Raskolnikov sneered at this gross and deliberate distortion of his idea

That's from III.5, p. 240.

In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky presents a series of ideas, embodied in characters, for me to distort or ignore.  The saving power of Russian Orthodox monasticism, or the Nietzschean idea that Great Men are allowed a different moral system for the sake of their Greatness.  I found Crime and Punishment far more interesting, though, not as a novel of ideas but as a novel of the psychology of ideas.  Perhaps this is Dostoevsky’s great idea in the late novels, the psychological use of ideas.  That sounds plenty glib.

But I did take it as a real insight when Raskolnikov, near the end of the novel, makes a last desperate run at justifying the murders he committed, including the Great Man nonsense.  “’But that’s all wrong,’” his sister protests.  Raskolnikov replies:

‘The wrong form, you mean – the aesthetics aren’t right!  I just can’t understand it: why is raining down bombs on people, during a regular siege, a more honourable way of doing things?  Fear of aesthetics is the first sign of weakness!  Never, never have I understood this as clearly as now, and never have I understood my crime less!’  (VI.7, 487)

A breakthrough.

In what is I suppose the worst chapter in the novel, two minor characters, one secondary and the other, I don’t know, quaternary, discuss the Utopian reformist ideas of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863), the same target as Notes from the Underground (1864), still a fresh subject.  The Chernyshevskian is made by Dostoevsky to do himself in:

‘You don’t understand a thing!  In the commune, this role [prostitute] does not exist.  That’s why people found communes in the first place.  In the commune, the essence of this role will be completely transformed: what is stupid here will become clever there, and what, in the current circumstances, is unnatural here will become entirely natural there.  (V.1, 347)

“What is stupid here will become clever there” is the most perfect distillation of Utopian thought I have ever come across.  What I mean by “worst chapter” is that this piece is completely detachable from the novel.  It is another variation of Dostoevsky’s attack on rationalism, light and comic compared to the murderous theorizing of Raskolnikov.  It is almost a clown scene.  Dostoevsky makes other, more subtle parodic uses of Chernyshevsky’s novel elsewhere in Crime and Punishment.  In this chapter, he just mocks it.

Oliver Ready’s notes do a fine job of covering this ground, but boy am I glad I fought through What Is to Be Done?  The best reason to read that book is to see what Dostoevsky does with it.

Maybe I’ll work on some of the dreams next.

Not merely nothing to do, but nothing to learn - Dostoevsky defends the humanities

Soon we’ll conceive of a way to be born from ideas.  (II.10., 91)

This will sound archaic, I know, but I first encountered Dostoevsky in a Western Civilization course, where he was read alongside Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Sigmund Freud, just to stick with his contemporaries, more or less, as if there were some value in the illusion that every undergraduate in the liberal arts read a common set of authors of some importance and difficulty.  How naïve we all were back then.

What is the right way to live, that was the constant question.  Notes from Underground was ethics, not literature.   Every text not related to the history of science was reduced to ethics, or politics.  Maybe I am wrong; maybe even Galileo’s Starry Messenger was reduced to ethics, although I doubt anyone in class argued the side of the Catholic Church.

Of course, after two times two, there’s nothing left, not merely nothing to do, but nothing to learn.  (I.9., 25)

Only now do I see the subtlety of the inclusion of Notes from Underground in Western Civ.  Dostoevsky is attacking the foundation of the university, an attack on the value of reason.  His book is a counter-Enlightenment assault on Chernyshevsky’s radical Enlightenment.  The university, as it exists today, is an Enlightenment enterprise.

At that time, it’s still you speaking, new economic relations will be established, all ready-made, also calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible questions will disappear in a single instant, simply because all possible answers will have been provided.  Then the crystal palace will be built.  (I.7., 18)

The “crystal palace” is from What Is to Be Done?, “Vera Pavlovna’s 4th Dream,” parts 8, 9, and 10, which depicts life in the rationalist utopia, where everyone lives, eats, and dances in communal structures of glass and aluminum which are lit by electricity and cleaned by child labor.*  And it is also an actual building, the home of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.  Humans turned into ants, says the Underground Man.  Dostoevsky had been horrified by the Crystal Palace and had written about it before Chernyshevsky used the metaphor.  Paradise for one, a nightmare for the other, and one more reason for Dostoevsky to be angry at Chernyshevsky.  Personally, I do not think Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is such a great threat, but I would probably be irritated, too, if someone stole and reversed my metaphor.

These days, I frequently come across attempts to defend or justify the humanities in higher education.  Dostoevsky’s implicit position, that the humanities are the home of the essential irrationality of humankind, is not likely to shake lose any grant money or tenure lines, even though he is right.

*  “More than half the children have remained inside to attend to the housework.  They do almost all the chores and enjoy their work very much.” (What Is To Be Done?, 4, xvi, 8, p. 371).  Proof, even more than the oceans turning to lemonade, that Fourierists were loons.

I was ecstatic. I rejoiced and sang Italian arias. - the Underground Man in action

Has the What Is To Be Done? plus Notes from Underground sesquicentennial readalong been a success?  Most of the action in the past couple of days has been in the comments of a Scott Bailey post about tea sandwiches.  I take that as a success.  These are interesting books!

