The Soviet Man Meets The Velveteen Rabbit

"When you are Real you don't mind being hurt." 

I am finishing up a lecture course called Introduction to Socialist Realism - in which I have feebly attempted, over four lectures, to convey the basics of the infamous Production Novel and Master Plot, the eternal battle between Spontaneity and Consciousness, and the iniquities of the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers, to an audience of mildly puzzled second years who wonder why anyone would write (let alone read) a book called 'Cement'. Today's lecture tried to bridge Nikolai Ostrovsky's How The Steel Was Tempered (Как закалялась сталь, 1932) and Boris Polevoi's A Story About A Real Man (Повесть о настоящем человеке, 1946) by discussing how Socialist Realist writers depict war. This brought us onto heroism, and the construction of manhood in the Soviet novel - territory already insightfully and entertainingly explored by Lilya Kaganovsky in How The Soviet Man Was Unmade (although I do feel she can be over-imaginative: her suggestion that Gleb Chumalov of Cement may have been castrated strikes me as below the belt, to say the least). In turn, this stimulated strange resonances inside my head. I found myself remembering one of my favourite children's stories - Margery Williams's The Velveteen Rabbit (1922). Before I explain this connection, allow me to recapitulate the Soviet hero archetype.

I ended my lecture by showing the students a video clip of the famous flight scene from Aleksandr Stolper's 1948 film version of A Story About A Real Man, starring Pavel Kadochnikov as Aleksei Meres'ev, the Soviet fighter pilot whose lower legs were amputated following a crash at the beginning of 1942. (Polevoi's book is based on the exploits of the real-life Aleksei Meres'ev, who really did retrain as a fighter pilot after losing both legs, and the film follows the book quite faithfully). This scene recreates Meres'ev's first flight since his injury; he has ruthlessly trained his body (even re-learning to dance) in order to compensate for his missing feet, and he has successfully achieved a degree of physical sensitivity to his controls that equals the skill of able-bodied pilots. Even better, his confidence and his love of flying have returned. When they land, Meres'ev's flight instructor scolds him for wearing thin boots that won't protect his feet in the frigid air. 'I have no feet', says Meres'ev proudly. The instructor doesn't understand. 'I have no feet, Comrade Lieutenant', Meres'ev replies, with a grin spreading all over his face. After insisting on seeing Meres'ev's prostheses, the instructor embraces Meres'ev and tells him ecstatically, 'You don't realize... the sort of man you are!'
'Of course', I apostrophized as I dived under the projector to wipe down the whiteboard (and as my students dived for the door), 'the moral of the story is that both Meres'ev and the instructor know exactly what kind of man he is. He is a REAL MAN, a Soviet hero. And the irony of the story is that in order to be a REAL MAN, Meres'ev first has to become less than a man'.

I was ad-libbing: Lilya Kaganovsky has already put the same point much better: 'in its attempts to articulate the coming into being of the New Soviet Man, socialist realism [...] produces a mangled or mutilated (male) body as frequently as it produces the hyperbolically healthy and strong Stalinist man' (2008 ed., p. 22). This irony is why Gleb Chumalov is festooned with battle scars; why Pavel Korchagin is blinded and crippled; why Meres'ev's mentor and model, Commissar Vorob'ev, is valiantly expiring from some unnamed but clearly unpleasant disease which bloats and agonizes his body; why Meres'ev loses his limbs (although it must be reiterated that, of these examples, Korchagin and Meres'ev are based on real-life exemplars; Korchagin's damaged body relives the physical decline of his creator, Nikolai Ostrovsky). All these semi-cripples and moribund victims are heroes of a Soviet ideal which vindicates pain by transcending it, and glorifies the body while mutilating it. After the unquenchable Vorob'ev has finally passed away in his hospital bed (while listening to a Soviet propaganda broadcast, appropriately enough), his fellow patients come up with a simple epitaph for him: he was 'a real man... a Bolshevik'. Young Meres'ev is enchanted by this phrase: 'A better description of the Commissar could not have been imagined. And Alexei was filled with a desire to become a real man, like the one who had just been taken on his last journey'.

That phrase set me thinking... of a conversation that takes place in Margery Williams's oddly unsentimental tale of a little stuffed rabbit who wants to be real, so he can play in the meadow with the live rabbits:

'"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."'

