A Writer’s Diary, Vol. One
By Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Kenneth Lantz with an introductory study by Gary Saul Morson
Northwestern University Press, 805 pages, $49.95
Notes From Underground
By Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Knopf, 136 pages, $20
Late 19th Century Russian chauvinism reached fever pitch in the Petersburg monthly “A Writer’s Diary.” Founded by Fyodor Dostoevsky, its editor and sole contributor, the journal was a running commentary on the events and issues of the day as well as a podium for Dostoevsky’s own radical conservative views.
From the pages of “A Writer’s Diary” Dostoevsky lectured his readers on the virtues of Russianness and Russian Orthodoxy. Reacting against then current talk of Russia’s cultural inferiority vis-a-vis Europe, Dostoevsky argued that Europe lacked a genuine religion and that European civilization was on the verge of spiritual collapse. He lashed out at an array of religions and nationalities, disparaging Catholicism as “demagogic socialism” and warning his readers to be wary of the international Jewish conspiracy. Russia, he asserted, was the only truly spiritual leader of the civilized world.
Dostoevsky’s nationalism, replete with visions of bogymen, cast a pall over “A Writer’s Diary.” It was a failed experiment in social and political commentary, the labor of a great novelist turned preacher-ideologue and Dostoevsky’s least read work.
Nevertheless, “A Writer’s Diary” is important. Many issues discussed there found their way into Dostoevsky’s fiction. The anti-utopian stance of the “Diary,” for example, is mirrored in the Underground Man’s spirited debunking of utopian thinkers, while the harangue on religion contained in the “Diary” likely served as preparation for the open-ended debate in “The Brothers Karamazov” between Alyosha, man of god, and Ivan, atheist intellectual.
The “Diary” also was where Dostoevsky published some of his finest short stories-“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” “Vlas,” “The Meek One,” “The Boy at Christ’s Christmas Party,” “The Peasant Marey” among them. Extracted from the “Diary,” they have appeared in various English anthologies of Dostoevsky’s works.
Kenneth Lantz’s new translation of the “Diary,” the first of two volumes, is a welcome event. True to the unpolished, often blunt style of Dostoevsky’s journalistic prose, it rises, where need be, to the impassioned pitch of the original and is supplemented by Gary Saul Morson’s thoughtful introductory study.
Morson stresses the importance of restoring the short stories to their original journalistic context. The stories were often fictional or semi-fictional renderings of events and issues Dostoevsky discussed in the journal, and one reads them differently in the context of the “Diary.”
For example, “The Meek One” was based on an actual court case that Dostoevsky reported on: the case of a woman repeatedly beaten by her husband who appeals to the court for help and, receiving none, ultimately commits suicide. Dostoevsky surveyed the press reports of the case in the “Diary” and was highly critical of the Russian court system, which did little more than instruct husband and wife to learn to live with one another. When he returned to the case in a later issue of the “Diary,” this time as a creator of semi-fictions, his focus was different: the husband’s deviant behavior.
“The Meek One” begins with the description of the husband found in the press. “Reports stated,” Dostoevsky wrote, that the man was “tall, very thick-set, powerful, and fair-haired.” Then he signaled the start of his fictional account-“I would add another touch: thinning hair. . .”-and quickly moved on to a step-by-step account of the action as he envisioned it:
“For a number of years he had beaten his wife with anything that was at hand-ropes or sticks. He would take up a floorboard, thrust her feet into the gap, press the board down and beat and beat her. . .his blows are measured; he doesn’t listen to her cries and her pleading; or rather, he does listen, and listens with delight-otherwise what satisfaction would there be in beating her?. . .But finally she grows quiet. . .like a madman he seizes a stick or a branch, anything he can find, he shatters it with three final, terrible blows across her back-enough! He steps away. A small girl, their daughter (and they did have a daughter!) trembles. . .in the corner, trying to hide. . .”
Here the author of some of the most riveting action sequences ever written, reclaims essential facts of the case as his own and improvises upon them. As Dostoevsky moves from facts to the action, the suspense is heightened by the narrator’s delaying, contradictory “he doesn’t listen. . .he does listen.” The climax, typically lasting a few mad seconds, ends, and Dostoevsky abruptly signals a return to the facts: “and they did have a daughter!” Improvising again, he makes the child a witness to the crime and closes the story on a theme that runs throughout his work: cruelty to children.
Dostoevsky, it would appear, was writing “The Meek One” for readers of the “Diary” who were already familiar with the facts of the case and was, in effect, inviting them to compose the story along with him.
Admirers of Dostoevsky also will be prompted to reconsider another of his works, “Notes From Underground,” thanks to veteran translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The confession of that wily anti-hero and spiteful social misfit, the Underground Man, “Notes From Underground” displays Dostoevsky’s skill as an ironist. Armed with the author’s conservative political views, the Underground Man attacked the social progressives of his day, dismissing as utopian nonsense the belief that one can enlighten the population and thereby forge a new, rational social order.
Seeing little evidence of humankind’s rational behavior, the Underground Man argued that actions are governed not by reason but by individual will. According to him, our personal whims are what we hold most dear and what rationalist social schemes would deprive us of.
The most recalcitrant to translation of all Dostoevsky’s novels, “Notes From Underground” is more spoken than written-the monologue of the Underground Man who, sitting in his “loathesome, stinking underground,” rants, raves and waxes paradoxical, now in convoluted sentences, now in abrupt asides. Neither a thinker nor a man of letters, he struggles to clarify his incoherent thoughts, is beset by doubts and conflicting emotions and dwells on imagined slights.
In previous translations, the Underground Man’s convoluted sentences have been routinely broken down into shorter, more customary English units, his penchant for repeating certain words has been altered and so forth-all, apparently, so that the English translation would “read well.” Indeed, English versions of “Notes From Underground” are smoother than the Russian original; at times the Underground Man begins to sound like a man of letters.
Pevear and Volokhonsky have restored much of the unkemptness of the original. The Underground Man’s repetitiveness is back, as are his convoluted sentences and the paragraphs that run on for a page and more. Most important, they make “Notes From Underground” sound like the spoken novel that it is.
In a previous translation one finds the Underground Man acknowledging that he had “committed something vile.” Here he announces that he has done “a nasty thing.” Similarly, he is impatient not with “trivialities” but with “piddling things.” When he states that he had never tried his hand at literature, a previous translation reads: “I had never engaged in literary endeavors.” Pevear and Volokhonsky, literally faithful to the Russian version, write instead: “I had never literaturized.”
One can quibble over particular choices-“literaturize” is not likely to catch on soon in English-but Pevear and Volokhonsky are on the right track. This translation invites us to discover the Underground Man anew.
