I first read Notes from Underground during an incredibly hot summer. It’s a short book but it takes a while to read and reading it made me realize it was exactly what I was looking for and didn’t know how to describe it. Dostoevsky was my first taste of Russian literature and it opened a whole new world for me that led to Nabakov, Bulgakov, and all the great -kovs we know today.
Dostoevsky changed how I wrote, how I perceived things. The way he was able to toy with the reader’s relationship with the Man from Underground was something I had never seen before. He made me feel so strongly in so many different ways about this man – I hated him, I related to him, I thought “I could never possibly live this sad of a life” yet here I was sitting in solitude for days reading about him; he was my life for two weeks.
There is a line in Notes from Underground that I think about constantly to this day; it keeps me up at night.
“‘I’m not keeping you am I?’, I asked after a two-minute silence.”
This one book cleared the dam in my head — I now had to read anything and everything from the small Russian section of my university’s library that I could. Wandering in and out of the shelves led me to Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, an absurd novel that takes place in one room but is one of the most engrossing things I have ever read. It was a summer of living like a hermit — Russian literature and occasional solo outings to bookstores got me through the summer of 2019.
Fast forward a few months later — I’m browsing a thrift store and see a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. It’s been on my list a while but the small size of the text at my university’s library was so daunting that I returned it right after I opened the book. Luckily, the text in this copy was slightly larger and my resistance to tiny text was smaller.
If you’re unfamiliar with Bulgakov’s masterpiece, let me catch you up to speed – it is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov that was published serially and censored in the magazine Moskva long after Bulgakov’s death in 1940. It ran from 1966 to 1967 in the censored form but an uncensored version was floating around via samizdat, the practice of underground literary publishing done to avoid the Soviet censor. The story centers around a writer known only as “The Master” and Satan’s visit to Moscow as Professor Woland along with his crew consisting of a valet, a hitman, a vampire, and a talking cat. The literary world clashes with Satan’s crew in amusing and terrifying ways throughout the book and often pulls from real literary and theater figures at the time located in Moscow that Bulgakov was not too fond of. Bulgakov is no stranger to making fun of his contemporaries incredibly bluntly, you can also find this in his novel, Black Snow, the story of a playwright’s failed suicide attempts after writing a terrible play that ultimately gets accepted by the Independent Theater, which reflects the real-life Moscow art theater, especially Konstantin Stanislavski and his surrounding cohorts.
What is referred to as the “re-capitation” Bengalsky of in The Master and Margarita also serves as the best metaphor for how this all affected me. Georges Benglasky is the master of ceremonies at the Variety Theater where Woland and his entourage perform their devilish feats for an audience. One of these feats is Behemoth the cat decapitating Bengalsky only to reattach his head, leaving him changed for his entire life. Of course, Benglasky’s life is turned into a horrifying screaming infinite hell but I felt this same change of perspective. I had attended my own personal beheading, watched my head removed and reattached, and with my new perspective from my previously unattached head, laughed at the absurdity of the world surrounding me.
One of the aspects of The Master and Margarita which I feel does not get enough attention is the fact that intertwined with all the fantastic realism and Satan on his romp through Moscow there is an incredibly refreshing Biblical substory. How someone takes a story that is thousands of years old, rewrites it in the early 20th century and it still feels new in modern times is beyond me. The only piece of media that I have seen do this as well as The Master and Margarita does is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, a 1964 take on the Gospel done by someone who has never read the Bible – the outsider has taken the place of the storyteller, creating his own unique and fresh take on something that has been seen thousands of times before. Although this wasn’t the case of Bulgakov, it is discussed that The Master and Margarita is criticizing a non-secular Russia, he still pulls from the angle of the outsider as a satirist writing biblical material.
A year or so later, I started to read the brick of a book called Crime and Punishment. The main character, Rodion Raskolnikov is the best written literary character I have ever had the pleasure to enter the mind of; he’s a terribly relatable anxious character that has made the mistake of a lifetime for reasons he cannot pinpoint. Albert Camus presented this same problem to us years later with The Stranger, another novel I love, but does not handle it with the humor that Dostoevsky does.
Besides being Russian, these novels all share another thing in common — they are hilarious. It’s a certain kind of dry and blunt humor that caters exactly to me. I know it wasn’t made just for me but it sure feels like it. I think one of my favorite moments in Invitation to a Beheading captures this beautifully. Our dear main character, Cincinnatus, who has been convicted of a crime only known as “gnostical turpitude”, goes on an incredibly long and profound monologue only for the next line to destroy it all.
“Actually, Cincinnatus did not say this at all, he was silently changing his shoes.”
I had to set down the book. I had to pace around my room. I had to take a breath and go outside. It was one of the best moments I had ever read.
There are certain pieces of the world you interact with that will change you and your thought process for the foreseeable future. In my life, it’s mostly found within the various forms of media. There’s been movies, music, books, television, whatever, that have changed the way I think, perceive, and the capabilities of art. It’s hard to find, but when you do find these pieces that have such an impact on you, it’s a truly special moment; I found that most recently in Russian literature and I beg you to seek it out someplace and find where it is for you.
All of these books also present us with the conundrum of a character that is the one we feel reflects us in some ways but we would never let the rest of the world know. Why is it I find characters like Raskolnikov or Cincinnatus relatable? They shouldn’t be. I have never gone to prison for an unknown crime, I have never committed murder. What is it? I think deep down, everyone relates to them and Dostoyevsky and Nabokov know this. We can all find a piece of ourselves in them whether we want to admit it or not, even though they exist far outside of circumstances we will never know. We hesitate to relate to such characters but we know the truth.
There’s also just something about reading Alex Ross’ Björk profile in Listen to This and learning her favorite book was also The Master and Margarita and saying “Wow, she’s just like me” that feels like you are part of a secret club.
I’m going to continue reading these authors. I will probably then read them again. I do not see a world where I don’t continually pick up The Master and Margarita or work my way through the rest of Dostoyevsky’s expansive bibliography.