Picked-Up Pieces (21 page)

D
ISCOURSE ON
T
HINKING
, by Martin Heidegger, translated from the German by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. 93 pp. Harper & Row, 1966.

A small book, of which nearly half is occupied by a not very helpful introduction. The other half consists of a “Memorial Address” delivered by Heidegger in honor of the German composer Conradin Kreutzer, and a trialogue between a scientist, a scholar, and a teacher entitled “Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking.” The address, with a certain donnish orotundity, lucidly sets forth the propositions that there are two kinds of thinking—calculative and meditative—and that amid the technological triumphs of calculative thinking man must survive as a meditative being. This he can do by saying both yes and no to technology, the yes being a “releasement toward things” and the no a continuing “openness to the mystery.” These concepts are developed into total obscurity by the “Conversation,” whose English version abounds in possibly precise but gritty equivalents like “re-present,” “autochthonic,” and “that-which-regions.” Meditative thinking is explained as “the coming-into-the-nearness of distance,” and our human position as a kind of holy “waiting”—“The relation to that-which-regions is waiting.” And “That-which-regions [
die Gegnet
in German] is an abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens itself, so that in it openness is halted and held, letting everything merge in its own resting.” What emerges is a humanism tied to a mysticism shorn of theology; the final coalescence of meaning is a metaphor of the night that, without seam or thread, binds the distant stars together in apparent nearness. The rarefied poetry of the discourse is made eerie by our knowledge that it was based on
a conversation that really occurred, within Germany, in 1944–1945, when the anvils of Hitler’s hell were beating loudest.

T
HE
H
EART
P
REPARED
:
Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life
, by Norman Pettit. 252 pp. Yale, 1966.

This finely written and beautifully printed study of post-Reformation theological niceties doubles as an analysis of the infant American psyche. Zwingli and Calvin held that man in his utter depravity “could neither anticipate salvation nor look to the inner self for signs of regeneration.” The English founders of Puritanism tentatively qualified the severity of predestinarian doctrine with suggestions that the heart, however unworthy, might predispose or prepare itself for the invasion of saving grace. In the theocratic communities of New England, a proclaimed inner experience of conversion became a criterion for church membership, and the “grappling with the heart” developed, notably in the discourses of Thomas Hooker, of Hartford, into a veritable poetics of introspection. Preparationism, never without its opponents, eventually succumbed to a reasserted Calvinism and to the practical problems of church enrollment, but its experiential emphasis remains a feature of American religious revivals and perhaps accounts for a Pelagian bias in our spiritual heritage. Dr. Pettit, though he traces the image of the prepared heart down to its final diffusion in Emerson, leaves to implication the present relevance of his thesis. His approach is strikingly concrete and, dealing with quibbles that might seem quaint, convincingly serious. In a prose whose clarity belies the volumes of cobwebbed tracts he has suffered through, he renders penumbral nuances of theology distinct, gives personality to a dozen divines, and somewhat sweetens our impression of the Puritan tenets.

DOSTOEVSKY

T
HE
A
DOLESCENT
, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew. 585 pp. Doubleday, 1971.

Why a new translation? And, if a new translation, why of this novel? Written between
The Possessed
and
The Brothers Karamazov, The Adolescent
(entitled
A Raw Youth
in the 1916 translation by Constance Garnett) possesses the greatness of neither. The novel, though it bears many marks of Dostoevsky’s devotion, and definitively enunciates some of the themes dearest to him, has that penetrating badness that casts doubt over even the peaks of an author’s accomplishment—as, say,
Across the River and into the Trees
drained magic from
all
of Hemingway’s headwaiters and undermined forever the consolations of café stoicism. In
The Adolescent
the frequent feverishness of Dostoevsky’s characters appears compulsory and their willful, self-careless perversity seems merely automatic, an author’s trick he employs in scene after scene. For once, the elements of Dostoevsky’s fictional universe—the fantastically compressed action, the stunning tirades, the melodramatic welter of coincidences and encounters and incriminating documents and postponed revelations—fail to fuse into a fiery whole. Rather, a string of firecrackers goes off, some louder than others, and some so damply we turn back the pages to catch what we missed. Four novels, Dostoevsky once told his wife, fight for attention within the covers of this one; his original instinct, Mr. MacAndrew tells us in his lengthy and gossipy introduction, was to entitle the book “Disorder.”

The hero is a young bastard, Arkady Dolgoruky. Unlike some of Dostoevsky’s first-person narrators, Arkady does not conveniently vanish when the action becomes heated, but wears out several pairs of boots rushing around St. Petersburg to keep eavesdropping appointments and wears out our ears with expostulations over the difficulties of maintaining a narrative so tangled. His voice and psyche, however, are the strongest thing in the novel: a “raw youth’s” passion for exploration and posturing and humiliation have rarely been more indulgently dramatized. Arkady aside, the characters seem inferior copies of characters met in the other novels—Versilov a more trivial Stavrogin, Katarina a feeble sister of
The Idiot
’s Nastasia, Makar a preliminary study for Father Zosima. The plot, on a circumstantial level, absurdly revolves around a slightly embarrassing letter that rides out six hundred pages in Arkady’s coat pocket; on a thematic level, it gropes toward secrets of parenthood and kinship that are firmly seized in the next novel,
The Brothers Karamazov
.

Why this novel? Perhaps, though Mr. MacAndrew does not say so, he felt it to be especially appropriate to America’s present condition of self-doubt and generational estrangement. Here is the Russia of the 1870’s:

Sound familiar? Yes, but I doubt that a majority of Americans will embrace Dostoevsky’s solution: “any order as long as it is our native one.”

