Tag: Russian Literature

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is a writer who has long been extremely important to me. During my teens, before this blog existed, I devoured the great novels, one after another, and then over and over. The Brothers Karamazov, without exaggeration, changed my life. Ultimately, its author became the embodiment of what I took to be a distinctively Russian approach to literature – an approach that treated what I then took to be the most important questions in life directly, without encrusting them with layers of social drama and squabbling over inheritances that I associated then (as now) with fiction from my own country. In Dostoevsky’s works people said exactly what mattered to them, and did the things that showed it mattered to them – they murdered, they threw tantrums, and sometimes even took their own lives. Dostoevsky inspired me precisely because he was clumsy, lazy, and disorganised in his writing. He showed a budding writer, dangerously, that so long as characters felt sufficiently, they became real and nothing else need matter. 

The Idiot, however, was never one of my favourites among Dostoevsky’s works. For one, it is Dostoevsky at his strangest. With its story of jealousy and obsession in love it is also a comparatively less interesting work, at least at first glance, to someone lusting after ideas. (At the time I was a Dostoevsky maniac I went to a boys’ school and didn’t know what a girl looked like, let alone how something like obsessive love worked.) Still, I’ve returned to this work after many years away because I believed it might be essential to a writing project of my own. The idea of the central character, a kind of Christ-like innocent, thrust into the world of scheming men and women, was what drew me back. But what turned out to be still more interesting was a kind of higher-order thematic framework here of logic and disorder, coherence and chaos.   

I am obliged to you to provide a summary of the plot, but unfortunately I do not have any idea what actually happened and I’m not sure Dostoevsky did either. Or rather, I know he did not. Gary Saul Morson, among other academics, has noted that after finishing the novel’s first part Dostoevsky’s notebooks show he didn’t know where he was going. Even after finishing the novel’s penultimate part he still had not worked out whom, if anyone, the “idiot” Prince Myshkin would marry. Besides these plot uncertainties, many characters have motivations which were not merely complex and contradictory, but outright impenetrable. I also regularly found myself asking myself, for a given group of characters, how on earth they knew one another well enough to haunt one another’s living rooms. I have no answer to any of this but will do my best to at least tackle the plot’s outline.  

Prince Myshkin (the name makes him kin to mice), a young man suffering from epilepsy, returns from Switzerland to Russia, somewhat cured of his ailment. On the train he meets another young man, Rogozhin, who has just inherited significant wealth. Rogozhin wants to use the money to win the heart of the beautiful Nastasya Philippovna. Nastasya is capricious and flighty and captivates the prince too, who seems to want to save her from her own self-destructive decisions. At the same time, the prince meets and falls in love with the Epanchin family, especially one of their daughters, Aglaya. Several hundred pages somehow pass and characters come in and out, but really there are few who matter. Money-mad Ganya, the drunken clerk Lebedev, and Ippolit, a young man dying of consumption, are the only others ones I discuss here.  

Before the characters, the first thing I noticed about The Idiot when I came to reflect upon it was the atmosphere, which is nothing less than apocalyptic. Dostoevsky wrote much of the novel in Italy while escaping debts back in Russia. The home of Catholicism, a religion he has the prince describe in an outburst as being worse than atheism, no doubt caused him psychic strain that is reflected in the writing and its moods. The novel begins on a train, and as with Anna Karenina or Effi Briest, this modern conveyance is not a neutral taxi by any means. We learn much later that Lebedev, who styles himself a hobbyist interpreter of the Apocalypse, (itself not a hobby one has in a healthy age), considers “the railway network spread across Europe” as in fact the “Star Wormwood”.  

Trains and musings on the Apocalypse are not the only things establishing a gloomy mood. Another relatively modern mistake freshly arrived in Russia is the newspaper. Characters are genuinely fascinated and disturbed by the news, which seems to reveal a more fallen world than had existed previously. Multiple murders in the papers are discussed to prove or disprove some speculation on human nature. Then there is illness, for the prince with his epilepsy is far from the only one suffering. Ippolit has consumption, Rogozhin’s jealousy and Ganya’s money obsession are both certainly a kind of illness, while it almost goes without saying that a vast number of characters are alcoholics too. What’s noteworthy is that the distribution of illness does not seem itself to be a moral statement about the sick as individuals. Instead, if everyone is ill, it makes their world ill.  

