bibliographing

Before A Hero of Our Time (1839), Mikhail Lermontov wrote many things, including a poem (1837) after the death of Pushkin that would get him sent to the Caucasus. As his Wikipedia entry quite romantically notes, “the tsar had exiled him to his native land,” and Lermontov would proceed to write the novel that takes place there.

Geography is key to A Hero of Our Time. To begin with, the frame is a travel writer, not doing his actual “travel writing,” but writing about his travles through the Caucasus all the same. The local customs, mountains, and climate all play a role in the travel writer’s story.

Then, there is the journal. The travel writer comes into possession of all of Pechorin’s papers up to his parting with Maxim Maximych. But he only chooses to publish those that describe his time in the Caucasus. Pechorin’s exploits in the capitals are quietly brushed to the side: “Someday it too will present itself for society’s judgement; but I do not now dare to take this responsibility upon myself for many important reasons.” Chief of which, one would guess, is that the rules are different in Russia’s outlying territories. In a vast country where society is concentrated in only two cities, very close to each other relatively speaking, different things can happen so far away.

That also makes possible a lot of what happens in the published journal. Grushnitsky is only able to act as he does in pursuit of Princess Mary because they are far from high St. Petersburg society. The rules change in a spa town. The Princess is taken with the cadet in the greatcoat.

This will probably be unusual in my current bout of Russian reading. A mix of town and country, perhaps, but nothing else this exotic.

Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, eponymous Hero of Our Time, is deliciously evil, and also just plain delicious because he knows the power of words—almost as well as Mikhail Lermontov. The travel writer who has come into possession of his papers publishes a portion of them, noting in the foreword*:

Reading through these notes, I have become convinced of the sincerity of a man who set his own weaknesses and vices out on display so mercilessly. The history of a human soul, even the pettiest soul, is almost more curious and beneficial than the history of an entire people, especially when it is the result of a mature mind’s observations of itself, and when it is written without a vainglorious desire to arouse sympathy or surprise. Rousseau’s Confessions have the immediate shortcoming that he read them to his friends.

In this journal we have confessions that were, it is a reasonable assumption, never intended to be made public. Pechorin lays his life bare in his diary; he describes even his negative qualities “boldly, because I’m used to admitting everything to myself.”

First is the story “Taman,” of a run-in Pechorin has with some strange smugglers. Part of the trouble starts with his words, which “were quite out of place; I didn’t suspect their importance then, but subsequently I had occasion to repent of them.” He gets himself out of the scrape, but won’t go to the police because of the absurdity of putting his trouble into words: “And wouldn’t it be ridiculous to complain to the authorities that a blind boy had robbed me and an eighteen-year-old girl had almost drowned me?” Of course, the words he used to record these events in the journal were not ridiculous at all—he was robbed and nearly drowned.

In the centerpiece, “Princess Mary,” Pechorin’s affinity for words comes into full focus as he goes up against Grushnitsky, quite his opposite in this department, for the affections of Princess Mary**. Pechorin is set on giving advice to his rival:

“She has such velvety eyes—specifically velvety: I advise you to appropriate that expression when talking about her eyes; the lower and upper lashes are so long that the sun’s rays aren’t reflected in her pupils. …What a shame she didn’t smile at your grand phrase.”

“You talk about a pretty woman as you would about an English horse,” said Grushnitsky indignantly.

Grushnitsky’s intentions might be good—he actually loves the Princess, while Pechorin is only interested in toying with her to hurt both Grushnitsky and Mary—but he knows not of what he speaks. Or rather, he does, he’s just wrong about its effectiveness. Pechorin knows how to really impress the Princess, and sometimes that means withholding words as well: “if she’s bored beside you two minutes running, you’re irretrievably lost: your silence must arouse her curiosity, your conversation never satisfy it completely; you must alarm her at every minute.” When Pechorin’s friend the doctor*** offers to introduce him to the Princess, Grigory Alexandrovich politely declines: “‘Oh, please!’ I said, clasping my hands together; ‘as if heroes are introduced! They make the acquaintance of their beloved in no other way than by saving her from certain death…’”

Grushnitsky is hopeless. “Women, women! Who can understand them? Their smiles contradict their looks, their words promise and beckon, while the sound of their voice repulses,” he complains, and then lifts his own spirits “with [a] bad pun.” Whereas Pechorin goes around facilely answering people “with one of those phrases that everyone should have prepared for such an instance.” When he does get alone with his beloved (not, ahem, Princess Mary), they have “those conversations which make no sense on paper, which can’t be repeated and can’t even be remembered: the significance of the sounds supplants and supplements the significance of the words, just as in Italian opera.”

