The Idiot

The Idiot made me feel like an idiot: there’s my pithy one-sentence review.

Crime and Punishment was one of my favorite pieces of required reading in high school (and one of my favorite books, full stop), so I went on a bit of a Dostoyevsky collecting spree in my early twenties. The Brothers Karamazov, Notes From the Underground, The House of the Dead and, of course, The Idiot got piled on my TBR with abandon, but I only ever finished Brothers.

Well, now that I’m making a more concerted effort to clear out my TBR, it was time to finish that project!

I made an attempt at The Idiot in Swedish a few years ago, but I quickly gave up—I was swamped with work and didn’t have the focus left for Dostoyevsky in Swedish (even if I was curious about translations besides Constance Garnett’s). Browsing the shelves at the freshly renovated library at Medborgarplatsen back in January, I came across the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (pictured here) and decided why not! So here we are.

The translation is great and I would like to sing the praises of the abundance of explanatory end notes. Very interesting, very informative, very essential. Well done, Pevear and Volokhonsky! I might have cleared one book out of the TBR queue by finishing this, but I also just added two more because now I’m deeply curious about their treatment of the Dostoyevsky I’ve already read.

But man oh man, as far as a story goes this was a confounding bummer for me, which is why it made me feel like an idiot. I am bad at subtext even in the best of times; with novels of a certain age it’s all but impossible. I would never have guessed at Totsky’s sexual exploitation of Nastasya Filippovna if I weren’t reading summaries of the book as I finished each part.

And while I appreciate the larger point, or the thought, or motivation, or whatever behind the book—what happens when you take an Actually Good person and throw them into real society?—the society in question felt populated by flat characters who were either extreme melodramatic stereotypes or bland interchangeable nobodies, making their response to pure angelic precious baby Myshkin not particularly interesting. In a lot of ways The Idiot was the complete opposite of what I remember from Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, with complicated characters presented with nuance and depth, but I read them so long ago that maybe I’m just making that up.

Characters aside, the structure is also a bit loosey-goosey. There are whole pivotal sections that just happen off-screen, off the page, that people only refer to in weird info dumps, like Nastasya Filippovna ping-ponging back and forth between Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin. There’s no urgent organizing crisis or imminent threat, no murder to solve (or get away with), just a Jane Austen problem of who gets to marry whom. The one saving grace is that it ends in murder, which is more than you can say for a Jane Austen novel.

Speaking of: it would be great if someone could Wide Sargasso Sea the novel from Nastasya Flippovna’s perspective, and maybe someday someone will. I’d be the first to sign up to read it.

Picknick vid vägkanten

It’s always interesting to me to read books that had to undergo significant censorship for their initial publication. Sometimes the ideological clash between author and state is pretty clear, but other times it’s a head-scratcher. Picknick vid vägkanten is one of the latter. It’s difficult for me to find what Soviet censors would have objected to, as opposed to books like We or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. All the implied black market and organized crime, maybe? Regardless, a censored version was published in the Soviet Union, and Tartovsky worked with the Strugatsky brothers to turn the idea into the 1979 movie Stalker. (The entire movie, with English subtitles, is available for free on YouTube from Mosfilm.)

A strange alien visitation in the near future (officially the book takes place at some unspecified year in the twentieth century) has resulted in six Zones around the world, all filled with baffling scientific marvels and unpredictable hazards. Picknick follows Red, one of the people who now make a living by navigating the life-threatening terrain to bring back items, a group of people who have come to be called “stalkers.” It’s implied that Red’s regular exposure to the Zone is the reason for the strange mutation in his daughter, who is born mostly normal but covered with long fur and black eyes. She starts out life with the same mental capacity and personality as any child, but eventually becomes withdrawn and non-verbal. Hoping to cure his daughter, Red makes one last incursion into the Zone to reach the Golden Sphere, which is rumored to grant wishes.

Picknick is another classic that feels a bit pointless to review, established as it is within the science fiction canon. I appreciate its weirdness and its refusal to provide any kind of explanation for the Zones or the items, or to descend into a pew-pew space lasers alien invasion story. Instead it’s just people dealing with the fallout (pun intended) of a brief and inexplicable encounter with an alien Other. Science fiction really does get an unfair reputation because everyone’s seen Star Wars and no one’s read books like Roadside Picnic. Next thing you know, we have Ian McEwan convincing himself he’s invented an entirely new genre.

Sigh.

The Swedish translation is worth noting, since it took a lot more research than one would expect to dig up the details of its history. Ola Wallin—who was also responsible for translating and publishing Trötthetssamhället—put out a new translation of Picknick in 2020.  That’s the one I read and it’s a fine translation. I think. My Russian is far too gone to attempt a meaningful comparison.

But! Before Ersatz and Olla Wallin, there was a Swedish translation from Delta by Kjell Rehnström, which Wikipedia purports (by way of Neil Cornwell’s Reference Guide to Russian Literature) won the “Jules Verne prize for best novel of the year published in Swedish.” Confirming that last part is proving trickier than one might expect, and will involve a trip to the library over the weekend to check an actual physical reference book. Stockholm Library also appears to have a copy (in addition to Wallin’s), which I might read for comparison’s sake if the mood strikes me.

Olla Wallin is alive and well, so finding out more about his biography isn’t particularly difficult. Kjell Rehnström is, well, alive at least, but if Ratsit is to be believed he’s also 85 years old. Unsurprising that he doesn’t have much of an online presence, then, though it seems he also translates from Polish, including Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz.

Book Review: One Day in the Life of Denis Ivanovich

I’ve long been interested in Russian literature, so when this title came up in the comments section of my favorite writing blog, I added it to my towering GoodReads “to read” shelf. A book club buddy gifted me a copy earlier this year and so I immediately sat down to read it.

The Penguin Classics cover of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, featuring a black and white photograph of someone in a prison.

Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; H. T. Willetts, translator

My GoodReads rating: 4 stars

Average GoodReads rating: 3.95

Language scaling: C1+

Summary: One day in the life of a prisoner in a Soviet gulag.

Recommended audience: Anyone interested in hyper-realism; anyone interested in Russian literature from the Soviet era

In-depth thoughts: Nothing happens, which will either bother you or it won’t. I’ve long been a fan of the “slice of life” kind of stories, where small struggles gain epic proportions (television shows like The Adventures of Pete and Pete or Seinfeld, movies like Clerks), and that’s largely what One Day… is. It’s just that the backdrop is a prison camp instead of American suburban life. If your tastes overlap with mine, then you’ll get a lot out of it. But if “a book about nothing, set in a gulag” sounds tedious to you, then it probably won’t be a lot of fun to read. (Not that it was “fun,” exactly.)

Because of the specific setting, and because so much of it centers around very small details and very small, easily overlooked items, reading the English translation might be difficult for lower level readers. (Unless you want to look up a whole bunch of new words about army barracks and stonemasony and so on). But for those already familiar with the original, or with a higher level of English, this translation is of interest.