Author Archives: ahb101

Mare Superum and St. Paul’s Shipwreck

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The Strait of Otranto is today the generally accepted dividing line between the Adriatic Sea and its neighbor to the south, the Ionian, but discovering exactly where the strait stops and starts, like many a water boundary, depends on who you ask and when. This southern boundary, moreover, is relatively recent. In a certain sense the fuzziness of its southern confines is understandable when one considers the Adriatic in a historical context that might come as a surprise to the inhabitants of, say, Scandinavia: it was long considered a northern sea. This quality in fact was what first-century Romans thought most noteworthy when they occasionally named it the Mare Superum or “Upper Sea” instead of any of its other names. “Adriatic” in turn appears to have derived from an old Etruscan city, Atria, which was located in the far north near the mouth of the Po River.

Tracing the Ancient references makes it clear that the boundaries of this sea, while obvious where the land met the water in the north, tended to be quite variable and sometimes contentious to the south, extending with Roman colonial expansion first to the Gargano Peninsula and then onward to Otranto, Roman Hydruntum. As Rome’s colonial expansion did not stop there, however, but kept growing, so too did the sea’s supposed dominion, infiltrating the Gulf of Taranto and overtaking both the Sicilian and Ionian Seas. For Procopius of Caesarea, writing in the sixth century, the Adriatic’s southern reaches appear to have extended far into the wider Mediterranean while the sea’s defining geographical trait mentioned in his History of the Wars is not a north-south boundary but an east-west one, with the island of Malta as the defining line between what he calls the Adriatic Sea, which appears to encompass the central Mediterranean, and what he calls the Tuscan, which reaches around the Italian Peninsula up to Tuscany.[1] [I am considering adding a roughly sketched map here]

It is in this context that the geography of the disciple Paul’s experience recounted in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles 27:39 to 28:11 has often been explained: upon leaving Crete, the vessel in which he traveled was said to have encountered a storm on the Adriatic that drove it towards the Maltese coast. But here ancient conceptions of time and space have tended to confound as often as clarify. The Biblical account does not say how long they had sailed before they met the storm, only how long it drove the ship to and fro after they met it (fourteen days). If they had hugged the coast, as ancient navigators were wont to do, perhaps it skirted up and around rather than headed out to open waters, making landfall, after this storm, not on Malta, as is believed by some, but on Mljet, off the coast of Dalmatia, as others have claimed. The ancient coast lines were likely quite different than what we see today, and there is evidence to suggest that much of what is land in modern memory was then water.[2] It turns out, moreover, that the two islands are referenced in both Greek and Roman sources by the same name—Melita—and each island has a harbor named after St. Paul, along with local attestations to his stay there after a storm and a shipwreck. Both regional and international scholarly opinion has come to the aid of such claims over the centuries, swaying this way and that with the region’s geo-political tempests. And so when the Spaniards controlled Malta, English opinion placed the great saint’s landing on Mljet, but when England controlled Malta, new research proved he had landed on Malta after all.[3]

[1] Book III, Chapter 14 (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Wars/Book_III#XIV)

[2] See Wilkes, The Illyrians, 1992, on the ancient coast and changes since.

[3] Ignjat Durdevic’s 1730 Venetian monograph places St. Paul’s shipwreck on Mljet. Ignjat Đurđević: Sveti Pavao apostol brodlomac (St Paul the Apostle Castaway), Miho Demović (ed.), Dubrovačke knjižnice, 2008.

Glagolitic Reflections

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The so-called “Glagolitic Path,” or, as the locals name it, the Aleja glagljaša, runs for a little more than four miles through the idyllic countryside of Istria’s Mirna Valley Basin between the villages of Roč and Hum. Nowhere near so well-traveled as the coastal towns just to the west, it is no less picturesque. Hilltop villages speckle the landscape, which has a fairy-tale quality that has often induced in me the anxious sensation that some unexpected, stunning surprise lies waiting just over the next incline. It often does.

In this wide, relatively open, sunny expanse the waters of the Mirna (or “peaceful”) River gather together before making their way down to empty, also quite humbly, into the Adriatic some twenty-five miles to the southwest near the town of Novigrad. Local legends suggest that the river was named after the wife of the giant Dragonja, who, when out tilling his fields one day, dug an especially deep trench all the way from the heights of the Ćićarija plateau to the sea. It is unclear from the stories whether Dragonja was happy or frustrated that the water that filled in his furrow moved slowly and steadily, for which quality he gave it his wife’s name.

The Path, which is probably best understood as a public art project or perhaps a modest ethnopark, was created between 1977 and 1983 to commemorate the heritage of Glagolitic writing, which featured prominently in the religious and cultural history of Istria, the Kvarner Gulf, and Dalmatia. As I note this, using words like “commemorate” and “heritage” and “featured,” it occurs to me that some might be inclined relegate the script, with its exotic sounding name and, to them at least, obscure history, to the category of bygone curiosities, artifacts of material culture significant primarily for their developmental value. It is a common way of thinking and categorizing among scholars of cultural history. We read and consider every artifact along historical timelines, it is true, and the categorizing and interpreting impulses tend to make everything of equal interest, a little like the underwater archeological prism I have noted elsewhere. But then some things catch our attention by jumping out of line, as it were, suggesting in fact that they might be of interest somehow outside history, not just because they are part of a chronology and lead to some subsequent stage but for other reasons that seem to speak to us directly, outside the context of our search for items of “developmental significance.” On this basis we sometimes switch our approach completely, seeing wonders and masterpieces in these exceptional cases, thinking that because they speak so to us they must also speak to others in the same way and not just in our own time. Perhaps, we think, they are of some intrinsically human interest.

The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin accounted for this phenomenon by suggesting that some cultural inventions incorporate not just content but “potential” inside them, such that they can live on beyond the time in which they were created and continue to grow, as future generations open them up and find new things that past generations might not have seen, all while continuing to recognize that the things earlier generations saw must also be “in there.” It is a brilliant solution to the generations-old question of how multiple interpretations of one and the same cultural artifact can be equally valid.

