A Note on the Translation
Readers may not recall that Dostoyevsky narrowly avoided being shot to death for sedition in 1849, reprieved at the last second in what some say was a staged maneuver. I think Julia Kristeva made a good choice when she decided to begin her highly personal study of Dostoyevsky with an account of his seconds on the scaffold followed by his years in a prison camp in Siberia. All of the moody Russian’s enduring writings spring from those experiences as if from a well of troubled waters, of a life beyond the limits — “over the line,” he said himself. How many of us remember, too, that he suffered from epileptic seizures throughout his adult life? Or that some thought the pedophile acts he depicted in more than one fiction stemmed from personal experience of same? And that he believed the very identity of Russia rested on its foundation in the Orthodox religion? Such topics are mere entries into the deep, complex understanding Kristeva brings to Dostoyevsky’s life and work, with all of her linguistic, semiotic, psychoanalytical, and humane expertise. Her reading is as polyphonic and carnivalesque as Dostoyevsky’s novels.
In these opening pages from Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Language Haunted by Sex (Columbia University Press, 2024), you will hear Julia Kristeva’s very special voice. Letting her ideas range freely, she imagines how Dostoyevsky might have sketched his life (“I was still a baby huddling in my mother’s arms”) and briefly plumbs the pre-Siberia books for the ways and means they initiated in anticipation of the great books to come.
— Armine Kotin Mortimer
December 22, 1849
“Retired Lieutenant Dostoevsky, age twenty-seven, for having taken part in criminal designs, having circulated a personal letter filled with impertinent expressions against the Orthodox Church and the sovereign power and for having attempted, together with others, to circulate works against the government through means of a private printing press, is condemned to death.”
The air is compressed and vibrates with the slightest sound. The members of the Fourierist circle Mikhail Petrashevsky, slipping on the frost-covered steps, climb the scaffold covered with a black cloth, on Semyonov Square near Saint Petersburg. Kiss the cross held out to them by the priest in funerary garb. Don ample pointed cowls of white cloth with long sleeves that reach to the ground. Drumroll. On their knees. The executioners flourish their sharpened sabers above their heads. Lined up three by three, the first ones are bound to three gray stakes, hands tied with rope. Dostoyevsky waits his turn in the second rank.
“Lower the hoods over your eyes!” “Aim!”
A few seconds … a minute … two … The rifles don’t go off.
Fyodor has always stared at death like the sun. Numb with fear, cries and trembling, loss of his self outside self, breathless and headlong … And once more, that harassing, sonorous drumroll that recaptures words, conversations, narratives, calls and responses. Life persists and returns in the voices, irrefragable verbal flow, infinite, spasmic, energetic, stunning dialogue, dazzling voluptuousness. “On the contrary, the brain is fearfully alive and active, must be working, working, working, ever so hard, like a machine; . . . as soon as you start telling a story, you stop being a philosopher” (The Idiot, 1868). A full life is a drumroll of voices, of novels. From the moment you narrate you are neither dead nor a philosopher, you finally exist.
Much later, surrendering to the sparkling needles of the same frosty sun, so powerful that they remind him of his obsession with “prescribing a remedy of birch rods” for himself (“Petersburg Dreams,” 1831), this “fantasy walker,” this “idle dreamer” will abruptly feel his heart swell. Similar to that 22nd of December 1849 at the foot of the dreaded platform. A gush of blood, a suffusion of powerful sensations, “but up until then unfamiliar to me.” With the absolute, bodily certainty that a “completely new world,” in gestation since childhood, can and must begin. Here it is, it’s “starting,” in this very minute, it’s striking. Henceforth, a new “I” will inhabit his new life, a life of voices sealed with images, theater of sensations-visions, scaffold of mask-wearers, moving puppets who burst out laughing. No minute is more full, sacred, and pure than such minutes, “as if inspired by opium.” Of course, he’ll have to close the books on sentimental, tumultuous romanticism, on the Schillers, Walter Scotts, and Paul de Kocks, they’re enough to make you cry laughing. It’s happening. Mortality, all the same, will not be sent off into the bloody twilight, it will be integrated into the pulsation of the serial narrative, which rebounds, languidly. The novel is a genre to be reinvented with each verbal flow, oscillating, intimate-extimate, tormented, undifferentiated, insane. Even Raskolnikov will lose himself in the foggy sun of Saint Petersburg only to blossom all the better, tied to the crimes and the punishments that constitute him, that give him being.
