Author’s note: “Weekend Short” is a recurring column profiling short stories. Analysis from the readership is encouraged in the comments section.
Welcome to the weekend!
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” has been on the list for a long while now; fitting really. Russian in its brooding length, the story is simply too good to pass on for fear that some readers may turn away. So, like a shabby man in a shabbier chair, let us together make the decision to sally forth into the first chapter despite the slothish pressures to embrace the void of Dostoevsky-lessness.
Introduction and Excerpt
Born in 1821, Dostoevsky stands apart from his Russian-lit peers owing first to his birth; he was a son of the middle class, unlike high-born Tolstoy and Turgenev, and more significantly, was exposed to the rotten axis of depravity and deprivation through his father’s work as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. Dostoevsky’s later imprisonment and mock execution after protesting krepostnoe pravo (Russian serfdom) were owed to actions taken informed by his childhood experiences and Christian egalitarianism.
Chapter One of “Dream” is a confession from our protagonist, ever nameless except for being a self-described “ridiculous man.” For this series, we’ll depend on the prodigious translating abilities of Constance Garnett, the godmother of Russian literature translation. Balancing the French influence on Dostoevsky’s Russian, Garnett in 1913 is well-placed to bridge the language span — close enough to understand the period while distant enough to synthesize styles and peculiarities. However, if Edwardian prose isn’t for you, consider one of any number of translations.
Dostoevsky writes:
I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me – and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly dear to me. I could join in their laughter–not exactly at myself, but through affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as I look at them. Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won’t understand that. No, they won’t understand it.
In old days I used to be miserable at seeming ridiculous. Not seeming, but being. I have always been ridiculous, and I have known it, perhaps, from the hour I was born. Perhaps from the time I was seven years old I knew I was ridiculous. Afterwards I went to school, studied at the university, and, do you know, the more I learned, the more thoroughly I understood that I was ridiculous. So that it seemed in the end as though all the sciences I studied at the university existed only to prove and make evident to me as I went more deeply into them that I was ridiculous. It was the same with life as it was with science. With every year the same consciousness of the ridiculous figure I cut in every relation grew and strengthened. Everyone always laughed at me. But not one of them knew or guessed that if there were one man on earth who knew better than anybody else that I was absurd, it was myself, and what I resented most of all was that they did not know that.
Read more, listen more, watch Aleksandr Petrov’s animation; maybe buy it.
Rumination (Spoilers Abound)
The sentence, “Rain had been falling all day, and it had been a cold, gloomy, almost menacing rain, with, I remember, an unmistakable spite against mankind,” immediately evokes the freezing rains of the Pacific Northwest. There’s something malevolent in rain that ought to be snow — when subjected to that torment, it’s as if the heavens rebel against God’s perfect solidification logic, instead deciding to lash the exposed hides and souls of those below; nothing is more tormentous than drowning and freezing on solid ground.
As for the first chapter as a whole, our ridiculous man knows himself to be a fool, and one so depraved as to pretend to the world he’s something other than. Whether we are to understand ourselves to be the narrator is up to the reader, ultimately, though I can commiserate with his top-line observations. I graduated from being a ridiculous boy to a ridiculous man after boot camp, and, now freshly 30, those same personal deficits sit beside me — some muzzled since 19, others strengthened by ego, position, and income. Better writers than I have become ethically bankrupt and petty creatures because they didn’t know when to step away from the bully pulpit that is commentary. How many great conservatives have undone whatever good they achieved for America’s politics and her public because of internecine grievance and elevation to positions that flattered their ridiculous pride?
The irony is not that our narrator is ridiculous but rather that he cannot accept he is so — else he would tell others and find that they are the same way. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress illustrates the solution well enough with his Pilgrim’s burden and the ultimate surrender of that damnable load at the cross. No, our protagonist is much too concerned about himself, selfish in all things, even to such an extent that he denies helping a screaming little girl who beseeches him for assistance. When he isn’t prowling the streets, he stews in a sleepless vacuum with a revolver by his side. Meanwhile, a drunk and blackguard of a captain terrorizes the others in his lodgings. So engrossed within himself, the idea of intervening on behalf of anyone — he has the tools (interesting that there are presumably six bullets and there are seven villains) — never occurs beyond detached cataloging.
But going back a few chapters, let’s consider the star that prompts our narrator’s suicide pact this particular evening.
As I was thinking about the gas lamps in the street I looked up at the sky. The sky was horribly dark, but one could distinctly see tattered clouds, and between them fathomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a star, and began watching it intently. That was because that star gave me an idea: I decided to kill myself that night. I had firmly determined to do so two months before, and poor as I was, I bought a splendid revolver that very day, and loaded it. But two months had passed and it was still lying in my drawer; I was so utterly indifferent that I wanted to seize a moment when I would not be so indifferent—why, I don’t know. And so for two months every night that I came home I thought I would shoot myself. I kept waiting for the right moment. And so now this star gave me a thought. I made up my mind that it should certainly be that night. And why the star gave me the thought I don’t know.
Something worth knowing is that the Pulkovo Observatory of Tsar Nicholas I was founded in 1839 outside of St. Petersburg and made Russia a leader in astronomical research and discovery. That same year Dostoevsky was enrolled in St. Petersburg’s Academy of Military Engineering, and it also happened to be the year when his father died unexpectedly, making the young man of 18 an orphan (his mother died two years prior). Astronomy was catching on in Russia, and the idea of an empty cosmos was popular among the religiously skeptical upper classes. Meanwhile, the paternal firmament Dostoevsky knew departed with his father. All of that to say, the star above the narrator is an accusatory witness; it’s a reminder of oblivion and meaninglessness instead of God’s promise seen above Bethlehem or suggestive of the clockmaker’s eye observing the whirring permutations of his great work. Our narrator is illuminated by stage lights that reveal his ridiculous person; what could be worse for one with so much to hide?
What do you think? Please let me know if you’re up for a multi-part exploration.
Thanks to Kevin for the suggestion.
Wisconsin Postcard:
For five days, I laid out our lawn-furniture cushions to dry in the sun, and for five days, it rained. Today I checked them and they’re not only waterlogged but frozen through. Like an ice-cutter of old, I dragged the stupid things across the crimson and marigold leaves that blush the fescue’s stubborn green to see if the cushions might fare better before a shop fan in the garage. Snow is expected this week. Pray for us.
Here’s Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Hymn of the Cherubim”:
Author’s note: If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com.