The little Rabbit does become Real in the end... but only after he has lost his whiskers, and the lining to his ears, and even his shape until 'he scarcely looked like a rabbit any more', and until, finally, he is unfairly ejected from the nursery and his place beside the Boy that he loves. After he has survived this self-sacrificial rite of passage, the Velveteen Rabbit becomes REAL and plays with the flesh-and-blood rabbits in the meadows. If this isn't a journey from spontaneity to consciousness, what is? I'm not suggesting that Katerina Clark should insert a chapter on 'The Velveteen Rabbit as Master Plot' in her Fourth Edition of The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (which fans of the genre will recognize as the Ur-text of Socialist Realist criticism). But nonetheless, the Rabbit's apotheosis via trauma pre-enacts Pavel Korchagin's unsparing 'spartanstvo', Meres'ev's single-minded return to the cockpit, and other Socialist Realist Bildungsromans. The Master Plot for all  of these tales is, of course, Gethsemane, Golgotha, and Resurrection. In their quest to become REAL, Socialist Realist heroes grotesquely act out Christ's mutilation and transfiguration. Yet isn't it odd to reflect that the essence of their philosophy was summed up in 1922 in a conversation between a plush rabbit and a stuffed horse?

Pavel Korchagin

Velveteen Rabbit

Aleksei Meres'ev

CREDITS The citations from A Story About A Real Man in this post are taken from J. Fineberg's translation (Moscow, 1952); the text of The Velveteen Rabbit is courtesy of http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html

There is a link to a good translation of How The Steel Was Tempered from this Wikipedia article.

At the London Book Fair with Valerii Briusov

Briusov under the table. Picture credit: Northwestern University's Poet Page

Valerii Briusov was not at the 2011 London Book Fair. If he had been, he'd have taken the place over; I can just imagine a huge tent in Earl's Court emblazoned with the word 'Skorpion' (the name of his publishing house), and plastered with exotic sketches by Bakst, Feofilaktov, and other Symbolist artists. Interviews with Briusov would be all over BBC iPlayer; he'd probably be on Twitter; and he'd certainly generate copy by parading a host of languorous literary lovelies around West Kensington. The mind boggles. A man made famous by a monostich, or single-line poem ('О закрой свои бледные ноги' - O, cover your pale legs), Briusov grew up to be one of Russian literature's greatest publicists. Although Academia Rossica did an impressive job of co-ordinating this year's Russian Market Focus events, I feel Briusov would have out-PR'd even their best efforts. However, his most famous fashion tip fell on deaf ears: thanks to unexpected spring sunshine, there were plenty of pale legs on display.

Since, unlike Briusov, I was at the London Book Fair, it felt appropriate to be reading his novel The Fiery Angel (Огненный ангел) in between panels. By pretending that the book is based on an original early modern text, Briusov goes one better than the Walpolesque found-manuscript dodge: his Introduction claims that Fiery Angel is a found manuscript that is clearly a copy of an original, even earlier manuscript (as betrayed by certain linguistic anachronisms). I was reading the novel in connection with research on the portrayal of alchemists in Russian literature: the respectively real and invented alchemists Cornelius Agrippa and Faust play important supporting roles in its plot. Briusov's book is a first-person account of how, in the year 1534, Ruprecht, a village doctor's son, medical school drop-out, ex-soldier and New World explorer, finds and loses the love of his life in the Rhineland. Ruprecht is on his way home to Trier, armed with Inca gold and self-made swagger. En route, however, he meets a red-haired damsel in distress, Renata, who swiftly manipulates worldly-wise Ruprecht into a state of sexual and moral subordination by convincing him to help her find the 'fiery angel' which has dominated her life since childhood. To the modern reader, Renata appears plainly schizophrenic, and Ruprecht repeatedly hesitates on the verge of making a similar diagnosis; but he never excludes a supernatural explanation for his beloved's vagaries. Andrei Bely endorsed Fiery Angel warmly while insisting that it was a book for the elite: 'для небольшого круга истинных ценителей изящного' ('for a small circle of genuine admirers of the exquisite'). You can read his review here. I feel Bely was being unjust; despite the very detailed end-notes which testify to Briusov's meticulous historical research, this is not an elitist book. Nor does it attempt to sustain Briusov's reputation for perversity, despite some references to unnatural congress at Satanic sabbaths. Perhaps Bely, aware that Ruprecht, Renata and the angel were avatars of a real-life love triangle involving Briusov, Nina Petrovskaia and himself, wanted to discourage potential readers.

