The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (32 page)

When I came back from Samarkand, I almost entirely lost the ability to read poetry. It was like a language I didn’t speak anymore. What I used to enjoy in poetry was precisely the feeling of only half understanding—a feeling that is intensified, as Tolstoy once observed, when the poetry is written in a foreign language:

Without entering into the meaning of each phrase you continue to read and, from the few words that are comprehensible to you, a completely different meaning arises in your mind—unclear, cloudy, and not in accord with the original phrasing, but all the more beautiful and poetic. For a long time, the Caucasus was for me this poem in a foreign language; once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented, and many cases in which I believed the real poem was better than the imaginary one.

After Samarkand, the beauty of cloudy, poetical meanings conjured out of associations and half-grasped words—the beauty of things that don’t appear on the page—somehow
lost its charm for me. From that point on I was interested only in huge novels. I started researching a dissertation on the hugeness of novels, the way they devour time and material. And although I suppose it’s just coincidence that Tolstoy compared the subjective charms of half-understood poetry to the Caucasus in particular, nonetheless, I was finished with them, too—with the Caucasus, the Russian East, and the literatures of the peripheries.

School started again, the endless cycle of seminars and coffee, coffee and seminars. Luba had spent the summer researching the life of the princess Dashkova in St. Petersburg; Matej had been in Berlin doing some kind of topographical study of Walter Benjamin. Those were cities with archives, university presses, libraries—cities where students went to learn from books, not from “life.” And they were right, those students: I had seen life, and it hadn’t added up to anything. For a while it was a departmental joke that I had spent two months in Samarkand intensely studying Timurid love poetry, but soon everyone forgot about it, including me. I was busy teaching first-year Russian and reading Balzac. I spent more and more time on campus, returning to the Mountain View apartment only to sleep. In the winter, shortly after New Year’s, I moved out. Samarkand was the last trip that Eric and I took together.

Muzaffar and I still e-mail each other sometimes. He and his wife moved out of his parents’ house last year—a difficult and controversial decision. At the present time, he works as an office manager and has two children: a little boy, Komron, and a baby girl, Komila. Sometimes he travels to Kazakhstan, near the Uzbek border, where he does translation work at a village clinic run by Americans.

For a few years, Dilorom and I exchanged letters and gifts. “Respected Elif
qizim
! I was not at all surprised to receive your letter—because I was expecting it,” Dilorom wrote in a card enclosed with a hardcover 1992 edition of
Past Days
, the novel I had looked for all over Tashkent. I think she hoped I would translate it into English, but I never even made it past page two. I dreamed about that book, not about its contents but about the physical book, its black cloth cover embossed with red wallpaper-like arabesques, indicative of the bourgeois character of historical realism. In my dreams, the cover was imprinted with “performative” blurbs ascribed to old school Anglophone literary critics:

“Kicking this book will cause pages nineteen and twenty to stick together. (In the paperback edition, the stuck pages will be fourteen and fifteen.)”

—F. R. Leavis

 

Northrop Frye has stated that, when addressed in the form of a proper Arab gentleman, the book will clap itself over the nose of the reader’s worst enemy and remain there until the enemy has touched something that once touched a camel.

I would wake filled with relief, understanding that I didn’t actually have to read the book, that the book didn’t work that way (by being read), but rather by being kicked, or addressed in the form of a proper Arab gentleman, either of which was much less time-consuming than poring through the densely typed pages, looking up every other word in the dictionary. And although I am reluctant to say that what ended in Samarkand
was my youth
, nonetheless, this copy of
Past Days
brought home to me, with a kind of material immediateness, the truth of human mortality.

_____________

*
Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, as he is known to Western scholarship, lived from 1483 to 1530. The
Baburnama
is the first—and was for a long time the only—autobiography in Islamic literature, and is one of the longest prose narratives ever written in Chaghatay Turkish. To this day, no one knows what motivated Babur to keep a written record of his life. He hadn’t finished it when he died—the narrative breaks off mid-sentence in 1529.

