Under Review

Reviews by Robert Blaisdell

Conversations with Dostoevsky: On God, Russia, Literature, and Life

by George Pattison
Oxford University Press; $40; 320 pp.

“To be honest,” writes George Pattison, “It would be ridiculous to try to explain Dostoevsky better than he explains himself.” So what would happen if he, Pattison, stepped out of his role as the self-effacing “Honorary Professor in Divinity” at St. Andrews in Scotland, and let himself imagine, really imagine in all its impossibilities, visitations in 2018-19 from an author that he has been excited and troubled by? He would write an original, brilliant, confounding and honest-to-god novel. Pattison says that Conversations with Dostoevsky is not a novel; I would argue that, if he had written a novel before, he would call it one, because it is. The narrator is not, he insists in the after-novel, himself, and, as he unnecessarily adds, his Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky is not of course actually Dostoevsky, who has been dead since 1881. But Pattison’s Dostoevsky lives in this novel as vividly as he does in Dostoevsky’s own writings, and far more believably, because imaginably, than in Joseph Frank’s comprehensive but dull five-volume mega-biography (1976-2002).

“Listen,” [Dostoevsky] said, quietly but seriously, turning back to me. “You have to think about why you are asking me these things. If the words I wrote in my books were the truth, why shouldn’t they be enough for you?”

Can we ever get enough of a great writer? I think not. And were those words in Dostoevsky’s works “the truth”?

Pattison manages to think of all the complications of explaining how his narrator has been chatting with a dead man:

One evening he drank a beer with me. Other people too saw him. He was, then, “real”—but there was definitely something odd about him. For a start, he didn’t always look exactly the same. Even within the space of a single conversation he might change from the magisterial personage of the portrait that you’ve probably seen on book covers to the traumatized ex-convict newly arrived back in St. Petersburg.
 
The narrator’s swaying visual focus on Dostoevsky is perhaps a metaphor for Professor Pattison’s exploration of these fictional literary discussions; after all, novelists know it’s hard to keep a character distinct and consistent:
 
Over the course of our last few exchanges, Fyodor Mikhailovich was starting to look tired; the folds of his clothes seemed to be flattening out, almost as if he was becoming two-dimensional; even his face seemed to be fading, looking more and more like an old photograph rather than a living person.

It also seems that Pattison had to sort out whether the conversations should be a continuous stream of profundities, or rather – as the narrator discovers – like actual wondering, wandering chat?

“Well, it is a Danish beer,” I said, amazed at how easily one slipped into small talk, even with a dead writer. “In Copenhagen they say it’s probably the best lager in town,” I couldn’t help adding.

And, as if in a dream, the narrator keeps having to confront the idea that these conversations are in fact happening:

[Dostoevsky asks:] “Why are we having this conversation at all?”
 
“Because you turned up, here in my flat—and without even being asked!”
 
He chuckled.
 
“I suppose I did. But I wouldn’t have turned up (as you put it) if you hadn’t wanted me to. The question is, why did you want me to?”

The answer to this is also for Pattison-the-Professor to puzzle over. Why, since we all have access to vast amounts of Dostoevsky’s writings (even in English translation, which is how Pattison reads him, mostly in Constance Garnett’s versions), why, given all that material, are we still confused about Dostoevsky’s philosophy and beliefs?… Because they are alternately lucid and confusing.

While it’s hard to know sometimes what Dostoevsky is or was thinking, Dostoevsky apparently knows what Pattison’s narrator has been thinking:

Several times before, I’d had the feeling that he knew what I was thinking—and if that was so, then I’d no reason to hold back.

This is such a clever touch. Conversations with Dostoevsky suggests that as deeply as Dostoevsky has let us in, he intuits our depths as well. There are limits, however, to the great author’s knowledge:

“Let’s be very clear,” he said. “One thing I cannot do – cannot do, may not do – is to comment on what’s going on in your world, in your “today.” Your time is your time, not mine, and dealing with it is your duty, not mine.”

I don’t think any of us admirers could get closer to the heart of Dostoevsky’s art and soul than Pattison’s narrator does. The narrator works up the nerve to ask: Does Fyodor Mikhailovich ever see Jesus Himself up there?

“We don’t – as you put it – sit around looking at Him. We see Him, but we see Him in the light in which we see each other and to see each other in His light is to see Him.”

What a satisfying and profound answer!

Why should we believe in this Dostoevsky? I think it’s because he is not idealized or simplified--or always cooperative or wholly intelligible: “He stopped and looked at me searchingly, as if trying to see whether I’d understood. He clearly decided that I hadn’t and set off on a less abstract line of approach.”

