Sinners, Saints and Pilgrims

Kevin Birmingham (Penguin Press, $30)

The “Masterpiece” of the title is Crime and Punishment, and Birmingham narrates Dostoyevsky’s life and work through that novel’s serial publication in 1866. Birmingham positions us as if over Dostoyevsky’s shoulder, in just the way Dostoyevsky figured out how to present Raskolnikov’s experiences, which Dostoyevsky originally conceived of as an 80-page novella presented through the murderer’s letters:

“At some point in late November [1865], one question must have occurred to him: What if the most intimate perspective isn’t actually the first person? What if we could be even closer to the murderer by lurking a half step behind him, looking over his shoulder, close enough to hear his quickening breath, to see his eyes darting, to think and feel what he thinks and feels not because the murderer narrates it but because we hear it slantwise from someone more lucid, someone who could be Raskolnikov’s double. The narrator would be ‘invisible but omniscient,’ Dostoyevsky decided, someone ‘who doesn’t leave his hero for a moment.’ The half-step distance from Raskolnikov allows the reader to follow all his actions, thoughts, and emotions, without being overtaken by them.”

This ever-engrossing biography is about Dostoyevsky’s eventual fevered writing of Crime and Punishment – “eventual” because it isn’t until halfway through the book that Birmingham brings us to the hotel room in Germany where Dostoyevsky, literally trapped by debt, begins writing his most famous novel. Birmingham’s repeated sidelong glances to “the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece,” that is, the cynically philosophical French criminal Pierre-François Lacenaire (1803-1836), is the only significant miscalculation by the author, as that madman was only one of many of Dostoyevsky’s inspirations. Birmingham otherwise elegantly and unobtrusively glides us over and through Dostoyevsky’s life and work while quietly offering one astute comment after another: “People sometimes think of Dostoyevsky as writing novels from the top down, beginning with an ideology he wished to explore and then looking for ways to dramatize it. But he almost always worked from the bottom up, starting with intriguing personalities, a handful of clear details, memorable scenes or circumstances.” 

If you have read Joseph Frank’s enormous, comprehensive and terrifically tedious five-volume biography of Dostoyevsky (published from 1976-2002), congratulations, because there is no need for you to read it again unless you plan on writing your own biography. Birmingham relies on Frank and dozens of other scholars to provide him with the material for re-creating the story of Dostoyevsky making his difficult way through life, starting from his awkward and unhappy adolescence that was capped off by his father being killed by his own serfs. Young Dostoyevsky continually made things difficult for himself and others, and though recognized early on for his extraordinary literary gifts, he joined a small reform-minded political group that almost got him executed and did get him exiled to Siberia. 

Birmingham redramatizes what Dostoyevsky only barely fictionalized in Notes from a Dead House and leads us through Dostoyevsky’s return to Petersburg after ten years of exile. We agonize over his unhappy first marriage and his willingness, when desperate, to gamble away every piece of money he can beg or borrow from friends, family and acquaintances: “Dostoyevsky’s response to Russia’s turmoil, to [his magazine] Vremya’s banning and its lingering debts, to his brother’s hardships, to his health, and to their troubled marriage was to flee to a casino in Wiesbaden, Germany.” We see him save himself and return to Russia from Europe with a grand idea and an ever-evolving plot about the murder or murders committed by an idealistic young student, Raskolnikov: “The narrative itself has to be paranoid. It has to mimic a suspicious mind. Dostoyevsky made a note for himself: ‘Completely unneeded and unexpected details must leap out at every moment in the middle of the story.’” More clearly than most of us could make of Dostoyevsky’s working notebooks, Birmingham shows us how the novelist “began letting his own uncertainty drive the story forward. In a way, he had no choice (the first chapters, after all, were due), but his insistence upon continually revising the plot, the narrative perspective, and his central character began to give Crime and Punishment its distinctively unsettling character.” 

It’s not easy to dramatize a writer at work, even in a movie, which this book, seamlessly humming along, sometimes feels like. Birmingham does not assert or invent a new or better Dostoyevsky. He allows us to wince as the impossible genius makes a mess of his life, but we are never superior to him. We are in awe at his creations and in despair at his failings, similar to the feelings one can have reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Both of those authors redeem themselves or are forgivable because they so obviously suffer over their own excruciatingly described mistakes. 

Birmingham has read all the academics but does not write like or pose as one. He never argues; he honors and respects the man and the novelist. Birmingham reminds us that “the notion that Raskolnikov repents and finds God is one of the things that nearly everyone gets wrong about Crime and Punishment. The trouble with ideas is the way they interact with everything else that’s human about us, things that have nothing to do with reason or evidence or theory. Dostoyevsky’s novel is about how ideas inspire and deceive, how they coil themselves around sadness and feed bitter fruit.”

The Sinner and the Saint is a masterpiece of literary biography.

Teffi (New York Review Books, $17.95), Edited by Robert Chandler

Teffi, the pseudonym of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, had almost only been a name to me in the history of Russian literature. Seeing her dates (1872-1952), I realized, my gosh, as a girl she grew up reading the latest great stories by Chekhov! I was not surprised to learn that Teffi was part of the post-Revolution Russian diaspora.

In her earliest (and in this collection best) stories, Chekhov’s influence seems to me primarily inspirational: eerie original tales of vulnerable, bewildered peasants; sympathetic psychological descriptions of broken women; perplexed children confronting the adult-world. The stories from the collection The Lifeless Beast (1916), among them “Confession,” “Yavdokha” and “A Quiet Backwater,” had me wondering how I could have overlooked her brilliance all these decades:

The boar lived in a dilapidated shed stuck onto the side of her hut. At night Yavdokha could hear him scratching his flank against the wall. She would think lovingly, “Aye. ‘Ave a good scratch nah. No scratchin laters, when tha’s scran for t’Yule feast.” It was for the boar’s sake that she got up each morning, pulled a thick canvas mitt onto her left hand, took an old sickle, now worn to a thread, and went out to cut the tough, fibrous nettles growing along the track.

Teffi’s fantastical and magical tales are rendered here and reviewed by a raft of prominent translators, including the editor Robert Chandler himself and his wife Elizabeth Chandler. They had to decide how to translate the distinctive idiomatic regional dialects, and their choices seem to me to work.

Chandler’s essay on the challenges of and insights he gained from translating Teffi is fascinating in itself: “It has been said that the first letter of the Hebrew Bible is untranslatable. Nevertheless, the Bible as a whole evidently can be translated. Something similar is probably true of any great work of literature, however universally it has been recognized; there will always be at least an occasional sentence where the author has made such creative use of the most specific resources of a particular language that any attempt to reproduce this sentence in another language is bound to fail.” But, as the proverb goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

In the second half of the book (“the first time that Teffi’s more ‘otherworldly’ stories have been brought together in this manner”), which Chandler arranges for the most part chronologically, I realized that I had indeed read before a few of her wry and winking Russian and Ukrainian folk tales, which for me are not on a par with her vivid and unique short stories.