A Weird Year

What is the most obvious statement I can make? 2020 is a weird year. I’m still amazed that Kobe Bryant is dead. The world has been shut down. And I’ve also taken to Russian literature. Odd it may seem, reading these darker, more serious tales that invoke feelings of obscure, frigid, snowy days are comforting.

I started off with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. Contrary to all the descriptions, the short novella didn’t read as a dark story for me. It did have a protagonist that shares a lot of traits similar to its counterparts in other Dostoevsky stories. They all tend to be self-centered, selfish, emotionally immature, highly conflicted, and to an extent mental unstable. This holds true for Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment as well as the main characters in Notes from Underground and The Double.

Raskolnikov’s story is pretty dark. After killing an old pawnbroker and her sister in cold blood, we see how Raskolnikov deals with the stress of committing murder, going through extreme bouts of fever and delusion. We also see how his relationships are destroyed, not only as a consequence of his egregious actions, but by his extremely flawed personality and how those same traits end up allowing someone to uncover his secret.

The edition of Notes from Underground and The Double that I read were coupled together. The latter was considerably darker in my opinion. Its pretty clear that Golyadkin is suffering from severe mental illness throughout the entire novella and the reader can see him slowly succumb to it as the narrative progresses. Its not as apparent in Crime and Punishment because of the sheer dislikability of Raskolnikov, but all three main characters cannot help themselves when it comes to social faux pas. All three desperately want to be a part of the higher class, but they can never quite master the social etiquette part.

It’s also remarkable how the three are banished from society to some extent. Golyadkin is taken to an asylum after suffering a sever mental break while Raskolnikov is sentenced to 8 years in Siberia for his murder. Where Golyadkin’s story reaches its end with the confinement, Raskolnikov is able to finally redeem himself as a human and accept love and express love.

Varlam Shalamov provides no such comforting silver lining with this Kolyma Tales. In what may be the most beautiful writing (in translation of course) out of all of these works, Shalamov describes the utter hopelessness that existed in the gulags and work camps of Siberia during the Soviet epoch. The seamless prose is simple, but dense enough to convey the somber sentiments of the convicts. Poignant, simple sentences really hit home: “We all understood that we could survive only through luck,” “We had long since given up planning our lives more than a day in advance,” and “Our spiritual calm, achieved by a dulling of the senses, was reminiscent of the ‘dungeons’s supreme freedom’ and Tolstoy’s non-resistance to evil.”

His thoughts on friendship also demonstrate how time in Siberia as a convict shaped his views.

For friendship to be friendship, its foundation had to be laid before living conditions reached that last border beyond which no human emotion was left to a man — only mistrust, rage, and lies.

An Individual Assignment

Friendship is not born in conditions of need or trouble. Literary fairy tales tell of ‘difficult’ conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but such conditions are simply not difficult enough. If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great. Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends.

Dry Rations

Quotes such as these can shed some light on the characters of Dostoevsky’s work. Raskolnikov, Golyadkin, Alexei, and others are such loners. Their tragedies simply cannot be shared with others, so they are doomed — much like the narrator in Kolyma Tales — to bear their burdens alone.

I’ve by no means delved into the entire spectrum of Russian literature yet. But the primer I’ve had is useful for understanding a general theme in literature from the country. It allows me to put these works in a context that encourages a greater understanding of the people of Russia and their culture. I’ve always believed that I learned more about other cultures through literature than scholarly work. Its probably second only to actually immersing oneself in a society. I look forward to digging further into Dostoevsky, checking out Tolstoy, Gogol, Nabokov, Victor Serge, and several others to really get a feel.