Scott has also put together a handy list of many of the parts of Chernyshevsky’s novel directly parodied by Dostoevsky.  I’m going to look at one of them, the sidewalk bumping scenes.  This is in no way original.  Marshall Berman devotes twenty pages of All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982) to these scenes.  My excuse is that I read that books twenty-five years ago and do not have it at hand.  If you do, skim this and read that.

In Part 3, chapter viii, one of Chernyshevsky’s robot men bumps shoulders on a St. Petersburg street  with a “portly gentleman.”

The gentleman, turning slightly toward Lopukhov, said, “What sort of swine are you, you pig!”  He was about to continue this edifying speech when Lopukhov turned to face him, seized the gentleman in a bear hug, and deposited him in the gutter very carefully.  He stood over him and said, “Don’t move or I’ll drag you out there where the mud is deeper.”  Two peasants came by, looked, and applauded.  (209)

The fat fellow is presumably the young tutor’s social superior in some obvious way.  Everyone is happy to see him get his comeuppance.  The revolution must be just around the corner.

Some parts of What Is To Be Done? seem to have enraged Dostoevsky, but this one must have made him laugh (those peasants).  It led to one of his all time great comic scenes.  It begins in a billiards parlor:

As soon as I set foot inside, some officer put me in my place.

I was standing next to the billiard table inadvertently blocking his way as he wanted to get by; he took hold of me by the shoulders and without a word of warning or explanation, moved me from where I was standing to another place, and he went past as if he hadn’t even noticed me.  I could have forgiven even a beating, but I could never forgive his moving me out of the way and entirely failing to notice me.  (II, 1, 34)

I can imagine Ralph Ellison reading this passage with great interest.

Unlike Chernyshevsky’s buff heroes, the Underground Man is “small and scrawny,” so he can only plot his revenge.  A duel, perhaps (duel fantasy follows, the first of two in the novel).  Or a satirical article in the newspaper (submitted; rejected).  He encounters the officer on the Nevsky Prospect, always stepping aside for his superiors, as does the narrator, as does everyone.

Then a most astounding idea suddenly dawned on me.  “What if,” I thought, “what if I were to meet him and…  not step aside?  Deliberately not step aside, even if it meant bumping into him: how would that be?”  The bold idea gradually took such a hold that it afforded me no peace.  I dreamt about it horribly, incessantly, and even went to Nevsky more frequently so that I could imagine more clearly how I would do it.  I was in ecstasy.  (37)

But what gloves should he wear, black or lemon-colored?  Is his shirt nice enough (no)?  And what about his old overcoat, with a raccoon collar?  Impossible.  The Underground Man goes into debt, humiliating himself before his boss, to buy a nicer collar.

Even this is not enough to give the Underground Man courage, but he finally does succeed.  “Naturally, I got the worst of it; he was stronger, but that wasn’t the point.”

I returned home feeling completely avenged for everything.  I was ecstatic.  I rejoiced and sang Italian arias.  (39)

All of this is in a single two-and-a-half page paragraph.  The “Italian arias” could not be improved upon.

Between Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky there is a difference about how people behave, what they fundamentally are like, that is irreconcilable.  One pictures a world free of humiliations, a world of small, meaningful triumphs; the other says we create the former and imagine the latter.  One enjoys a fantasy of perfectibility; the other is horrified. 

You’re wrong about that, too - starting Notes from the Underground

Didn’t we all have fun with Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 What Is To Be Done?  And we have not even gotten to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s parodistic novella written a year later, Notes from the Underground, as it is commonly known, or Memoirs from a Mousehole as Nabokov charmingly calls it.  The little book otherwise lacks charm.  It begins with a thirty page rant by a madman, which is followed by sixty pages of a narrative of self-destruction and self-loathing culminating in a particularly vile act.  It is the finest of Dostoevsky’s comedies, I think, an early masterpiece of the comedy of humiliation.

Notes from the Underground also swallows What Is To Be Done? whole and transforms it into something new.  Knowing both books, it is beyond my capabilities to read one book independent of the other.  Dostoevsky is, obviously, the greater artist and thinker, but the books enrich each other.

Perhaps I should mention that just like the original Russian readers I have always read the books together.  Strike the part in italics for the truth, but I do know that Michael Katz’s 1989 edition of What Is To Be Done? was a brand new book when I bought and read it, which must have been just after I read Fathers and Sons and Dostoevsky and Nabokov’s Chernyshevsky-bashing The Gift.  I have been looking for a cluster of books like this ever since.  I did not understand at that point the extent to which Dostoevsky kept returning to the argument in his major novels, how characters with Chernyshevsky in their blood inhabit all of Dostoevsky’s major novels.

I have expressed skepticism and perhaps mockery of Dostoevsky’s art and ideas, but it is exciting to watch him at work.

The underground man, as I take him, is one of Chernyshevsky’s rational egoists intellectually, but is emotionally a bundle of neuroses, prejudices, and impulses (“caprices,” to use Chernyshevsky’s word).  He is a Chernyshevsky character with a human personality, with a soul.  It is like on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; you remember.  So Dostoevsky is attacking Chernyshevsky by taking his ideas to their illogical end.

