The Book of Lost Books (35 page)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

{1821–1881}

“LIKE A RAT, slithering along in hate” was D. H. Lawrence's verdict on the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Hatred did indeed motivate the author: hatred of socialists, anarchists, the corrupt aristocracy, the feckless peasants, Germans, Jews, the French (“they make me sick”), himself, the gaming tables of Baden-Baden, the “Baal” of London, Turgenev, publishers, critics, the complacent, and the radicals. “Let the nihilists and Westerners scream that I am a
reactionary
!” he boasted in the 1870s.

Yet this was the man who, in 1849, had stood before a firing squad, fully expecting to be shot for sedition. The sentence was commuted to four years' imprisonment in Siberia, followed by four years as a private soldier: the whole ritual of blindfolding and waiting was part of an elaborate state ritual designed to bring the condemned to the brink of execution, before the tsar's benevolence exiled them to the wastes of Omsk.

At the time of the capital-punishment charade, Dostoyevsky was a minor, but not unimportant, writer. His debut work,
Poor Folk
(1846), had caused quite a stir. The poet Nikolai Nekrasov had read the manuscript, and dashed to see the eminent critic Vissarion Belinsky, whose imprimatur guaranteed a book's success. Nekrasov lauded the appearance of “a new Gogol,” to which Belinsky retorted, “Gogols sprout like mushrooms in your imagination.” The arch cultural arbiter, however, was won over, and praised the young novelist who had shown the garret-dwelling underclass to the pampered bourgeoisie, saying, “These men too are your brothers.”

Belinsky was to be tangentially responsible for Dostoyevsky's Siberian incarceration. In 1847, the increasingly unstable Nikolai Gogol had shocked his friends and admirers by publishing an almost lunatic justification of tsarist autarchy,
Selected Passages from Correspondence with
Friends.
Belinsky had responded with the so-called Gogol letter, condemning it as an “inflated and sluttish hullabaloo of words and phrases.” The censors acted quickly, and it became a crime to distribute the “felonious missive.”

Dostoyevsky was, at this juncture in his life, an ardent acolyte of Belinsky's socialism and an uncommitted observer of his atheism; he was also involved with the Fourierist “Petrashevsky circle.” He was arrested, charged with “orally disseminating” and “failing to report the dissemination of” Belinsky's letter. In the harsh conditions of his penal sentence in Siberia, Dostoyevsky's views took a swerve similar to Gogol's. He recanted his former allegiances, and excoriated his former friends. Belinsky was a “dung beetle . . . the shit,” “the most stinking, stupid and shameful phenomenon in Russian life.” It was this new, ultraconservative Dostoyevsky that would go on to write
Crime and Punishment
(1866),
The Idiot
(1868),
The Devils
(1872), and
The Brothers Karamazov
(1880).

After his release, Dostoyevsky's attempts to reenter literary life trapped him in a spiraling morass of debts and creditors. With his brother, Mikhail, he started a magazine,
Vremya
(
Time
), which serialized the novelization of his Siberian experience,
Memoirs from the House of the
Dead.
Arguments with the censors forced the closure of
Vremya,
and the brothers started another journal,
Epokha
(
Epoch
). The death of Mikhail in 1864 not only left the periodical without a safe pair of financial hands, it left his brother with the responsibility for supporting Mikhail's wife and children as well. Despite a grant from the Society for Assisting Needy Authors and Scholars, Dostoyevsky became entrapped by the unprincipled publisher Stellovsky, who had bought up his outstanding IOUs and strong-armed him into a decidedly inequitable contract.