I suppose from a certain perspective, Glagolitic must appear as what Jan Morris, in her Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere calls “another kind of arcanum” (155) whose presence “so close to the city center of Trieste” is “like an unsuspected spell or exorcism, left in the attic.” It is thus mysterious and exotic, a remnant of a dark past that lingers in unknown places, hidden amid the dust of forgotten documents, and then creeps out to dazzle us with its unexpected shapes and squiggles when we are busy looking for something else. Or perhaps we must travel far to find it, venturing down into peripheral or interstitial territories about which we have only heard stories. Thus Glagolitic is “like no other European writing” and “for centuries… defied the intrusion of the Latin alphabet” (Ibid., 156). This is basically true. It is also thick with perspective, partly Morris’s (whose subject is Trieste, after all, not Istria, let alone the eastern Adriatic), partly that of the members of the Istrian émigré community who made their home in Trieste following their departure from Istria after World War II. I have felt the thickness of this perspective, its palpability, which is based on real and hard-lived experience, and so I cannot say that it is wrong. But it is certainly limited and incomplete.

While many outsiders know about the use of two writing systems in the Balkans, Latinate and Cyrillic, fewer are aware of Glagolitic, which is in fact older than the latter though not so old as was once believed. For hundreds of years Glagolitic was thought to have been invented in the fourth century by St. Jerome, whose now legendary birthplace somewhere on the border between Dalmatia and the Pannonian plain combined effectively with his spiritual authority as the translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible, on the one hand, and the most learned of the Church Fathers, on the other, to shore up support for the alphabet’s continued use over the centuries, particularly as part of the liturgical language. In addition to “Illyrian” and “Slovenish,” the script is thus often referred to in medieval manuscripts as “Hieronymian,” after Jerome’s Latin name, Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus. Jerome’s skill with numerous languages and the fact that the letters of Glagolitic appear to derive from a variety of ancient scripts, including Phoenician, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Samaritan, and Coptic, helped to keep the story alive, and it is easy to sense the power of the tradition behind doing so, as the clerics told themselves and others that they were continuing along the path forged a thousand and more years before, preserving the great Jerome’s legacy in its purest form, the system of writing down the sounds of their language that he had created. Unfortunately, this just isn’t true.

Bastards All

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Mixture has turned out to provide an especially fruitful path of inquiry in researching this book, while its relationship to intimacy has furnished one of my central themes.

I am aware that there is another sense to the term in question, but let us begin with this.

A Baster is a member of a racially mixed group of frontier people who live in Namibia and North West South Africa. The name appears to come from the Afrikaans baster, meaning “half-breed.” They were once also called Bastaards—a spelling that, I suppose, means the a is long as in father—and are believed to be descendants of eighteenth-century Dutch and French fathers and Khoi-Khoi (Hottentot) mothers. They speak a dialect of Dutch but have some knowledge of Khoi-Khoi. They long lived in autonomous hybrid communities founded in the nineteenth century, which blended a variety of traditions and practices of their parent cultures. The early Basters were proud of their White ancestry, which they would emphasize to justify claims of superiority over their aboriginal neighbors.

This is a way of seeing one’s own skin color that most white people never experience, an instrumental and objectivized approach to some part of yourself, a little like being proud of having a car that’s better than your neighbor’s, only it’s not a car you drive, it’s one you wear, or better one that’s attached to your body as a kind of automotive appendage that you see every time you look in the mirror, from ever since you were aware of yourself as a distinct person, a constituent self-object inherited from your mother, or your father, or some distant, great great Bastaard relative.

“Bastard toadflax” refers to small annual or perennial herbs of the sandalwood family. They have narrow leaves like true toadflax, but they are not true toadflax. In the same way, “bastard saffron” is not true saffron, “bastard pimpernel” not true pimpernel, and “bastard balm” not true balm. It might seem on the surface that these names all refer to, and so in a sense benefit from, the association with the true. But in effect their names all define them fundamentally by their difference from something else, the absence of something in them, their impurity, falseness, inauthenticity. They resemble but are not some other thing, something other and better because it is called what it is and it is that, not something other and worse because it is not that.

This puts them together in a surprisingly productive category of things defined by what they resemble but are not, as for instance most things termed faux—faux leather, faux pearls, faux fur, though faux is not always the same as bastard. Faux bois is not real bois, it’s imitation, like all the other imposters. We can put a faux memoir, which is not to be confused with a false memory—why does everything change so much when you translate it into French?—in this category as well. But a faux pas really is a pas, it’s just a really bad one. In some ways a faux pas might be a more distinctive pas than a non-faux pas. We perform a thousand non-faux pas every day, and no one ever notices. They are the mundane details of life, rather boring and forgettable. But a faux pas is unique, memorable, the stuff of stories, though not of the heroic sort. The faux pas finds its place in the salon rather than on the field of battle. Nevertheless, it has a bold authenticity that a mere pas can never hope to achieve.

A “flat bastard” is a type of metal file specific to the North American system of pattern coarseness. It refers to the tooth spacing, or number of teeth per inch, on a file, usually a metal one but wood is also possible. This file renders a “bastard cut,” which is the result of having the fewest number of teeth per inch. The more teeth there are on the file, the smoother the finish after filing. Which means that the obverse is also true: the fewer the teeth, the rougher the finish.

This usage is analogous to the bastarda script that was used for less formal, vernacular texts in France and Germany during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, bastarda being synonymous with less refined, less polished, less sophisticated. Presumably a liturgical text (in Latin) would not have been printed in such a bastard script, just as a fine wood would not be subjected to a course bastard file, flat or otherwise. Both these uses reassure in their democratic implications, their roughness marking a natural authenticity, an absence of elitism, exclusion, or snobbery. Applying the word faux to your flat bastard or claiming that your flat bastard was better than someone else’s flat bastard because it had, say, even fewer teeth than his—distorts the very idea of the bastard in all its purity.

Bastard appears numerous times in the King James Bible. In Zechariah 9:6, “And a bastard shall dwell in Ashdod, and I will cut off the pride of the Philistines”; in Hebrews 12:8, “But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons”; and in Deuteronomy 23:2, “A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter in to the congregation of the Lord.” The usage is rather inconsistent from one Bible translation to another, where “mongrel,” “mixed” might be preferred, while in several more recent translations, instead of “bastard,” terms like “foreigner,” “half-breed,” and phrases like “born of a forbidden marriage” appear. The confusion appears to center around the Hebrew concept mamzer. According to rabbinic law, this name refers to offspring of individuals unable to contract a legal marriage, especially if it would be incestuous. The child of parents genealogically free to marry is never understood as a mamzer, regardless of how few teeth it might have.