A huge part of this is about control.**** Pechorin is in complete control of all his actions and words, in turn giving him complete control over all the social situations he falls into. Words will again betray Grushnitsky when Pechorin overhears his machinations regarding their duel; Pechorin ends up in control of the ultimate plot because Grushnitsky and his friends were so powerless over their own words. Pechorin watches what he does and says closely and thus protects himself from every contingency. Even the relatively inconsequential is held to this standard—“his proud step would have made me burst out laughing had that been in accordance with my intentions.”

Pechorin not only has power through words, he respects their inherent power, because he recognizes and fears it in a visceral way:

In my place another man would have offered the Princess son coeur et sa fortune; but the word marry has some magical power over me: however passionately I love a woman, if she lets me so much as feel that I ought to marry her—goodbye to love! My heart is turned to stone, and nothing will warm it up again.

It’s not just that Pechorin is averse to marriage, or afraid of it. The word has real effects: it changes his heart to stone, and actually rids him of love. And the word got this power, well, through a pronouncement:

It’s a sort of innate terror, inexpressible foreboding… Should I admit it?… When I was still a child, an old woman told my fortune for my mother; she predicted my death on account of a malevolent wife; this affected me deeply at the time: in my soul was born an insuperable aversion to marriage…

He even had to admit the story about the fortune, and asking whether he should do so admits there is significance in that as well. And like the word “marry,” the fortune-teller’s pronouncement had real effects.

This has gone on long enough, and I hope you get the idea. But I haven’t even mentioned “The Fatalist,” the last story in the journal. The end of that, with Maxim Maximych and Pechorin trying to explain to him the meaning of the word predestination… Oh, and—did I mention he is writing this all down?

*Hm, notice how I quoted the foreword to the whole novel to set up for the last post?
**To whom words matter so much that she goes by the Anglicized version of her name.
***Who also has a way with words: “He had a spiteful tongue: with one of his epigrams as a label, more than one good man has come to be thought of as a vulgar fool….”
****And let’s not forget who’s really in control, here, either—Lermontov is good.

A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov’s only novel, and a short one, is the kind of thing that gets me warmed up right away: a small, faceted, framed thing, filtering its story through several layers of mesh and coming out the other side with multiple narrators and a nonchronological plot. Readers of all but the first edition have Lermontov’s own voice to warn them, in a foreword, to pay attention to what they are about to read. He complains that the Russian literary public

is still so young and ingenuous that it does not understand a fable if it does not find a moral at the end of it. It does not get a joke, does not sense an irony; it is simply badly brought up. It does not yet know that in decent society and in a decent book blatant abuse can have no place; that the modern level of education has invented a tool more sharp, almost invisible and nonetheless deadly, which, dressed up as flattery, strikes an irresistible and sure blow. Our public resembles a man from the provinces who, if overhearing a conversation between two diplomats belonging to hostile courts, would remain certain that each of them was deceiving his own government in favour of the tenderest mutual friendship.

So then, there are to be no misunderstandings here: Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin is “a hero of our time” in the sense that he is a great villain, an antihero, a magnificent and Romantic Byronic hero, evil and wonderful and bored and irresistible. But we don’t quite know that yet.

First we know only the narrator, a travel writer on his way through the Caucasus, who gets the story of Pechorin from a fellow traveler, staff captain Maxim Maximych. Who, incidentally, gets the Byronic hero description down to a tee in the first mention of Pechorin:

He was a splendid fellow, I’ll make so bold as to assure you—only a bit strange. I mean, for example, in the rain, in the cold, hunting all day long; everyone’ll be frozen through, tired—but he’s all right. Yet another time he’s sitting in his room, there’ll be a puff of wind and he claims he’s caught a cold; a shutter’ll bang, he’ll jump and turn pale; yet I’ve seen him going for a wild boar one on one; there were times you wouldn’t get a word out of him for hours on end, but then sometimes when he started telling stories, you’d just split your sides laughing… Yes, sir, there were some very strange things about him, and he must be a rich man: he had such a lot of expensive bits and pieces!…