Stellovsky had demanded a new work of at least 160 pages, by November 1866, which if not delivered would result in the forfeiture of copyrights on all writings past, present, and future. Dostoyevsky did not wish to hand over his work in progress,
Crime and Punishment,
and engaged a secretary to take dictation of what would become
The Gambler
for Stellovsky. At the same time, he was attempting to raise sufficient funds to quit Russia, and was consequently hawking a new novel,
The Drunkards,
around the editors of
Homeland Notes
and
The Russian Herald,
with a price tag of three thousand roubles. Neither was interested. Perhaps the meager conditions of the Siberian camp had taught Dostoyevsky how to cannibalize and recycle even ideas.
The Drunkards,
and its antihero Marmeladov, became incorporated into
Crime and Punishment.
As he fell in love with his stenographer Anna, and completed both
The Gambler
and
Crime and Punishment,
he prepared to escape with her from St. Petersburg.

Their married life in Continental Europe bounced from city to city like a roulette ball jumping the numbers. Apart from working on an essay on Belinsky, which never saw the light of day, Dostoyevsky plotted continually for a grand novel that would settle scores with his enemies and his former selves. In 1868 it was called
Atheism,
about a forty-five-year-old civil servant who loses his faith in God. “He gets mixed up with the younger generation, the atheists, Slavophils, and Europeans, Russian religious fanatics, monks and priests; gets deeply involved, among others, with a Jesuit propagandist, a Pole; sinks as low as the sect of flagellants and in the end—regains his faith in Christ as well as in Russia,” he wrote to the poet A. N. Maykov. “For God's sake don't tell anyone about it: so far as I am concerned, I am going to write this last novel if it kills me.” Elements of
Atheism
were eventually grafted into the character of Stavrogin in
The Devils.
But, he told his niece, he could not write
Atheism
in Europe.

By 1870 the masterpiece was to be called
The Life of a Great Sinner,
and would be “as long as
War and Peace.
” Dostoyevsky conceived of the work in three, then five interrelated but discrete novellas. The sinner was to be an illegitimate child, brought up by grandparents, whose noble family was “degenerate to the point of swinishness.” He detests the moral aberration of his kin, and is drawn to two individuals: a beatific crippled girl called Katya, whom he forces to worship him, and a family retainer, Kulikov, a member of the self-whipping Khristy sect. The first volume ended with the “wolf-child, nihilist” murdering a notorious brigand.

The second volume, after his confession, was set in a monastery school. There, the sinner befriends Albert, with whom he desecrates icons but whom he beats for blaspheming, and the debauched Lambert, whom Dostoyevsky scavenged into
A Raw Youth
(1875), as well as being influenced by a character based on the Russian mystic Tikhon Zadonsky, later transformed into Father Zossima in
The Brothers Karamazov.
The sinner would, by the last volumes, become an ascetic, be tempted by suicide, and be the founder of an orphanage.

The Life of a Great Sinner
was variously renamed
The Forties, A Russian Candide, A Book of Christ,
and
Disorder.

The whole idea of the novel is to show that universal disorder now reigns everywhere in society, in its affairs, in its leading ideas (which for that reason do not exist), in its convictions (which do not exist, either), in the disintegration of family life. If passionate convictions do exist, they are only destructive ones (socialism). There are no moral ideas left.

All these hypothetical novels would be synthesized into
The Brothers
Karamazov,
a work as equally indebted to the falsely convicted parricide Dostoyevsky had met during his time in Siberia. Even that is an incomplete manifestation of the book he was trying to write.

The introduction to
The Brothers Karamazov
makes clear that we are learning the vast background, the inherited and acquired traits of a new kind of novelistic hero. “The trouble is,” he wrote,

that while I am dealing with one biography, I have two novels on my hands. The main novel is the second one—it deals with the activity of my hero in our own day . . . The action of the first novel, on the other hand, takes place thirteen years ago and is not really a novel but just a chapter out of my hero's adolescence. It is quite impossible for me to dispense with the first novel because without it a great deal in the second novel would be unintelligible.

The Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich recorded what a journalist, Alexei Suvorin, maintained the second volume would have involved. The central character was the saintly Alyosha Karamazov, younger brother to the atheist writer Ivan, the dissolute but endearing Dmitry, and the murderous half-brother Smerdyakov. “It seems to you that in my last novel,
The Brothers Karamazov,
there was much that was prophetic. But wait for the continuation. In it, Alyosha will leave the monastery and become an anarchist. And my pure Alyosha will kill the Tsar!”

