, but yielding to none. Fyodor, the libidinous patriarch of the Karamazovs, is mad for her. His oldest son Dmitri is also mad for her, abandoning and cheating his respectable (but mean, and partially compromised) fiance, Katya, for her. For his passion for Grushenka, Dmitri is brought to utter ruin, charged and convicted with the murder of his father. He loses his honor entirely, by keeping rubles entrusted to him by his fiance in order to bankroll a hoped-for elopement with Grushenka. Grushenka wants to restore her lost reputation by marrying her now-widowed seducer, the Polish officer, after five long years of waiting. He turns out to be too old for her, he has lost his charm, is "like a father," and wears a lousy toupee (430). She runs her fingers through the fair curls of a pretty younger man, Kalganov, and is "clutching" his hand as Dmitri strides in to her rescue (416). Earlier, Dmitri's own innocent and saintly brother Alexei calmly embraces her, while Grushenka sits seductively on his lap: she has paid twenty-five roubles to an unbeliever to bring the lovely monk to her. He decides, she is an angel. A young lawyer of the town, Nikolai, goes about saying she has upper class manners (504)! Grushenka ends up living with another old man, Maximov, a charity case. Gruschenka can't get away from men, they flock to her, they fall at her "little feet." She prefers the young, good-looking ones, but suffers all of them quite democratically. The story might be said to be a tale about sexual jealousy in men, especially as between older men (who can afford love) and younger men (who attract love). Grushenka has a talent for both money and men. She has become a financial asset to her ancient merchant, his bookkeeper, in fact, she is herself a money-lender for interest and has accumulated a tidy pile. She is able to keep them all in her power through love or money. The only two who remain cold to her, Ivan and Smerdyakov, are immune to these two charms. Her name is Agrippina, after the mother of Caligula and Nero (Agrippina the Older and the Younger), famous plotters and seducers. Seen from the twenty-first century, Grushenka might be considered a victim of sorts, but given the damage that is dealt out in her name: death, exile and punishment, disgrace, one wonders if this shoe fits the seductive curve of that lovely little foot.

Photo credit: alas, is lost in hyperspace. This jpg was called "Olga in a Black Wig."

No. Ten Cans and Other Literary Matters

Dear cherished readers, welcome to this blog. For novices in blogging, here is a little discussion of "how to read a blog." Blogs typically are semi-diaristic collages, very much "feuilletons," like Dostoevsky's "Writer's Diary." Konstantin Mochulsky called this kind of writing a "a literary work not presented in its finished form; the writer (is not) partitioned off by the walls of his study; we penetrate the very laboratory of . . . creative activity" (Morson, "Boundaries," 59). Typically, blogs are written sequentially, from the "bottom up." A blog is usually composed of random observations taken from life (in this case, a reading life), together with snippets of various "canned materials," if you will. Therefore, unlike a narrative, the very first entry is usually the last, so be sure to go all the way, sometime, to the first/last entry, which is on "page two," accessed by clicking on "Older Posts" at the bottom of this or any page. The posts are listed, from the very last post written, theoretically, (this one, "No. 10 Cans") to the very first ("Time and Meaning," dated July 3) in the Archive at the right. There are posts in July and August, the lists can be expanded or contracted as you wish. You can dip in here and there and sample any entry, or read sequentially. You may chose to follow the links provided therein, or not. Some links are more interesting than others. Delicious string beans in one, pasty, watery garbanzo beans in another. Dostoevsky himself hoped such random "linkages" would erode the reader's tendency to favor neat beginnings and endings, but rather to foster open-ended inquiry, allusions, ironic contextualism, etc.

If you do get bored and want to run away, there is also a straightforward list of links to Dostoevsky materials of note to the right, which will take you all over the internet to interesting or provocative sites. The bibliography for this blog is the top link, "Bibliography." I made a little web page for it, clumsily.

