Dostoevsky, Visconti (and Bhansali)

Sanjay Leela Bhansali's new film Saawariya is reportedly based on a story by Dostoevsky. I have nothing to say about the film and I am not very excited about its release either. Other than the usual complaints, it will no doubt add yet another episode in the long tradition of endogamy that has become a peculiar tradition of Bollywood. (Both the leads are sons and daughters of yesteryear's stars.)

Anyway a few words about the short story in question. It is one of his early works and would be quite obscure had it not been adapted by two of Europe's greatest film directors - Robert Bresson and Luchino Visconti. (That must surely be where Bhansali got his idea from too in the first place.) I haven't seen Bresson's film which is called Four Nights of a Dreamer but did see Visconti's La Notti Bianche (White Nights) with Marcello Mastroianni in the lead a while back. A few words about the film later.

Coming to the Dostoevsky's story, it is called White Nights with the subtitle informing what it is about - "A sentimental love story from the diary of a dreamer." White Nights of the title refers to the twilight nights in the summers of St. Petersberg. (I am not well informed on these astronomical matters so I will just point to the wikipedia article.) The story is told through the diary of the narrator and is set in these four consecutive nights. The narrator of the story, who remains unnamed throughout, is a character type who will be familiar to readers of Dostoevsky - a hyper self-conscious dreamer and a romantic who is also painfully aware of his own ridiculousness. (At one point in novel he thinks he is behaving like the hero of some two-penny "Russian society novel.") In this he is yet another example of superfluous man. On one of his routine lonely wanderings through the streets of St. Petersburg he runs into an equally lonely and desperate young girl. They soon strike up a tentative friendship based on mutual understanding. (There is a bravura monologue in the "second night" chapter where he explains why he is uncomfortable having any visitors - a fantastic portrait of an alienated soul.) The narrator naturally sees a glimmer of hope but the girl explains to him that she is actually waiting for her lover (played by the great Salman Khan in the Bhansali film) who left her a year ago promising to come back again if his business deal or something goes fine in Moscow. The day of meeting has already passed and he hasn't yet showed up. There is a suspense in the story - whether he will come back or not and some familiar cliches of love triangle - before it ends on a slightly lachrymose note. It is a subject that Dostoevsky returned back to later, in his more well-known masterpiece "Notes from Underground." It makes you a little uncomfortable once you realize that the nice young hero would turn into someone like the underground man with the passage of time.



Visconti's film is a faithful adaptation of the story, thought it enhances the dreaminess and romanticism of the story with the lighting and the way sets are designed. He also changes the setting to winter and adds a character of the prostitute (played by the great Rani Mukherjee in the Bhansali film I think, another evidence that it is not perhaps a direct adaptation but rather a copy). Mastrioanni and the actress who plays the girl are both very good. It is also an interesting film in Visconti's own career. He was one of the pioneers of Italian neo-realism and made his name by directing gritty and stark melodramas about working class people like Ossessione and La Terra Trema. This film also tries to capture the life of the working class people but the style here is radically different. One can't call it artificial though, only its approach to cinematic truth is different. Visconti later went on to make Senso (which Martin Scorsese likes very much) and The Leopard, none of which I have seen yet.

The film misses one vital element of the story - the alienating effect of the city life, specially the effect of such an "artificial city" as St. Petersburg (as the Underground Man calls it). In his writings Dostoevsky anticipated a lot of themes and subjects of modernist European literature - specially their treatment of city life and how romanticism and excessive self-consciousness turns so easily into psychosis in the modern industrial and post-industrial cities. This particular story is nowhere near Notes from Underground but it does point in the same direction. I was hoping the Visconti film would get into these subjects too but it is instead more concerned with the romantic drama of the two principals.

You can read the whole story in the translation by Constance Garnett here. It is also available in this collection by modern library. More information about La Notti Bianche here.

Two of my other favourite Italian films with Notte in the title - La Notte by Antonioni and Le Notti di Cabiria by Fellini.

