Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels (1955)

Barbara Pym, of all people, reminds us that no one agrees how to spell Dostoevsky. 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.

G. L. Dain, Russian Toys: From the Collection of the Toy Museum of the City of Zagorsk (Moscow: Soviet Russia, 1987).

In one letter to Brod, Kafka acknowledged himself to be Dostoeivsky’s son (blutsverwandter, “blood relative”).

He 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.)

The Trial is his answer to Crime and Punishment, obviously; The Metamorphosis, his answer to The Double.

And you can’t tell me Karamazov Sr. didn’t remind Kafka of his own father. 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.

Their characters seem to inhabit the same dark, miserable universe, confounding and absurd; a place to drive you mad, a place to make you truly question or rage against God.

Who else belongs on this Mt. Olympus? Fernando Pessoa, naturally, patron literary saint of Portugal. Darkness dogged him.

Next to him I would add Sadegh Hedayat – whose name, like FD, also experiences some variations in spelling. The Persian transliteration including diacritics is fun: Ṣâdeq Hedâyat. Somes you get Sadegh-e, very Persian. And, more brutal to my eyes, the French Sadek.

And, I would argue, you could actually place Barbara Pym in this constellation, too. There are dark hidden elements of her cozy mid-century village comedies of manners. I intend to explore this topic next.

“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. That is my belief.”

Kafka, Franz. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.

Some context: this quote – now endlessly circulating the drain of the internet – originates from Kafka’s 1904 letter to friend Oskar Pollak. Pollak was a fellow student at Charles University. His specialty was Baroque art & 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.