Guided by Gary Saul Morson (and others), I noted my ideas in no particular order, as they arrived, hopping over the fence willy-nilly into the garden. A blog is essentially asynchronous, so I worked on multiple entries at a time, going back and revising many times as my reading expanded, and deepened. I had several readers along the way, since it is a public site, and they noted my tendency to "disappear" whole sections, and to bring them back again, transformed. A miracle! I hope this does not happen to you, as it is maddening. "I could have sworn there was a photograph of an old boot and a commentary on Smerdykov's fashion sense . . ." Not. Anymore. Maybe. Later. Or, before. To be. Finally, I hope you all enjoy wandering around in this writing without a beginning or an ending, but with many, many thresholds. And, a little movie.

Photo credit: Lovely No. 10 can from WellsCan's U.S. Dollar website, where one may buy many kinds of beautiful cans by the case.

Surplus

This blog is about reading. The linch-pin is Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," but it is also about reading Gary Saul Morson "Freedom and Narrative: The Shadows of Time" and Mikhail Bakhtin on Dostoevsky's poetics. Bakhtin (1895-1975) wrote during the Soviet period in Russia. It is said he wrote "for the drawer," not for publication, as a humanist, and some would say a religious person, in times when these were two poor choices for a Soviet writer. He did spend time in exile after conflicts with Soviet powers, and during his lifetime he published little. His work began to be translated into English in 1968, finally reaching prominence in the international academic world in the 1980s. Looking at Bakhtin, one must consider the limited resources he had about us, and vice versa: a man writing in a vast continent that was and still is incomparably closed to the West. Dostoevsky used to complain, how is it that Russians can understand Europeans so completely, whereas Europeans never can "get" Russians? Perhaps this is why, as an introduction to Bakhtin, we are wise to go to Morson, a Slavicist, for a guide. Morson writes also about literature, and Bakhtin in particular, with great depth and feeling. In reading "The Brothers Karamazov," the great themes of damnation, redemption, and the meaning of God's goodness, even ideas of Paradise, must be included even in this humble blog. Morson's enrichments to this experience are myriad. However, there were surprizes right from the very beginning. At first writing, I found myself writing about Primo Levi, without knowing why. I had been reading Kjetsaa's biography of Dostoevsky, and abruptly threw down my book, and went right to the shelf and picked up Primo Levi's "The Drowned and the Saved," and read it right through. Later, I learned that Morson's book, "Narrative and Freedom," had started out to be another type of book entirely, about sideshadowing, a Bakhtinian term, to be co-authored by his friend Michael Andre Bernstein. As the two friends began to assemble their materials, it became clear the Bernstein wanted to look at "backshadowing," with regard to the Shoah, while Morson wanted to write about "foreshadowing," determinism and non-determinism (or freedom), and the "diseases of the present," using literature as the best evidence for his and Bakhtin's observations about time and narrative. From Bakhtin's foundational ideas about time and story, then, two rich books came: Morson's book on "narrative and freedom," and Bernstein's "Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalpytic History," where "The Brothers Karamazov" and "The Drowned and the Saved" both figure, using the very passages I'd drawn out initially to compare. I was drawn away from this theme for a while, lost in the beauty of Dostoevsky's "vortex time," and temporarily dazzled by Father Zosima's ideas about Heaven and Hell, which took me, not surprizingly, to William Blake and Swedenborg, but perhaps surprizingly, to Mormonism, about which I know just a little. I found upon investigation that both Dostoevsky and Morson are popular studies among studious Mormon book clubs and bloggers, and there is even a course centred on Morson's "prosaics" at Brigham Young University. Upon learning this, I did two things: I wrote to Morson, who is on record as a self-identified "Jewish Slavicist," and asked him if this is coincidence, and I read Morson on prosaics, yet another Bakhtinian term. This took me aback, because there I found Morson sounding more like Steiner in "Tolstoy or Dostoevsky." Another detour took me on a saunter around "holy fools." This had to be done when I discovered by using the concordance link, to your right, dear superaddressees, of Constance Garnett's translation, that she scrupulously avoids the use of this most Russian of terms, a term that leapt from the page of Pevear's translation each of the many times I read it. So I had to bristle my copy of Pevear's translation with post-it notes to compose a short, little post on the "holy fool." And then, there is always the beauty of Dostoevsky's writing, its "eventness" and constant surprises, which can't be and won't be canned. And so there is always much more, so then, on to the blog.