The narrator in the midst of another conversation notes: “I waited. I was getting used to the way in which he often avoided giving a direct or immediate answer to my questions.” This Dostoevsky is as contrary, illuminating and occasionally obscure as he was in his writings. That is, to the narrator’s consternation: “if I had somehow tuned in to his supernatural mind, why was I finding it so difficult to process what he’d said?”

Another factor contributing to the fictional believability (Dostoevsky might have liked this wrinkle) is that the narrator is himself occasionally abrupt or tactless:

[…] as I go back over that first conversation, when we’d known each other for less than an hour, I have to say that I’m rather embarrassed at how I spoke to Fyodor Mikhailovich. I realize that I probably sounded more like a rather irritable teacher dissecting an essay by a not very competent student rather than someone talking to one of the world’s greatest writers …

And Pattison’s narrator is not the only string on Dostoevsky’s bow. He visits others!

“[…] am I the only one who can see you?” It was very confusing, and I was confused.
 
“Anyone can see me, I suppose.” He glanced round, screwing up his eyes, but there was no one nearby. “The truth is, though, they’re probably not that interested. After all, who am I to them?”

Pattison becomes a novelist interviewing a novelist and discovers just what a novelist can and cannot do. He can’t (or shouldn’t) know ahead of time exactly what any character is going to say. Dostoevsky shrugs off a query about the title character of “The Eternal Husband”:

“… Who knows the mystery of another person’s heart?”
 
“But he’s your creation, can’t you make him think and do whatever you like?”

Pattison is realizing for himself that he can’t make his narrator or Dostoevsky “do whatever” he likes. His daring narrator does what he likes and confronts Dostoevsky about his blatant anti-Semitism. Dostoevsky concedes:

“The very first thing to say is that I’m not going to defend myself. Each of us is guilty of everything, before everyone, and I most of all. […] as a writer, I more than anyone should have been more alert to the power of words. We cannot just say things and imagine our words will float off into the air and evaporate. Words have effects. Perhaps in what I wrote about the Jewish question I attempted a bit of banter, as if it was a light-hearted matter that feuilleton writers and their readers could talk about in an ironic-humorous manner – but, of course, it wasn’t light-hearted at all.”

This Dostoevsky character is almost as infuriating as Dostoevsky!

When the narrator attends a fellow academic’s lecture about Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism, another professor in attendance grows irritated at the carping; her argument seems (to me) about the least bad that can be offered: Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism is simply one unfortunate characteristic of an otherwise supreme author:

“Of course, we know all this about Dostoevsky and anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a fact of Russian life. People are anti-Semitic, the Church is anti-Semitic, even Communists were anti-Semitic. But – so what? I’m Russian, I’m Jewish, I’m Orthodox. Theoretically, this shouldn’t be possible, but here I am. You know what Dmitri Karamazov said about Russia and Russians: Russia is broad, it contains many contradictions. Dostoevsky contains many contradictions and the fact that he was anti-Semitic didn’t stop him writing beautiful things about Christ, about love, about reconciliation. I don’t see the problem. This is life, not putting people in pigeonholes. Anti-Semitic, not anti-Semitic, blah blah blah.”

An admiring novelist (himself Jewish and deeply affected by Dostoevsky’s work) pointed out to me when I wondered how he accommodated the anti-Semitism: “Why should I be offended? Dostoevsky hated everybody.”

In any case, Pattison’s narrator is having the literary experience of his life, though in the midst of it, he disappointedly realizes: “… not every reader is going to have the benefit of having you come and explain it all.”

My awed and dazzled review of this marvelous novel now has to take a turn for the critical. The narrator’s conventional double, George Pattison, the academic, reasserts himself after the conclusion of the sixth fictional conversation. Having switched off his humor, originality and personality, Pattison appends a hundred pages of commentary and citations. Fortunately, nobody has to – I’m suggesting nobody should – take a cold plunge and read the lecture-style notes, quotes, justifications, qualifications, and academic noodlings underpinning his own novel.

The best that Professor Pattison can do in conclusion is say, perhaps in the voice and mind of his sympathetic and compelling narrator: “Dostoevsky is not yet finished with us, nor we with him.”

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

By Benjamin Nathans
Princeton University Press; $39.95; 816 pp.

“To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause” was a favorite mocking toast by Soviet dissidents. Yet, writes the admiring Benjamin Nathans, “they succumbed neither to apathy nor to purely symbolic gestures, neither to what they called dogmatic pessimism nor to pathological optimism.”

Nathans, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, is clear, scholarly and careful, averse to jargon, shrewd about testimony, subtle in his presentation of the various figures; he has interviewed many of the dissidents himself. “My effort to understand Soviet dissidents has led me to a very different point of departure, namely, that we can begin to fathom the history they made only if we consider the history that made them,” he writes. A major point he makes throughout the book is “Dissidents were Soviet people.” His ample evidence of that simple truth has helped correct my supposition that dissidents desired a government modeled on those in Europe and America; no, the homegrown citizens wanted the Soviet Union to live by its own ideals – and laws.