The portrait is too perfect; what could this Pechorin possibly be other than the hero of some romance? He is clearly passionate and mysterious; strange, but splendid overall. Maxim Maximych fairly eats him up, even when Pechorin, stationed at the same fort as the staff captain, begins a nasty intrigue straight from the most Gothic of novels: he abducts a native girl to take as his wife. Maxim Maximych is riveted to the exciting story being played out before his eyes. At the romantic climax, when the two young people finally embrace, “Would you believe it? Standing on the other side of the door, I started crying too, that is to say, you know, didn’t exactly start crying, but, well—silliness!…”

Silly indeed, like a sentimental young woman who spends much too much time reading novels!

Our narrator, the travel writer, needs our attention again. After this, he teases us: “But perhaps you want to know the conclusion of the story of Bela? Firstly, I am writing not a fictional tale, but travel notes: consequently I cannot make the staff captain tell the story sooner than he began telling it in reality.” And what must we wait through but a romantic ride through the snowy mountains, through a terrible storm, through extreme, climactic weather. The travel writer’s story is a bit of a Gothic romance too now. When he and Maxim Maximych reach the next station, he knows there will be more to the story of Pechorin, because “what began in an unusual way ought to end similarly too”—certainly, reality must meet the conventions of fiction. And it does; the ending is tragic enough for any Byronic hero.

We’re still only in the frame, though. The travel writer will meet Pechorin, by chance, and will be given his papers, including the journal that makes up the main part of A Hero of Our Time. At this point Pechorin is a character in a romance for him too, a romance told by Maxim Maximych, and the travel writer awaits him “with a certain impatience; although from the staff captain’s story I had formed for myself a not very advantageous impression of him, still several features of his character seemed to me remarkable.” He can’t resist the bad boy! Then, finally, we get the physical description of our antihero we should normally have had at the outset, in a less backward-style novel:

Firstly, [his eyes] did not laugh when he laughed! Have you happened to notice an oddity of this sort in some people?… It is a sign either of a malicious disposition, or of a profound, constant sadness. From behind partly lowered lashes they shone with a kind of phosphoric brilliance, if one can put it like that. …All these remarks came to mind perhaps only for the reason that I knew certain details of his life, and perhaps on someone else his appearance would have made a completely different impression; but since you will hear about him from no one but me, you must—like it or not—be content with this depiction. I shall say in conclusion that he was all in all rather good-looking and had one of those original physiognomies that society women particularly like.

Our travel writer, since he is describing Pechorin at the end, after he knows his story, describes “a malicious disposition, or…a profound, constant sadness” among other things; he is aware of how knowing the story has colored his impressions of Pechorin the man, and that he cannot be an unbiased reporter even of something as simple as physical appearance. But he is aware of it, wonderful! Would just any old narrator make the same admission at the beginning of a romance, even though he—that is to say, the author—was just as foreknowing?

More, later, on the journal, and Pechorin himself. He is not to be missed. Take your Darcys and Rochesters, your Heathcliffs and your Werthers; give me Pechorin any day.

Despite its long presence in my sidebar, I only just started reading A Hero of Our Time last night, and I should really just clear my mind of all expectations about any book I haven’t read yet because they seem to be wrong more often than not lately. Anyway, I freaking love it. Love. So, this will be a quiet Sunday full of more Russians. Which means I will, as planned, get through some more Russians before starting the newly planned readalong of The Brothers Karamazov chez Dolce Bellezza.

Not much to add beyond that except to announce the winner of my The Waves giveaway. Congratulations to mel u of The Rereading Life. Mel has some good reading plans and I hope The Waves will be an excellent way to combat the “twinkies and red bull” of mediocrity. (Oh, and count me in for that Parade’s End readalong you’re thinking about!) So, send me your mailing address at nicole [at] bibliographing [dot] com and I’ll send some Virginia Woolf your way!

Last week I received a surprise birthday book package that included J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories (the serendipity of long-ago-added-to-Amazon-wishlist books). I’d read about half the stories in high school, and remembered liking them—especially “For Esmé, with Love and Squalor.” But on the whole the book is rather different from what I remember. I didn’t remember the heavy focus, in several stories, on the psychological aftermath of World War II on the men who fought it—and didn’t. And it also seems even more different from the way I remember Catcher in the Rye, which makes some sense, since I never cared for that book.