Within hours of my arrival in Florence to research a magazine article about a Dante marathon, I found myself standing outside the apartment on the Via Guicciardini where Dostoevsky spent nine miserable months ravaged by debt and epilepsy. The building faces the Palazzo Pitti and is surmounted by a plaque:

I
N QUESTI PRESSI

FRA IL 1868 E IL 1869

F
EDOR
M
IHAILOVIC
D
OSTOEVSKIJ

COMPÌ IL ROMANZO
“L’
IDIOTA.”

Until recently, I had no particular interest in Florence, and had no idea that Dostoevsky had finished
The Idiot
there. Moreover, in the eternal debate of “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?” I have always been in the Tolstoy camp. But fate brought me to Dante’s city at the precise moment when I was obsessed by Dostoevsky’s
Demons
, the novel whose hero, Nikolai Stavrogin, is considered to be the diabolical double of
The Idiot
’s Prince Myshkin, and the early notes for which were composed right there in Florence.

•  •  •

In my free time from researching the drama of Florence’s centuries-long repentance for having exiled their greatest poet in 1302, I raced through
The Miraculous Years
, the fourth volume of Joseph Frank’s five-volume life of Dostoevsky.

I learned that forty-six-year-old Dostoevsky had gone abroad shortly after his marriage in 1867 to Anna Snitkina, the twenty-one-year-old stenographer who had helped him meet the deadline for
The Gambler.
The couple left Russia partly because Dostoevsky believed that the European climate was better for his epilepsy, and partly to escape the creditors, relatives, and hangers-on who were making Anna’s home life a misery. Ironically, considering the text that brought them together, Dostoevsky was seized anew in Dresden by his pathological obsession with roulette. He made a three-day trip to the famous casino of Homburg, which in fact dragged on for ten days, during which he lost not only all his money but also his watch, so that afterward, he and his wife never knew what time it was.

When the newlyweds decided to move to Switzerland that summer, Dostoevsky was unable to resist the lure of a stop in Baden-Baden. In between epileptic fits, he lost most of Anna’s jewelry and managed to cement a lifelong animus against longtime Baden resident Ivan Turgenev. The contretemps was precipitated by a chance meeting with Ivan Goncharov, author of
Oblomov
, who told Dostoevsky that Turgenev had seen him on the street but had decided not to say anything, “knowing how gamblers do not like to be spoken to.” Because he happened at that time to owe Turgenev fifty rubles, Dostoevsky couldn’t be seen to be avoiding him (which he was). At their subsequent meeting, Turgenev said such terrible things about Russia that Dostoevsky finally suggested he buy a telescope. “What for?” Turgenev asked. Dostoevsky said the telescope would help Turgenev see Russia better, so he would know
what he was talking about. Turgenev became “horribly angry.” Dostoevsky had taken up his hat and was preparing to leave when he “somehow, absolutely without intention,” ended up disburdening himself of everything that had “accumulated in [his] soul about the Germans in three months.” Nothing good, it turned out, had accumulated in his soul about the Germans, whom Turgenev, by contrast, admired deeply. The two writers parted, vowing never again to set eyes upon one another.

The Dostoevskys were by this point desperate to leave Baden-Baden, but Fyodor Mikhailovich had gambled away the necessary funds. Finally Anna’s mother sent them a money order. On the day of their departure for Geneva, Dostoevsky was unable to restrain himself and lost fifty francs and a pair of Anna’s earrings at roulette. One of Anna’s rings had to be pawned. An hour and a half before their train was scheduled to leave, Dostoevsky rushed back to the casino and lost twenty more francs.

