The Lady with the Lap Dog

Should you have any doubts about the intentions of this story’s protagonist, look no further than his first spoken line: “If she’s here without a husband and without anyone she knows, it wouldn’t be a waste of my time to get to know her.”  Gurov is a still-young playboy on vacation from his wife and children on the beaches of Yalta, and there is no immediate reason why he should gain a morsel of our sympathy.  Not that his wife, whom we only see once much later on, has anything great to offer this world.  For to understand Gurov and why he is in Yalta to meet a woman he will never be able to do without, it is his wife one should consider:

She read a lot, didn’t write the hard sign in her letters, didn’t call her husband Dmitri, but rather Dimitri; and he secretly thought of her as intellectually limited, narrow, unrefined; he feared her and didn’t like being at home.

Yet Chekhov, too subtle a writer for modern tastes, does not allow Gurov to find his wife’s opposite.  That would be too easy, the fodder for romance novels where every maudlin expectation is gratified.  Instead, he comes upon the titular Anna Sergeevna and her Pomeranian, who may or may not be better examples of moral creatures, but whom he loves completely and absolutely.  This story has nothing to do with honeycombed love and the effusive, romanticized backwash of pink weddings and little white houses; this is a tale of destiny, of suffering akin to that of “two migratory birds, a male and female, caught and forced to live in separate cages.”  This is about the conundrum of finding your fated twin soul, and not being able to cast away the dregs of your previous life.

The love affair, like the seasons, has four parts.  Gurov and Anna Sergeevna are first seen around a summery boardwalk, and Gurov is portrayed as the rakish misogynist.  That he calls women “a lowly race” but cannot do without them for “two days” coincides with the most prolific clichés about Lotharios.  How strange is it that in this story which will do anything to convince us of Gurov’s artistic authenticity, of his difference from the Philistine masses who have assumed the contours of his daily existence, we find he is nothing more than the commonplace womanizer.  I cannot be persuaded by literature’s thousand and one tales featuring immoral beasts and hedonistic daredevils, that under some of these exteriors lurk true artistic souls.  How you treat the world reflects your innermost passions and beliefs.  If you believe in saying and doing whatever is necessary for monetary, political  or sexual gain, then you are as empty and as meaningless as the moments you spend deceiving others.  We wonder to what extent deception is part of Gurov’s repertoire.  What does he say to these lonely women as he comforts them, albeit for “a short time”?  What is his role in life outside of a comforter of women who have no interest in his personality (another tedious chestnut)?  What motivation might he have for continuing in this vein?  Why is Anna Sergeevna any different?  Is this a cautionary tale or an allegory for pursuance of the Good?

It is in the fall, our story’s next section where little time has actually passed, that we catch a glimpse of their immortality.  Where modern literary critics might dissect “the old women dressed as young women and the bevy of generals” on the pier in some kind of countercultural gibberish, the fact is that these critics have never actually bothered to look at pictures and books of the Crimea of that time period as well as lack any imagination whatsoever.  Men all aspire to some title of greatness, while women really only want to be young enough to be coy (to paraphrase this author), and there is nothing more to it than that.  Those generals and old women are as fraudulent as any sentiment that you cannot understand and deem fraudulent because your narrow world has yet to experience it.  Against this backdrop, we are given a taste of what to expect once the seas have calmed and our last breaths have slowed, and stopped:

It was so noisy below, and here there was no Yalta, no Oreanda; now it was noisy and would continue to be as indifferently and deafly noisy when we were no longer here.  And in this constancy, in this indifference to life and death, each of us is covered, perhaps, by the price of our eternal salvation, of the unending movement of life on earth, of unending perfection.  And sitting beside that young woman who at dawn had seemed so beautiful, so serene, so enchanting before the fairy tale landscape around her, the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide blue sky, Gurov came to see that if one thought about it, everything in this world was essentially beautiful − everything except when we think and ponder, when we forget about the higher goals of existence and our own human dignity.

So later, when Gurov has gone through another season, this time a harsh winter, and realized that everyone’s “true life” is hidden beneath the surface, he makes one mistake.  He assumes that Anna Sergeevna thinks the way he does.  Men, especially those in more conservative societies, have the luxury of withdrawing from human interaction and relegating their secrets to a covert smile to a mirror or window pane when no one is looking.  But women, in those same circumstances, certainly cannot.  A woman will always be branded for her adulterous machinations, while a man may very well escape unscathed.  Yes Anna is also married, to someone whom we never quite meet but to whom she has bestowed one of our language’s most ignominious labels.  In fact, her husband seems to trot beside her as a reminder of her guilt, almost as if he were her Pomeranian (the Russian word for Pomeranian, shpitz, and his surname von Dideritz have some Germanic affinity), and almost like the two adolescents smoking above Anna and Gurov’s secret encounter in the opera remind the careful reader of Gurov’s two high school−aged boys. 