While I still enjoyed “For Esmé,” this time “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” stuck out as effective. It’s very simple: a gray-haired man and a girl are in bed when the phone rings; the gray-haired man answers; the call is from a man, Arthur, whose wife has not come home from the party they and the gray-haired man were at that evening. The gray-haired man calmly talks Arthur down, as Arthur drunkenly rants about his wife, her infidelity, and other personality flaws. The gray-haired man assures Arthur that Joanie will walk in any minute, after a wild outing in the Village, and they finally hang up. Arthur calls back a moment later to say that he was right, Joanie just came in, and everything is grand.

Of course, all through the first phone call, we are sure that Joanie is the very girl in bed with the gray-haired man. And we are sure that the gray-haired man, while genuinely trying to calm Arthur, is also carefully deflecting suspicion—and looking down on the man he’s cuckolding. Nothing at all says that. On the contrary, Salinger is careful not to say it. The girl’s eyes are a focal point; first they are described as “very, however disingenuously, large, and so blue as to appear almost violet.” Later, they, “more just open than alert or speculative, reflected chiefly their own size and color.” Arthur, beating himself up over the poem that gives the story its title*, says “it used to remind me of her. She doesn’t have green eyes—she has eyes like goddam sea shells, for Chrissake.” That sounds compatible, but what do eyes like sea shells look like? Are they blue, almost violet? There are lots of sea shells.

That’s not really the point. All this certainty builds up that, though it remains unsaid, Joanie is the girl, until finally the gray-haired man hangs up with Arthur and there is hardly any wiggle room left, the girl feels “‘like an absolute dog!’”; the man says “the whole thing’s so fantastic….” He’s pulled it off, though, Arthur has gone to bed. He pities Arthur, and aside from, you know, sleeping with his wife, he wishes Arthur well. But when Arthur calls back, to say never fear, Joanie is back, all is well—it is too much. “‘What?’ said the gray-haired man, and bridged his left hand over his eyes, though the light was behind him.” This is too pitiful. At first, the gray-haired man simply can’t speak, but finally he manages to end the call. Disgusted, he rejects Joanie as well. This is all much too close for comfort.

The jar is perfect. We are as surprised as the gray-haired man is to hear that Joanie has barged in. It makes no sense. What is happening? We experience the realization with the gray-haired man, and his reaction is ours. We want to shield ourselves from what Arthur will say next, from the optimistic nonsense he is peddling now that he realizes what a fool he’s made of himself. And for us too, Joanie has gone from a nice kid with good taste to a cruel child, an animal, destroying a man in this way. Very emotionally effective, in a series of such stories.

*According to the story, the poem, “Rose my color is and white, Pretty mouth and green my eyes,” was something Arthur “sent” to Joanie, that “remind[ed]” him of her, strongly implying that he didn’t actually write it, as seems to be a common internet misconception. Is it a real poem? Googling has gotten me nowhere.

The lovely Claire reminds us today to check back in on discussion of The Waves for posts recently added to the list—I went back through last night and some great stuff has been written (you know, other than my post).

So if all this talk of Woolf makes you want to read this lovely novel, perhaps you would like to benefit from the most truly bizarre UPS snafu I’ve ever heard of (whose details unfortunately cannot be revealed, to protect the privacy of a third party). I ended up with two copies of my edition (Claire, and others, take note: it is the Harcourt Harvest Book edition), and one could be yours! (Here’s the real question: do any of my readers not already have it, by now especially?)

If you are interested, please leave a comment to let me know. Worldwide is cool. I’ll take entries until 11pm CST on Friday, March 5, and, of course, choose a winner at random.

It’s no secret that 2666 is long. So long that my edition comes in three volumes, that I’m participating in a months-long group read of it, and that I’m through the first three parts and still have no idea what it’s about.

I mean, I can tell you that it’s about the femicides in Ciudad Juarez, but that’s not saying very much. What was The Part About Fate about? Something about how there are no Mexican light heavyweights, I think.* But because of the stature of both Bolaño and 2666, I have put myself into his hands entirely. I don’t know what he’s doing yet, but I’m willing to assume he does and it will be something in the end. Of course, I do this to some extent with almost all books, but only to some extent. Sometimes you’re working on a big one where you have to just close your eyes and not look down…for several hundred pages.