Interiors

Several interiors are given a special treatment in Brothers Karamazov. The minimal furnishings of Fyodor's house match his spiritual parsimony. The walls and fixtures are dirty white, the upholstery once red silk. His bed is hidden behind a red Chinese screen (391). One senses the furniture there is always pushed back against the walls, to allow for drunken passages and wide gestures. Finally, Fydor is represented in court in the form of his best evidence: his blood-stained white silk dressing gown, the white and red, the symbol of Fydor's stained life.

The dirty disorder of the Captain's hovel match his unkempt and provisional life, while Father Zosima's digs are heavenly, a garden, and inside, one finds "crude and poor" furnishings, no more than necessary, but also "porcelain eggs," the special gift of royalty, as well as "expensive prints" of Italian artworks. One imagines Dostoevsky's particular favorite, an insipid Raphael Madonna, here. Father Ferapont's cell is correspondingly wild and hallucinatory, filled with flickering lights and the darkened images of saints, on the wild edge of a dark forest. Ivan takes refuge in tavern, but not even a private room: he is a man of the commons, always taken in the crossroads. His private space is not revealed until very late in the book; it happens to be a large-ish space, very private, with a gate and a deaf servant, full of rooms that he hardly uses. This is a metaphor for his large mind, full of separate compartments, but with few comforts and no human voice to cheer, or hear, or console him. The samovar has always grown cold at Ivan's.

For Dmitri, there is an apartment where the landlords adore him, but more importantly his "look-out," a tumble-down gazebo: Dmitri is Pan. The gazebo is located in a paradise of a garden, however: there is a verdant meadow and a "thicket of lindens and old currant, elder, snow ball, and lilac bushes." Dmitri's gazebo is "blackened and lopsided, with lattice sides . . . everything was decayed, all the planks were loose, the wood smelled of dampness" (103-104). But, the roof "under which it was still possible to find shelter from the rain" and the little green benches, "on which it was still possible to sit" provide temporary shelter for a man destined for stone walls and no windows.

The women have their habitats, as well. Katerina Ivanovna's spacious digs are "filled with elegant and abundant furniture, not at all in the provincial manner." Here there is a silk mantilla, cups of chocolate, flowers in vases, and a "crystal dish with purple raisins, another with candies." There is "even an aquarium," a suitable metaphor for this hot-house lady's airless imprisonment by convention (144-145). Later in the book, however, this space seems to contract and is arduously up some narrow, dark stairs: her life prospects, along with her digs, have darkened and contracted. Grushenka's keeper has a house that is huge, dreary, "killingly depressing ," and although there are many large chandeliers, they are all wrapped in dust covers, so there is no chance of light (369). Grushenka's own home, a rented three-room wooden shack, is filled with discarded, oversized, and uncomfortable old mahogany furniture from the '20s (346). Alyosha finds her reclining on a torn leather sofa, with down pillows from her bed under her head for comfort. She cannot afford the candles, so lies waiting in the dark for "a golden message," but for Alyosha and Rakitin, she orders candles! champagne! (349). She spends her money on wardrobe, that is all. Of the Khokhlakov's interior, we know nothing, except that it is a fine house, and, near the vestibule, there is a sliding door, and later, a door that is shut painfully on Liza's finger.

Last but not least, Smerdykov migrates from his painful little room in Grigory and Marfa's house, big enough only for his cot, the scene of thrashing and suffering, to the "best room" in his fiance's home, which gradually fills up with furniture so that on Ivan's last visit, there is hardly room to move or sit. Grushenka's own torn leather sofa and now slightly soiled white pillows turn up there, but by this time, the mahogany is "imitation" (621). One wonders, how is this so? What communication has Grushenka with Smerdyakov that her sofa is now there?

