My fellow (non-saurian) blogger Languagehat wrote an interesting
but critical post about Dostoevsky's The Adolescent (1875) earlier
this week. Here he calls it 'one of the most annoying novels I’ve ever read',
drawing attention to its 'unreliable narrator' and 'ridiculous' adolescent
style, including 'endless coincidences, overhearings, [and] surprise encounters'.
One of my avatars has penned a much more sympathetic review
of Dora O'Brien's recent translation of The Adolescent which,
if you are a TLS subscriber, you can read here. (If you're not, you can be tantalized by the first
paragraph). Clearly, Languagehat and I have divergent views on the book that I
call 'understandably, if undeservedly, the least read of Dostoevsky's mature
novels'. His blog post concludes meditatively, 'I can’t help but wonder what
Dostoevsky’s reputation would have been if he had died just after publishing
this, never having written the Writer’s Diary or The
Brothers Karamazov — I suspect he’d be remembered as a very fine
writer like Turgenev rather than Tolstoy’s equal and rival. Fortunately, he
survived and triumphed.'
This notion of the incomplete obituary – what we might say
about great writers if they had died before writing their legacy works –
returned to my mind the following day when I opened a volume of the Argentine
author Ernesto Sabato’s essays. I was chasing a particular essay by Sabato, “La
Resistencia” (“Resistance”), which is quoted by contemporary novelist Julian Fuks
as the epigram to his novel Resistance, which in turn, as a
narrative of troubled metafictional fraternity, can be traced back to Dostoevsky
through Nabokov’s The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight and The Brothers
Karamazov. I couldn’t find Sabato’s “Resistance” but I did find, in a
charming anthology of tiny essays from 1971 called El Escritor i sus fantasmas, a piece called “Dostoievsky juzgado
por contemporaneous” (“Dostoevsky judged by his contemporaries”). Here, Sabato
picks up Dostoevsky’s career in the late 1840s, around the time of publication of The Double. Having briefly been the toast of St Petersburg literary
society for Poor Folk, Dostoevsky's star
has fallen. His peers mock his appearance, his style, his pride. Turgenev and
Nekrasov cruelly co-write a stinging stanza, which I give in Sabato’s witty
Spanish version (the original knight, after all, was also Spanish):
Caballero de la
triste figura
Dostoievsky, mi
querido fanfarrón,
Sobre la nariz de
la literatura,
No eres más que una
leve erupción.
Sabato goes on:
'The addressee of these lines lost confidence in his genius;
many of the pages of The Double,
which he was writing, seemed to him ridiculous, superficial, useless. He was
living in a kind of hell (un infierno).
He had lost the euphoria of that time so near and so far away when Belinsky had
lauded him to the skies. He heard laughter all around him; he mistrusted the
smiles of his circle (capilla). Three
years after the memorable night when Belinsky and Nekrasov had wept at the
reading of Poor Folk, he was a broken
man (un hombre terminado). He was
saved from either madness or suicide by (paradoxically) prison. Buried alive (Enterrado en vida),
he found the opportunity to reflect on the vanity of all things. While he was
still sealed up in Siberia, forgotten, one of the individuals who had been part
of his circle, a certain Panaev, remarked: “We were on the point of being
besotted with one of the little idols of the day. We showed him off in the
streets of the capital, we trumpeted his glory everywhere. Eventually he lost
his way. He was immediately abandoned by all of us. Poor man! We destroyed him
(Lo hemos aniquilado), we turned him
into a ridiculous thing.'"
Imagine if Dostoevsky really had stopped with Poor Folk and The Double, stifled by Siberia, suicide, or both. Would we remember
him today as a footnote to Gogol, a minor literary figure (like Ivan Panaev
himself), a “ridiculous thing”?
Thankfully, Dostoevsky returned and rebuilt his life and
reputation, writing The Adolescent… and
one or two other novels.