Briusov was intensely interested in German culture, and this novel is his paean to the sixteenth century, when humanism collided with esotericism, global expansion with religious fanaticism. His plot and characters reflect the inevitable inadequacies and imbalances of this fusion. Melodramatic incidents, such as Renata's trial by the Inquisition, are combined with petty but true-to-life details: Ruprecht's involvement with Renata impoverishes him and he is ultimately too ashamed to make himself known to his aged parents. Ruprecht's intellectual flaws, his failure to distinguish between science and superstition, reflect the confusion within sixteenth-century academia. Another underlying issue is social status; Ruprecht is born with a toe-hold on the middle classes, but when challenging a nobleman to a duel, he lies, claiming 'Я такой же рыцарь, как вы' ('I am a knight just like you'). Honesty would have risked invalidating his challenge, since the honour code didn't oblige a nobleman to fight a commoner; but Ruprecht lies primarily because he feels he's earned the right to call himself a true knight. He lives by the honour code, talks the talk and wears the clothes - and he can't bring himself to admit that this will never be enough. He is even more humiliated when his enemy discovers that he isn't noble, but still condescends to fight him. Later in the book, he enters a freethinking Count's suite as an unpaid aide. The Count hails Ruprecht as a 'brother humanist' - but this intellectual bond doesn't prevent him from addressing Ruprecht by the familiar pronoun, as if the latter were a servant. Nor does Ruprecht's resentment prevent him from deferring to the Count, even when Renata's life is at stake. Ruprecht has plenty of convictions, but lacks the courage to act on them; he's observant, but lacks the nous to draw conclusions. I feel that he is all the more interesting for not being either a Conan-style barbarian or a Faustian disillusioned intellectual. The Fiery Angel has been translated into English in a Dedalus edition, although I vastly prefer my quaint, lavender-coloured library copy, with colour plates reproducing Briusov's original drawings. The Fiery Angel is much better known as an opera by Prokofiev; YouTube has many links to some of the more stirring performances.

My adventures at the LBF were not as dramatic as Ruprecht's or Renata's in early modern Germany. Nor did it resemble a witches' sabbath, although the wheeler-dealing among the publishers in the bigger tents looked pretty frenetic at times. Instead of meeting alchemists and inquisitors, I got to meet or gawp at some personal heroes. These were not, for the most part, the authors (many of whom were youthful unknowns). Instead, as ever, the LBF is a great venue to meet the people who make Russian literature accessible to non-Russian readers: translators, critics, and bloggers. Where else would you see Boris Akunin casually telling his translator Andrew Bromfield to 'start writing your own books' because Akunin, as a novelist, gets to 'wake up late, and I only write when I feel like it, although I usually feel like it', whereas Bromfield refers to himself as a 'recluse', working for hours every day to translate Akunin (and others)? It certainly sounds as if translators get the worse deal, despite their dedication and effort.

Pavel Basinskii and Elif Batuman

Where else than at a spin-off event at the South Bank Centre would you find Elif Batuman, columnist, blogger, and author of surprise bestseller The Possessed, comparing her views on Tolstoy with Pavel Basinsky, a seasoned academic and the literary editor of Rossiiskaia gazeta? My positive impression of Batuman, formed from The Possessed, was reinforced by meeting her in person: she has a winning way with an audience and wears wonderful boots (to boot).

Where did she get those boots?

Basinsky was kind enough to give me a copy of his hot-off-the-press reconstruction of Tolstoy's final weeks, Flight from Paradise (Бегство из рая) as a gift; I'll dedicate a future post to reviewing it. Back at the LBF, at a pavilion dedicated to literary translation, Robert Chandler and Sasha Dugdale led an intriguing but too-short panel on translators' values, raising more questions than they could hope to resolve in forty-five minutes.