Photo credits: "1) Traditional Russian Interior, " Courtesy Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. 2) Rene Magritte, "Perspective: Madame Recamier by David, " 1956, from a West Valley College site on "Natural Surrealism." The original painting Magritte sent up is by David, from 1800, so this divan is about the right date for Grushenka's provincial imitation "from the twenties," so far from Paris, the fashion capital. Dostoevsky had a keen eye for details of style, and in particular had a keen sense ofthe ridiculousness of Russians slavishly copying Europeans, for example, Smerdyakov's studying French, like a nobleman, in his tawdry room.

Holy Fools

The term "holy fool" is liberally used in "The Brothers Karamazov" in Pevear's translation. Garnett's translation avoids this peculiarly Russian term, which a key concept in understanding "Brothers." The importance of holy foolishness in Russia cannot be underplayed: the magnificent onion-domed St. Basil's Cathedral, in Moscow's Red Square, is dedicated to "Basil the Fool," canonized in 1580. In fact, the Orthodox Church canonized some 30 saints under the rubric of "foolishness for Christ's sake" (Murav 2), while there were many more whom were not canonized, but nevertheless venerated. So central is the "holy fool" in Russian culture, Slavicist Ewa Thompson argues that the holy fool "code of contrasts" essentially defines the Russian character. Despite the centrality of this form of conduct in Russian culture, Soviet scholars dismissed or minimized the "holy fool" generally, in their critique of Dostoevsky in particular. Bakhtin, indeed, called the "holy fool" device in Dostoevsky as "a sort of form, a sort of aestheticism -- but, as it were, in reverse" (Bakhtin, Problems 231). Harriet Murav in "Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique,"argues, in fact, that Dostoevsky writes "holy foolishly." She writes that "Brothers" is in the form of an icon, with its "glimmering of restoration just beyond its boundaries" (131). The novel, like a traditional icon, has three parts: heaven, earth, and hell. "In the novel, we will see," she comments, "hell takes up the largest part" (135).

Murav describes three basic Russian types of "holy fool": the born fool, like "Stinking Lizaveta," often said to have the gift of augury; the religious person who is also or who becomes or is sporadically mad, like Ferapont; and the purest form, a person who is foolish for Christ, in her words, "a person who feigns madness or folly as an ascetic feat of self-humiliation" (2).

"Stinking Lizaveta" is the perfect exemplary "holy fool" because she was born, not made. She is the kind we recognize most readily, one of God's own special ones (97). Garnett uses the term "idiot" here rather than Pevear's term, "holy fool." Father Ferapont is also cited as an exemplary holy fool, as he is clearly mad, but for holy purposes. It is said this is "what fascinated" the monks about him (163). (In Garnett, he is called simply, "crazy," and it is his "craziness" that "attracted" them.) Father Zosima is called a "holy fool" by Rakitin, who says about Zosima's inexplicable prostration before Dimitri: "He predicted the crime and marked the criminal! That's always the way with these holy fools; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple. Like your elder, he takes a stick to a righteous man and falls at the feet of a murderer" (78). In Garnett, Rakitin uses the term "crazy fanatic." This blunt terminology eliminates the possibility of Zosima's foreknowledge or clairvoyance, and slices out the entire discussion about faith and miracles, knowing and forgiving, and the tragic/transcendent nature of Dmitri's fall from grace.

Ivan's tavern scene is foreshadowed in this statement, as well as the possibility of possibilities that Ivan, too, is a holy fool, throwing stones at the temple from the vantage point of the tavern. (This phrase is from a work on folk legends by Afanasiev in 1852, where a worker behaves badly, throwing stones at the church, etc. and it is discovered that he alone sees clearly because he is the angel of God and sees truly what mortals cannot see, the devils circling the steeple (Buzina 232). Buzina also points out that from the point of view of folklore, Ivan is named the traditional name of the "third son" who is a fool but nevertheless slays the giant, finds the gold, marries the princess, etc.: "Ivan the Fool" (238). Alas for Ivan Karamazov, he is no fool. Smerdyakov should be a fool, throughout the novel he is identified as an "idiot" because of his illness, but in no way in Smerdyakov a fool. He never acts disinterestedly, even less so than his counterpart, the Devil.