“I remember, one January winter evening, I was hurrying home from the Vyborg side of the city … Night was descending on the city, and the whole immense Neva River, flat, swollen from the frozen snow, was sprinkled with endless myriads of sparkling dots of hoar-frost in the last reflection of the sun. A twenty degree frost was setting in … I trembled and my heart was, as it were, suffused at this moment with a hot rush of blood, which suddenly boiled with the surge of a sensation which was powerful but up until then unfamiliar to me. It was as if I realised something in that minute which had up until then only stirred within me but was still not fully comprehended; as if I had had a vision of something new, of a completely new world, which was unfamiliar to me and known only through some dark rumours, some mysterious signs. I suppose it was from that minute that my existence began …
“And I began to scrutinise things and suddenly I beheld some strange faces. They were always strange and peculiar figures, completely prosaic, not at all like Don Carloses and Posas, but titular councillors to the full and, at the same time, kind of fantastic titular councillors.Someone was grimacing before me, while hiding behind this whole fantastic crowd, and was tugging at some threads and springs, and these puppets moved, and he roared and roared with laughter! And I imagined at that time a different story, in some dark corners, some titular heart, honest and pure, moral and devoted to the bosses and, together with this, some little girl, insulted and sad, and my heart was deeply torn by their whole story. And if one was to assemble this entire crowd, which appeared to me then, it would have been a glorious masquerade” (“Petersburg Dreams,” 1861).
Nothing is more ardent — when the black sun of death is within reach — than the theater of childhood, a fugitive reminder of obscure youthfulness … The condemned man is an infant who suckles the Bible.
“I was still a baby huddling in my mother’s arms when Job’s cry pierced my eardrums. A dark voice from the chest, like mine, it still strikes me: ‘why I can’t hold my tongue in my anxiety.’ ‘Thine eyes are upon me, and I am not.’ Mama’s all honeyed song. Maria Fyodorovna, she rocks her “little hero” who bears the ‘blessed given name’ of her own father Fyodor Nechaev, no connection with the nihilist Sergey Nechaev, viscous proximity … I prefer to ignore that fake Jupiter, his jealous thunderbolts of anger, the greedy power of his money, that unhearing Pantocrator, my military doctor of a father, Mikhail Andreyevich … The melody of my almost twin brother effaces and absorbs them; born only a year before me, the same day as I, named Mikhail like my father, Mikhail Mikhailovich then, doubly the father, eclipsing the father, marker and foil: ‘we were two, I maintain,’ programmed doubling … Glacial cacophony of the adults, professors, and parents … Morose murmur of the poor, avid for life in the paternal hospice, sole playground in the saddest neighborhood of Moscow … The silence of the woods and the cold blue of the countryside, Darovoye and Chermashnya … An idiot woman moaning the death of her child by an unknown father … The muzhiks and their horses, the drunken brigands, and a tender laborer, the fabulous Marey who caresses my cheek until more life comes to me … The crosses and the fisticuffs … The permanent anguish about dying while asleep … I spread sheets of white paper on my bed, I ask that I not be buried until after a lapse of five days … All my senses sharpened, always inside-outside, inaccessible refuge fervor.
“We have a subscription to the review Library of Reading: classic literature and history, popular poetry, Russian folklore … The voices from the books come back to me now: amplified, magnificent, mortiferous, resuscitated in the electric verses of the poets … Racine, Schiller, Goethe, Pushkin, Zhukovsky … ‘Frozen in enthusiasm and horror’ … well, everything. And especially the ample whirlwind of novels creating a world in the world … The gothic turmoil of Ann Radcliffe, the sovereign feminist George Sand with her Indiana … The mysterious Balzac — irresistible vocation and hand-to-hand combat with his Eugenie Grandet, did I translate it or rewrite it? … His Old Goriot possessed by money, the most passionate of the passions, it governs the end of the world … The young Victor Hugo of Hans of Iceland, marriage of nature and romanticism … All in all I prefer Hoffmann, and I set out with new strength: ‘Yes, if I won’t be able to write, I’ll perish. Better fifteen years of imprisonment and a pen in hand!’ (Letter to Mikhail, December 22, 1849) … A few strong friendships with schoolmates; Durov, housemate and prison-mate … And you, my brother, dear Misha, so faithful and loyal, you don’t dare compromise yourself too much with me, author of a crime against the State — I can hear you from here, that’s my prophet side … All of them revolutionaries in the soul and in the firmament of free ideas, subversive ideas that noisily agitate the West … I have no violent action to reproach myself for, scarcely a clandestine printing press, and all for the vocation … Aside from that, I’m not known for any female conquests; paralyzed by women, I swoon before the majestic Mme Panaeva, a splendid beauty à la George Sand (she again), hanging on the arm of her frivolous husband, the muse of his circle of amorous authors; first time for love at first sight and first instance of the ‘trio,’ two men for one woman, delicious torture, I will be a long-time subscriber … Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky praises me, glorious moment, I exist, I exult; he rejects me, I collapse,’knight of the sad countenance,’ the laughingstock of Saint Petersburg high society, pretentious neurotic hypochondriac …
“Nekrasov and Turgenev attract me, then disappoint me … But nothing will erase the ineradicable passion that attaches me to Nikolay Speshnev, irresistible aristocratic libertine and already a Marxist, my terrorist creditor, atheist and communist, ‘I am with him and I belong to him,’ I see him, he inhabits me, I will make a character out of him … Gogol obsesses me, though I thumbed my nose at his lugubrious, realistic ‘Overcoat’ in my Poor Folk (1846), which was the first half-fantastic, half-social novel, that’s what they said, I stick to pathetic souls, I haven’t finished dealing with Gogol, I know.