Dostoyevsky died on January 28, 1881. At the end of February 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated.

Sir Richard Burton

{1821–1890}

WITNESSING CANNIBALISM WAS one of the few ambitions Sir Richard Burton failed to satisfy. As an explorer, author, intelligence agent, and diplomat, he had chalked up an astonishing number of firsts, and an equally honorable number of bizarre near-misses. He was the first European to perform the hajj, the ritual pilgrimage from Medina to Mecca, disguised as a practicing Muslim. He discovered the Great Lakes in the interior of Africa, though, through illness, he did not succeed in locating the source of the Nile. He studied Mormons in Salt Lake City, and met the religion's own St. Paul, Brigham Young. He toured the battlefields of Paraguay after the disastrous war waged by Francisco López and his mistress Eliza Lynch.

He was the first Christian to enter the Ethiopian Islamic stronghold of Harar, which was forbidden to outsiders, and, with his redoubtable wife, Isabel, he reached the city of Palmyra without the help of the Bedouins who controlled the routes. During an ambush in Somaliland, a spear was thrust through his cheeks. Burton's search for gold in the Midian failed, though if he had been looking for oil he would have become a rich man. Similarly, during his consulship in West Africa, he failed to appreciate the pecuniary potential in an “exceptionally sweet” drink combining water and kola nuts, though he did patent a beverage called “Captain Burton's Tonic Bitters.”

His peregrinations were distilled into a remarkable literary oeuvre, comprising geography, ethnology, anthropology, poetry, swordsmanship, translation, satire, and a complete, unexpurgated, and annotated edition of
The Arabian Nights
in sixteen volumes. He mastered over twenty languages as well as countless local dialects, wrote definitively on the Portuguese poet Camoëns, and published forty-seven works in his lifetime, followed by several posthumous volumes.

Physically courageous and intellectually daunting, he should have been a Boy's Own hero, but a sticky film of innuendo and rumor clung to his reputation, and not without cause. Burton never suffered fools gladly, and his indiscreet criticisms of imperial policy in the Indian subcontinent and Africa earned him the disapprobation of his superiors. He was arrogant, ambitious, and fond of bitingly sarcastic reproaches. Perhaps most damaging for his hopes of advancement, his insatiable curiosity extended into the realms of the erotic.

As a young soldier in Karachi, with a proven flair for languages and an unparalleled ability to pass himself off as a native, he was asked by Sir Charles Napier to prepare a confidential report on alleged homosexual brothels. The resulting document was authoritative to a shocking degree, sparing the reader no detail about the relative practices of eunuchs, pederasts, and catamites. Although the report was supposed to be destroyed, it was skimmed by the eyes of Napier's successor as governor of Sindh, the civilian R. K. Pringle, who was so shocked he forwarded the document to the authorities, recommending that Burton be immediately dismissed.

The actual report has never resurfaced in the annals of bureaucracy, but the beginnings of Burton's notoriety as a Byronic libertine were established. Furthermore, his successful impersonation of a Muslim pilgrim led to persistent rumors that he had actually converted, and that he harbored a deep animosity, not only to missionaries, but to the Christian religion in general.

Burton, half-jokingly, later claimed that he had broken every one of the Ten Commandments. That any respectable Victorian woman would marry the infamous Burton was unlikely: that an ardent Roman Catholic girl from an aristocratic family would elope to do so is even more surprising. Isabel Arundell had been in love with Burton since she had met him at the age of nineteen, and bolstered by a gypsy prophecy that she would marry a Burton, she turned down countless suitors, flew in the face of her mother's protestations, and ran off with him.