This seems to be the heart of a century of critical debate about the novel, by the way.  Is the underground man mocking Chernyshevsky; does he agree with but also rebel against Chernyshevsky; or is he simply Dostoevsky’s mouthpiece?  I pick the middle option, the more subtle one.  In addition, is the underground man crazy, or really, how crazy is he, or more accurately, why is he so crazy?

You probably think, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you.  You’re wrong about that, too.  I’m not at all the cheerful fellow I seem to be, or that I may seem to be…  (I.2, 5)

Like Chernyshevsky’s narrator, the underground man argues with and mocks his imaginary readers.  Other images and scenes recur.  I will write about them.  Why else did I read these books if not to write about the parallel scenes where the protagonists bump into an officer on the street?

Maybe the next post will be all quotations, to balance this one.  Notes from the Underground is almost too quotable.  It is a distraction.

Page references to the Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition, translated by Michael Katz.

The theory is cold, but it teaches man how to procure warmth - warm Chernyshevsky

This one’ll be a hodgepodge.

Erik McDonald of XIX век has been reading What Is To Be Done? in Russian.  He knows more about the cluster of books surrounding this novel and Fathers and Sons than I ever will.  One of his posts compares most of the different English translations, discovering that only one of the old public domain translations is terrible.  Anyone reading this book right off of the internet, be sure you have the Benjamin R. Tucker translation.

I have neglected the first third of the novel, the more conventionally plotted part, probably because it is readable and contains characters who if not exactly recognizable as humans at least function as literary types, comic types, even.  Erik’s second post gives an example of how Chernyshevsky undermines his own clichés, in this case with an eavesdropping scene.  The heroine’s mother suspects her daughter and her male friend of amorous behavior, and is shocked to discover that the do nothing but talk about ideas.  “’The theory is cold, but it teaches man how to procure warmth’” (116) that kind of thing.

I hope Erik write more as he moves through the book.

Most of the final quarter of the novel, post-Rakhmetov, is quite dull, Chernyshevsky at his worst – that accounting chapter is an example, although I enjoyed its grotesquerie.  But there are still two long scenes that are among the best in the book, both openly political – had the censors just given up?  The first is “Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream,” in which a fertility goddess singing Schiller songs reveals the post-revolutionary paradise, where work is leisure, love is easy, and wasteland has been transformed into garden.  This is pretty explicitly a return to the Garden of Eden.  The scene would not be much different if the characters had all been killed, if this were a vision of socialist heaven.

Almost everyone lives in aluminum and glass palaces cooled by fountains, lit by electricity.  People develop better singing voices  because “it’s healthy and very elegant.  As a result, the chest improves and the voice does too” (377).  Chernyshevsky is so odd.

The other good scene is the winter picnic, set back in the novel’s reality.  All of the characters, plus a new one, Chernyshevsky’s wife – she’s like a special guest star – sing and eat and play in anticipation of the new world that is soon to arrive.  Look, a genuinely good, novelistic  detail!  There ain’t many:

Within five minutes she’s charming Polozov, ordering the young men around, and drumming out a march or something on the table with the handles of two forks.  (438)

More of that, please!  But there is no more, the novel is ending, the Czar is overthrown, and the unjustly imprisoned first-time novelists are freed.

When I announced this preposterous readalong, I warned that What Is To Be Done? is a bad novel  by ordinary standards.  It had a series of extraordinary readers, though, who were able to find the complexity in Chernyshevsky’s book and make something out of it, whether in anger like Dostoevsky or fervor like Lenin or refined amusement like Nabokov.  I doubt the book has run out of such readers.

Not as long as Notes from the Underground is still read.  That’s where I’m going next.

The expulsion of the perspicacious reader by the triumphant narrator - Chernyshevsky and the censor

Now do you understand?  You still don’t?  You’re a fine one!  Not too bright, are you?  Well, then, I’ll have to spoon-feed you.  (4, xxxi, 310)

The narrator of Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? is berating his idiot reader, always referred to as “the perspicacious reader,” for failing to understand why the revolutionary Rakhmetov has been introduced into the novel in so much detail if he is only to be used in a single scene.

“How dare you speak to me so rudely?” exclaims the perspicacious reader, addressing himself to me.  “I’ll complain about you and I’ll spread the word that you’re an evil person!”  (310)

This is another chapter with a title: “A Conversation with the Perspicacious Reader Followed by His Expulsion.”

The novel is full of direct addresses to the reader, mostly insults and harangues.  Russians loved Tristram Shandy.  “I speak arrogantly to the vast majority of readers, but to them alone…”  (Preface, 48-9).  At first the joke seems to be that the perspicacious reader is the conventional reader of fiction, deft at outguessing conventional plots.  Since the first third of What Is To Be Done? makes use or is a parody of a conventional plot, a virtuous woman trying to avoid a loveless arranged marriage, the narrator enjoys mocking his own devices and mocking the reader who enjoys such clichés.  “As a novelist I very much regret that I  wrote several pages in which I stooped to the level of vaudeville”  (119), that sort of thing.  The perspicacious reader is not actually so perceptive, that’s the joke.

There’s something else going on, though.