It is also no coincidence that the only line uttered by Gurov's wife is, "playing the fop, Dimitri, doesn't suit you at all."  And why would "Dimitri" have to be dressed so well if it weren't in his interests to look good to women around him?   We are not supposed to trust Gurov's wife because she is a classic manifestation of poshlost', of that smug vulgarity that is the absolute antithesis of art.  So then maybe Dmitri is very good in his role as seducer, and maybe his alleged love for Anna Sergeevna is no more than a delusion − Chekhov only hints in one direction but does not compel us.   The only compulsion we have, in fact, is to read on to the end, where Gurov asks himself another, much more important question. 

To the Limited Rationalists

For those who believe certain materialist thinkers to be fountains of freedom, I offer a brief and harmless essay to the contrary.  

It appears you have certain issues with what liberty and choice might really mean, and aver that any organized religion who offers some perspective on these matters should be roundly criticized as engaging in antiquated hogwash.  I am particularly drawn to your denigration of one journalist’s claims that the Abrahamic religions, instead of being the golden shackle on our scrawny shins, provided Western society with the basis for liberty and individualism.  You have wisely put your faith in “limited reason,” which is arguably redundant, and promoted the great and underappreciated Baruch as the most sagacious thinker since the Church began its onslaught.  All these steps are in keeping with the modernity of the Enlightenment; and as technology has shown us, the world is not flat, nor the sovereign of the sun, nor the breeding ground of demons (well, I suppose that’s still debatable), and Jesus was wrong about everything except his sense of the beyond, of the cosmic forces that seem at times to steer our decisions, because the logos was the beginning of it all and He knew it.  And now so do we.

The problem with reason is not so much that it is limited, or that it is constantly reinventing itself, or that, like religion, it has more than a few internal disputes, but that it seems to question everything except, well, reason.  When I plug in a blender and make myself a smoothie, I have acted reasonably, because blending those fruits together by some other method would be a colossal waste of time and energy.  But when I say a prayer to my deity to thank it for allowing me to live in a society that produces such a machine, as well as a surplus of fruit that affords me luxury menu items while millions starve, I am acting like a fool.  

I am also a fool when I believe that capitalism in its evitable excesses is bad, and actually do it a disservice by attaching to it that impish tail which characterizes the ephemeral and trendy fancies of intellectual cabals.  After all, capitalism is the economic law of the jungle and the most successful and most accurate market reflection of the greatest scientific discovery of all time, evolution.  Now I certainly believe in evolution.  I believe we were all once amoebae, then prior to that some form of subsentient lava, then microparticles of some galactic geyser.  Who or what set off that geyser, or whether it created itself out of nothingness, is the subject of eternal speculation that has led many to think of religion as a fallback position.  The resort, in other words, of those too lazy to subscribe to issues of Limited Reason Monthly.

Let us go, therefore, with the Bang.  It happened, and gazillions of years later, we happened.  We are the logical outcome of that Bang.  Along the way, of course, there was much infighting, internecine, purges, extinction, and specicide, but we and our countless forefathers and mothers made it to the magnificent present.  We are the poster children for evolution, laissez–faire capitalism (the genuine article), and survival of the most deserving.  Those who did not make it, or continue to die out in conditions neither you nor I can rightly imagine, simply could not or cannot muster enough effort or strength to do away with facetious credos and superstitious tales of redemption.  They or their ancestors were not strong enough.  And so they have to die.  

Limited Reason Monthly tells us that we should pity these people.  We should pity them not because they are human souls sinking in an eddy of inequity, but because their leaders, be they chieftains, generals, popes, or presidents, have not been enlightened.  These leaders, the lodestars for their miserable nations, are ignorant of true freedom.  They believe in shibboleths, crosses, and magic books.  They warn their faithful that those who have dispensed with the need for absolute moral laws will be dealt with in the hands of Time.  Often these same leaders, old hypocrites for the most part, utilize these sermons to further their own Darwinian urges: they erect palaces and monuments and regale themselves on the finest goods available on the politically neutral capitalist markets.  The barbarians who mutilated the De Witt brothers in 1672 have not fallen, it seems, far from the prison tower.  In fact, they make most of their decisions today based on their cookie–cutter ideologies and regardless of what rational thought might otherwise suggest.

 

But what if we could somehow inculcate the teachings of reason?  What if, wonderful to recount, everyone were to consider life as Spinoza or his Collegiants once did and some, a vocal and proud minority, still do today?  (There are probably some who think Spinoza is an epidural or a type of cactus.)  What paradise would then obtain!  It would be a paradise because everything would be run according to reason and logic, with compassion and irrational love panting behind them in the far distance.  Logic has many benefits, not the least of which is determining who gets what in society.  Obviously, the more enlightened you are, the more likely you will be to make use of societal levers and pulleys to acquire everything that rightly belongs to those who can get it (this may sound familiar).  Being enlightened, you understand that you cannot understand everything (you have renewed your subscription for another glorious decade or two); but after those things you can understand you dive headlong and surface with the proverbial golden dagger between your teeth.  I am free, you scream as you take a deep breath and bob up and down on the waves like a bottled message finally retrieved.  I am free from any god or government or ideology!   I believe in myself and in rational and peaceful thought!   I am at the apex of human achievement!