Robert Chandler looking intense

On a personal note, I met my own publisher, Antony Wood of Angel Classics (himself a noted translator of Pushkin's lyric poems), who reassured me that my collection of Soviet-era ghost stories, Red Spectres, is continuing to forthcome. I was also thrilled to bump into Lizok of the invaluable Lizok's bookshelf, in person. Overall, however, I found the Fair's Russian focus slightly misleading. Despite the lavishness of the pavilions, the relentlessness of the spin, the ingenuity of the graphics, and the clever branding of everything from carrier bags to individual wrapped chocolates, I saw little real communication between authors and audiences (that said, inevitably, I missed many of the often-simultaneous panels). Most of the authors, nannied by agents and (rarely fully bilingual) interpreters, uttered set phrases which they had clearly trotted out many times, looking glazed-over, if not outright bored. I found myself admiring most those who refused to co-operate with the sales formula by blatantly over-performing (like Mikhail Elizarov) or simply looking very uncomfortable (like German Sadulaev or Aleksandr Ilichevskii, who had to suffer the indignity of seeing his name in lights, mispelled). Panels which promised ambitiously  to promote Russian cultural discussion were often stymied by their chairs' superficial engagement with Russian culture and indeed with the panellists, who could hardly be blamed for responding with cynicism or crude, untranslatable humour to crudely posed political or cultural questions. Rosie Goldsmith, a well-groomed but firmly feminist BBC presenter (titanium totty, if you will), drew a particularly unreformed panel consisting of the critic, blogger and ex-Playboy editor Lev Danilkin, the ex-Special Forces captain and dissident Zakhar Prilepin, and Pavel Basinskii. She treated them like three bad little boys, twitting them (essentially) for not being women, for not writing biographies of women, and and for the lack of major women writers in the Russian canon. Surely not all of this was their fault. Prilepin, reasonably enough, pointed out that he wasn't qualified to write a biography of a woman because no man can understand what's going on in a woman's head. Next Goldsmith asked her panel goadingly if they'd be too scared to write a biography of Putin. Prilepin (again) suggested that someone offer Medvedev a contract to write Putin's biography, and vice versa. It fell to Basinskii to chivalrously supply coherent responses in the silences that followed many questions. Danilkin, who spent most of the discussion watching an invisible fly in the middle distance, allowed himself to be coaxed into revealing the subject of his next biography (shock horror: Anatolii Fomenko), and looked disappointed when the audience received this in respectful silence, instead of the fusillade of catcalls he'd clearly expected. The boys only looked happy once: when an Academia Rossica cameragirl, in figure-hugging jeans and blouse, strolled by with a videocamera. 'Ходи туда все время, родная!' Prilepin invited her. 'Тебе честь!' ['Walk past all the time, honey. You do us proud!'] It was gallantry, but not as British equality tribunals understand it. At least the girl had read her Briusov; she'd covered her pale legs.

Left to right: Lev Danilkin, Zakhar Prilepin, Pavel Basinski

Sailing, or Tiutchev in the Octopus's Garden

At the risk of misquoting Jerome K. Jerome, this post will be about three men in three different boats, in three different poems. Taken together, these poems offer distinct perspectives on the Romantic concept of freedom. The earliest is Mikhail Lermontov's famous 'The Sail' (Парус) (1832):

Белеет парус одинокой
В тумане моря голубом!..
Что ищет он в стране далекой?
Что кинул он в краю родном?..

You can read it in full here,  and listen to it here. A rough (and very free) translation would be:

A white sail gleams

On the ocean's steel-blue spume!...

What does it seek in a distant land?

What has it left at home?...

Lermontov's tiny poem (just three quatrains) has become one of the most cited and pastiched verses in Russian literature. It is almost impossible to convey in English the extraordinarily evocative spatio-kinetic effects of the young poet's language: the stressed long vowels in words like 'одинокой','тумане', 'ищет', and 'далекой' emphasize the breadth of the horizon and the emptiness of the seascape; the Russian colour 'голубой', the hue of a summer sky, is poorly but traditionally translated as 'pale blue'; the unexpected juxtaposition of this bright, rich colour with 'туман' (fog) forces the reader to visualize the dazzling dimness of spray interacting with sunlight; in the last line,  the verb 'кинуть' (to throw'), although not as emphatic as бросить ('to throw over, abandon'), stresses the energy and decisiveness of the sailor's departure from his home.