Into this atmosphere of fragility and decay comes the prince. I had remembered, or rather imagined, that the plot involved the prince’s kindness and simpleheartedness acting to reveal the moral failings of others by providing a contrast, but that is not what happens here. Instead, he is a more directly moral person than that. In his first encounters with the Epanchin daughters he discusses the sufferings of people undergoing capital punishment without any prompting, while at another point after being slapped he refuses to fight back or consider a duel, saying to the slapper “how ashamed you’ll be of what you’ve done.” Hence, the prince is more directly and strangely a voice of conscience. He draws our attention to violence we ignore – state violence, the cyclical violence involved in honour questions – albeit a little too naively, like someone at university home for the holidays who has just learned what critical theory is but not yet how to persuade anyone it makes sense.  

The prince may be the voice of conscience, but it is important to consider whether he can succeed at this within the story. While one phrase used to describe him is Christ-like, among the first words actually used in the novel is yurodivy  or “holy fool.” These historical, largely Russian figures, were typically poor itinerants who had dedicated their lives to Christ without a formal role within the Church. Their behaviours were often shocking and insane, but enough of society acknowledged them as having mysterious wisdom that they were largely left alone, only occasionally brought in as quirky dinner guests by nobles. To call the prince a holy fool says that his message and concerns may be important; it also, however, provides a framework for characters to ignore him as merely raving. So, too, does the designation of “idiot” on account of his illness. In short, while he wants to save, he’s not viewed as a saviour: even his famous assertion that “beauty will save the world” is quoted back at him in mockery. 

The Prince thus has the challenge of altering others’ perception of him if he wants to persuade others to do good in this world. But just as great a difficulty is the treatment of causation within the novel – the ideas of “logic” and “nature”. If we believe humans are supremely rational, The Idiot is a novel that will make no sense to us. At a key moment the Prince asks Rogozhin of Nastasya, “who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?” The Prince is expressing a viewpoint that Nastasya refutes by her own existence and repeated, free, choices that harm her wellbeing – she chooses Rogozhin over the Prince, time after time. Lebedev states this point generally: “the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in mankind! The devil rules equally over mankind until a limit in time still unknown to us.”  

With Nastasya’s character, and not only, the novel makes Lebedev’s argument real. One of the murders reported in the newspapers provokes heated discussion among the characters precisely because the defence lawyer argues that the six murders committed by the man at trial were “natural”, due to his poverty. This is illogical, but perhaps at least partly true. Yet for the characters it is one more suggestion that their world is falling apart. At least for some of them. For others, they are themselves this decay. At Nastasya Philippovna’s birthday party, the highpoint of the novel’s first section, characters compete in telling the most bad things they have done. It is not a sequence to inspire hope about the human condition, but it also shows what the stakes of the lawyer’s assertion are – if we normalise the world as being illogical and morality as being a secondary concern, we enable further decline. 

One of the places where this sense of the consequences of bad thinking and a bad world are most obvious is in the case of Ippolit, the young man dying of consumption. In his multi-chapter “Necessary Explanation”, he explains just what it feels and what it means, to have death hanging over him. He can hardly do anything, because so much requires time and practice – like learning an instrument. It is only with death coming that he has a sense of the value of life, while all those who are alive but with the sound of ticking fainter place no real value upon their days. At first he uses his sense of life’s remaining possibilities to do good, helping out a stranger he meets on the street. But then he becomes angry with the idea of God, specifically why he should “praise that which has eaten me” with this death sentence. Finally, he decides that the only remaining action he can take, the “only thing I still have time to begin and end of my own will”, is precisely to head off this death sentence by taking his own life first.  

Dostoevsky is not an author we can easily call rational, but with these examples we can see that if human illogicity is a fact, there must be limits to our willingness to support it, or we will all end up like Ippolit or Nastasya and turn against life itself. In a letter Dostoevsky once wrote that “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” He did not say that anything else was preferrable to the truth. If irrationality is not bounded, the pathway to God gets narrower, not wider. It is into this irrational, illogical world, that the prince comes preaching goodness, only to find that it seems beyond his own redemption. The murder the novel ends with brings a sense of bleakness and total defeat that I was shocked to rediscover – it was even more horrific than the end of Demons.  

