“Ah, have the Karamazovs been making mischief yet again?” asks a disreputable acquaintance of the disreputable family. “No doubt about it.”
New translations are always a good reason to reread the classics. I confess I tried and failed to get through Братья Карамазовы during the pandemic, so I’m grateful to Michael R. Katz for providing such a readable English edition. For example, Dmitry Karamazov’s exuberant complaint about Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova’s allure: “I tell you: she has a certain curve. Grushenka, the witch, has a certain curve to her body; it even shows in her little foot, even in her little toe on her left foot. I’ve seen it and kissed it …” (“У Грушеньки, шельмы, есть такой один изгиб тела, он и на ножке у ней отразился, даже в пальчике-мизинчике на левой ножке отозвался. Видел и целовал …”)
Dostoevsky’s last novel, published in 1880, has so many highlights, but what I had forgotten is how long and sustained those highlights are: the Grand Inquisitor, the “shocking” aspect of Father Zosima’s corpse, Ivan and his devil, Dmitry’s trial. Neither did I remember how wonderfully entertainingly terrible papa Fyodor Karamazov is: “‘Dmitry Fyodorovich! … If you weren’t my own son, I’d challenge you to a duel this very second… With pistols, at a distance of three paces … across a handkerchief! Across a handkerchief!’ he concluded, stamping his feet.”
Later, terminally immoral but anxious Fyodor queries his most learned son, Ivan:
“… is there a God or not? But take it seriously! I want to know for sure.” “No, there is no God.” […] “Ivan, is there immortality, well, any kind, even the smallest, tiniest bit?” “No, there’s no immortality either.” “None at all?” “None at all.” “That is, absolutely nothing or something? Perhaps there’s a little something? After all, a little isn’t nothing!”
Despite his father’s faultless logic, Ivan won’t concede even the “tiniest bit” of something, though Alyosha, the good son who is also present at this gathering, insists that there is indeed “Both God and immortality.” Saints like Alyosha are earnest and admirable, but in Dostoevsky, they’re scarcely believable, overwrought, and lack the brilliance that the devilish characters have.
Sigmund Freud understood and appreciated that Dostoevsky goes into the dark in order to illuminate our hidden recesses. Goodness and purity and the uniqueness of the Russian soul are aspirational or pretty ideas, while Ivan’s devil and Dmitry’s devilish side are not ideas but evidence of life in all its chaos:
“In attacking you, I’m attacking myself!” Ivan said [to the “gentleman” devil] … “You are me, me, only with a different mug. You just say exactly what I’m thinking … and you can’t say anything new to me!” “If our thoughts happen to agree, that does me honor,” the gentleman observed with tact and dignity. “But you only pick my vilest thoughts and, what’s more, the stupidest ones. You’re stupid and vulgar. You’re terribly stupid. No, I won’t put up with you! What am I going to do? What am I to do?”
Dostoevsky shows us—to paraphrase and distort the title of one of Tolstoy’s greatest religious stories — that “Where Life Is, There the Dark Side Is Also.” As divided, confessional Dmitry observes: “we’re all cruel, we’re all monsters; we make men, mothers, and babes in arms weep. But of all the rest, may it now be resolved: I am the lowest reptile of all!” And yet Dostoevsky makes us feel more sympathetic to this temperamental, sin-laden giant than to any other character.
Katz, a professor emeritus at Middlebury College, is a veteran translator of the Russian classics, including four novels now by Dostoevsky, and he conveys the gigantic novel in all its shocking glory.
Mikhail Zygar Scribner; $30; 432 pp.
Mikhail Zygar, the founder of the independent TV news channel Dozhd, now living in (having escaped to) Germany, opens and closes his history of Russia’s perpetual misunderstandings of Ukraine with a bowed head. He begins: “This book is a confession. I am guilty for not reading the signs much earlier. I, too, am responsible for Russia’s war against Ukraine. As are my contemporaries and forebears. Russian culture is also to blame for making all these horrors possible.”
He closes: “Imperial history is our disease; it’s inherently addictive. And the withdrawal symptoms will hurt. But this is inevitable. We have to return to reality and realize what we’ve done. We have to learn this lesson. To stop believing in our own uniqueness. To stop being proud of our vast territory. To stop thinking we’re special. To stop imagining ourselves as the center of the world, its conscience, its source of spirituality. It’s all bunk.”
In between those soul-stirring admissions, he relates how Putin is the embodiment of that Russian history “bunk.” In his chilling public pronouncements, Putin sounds like a serial domestic abuser who can only hear his own justifications for beating his wife and children. How ungrateful they are! They now want to leave him – after all he's done to protect them (from everyone but himself) – and, what’s more, they claim they never wanted to be with him in the first place!
War and Punishment, as befits the title’s nod to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, is long but written plainly in clear, journalistic style. In pithy narrative, Zygar demonstrates how for the last 400 years Russia has distorted and repurposed its relationship with Ukraine. He relates the coincidences and deliberate repetitions of history and doctored-history. When, halfway through, Zygar reaches the twenty-first century, he recounts reflections on his own personal interviews with various Ukrainian and Russian newsmakers and politicians.
I have read various biographies of Putin, and in them he comes off as almost human, with almost a soul. But here, through Zygar, I understand him for the first time as someone completely sincere, completely free of the feeling of guilt, someone only a hedonist like Fyodor Karamazov could admire. I imagine that most horrible of Karamazovs exclaiming, “Oh, if only I could have squeezed out every last drop of humanity from myself! I’d have become Tsar!” Zygar’s analysis and recounting of the history between Ukraine and Russia will give no one any comfort (Ukraine, like any country, has plenty of shameful chapters in its past), but it will certainly give readers a more realistic assessment of the continued danger of Putin’s reign.