With an eighteen-year-old's characteristic cruelty, Lermontov makes it clear in the next stanza that his sailor-hero has already suffered misfortune and has lost faith in the possibility of happiness: 'Увы! он счастия не ищет,/И не от счастия бежит!' ('Alas! It does not search for joy/Nor is it joy it flees!'). In the final lines of the poem, it becomes clear that this disenchantment has formed into a philosophy of living: 'А он, мятежный, просит бури,/ Как будто в бурях есть покой!' ('But rebelliously, it calls for storms/As if in storms peace could be found!'). It is not clear whether Lermontov is endorsing or ironizing this Byronic infatuation with tempestuous travel; probably, given his age and future career, the former. The Third Witch's incantation in Macbeth springs to mind: 'Though his bark cannot be lost,/Yet it shall be tempest-tost'. Sadly, Lermontov's own bark would be lost nine years later - not at sea, but in a pointless duel.

My second poem, Fyodor Tiutchev's 'A Dream at Sea' (Сон на море, probably 1830) is less dramatic but equally reflective. It begins:

И море, и буря качали наш челн;

Я, сонный, был предан всей прихоти волн.

Две беспредельности были во мне,

И мной своевольно играли оне.

Here I rely on Richard Gregg's translation (details below):

Both the sea and the storm rocked our skiff;

Sleepy, I was abandoned to the full caprice of the waves.

The two infinities were within me

And willfully they played with me.

Where Lermontov erects a sequence of screens (the distant sail is metonymous with the unnamed sailor-hero, and all emotion is focalized though the narrator on the shore), Tiutchev brings us directly on board, into the midst of the swell and spray. As the storm continues to rock the poet's craft, he takes the reader deeper into his own mind. The poem takes the form of a sonnet (14 lines) sandwiched between two quatrains; the first quatrain introduces the sleepy poet lying in the bottom of his boat (and not a glamorous sailboat this time: the word 'челн' evokes for the modern reader the 'sorry skiff' or 'бедный чёлн' of the miserable native Finns in Pushkin's 1833 poem The Bronze Horseman). In the first six lines, or sestet, of the quatrain, the poet's dream ('сон') gradually overcomes the 'хаосом звуков' ('chaos of sounds') enveloping the boat. In the octet, the poet experiences a vision that would have done McCartney and Lennon (circa 1967) proud: he sees 'Labyrinthine gardens, palaces, columns,/... magic creatures, mysterious birds./Across the peaks of creation I strode like a god,/And under me the world shone motionless'. The poet has achieved a qualified divinity: most importantly, he has imposed his own 'motionlessness' upon the restlessness of the sea. However, this apotheosis is transient. In the concluding quatrain, the real world pours in upon the poet: 'But through all the dreams, like the wail of a magician,/I heard the roar of the ocean's abyss,/And into the quiet domain of visions and dreams/Burst the foam of roaring waves'. Is the sea resisting or colluding with the poet's self-enchantment?

Whether this poem is influenced chiefly by Schelling or by Pascal, whether it celebrates the power of the human imagination to transform and control nature, or whether it dramatizes man's precarious position between two 'abysses' - imagination and the natural world - it constitutes a powerful late Romantic speculation on the nature and limits of creativity. Tiutchev, a youthful diplomat posted to Munich at the time of writing, had yet to experience the unhappy love affairs that would stimulate his most moving love poetry. In 1865, aged 63, he would return to the sea as a metaphor for nature's innate harmony in the tragic 'Певучесть есть в морских волнах' ('How tuneful is the voice of the sea'). Here, man is a 'мыслящий тростник' ('a thinking reed', in Pascal's phrase). The aged poet laments man's permanent isolation from the natural chorus: '... отчего же в общем хоре/Душа не то поет, что, море' ('Why, in the world's chorus/Cannot the soul sing like the sea')?

My final poet in a boat is Evgenii Baratynskii, whose poem 'The Steamship' (Пироскаф, 1844) was written on (and about) the Mediterranean while sailing from Marseilles to Naples. The poem is set on board a ship powered by both sail and steam, creating a fusion of power that both thrills and slightly unnerves the poet. Here is the first stanza, and the first word of the second:

Дикою, грозною ласкою полны, 

Бьют в наш корабль средиземные волны. 

Вот над кормою стал капитан. 

Визгнул свисток его. Братствуя с паром, 

Ветру наш парус раздался недаром: 

Пенясь, глубоко вздохнул океан! 

Мчимся.

