Long Winter Tales
Inspired by Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
You might wonder about my sanity if you knew how I began my winter’s reading three years ago, that second chilled season of pandemic lockdown. Why I decided to reread Crime and Punishment I am unable to reason even to myself. Here I confess that I had the barest recollection of what I’d read six decades earlier in college (English translation, of course), nor did I think that I’d taken away anything substantial or regarding themes of human consciousness, inner torment, deliria, or despair. Likely a literature professor had led a class discussion or put forth a crafty essay exam question, but again I admit to paucity of memory, my mind fading like fog lifting over a lake deep in a Russian forest of burdocks and wild hemp.
So armed with a new copy, I slid into the dark mid-nineteenth century world of Fyodor Dostoevsky with all its wretchedness, suffering, loathsome human creatures crushed by poverty, drunken men cursing and stumbling out of “pothouses that gave of intolerable stench,” wenches forced by circumstance into the city’s district of promiscuity, beatings of wives and children, starving horses dropping dead on the streets. . .
Now the protagonist, Raskolnikov, a former student, bears his life of debt, self-pity, lengthy bouts of illness living in a room so cramped he calls it a closet. With precision he lays way a plot to murder a pawnbroker with an axe and take her money . . . for why should the “dried-up old crone . . . with spiteful little eyes. . . and a long, thin neck which resembles a chicken’s leg” deserve and possess wealth when he believes himself a superior human being.
I suppose you are still wondering why I continued turning this dense dark novel’s near six-hundred pages. Hah! Why didn’t I just go out and purchase several bottles of the finest vodka. . .
No, I plunged into the compelling story, while Dostoevsky, aware of his own psyche, probes the schismatic mind of his anguished young man and births a character, a soul like no other writer in any language had ever before put to words.
At the end Raskolnikov’s “hideous, lost smile forced itself to his lips.” He confesses, “It was I who killed the official’s old widow and her sister.” While closing the tome, I shivered with brutal winter winds on the Steppe, felt the cold fear of huddling on a sledge trapped in a mound of snow as darkness descends.
The evening after turning the last page I opened a newly published book, The Sinner and the Saint, a chance loan from a friend. The timeliness of the loan astonished me. Perhaps it was a meant-to-be addenda, as I continued wading through my self-imposed doldrums. Dostoevsky’s bleak life story and all its bearings on him, interwoven with the why and how he compulsively delved into writing Crime and Punishment, this work adroitly written by historian Kevin Birmingham. As the late hours passed I learned that Dostoevsky suffered severe, debilitating epileptic seizures. Then due to secret meetings with intellectuals to discuss freedoms (unknown in daily Russian life under czarist reigns), he was arrested as a political prisoner and exiled to Siberia. “In summer, intolerable closeness, in winter, unendurable cold,” he journaled. “All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick. . . packed like herrings in a barrel. . .fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel.” Dostoevsky then was sentenced to hard labor. Mindless work indeed. Throughout those years, though, he became fascinated by the enigma of the inner minds of criminals surrounding him, probing their feelings of alienation, doubts, guilt. . . all the while weighing his own thoughts of why and how a man would bring himself to plan and commit a murder. . . how might such a man navigate his everyday life. . .
Upon completing that introspective treatise, I felt bound to dig up an old copy of short stories. Aha! Here was the story master. Anton Chekhov. I’d never read Ward No. 6, which turns out to be a small “God-forsaken” lodge for the mentally ill on the grounds of a hospital. Its roof is rusty, the chimney and front steps rotted. Inside where the pitiful inmates are housed until they die, is the constant sound of “coughing consumptives” and “the stench of soured cabbage.” Tattered, old mattresses are heaped on the floor with dressing gowns, trousers, boots. . . A porter, Nikita, an old soldier, “is always lying around with a pipe between his teeth. He has a grim surly battered-looking face. . . He is short and craggy, but his fists are vigorous. . .” Yes, vigorous at beating the inmates. How Chekhov sets the scene! How he captures the despair and darkness! The protagonist, Andrey Yefimitch Ragin is a disillusioned doctor who visits the ward but also reveals his disdain for its immorality. Slowly, thoughtfully, I follow this beleaguered man’s contradictory philosophies about life’s vexatious traps, myself often feeling that I’m straddling a wobbly path in a life and world of such dim and rapid change. How is it that I taste, relate to such shadowy darkness, I wonder, slowing the turn of pages, looking out the window at the night. How much is this my sole soul? How much my Russian and Romanian ancestry?
“The old country,” we called it, the place from whence came my grandparents. As befitting this complex individual, the doctor sinks into depression, madness, and finally death. Ah such an insightful master storyteller is Chekhov, who brings us the richest of irony, conceiving as well, a microcosm of Russian society of its day. Dear Reader, this was not lost on me in our current fraught time in America. Could my next read have been another meant-to-be, since for my sanity’s sake it was time for a light-hearted book. Only days later a library email informed me that a book I’d reserved before it’s publication date was ready for me at curbside pickup. All About Me by comedian, screen writer, film-maker Mel Brooks. I’m a great fan of comedy. Written with jocularity is the story of his depression-era childhood in Brooklyn, his military service during WWII, his career hits and misses. . . then at the chapter touting his happy accident of successfully ad-libbing a 2,000 year-old character interviewed by comic partner Carl Reiner, I sat alone in my comfortable reading chair and laughed. Out loud. Good. Silly. Laughter.
Carl: This gentleman here is one of the phenomena of the world. He is 2,000 years old. Is that true, Sir?
Mel: You wanna see my driver’s license?
***
Carl: Did you know Shakespeare? He was reputed to be a great writer. He wrote thirty-seven of the greatest plays ever written.
Mel: Thirty-eight.
Carl: Thirty-eight? Only thirty-seven are listed.
Mel: One bombed!
Carl: Actually, it’s never been recorded. What was it?
Mel: Unfortunately, I had money in that play.
Carl: You invested in a Shakespearean play that was a failure?
Mel: He said would you put money in it. I read it up and I said to him, this is a beauty.
Carl: What was the name of it?
Mel: Queen Alexandria and Murray.
Carl: I never heard of it. Did it see the light of day?
Mel: It closed in Egypt!
Hah! From Siberia to the Sublime. That’s all about me, too.