Perhaps this triumph of chaos and irrationality is foreseeable from the very first words, for it is also intimately linked to Dostoevsky’s writing style as well. Dostoevsky is not a gifted stylist, but his themes are well served by his style. For one thing, there’s a layer of uncertainty and confusion built into the narration. At the end of the novel’s first part, the prince leaves for Moscow for six months, but even though it is clearly important what takes place there, the narrator declares “we can supply very little information” about what happened. (One theory is that Dostoevsky had such a miserable time living in Moscow himself that he refused to ever write about it in his fiction – itself an insane reason for sabotaging his story.) At other points, the narrator admits to an impossibility in understanding other characters’ motivations. This makes the impossibility of saving the world feel not just like it’s the prince’s fault, but somehow more general. It is such a mess that not even the narrator can keep it together. 

And it is precisely the whole world that somehow feels like it needs saving here. It may have been simply because Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot while stuck in Europe, but it is as if almost nothing exists solidly in the book. There are no smells, there are very few sights, there are no noises except that of the squabbling people. And furthermore, these people do not talk like humans – they give unprompted speeches, they refuse to shut up. I had the feeling that they had to be like this, because as soon as a character stops talking, like one of Beckett’s narrators in his Trilogy, they seem to cease to exist. If Tolstoy’s characters all exist with a uniform vitality, however minor their role, due to his use of leitmotifs and physical descriptions, Dostoevsky’s characters gain all their vitality only through victory in the contest of voices and their silencing of others. This is therefore the perfect style for conveying desperation and egoism. 

The Idiot is my first Dostoevsky for about five years. Coming back, what shocks me is exactly what I expected to, even in spite of that expectation – the obsessive drive of his characters towards meaningful utterances. Characters talk about what matters to them, because it matters to them. They act and live as if they are in the last days, when almost all decorum is dead. Compared to, say, Mann’s Magic Mountain, there is far less sense of the characters holding back part of themselves, or of their ideas not being immediately bindable to real-world things. The Idiot is not the reflection of the isolated upon a Swiss mountain, but a work with one attempted murder, one real murder, and an attempted suicide. Mann’s work is brilliant too, of course, but in its directness Dostoevsky’s is incomparable.  

I read the novel again because I wanted to see what I might learn for my own little novel of ideas with an idiot, of a sort, at its centre. But what I see now is that I have so far not emphasised enough the desperation associated with beliefs that makes them fresh and vital to the bystanding reader, nor yet plotted enough scandals or actions where a decision is necessary, one that would make these beliefs feel like they have a real-world importance. As for Dostoevsky’s style, whether I want to take anything from that is a harder question to answer. But there are plenty more of his works out there to help me decide.  

Elif Batuman – The Idiot

I bought Elif Batuman’s The Idiot because I wanted to read a contemporary reimagining of Dostoevsky’s Idiot, which I suppose makes me the idiot on this particular occasion, since the connection to Dostoevsky is tenuous. Instead, it’s a novel about a naïve student on her first year at Harvard who falls in love and spends the summer in Hungary. It’s a novel with ideas, if not quite a novel of ideas. Selin, the protagonist, studies things like linguistics and the philosophy of language, and reads books like The Magic Mountain, and has an opinion on Dostoevsky. However, on the level of language this is more akin to Sally Rooney than Mann or the Russian. It’s all light and easy sentences, dialogue smooth as someone letting a slinky slide between two outstretched arms, and disorganised observations of things in rooms. It’s real in the way reality TV is real – it is existence absent of any redeeming light.

One of the criticisms I might make of it is that so much of its four hundred, easy-to-read pages, feels meaningless. The things caught in our narrator’s gaze often have neither narrative nor thematic relevance; their purpose is to make reality feel real, but often they don’t even seem to do that. The interactions between characters are regularly similarly lightweight. Yet the novel as a whole might make for itself the defence that it is actually serious about meaning, that such scenes are essential to its construction, that I am the one misunderstanding it. For indeed, being a work about language, love, and communication, it tries to treat seriously the shifting presence and absence of meaning in our day-to-day lives. Perhaps. The fact that I sit here writing this suggests maybe it’s a case worth making.

The Idiot begins in 1995 with Turkish-American Selin arriving at Harvard to begin her undergraduate studies. She meets her roommates and her classmates. She majors in linguistics and studies things in the philosophy and psychology of language. She volunteers a little of her time to teach maths and English as a second language, largely without success. She goes to the odd party but barely drinks and certainly does nothing sexual. There are many characters who drift in and out, largely undifferentiated, but there are two that are important – Ivan, an older Hungarian man Selin meets during Russian class, and Svetlana, a Serbian girl from the same class. Ivan provides a kind of love interest for Selin, while Svetlana is a kind of worldly motherly figure for her. In the summer break Selin goes to Paris with Svetlana, and from there on to Hungary, where she is to teach English to some Hungarian village children.