The Venetian galea bastarda, or “bastard galley,” was a cross between the galea sottile and the galea grossa. It was characterized by its relatively fuller hull and stronger built, which allowed it to accommodate a fourth, and later a fifth, rower per bench. Some of these rowers would eventually be captured Turks, others enslaved Morlachs from Dalmatia, but the Venetians held out against the practice of slave rowers on their military vessels for as long as they could, preserving, it seems, the practice of citizen rowers from the Ancient World. The increased size and strength of the bastard galley made it especially suitable for use as a flagship in both military and commercial expeditions. A bastard sail is also known as a lateen mainsail, that revolutionary design that allowed sailors to maneuver both upwind and down and was especially popular among the islands of the eastern Adriatic, where even today there are special “lateen” regattas.

The English word bastard appears to derive from the Medieval Latin word bastum, meaning a pack saddle used by muleteers traveling from inn to inn. Calling someone a “fils de bast,” or “son of the bastum,” was a euphemistic manner of suggesting a child not born of marriage bed. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that bantum is related to “bantling,” a corruption of the German “bänkling,” from bank, or bench, suggesting a child begotten on a bench rather than a bed. These words thus at some earlier point in their histories carried subtle allusive qualities that the contemporary usage of bastard makes rather ironic, bastard having been coarsened over time. Bastard, in fact, was once a relatively common name. Its bearers include a minor French composer of the sixteenth century, a Devon family established at Kitley near Yealmpton in the late seventeenth century, and a geographical district of Canada, in the Province of Ontario. With the term’s descent into abuse, many former bearers of course changed their names, leaving most descendants ignorant of their true origins.

A New Book

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Having settled into the new year, I have discovered that I’m apparently writing a new book. The realization came to me rather suddenly, but as soon as it did, I understood that I’ve been preparing to write this book for many years. I believe it is called Sea of Intimacy. I believe this is its first line:

The Atlantic and Pacific are seas of distance, the Mediterranean a sea of propinquity, the Adriatic a sea of intimacy.

Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape

The book from which the quote comes was translated into English from its original Serbo-Croatian version (which was called Mediteranski brevijar) by Michael Henry Heim and published in the title above by the University of California Press in 1999. I gave a talk at the annual Mediterranean Studies Association meeting in 2018 that explored the idea of Adriatic intimacy, and perhaps that was what started making me see it. Now I can’t get it out of my mind. Here are some paragraphs from the start.

On first glance, the claim made by Predrag Matvejević that has given me this book’s title and first epigraph might seem surprising given the many human conflicts that have historically ranged across the Adriatic’s waters, some of them for centuries at a time. Given this apparent disparity, my first inclination is to interrogate the varied crossings of culture, language, ethnicity, and faith that might be used to support such a claim. Here one might consider the solidarity of slaves constructing Diocletian’s Palace in the early fourth century, or the ties of blood among extended Sephardic Jewish and diasporic Greek families that served as sometime intermediaries among the powers of Ottoman Turkey, Venice, Ragusa, Austria, and Ancona, or the mixed marriages and mixed idioms of the sundry peoples who have made their lives here. Mixture has turned out to provide an especially fruitful path of inquiry in researching this book, while its relationship to intimacy has furnished one of my central themes. Mixture and intimacy go hand in glove in the Adriatic.

In his fine treatment of cultures and lands in propinquity to one another, Black Sea, Neil Ascherson notes that “peoples who live in communion with other peoples, for a hundred or a thousand years, do not always like them—may, in fact, have always disliked them. As individuals, the ‘others’ are not strangers but neighbors, often friends.” He was writing of course about another sea, on the other side of the Balkan Peninsula from the Adriatic, at a different historical moment, but it is relatively plausible to substitute “Adriatic” in many instances where he has the word “Black,” somewhat like this:

“My sense of [Adriatic] Sea life, a sad one, is that the latent mistrust between different cultures is immortal. Necessity, and sometimes fear, binds such communities together. But within that binding-strap they remain a bundle of disparate groups—not a helpful model for the ‘multi-ethnic society’ of our hopes and dreams. It is true that communal savagery—pogroms, ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the name of some fantasy of national unity, genocide—has usually reached the [Adriatic] Sea communities from elsewhere, an import from the interior. But when it arrives the apparent solidarity of centuries can dissolve within days or hours. The poison, upwelling from the depths, is absorbed by a single breath” (Ascherson 1995: 9).

Ascherson’s claim of “a bundle of disparate groups” as a characterization of the Black Sea seems to ring true for the Adriatic across its history on some level, and yet it contrasts profoundly with Matvejević’s evocation, and the echoes of that evocation before and after, most recently in a 2017 exhibit held in Trieste’s Salone degli Incanti devoted to underwater archeology in the Adriatic and entitled, “Nel mare dell’intimità” (In the Sea of Intimacy) in reference to the very same key passage from Matvejević’s Mediterranean.

The urge to speak of the Adriatic as one thing and the peoples of the Adriatic as one people is palpable, even explicit at times, in the exhibit’s contextualizing materials, as in this characterization: “At the centre of it all—commerce and military expeditions, big enterprises and evil trades, ship wrecks and recoveries—always them: the inhabitants of the Adriatic shores, one great people sharing many different languages and cultures, extending well beyond the sea.” Taken as a whole, moreover, the exhibit appears to provide evidence of such a claim of unity and commonality, through its ten organizing categories: the Adriatic space, ports and landing places, ships, goods, peoples, activities, wars, sacred places, migrations—all delivered through the prism of the last category, underwater research. It is wonderfully coherent and convincing, yet I am left unconvinced of this central claim. I suspect what I might be sensing here is attributable to differences of perspective and emphasis and to the categories one uses as the basis for judgment about the relative unity or lack of unity of the phenomena in question. The categories themselves seem to me essential.

Before I go any farther, and lest anyone think that I am criticizing the work of scholars in other fields, some of which I know little about, let me emphasize that I too am attracted by the urge to speak of the Adriatic as one thing and the peoples of the Adriatic as one people, especially in a sort of historic symbiosis of nationalities, religions, and languages, something that Ascherson rightly points out has often appealed to visitors eager for viable proof that, despite today’s narrow nationalisms, different peoples can in fact get along and have done so over millennia. “But,” he cautions, “nostalgia makes bad history. The symbiosis has often been more apparent than real” (Ascherson 1995: 245). I am not sure I agree with this last statement, not yet. This is the beginning of a book after all.