The next year, in Switzerland, Dostoevsky worked on
The Idiot
, and Anna gave birth to a little girl. Three-month-old Sonya died of pneumonia that spring. The devastated parents resumed their travels, crossing the Alps to Italy late that summer and eventually settling in Florence. “In my opinion,” wrote Dostoevsky in a letter to his niece, “it is worse than deportation to Siberia. I’m speaking seriously and without exaggeration . . . If here in Florence one finds such a sun and sky, and if there are
marvels of art
, quite literally unheard-of and indescribable, nonetheless in Siberia, when I left the penal colony, there were other advantages, which here are lacking.” Having to write “without continuous and firsthand Russian impressions” was a particular torment for Dostoevsky, who spent long hours in the Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G. P. Vieusseux, poring over the Russian periodicals to which he was addicted.

Dostoevsky didn’t have an easy time finishing
The Idiot
. “I wrote the final chapters day and night in anguish and terrible uncertainty,” he reported to his niece. “I had two epileptic attacks, and I was ten days over deadline.” The last installments of the novel appeared in the journal
Russian Messenger
early in 1869.

Because of a delayed payment from his publishers, Dostoevsky ran out of money that spring. He and his wife (who took to calling each other Mr. and Mrs. Micawber) left the Via Guicciardini apartment and relocated to a single room overlooking the Mercato Vecchio, later described by Dostoevsky as “a market-square with arcades and splendid granite pillars [and] . . . a municipal fountain in the form of a gigantic bronze boar from whose throat the water flowed (it is a classic masterpiece of rare beauty).”

I, too, had been struck by that fountain, which is for some reason known as
Il Porcellino
: “the piglet.” It was quite jarring to come into the square for the first time and see, not the piglet one had been expecting, but a huge disaffected-looking boar. Gazing upon the Porcellino, I found myself recalling a line from Gogol’s “Overcoat,” in which a police officer is knocked off his feet by “an
ordinary adult piglet
which came tearing out of a private house.” This sentence is sometimes cited as an example of Gogol’s absurd use of language: If it’s an adult, then how is it a piglet? Apparently, the same absurd use of language was made by the Florentines when naming their gigantic bronze boar fountain.

In the apartment overlooking the Porcellino, Dostoevsky and his wife caught two tarantulas. On the night of the first tarantula, Dostoevsky lay awake for hours, remembering a certain Cossack of his acquaintance who had died of a tarantula bite fifteen years earlier in Semipalatinsk. Only by repeatedly “reciting aloud Kozma Prutkov’s didactic fable
‘The Conductor and the Tarantula’ ”
*
did he finally calm himself enough to drift into uneasy dreams.

From Florence, the Dostoevskys returned to Dresden. Over the next twenty months, Dostoevsky wrote “The Eternal Husband” and the first section of the novel that would eventually become
Demons
.

Arguably Dostoevsky’s most enigmatic novel, sprawling, ideologically overpopulated, generically ambiguous,
Demons
—formerly translated as
The Possessed
—haunts me like a prophetic dream. The title comes from the novel’s epigraph: the verses Luke 8:32–36, in which demons leave the man whom they have possessed and enter a herd of swine; the swine rush down a steep bank into a lake and are drowned.

Demons
is the story of certain “very strange events” unfolding in a provincial Russian town, a place “hitherto not remarkable for anything.” The narrator—whose eccentric, discursive chronicle includes scenes at which he himself can’t possibly have been present—is a friend of one of the key characters in the novel: an aging pedagogue, poet, and lapsed scholar named Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, whose academic distinction consists of having once “managed to defend a brilliant thesis on the nearly emerged civic and Hanseatic importance of the German town of Hanau, in the period between 1413 and 1418, together with the peculiar and vague reasons why that importance never took place.” Twenty-two years before the events narrated in
Demons
, Stepan Trofimovich is appointed as tutor to the only son of
Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, a wealthy local landowner. He becomes very close with his ten-year-old pupil, frequently waking him up at night “to pour out his injured feelings in tears before him”; the two then “throw themselves into each other’s embrace and weep.”