Notes from aboveground

Serious mountain climbers aspire to tackle Everest and K2, serious racecar drivers dream of the Paris-Dakar Rally, serious travelers plan to do India, but what of serious readers? (By “serious readers” I mean amateurs, as opposed to professional readers in the academe.) Unlike mountain climbers who set more and more ambitious goals for themselves (Cristobal today, Aconcagua tomorrow), serious readers tend to read without a plan.

My choice of reading matter is usually dictated by mood: “I feel like something romantic and tragic, set in Venice during a plague” or “Carnage, lots of carnage.” It’s an undemanding arrangement, sometimes too undemanding. One needs a challenge, a goal, a test to add zing to his or her workaday existence. Mountaineers train for years, but we serious readers have been training for most of our lives, and for what?

That is how Fyodor Fyodorovich and I decided to go on a quest, one that would test our endurance while indulging our natural snobbery. (What, you’ve never climbed Sula Grande?) Years ago I’d suggested that we read everything by Balzac. Balzac seemed the right choice because he loved coffee and cats. Brimming with confidence I brought a copy of A Harlot High and Low — all I knew of it was the title — to read on a 15-hour flight. By chapter two my eyes had glazed over. There was no mention of the Balzac Marathon ever again.

Later, Fyodor Fyodorovich argued for the complete works of George Eliot. He would not be dissuaded, even when I roll0ed my eyeballs and cried, “Silas Marner?!” We did a trial run. Eliot was never mentioned again.

This time we were in agreement: we would read the classics of Russian literature. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, naturally, in the acclaimed new translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky. Turgenev neither of us likes but he has to be in there; Gogol; Lermontov’s A Hero Of Our Time. Our beloved Chekhov, the plays and stories. The final reading assignment would be Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, in the notoriously difficult translation by Nabokov.

As you can see, our previous failures had not dented our self-confidence. One of my personal mottos is: If at first you don’t succeed, aim higher. This way your failure may be ascribed not to a lack of talent or skill but to an excess of ambition. Fyodor

Fyodorovich was already planning to include the Soviet-era writers

Babel, Bulgakov, Shokolov; I said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Vassily Grossman, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, or Ludmilla Petrushevskaya!” (I know what I sound like: those cinema freaks who compete at naming obscure geniuses.) Just pronouncing the names makes me feel superior.

Oddly, Solzhenitsyn never entered the discussion. I’ve never read him, for the most absurd reason. When I was a high school freshman I had to pick an extracurricular activity. Between joining a club or being a library assistant, I chose the latter. On my first day of work a sophomore requested the novel Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Cancer Ward,” he repeated.

I was baffled. “Corns of Art?” To this day whenever I see a title by Solzhenitsyn at the bookstore I think of ugly feet obtained in the service of art and walk on.

After some discussion, Fyodor Fyodorovich and I agreed to begin the quest with Dostoevsky’s Demons (Earlier translations were titled The Possessed). Yes, we would go straight to the hard stuff instead of getting acclimated with something easier like Notes From Underground.

Like climbing the Matterhorn it is advisable to read Dostoevsky in a group. This way your buddies can throw you a rope if you are slipping into the abyss. In my case I can count on Fyodor Fyodorovich to throw me a noose. Not for us the comradely exhortations of “Go on, you can do it!” We agreed that whoever could not finish the quest would perish of contempt. The thought of ignominious defeat has sustained me through the most trying sections of Demons, i.e. every chapter until “The Duel.”

For starters, the names can make you nuts. Nikolai Vsevolodovich

Stavrogin is called Nikolai Vsevolodovich, Nikolai, Stravrogin, and Nicolas, but Lyamshin is just Lyamshin. Fyodor Fyodorovich complains that the Constance Garnett translation is clear about the cast of characters, but that’s not how it’s supposed to be in the original.

Dostoevsky is messy, repetitive, infuriating; the P/V translation gets that.

I’ve learned that in reading Dostoevsky the important thing is to keep moving forward. Don’t look back! If you keep reviewing the previous chapters to get the names straight, you will get bogged down. You’ll just have to trust your brain to process the information. Keep reading no matter how confusing it gets. Suddenly things will snap into place and everything will make sense.

It’s like using a new phone. The keypad or lack of it may infuriate you at first, but after a few days your mind adjusts to the new system. Also, connections get worked out in the brain during sleep (and new facts get moved to long-term memory). You wake up one morning and your first thought is, “He had something going with Darya Pavlovna and Dasha because they’re the same woman!”

Once you get to “The Duel,” a particularly wacko chapter in which Nikolai Vsevolodovich refuses to aim his pistol directly at his opponent, further insulting and angering the man (by refusing to shoot and possibly kill him), the next chapters just hurtle along.

Even in the most aggravating sections Demons has a manic energy: it’s a novel about people literally driven mad by ideas, the titular demons.

“Good,” mutters Fyodor Fyodorovich, “I was planning to kill myself.”

“Then you have the true spirit of Demons,” I cry, “for everyone in it is offering to kill themselves!”

It’s a novel that must be lived.