Racing to 2019

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Quite a few things have happened since I last posted, so much that I am having trouble remembering what happened when, what I wrote down and what I didn’t, where I traveled, and how many people’s names I’ve forgotten since I spoke with them. Apologies for my tardy replies and general slowness.

We got a four-year, one million dollar grant from the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine to work with a partner university in Kyiv/Kiev to help train communications specialists in Ukrainian civil service. We got a two-year $700,000 grant to establish a Russian Flagship Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. I helped to organize, then took part in a conference on Siberian Infrastructure and Environment at the Indiana University Gateway in Berlin, Germany (my paper “Tree and Bird,” focuses on the spruce and the jay, especially the Norway Spruce and Steller’s Jay, markers of sorts at the confines of an imagined geography of Siberia that starts with my front yard and ends in Alaska).

AHB published three books! First was Christopher Merrill and Won-Chung Kim’s translation of Sunwoo Kim’s If My Tongue Refuses to Remain in My Mouth; then Anna Rosenwong’s translation of a compilation of poems by Jose Eugenio Sanchez as Here the Sun’s For Real (just reviewed by Anthony Seidman at the LA Review of Books); and third the 91st Meridian Books title The Same Gate: A Collection of Writings in the Spirit of Rumi, which is complemented by an entire series of events and films at the International Writing Program over the past several years.

In October, the American Literary Translators Association‘s annual conference came back to Bloomington, the second time in six years we have hosted it. The first was when I had just moved there (here), in 2013, and was in my first year as chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. On the eve of the conference in 2013, I learned I would be president, not VP, as I had assumed (the president-elect had a heart arrhythmia that needed to be treated….)

As I look back on this, I am a bit surprised I did not collapse at the time. It is sometimes surprising how much adrenaline can accomplish. This is worth taking a step back to remember, at least for myself, so I’m going to write it down here, in the spirit of Predrag Matvejević, to remember and record, lest it fall into the nothingness of oblivion. We all have time enough for that.

I started my term as ALTA president in something of an emergency. I was slated to take on the vice president’s role, but on the eve of the 2013 conference, our president-elect at the time, Elizabeth Lowe, contacted me to say that she’d been diagnosed with a serious health problem and would not be able to take on her duties as president. Thankfully, she is doing quite well again now (I was quite happy to see her at the opening reception of the 2018 conference enjoying a beverage), but at the time the board turned to me and asked me to serve. There wasn’t anyone else do it, so I agreed. I was then in my first year of chairing a department at a new institution—I had come to Indiana just nine months before. This meant that I didn’t have the usual preparatory period before assuming the presidency and that I had many other things on my mind. It was also at this moment that ALTA was transitioning from its long sojourn at UT-Dallas to something new, which meant we were heading into completely uncharted waters.

I found local support at Indiana University through graduate assistants and the Executive Dean’s Office in the College of Arts and Sciences, which provided financial support for travel. I reached out to colleagues in ALTA whom I knew were committed and knowledgeable for advice and counsel. These individuals included Aron Aji, Susan Harris, Sean Cotter, Olivia Sears, Susan Bernofsky, and Esther Allen. Several agreed to become board members, and some of these individuals are serving in the current leadership still. Some months later I turned to my former student from the University of Iowa, Erica Mena-Landry, with whom I had collaborated on several projects at Autumn Hill Books and The Iowa Review, and whom I knew to be a tech-savvy, artistically sensitive, and extremely dynamic person. Erica and I worked for many months essentially as partners on a host of ALTA initiatives, feeding off each other’s energy and enthusiasm. This was both good and bad. It propelled ALTA forward in profound ways—we added new awards programs, re-established our NEA collaboration, begin receiving regular NEA funding for the annual conference, and became a literary partner of the AWP. But it also wore us both out and made it clear that what we were trying to do in the way that we were trying to do it was not really sustainable in the long term.

This realization came close to the end of my three-year term as president, and the executive committee (Aron Aji, Sean Cotter, Paul Daw and myself) was by then seriously considering the potential benefits of a new affiliation with an institution of higher learning. The process of partnering with the University of Arizona, ALTA’s newly established home base, has been skillfully shepherded by current president Aron Aji and vice president Ellen Elias-Bursac, while ALTA’s new executive director, Elisabeth Jaquette, its communications and awards manager, Rachael Daum, and program manager, Kelsi Vanada, have launched themselves into the many new prospects and opportunities that this affiliation affords. My last of six years on the board ends in October of 2019.

A few weeks ago, Jill Schoolman at Archipelago wrote to let me know she’s almost finished reading my translation of Jergović’s Kin. I had been waiting patiently, somewhat nervously (what if she didn’t like it after all?). In her note she wrote, “You’ve done a wonderful job with it. I love the book.” Yes, so do I. Excerpts coming soon.

What’s a Person Worth

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My colleague Alexey Vdovin at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow wrote to ask for an article I published in 2003 as part of the proceedings of the 13th International Congress of Slavists, which was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia the year before that, and since I don’t have a definitive version of that article handy, and I haven’t put up any new blog posts for a while, I will make it available here (help yourself Alexey!). This essay was the kernel of a chapter in The Woman in the Window, so I don’t believe it has additional insights or interpretations from the ones offered in the chapter entitled “Three Modern Characters: the Double, the Con Man, and the Woman in the Window.” But I could easily have forgotten things. The actual essays is called “What’s a Person Worth: Character and Commerce in Dostoevskii’s Double,” and it appears in Robert A. Maguire and Alan Timberlake, eds. Proceedings of the 13th International Congress of Slavists (Bloomington: Slavica, 2003), Vol. 2: Literature, pp. 203-212. (Alexey, I’ll try and get you a pdf in the meantime, in case you want to cite page numbers.)