In my approximate translation:

Full of wild and fierce affection,

The waves of the inland sea strike our vessel.

There, the captain's appeared in the stern:

His whistle rings out. In league with the steam,

The wind purposefully unfurls our sail:

The ocean exhales a gout of foam!

We rush onwards.

'The Steamship' is the longest (at 36 lines) as well as the latest of the three poems discussed here, and also the most populous (the poet-narrator in the midst of the action, the captain, the sailors, the flapping sail and churning paddles of the boat, the gulls and waves associated with the sea, other boats!). The poets are getting progressively older: Baratynskii is 44 at the time of writing, reflecting on a life saddened by (not entirely undeserved) disgrace and (unjust) critical neglect, but also palpably quickened by the European tour he was undertaking with his wife and children. Although troubled by his wife's poor health, his hopes for the future have reached a high pitch. The overriding optimism of the poem reflects this. We can find echoes of both Lermontov and Tiutchev: like Tiutchev, the poet is slipping into a maritime reverie, but his visions of the past and future resonate (rather than competing) with the sounds and motion of the sea. Like Lermontov, he is conscious of the Romantic truism of finding (not necessarily happy) fulfillment through travel and adventure ('Since childhood I have been lured by my troubled heart/Into the free nation of the aqueous god'). However, this trip is not a surrender to the random direction of current and breeze, but a consolidation of rational decisions already made: ('I decided many tumultuous questions./Before ever the hands of the Marseilles sailors/Lifted our anchor, that symbol of hope!'). As my colleague Andrew Kahn stressed in an inspiring 2010 seminar, this poem deflates the heroism of the Romantic wanderer while dismantling an important Romantic topos: here, the hero's fate is decided before he sets out. The Romantic ideals of freedom and realized imagination are not abandoned, but revised in light of experience. Baratynskii's mood of hope and potential achievement is consonant with, but independent of, the playful grandeur of the sea. In the final lines, he looks forward to specific goals: 'Tomorrow I will see the towers of Livorno/Tomorrow I will see Elysia on earth'! Unfortunately, in an unconscious irony, Baratynskii would die of heart failure, aggravated by fever, a very few days after landing in Naples. This poem is one of his last. Baratynskii's hopes for the future were thus tragically delusive (Andrew Kahn confesses that this poem always chokes him up).
All together for a chorus of Rod Stewart's 'Sailing' (quite a typically Romantic lyric, in its way):

I am sailing, I am sailing

Home again across the sea

I am sailing stormy water

To be near you, to be free.

For more on Tiutchev’s poem ‘Son na More’, see Ralph E. Matlaw, 'The Polyphony of Tyutchev’s “Son na more”’, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 36, No. 86 (Dec. 1957), pp. 198-20, and also Richard A. Gregg, ‘“Dream at Sea”: Tiutchev and Pascal’, Slavic Review, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Sep. 1964), pp. 526-53. Gregg’s article includes a full English translation of the poem.



                                                                

Ekphrasis and Epilepsy in Dostoevsky's life and fiction

Self-portrait of Dostoevsky (lower right), with a sketch of an old man, from http://az.lib.ru/d/dostoewskij_f_m/text_0810.shtml