I remind myself that Chernyshevsky was writing the novel from prison, that he was writing a novel because he was forbidden to write essays, and that any publication had to pass through two levels of Czarist censorship, a prison censor who might forbid a manuscript to leave the prison, and the regular censor who could forbid or alter what was published in magazines.  Occasionally I wondered if Chernyshevsky was literally writing in code.  I mean, “from 11 A.M. on Thursday to 9 P.M. on Sunday, a total of eighty-two hours,” what is that?  But I do not really think there is that kind of code.

The overthrow of the Czar obviously cannot be mentioned.  Rakhmetov spends a “quarter of his time” on reading and weight training, while “[t]he remainder he devoted to matters of concern to others or to no one in particular” (284).  Michael Katz identifies odd lines like this as a reference to revolutionary activity.  I quote another example yesterday, which said Rakhmetov had “vanished from Petersburg for the second and probably the last time” – what awkward phrasing.  But it is purposeful.  The next time Rakhmetov returns he will not have to vanish again.  He will bring the revolution with him.  “Probably.”

The Rakhmetov chapters are particularly coded, and it is only after them that, as I mentioned above, the narrator decides to “expel” his perspicacious reader.  I began to see this reader differently.  I imagined Chernyshevsky in his cell, writing his book, thinking – how could he not – of a single reader, the prison censor, or of a group of censors.  “’I’ll complain about you’” – to whom?  They are the readers who are supposed to be professionally perceptive, and they are the ones Chernyshevsky needs to deceive.  Or convert.  Or bore so much they rubber-stamp his text.  I don’t know.  Whatever he was doing, it worked.

This is another story the novel tells, the duel between the narrator and the censor.  I am likely over-interpreting half of it and failing to see the other half.  But paying attention to how the narrator mocks, goads, and subverts the censor makes the novel a lot more interesting, and even artful, in its way.

Chernyshevsky invents the Bolshevik - he would always eat apples, but never apricots

“It's the scene for which, I believe, the entire novel was written to bring into the world, the reason Nikolai Chernyshevsky sat down in his cell at the Peter and Paul Fortress prison and began the book” writes Scott Bailey.  It’s Part 3, chapter xxix, “An Extraordinary Man.”  You always know something is up when Chernyshevky gives a chapter a title.  With minor changes, the chapter could be an independent short story.

The story is the biography of Rakhmetov, revolutionary superhero. 

The ideal of the disciplined, dedicated revolutionary, coldly Utilitarian and even cruel to himself and others, but warmed by a love for mankind that he sternly represses for rear of weakening  his resolution; the iron-willed leader who sacrifices his private life to the revolution, and who, since he looks on himself only as an instrument, feels free to use others in the same way – in short, the Bolshevik mentality, for which it is impossible to find any source in European Socialism, steps right out of the pages of What Is To Be Done?  (199)

That is Joseph Frank again, actually from the same page of Through the Russian Prism that I quoted yesterday.  Chernyshevsky invented the Bolshevik.  Or Chernyshevsky plus Vladimir Lenin.  This chapter did a lot of damage.  On the same page, still, down in the footnote about Emma Goldman’s sewing cooperative, I learn that the anarchist Alexander Berkman, when he planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, used “Rakhmetov” as his pseudonym.  Imitation Rakhmetov’s began to pop up all over, including in Dostoevksy’s Devils (1872).  Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov (1866) is a relative, too, an inversion or parody.

So what is Rakhmetov like?  He is amazing.  Some quotations:

… he needed to eat beef, a great deal of beef.  So he did.  He regretted every kopeck spent on any other kind of food…

Therefore, if fruit was served, he would always eat apples, but never apricots.  (281)

This is because he only eats the food not eaten by but potentially available to the common people.  Thus he will eat meat pies, “[b]ut he wouldn’t eat sardines.”

The things he used to say and do on such occasions are beyond comprehension.  (284)
Yes, however rude Rakhmetov’s manners, everyone remained convinced that he acted as he did because it was the most sensible and simplest way to act…  In spite of this phenomenal rudeness, he was basically a very tactful person.  (286)

As a teenager, Rakhmetov works to become super-strong.  He is a wealthy aristocrat, but he works as a Volga river bargeman to improve himself, and is eventually capable of legendary feats of strength (279).  Later he stops a runaway carriage by grabbing “the rear axle.  He brought the carriage to a halt and then fell down.”  Had Chernyshevsky been reading Les Misérables, published the previous year?  Rakhmetov is as strong as Jean Valjean.  I will try not to mention it again, but Chernyshevsky has an obsession with upper body strength that appears throughout the book, often in strange contexts, people lifting each other over their heads for fun, that sort of thing.

When he hears about revolutionary political ideas, Rakhmetov becomes an instant convert.

He asked, “What books should I read first?”…  He acquired what he needed and then read for more than three days and nights in a row, from 11 A.M. on Thursday to 9 P.M. on Sunday, a total of eighty-two hours.  (280)

“[E]ight glasses of strong coffee” keep him going for a while, but eventually he “collapsed on the floor and slept for about fifteen hours.”  You may wonder why I am not more sympathetic with Rakhmetov – that is my question; that is just how I read! 