Meanwhile, recounting President Zelensky’s career as a comedian and his transformation into a war-hero is one of the accomplishments of the timely book. In case you missed it, here is Zelensky’s September 11, 2022, address to the Russian people, which document will go into the history books if Democracy and Civilization survive Putin’s nuclear threats:
Do you still think we are one people? Do you still think you can scare us, break us, force us to make concessions? You really don’t get it? Don’t you understand who we are? What we stand for? What we’re about? Read my lips: Without gas or without you? Without you. Without light or without you? Without you. Without food or without you? Without you. Cold, hunger, darkness, and thirst are not as terrible and deadly for us as your friendship and brotherhood. But history will sort things out. And we will have gas, electricity, water, and food… without you!
Zygar has not given up on the Russian people – but only if they, as many of their fellow citizens have already done, humble themselves before truth and history: “So that Russian culture may live on, we must act. We must start by looking inside ourselves and telling the truth about our past and our present.”
Ralph Dutli Translated from the German by Ben Fowkes Verso; $39.95; 432 pp.
Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) was a world-class author, greater, in the opinion of some aficionados, than any other twentieth-century Russian-language poet. Mandelstam’s entire life is, as the biographer Ralph Dutli tells it, fascinating, dramatic, sad and joyous, impressive and frightening. Born in Warsaw to Jewish parents (a faith he abandoned but eventually respected and occasionally defended), he grew up near St. Petersburg. As a teenager, he was swept up in revolutionary fervor, so his parents countered that dangerous activity with his other passion, poetry, and sent him off to school in Paris.
Dutli knows which poetic themes engaged Mandelstam then, which themes changed, when themes developed and which ones disappeared, and we learn about the various poetic movements Mandelstam joined or inspired, including Acmeism. We marvel at Mandelstam’s regular successes until Stalin’s grip on the empire, not to mention experimental art, tightened in the mid-1920s, and publication of Mandelstam’s poems was for the most part prohibited. This biography reveals him as brilliant and alternately reckless, unlucky, lucky, impulsive, hesitant, defeated, unconquerable, independent, helpless, fearful and brave. He was also susceptible to losing his head over the enchanting women he met who, usually, loved him right back. (Among his enthusiastic lovers were the poets Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, who, when the love was gone, remained his friends.)
Even though Mandelstam ran into trouble with the Soviet government right away and expected to be silenced and eventually murdered by Stalin, he kept living, making do, writing essays about poets and poetry, translating literary works, dedicating himself to the study and appreciation of Dante and other Medieval poets, writing children’s stories, falling in love (even after marrying Nadezhda Khazina), regularly going into a kind of writerly hibernation and then, for seemingly no reason except that the lava of poetry rose in him, erupting again. Most of his poetry after 1923 never saw publication in Russia until 1990.
He did somehow slip “Leningrad” past government censors. In 1932, the final verse of which anticipated his own arrest in 1938:
I live up a back flight of stairs, and when they tear at the bell pull The ringing hits me in the head. I wait until dawn for the dear guests to arrive, And each rattle of the slender door chain is like the clank of shackles. [1]
Mandelstam comes off very well and human. Nadezhda Mandelstam, his forbearing and heroic wife, of course comes off great. She lived until 1980, almost but not quite long enough to witness Mandelstam’s official “rehabilitation” in 1987. Her last letter to Mandelstam broke my heart. He was nearly dead in the Gulag when she wrote it, and he didn’t live to read it. The letter concludes: “I do not know where you are. Will you hear me? Do you know how much I love you? I could never tell you how much I love you. I cannot tell you even now. I speak only to you. You are with me always, and I, who was such a wild and angry one and never learned to weep simple tears – now I weep and weep. It’s me: Nadia. Where are you? Farewell.” The biography continues after his death in Kolyma (an “Auschwitz without ovens,” wrote Georgy Demidov) with the story of the preservation of his hidden manuscripts and Nadezhda keeping out of the KGB’s sights and her writing of her famous memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned.
This biography is very good; the biographer is quietly expert, knowledgeable, and admiring. He quotes the poetry continually to highlight Mandelstam’s life and his development and mastery of his art. The Swiss-born Dutli must be the world’s greatest Osip Mandelstam scholar, as this is the fourth book he has written about the poet after having collected and edited and translated into German the complete ten volumes of Mandelstam’s work. Oddly modest, Dutli doesn’t even mention his experience and expertise until the Acknowledgments page.
The book concludes with a chronology and the ecstatic testimonials from poets of Mandelstam’s time and after, among them, my favorite, by the poet Adam Zagajewski in 1989: “If Russia had been founded by Anna Akhmatova, if Mandelstam had been its law-giver, if Stalin had only been a marginal figure in a vanished Georgian epic, if Russia had stripped off its shaggy bearskin, if it had been able to live by the word not by the fist, if Russia, if Russia …”
[1] See also Christian Wiman’s translation of “Leningrad” in Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (2012): “I have come back to my city, quietly, so quietly, / But the doorbell’s wired to my nerves, rooted in the meat of me. / And all night I itch untouchable, as with a paraplegic’s pains, / Waiting for the door to rattle in its chains.”
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