***

When Titular Councilor Iakov Petrovich Goliadkin, in Dostoevskii’s 1846 novel The Double, rushes from one merchant to another to arrange purchases to be concluded at some unspecified future time or changes his larger bills into smaller in order to have a fatter wallet, he is manipulating the superficial details of commerce in order to give himself the appearance, and perhaps the inner sense, of affluence. The same may be said of his hiring a carriage, renting livery for his servant, driving around town, and “paying a call” on his doctor. These are the trappings of a station higher than the one he currently occupies, and Goliadkin’s eventual descent into madness may be understood, as Dostoevskii himself indicated in his feuilleton of the period, as the result of an urge for upward social mobility, in short, ambition.[1]

This conceptual framework links the book less to the world of the Gogolian petty clerk, that is, to “Diary of a Madman” and “The Overcoat,” which, as numerous critics have shown, functioned as the inspiration for Dostoevskii’s Poor Folk, than it does to that of Dead Souls. This latter relation, as Joseph Frank has shown, while uppermost in Dostoevskii’s mind at the time of The Double’s initial creation, has tended to be neglected because of his subsequent revisions, which removed most of the direct intertextual references for the 1866 edition (Frank 1976: 299-300). Nevertheless, these two texts, even after Dostoevskii’s changes, remain crucially connected to one another. While I agree with Frank that “the best way to understand The Double is to see it as Dostoevskii’s effort to rework Dead Souls in his own artistic terms,” the resulting “new synthesis of Gogolian elements” and, in particular, the “genuine exploration of encroaching madness” that he identifies in The Double depend upon an assumption of realism that the work itself calls into question. Indeed, it is not even clear that Goliadkin in fact goes mad at the end of the work. Goliadkin Junior, we are told, is outside the carriage in which Goliadkin Senior is being led away, and subsequently drops out of sight. For all we know, he returns to the ball from which he emerged “hatless” at the moment of Goliadkin Senior’s discovery behind the woodpile. If one sees Junior as a manifestation of Senior’s repressed social aspirations, as many have, then of course it is only the guilt-ridden, retiring, “conscience” that is committed. In other words, if half the man stays behind, well-adjusted, even giddy at the removal of his twin, that is not madness in any ordinary sense, let alone a clinical one, and the appeal to realism gives way before other, symbolic or metaphorical interpretations.

I do not mean to supply a definitive answer to the question of whether Goliadkin does or does not go mad in the present essay, for I don’t think one is possible. Dostoevskii has provided equal evidence for at least two ways of interpreting his text, turning the “either/or” of reality into a dreamlike “and,” in effect daring his readers to attempt to see through the filter of his words to a reality beyond it that is, of course, not there.[2] The work’s conflicting details thus lead readers into an interpretive impasse, problematizing interpretation itself. Here the link to Dead Souls is relevant in another manner, with Gary Saul Morson’s suggestion of Gogol’’s book as a “hermeneutic parable” providing a helpful starting point (Morson 1992). But such a reading—namely, seeing problems of interpretation as paramount—vitiates the social and political aspects of Dostoevskii’s work, and Gogol’’s for that matter, to too great an extent. It is certainly true that both writers were interested in the manner in which readers read and interpret literature, making sense or nonsense out of life in the process. But Morson’s equation of the puzzling aspects of Gogol’’s work with its purport, while rhetorically quite skillful, also divorces that work from pivotal features of its immediate socio-political context, and, as a result, distorts the very real sense in which the writer hoped to transform the world.

Gogol’’s Dead Souls, which I have treated elsewhere (Valentino 1998), presents in part a reaction to the encroachment of a commercial ethic on the upper echelons of Russian society in the early nineteenth century. Chichikov’s seemingly nonsensical wanderings represent a progression from the a-commercial, sentimental state of Manilov to the degradation of Pliushkin as a result of the gradual acceptance of commerce in human souls by the middle terms: Korobochka, who is fearful but acquiescent, Nozdrev, who is trade incarnate (along with lying, cheating, and gambling), and Sobakevich, whose knowing subjection of questions of human value to questions of price leads directly to the degradation of worldly value at Pliushkin’s estate. Behind this interpretation lies a long-standing trend in republican thought that has tended, in opposition to capitalist apologists, to see social corruption as a function of the rising commercial ethic.[3] Viewed in this manner, Gogol’’s depiction links commerce with fraud, depravity, corruption, and ultimately, slavery.[4]

There is, however, a fundamental ambiguity in Dead Souls with regard to the very commercial processes the work implicitly critiques. It is an equivalent to what Joseph Frank refers to as the “puzzling ambiguity of attitude” in The Double, where “a character is shown simultaneously as socially oppressed and yet as reprehensible and morally unsavory because he has surrendered too abjectly to the pressure of his environment” (Frank 1976: 307). In much the same way, all while suggesting the morally inflationary effects produced by the action of trading in human souls, Gogol’ gives us a hero, the explicitly non-virtuous Chichikov, who is both the commercial agent par excellence and the work’s only catalyst for social change. Herein lies its most important connection to The Double and the one I shall pursue in this essay.

As social catalyst, Chichikov represents a revolutionary force. This force explains the rumor among the town’s inhabitants that he is “Napoleon in disguise” (Gogol 1997: 209). Such an individual is not like what John Bayley calls “the Napoleonic hero, the man of will, obsession and dream” (Bayley 1971: 316). Nor is he primarily the Napoleonic manipulator, who reduces others to the means of achieving his own ends (see for instance Lotman 1978: 476-77). He is instead Napoleon the upstart, a man who, by obtaining power, wealth, and/or influence, will cease to be who he was and become someone new. This social, political, and economic advancement on the part of one man amounts to a revolution of the old system of landed wealth and title, which fixed the future position of a man as rigidly as fate itself. It serves therefore as an icon for the processes of modernization, the emergence of the modern social individual. The ambiguity that lies at the heart of Dostoevskii’s Double may be understood in the very same way: in order to rise from one’s place, whatever it is, one must break with oneself, perhaps take on a disguise or deceive and manipulate others. One must create an image of oneself in the eyes of others, which may or may not correspond to one’s “true” self. One must nurture and manipulate the icons of consensual fantasy, including the very image one has created, in a thirty-year-mortgage style attempt to translate oneself into something real.

This is precisely what Chichikov attempts to do, namely, associate himself with the collective fantasy of the dead serfs’ value, thereby acquiring real estate and transforming himself into a pomeshchik. In the process, he becomes at one point a “millionaire,” at another the worthless kidnapper of the Governor’s daughter, at a third “Napoleon in disguise,” all as a result of the collective fantasy of the town’s inhabitants, the fluctuations of which raise, lower, and altogether reformulate his social image, his social and political value, with the baselessness of rumor, or words on a page, or stocks floating in a market. In his relation to Goliadkin, the fact that Chichikov does not suffer psychologically from these shifts of identity has prompted critics to look elsewhere in Gogol’’s opus for a suitable model, but this leads one along a side path. While the chinovnik atmosphere of such works as “The Overcoat” and “Diary of a Madman” furnishes a superficial resemblance to that of The Double, the best way to understand The Double’s relation to Dead Souls is to dig deeper into the origins of Chichikov’s character, all while keeping in mind the broad socio-economic, political, and psychological implications of the interpretation I have offered. Chichikov’s nearest literary referent is in fact not Popryshchin or Akakii Akakievich, nor indeed, any previous Gogolian creation. It is Hermann from Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades.”