It makes sense to start with language, since these are the ideas that underpin the novel as a whole. With her linguistics studies, Selin tries to make sense of language itself by considering how language could be explained to Martians, or by them to us. “Supposing we went to Mars and the Martians said “gavagai” every time a rabbit ran by”, it would not be possible to know whether this referred to running, or rabbits, or something else entirely. Selin finds this depressing, as this early introduction to communication seems to suggest we cannot communicate, that meaning is trapped inside of us, never to get out. Naturally, this is an introductory class, so the fact that Selin can’t get anywhere towards solving this problem is one of those examples where a text seems to provide a problem that contains the seeds of its own later dissolution. (She should keep studying as it’s obvious she does not have the full picture yet).

The novel also challenges this “communication doesn’t work” idea through a short story for Russian learners whose chapters are scattered throughout its pages. This tells of a girl called Nina who goes to Siberia after the man she loves disappears, but one of its quirks is that the text is simplified to focus on the grammatical structures the learners are currently focusing on, such as a particular grammatical case. While the story contains plenty of miscommunications, the fact that a coherent narrative can be produced even with such obvious linguistic limitations rather suggests that it is people who are failing to communicate, rather than language itself. In other words, meaning’s general transferability is not precluded by language. Rather, it is people who are the problem. I found this a little unsatisfying – The Idiot introduces a problem only to deny it is one.

This sense that people are the problem is one we might have picked up on from the novel’s title, of course. Selin is naïve – in this she has something in common with Prince Myshkin. Since she is naïve and innocent she struggles with the articulation of her own emotions towards Ivan, turning from speech to lengthy emails that might work if they were not themselves, inevitably, an exercise in avoiding communication – they talk indirectly, and so do not reach the destination:

“Dear Selin, would you trade wine and cheese for vodka and pickles? Why does a Greek hero have to fight his fate? Are dice a lethal weapon?  Is there any way to escape the triviality-dungeon of conversations? Why did you stop coming to math?”

The above is one of Ivan’s, though Selin’s are no better. At times they also use Russian, a language neither of them knows well, which naturally enough does not help either. These are two people failing language. This is a point stressed when Selin is in rural Hungary teaching English, and trying and failing to fight a local fellow-teacher who insists one pronouncing all the silent vowels in English. “One”, becoming “oh-neh”, for example. Selin herself does not really seem to realise that teaching requires effort on her part, so while she is critical of her co-teacher she gets nowhere with her own students – “Papel iss blonk”, one of them says, for “the paper is white”. Failure, but human failure, everywhere.

These failures mean that Ivan and Selin do not connect in the way they should, or could, and create joint meanings together. They leave things unsaid, or said in a distorted manner. In this they are like teenagers, however, rather than people seriously struggling with a higher-order problem about the possibility of meaning transference. We might say that Batuman wants to make a point about culture here, and its relationship to this connection-building among people. Hungary and America (or Turkey) are different! Look, Ivan hasn’t read Walden. Again, the text raises this potential problem only to refute itself. The Hungarians and Turks can bond, we are told, over the shared indignities of the collapse of empire – “Trianon! Touché!” one of the Hungarians says. Even the legendarily strange Hungarian language is demystified by Batuman stressing the similarities and loanwords common to it and Turkish.

It is perhaps wrong to disparage a book called The Idiot for having an idiot at its centre or suggesting that the ideas she encounters are really less important than her own failures. (Would this not mean that writing a novel called “A bad book” would always be good, unless it were excellent?) Yet it’s wrong to dismiss how corrosive the idea of human failure can be when it becomes central. A lot of Russian novels – and Batuman loves Russian novels enough to have written a whole book on them – centre on the gap between the idea and the reality of human practices. Raskolnikov’s theory of murder, and the reality of a bloodied axe, for example. But there’s an important distinction to be made between this and what The Idiot does. Raskolnikov or Bazarov discover that human failings cause issues for their philosophies. Selin has no philosophy to be challenged, so ideas cannot be central to the work, no matter what other reviewers on the cover might say.