About a year before he vanished from Petersburg for the second and probably the last time, Rakhmetov said to Kirsanov, “Give me a rather large amount of ointment for curing wounds inflicted by a sharp instrument.”  (288)

Rakhmetov is testing his strength by sleeping on a bed of nails, like an Orthodox martyr.  He is preparing himself for torture.  Or he is a lunatic.  “’Now I know I can do it.’”

Because of the censorship, anything about Rakhmetov’s revolutionary activities are hidden, thus that odd bit about vanishing, but obvious enough that the publication of the chapter is almost miraculous.

Forget what happened later, and forget the reality of the character, which is non-existent.  Rakhmetov, a blend of philosopher, Orthodox ascetic, folk hero, and Hugo is an extraordinary, rich imaginative creation.  That anyone wanted to be him, that seems crazy to me.  But of course writers, critics and revolutionaries wanted to do something with him.  For a cartoon character, he is strangely complex.

Except for the sorrows, it was all joy - Cherynshevsky's guide for the collectivist small businesswoman

Vera Pavlovna has spent the first third of What Is To Be Done? escaping, with the help of the self-sacrificing Lopukhov, from the unbearable mother who planned to sell her into a loveless marriage.  Now, married to this selfless egoist, she needs to “get down to work” (173).

Thus, the dressmaking collective, a part of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel that fascinates me. 

“Your business must stand on its own merits and everything should be based on commercial calculation.”

“Of course it must” [This is Vera, replying to her dull husband]

“So what else is there?  Why do you need my advice?”

“About the details, my dear.”

“Tell me about them…  Details are determined by the particular conditions of each situation.”  (3, ii, 173)

What a bore this guy is.

Vera hires or enlists three seamstresses of stellar personal character.  She fortunately has a friend from the earlier part of the novel who is a high-class French courtesan, who helps them get business.  She is named Julie, after Rousseau’s heroine, and apparently represents the decadence yet continuing vitality of French revolutionary ideas.

Vera Pavlovna’s dressmaking shop was quickly established.  The basic principles were simple, in fact so simple in the beginning that there really isn’t much to be said about them.  (3, iv, 188)

This is because Chernyshevsky knows nothing, really nothing at all, about running a business of any sort, much less sewing or dressmaking. 

Therefore, it was only natural that the work proceeded well.  The workshop didn’t lose a single customer who had ever entrusted an order to it…  In a year and a half almost twenty girls were employed, later even more.  (192)

No obstacles or complications of any sort ever arise.  The women first pool and divide the profits, but soon begin to pool their living expenses, forming a buying cooperative.  Soon enough, they are all living together in a dormitory, eating communal meals, and organizing adult education classes.  They have voluntarily formed a Fourierist phalanstery.  Chernyshevsky does concede that all of this is “very slow” and required a “whole series of efforts” (195).  Occasionally a seamstress becomes ill or is dumped by her boyfriend.  Otherwise: “Except for the sorrows, it was all joy” (198).

The workshop, once established, recedes from view for plot reasons, but it returns with a vengeance near the end of the novel in a chapter much too tedious to quote from much, in which Chernyshevsky, perhaps worried he did not provide enough supporting evidence, proves mathematically that the collective doubles the workers income and halves her expenses, effectively quadrupling her income.  Twenty-five seamstresses, living together, no longer need to own twenty-five cheap two-ruble umbrellas but can get by with five nice five-ruble umbrellas.  “You see, each one gets to use a fine umbrella, instead of a worthless one for only half the price” (5, xviii, 383).

No, I will not quote any more of that chapter.  I pity the poor saps who believed this stuff.  Were there any, really?  Joseph Frank says there were many:

Innumerable cooperatives were also established. in imitation of Vera Pavlovna’s dressmaking establishment, among student groups in universities and colonies of Russian exiles.  Alas, not always with the same happy results. (198)*

I hoped for more detail, or a source, but Frank swerves to a related topic, only pointing me to an article about the sewing cooperative “modelled directly on Vera Pavlovna’s enterprise” (Frank, 199, note 6) established by Emma Goldman in her New York apartment!

I have made the novel sound so dull at this point.  That accounting chapter is dull.  All right, tomorrow, the superhero.  That’s exciting.

*  Joseph Frank, “Chernyshevsky: A Russian Utopia” (orig. pub. 1967), in Through the Russian Prism: Essays on Literature and Culture (1990), pp. 187-200.

They related their histories to each other in a reasonable manner. - Nikolai Chernyshevsky's stories

To my surprise, two people wanted to read Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s bad yet significant radical revolutionary wish fulfillment fantasy novel What Is To Be Done? (1863) along with me.  To my dismay, they have written most of what I had thought I might write.

Let me catalogue these.  Scott G. F. Bailey wrote four posts:

Halfway through: “It's preachy and digressive and the prose is not great, but the prose is not as bad as I'd heard it was.”

What is not being done: Character, setting, interesting language.  “[A] D.H. Lawrence novel as penned by a writer of encyclopedia articles.”  A truly damning post.

Three quarters in: “This is the scene that launched What is to be Done? into its place as the most influential Russian novel of the 19th century.”  I’m going to write about this chapter even if I just openly plagiarize what others wrote.