“Death expands, interminable minute. In the distance, the top of a church cupola sparkles, glimmerings blended with the voices, dazzling kaleidoscope of clamor. Could it be the specter of Countess du Barry alongside Sanson? ‘She sees him bending her neck under the blade, kicking her forward — the crowd laughing — and starts shouting: Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau, encore un moment!’ One of my characters, Lebedev, ‘another sinner like her,’ will pray for the lady … ‘What if I didn’t have to die! If life was returned to me — what an eternity it would be! And it would all be mine!’ (The Idiot, 1868).”
What eternity? The Superior School of Engineering? Fine, it’s done, though loathsome; indigence and deprivation … Galvanized by the theater: Shakespeare, Racine! And always Balzac, Schiller, Hoffmann. To write, “to redeem oneself or be lost,” exaltation and torments. Five years of publication already, sudden fame and total fall from grace … The voices of his books now invade the silence of Semyonov Square, gaping black hole of the frosty cosmos. Thoughts are intonations, incessant dialogues, proliferating points of view, echoes carrying afar …
He hears them, he sees them, a fluid rhapsody flows outward (water is his element, with the sun) in the tortured turns of a collection of letters of unrequited love inaugurated by Makar Devushkin, his first character, that pathetic rat of a minister, that ludicrous functionary (say it in Russian: chinovnik, guaranteed effect of morose laughter), who doesn’t know he’s the grandfather of the anticapitalist-man-machine in Kafka and Chaplin. His relative Varenka replies to him with kindness, “muddled friend” and abused orphan who nevertheless marries another oppressor, with the amorous participation and faithful compassion of Makar himself, inconsolable poor folk.
A nervous laugh dilates and twists the face of the condemned man: the dream of the sickly and triumphant letter-writer, which doesn’t leave him when the woman he loves leaves him for another, this the author knows well, it’s his wild dream. The secret of what has been taken for his sentimental humanism tormented by anguish is obvious in the patronymic of the hero, Devushkin, in Russian devushka:“young girl”! The despairing orphan is also he, the budding writer! You couldn’t love the other as yourself since this poor other was your alter ego: your very own feminine self. Deep down within you there follow undecidable oscillations and, outside of you, voluptuous blockages. Did the enthusiasm of the redoubtable Vissarion Belinsky for Poor Folk pick them out when he predicted the fame and future of a “great writer”? This famous literary critic, who considered himself a socialist, was to recant with The Double (1846), the second book by his protégé, because the acclaimed author, having ostensibly portrayed his doubling, dissected it and caressed it, madly, tirelessly.
The revolt of the universal civil servant aiming at the system: quashed. The lame dream of the romantic couple: temporarily abandoned. In getting undressed (golyi, in Russian, means “naked, denuded”), at the fringes of indecency, the subservient soul of the small-time bureaucrat splits into Goliadkin the elder and Goliadkin the younger: the “dirty old rag” with “unrequited ambition” and the arrogant snitch, the magnanimous convulsive and the sneering scoundrel. They embrace feverishly in a secret revolutionary soirée, but it’s only nothingness, nihil, madness, nothing. The sentence withers irreversibly with the narration. Meaning is lost with the character, and the risk of mental collapse descends upon the scaffold, atrocious perception and prophetic vision of self-destructive nihilism.
About thirty years later, in 1877, the writer will persist; he writes that he had “never literally achieved a more serious idea” than the one in The Double. With Goliadkin he sensed the demons. Already now, the condemned man hears them in Pushkin’s verses:
Upon my life, the tracks have vanished,
We’ve lost our way, what shall we do?
It must be a demon’s leading us
This way and that around the fields.
