SCENE II. A room in a castle.
LORD POLONIUS
What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET
Words, words, words.
DOSTOEVSKI | KAFKA | PYM
EXTREMELY COMPACT
My grandmother Dorothy’s copy of Hamlet, which she relied upon in her high school English class. As she has passed on Easter Sunday in this year of our Lord, 2025 (followed shortly thereafter by Pope Francis), I find myself treasuring it especially well.
“It would need the pen of a Dostoievsky to do justice to their dreadful lives.”
Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels (1955)
Barbara Pym, of all people, reminds us that no one agrees how to spell “Dostoievsky.”
Obviously we ought to use Nabokov’s preferred transliteration, Dostoevski, as he was an expert, and an American, and a stickler for that kind of thing.
A DOSTOEVSKI BIBLIOGRAPHY
I would not be the profoundly disturbed individual I am today if I had not read so much Dostoevski. Particularly Notes from a Dead House. It almost makes you want to go to a Siberian prison camp.
I found my copy of Crime and Punishment on a Berkeley sidewalk, looking as though someone had tried to stab a knife through the cover. The Idiot was gifted to me. I purchased the Penguin edition of The Double/Notes From the Underground pictured above many years ago for a summer visit to Kansas, Wichita being a wonderful city for getting some reading done.
Publishers, take note: nothing makes me purchase a book faster than a striking-looking portrait on the cover.
I think many people would be surprised how much a cozy Barbara Pym novel has in common with a really devastating Russian story, like The Gambler, for instance. She has got a lot more Dostoevski and Kafka in her than people realize.
ABOVE: Carved toys from G. L. Dain, Russian Toys: From the Collection of the Toy Museum of the City of Zagorsk (Moscow: Soviet Russia, 1987).
ACT III, SCENE IV. Below the balcony.
CYRANO
Your name rings in my heart like a bell. When I think of you, I tremble, and the bell shakes and rings out your name!
If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Kafka, Franz. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.
LETTER FROM FRANZ TO OSKAR
Some context: the preceding quote – now endlessly circulating the drain of the internet – originates from Kafka’s 1904 letter to friend Oskar Pollak.
Pollak was a friend and fellow student at Charles University. His specialty was Baroque art and architecture (Kafka was learning law). By this time Kafka would have known him for about 4 or 5 years. And the letter would have originally been in German, obviously.
Ein Buch muss die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
They wrote back and forth quite a lot to each other. In one letter to Brod, Kafka acknowledged himself to be Dostoeivsky’s son. The word he uses is blutsverwandter, “blood relative.” And their works seem to run in parallel lines. Kafka has In The Penal Colony, with its sinister apparatus, to answer Notes from a Dead House. I’m sure Dostoyevsky would have been very impressed by the “apparatus” (mechanical torture machine.) The Trial is his answer to Crime and Punishment, obviously; The Metamorphosis, to The Double.
Blutsverwandter: “blut” (blood) and “verwandt” (related). Ein eigentümlicher Apparat: a peculiar apparatus.
ein eigentümlicher Apparat
It is hard to resist comparing the father figures of Karamazov and Hermann Kafka, the way they loom in the imagination.
The astronomical ego, the cruelty and abuse. There’s a chilling, matter-of-fact anecdote Dostoevsky casually drops in about child torture in The Brothers Karamazov; I’m certain Kafka was electrified to discover the brutality and sadism Dostoyevsky was capable of rendering. He probably recognized it very well, and felt seen. I love how their darkness holds a mirror up to itself. And endlessly refracts.
There is only one episode in the early years of which I have a direct memory. You may remember it, too. One night I kept on whimpering for water, not, I am certain, because I was thirsty, but probably partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. After several vigorous threats had failed to have any effect, you took me out of bed, carried me out onto the pavlatche,* and left me there alone for a while in my nightshirt, outside the shut door. I am not going to say that this was wrong—perhaps there was really no other way of getting peace and quiet that night—but I mention it as typical of your methods of bringing up a child and their effect on me. I dare say I was quite obedient afterward at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and then the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other. Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the pavlatche, and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.
*Pavlatche is the Czech word for the long balcony in the inner courtyard of old houses in Prague. (Ed.)
A KAFKA BIBLIOGRAPHY
This bibliography could be longer. I have not got nearly enough books by or about Kafka in my personal collection; I’ve always had to borrow him from the public library.
A BARBARA PYM BIBLIOGRAPHY
I have such a feverish love for Barbara Pym. I love all her ridiculous romances, and thwarted chances, and committed spinsters declining proposals. I love the strange eating, like Bovril , and “boiled chicken smothered in white sauce,” not to mention the unsavouries, such as salad with a caterpillar, cigarette ashes in the baked beans.
The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things…
The trivial pleasures like cooking, one’s home, little poems, especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.
Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels (1955)
The Tempest
ACT I, SCENE II
PROSPERO
Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
A BIBLIOGRAPHER’S BIOGRAPHY
I am pathologically obsessed with books and reading, and as a result of that hold a Bachelor’s degree in English from UC Berkeley. When I’m not at work or at home, I can usually be found at the public library.