Last thoughts:  “The last quarter of the novel is a mess, is what I'm saying.”

And here is Jean of Howling Frog Books, with a description I will not be able to top: “Sometimes I think it was written by an alien or something.”

What Is To Be Done? was written by one strange human, that is for sure.

One story that is in the novel, the one Scott develops in his series, is about a famous journalist, a radical idealist, who, while unjustly imprisoned on nonsensical charges writes a utopian fantasy which is as much about his own anxieties, about, say, his conventional wife, or his inadequate upper-body strength, as it is about social change.  The novel is full of meta-fiction and direct, mostly mocking, addresses to the reader – Laurence Sterne stuff – so the narrator is a central character, the only one with an interesting psychology.  Really interesting, I thought, comic and sad.  In The Gift, Vladimir Nabokov creates a Nikolai Chernyshevsky character much like this narrator, a sympathetic fool, and under Nabokov’s influence I could not help constructing him out of the text.  Scott was doing the same thing, but without Nabokov’s assistance, which is impressive.

We’re reading the novel as if it were written by someone like Gogol or Nabokov, with a self-revealing unreliable narrator, yet written with such conceptual purity that the real author does not allow himself a single interesting image or unusually good sentence.

A second story takes place outside of the novel.  Ivan Turgenev updates the old Superfluous Man to create young Nihilists, doctors who believe in nothing, not even science, and whose non-beliefs crumble when they fall in love.  Young radicals thought Turgenev was attacking them.  Chernyshevsky’s central male characters (besides a bonus superhero) are two doctors who do very much believe in science, progress, and reason, to the point that they often sound like Ayn Rand characters.  When they fall in love, they remain sedate creatures of pure reason.  See, old man, that ‘s where the youth of today is really at!  This is the stuff that made Fyodor Dostoevsky so blindingly angry that he wrote Notes from the Underground (1864), an inside-out parody of Chernyshevsky.  I imagine Dostoevsky grinding his teeth, pulling on his beard, spitting “People – aren’t – like – that!”

The third story is the fictional one, in which virtuous, heroic Vera Pavlovna escapes from her horrible mother, establishes a successful dressmakers cooperative, practices rational free love, and dreams of an imminent socialist utopian future.  That first part, with the mother, is the most conventional part of the novel, and is not bad; the sewing cooperative I find fascinating for negative reasons; the free love business is tedious but, I have to say to Chernyshevsky’s credit, genuinely, recognizably feminist, and not creepy, not the usual male harem fantasy; and the dreams are a major part of why people read (past tense, mainly) this bizarre book.

I guess making sense of all that is something to write about.  The title quotation is part of the tedious free love business, from p. 337 of Michael Katz’s 1989 translation.

inconsequentiality, moderatism, and bourgeois tendencies - like an epistolary novel - Chernyshevsky chased with Nabokov

I am about halfway through What Is to Be Done? – I have just reached the establishment of the sewing collective – yes, you read that right, a cooperative sewing business with all profits shared equally, all described in great detail – how many readers are thinking “I was going to skip that Chernyshevsky novel, but I did not now it was about a sewing collective!” – my point is that I am on schedule to write about the Chernyshevsky novel and Notes from the Underground during the last week of April and beginning of May as I had originally planned, so to anyone curious enough to read along, there we go.

Chernyshevsky’s novel is certainly readable.  That is not the problem.

They attacked each other for inconsequentiality, moderatism, and bourgeois tendencies.  These were general charges.  But then each and every one in particular was accused of a special fault: for one it was romanticism, for Dmitry Sergeich, schematism, for another, rigorism.  (3.vi., p. 203 of Katz)

This is a game, being played by adults.  At a picnic.  All right, the novel is mostly readable; that’s mostly not the problem.  I was planning on writing something more substantive, but unfortunately my schematism has flared up, so nothing too serious until I recover.

I have Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift out because Chernyshevsky is the subject of one of its chapters, but it has also proved a helpful remedy for rigorism and schematism, by which I mean dull prose.  Just on the first couple of pages, a moving van has “a shamelessly exposed anatomy”; the name painted on its side “was shaded laterally with black paint; a dishonest attempt to climb into the next dimension.”  A man wears an overcoat “to which the wind imparted a ripple of life.”  The street “rose at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with a post office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel.”

Ah, what relief, a writer who not only writes, but who put something interesting in every single sentence.  The Gift is about a young writer, a Russian émigré in Berlin.  His first book of poems has just been published, so he is in a heightened state of sensitivity to sensory impressions, which he funnels into the art-generating mechanism in his brain (“Someday, he thought, I must use such a scene to start a good, thick old-fashioned novel”).  Nabokov is not merely showing off.

A couple of pages later is this dull thing: “His landlady let him in and said that she had left his keys in his room.”  The sentence is secretly referring to the end of the novel, 350 pages later.  Its plainness is almost a tell.  Keep an eye on this one, there’s a trick somewhere.

