Consider the Lobster (44 page)

³
The amount of library time he must have put in would take the stuffing out of anybody, I’d imagine.
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⁴
Among the striking parallels with Shakespeare is the fact that FMD had four works of his “mature period” that are considered total masterpieces —
Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons
(a.k.a.
The Demons,
a.k.a.
The Devils,
a.k.a.
The Possessed
), and
The Brothers Karamazov
— all four of which involve murders and are (arguably) tragedies.
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⁵
Volume III,
The Stir of Liberation,
includes a very fine explicative reading of
Notes,
tracing the book’s genesis as a reply to the “rational egoism” made fashionable by N. G. Chernyshevsky’s
What Is to Be Done?
and identifying the Underground Man as basically a parodic caricature. Frank’s explanation for the widespread misreading of
Notes
(a lot of people don’t read the book as a
conte philosophique,
and they assume that Dostoevsky designed the Underground Man as a serious Hamlet-grade archetype) also helps explain why FMD’s more famous novels are often read and admired without any real appreciation of their ideological premises: “The parodistic function of [the Underground Man’s] character has always been obscured by the immense vitality of his artistic embodiment.” That is, in some ways Dostoevsky was too good for his own good.
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⁶
This last one Frank refers to as
The Devils.
One sign of the formidable problems in translating literary Russian is the fact that lots of FMD’s books have alternative English titles — the first version of
Notes from Underground
I ever read called itself
Memoirs from a Dark Cellar
.
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⁷
Never once in four volumes does Professor Frank mention the Intentional Fallacy7(a) or try to head off the objection that his biography commits it all over the place. In a way this silence is understandable, since the tone Frank maintains through all of his readings is one of maximum restraint and objectivity: he’s not about imposing any particular theory or method of decoding Dostoevsky, and he steers clear of fighting with critics who’ve chosen to apply their various axes’ edges to FMD’s work. When Frank does want to question or criticize a certain reading (as in occasional attacks on Bakhtin’s
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics,
or in a really brilliant response to Freud’s “Dostoevsky and Parricide” in the appendix to Volume I), he always does so simply by pointing out that the historical record and/or Dostoevsky’s own notes and letters contradict certain assumptions the critic has made. His argument is never that somebody else is wrong, just that they don’t have all the facts.

What’s also interesting here is that Joseph Frank came of age as a scholar at just the time when the New Criticism was becoming entrenched in the US academy, and the good old Intentional Fallacy is pretty much a cornerstone of New Criticism; and so, in Frank’s not merely rejecting or arguing against the IF but proceeding as if it didn’t even
exist,
it’s tempting to imagine all kinds of marvelous patricidal currents swirling around his project — Frank giving an enormous silent raspberry to his old teachers. But if we remember that New Criticism’s removal of the author from the interpretive equation did as much as anything to clear the way for poststructural literary theory (as in e.g. Deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist/Feminist Cultural Studies, Foucaultian/ Greenblattian New Historicism, & c.), and that literary theory tends to do to the text itself what New Criticism had done to the author of the text, then it starts to look as if Joseph Frank is taking a sharp early turn away from theory7(b) and trying to compose a system of reading and interpretation so utterly different that it (i.e., Frank’s approach) seems a more telling assault on lit theory’s premises than any frontal attack could be.

^7(a)
In case it’s been a long time since freshman lit, the Intentional Fallacy = “The judging of the meaning or success of a work of art by the author’s expressed or ostensible intention in producing it.” The IF and the Affective Fallacy ( = “The judging of a work of art in terms of its results, especially its emotional effect”) are the big two prohibitions of objective-type textual criticism, especially the New Criticism.

^7(b)
(said theory being our own age’s big radical-intellectual fad, rather as nihilism and rational egoism were for FMD’s Russia)
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⁸
It seems only fair to warn you, though, that Frank’s readings of the novels are extremely close and detailed, at times almost microscopically so, and that this can make for slow going. And also that Frank’s explications seem to require that his reader have Dostoevsky’s novels fresh in mind — you end up getting immeasurably more out of his discussions if you go back and actually reread whatever novel he’s talking about. It’s not clear that this is a defect, though, since part of the appeal of a literary bio is that it serves as a motive/occasion for just such rereading.
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⁹
That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick. The quality’s almost impossible to describe or account for straight out — it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility — and critics’ attempts to reduce it to questions of “style” are almost universally lame.
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¹⁰
One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author’s vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of time as “great” or “classic.” Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared “good for them” that they “ought to like,” at which point the students’ nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It’s like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire.
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¹¹
… especially in the Victorianish translations of Ms. Constance Garnett, who in the 1930s and ’40s cornered the Dostoevsky & Tolstoy–translation market, and whose 1935 rendering of
The Idiot
has stuff like (scanning almost at random):

“Nastasya Filippovna!” General Epanchin articulated reproachfully.…

“I am very glad I’ve met you here, Kolya,” said Myshkin to him. “Can’t you help me? I must be at Nastasya Filippovna’s. I asked Ardelion Alexandrovitch to take me there, but you see he is asleep. Will you take me there, for I don’t know the streets, nor the way?”