And that’s great. But it leaves me fixating most of all on passages where you know that, in whatever indirect way, the writer is saying something about his own book, his own writing. When I caught that breeze in The Part About Amalfitano, it alluded to novelistic structure and ambition. In The Part About Fate, my ears perked up at an interlude regarding the novel and society.

A “white-haired man” eating at a diner with a young man is discussing death, and how “society tended to filter death through the fabric of words.” He gives the young man a history lesson, on how “[r]eading news stories from back then you might get the idea that there was hardly any crime…yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings.” But the society that didn’t want death to intrude on it closed its eyes, like a child—and that meant that it closed its words.

The old man, perhaps a professor, speculates that this was possible because of how very small polite society was “back then.”

I’m talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn’t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations.

What was different about those who were part of society: “What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible.” The old man again refers to “back then” when he says that words were used mostly to avoid rather than to reveal. What about now? What about coming right up, in The Part About the Crimes?

An anecdotal data point: the femicides were, presumably, known to everyone who began reading 2666 with our group, yet several people seem to have been quite affected already by reading a novel that’s not yet anywhere near as intense about making these women legible as it’s going to be (or so I understand).

*I am (only slightly) joking here. Note that I have really not read much of the group discussion over the past week, or much on other people’s blogs; I’m posting this before I get a chance to, which I should later today. But that’s not the point here.

“Now let us issue from the darkness of solitude,” said Louis.

“Now let us say, brutally and directly, what is in our minds,” said Neville. “Our isolation, our preparation, is over. The furtive days of secrecy and hiding, the revelations on staircases, moments of terror and ecstasy.”

As a story of friendship, especially between among a group, The Waves is unparalleled in my experience. This almost serves to make it alienating: this group of six people is knit impossibly together; are my relationships really this intense? Are they woven so tightly that one day, like Bernard, I will ask how we are even separated, when there is no obstacle between us?

But it’s this intense relationship that gives rise to the form of The Waves, which interests me more: the alternating soliloquies of six characters, along with a (superficially) unrelated third-person narrative. The novel is a kind of literary cubism whose effect is described at one point by Bernard:

We have come together (from the North, from the South, from Susan’s farm, from Louis’s house of business) to make one thing, not enduring—for what endures?—but seen by many eyes simultaneously. There is a red carnation in that vase. A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves—a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution.

This is really experimental; it’s just “said Bernard,” “said Susan,” “said Rhoda,” “said Neville,” “said Jinny,” “said Louis,” “said Bernard,” jarring and disorienting the reader, making him work. Who are these voices speaking to, if they are speaking at all? To the narrator? Who is the audience? But one thing is clear: even if there is no listener, even if the characters are silent, they are speaking, at least in their own heads. These are not the thoughts laid bare of Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. The statements in The Waves are performative, confessional, self-aware. And we find out from quotes like that above that at least some of the time, the friends are talking, and some of the time they are talking to each other.

This speaking brutally, directly, freely does not happen only among friends. In fact, despite Neville’s command, Bernard hints at the beginning of his climactic 60-page monologue that it happens best between strangers: “Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think on board a ship going to Africa) we can talk freely.” He proceeds to do so, at length, stretching the form of the novel back to something much less avant-garde* but at the same time deepening the emotional and psychological content to a breaking point. When Bernard is given more than a few paragraphs at a time to examine and confess himself, he digs through layers I cannot penetrate. Woolf’s poetic emotional imagery, so effective earlier in the novel with six voices buffeting the reader, fails for me here, and for a moment I almost feel she has been self-indulgent. I read Bernard’s confession of the joys and horrors of human existence and think, yes, but wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.** Of course, that’s exactly what Woolf is trying to fight against with this seven-sided red carnation of a novel. It was a lifelong and a noble battle.

Although I think this reaches too far, or at least to a place I can’t follow, Woolf’s genius is clearly still at work. She meticulously plants dozens of motifs that will work through the threads of all the characters lives. Idle predictions come true, childhood memories resurface, moments in time and thought are distilled into magical phrases. There are great crests and troughs of joy and pain, each character telling of it in his own personal wave imagery. Right now I take as especially wonderful Louis and Rhoda, who “trust only in solitude and the violence of death,” and while much of Bernard eludes me, not all: “No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea.”