All of this is extremely Proustian, perhaps the most purely Proustian stuff Nabokov ever wrote.  By chance I am just at the point in Time Regained where the narrator has achieved a heightened state of sensitivity to sensory impressions, allowing to him to solve the problem of his artistic vocation and begin writing a novel much like, but not the same as, the Proust novel he narrates, just as the writer in The Gift likely someday writes a novel much like The Gift, which will also contain

the tobacconist’s speckled vest with mother-of-pearl buttons and his pumpkin-colored bald spot.  Yes, all my life I shall be getting that extra little payment in kind to compensate my regular overpayment for merchandise foisted on me.

Nabokov, Dostoevsky, and others demonstrate that even the reading of What Is to Be Done? has some compensations.  People read it and then write masterpieces.

The Nikolai Chernyshevsky What Is to Be Done? readalong - if I hadn’t warned you, you might have thought that this tale was being told artistically

Literature can’t be all fun and Moomins, can it?  So in the tradition of the 2010 readalong of Herman Melville’s Clarel and the 2011 Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity I am announcing the Wuthering Expectations What Is to Be Done? reading event.  Some of you said you wanted it.  I hold no one to any rashly made promise.

No, I am kidding, this will be fun.  And educational.  Mostly educational.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? is a radical socialist Utopian novel written while in prison, waiting to be tried for a bunch of trumped up nonsense for which he was eventually convicted and sent to Siberia.  Given that Chernyshevsky was in prison because as an editor and essayist he was seen as a threat to the state, the fact that he was allowed to write and publish What Is to Be Done? is almost inexplicable.  This was the novel that prepared the ground for revolution.  Its importance in Russian intellectual history is immense.

The novel is full of idealized people doing idealized things.  The novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau served as Chernyshevsky’s models.   Another inspiration was Hard Times, but Chernyshevsky thought Dickens wasted too much time on trivialities like love and happiness.  Another great influence was Georges Sand, and the novel is openly feminist in the usual fashion of 19th century Utopians – if society is to reform, marriage and family must reform, too.

What Is to Be Done? was a direct response to the nihilist protagonist of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862); it in turn inspired Fyodor Dostoevsky to write Notes from the Underground (1864).  Dozens of other novels spun off of this remarkable chain of books.  Here is the problem:

I possess not one bit of artistic talent.  I even lack full command of the language.  But that doesn’t mean a thing; read on, dearest public, it will be well worth your while.  Truth is a good thing; it compensates for the inadequacies of any writer who serves its cause.  Therefore, I shall inform you of the following: if I hadn’t warned you, you might have thought that this tale was being told artistically and that its author possessed great poetic talent.  But now that I’ve warned you that I possess no talent whatever, you know that any merit to be found in my tale is due entirely to its truthfulness.  (Preface, p. 48)

I do not believe much of this is meant ironically.  What Is to Be Done? is, by most aesthetic measures, a bad novel.  Wooden, ridiculous, dull, ethically dubious, linguistically flat.  Yet it is not actually incompetent like these horrors recorded by Adam Roberts, books by authors who seem to have trouble with the elementary use of language.  Chernyshevsky is rhetorically sophisticated, at least.  Structurally, too.  The book can be read; I have read it.

Still, Chernyshevsky’s literary importance depends as much on Dostoevsky as on his own book.  He makes Notes from the Underground even more interesting.

Maybe I should have called this the Notes from the Underground readalong.  It is that book’s 150th anniversary, after all, and I will read it along with Chernyshevsky.  Maybe I should – no, no – take your vitamins.

No, read what you want!  Say that you are interested in the intellectual history but put off by the 400 didactic pages of the novel itself.  That is fine.  I recommend, besides Fathers and Sons and Notes from the Underground, something from the following list:

The “Russian Populism” chapter in Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers (1978).

The relevant chapter of Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982).

Chapter 4 of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift (1938) – the entire novel, really, one of the great novels of the 20th century, but that chapter, a fictional biography of Chernyshevsky, is detachable.  It is so detachable that it was in fact censored by its original publisher.  It is a strange story.  Nabokov’s critique is aesthetic yet also ethical – ethics by means of aesthetics.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Devils (1872) – he keeps returning to the subject.

Leo Tolstoy’s book What Is to Be Done? (or What Then Must We Do? or something similar, 1886).

Vladimir Lenin’s essay “What Is to Be Done?” (1902).

Erik McDonald of XIX Bek is actually translating a NikolaiLeskov novel that is another response to Turgenev and I think to Chernyshevsky.  Perhaps Erik will have more suggestions.

The quotation is translated by Michael Katz, in the 1989 Cornell University Press edition, which was brand new when I first read it.  Strangely, the first two English translations both date from 1886, and there is a later Soviet translation, too, but you are nuts if you read anything but the Katz translation.  The others are bowdlerized, for one thing, with some of the sexual material removed, and it would be ironic to the point of pathos to read this novel in a censored form.

How does April sound?  End of April?  This is a novel for the spring.

The Best Books of 1863 - how very few of these / Poor little busy poet bees / Can we expect again to hum

Ow, my eyes.  You can see the 1863 “Birth of Venus” by Alexandre Cabanel in the flesh – or in the marzipan (see the Zola quotation at the following link) –  at the Musée d’Orsay, although I do not know why you would, since that museum has so many good paintings.

The Best Books of 1863 were better than this painting.  But it was the year of the second-rate.