Fedor Dostoevsky's fiction, like his life, was punctuated by moments of ecstasy. Indeed, according to one article, even Dostoevsky's epilepsy was ecstatic in character: its current medical definition is 'Temporal Lobe Epilepsy with Ecstatic Seizures'. Many epileptics describe the 'aura' - the period of mental confusion immediately preceding a seizure - as producing a sensation of clarity or wellbeing. Dostoevsky was no exception. As attested by his own records and those of his second wife Anna Grigorievna, Dostoevsky had - on average - one fit every three weeks between the onset of epileptic seizures in his mid-twenties and his death, aged sixty, in 1881. Sometimes these fits were provoked by overwork, sometimes by emotional stress (he suffered severe, repeated seizures immediately after both of his marriages), and sometimes they had no obvious trigger. Dostoevsky's friend, the critic Nikolai Strakhov, famously described the onset of one such fit: '[Dostoevsky] called in on me very late, after ten o’clock, and we had a very lively conversation […] Fedor Mikhailovich grew very animated and was pacing about the room, while I sat at my desk. He was speaking of something very elevated and joyous [высокое и радостное]; when I made some remark of agreement he turned to me with an inspired face which revealed that exaltation [одушевление] had reached its peak. He paused for a moment as if groping for words to express his thought, his mouth already open. I looked at him in strained expectation, sensing that he would say something extraordinary and that I would hear some revelation […] Fedor Mikhailovich told me many times that he would have moments of exaltation before a fit. “For a few brief moments", he would say, “I feel a kind of happiness that is unthinkable in a normal state and which is unimaginable for other people. I feel complete harmony with myself and with the whole world, and this sensation is so powerful and sweet that one would give ten years of life, perhaps one’s whole life, for a few seconds of such bliss”’ [The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia, ed. by Kenneth Lantz (2004), p.200]. Another friend recalled that Dostoevsky had described this harmonic sensation less innocently as 'сладострастие', which is closer to 'voluptuousness' than 'bliss'. Many of Dostoevsky's fictional characters share this medical condition: Kirillov in The Devils and Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, for example. The hero of The Idiot, the mild and Christlike Prince Myshkin, suffers three clearly defined epileptic seizures during the course of the plot, the last of which plunges him back into the helpless, irrational 'idiocy' of his childhood. Myshkin's first seizure is preceded by a sensation of oppression and guilt; his second, on the contrary, by a new (and misleading) feeling of acceptance and trust among members of St Petersburg 'high society'. On display by his hosts the Yepanchins as a potential son-in-law, Myshkin tries to find common ground with a selection of dessicated grandes dames and high-ranking civil servants; naively mistaking tolerance for sympathy, he breaks into an ecstatic eulogy: '"Do you know I don't know how one can walk past a tree and not be happy at the sight of it? How can one talk to a man and not be happy in loving him! Oh, it's only that I'm not able to express it... And what beautiful things there are at every step, that even the most hopeless man must feel to be beautiful! Look at a child! Look at God's sunrise! Look at the grass, how it grows! Look at the eyes that gaze at you and love you!"'. Unfortunately, on this pinnacle of ecstatic communion, the Prince topples over into a humiliating - and silencing - seizure. The harmony experienced in epilepsy was clearly unreliable, transient, and - worst of all - impossible to share with others. Yet this frustration did not lead Dostoevsky or his characters to renounce the clarity gained during the aura; Catteau even suggests that 'Dostoevsky may have mythologized the aura so as to experience a transcendence which he could not reach by other means' (Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, 1989, p. 125).

However, epilepsy was not the only conduit for ecstasy in Dostoevsky's life. During the four years he and Anna Grigorievna spent wandering through Europe (not an extended honeymoon, but a prolonged avoidance of creditors at home in Russia), Dostoevsky found a new ecstatic connection: with the Great Masters. As the Dostoevsky scholar Jacques Catteau admits, Dostoevsky's appreciation of art was neither adventurous nor profound; he was capable of confounding the relatively trivial or unoriginal (Watteau, Battoni) with the timeless (Rembrandt, Titian). However, his most spontaneous admiration was commanded by truly eternal masterpieces: Titian's The Tribute Money and Raphael's The Sistine Madonna. Anna Grigorievna has left us a vivid account of Dostoevsky's enjoyment of these works at the Gemaldegalerie in Dresden : 'Passing by all the other halls, my husband led me up to the Sistine Madonna - a painting which he held to be the highest manifestation of human genius. Subsequently, I was to see how my husband could stand for hours in front of this strikingly beautiful painting, deeply moved and affected'. She added that she had the startling impression that the Madonna was flying upwards from the canvas to greet her visitors. In another account of their first sight of Raphael's painting, Anna Grigorievna wrote: 'What beauty, what innocence and sadness in that divine face, how much humility, how much suffering in those eyes! Fedya finds that her smile is sorrowful' [both passages are my own translation]. (And yes, for the record, she did like those ubiquitous Dresden cupids at the bottom of the painting; Dostoevsky's reaction to them is not known). At the Kunstsammlung in Basel (the city's collection had not yet removed to the present-day Kunstmuseum), Dostoevsky saw Hans Holbein the Younger's image, The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521), which would affect him differently but equally profoundly.