Perhaps we can rephrase this in terms of the ideas and their potential for realisation. Communication is possible. Sometimes it’s hard, but that’s allowed. The theories on it are developed and probably, to a certain extent, the result of real thought and experimentation. Utopias, as far as we can make out, are not possible. The ideas fail because they imagine an incorrect view of human nature. Communication eludes Selin not because the theories are wrong, but because she is naïve, childish, and doesn’t really put any effort in. One approach becomes universal because it’s about all of our failings, while the other is about an individual’s failings which she will probably sort out once she has grown up a little.  

I have gone quite far from what I actually thought is the most interesting thing in this book – its use of section breaks. While Ivan and Selin’s not-relationship is the central story of the book, the bulk of it is taken up with Selin’s day-to-day experiences of being a new student in a big university. When I was about sixteen and thought I could teach myself writing through an entirely formulaic approach, I read in various places that my sections could never be shorter than 1’500 words and should always include some kind of conflict. This number has stuck with me even as it has never helped me much with my own writing. With The Idiot, Batuman doesn’t follow this rule either. Many of its sections are impressionistic and under a page in length. They accumulate, creating a sense of Selin’s experience of Harvard. They are snatches of conversations, or things spotted from a window. They are not, really, meaningful – even within a mesh of novelistic themes and meanings. But they are the brocade out of which the novel as a whole is built.

What is mildly interesting here is the way that Batuman builds meaning into this use of length and brevity. On the one hand, this is most obvious in the way that once the not-romance gets going, the sections with Ivan are considerably longer than the sections without him. It’s a quite direct way of putting the disorganised meaninglessness of the earlier sections into perspective by showing the paucity of their development quite literally on the page. On the other, and more thematically curious, is the way that this relates to Selin’s friendship with Svetlana. There is a moment when Svetlana reveals that she used to be bulimic and the narrative cannot contend with this fact, so the section just ends. It’s not presented as something deeply revealing from Svetlana within context, but Selin’s lack of reaction is another indication about the meaning-problem of the novel. Selin is yet again too immature, too naïve, to appreciate what her friend has told her. It’s not relevant to her own story.

If there’s something close to an epiphany to cap The Idiot, it’s the discovery by Selin that she is not the centre of the world, only of her world. This little bulimia mention is one example, as are the countless new people that she meets in Hungary: “I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.”

I can be charitable and say that the novel begins with a meaningless mass of impressions, grows more formally clear at its centre with Ivan, then ends up with a return to those same disconnected impressions. Only this time, Selin has a new consciousness of what they mean through her slightly-increased maturity. She has a sense that even if they are disconnected and non-narrativised to herself, they may be formed and clear in others’ worlds. Indeed, perhaps that’s one hidden message of all the teaching in the novel – that a teacher, like Selin herself, can have an impact on her students far greater than she herself would ever know.

Anyway, it was a reasonably funny, easy-to-read, work of contemporary fiction. Now I can go back to the dead.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Fall” – a modern “Lady with the Dog”

After the big braying dogs of the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s a curious turnaround that some of the most important people writing in Russian in recent years are women – Maria Stepanova, Tatyana Tolstaya, Ludmilla Ulitskaya, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. With the exception of Stepanova, who is from the generation after the other three, they came to creative maturity as the Soviet Union was collapsing, a fact without which much of their work would have been unpublishable, and are now in their seventies and eighties, living in self-imposed exiles. A blog post on Ulitskaya’s Big Green Tent may one day appear here. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, so much as that I didn’t love it. Long, meandering, it had something of Pynchon in its encyclopaedic portrayal of Soviet dissidents, but shared the American writer’s lack of warmth. Today, I am taking a different approach. Through a close analysis of a single four-page story by Ludmilla Petrushevskya, I’d like to make the case for her own brilliance.

Nothing Petrushevskaya has written has been very long. The three works collected in There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In (not Petrushevskaya’s title, nor those of the other Penguin editions of her work in English, as far as I can make out) are at the lower bound of a novella in length. Her more typical mode is the very short story. Not quite flash fiction, these are still only a few pages long. If you seek a modern Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, at least in form, you will be disappointed. Yet that is perhaps the only ground for disappointment, for these stories are innovative, especially in their narration, and far truer to my experience of the majority of Russian lives today than any ballroom or hunt from War and Peace.