Like Chichikov, Hermann attempts to manipulate fantasy. True, it is not the fantasy of money or commodified labor, but it is no less powerful for all that. Moreover, the revolutionary implications of Hermann’s “entrepreneurship” are highlighted once again in a reputed resemblance to Napoleon. The similarity is noted, appropriately, thrice (see Leighton 1977). First, Tomskii comments to Liza, “He has the profile of Napoleon and the soul of Mephistopheles.” Then the narrator remarks, “He was sitting on the window sill, frowning fiercely, his arms folded. In this attitude he bore a striking resemblance to the portrait of Napoleon.” Finally, we are told simply, “This resemblance struck even Lizaveta Ivanovna” (Pushkin 1936: 250, 252). The allusion to “The Queen of Spades,” through the suggested resemblance of Chichikov to Napoleon, is strengthened by several parallel themes: false representation (Hermann pretends to be in love with Liza), social climbing achieved through criminal actions, and the subjection of questions of value to the measure of money. Dead Souls carries on where Pushkin left off, presenting a politically conservative reaction to a loss of social value as the result of commercial culture’s spread in post-Napoleonic Russian society. But Gogol’’s depiction leaves out the psychological implications that such a transformation of social identity represented for Pushkin. Through its prominent interrogation of madness, The Double recreates this psychological dimension, accompanying it with a characteristically Dostoevskian emphasis on moral and esthetic questions.

The government assignatsii over which Goliadkin gloats at the beginning of the story are objects of beauty and sensual pleasure to him. Thus the “pachka zelenen’kikh, seren’kikh, sinen’kikh, krasnen’kikh i raznykh pestren’kikh bumazhek” looks at Mr. Goliadkin “affably” and “encouragingly” (Dostoevsky 1972: 110). He must wipe his hands before touching them. He counts them for the hundredth time in the course of two days, caressing each between his thumb and index finger. Even in all their numeric specificity, they represent for him a rather indeterminate, “splendid” sum of money, which “can take a man far.” In much the same manner, the government document, another kind of valued paper (bumaga), must be beautified before it is turned in. It is under the pretext of scratching out a blot that Goliadkin Junior is able to wrestle the crucial paper away from his elder twin in order to worm his way into the good books of their department superiors. The government issued money and the government office document are thus powerful in an equivalent manner, namely, through their appeal to desire and imagination.[5] As such, they may be filled, on one hand, with all Goliadkin’s hopes of success as well as, on the other, his fears of conspiracy and betrayal.[6] But they are more than mere personal symbols. These are public phenomena that have underlain modern European society since the middle of the eighteenth century. As such, they are filled with the hopes and fears of the public as a whole and are powerful only to the extent that humans agree among themselves to value them and, most importantly, make good on their promises.

This aspect of Dostoevskii’s works, that is, the importance of monetary promises—promissory notes—has tended to be overlooked by critics. A quick glance at the two most important of Dostoevskii’s post-exile novels makes the omission clear. Raskol’nikov is brought to the attention of the investigating authorities initially because he faints at the police station, where he has been summoned because of a stale IOU that he earlier gave to his landlady. The entire subsequent development of the story hinges on the fainting spell, which the broken promise to pay has brought to the surface. Dmitrii Karamazov is led to his fateful encounter with Grushen’ka because his father has threatened to sell her Dmitrii’s promissory note. The note thus links the three characters in what will become the novel’s main conflict. In neither work is the piece of paper the central problem. In both it serves as a kind of catalyst, a container for potential inside the stories, which mirrors the actual role of promissory notes, and indeed, all forms of credit, in life itself. The power of such phenomena lies in the kind of imagination, consensual collective fantasy, that underpins modern society.

In The Double Dostoevskii has in effect concentrated this fantastical potential in the mind of a single individual. Goliadkin thus begins his journey by fantasizing about his fantasy-based assignatsii. He toys with the trappings of wealth that can create an image of himself as prosperous in the eyes of others. He sinks himself into the symbols of the government bureaucracy that serve to verify the greatness of the Russian state, its power and “benevolence,” and by extension, the power and greatness of each of its individual human cogs. The split that takes place in him as a result of this wholehearted acceptance of 1840s modernity is merely a coming to terms with the trade-off that his complicity necessitates. In this interpretation the story may be seen as yet another version of the moral or spiritual decay that accompanies modernity in such works as Goncharov’s An Ordinary Story (1847) and Balzac’s Illusions perdues (1837-43), as the growth of social dependence in the forms of salaried office, personal and professional patronage, “the exchange of forms of mobile property” and “modes of consciousness suited to a world of moving objects” with fluctuating values, signal a fundamental transformation in the social and political life of the individual.[7] The loss of such “human” traits as sensitivity and a Schilleresque beauty of soul that make one capable of appreciating the love that binds us to others and to the world itself, are an inevitable, lamentable, but “ordinary” complement.

To the questions of what one might give up, beyond psychological integrity, by coming to terms with such a world and what might constitute an appropriate rebellion against it, this early work of Dostoevskii’s furnishes intriguing responses. The first dovetails with what Albert O. Hirschman has called the “Romantic critique of the bourgeois order,” which, from Fourier and Marx to Freud and Weber, portrays the triumph of the ideology of self-interest as an impoverishment of the “full human personality.” The irony of such a critique stems from its historical blindness, since, as Hirschman explains, “capitalism was precisely expected and supposed [by its eighteenth-century apologists] to repress certain human drives and proclivities and to fashion a less multifaceted, less unpredictable, and more ‘one-dimensional’ human personality’” (Hirschman 1997: 132-33). For Dostoevskii, particularly in his pre-exile, humanist phase, this irony would have weighed little in comparison with the very real conditions of early nineteenth-century Russian society, with its entrenched serfdom and dehumanizing bureaucracy. Goliadkin’s complicity in the modern world, his desire to raise himself in it through the manipulation of his self-interested public persona, may be seen therefore as an impoverishment of his humanity, which is depicted as a fundamental division.