…The phrase flattered and touched and greatly pleased General Ivolgin: he suddenly melted, instantly changed his tone, and went off into a long, enthusiastic explanation.…

And even in the acclaimed new Knopf translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the prose (in, e.g.,
Crime and Punishment
) is still often odd and starchy:

“Enough!” he said resolutely and solemnly. “Away with mirages, away with false fears, away with spectres!… There is life! Was I not alive just now? My life hasn’t died with the old crone! May the Lord remember her in His kingdom and — enough, my dear, it’s time to go! Now is the kingdom of reason and light and… and will and strength… and now we shall see! Now we shall cross swords!” he added presumptuously, as if addressing some dark force and challenging it.

Umm, why not just “as if challenging some dark force”? Can you challenge a dark force without addressing it? Or is there in the original Russian something that keeps the above phrase from being redundant, stilted, just plain bad in the same way a sentence like “‘Come on!’ she said, addressing her companion and inviting her to accompany her” is bad? If so, why not acknowledge that in English it’s still bad and just go ahead and fix it? Are literary translators not supposed to mess with the original syntax at all? But Russian is an inflected language — it uses cases and declensions instead of word order — so translators are already messing with the syntax when they put Dostoevsky’s sentences into uninflected English. It’s hard to understand why these translations have to be so clunky.
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¹²
What on earth does it mean to “fly at” somebody? It happens dozens of times in every FMD novel. What, “fly at” them in order to beat them up? To yell at them? Why not
say
that, if you’re translating?
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¹³
Q.v. a random example from Pevear and Volkhonsky’s acclaimed new Knopf rendering of
Notes from Underground:

“Mr. Ferfichkin, tomorrow you will give me satisfaction for your present words!” I said loudly, pompously addressing Ferfichkin.

“You mean a duel, sir? At your pleasure,” the man answered.
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¹⁴
(… who was, like Faulkner’s Caddie, “doomed and knew it,” and whose heroism consists in her haughty defiance of a doom she also courts. FMD seems like the first fiction writer to understand how deeply some people love their own suffering, how they use it and depend on it. Nietzsche would take Dostoevsky’s insight and make it a cornerstone of his own devastating attack on Christianity, and this is ironic: in our own culture of “enlightened atheism” we are very much Nietzsche’s children, his ideological heirs, and without Dostoevsky there would have been no Nietzsche, and yet Dostoevsky is among the most profoundly religious of all writers.)
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¹⁵
Frank doesn’t sugar-coat any of this stuff, but from his bio we learn that Dostoevsky’s character was really more contradictory than prickish. Insufferably vain about his literary reputation, he was also tormented his whole life by what he saw as his artistic inadequacies; a leech and a spendthrift, he also voluntarily assumed financial responsibility for his stepson, for the nasty and ungrateful family of his deceased brother, and for the debts of
Epoch,
the famous literary journal that he and his brother had co-edited. Frank’s new Volume IV makes it clear that it was these honorable debts, rather than general deadbeatism, that sent Mr. and Mrs. FMD into exile in Europe to avoid debtors’ prison, and that it was only at the spas of Europe that Dostoevsky’s gambling mania went out of control.
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¹⁶
Sometimes this allergy is awkwardly striking, as in e.g. the start of part 2 of
The Idiot,
when Prince Myshkin (the protagonist) has left St. Petersburg for six full months in Moscow: “of Myshkin’s adventures during his absence from Petersburg we can give little information,” even though the narrator has access to all sorts of other events outside St. P. Frank doesn’t say much about FMD’s Muscophobia; it’s hard to figure what exactly it’s about.
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¹⁷
=
Poor Folk,
a standard-issue “social novel” that frames a (rather goopy) love story with depictions of urban poverty sufficiently ghastly to elicit the approval of the socialist Left.
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¹⁸
It is true that FMD’s epilepsy — including the mystical illuminations that attended some of his preseizure auras — gets comparatively little discussion in Frank’s bio; and reviewers like the
London Times’
s James L. Rice (himself the author of a book on Dostoevsky and epilepsy) have complained that Frank “gives no idea of the malady’s chronic impact” on Dostoevsky’s religious ideals and their representation in his novels. The question of proportion cuts both ways, though: q.v. the
New York Times Book Review’
s Jan Parker, who spends at least a third of his review of Frank’s Volume III making claims like “It seems to me that Dostoevsky’s behavior does conform fully to the diagnostic criteria for pathological gambling as set forth in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual.” As much as anything, reviews like these help us appreciate Joseph Frank’s own evenhanded breadth and lack of specific axes to grind.
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¹⁹
Let’s not neglect to observe that Frank’s Volume IV provides some good personal dirt. W/r/t Dostoevsky’s hatred of Europe, for example, we learn that his famous 1867 spat with Turgenev, which was ostensibly about Turgenev’s having offended Dostoevsky’s passionate nationalism by attacking Russia in print and then moving to Germany, was also fueled by the fact that FMD had previously borrowed fifty thalers from Turgenev and promised to pay him back right away and then never did. Frank is too restrained to make the obvious point: it’s much easier to live with stiffing somebody if you can work up a grievance against him.
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