Ivan Turgenev: A Fire at Sea

One of the many hilarious parts (in an otherwise extremely dark novel) Dostoevsky's The Possessed is the satirical caricature of the character Karmazinov. Dostoevsky portrays him as a self-obsessed and pompous narcissist, given to naive and affected poetry and delusions of grandeur. Here's one example where the narrator discusses an article of his:

A year before, I had read an article of his in a review, written with an immense affectation of naive poetry, and psychology too. He described the wreck of some steamer on the English coast, of which he had been the witness, and how he had seen the drowning people saved, and the dead bodies brought ashore. All this rather long and verbose article was written solely with the object of self-display. One seemed to read between the lines: “Concentrate yourselves on me. Behold what I was like at those moments. What are the sea, the storm, the rocks, the splinters of wrecked ships to you? I have described all that sufficiently to you with my mighty pen. Why look at that drowned woman with the dead child in her dead arms? Look rather at me, see how I was unable to bear that sight and turned away from it. Here I stood with my back to it; here I was horrified and could not bring myself to look; I blinked my eyes—isn't that interesting?”

It is well known that Dostoevsky based this character on the real life model of Turgenev, with whom he had difficult relations. He also based the above description on a real life incident that happened to Turgenev. It happened when he was nineteen and going to the university of Berlin to continue his studies in philosophy. On the way the steamer caught fire and was completely destroyed. Most of the passengers escaped unhurt, among them Turgenev. But his behavior became a cause of lot of rumour mongering. Isaiah Berlin, in the introduction to the piece that Turgenev wrote about the incident when he was on his Death-bed, writes:

According to the stories that circulated in Moscow and St. Petersburg he had completely lost his head, loudly lamented his approaching end, tried to push his way into the lifeboat, brutally shoving aside women and children, and finally, in full sight of the entire company, seized a sailor by the arm and offered him ten thousand roubles in his mother's name if he would save him, saying that he was the only son of a rich widow and could not bear to die so young.

Berlin then describes how writers, journalists and the general Russian literati of the time contributed in keeping the rumour alive by embellishing their versions with more and more details as the fame of Turgenev grew higher and higher. At last when Turgenev was dying he tried to settle the account by giving his version of the events. The short article is quite good, very typical of Turgenev writing, naturalistic and observational, with fits of lyricism at regular intervals. He does mention the offering of roubles episode but in a very self-deprecatingly humorous way. Berlin writes:

At last the memory of a moment's weakness that must (if my hypothesis is correct) have preyed on him for more than forty years was exorcised, turned into literature, rendered innocuous and even delightful. He represents his own conduct as that of an innocent, confused, romantically inclined young man, niether a hero nor a coward, slightly cynical, slightly absurd, but above all amiable, sympathetic and human.

I have started to like Turgenev a lot. Specially after reading First Love, The Torrents of Spring and parts of Hunter's Sketches recently. Also about his life and the unhappy love affair that he was involved in. I had read Fathers and Sons long back and was disappointed to find the overheated style of Crime and Punishment missing in it... I thought all Russian novels were like Crime and Punishment! I want to read it again now.

Dostoevsky in Manhattan

I am currently deep into Dostoevsky's The Possessed (also translated as The Devils and Demons). I had bought the book last year but have managed to get around to reading it only now. It is more than 700 pages long so it requires more than usual level of commitment and intellectual energy to finish it in one go. Looks like I will finally be able to finish it. I am already more than half way through. Will write about it once it is over.

Actually I got interested in reading it after reading some interesting articles about Dostoevsky linking him to the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism. Specially this article by the literary critic James Wood in the guardian. Dostoevsky is certainly the master psychologist revealing how resentment, and other "modern emotions" of envy, rage and impotent hatred manifest themselves in nihilistic violence. And it is indeed intriguing to see people like Mohammed Atta as modern day Underground Men. Here's another review by Wood of a recently published novel of John Updike called Terrorist. Wood says:

The academic and journalistic analysis of terrorism is usually too indulgent of rationality or too indulgent of irrationality: either the terrorist's motives are robustly explicable (the existence of a Jewish state, the American occupation of the lands of the desired Caliphate) or sensationally inexplicable ("but why this young woman with everything to live for set out one morning to commit her dreadful deed will never be properly understood. ..."). Such work tends to founder precisely on the unimaginable--on the margin of irrational rationality that seems to lurk in the decision to blow up oneself and many others.

It is quite true in fact. You can't dismiss the religious terrorism as a result of stupid intellectual confusion. They do make some rational sense in the mind of their perpetrators and not in the straightforwad causal sense. Dostoesvky and Conrad (whose Secret Agent I have not read) do seem to understand how that rationalization takes place in the minds of those people rather well.

Another book that had created some news some time back was Dostoevsky in Manhattan written by a french philosopher Andrea Glucksmann. I don't think there is an English version of the book yet. There is an interesting interview with the author though. Link here. He says:

Actually, the beautiful thing about Stavrogin is that you don’t really know him. You don’t know if he believes in God or not. In the end, what surprised me was to find that he is a little like bin Laden; he might be very cynical, or fanatical, nobody really knows.