Quotations from the story come from the translation by Anna Summers, found in There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. The quotes at the end come translated via The Moscow Times.

“The Fall” is a love story, told from the sidelines. “That summer we watched a transformation by the sea. We were staying across the street from a resort for workers; she was one of the guests. We couldn’t ignore her – she was too vulgar.” This beginning is shocking not through what it says, but how it says it. Immediately we have a narrative voice that wishes not one bit to settle into a kind of easy anonymity like a grand 19th century doyen – it wants to judge, and crush with that judgement. Even without the word “vulgar” there’s this persistent “we”, which begins three out of the first four sentences of the story. It seems to say that we don’t have a narrator, so much as an unquestionable judgement from the very voice of polite society.

Against this society, we have a woman, who is given by it the name of Carmen. “Just imagine her: a tight perm, plucked eyebrows, gaudy lipstick, a miniskirt”. Note the command to imagine – the narrator doesn’t just want to judge, they want to force readers into adopting their perspective – to picture the scene so that they can judge the same way. Carmen herself seems to be looking for love. Between the chops of the narrator as they try to destroy any worth that plan may have – “she strained, pathetically”, “a little womanly happiness (as imagined in soap operas)” – we understand that much about Carmen’s intentions.

Carmen has several admirers, from “a tall one in a heavy wool suit”, to “a skinny youth with hippie locks”. To the narrator, they are like animals – the word “pack” is used twice for them. By the next paragraph, “Number One”, the man in the suit, has come out on top. “Carmen and Number One walk about with dignity: she’s curbed her laughing; he carries her purse.”

“Dignity”? The narrator has shifted their tone from the total dismissal of the first page. The first sign of this comes a little earlier, when describing her laugh: “our Carmen laughs shrilly, but not as shrilly or loudly as one would expect – her laugh is not the war cry of some neighbourhood whore who invites all and sundry to her table; this Carmen laughs softly.” As a reader you can almost hear the frustration in the narrative voice – that “but not” that shows they would like to be meaner but cannot justify it, that reference to a “neighbourhood whore” so as to tar Carmen by association within the sentence, even if the narrator cannot call her such outright.

The next paragraph sees the two of them on a bus. Phrases like “those atrocious heels” let us know that Carmen is still in trouble, even if other remarks, like how “Number One gazes abstractly over everyone’s heads, looking out for his little lady”, suggest a seriousness to the couple and their “love” that the dismissive narrator, in their cruelty, lacks. “The biggest misery of all – a doomed love” – that’s the narrator’s assessment. But coming from such a meanie, whose only goal seems the tearing-down of others, this love, however doomed, shines like a light in the narration. Carmen, as a name, may refer to a fictional character, but she seems considerably more real and authentic than the woman staying in the hotel across the road.

The result of love, as it should be, is transfiguration: “Carmen has mellowed and acquired a golden sheen. Her ridiculous curls have loosened up and lightened in the sun”. The judgement “ridiculous” is replaced by the neutral statement that the curls have loosened up. The narrator changes tack, from dismissing her as crass to a kind of crushing, dismissive, fake pity that is even nastier. They are “trying to dance” as “a few days remain” before their “eternal separation.”

In the final paragraphs the time has slipped forward as “The new season has begun.” What happened cannot matter. Their love, like everything in this world, is washed away as a new wave of guests rolls in. The two of them have gone “back to their children and spouses”, and all that remains is a “long-distance call in a phone booth at the post office.” In the end, “They’ll shout and cry across thousands of miles, deceived by the promise of eternal summer, seduced and abandoned.” What a pessimistic ending! But note, though, the tense – we are now in the future. The narrator’s knowledge of other people has already been undermined by the time we get here – so why trust her suggestion of what the couple will do? There’s no need. In this shift to the future, there is a small gap for readerly agency – we can find hope where the narrator does not. But that is all we can do.

“The Fall” is Petrushevskaya at her best. It’s a story where the hard work is not in the language or images directly so much as in what lies behind it – the narrator and their voice. The narrator here is unreliable, but not in the sense of someone who conceals the truth. Instead, their prejudices distract them from it, so that they struggle to see the value of the love of poor Carmen. By seeing their petty prejudices, and following their interaction with what we take to be the reality underneath – a fairly average Black Sea romance – readers are led to see their own prejudices and how they might obscure their view of the world. At the same time, like a good character, the narrator is themself changing as they narrates – we hear their surprise at Carmen’s relationship, and there’s a certain commendable honesty in the way they belittles her without calling her something she is not, such as a whore.