I would pick The Cossacks, Leo Tolstoy’s clear-eyed look at the desire to romanticize other cultures, as the best book of the year, but it is not quite first-rate Tolstoy.  Now that is an absurd standard, but the fact is that The Cossacks is dragged along behind Tolstoy’s great masterpieces.  It is read as much as it is, and will continue to be read, because of other books.

My list of surviving English novels for 1863 looks like this:

Romola, George Eliot
The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley
Salem Chapel, Margaret Oliphant
Rachel Ray, Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington, Trollope, in the middle of its serialization.

Boy, there is always plenty of Trollope in the 1860s.  I have only read two of the five.  We see  some of the same phenomenon here, I think, certainly with Romola, possibly with the Trollope novels.  The exercise is to imagine that Romola were the only George Eliot novel.  Would anyone still read it?  The exercise is preposterous, so I will move on.  The English class of 1863 seems a little weak, is all I am saying.  Go to those links, though, the ones not to Wuthering Expectations.  A good case is made for every one of those books.

No idea what was going on in French literature this year (or Spanish, or Italian, or German).  American literature was almost put on hold by the Civil War.  Without a doubt, the great American work of the year is a speech, the Gettysburg Address, elegant, forceful, rhetorically brilliant, and now, in its way, one of the key  texts  of the United States.

Louisa May Alcott’s charming Hospital Sketches and Henry Longfellow’s Tales from a Wayside Inn can hardly stand that kind of competition, although both are enjoyable books.  The Longfellow book contains “The Birds of Killingworth,” a bizarre and superb poem of ecological apocalypse.

One more novel was not even second-rate artistically, but was all too significant, Nikolai Chernyshevksy’s What Is to Be Done?, a radical Utopia, written in prison, smuggled out, published illegally, eventually becoming a founding text of the Russian Revolution.  So if not such a great year for novels, 1863 was unusually well equipped with important political literature.

I wrote a bit about the Chernyshevsky novel while discussing Fathers and Sons, where I was startled to see a number of people declare that they wanted to read What Is to Be Done?  Are you all nuts?  But I will suffer along with the rest of you.  I should organize a readalong – it would be the least popular book blog event since the readalong of Herman Melville’s Clarel a few years ago.  And if it turned out a fifth  as well, that would be something.

I wonder what I am missing?  I never mean these posts to be completely comprehensive, and how could they be, but I do hope that any additional suggestions sound a bit desperate and little-read  – Walter Savage Landor’s last book of poems, how about that one?

Come to think of it, I have read that book.  Landor, eighty-eight years old in 1863, was a fine poet; it is a fine book.  But that is hardly my point here, as Landor knows:

The Poet Bees
There are a hundred now alive
Who buz about the summer hive,
Alas! how very few of these
Poor little busy poet bees
Can we expect again to hum
When the next summer shall have come.

One hundred and fifty years is a long lifespan for a book.  Seven novels, the Alcott book, the Longfellow poems, one of the greatest funeral orations, not bad, really.

The unusual case of Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons (1862) is so rich, so important, and so well-written that I assumed I would have a lot to write about it.  Well.  But when did that ever stop me?

The strangest side of the novel is its importance, its place in the intellectual history of Russia.  It was a surprise to its author, certainly.  Ivan Turgenev spent much of the rest of his writing life returning to the ideas of the novel and responding to his critics.  Even more amazingly, so did other writers including Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I do not know of another chain of novels like this one.  What Is to Be Done?, a novel by the radical journalist Nikolai Chernyshevksy appeared in 1863, in direct response to Turgenev.  Then in 1864 Dostoevsky published Notes from the Underground, an attack on Chernyshevsky.  Dostoevsky, like Turgenev, pursued his ideas into later novels, particularly Demons (1872) and one wild scene in The Idiot (1869).  Tolstoy responded, although I think rather more indirectly.  One of Vladimir Nabokov’s finest pieces of writing, Chapter 4 of The Gift (1938), piles onto Chernyskevsky.  I have no doubt there are dozens of other branches that I have not even heard of.  Soviet critics continued the debate decades into the twentieth century.

Still, it is that first, compact chain, 1862 – Fathers and Sons, 1863 – What Is to Be Done?, 1864 – Notes from the Underground, that I marvel at.  The central issues of the day engaged at the highest intensity in fiction.  As art, the episode did well, too, with two masterpieces, one of them a rare case of a genuine philosophical novel.  The Chernyshevsky book is pretty bad, and likely the most influential of the lot, a book that did real damage.

What most amazes of course is the place fiction had in Russian intellectual life at the time.

The intellectual history and the art of Fathers and Sons are cleanly separable.  I have seen this demonstrated:  Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Fathers and Children,” found in Russian Thinkers (1978), is all about the debate, while Nabokov’s notes in Lectures on Russian Literature (1981) are entirely about the art.  Both perspectives are valuable, but they are only barely related.  The book was unnecessarily well-written for the debate it sparked.  And if it had been politely ignored we would still read it as the finest Turgenev novel.

I have avoided mentioning – hinting at – what any of the ideas of the novel are or why they caused such a turmoil, or anything else about what the novel might actually be like.  Good, that gives me something to write about.