…
How many are there? Where have they flown to?
Why do they sing so plaintively?
Are they burying some household goblin?
Is it some witch’s wedding day? (Demons, 1872)
The underground man (Notes from Underground, 1864) is the first to defy the demonic din. Lame Marya, Stavrogin, and Pyotr Verkhovensky (Demons) are not born yet. The irresistible thrust of the words alone, on the scaffold, embodies the urgency of giving flesh to the doubles, the shame, and the obscurity that border on crime.
Obstacles are thresholds: to disseminate, to repent, and to correct oneself, to say and say again, anguish and crisis. To listen, to listen to oneself, to undo oneself, infiltrate oneself and infiltrate you, my likeness, my brother. Cross over … turn in circles … faint, to a point barely posed … and rebound. Inexhaustible conversation, the non-finite is infinite. Who talks of abandoning hope? This inferno is a palliative, nothing is forbidden, everything can and wants to be forbidden.
Two or even three who are “saved” in the beauty of their infinitely deformed reflections, discordant polyphony? The three who were tearing themselves apart in Poor Folk — which did not prevent the narrator from dying of laughter about it, but nothing is ever for sure in this caustic anguish — this trio continues all the better in “The Landlady” (1847), it will survive the scaffold. A solitary old man, a researcher in the history of the Church, gives his tender heart away to the torments of the tumultuous Katerina — the condemned man will retain this first name for the strong women to come in his writing, which leads him to the essential: confronting the redoubtable rival. The epileptic old man, convicted criminal, tyrannizes his incest-marked daughter-wife so well that the “mistress of the house” (hoziaïka) succumbs to sadistic subservience! And the triumph of feminine masochism carries off the two romantic idealists, the landlady and the tenant.
The feminine assails him, it penetrates the novelist still, while the blacksmiths encircle his feet in irons, he doesn’t care. It is in the feminine that he hears the voice of his first confession signed in the first person singular. To be left unfinished (Netochka Nezvanova) because of the trial for sedition that brings him precisely here, facing death. In the name Netochka, one can hear negation, nyet “no” and tochka the“point”: final point or there is no point? The patronymic Nezvanova, from the adverb nie “negation, lack, absence” and zvaniie “title, grade” from zvat “to call, invite, name,” completes the orchestration of the negative: unnamed, ignored, without help, unnamable … Emerging from nothingness (“I do not remember my father”), the young woman will become a singer — perhaps. A painful replica of “feminism” à la George Sand, does she seem to think that only art can still save us? Like the revolutionary aesthete on the scaffold, who lives on, survives, haunted by the voices of his characters, transcended by literature. But the adoptive father of the little memoir-writer is a brilliant violinist who goes crazy, and her sickly desires are expended in suave effusions with Katia, the dominator. Sadism in the feminine becomes frenetic: “And, crying and laughing, we kissed each other till our lips were swollen.”
Drumroll. It’s still not the end … The condemned man has more than one trick up his sleeve, inexhaustible romantic vein, sentimental, sadistic … His last seconds on this earth flood him with memories of the orgasms of the young boy within him … The trembling voice of the“little hero” he has just penned, this night, in the prison of the Peter and Paul Fortress, knowing he will have to die the next day, today … He is eleven, splendid women caress him and a mysterious sensation invades him, something terrifying that makes the heart, the body, everywhere beat and burn … Blushes and unexpected tears, solitude, “ashamed and even hurt” by so many “privileges” I enjoyed, I could “remember something — something which [I] now had suddenly forgotten, something without which I could not … exist at all.” Sexual abuse or guilty pleasures? “Lately women have been making me feel particularly afraid, and that’s why I was seized with a terrible confusion” (“The Little Hero,” 1849).
The condemned man feels the bullet penetrate his cranium, his neurons catch fire, his creatures, his doubles, his puppets escape, grimace, and sneer … When all is said and done, they have always been ridiculous because they scrutinize themselves, torture themselves, interpenetrate each other. But in that fatal minute, at the threshold of the ultimate punishment, the narrator himself joins in the dance, in the end he is going to burst out laughing … Drumrolls.
The imperial pardon arrives with an aide de camp on a galloping horse. “His Majesty took cognizance of a petition … commutes the death sentence … stripped of all rights … sent to prison … indeterminate term …”
That very evening, from the Peter and Paul Fortress, the survivor writes to his brother Mikhail: “On voit le soleil!” In French.
/ / / / /
Excerpted from Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death: Or Language Haunted by Sex by Julia Kristeva, translated by Armine Kotin Mortimer. Translation copyright (c) 2024 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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