It’s hard to read “The Fall” without also thinking about how it fits into the wider Russian literary tradition, because for one the comparison with Chekhov’s Lady with the Little Dog is so obvious. Both are Black Sea adultery tales, after all. Yet the texts are very different, despite their setting. Chekhov’s tale has a neutral, unobtrusive narrator. Instead, its focus is on Gurov, a serial adulterer who discovers that he is capable of true love after all. After the initial romance in Crimea, instead of just “long-distance call[s]”, Gurov actually follows Anna to her hometown to see her, and after that “the most difficult and complicated part” of their affair begins. As for Carmen, perhaps the same may happen with her too – as I noted, we don’t know. But what both works implicitly aim to do, is show the transfiguring power of love. Carmen becomes beautiful, and Gurov becomes good.

Love, though in adultery – it’s a little scandalous, even today. Neither narrator judges the relationship, only the romance. This stands in contrast to another great Russian work on adultery, Anna Karenina, which Lady with the Little Dog responds to. With the epigraph “vengeance is mine, I will repay”, Tolstoy is quite willing to be explicit about adultery’s evils when the other writers are not.  Out of the topic he wrote a huge novel, contrasting adultery to the good love of Kitty and Levin. Chekhov reacted to this by writing something much smaller. Adultery, he seems to say, is a thing to consider based on the specific case, rather than some abstract moral scheme. Gurov was leading a bad life before he met Anna, yet somehow this final adultery finally freed him from much in his life that was evil. Life is strange, but that’s why it’s wonderful. 

In “The Fall,” the narrator is like a representation of the forces of society in Tolstoy that ultimately drive Anna to her death, a figure judging and condemning. Yet just as Tolstoy himself couldn’t help but create in Anna a creature of vitality and excitement that readers have come to love, here too the narrator in “The Fall” has to admit the validity of the human as opposed to the ease of the casual condemnation. The dignity of Carmen and Number One is not just a thing they have, it is also a thing that the narrator, begrudgingly, grants them – they are in love, however doomed, and that makes them sparkle.

Like Chekhov, Petrushevskaya writes about the little folk. In that, her stories remind me much more of the Russia I knew than do those of any other writer. The dirt and grime and flaking wallpaper of a communal apartment I visited with a friend, the cramped kitchen of my ex-girlfriend’s family, with the same oily soups swapping pans day-in, day-out – such scenes Petrushevskaya brings to life. To them she adds, lit with a painful light, characters and events that I was lucky enough to mostly miss – endless stories of alcoholism, murder, and domestic violence. Chekhov is easy to read – he redeems the pathetic and largely innocent; Petrushevskaya is harder because the people she tries to redeem are often so obviously horrible even as she tries to save them.

The full extent of this badness is something she herself discovered to her horror only recently. In July 2023, she publicly announced she had given up writing, perhaps for good: “I’ve always written about my people. About the people who live in Russia. I felt sorry for them, the drunks and wretches… But now I don’t feel sorry for my people — invaders, thieves and rapists, murderers of children and destroyers of other people’s lives — or their hateful families, their wives and mothers… I will never write about them or for them.”

What are you supposed to do as a writer of a people who no longer seem worthy of redemption? If an author herself seems to turn on her work, should we still read it? If we spend our time looking through grime for chinks of light, that might make for good fiction, but isn’t it itself a bit hypocritical? Shouldn’t we instead get the damp cloth that will wipe the grime away?

I’ve been turning Petrushevskaya’s words over in my mind for months, and though I admire her stance, I think we should continue reading her stories and engaging with her characters. These stories are windows to a world – both through the flawed narrators, and through the grim narration – that exists. Without understanding it, with its prejudice and its meanness (in both senses, for after all these stories are unglamourously short compared to the great works of the 19th century), there is no way that the cycles of violence and trauma that characterise Russian life so strikingly can ever be stopped. Here in Petrushevskaya, there’s no wish fulfilment here for me to enjoy, but there is an overwhelming sense of seriousness. That, with fiction, is important too.

If you want to get started with Petrushevskaya, among the English language collections available, I’d say the collection this story comes from is the best – There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In is good too, but a little less approachable. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby I did not enjoy as much, but perhaps I’ll revisit it later.