The bold and engaging Andrei Amalrik emphasizes that he and other dissidents “did something […] simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.” A pioneer in post-World War II Soviet dissidence was the mathematician Alexander Volpin; he created the “counter-intuitive strategy of civil obedience.” That’s right: obedience to the written laws, which officials and agents meanwhile were ignoring or flouting. Volpin saw no need to defy Soviet laws; one had to simply and in good faith observe and obey them. He demonstrated to anyone that would listen that “there is no law obliging all the citizens of the USSR to believe in communism or to build it, or to collaborate with the security organs, or to conform to some mythical ethos. The citizens of the USSR are obliged to observe the written laws, not ideological directives.” Unfortunately, “in the short run, the transparency promoted by the dissident movement was moving the Soviet state not to abide by its own laws and judicial procedures, but to work around them.” By the late 1970s, the KGB’s Fifth Directorate managed to arrest or silence almost all dissident activists.

Nathans is particularly fascinated by and fascinating about the development and practice of samizdat, which was never effectively squashed. We learn that “By the late 1960s […] consumption of samizdat had expanded so dramatically that ‘the intelligentsia could no longer imagine life without it.’” He inspiringly describes the phenomenon:

Samizdat provided not just new things to read, but new modes of reading. There was binge reading: staying up all night pouring through a sheath of onion-skin papers because you’d been given twenty-four hours to consume a novel that Volodia was expecting the next day, and because, quite apart from Volodia’s expectations, you didn’t want that particular novel in your apartment for any longer than necessary. There was slow-motion reading: for the privilege of access to a samizdat text, you might be obliged to return not just the original but multiple copies to the lender. This meant reading while simultaneously pounding out a fresh version of the text on a typewriter, as a thick raft of onion-skin sheets alternating with carbon paper slowly wound its way around the platen, line by line, three, six, or as many as twelve deep.
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There was group reading: for texts whose supply could not keep up with demand, friends would gather and form an assembly line around the kitchen table, passing each successive page from reader to reader, something impossible to do with a book. And there was site-specific reading: certain texts were simply too valuable, too fragile, or too dangerous to be lent out. To read Trotsky, you went to this person’s apartment; to read Orwell, to that person’s. However and wherever it was read, samizdat delivered the added frisson of the forbidden. Its shabby appearance – frayed edges, wrinkles, ink smudges, and traces of human sweat – only accentuated its authenticity.

He conveys the marvelous excitement of an era when reading independent voices really mattered: “Samizdat turned reading into an act of transgression. Having liberated themselves from the Aesopian language of writers who continued to struggle with internal and external censors, samizdat readers could imagine themselves belonging to the world’s edgiest and most secretive book club. Who were the other members, and who had held the very same onion-skin sheets that you were now holding? How many retypings separated you from the author?”

Nathans describes how deeply and wonderfully samizdat affected them: “What is certain is that they typed and retyped more than any other people in the world. Every document reproduced and circulated via samizdat became a kind of chain letter, addressed to an indeterminate, risk-sharing, infinitely expandable readership.” He reminds us that “Samizdat was irrepressible because there was no root ‘from which all this comes.’ There were thousands of roots. Every copy of every samizdat text had the capacity to spawn thousands more (or millions, if one counted dissemination via the Voices). No text could count as definitively suppressed so long as a single copy remained at large. In contrast to the Internet, there were no central platforms or servers from which the dissemination of texts could be blocked. Every typewriter was a virtual private network.”

There were samizdat “how-to” books about how to conduct oneself in an interrogation, how to cope with prison, how to conduct oneself under punitive, unethical psychiatric examination: “’Everyone says you have to know certain principles of criminal law,’ complained Vladimir Albrekht in his manual on how to behave during an apartment search. ‘Aren’t the laws of ordinary morality enough? If there is such a thing as truth, I think it must be naive. Not for nothing was it a child who first said The emperor has no clothes! In some sense we too are children.’ There was nothing wrong with knowing and invoking the law; in some situations it was vital. But it was equally important to appeal to justice and common sense.”

A custom for any dissident or group seems to have been to disagree in part or in principle with the methods or forms that all the others took. I admit I admire the most “hopeless” ones, where lone, unaligned individuals sat down in Red Square and held a protest sign against the invasion of Czechoslovakia or those who decided that the only law they would follow is that of their own conscience. Nathans quotes Vladimir Bukovsky: “Each of us wanted to have the right to say to our descendants, ‘I did everything I could. I was a citizen, I fought for the rule of law and never went against my conscience.’”