In a way, all holy or even good people are fools, when compared to a sinner like Fyodor or a sensualist like Dmitri. Fydor is very free in calling people "fools," although he prides himself on his "foolishness," which he believes is just an act. Very few of the monks are "foolish." Even the meek Father Iosif has to make little wise editorial comments in Father Zosima's presence. Alyosha is on the way to being a "holy fool," the way he runs around like a chicken with his head cut off. At page 21, the putative "author" says that, vis a vis Alyosha's handling of money, that "anyone who got to know him a little would be immediately be convinced . . . that (he) must be one of those youths, like holy fools, as it were, who, if they were to chance on even a large fortune, would have no trouble giving it away. . . ". Garnett translates "holy fool" in this passage as "a type of religious enthusiast." None of the women, except Lizaveta, who is dead before we meet her, are fools of the holy sort, although fools they are, to a woman. Katerina Ivanovna, who is most certainly "fooled" by others, and her own pride. In anger, she calls Alyosha a "holy fool" when he insists that she is tormenting Ivan by claiming to love Dmitri (192). In Garnett, she calls him a "religious idiot." Again, in Garnett's translation the penetrating capacity of the holy fool to see through human folly is lost. Ivan follows this exchange with, "You are mistaken, my good Alyosha," then attempts to reason away his flight to Moscow on the morrow.

A fool is, among other things, as we see from Alyosha's example, one who trusts in luck, or, perhaps, in God. Sometimes this fool, his or her eyes clapped on god, sees through the trickery and self-deception of other mortals. Sometimes, like Ferapont, they see angels and devils with such facility they lose touch with the human world, and slip over into simple madness. Dmitri is perhaps just foolish enough to be saved by earthly damnation, Ivan, perhaps, is not so lucky: he slips over this fine line accompanied by the Devil. And the Devil is never a fool.

Photo credit: A beautiful aged Orthodox priest performing liturgy in Kosovo, from a Kosovo Church blog that has disappeared. This old gentleman has an innocent and saintly look I'd associate with a Holy Fool, and his colleagues look to me like Zosima's wise-guy companions at the monastery.

Quotidian Days

Gary Saul Morson's 2001 essay, "Prosaics: An Approach to the Humanities" pleads for "a way of thinking" that "focuses on the ordinary, messy, quotidian facts of daily life - in short, on the prosaic," and for a shunning of grand systems. His essay looks at Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as examples of prosaic writers who bring for us the "messiness of the world," unlike epics, lyrics, tragedies or romances. Freud, for example, he argues, was a "system" man: for Freud, even forgetting is part of a system, albeit hidden: there are no accidents for Freud. Morson thinks this is not the way the world is -- for him, it's a mess, its natural state is disorder, and any order found in it, "is always the result of work" and "requires an explanation." Contingencies are the world. Dostoevsky, Morson says, believed that the world was driven by "sudden eruptions from the unconscious," a rather Freudian idea, while Tolstoy believed that our choices are shaped by the "whole climate of our minds, which themselves result from countless small decisions at ordinary moments." Morson says that Anna Karenina's life was destroyed, because she lacked the ability to grasp the prosaic; she insisted on living on another scale, in a big system, and the loneliness of it killed her: as Morson says, "she dies from a lack of prosaics." Tolstoy contrasts Anna's grandiosity with other characters prosaic goodness, like Dolly and Kitty, illustrating their "moral compass" through daily, tiny actions taken, such as Kitty with her mother and the peasant women making jam. Does anyone in Dostoevsky ever do anything so ordinary? (Mind you, Dostoevskythought Kitty was "stupider" than anyone else in the novel, which he felt was full of "banality and mediocrity" (cited in Frank, "Mantle," 219). Dostoevsky's characters are so much dramatis personae, it is hard to imagine anyone making jam. Ivan hints at ordinary life with his love for the "sticky green leaves" of springtime, and so does Dmitri with his statement to Alyosha to not cry because, "the sun shines, how clear the sky is, the leaves are all green, it's still summer, four o'clock in the afternoon, so calm!" But these are not acts, these are singular acts of enjoyment and reflection, not choices to do the right, small, thing, over and over again.