The sense of human kind’s moral diminution must also be related to a perceived loss of heroism, particularly as a chivalric, aristocratic ideal, in modern times, when “to strive for honor and glory” comes to seem anachronistic, if not ridiculous. Dostoevskii gestures toward this chivalric mode by having his hero, love letter in hand, look up to the window behind which Klara Olsuf’evna supposedly awaits him, thereby invoking the gaze of the devoted knight toward his feminine inspiration.[8] But what looks back from behind the window is not his beloved at all, or at least not the beloved woman Goliadkin has convinced himself to expect. It is an undifferentiated public gaze:

Suddenly, in all the windows at once, a strange commotion took place. Figures appeared, curtains opened, entire groups of people rushed to Olsufii Ivanovich’s windows, all looking for something in the courtyard. From the safety of his pile of firewood, our hero, in turn, began following the general commotion with curiosity and stretched his head from right to left as far as the little shadow of the woodpile concealing him would allow. He froze all at once, shivered, and all but sat down on the ground from fright. It occurred to him—in a word, he guessed it with all his being—that they weren’t looking for something or someone: they were looking precisely for him, Mr. Goliadkin. Now everyone is looking, pointing in his direction. […] Suddenly they have all seen him, all at once, and are waving at him, nodding towards him, saying his name. (Dostoevskii 1972: 224)

This substitution of public notice, public opinion for the approval of an exalted, untouchable woman is a masterstroke of literary transfiguration, by means of which all the “tainted” ambitious motives of the hero are stripped of their idealist veneer. The utterly confused Goliadkin Senior does not have the conceptual wherewithal to comprehend that what emerges from the ball to meet him in the very next moment is not an alien enemy-twin but the public self his own desires and fantasies have unleashed.

The story’s mock heroic narration, the subject of much critical speculation,[9] is also best understood within the intellectual historical context of the demise of knightly glory in the modern world.[10] Here again Dostoevskii’s text appears to take its cue from Gogol’’s poema, which functions in part as a form of lament on the disappearance of the hero, particularly the virtuous hero. “The virtuous man,” explains Gogol’’s narrator,

has not been taken as a hero […] because it is time finally to give the poor virtuous man a rest, because the phrase ‘virtuous man’ idly circulates on all lips; because the virtuous man has been turned into a horse, and there is no writer who has not driven him, urging him on with a whip and whatever else is handy; because the virtuous man has been so worn out that there is not even the ghost of any virtue left in him, but only skin and ribs instead of a body; because the virtuous man is not respected! No, it is time finally to hitch up a scoundrel. And so, let us hitch up a scoundrel. (Gogol 1997: 224)

What Gogol’ develops is an opposition between the virtuous man and the confidence man, the trading man engaged in shady commercial transactions, which points to a long legacy of negative attitudes toward business in Russian culture.[11] Dostoevskii’s critique of modernity, however, does not limit itself to the morally inflationary consequences of allowing commerce to infiltrate culture. Instead, he directs his attention inward, to modernity’s very “fantastical” foundations, to the fashioning of public personae, the wearing of masks, the acquisition of status, and the effects of such “progress” on the inner life of one “not handsome, but also not bad looking, neither too fat nor too thin” individual (Gogol 1997: 3). His story is not that of the petty clerk crushed by the monolithic bureaucracy but of the everyman who tries to get by within it. The monumental struggle between the two Goliadkins, then, is mock heroic only in a historical sense, that is, when placed alongside what Bakhtin has called the “externalized” heroes of the ancient epic (Bakhtin 1981: 13-20). For the modern individual by contrast, Goliadkin’s inner struggle is, more often than not, the only kind of heroism available.

I am suggesting that Dostoevskii’s novel be understood in effect as something of a Psychomachia, or “struggle for the mind,” on Prudentius’ fourth-century model, just as Gogol’’s work, in its finished form, was to be something of a Divine Comedy. But, it should be noted, Gogol’’s book was to be an active, transformative Divine Comedy, which would mark the end of Russia’s Middle Ages and also propel the country into a new, moral and spiritual renaissance.[12] The question arises: how can a work of literature, or any work of art for that matter, manage to transform society if not by its imaginative potential? Here the great power of modern society re-enters each of these quintessentially modern works, pointing once again to the fundamental “ambiguity of attitude” that they share. Gogol’’s aborted attempt subsequently to transform his hero introduced in effect an open question into Russian nineteenth-century literary depiction: how could notions of self-interest—so important to the development of modern society in Western Europe—be appropriated by Russian society without its socially corrosive concomitants? In other words, how might a self-interested agent be depicted in the Russian context as a non-fragmented behavioral entity, socially valuable in a manner that re-directed the self-interested energies Gogol’ satirized so devastatingly? For Dostoevskii in The Double, the fantasy of the assignatsiia and the fantasy of the document exercise a transformative power equivalent to the fantasy of the literary work, as all represent the power to make ideas, collective consensual fantasies, into reality and create something out of nothing.[13] The effect of The Double on a reader attempting to locate the boundary between truth and fantasy is to point to what Slavoj Zizek has called the fantasy of “ontological consistency” (Zizek 1989: 68), the pervasive truth of ideological fantasy in the modern world, the “positive structuring of social reality by shared fantasy” (Mulcaire 1999: 1039). It is ironic that of all movements, realism, with its explicit truth claims and denigration of the imaginary, would make the greatest use of this fantastically transformative power of literature.

In the specific context of Russian literary history the task of depicting the whole man is of course bound up with the notion of the positive hero.[14] It was Chernyshevskii and his followers who would take up Gogol’’s question most forthrightly in subsequent years, namely in their attempts to create self-interested, yet virtuous heroes whose actions were directly beneficial to the whole of Russian society. Dostoevskii’s well-known opposition to such representations, while on one hand demonstrating the great chasm that separates his later political views from his early humanism, nevertheless stems from a similarly internalized look at the inevitable contradictions of modern personality.

NOTES

[1]Goliadkin, states Dostoevskii, “goes mad out of ambition, while at the same time fully despising ambition and even suffering from the fact that he happens to suffer from such nonsense as ambition.” Frank 300.

[2]“Dreams are quite incapable of expressing the alternative either-or; it is their custom to take both members of this alternative into the same context, as though they had an equal right to be there. […] There is not really an alternative in the dream-thoughts, but an and­­­­––a simple addition.” Freud 267.

[3]The history of republicanism in West European thought is well documented in the works of Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock, and others in the Cambridge School of the history of political theory. This essay relies in particular on numerous underlying themes of modernity as formulated by Pocock 1975.