Isabel, in many ways, was the ideal companion. She combined self-will and submissiveness to an extraordinary degree. Having singlemindedly won her man, she then advised future brides to tolerate everything. In a phrase rich with metaphorical possibilities, she counseled them to let their husbands smoke at home, since they would assuredly find someplace else to, should it be frowned upon. She shocked guests by wearing trousers, and accompanied Burton on some of his most dangerous escapades. Unstintingly loyal, she acted as his literary agent and harangued lukewarm reviewers. It was only after his death that erstwhile lifelong friends launched a cacophony of animosity against her. After her own death, numerous biographers colluded in depicting her as an unfit, inferior partner.

Richard Burton made Isabel his literary executrix in the year of his death. He had already published his translation of the
Kama Sutra
and the explicit commentary on sexual behavior that accompanied
The Tales
of 1001 Nights.
Both of them were aware of the levels of censorious prudery in late Victorian society: the
Edinburgh Review,
in its notice of Burton's
1001 Nights,
compared rival translations and declared, “Galland is for the nursery, Lane for the study and Burton for the sewers.”

Burton's attitude was one of frustrated defiance. If he was prosecuted for obscenity, he intended to arrive at court with the Bible, Shakespeare, and Rabelais and ask how much of those works was to be suppressed. A vein of utter devilry runs through some of his correspondence. When working on a study of the geographical limits in which sodomy was permissible, he hoped that “Mrs. Grundy”—the personification of nineteenth-century puritanism—would “howl on her big bum to her heart's content.”

Isabel had always been more cautious. She had prepared a bowdlerized version of the
1001 Nights,
dedicated “To the Women of England,” and her frequent defenses of Burton's views became the targets for gleefully malicious reviewers. Nonetheless, before he died, Burton trusted her with his extant manuscripts and prepared an inventory of what was to be burned.

In later years, the myth of Lady Burton's embittered and ignorant act of arson would be elevated to the status of fact. The poet Swinburne, who had admired Isabel as a wife, would refer to her as a harpy when she was a widow, his vitriol exacerbated by the fact that she had arranged for her unconscious, agnostic husband to be given extreme unction. Isabel Burton did burn some papers, most notably the entire 1,200 pages of his translation of the Arabic erotic classic
The Scented Garden.
Burton had previously written a version based on French translations, entitled
The
Perfumed Garden,
and had been engaged in an edition from the original language at the time of his death.

Isabel did, however, prepare various posthumous works for publication. When news of the destruction of
The Scented Garden
broke, rumors started that Isabel had actually secreted the manuscript in her husband's crypt. Unscrupulous publishers kept hinting that they had access to another copy, which would shortly appear, alongside other works “by” Burton. In light of the difficulties of managing the estate and fending off unauthorized or counterfeit editions, her own will stipulated that everything should be burned: her papers, her manuscripts, his unpublished works, his remnants. It was not wholly successful: a work that Burton had wanted destroyed—an essay on a mysterious Arabian sect of Jews who supposedly performed human sacrifices—appeared after Isabel's death.

It was following Isabel's, not Richard's, death that the real literary cremation took place. Burton's journals from 1872 to 1890, alongside her own teenage diaries; their letters; his unfinished manuscripts on the lowlands of Brazil and North, Central, and South America; Syrian proverbs; notes on the eunuch trade; translations of Ovid, Ausonius, and Ariosto; studies of polygamy: all were erased. Isabel had already destroyed her own book
The Sixth Sense.
It was not out of spite, but out of love, that she had ever burned anything at all. Had their correspondence alone been spared, the speculation about the relationship between these two remarkable and devoted people would have been instantly stilled.

But her detractors had done their job well, and Isabel would be blamed for the pyre in subsequent biographies. Few would mention that Burton had already lost a lot of unpublished material during a warehouse fire in 1860. Among those papers was one study that might have proved more interesting than yet more erotological investigations. As a soldier in Karachi, Burton had kept forty monkeys in a house, and was attempting to use his formidable literary abilities to understand their language. The results of this experiment—a vocabulary of sixty words—were lost thirty-six years before the more conspicuous conflagration.