Evil, says Morson, is often depicted as "grand, terrifying and Satanic," but in Tolstoy, Chekov and Dostoevsky, evil is petty, even prosaic. Ivan Karamazov's Devil is petty, commonplace; even his hell has adopted the metric system - - the Karamazov hell is measured in millimeters. Goodness is also measured in millimeters, Morson argues. He explains that a "system" of ethics can lead to avoidance of responsibility and wrong choices in a contingent world. Rather, he argues that only a constant wielding of "moral alertness" to the small choices that life is made of, the tiny instances of "oughtness" (Bakhtin's word) that compose our moral decisions and direct our acts, which always take place in a complex world in all its messiness, will lead to a life lived ethically. "For such reasons," he writes, "Bakhtin came to regard the novel as the highest art form . . . more profound than philosophy. In great novels the texture of daily life is described with a richness, depth and attention to contingent particulars that no other form of thought or literary genre offers. In novels we see moral decisions made moment by moment by inexhaustibly complex characters in unrepeatable social systems at particular historical times: and we see that the value of these decisions cannot be abstracted from these specifics." He describes how great prosaic novels like "The Brothers Karamazov" teach us, through the "moment-to-moment decisions we make in the course of reading." Our moment-by-moment moral assessments of the actions portrayed are a form of "practice" for making complex moral decisions in the disordered, bumptious real world. These practice runs are far more instructive and seep more deeply into our consciousnesses than mere ethical or moral "instruction." Morson reiterates Tolstoy's thoughts about the "ethics of reading." It is not important what the "explicit" moral of the passage or the novel might be, but rather how the work "infects" the reader as they read, "practicing" making moral choices moment-to-moment, and making "tiny, tiny alterations of consciousness in the process."

Image credit: 1) Photograph of Gary Saul Morson, complements of the Slavic Department, Northwestern University, Chicago. 2) Painting by Mary Pratt, "Raspberries Reflecting Summer." Oil on canvas, 61 x 91 cm. 2000. Courtesy Gallery Stratford; in a private collection. The berries on a plate appear to be the very best berries ever, and that is because they are a work of genius by the Newfoundland painter, Mary Pratt, consummate artist of the still life.

Ivan Karamazov and The Devil

"An episode of Dostoevsky's Karamazov Brothers. Brilliant performance of Kirill Lavrov, great Russian actor (acts as both Ivan Karamazov and the devil). Kirill Lavrov passed away on April, 27, 2007. Directed by Ivan Pyryev, a prominent film maker, who died during the shooting process.
(p) Mosfilm 1968." If this video clip should act up, and it will from time to time as the source is in Russia, go to this link to view the clip.

Ivan's visit from the Devil is a slice out of time. His wet towel is dry, the glass sitting prettily intact on the table, yet his candles have burned down, indicating the passage of time. Alyosha banging at the window snaps him out of his hallucination, and yet Alyosha seems to know what has happened. Alyosha, like the devil, seems to have the gift of bending time. In the earlier, more innocent, days of the novel, when he was still an acolyte, his days seemed preternaturally long, as he ran from task to task. Here he arrives "at midnight," on the dividing line between Mitya's last day before the trial, and the day of the trial. Ivan has been making tiny, tiny choices all day. First, he returns home, and with his hand on his doorbell, turns and to goes to Smerdyakov, and there hears Smerdyakov's admission of guilt (620). He decides to save the drunken peasant he has knocked down, telling himself he has used an hour in "saving" the peasant from freezing to death only because he was feeling pleased with his decision to tell the court everything on the morrow (634). He stops again at the gate to his house, and asks himself, "why shouldn't I go to the prosecutor right now at once and tell him everything?" This mirrors the Dmitri's daily question, "why don't I go to Katya right now and return the money?" It is these steps not taken that lead to disaster. Alyosha does not think before acting, he always chooses the right, immediate action, whereas Ivan and Dmitri hesitate and hesitate. This seems to give Alyosha "all the time in the world" while Dmitri and Ivan, to say the very least, have "terrible timing."