The inner nature of this nihilistic terrorism is that everything is permissible, whether because God exists and I am his representative, or because God does not exist and I take his place. That is what I find so impressive about Dostoevsky: he is a secret, a riddle.

I am still in the middle of the book but I don't think I would agree with this Bin Laden comparison. In a way Bin Laden is a revolutionary too, fighting for an ideal, and willing to go to any lengths for that absolute ideal but still it just doesn't feel right.

Anyway, here is another article by Slavoj Zizek in which he says that Dostoevsky might be right in his diagnosis of nihilism but his prescription of countering with a dose of Christianism just won't work today. He says:

FOR centuries, we have been told that without religion we are no more than egotistic animals fighting for our share, our only morality that of a pack of wolves; only religion, it is said, can elevate us to a higher spiritual level. Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow. What about restoring the dignity of atheism, one of Europe's greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for peace?

Milan Kundera, Dostoevsky and Sentimentality

The New York Times Book Review archive is a treasure trove. They have made all of their book reviews since 1981 public and they are easily searchable online. So whenever I am getting bored I type in some name in the search bar and lo and behold, I get to read some very well written and informative review of authors and books I love. The reviews are also reasonably middle-brow, which suits amateurs like me.

So I think I was looking for some article on Tristram Shandy and I found this essay by Milan Kundera which he wrote as an introduction to his stage adaptation of the Eighteenth century French novel Jacques the Fatalist by Diderot, a book which I have not read. There are many insightful observations in it about the history of the novel and what the purpose of art should be but what intrigued me was what he had to say about Dostoevsky and sentimentality. He has written about the evils of kitsch and sentimentality eloquently in his novels The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality and others. But here he makes even greater claims. He says:

"Man cannot do without feelings, but the moment they are considered values in themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for kinds of behavior, they become frightening. The noblest of national sentiments stand ready to justify the greatest of horrors, and man, his breast swelling with lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the sacred name of love. When feelings supplant rational thought, they become the basis for an absence of understanding, for intolerance."

He then, rather surprisingly, goes on to criticise Russians (Kundera had to flee from his country after the Russian invasion of Prague) and particularly Dostoevsky for living in the middle ages and being sentimental.

"What irritated me about Dostoevsky was the climate of his novels: a universe where everything turns into feeling; in other words, where feelings are promoted to the rank of value and of truth."

There are a few problems which I find with Kundera's assertions. First, while it is true that many of the Dostoevky's characters are sentimental, this is not specific to Dostoevky. The poor and miserable drunkards that we find in so many Russian novels are not artificial creatures created to manipulate readers into submission but rather, they are true Russian types. Perhaps it was Gogol who created the first in his classic short story The Overcoat.

Also calling him "medieval" is definitely wrong. Perhaps no one understood the contradictions between the modernistic ideas of progress based on science and rationality and the essential nature of human soul, better than Dostoevky. At many places in his novels there are explicit references to Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin and the utilitarian economists like Bentham and Mill whose ideas form the basis of the modern conceptions of man and his place in society. Notes from Underground is actually a response to the Russian writer Chernyshevsky who popularized the utilitarian philosophy in Russia. Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Possessed (I haven't read it so far) and The Brothers Karamazov (specially the final court scenes) are prophetic critiques of the utopian experiments that resulted in most of the horrors of last century, which in fact also forced Kundera to live a life of exile. Dostoevsky's solutions ("return to the church, respect the patriarchal authority of Czar") were perhaps medievalistic, yes. But that's what makes his whole vision of human condition even more tragic.

Finally, in championing reason Kundera forgets that reason can also (in fact in most cases it does) act as a mask for the will and can lead to the same atrocities that he condemns sentimentality for. There can be no arguing with Kundera that we can never trust feelings as arbiters of ethical behavior but can we trust reason? Nietzsche thought otherwise and so did Dostoevsky. If Nietzsche is considered the most modern of all philosophers, there is no reason why Dostoevsky can not be considered anything but equally modern.

P.S. Found another article in the archives by the Nobel Prize winning Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky who responds to Kudera's arguments, much more eloquently and with far more authority than this humble post of mine. It is long and dense but worth battling through.

Also the "featured author" page of Milan Kundera.

Nabokov's opinions on Dostoevsky are also worth going through. They are funnier!