Dostoevsky's emotional engagement with art brings us to ekphrasis, a term used in Greek and Roman schools of oratory to describe the skill of creating a picture in words; as a modern critical term, it refers to the description of an artwork in literature. Dostoevsky's major novels abound in ekphrasis: not only does he describe works of great art, he uses their description or invocation as short-cuts to achieve insight or arouse emotion. In The Idiot, for example, a reproduction of Holbein's Dead Christ transfixes several characters with horrified fascination: it is a painting that might make a man lose his faith, as Prince Myshkin remarks. Conversely, in several of the novels but most prominently in The Devils, Raphael's Sistine Madonna becomes a rallying-cry for art as an eternal value: as the mildly ridiculous but sincerely idealistic Stepan Trofimovich challenges a cynical crowd, '"...which is more beautiful, Shakespeare or boots, Raphael or petroleum? [...] Shakespeare and Raphael are more precious than the emancipation of the serfs, more precious than Nationalism, more precious than Socialism, more precious than the young generation, more precious than chemistry, more precious than almost all humanity because they are the fruit, the real fruit of all humanity and perhaps the highest fruit that can be.'" To Stepan Trofimovich, the Sistine Madonna symbolizes not only of the purity of art, but also the best that mankind can achieve. He's forced by his rowdy audience to over-simplify his point: what he really wants to say (and what Dostoevsky believes) is not that Raphael's painting is more important than petroleum or, indeed, the emancipation of the serfs, but that it is differently important. The provision of boots and petroleum and the freeing of slaves are all steps towards a goal where all of mankind will perceive, perpetuate and even enact the spiritual values expressed in the painting. Conversely, Dostoevsky exposes a negative, shallow character by her reaction to the Sistine Madonna: '"I spent two hours sitting before that picture and came away utterly disillusioned. I could make nothing of it and was in complete amazement [...] All its fame is just the talk of the last generation"'. Politically, Dostoevsky had little in common with Stepan Trofimovich, but a decade before writing The Devils, he had used similar arguments to defend the independence of aesthetic values from politics in his 1861 article Mr -bov and the Problem of Art. (Susanne Fusso has  a great article on this subject in Slavic Review).

In his excellent book on Dostoevsky's aesthetics, Dostoevsky's Quest for Form (1966), Robert Louis Jackson points out that throughout his entire career, Dostoevsky was preoccupied by a search for a consistent aesthetic form - part style, part philosophy, part theme - that would make his literary achievements consistent and unitary. Jackson points out that when Prince Myshkin, in The Idiot, repeatedly apologizes for his lack of form - that is, his failure to speak or think coherently, or behave with the expected suavity of a nobleman - he is expressing Dostoevsky's fear of compromising his own ideas through flawed expression (Jackson, 'Introduction'). Myshkin's epilepsy may therefore not be just an autobiographical echo but an elaborate metonym of narrative incoherence. In The Devils, Stepan Trofimovich's polemic with his increasingly riotous audience is another parable of aesthetic fragmentation: his message is betrayed by the messenger. In contrast, Dostoevsky's use of ekphrasis - the careful reconstruction of artworks within his text - is a reassertion of form. The writer's form emerges in the skill with which the image is described; the message is encoded in the image - a perfect form, because Platonic - and shared by the writer, the reader, and the characters in the narrative. Holbein's dead Christ, described in sadistic detail by the consumptive Ippolit, challenges everyone's faith in God (Ippolit's monologue is a precursor to the Grand Inquisitor parable in The Brothers Karamazov); Raphael's Madonna, flying upwards over her tormentors, eternally supersedes the need for petroleum or boots.

My contention, ultimately, is that ekphrasis was Dostoevsky's alternative route for reaching the state of ecstatic communion which epilepsy simultaneously afforded and denied to him. Crucially, ekphrasis offered the possibility of deliberately recreating and sharing such moments of insight, thereby overcoming the tragic isolation of individual consciousness. The obverse of ekphrasis was, to a limited and subjective extent, also true: the paintings that Dostoevsky saw with his young wife in Dresden, Venice, and Basel also prefigured the narratives of his novels: the idyllic pastoral 'Landscape with Acis and Galatea' by Claude Lorrain (1657), pictured right, inspired the characterization of Prince Myshkin.


All translations in this post, unless otherwise credited, are by Constance Garnett.


Dostoevsky and the Healing Art: An Essay in Literary and Medical History

Dostoevsky's quest for form: A study of his philosophy of art (Physsardt publications in literature ; 2)