Nathans also reminds us that the renown of those most famous of dissidents, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov contrasts with “the many lives” of the other Soviet dissidents: “the price of following one’s conscience varied widely from individual to individual.”

One of the brave citizens who had been jailed in a psychiatric institution conceded, “In truth, one has to be decidedly ‘different’ to become a dissenter in the USSR.”

Those that were different and independent found one another not in public groups but in prison. Nathans appreciates that “The dissident movement fostered the mingling of individuals from different cities and towns, different nationalities, different belief systems: Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Crimean Tatars, Jews, Catholics, evangelical Christians, Russian Orthodox, atheists, neo-Leninists, social democrats, and those for whom all variants of Marxism were anathema. […] it was the state, in their view, not the defendants, that made trials and prisoners ‘political’ by subordinating legal norms to considerations of power and ideology.”

This immense history is continually interesting, only losing some momentum in the late chapters when Nathans details the creation and development of foreign organizations that attempted interventions for the dissidents.

“To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause” could be repeated today by anyone in Russia still working for human rights or freedom of expression, as Nathans acknowledges that the situation there in 2024 looks grim: “The dream of post-Soviet Russia abandoning its tradition of concentrated, personalized power in favor of laws and institutions has long since evaporated.” He notes that “Under Russia’s wartime regime, the ground for which was carefully prepared during the preceding decade, the space for public dissent has shrunk to the vanishing point.”

Nathans concludes (I believe in a hopeful spirit): “The wonder of the dissident movement is how so few people with so few resources managed to discredit so profoundly the USSR’s claim to be a modern, lawfully governed country.”

Let us hope against hope that the voices of conscience that have survived in Russia soon manage to discredit Putin and Company.

The Lady of the Mine

By Sergei Lebedev
Translated by Antonina W. Bouis
New Vessel; 232 pp; $17.95

I doubt Lebedev himself could sum up the plot of Белая Дама in a paragraph, but I’ll try:

It is July 2014 in a mining region of Ukraine, which has been invaded by the Russian military and terrorized by local Russia-supporting thugs. A washerwoman for the mines and its townspeople, Marianna, is witchlike in her power to clean; no stain remains when she works her magic on clothing and bedding: “They came to her with the nastiest, most corrosive dirt that clings forever, which the best dry cleaner in Donetsk could not handle. […] You would remember all your life how you created that stain, what you spilled, how dirty it was—unless Marianna took pity on you and washed it. It was like going to confession.”

As Marianna approaches death, she treats her daughter, Zhanna, spitefully. Zhanna has left her university studies to tend to her mother.

Meanwhile – there are many meanwhiles in this tale told from several points of view over the course of five days – the washerwoman’s neighbor’s son, nicknamed Valet, banished from town by Marianna several years ago (a sentence accepted by Valet’s mother), has returned, with revenge and Zhanna in mind. He is a veteran of the Ukrainian armed forces who tried to police the Maidan Square protests; he is now a lackey in a paramilitary gang.

Meanwhile, there is a horrifying secret about one of the local mines, which for some reason (if Lebedev mentions it, I missed it) only Marianna and a Russian general who used to work in Soviet Ukrainian intelligence know. In a closed, sealed coal mine are buried victims of every massacre in the region over the last hundred-some-odd years. “It’s impossible to remember us,” declares their collective voice, “because it’s impossible to remember hundreds of meters of dead people. Under us lie Red Army prisoners shot by the Germans. Beneath them, people shot by the Bolsheviks when the Red Army was retreating, and the prisoners of Soviet prisons. Under them, people executed in the Civil War by advancing and retreating troops: Whites, Reds, Greens, random people, hostages. Below them, the murdered strikers of the first revolution, in 1905.” The mine’s deceased engineer narrates the mine’s ambitious and then increasingly hellish history. We hear the point of view of the compressed bodies who have begun their long journey into becoming coal: “We are now as natural a part of the world as the bones of dinosaurs and mammals, as dead shells of vanished seas and petrified wood.”

Meanwhile, a Malaysian passenger plane, targeted over the region by a paramilitary group, explodes and the bodies rain from the sky. This episode is a waking nightmare: “It seemed that they, the corpses, were invaders, landing here like aliens from outer space. Catching the locals unawares, they had strewn themselves all around the area, occupying it.”

Valet, one of the crew that shot down the plane, attempts to seduce Zhanna after her mother’s death; he offers her the gift of a victim’s expensive lipstick. Zhanna dodges the fate Valet intends for her and finally understands her mother – and the secret of divine deep-cleaning. (This understanding is not shared by this reviewer.)

Disturbing and occasionally, particularly in regard to Marianna’s powers and significance, too mysterious for the likes of me, I have read nothing so descriptive and efficient in communicating the grim and ghastly effects of war in the Donetsk region as Lebedev’s remarkable novel