[4]“Trade, without doubt, is in its nature a pernicious thing; it brings in that wealth which introduces luxury; it gives rise to fraud and avarice, and extinguishes virtue and simplicity of manners; it depraves a people, and makes way for that corruption which never fails to end in slavery, foreign or domestic.” Davenant 1771: 275.

[5]See Mulcaire 1999 for a well-argued reformulation of the understanding of the role of public credit, especially in early eighteenth-century British society.

[6]Likewise, his concerns about Petrushka are invariably presented as fears of being “sold out” (prodan). See Dostoevskii 1972: 111, 188. All translations from this text are my own.

[7]On the advent of a “world of moving objects” and its questioning of the constitution of modern personality, see Pocock 1975: 464.

[8]This supremely charged trope is ubiquitous in nineteenth-century literary representation, from Schiller’s “Knight of Toggenburg” to Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Hugo’s Les Miserables, Turgenev’s A Nest of the Gentry, Henry James’ The American, and the list goes on. Dostoevskii began his first published work, Poor Folk, by invoking this image. He would toy with it on more than one occasion in subsequent works, not only in his pre-exile period. It is inverted, for instance, at the conclusion of Crime and Punishment, when Sonya looks up to the hospital window behind which Raskol’nikov is recuperating and understands that her life is now meaningful only as a reflection of his.

[9]Cf., for example, Bakthin 1963: 291-92; Vinogradov 1929: 261-67; and Terras 1969: 206-212.

[10]Hirschman sketches a brief history of “the Idea of Glory and its Downfall” in The Passions and the Interests, 9-12.

[11]I do not wish to claim that this is a trait unique to Russian culture. From Lazarillo de Tormes to Defoe’s Moll Flanders to Le Sage’s adaptations of Guzman de Alfarache and, especially, Gil Blas, one repeatedly witnesses the social and economic rises and falls of individuals through calculating, self-interested, and not always legal, commercial undertakings. However, retarded commercial development in Russia and its artificial freezing by the Soviets meant in practice a preservation and even popularization of certain aristocratic attitudes toward commercial enterprise—what Gogol’’s narrator refers to as that “which the world dubs as not quite clean”—and a shielding of the Russian populace from the dilemmas of modern commercial society. In the socialization of school-age Russians one finds even today a strong suspicion of self-interested motives and a tendency to denigrate the individual who puts “Ia” at the front of the alphabet, instead of where it belongs, at the end. Such suspicion may have passed through and been institutionalized by the Soviet period, but its roots in Russian culture are far deeper than the twentieth century.

[12]For a discussion of Gogol’’s literary models, particularly in relation to Dante, see Maguire 1994: 296-97; and Fanger 1979: 167-68.

[13]Certainly in this Gogolian phase and probably later as well, Dostoevskii believed that art could have such transformative power. The great responsibility such a stand conferred upon the artist, which clashed with the professionalization of literature taking place in this very period, tormented him throughout his creative life. Dostoevskii’s financial straits are well known, though the extent to which he might have unconsciously sabotaged his own financial well being, almost always in connection with his literary endeavors, can of course never be known for certain.

[14]The classic treatment of the expression of politically virtuous behavior in Russian literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remains Mathewson 1958. It generally steers clear of economic history, leaving issues of republican thought in the Russian context untouched.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1963. Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo, 2nd ed. Moscow.

–––––. 1981. “Epic and Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed., Holquist; tr., Holquist and Emerson. Austin.

Dostoevskii, F. M. 1972. Dvoinik. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh; 1. Leningrad.

Bayley, John. 1971. Pushkin: a Comparative Commentary. Cambridge, England.

Davenant, Charles. 1771. “An Essay Upon the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade,” The Political and Commercial Works. London.

Fanger, Donald. 1979. The Creation of Nikolai Gogol’. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Frank, Joseph. 1976. Dostoevskii: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849. Princeton.

Freud, Sigmund. 1955. “The Interpretation of Dreams,” tr. Brill. The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Chicago.

Gogol, Nikolai. 1997. Dead Souls, tr. Pevear and Volokhonsky. New York.

Hirschman, Albert O. 1997. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph. Princeton.

Leighton, Lauren G. 1977. “Numbers and Numerology in ‘The Queen of Spades’” in Canadian Slavonic Papers XIX. 4: 417-43.

Lotman, Jurij M. 1978. “Theme and Plot: The Theme of Cards and the Card Game in Russian Literature of the Nineteenth Century,” Poetics and Theory of Literature 3: 455-92.

Maguire, Robert A. 1994. Exploring Gogol. Stanford.

Mathewson, Rufus W. Jr. 1958. The Positive Hero in Russian Literature. New York.

Morson, Gary Saul. 1992. “Gogol’s Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosaics. Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word, eds. Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer, 200-239. Evanston.

Mulcaire, Terry. 1999. “Public Credit; or, the Feminization of Virtue in the Marketplace,” PMLA, (114) 5: 1029-1042.

Pocock, J.G.A. 1975. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton.

Pushkin, Alexander. 1936. The Captain’s Daughter and Other Stories, tr. T. Keane. New York.

Terras, Victor. 1969. The Young Dostoevskii 1846-1849. The Hague.

Valentino, Russell Scott. 1998. “A Catalogue of Commercialism in Gogol’’s Dead Souls.” Slavic Review (57) 3: 543-562.

Vinogradov, V. V. 1929. Evolutsiia russkogo naturalizma. Leningrad.

Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London.

 

Deliver us

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Just translated and adapted this from the Polish original, which was written by Adam Mickiewicz ca. 1830. It seems pretty appropriate for our time.
 
Almighty God! The children of a democratic nation raise their pretty damn-well armed hands to you from every quarter of the world (some of them just keep inexplicably exiting the country). They cry to you from great plains and snow-capped peaks, from rising waterways and sinking dessicate valleys. By the blood of our people fallen in battles for liberty and justice, deliver us O Lord!
From the profane little hands of fools, deliver us O Lord!
From the darkness of ignorant minds, deliver us O Lord!
From the superficial inanity of wealth without depth of character, deliver us O Lord!
From intolerance and hatred bred of xenophobic fear, deliver us O Lord!
From two-faced reactionary hypocrisy, deliver us O Lord!
From intemperate rhetorical ineptitude, deliver us O Lord!
From silly narcissitic speachifying, deliver us O Lord!
From sexist pus*-grabbing boasters, deliver us O Lord!
Such a visionary that A. M.!