And why a new translation? Presumably because the old one, by the tireless Mrs. Garnett, was judged to be improvable. I have compared passages of Garnett vs. MacAndrew, and read the last third of the novel in alternate chapters from each; and my impression is that more has been lost than has been gained. Mr. MacAndrew’s modern idiom does very well with the jerks and halts of interior monologue, and occasionally captures a precision where Mrs. Garnett either flunked the Russian or held to a Victorian middle style—“as though pouring his words
through a funnel” betters “dropping out his words one by one”; “crush him until there’s only a wet spot left behind” outcruels “pound him to a jelly.” But more often the precision is on Garnett’s side: “worldwide compassion for all” pales to “universal concern”; “she was now evil” simpers as “she was not a nice person.” MacAndrew drops the patronymics, which may save some confusion but sacrifices a peculiar warmth of Russian novels, and when terms of endearment are employed he is almost helpless. Where Garnett’s phrasing is moving, his is often blank tin: “They rejoiced, like birds, did not feel their ruin, and their voices were like little bells” becomes in MacAndrew’s version, “They’re happy like little birds and their voices sound like jingle bells.” And surprisingly, the modern translator shows less feel for the philosophic checkpoints of the novel: the key concept that Garnett imaginatively renders as “seemliness” is blandly presented by MacAndrew as “beauty,” in quotation marks. The most famous sentence in
A Raw Youth—

comes out all muddled and adverbial in MacAndrew’s version—

Even the title feels wrong. MacAndrew has Arkady as nineteen, Garnett as twenty years old: either way, he is too old to be an “adolescent.” In general, two translators being more or less competent, the one closer in time to the original is apt to be better, more instinctively sharing the author’s universe. Manners and moral concerns become distant and take language with them. The characters in the Garnett translation behave bizarrely, but as foreigners do. In MacAndrew’s translation they are bizarre like figures in a dream.

T
HE
G
AMBLER
, by Fyodor Dostoevski, with Polina Suslova’s Diary, translated by Victor Terras. 366 pp. University of Chicago Press, 1972.

The University of Chicago Press, which has issued, under the editorship of Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky’s notebooks for his five major novels, has extended this valuable series with a new, complexly augmented translation of the short novel
The Gambler
. The augmentations include: letters from Dostoevsky during the hectic period of his life when he was obsessed by gambling, debts, his dying wife, his dying brother, and Polina Suslova; the diary of this same Polina Suslova, who is described by the normally unemphatic
Encyclopaedia Britannica
as a “young woman of sensual, proud, and ‘demoniac’ character” and who is often cited by critics as a prototype for the perverse and taunting Dostoevsky heroines; and a short story by her about a love affair between “Losnitsky” and “Anna.” This bundle of interrelated materials is intelligently edited and fluently translated, though I blinked at the exclamation “Wow!!!”—the Garnett translation has “What!!!”—and regretted that the proofreaders allowed one doubled slug to slip through. And I would have been grateful for a little factual background to Polina’s diary, “published here in English for the first time.” Why does it begin and end so conveniently and abruptly, August 19, 1863, to November 6, 1865, in effect bracketing the European phase of her affair with Dostoevsky? Did she keep a diary only then? And the chronology of this affair is not set forward as clearly as it is in, say, Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s biography.

Polina and Dostoevsky probably met, in Petersburg, before September of 1861, when a story of hers appeared in
Vremya
(
Time
), which he edited. He was forty; she was little more than half his age. They became friends and, by the time she was twenty-three, lovers. He kept the secret from his wife and made no offer to divorce her, which may have offended Polina. However, she went to Paris in the spring of 1863 with the understanding that Dostoevsky would join her there and that they would travel together in Italy. A tangle of business generated by the government’s suppression of his magazine held him in Petersburg until mid-August, and en route to his mistress he stopped off at Wiesbaden and
Baden-Baden to gamble—first winning, then losing. By the time he arrived in Paris, Polina had been captivated, seduced, and abandoned by Salvador, a young South American medical student, who did not love her. Dostoevsky quickly adjusted to this new embarrassment and proposed that he and Polina travel to Italy anyway, not as lovers but “remaining like brother and sister.” Thus uneasily attached, they toured for two months; then Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg, to write
Notes from the Underground
and most of
Crime and Punishment
. He did not see Polina until nearly two years later, in the summer of 1865, in Wiesbaden. Though his wife (Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, a she-devil in her own right) had died in the interim, the affair did not prosper. In the few days he and Polina were together, Dostoevsky lost his last kopeck at roulette, and proved no luckier at love. The reunion didn’t rate a line in her diary, though it did elicit from him two frantic but amiable letters to her, postage due, begging for a hundred and fifty gulden. Their final encounters occurred that fall and winter, in Petersburg, to which Polina returned in November; “he has been offering me his hand and his heart,” Polina wrote, “and he only makes me angry doing so.” She departed three months later. He finished
Crime and Punishment
and in October of 1866 dictated
The Gambler
to a competent, patient, and smitten young stenographer, Anna Snitkina. Dostoevsky married Anna in February of 1867, and that spring, in response to a letter from Polina, informed her of his marriage and added, “
Au revoir
, my good friend forever!” He and Polina did not—if one discounts a romantic story Dostoevsky’s daughter tells of a “woman in black” who called on her father in the late seventies—meet again.