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The Waves marks the last of Woolf in Winter. Visit Claire at Kiss a Cloud, who is hosting this week’s installment, for more on The Waves. Thanks, Claire!

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*This soliloquy, along with the intercalary chapters of more traditional narration, make the whole form a bit more traditional. There is no plot, there is no story, but there is; Bernard desperately wants to tell a story and he gets a lot of space to try. Even though Woolf may be at the height of her innovation here, Bernard does note:

After all, one cannot find fault with the biographic style if one begins letters ‘Dear Sir,’ ends them ‘yours faithfully’; one cannot despise these phrases laid like Roman roads across the tumult of our lives, since they compel us to walk in step like civilised people with the slow and measured tread of policemen though one may be humming any nonsense under one’s breath at the same time…

**”What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Philosophy professor Oscar Amalfitano, unlike the critics of the first volume of 2666, is for me a highly sympathetic character. The first thing to note about The Part About Amalfitano is that it very quickly seems not to be about Amalfitano at all, but about his wife and her leaving him and their daughter. Right away we find that Amalfitano, who has no idea how he ended up in Santa Teresa, isn’t actually there after all—he’s in his own head. He lives in a world of memory and reminiscence, mulling his abandonment by Lola, the origins of old books, Duchamp readymades.

On the 2666 group read blog, Maria Bustillos describes Amalfitano thus:

Part of the trouble with Amalfitano is, he’s like Hamlet, kind of. He’s stuck, largely because he has no faith in the significance of his own actions, so it’s like he just can’t move. He is outside all these games everyone else is playing; he can’t understand them. For example, he is neither macho, nor is he gay. He likes Archimboldi just fine, but his head wasn’t turned by Archimboldi as the heads of the critics were. He’s not doing any of that stuff; he’s just a human being, just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.*

This is what makes him so much more likeable than the critics, who are only playing games. They have a brittle, opaque veneer, so that we can’t get at them at all or know what they’re thinking. We don’t know much of what they think about Archimboldi, except for the most superficial asides. And it’s only when the veneer is chipped away by some out-of-the-ordinary incident that we discover the machismo, say, bubbling within Pelletier and Espinoza.

From their perspective, in The Part About the Critics, Amalfitano appears to have a veneer too, albeit a strange one. Aside from their prejudices against him as a backwater professor, they perceive him as somewhat strange or off even as they begin to like him. Because they cannot understand him either. But in The Part About Amalfitano, the narrator (who I would argue is the same as in the first part) takes his point of view and we actually have access to his thoughts and feelings—including thoughts and feelings about books!

Archimboldi, the “obviously” failed European bumbling around in the dust of Mexico, is skeptical, thoughtful, ruminative, and brings more of value to 2666’s direct discussion of literature than his illustrious professional rivals even in his wandering thoughts. He reminisces about a young pharmacist he saw often in Barcelona, who would read during his quiet night shift. Amalfitano once asked him about what books he liked: “The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol.”

…[T]here was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick. …What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

So for all that Amalfitano is not impressed with Archimboldi, he is impressed by “real combat”—and certainly we don’t get the impression that “blood and mortal wounds and stench” are what the Archimboldi critics are wrestling with back in Europe. They seem much too sterile for all that.

*Marco Antonio Guerra, the son of Amalfitano’s dean, is similarly stuck and ineffectual, but rather than daydream about geometric shapes and philosophers, he takes the fight club route out of this Sonoran malaise.

Vladimir Nabokov’s book on Nikolai Gogol is my favorite sort of thing: one writer I love writing about another writer we both love. And I loved it. Nabokov is a joy to read, period, and his insights about Gogol were helpful in articulating the swirling mess of thoughts I had about him. But if Nabokov is an intimidating writer of fiction (which is a stronger word than I would use), he is much more so writing about fiction.

He has tastes, he knows what they are, and he has no problem putting them up as simply correct. He is harsh, he pulls no punches, and his disdain for any number of things is right there on the surface, totally unhidden and unvarnished. E.g.:

There is nothing more dull and sickening to my taste than romantic folklore or rollicking yarns about lumberjacks or Yorkshiremen or French villagers or Ukrainian good companions. It is for this reason that the two volumes of the Evenings as well as the two volumes of stories entitled Mirgorod…leave me completely indifferent.

Also unhidden is the scorn for the wrong kind of reader:

It is strange, the morbid inclination we have to derive satisfaction from the fact (generally false and always irrelevant) that a work of art is traceable to a “true story.” Is it because we begin to respect ourselves more when we learn that the writer, just like ourselves, was not clever enough to make up a story himself? Or is something added to the poor strength of our imagination when we know that a tangible fact is at the base of the “fiction” we mysteriously despise? Or taken all in all, have we here that adoration of the truth which makes little children ask the story-teller “Did it really happen?” and prevented old Tolstoy in his hyperethical stage from trespassing upon the rights of the deity and creating, as God creates, perfectly imaginary people? …
I have a lasting grudge against those who like their fiction to be educational or uplifting, or national, or as healthy as maple syrup and olive oil, so that is why I keep harping on this rather futile side of The Government Inspector question.

This sort of thing gives me a lot of discomfort. First, I abase myself before true genius. And I also note that Nabokov has an enormous amount of that self-confidence that comes seemingly so easily to men (whom I’m not intimidated by, but cannot mimic) and the upper classes (whom I am intimidated by, despite my best efforts). And so much of Nabokov’s particular critique in this case revolves around a concept tied very closely to class issues: the idea of poshlost’ (or, here, poshlust).

Poshlust is one of these untranslatable concepts and important to Gogol’s work. Some English words in the nearby semantic space include “cheap, sham, common, smutty, pink-and-blue, high falutin’, in bad taste…inferior, sorry, trashy, scurvy, tawdry, gimcrack.” In the realm of literature, poshlust does not apply to actual trash, but to “the best sellers, the ’stirring, profound and beautiful’ novels; it is these ‘elevated and powerful’ books.” In other words, any amount of your average, garden-variety “literary fiction.” And the real damnation of it all:

The dreadful thing about poshlust is that one finds it so difficult to explain to people why a particular book which seems chock-full of noble emotion and compassion, and can hold the reader’s attention ‘on a theme far removed from the discordant events of the day’ is far, far worse than the kind of literature which everybody admits is cheap.*

So what is poshlust but tawdry, bourgeois taste, and who can be the arbiter of real taste other than someone very much like a Vladimir Nabokov? How is it possible, even for those not infected with appreciationism, to trust oneself?

Because as much as you might want to write this all off as the exercise of an ego beyond all reasonable bounds, there is a small problem with that: he is right, about pretty much everything. And that’s after I’ve stripped out (most of) the class shame and resentment and general self-abasement of the student. So many of these were already my ideas, both about Gogol and about literature, and despite certain matters of taste (I still like folklore and rollicking yarns; sorry, I am hopelessly tawdry). I don’t disagree with Nabokov about, say, the purpose of fiction, as many would. I am completely with him here:

Gogol’s play is poetry in action, and by poetry I mean the mysteries of the irrational as perceived through rational words. True poetry of that kind provokes—not laughter and not tears—but a radiant smile of perfect satisfaction, a purr of beatitude—and a writer may well be proud of himself if he can make his readers, or more exactly some of his readers, smile and purr that way.

I know that smile and purr. Here I am rewarded for being “the right kind of reader,” and reminded that I do know what does it for me. And rewarded further when he describes the course of a Gogol story in terms even I could articulate:

So to sum up: the story goes this way: mumble, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into the chaos from which they all had derived. At this superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the underdog or cursing the upperdog. It appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.

I suppose I could simply say that reading Nabokov on fiction is as rewarding and humbling as reading his novels; the experiences are not dissimilar. But I was much more unsettled after this. There are so many obstacles. I cannot understand Russian literature without speaking Russian—or, let’s be real, being Russian—I cannot understand any of it without understanding my own feelings about fiction more deeply, and being able to justify them; and even after all that I cannot trust myself or my own judgment. This is the periodic problem that stalls my blogging. I will continue to fend it off and write the muddled mediocrities of a poor poshlyáchki.

*Another, and an amazing, example of his real damn-you’re-so-rightness is the takedown in this section of a (made-up?) review of such a book, through a devastating close reading. An editing as well as a writing superhero.