 

And it gets even better.  Once you believe in all this, there is nothing left to do.  The world is rational and so are you, so both of you will get along swimmingly.  No more injustice, no more crime, no more silly wars over some holy–schmoly rigmarole.  The world and you are free like the birds to which you are distantly related; all that remains is to decide what to do with your time.  It would be arrogance itself to think that the Mysteries of the Universe (a regular Limited Reason Monthly column) could be solved in your lifetime, although hints and implications keep piling up like leaves in your front yard.  Thus, now freed of all ideological baggage, you proceed to list (here you giggle in anticipation) all the things you know: you know where we came from, although not ultimately, and you know why we are alive (although not where we go, if anywhere, when we die; perhaps we do not die; you need to think this one through a little more and add a small question mark in the margin).  You also know what everything costs, which is great!  The market determines itself, so if you pay sixty–nine dollars for a blender, that must be correct because the market is never wrong.  Sixty–nine dollars may be also a month’s wages in Malawi or Somalia, but that’s what those people deserve.  They deserve a blender a month.

 

But we are all free!   You are free to buy your blender, and Somalis and Malawians are free to work for forty-odd cents an hour in those aforementioned terrible conditions.  Once they work a little harder, perhaps knife a couple of other laborers to death to derail competition for a promotion, the market will take care of them.  If they really put their nose to the grindstone, although it’s probably so close already that flint particles array their cheeks, their children will earn a blender a week.  That’s a 400% increase in GDP over one generation, and no economist worth his salt or salt substitute would ever argue with that number.  After all, the forefathers of those Somalis and Malawians, or at least the leaders elected or tolerated by those forefathers, were not enlightened and were not thinking about their blender purchasing power.  Everything will fall into place in time and look wonderful and uniform and good.  Just like your smoothie once you pour it out of your blender.

Now, I have been naughty and not mentioned that you provisionally accept the idea that good and simple people leading a good and simple life have a chance for the Big Stage in the Sky when they pass on.  Nor have I said that you are not atheists, but simply reject revealed and organized religion in all forms and push for some kind of rational cosmic force, if anything, as the center of it all.  I believe you also stated that this force is indifferent to human activity, and by very logical mimesis, so are you.  And this is where we diverge.

Despite your claims against the inhumanity of the world, logic and compassion do not go hand in hand.  Equally unattracted to one another are capitalism and compassion, or evolution and compassion.  In fact, compassion has had a hard time finding a date.  Those compatibility boxes that she checks in her online profile don’t yield any matches except from altruism (which hasn’t logged on in years) and love, who is going through an unbelievable identity crisis and cannot even tell others what he’s really all about (everyone has a differing opinion on him).  Meanwhile, logic, capitalism, and evolution have become the best of drinking buddies, with some long and thirsty nights (there is much to celebrate) even resulting in sexual hijinks.  After a long period of time with such freedom (maybe even extending into old age), you wake up one morning, take a good look at yourself in the mirror and are rather appalled at what you see: all youth and hope are gone and replaced by a permanently furrowed brow, a cobweb of wrinkles, and a dimness that might even suggest senility.  Life is coming to its slow end, so how do you presume?  Well, you do have positivism and reason, and they have always stated in unison like twin insurance agents who finish each other’s sentences that you are completely free as long as you’re signed on with them.  This is an obvious policy to adopt when you’re young and brash and life’s accomplishments wait in some distant throne room.  But now you are old.  You are free, but old.  Positivism and reason tell you not to worry about age, because your existence will end at exactly the biologically determined time.  Perhaps you might look into some vitamins or other remedies (candy for the free!) to give yourself a couple of more years.  But sooner rather than later, you will die.  

 

You get dressed laboriously and go for a walk around your neighborhood.  It is probably privileged since you have understood the free market now for the great majority of your life, and you have invested soundly.  You walk, it hurts a bit to move (you remember when you could race!), but you keep at it and, at the same time, gaze upon the younger generations.  Children and teenagers, mind you, still subject to parental whims and decrees.  They play and whoop and holler, yet they are not free, you think.  At some point they will realize that they have to listen to no one except logic and reason, true enlightenment’s bicephalous beast of burden.  Then they will be free.  Oh, it won’t be long now, laddies!   This you think but do not say.  And you walk around them.  

 

But as you walk away, you hear laughter.  You turn (it hurts to turn quickly) and eventually see those same children snickering.  Much quieter now because they’re cowards and fear authority, but you take one look at their faces and know that they don’t respect you.  Their stifled contempt is more than they can bear and their faces turn into giant beets before they break out again in mocking guffaws.  How old are these children, anyway?  Perhaps ages six to fourteen, it doesn’t really matter.  You wonder why they could be laughing at you and you start touching yourself all over like some arthritic octopus.  Why are they still laughing?  You keep feeling around until you get to the seat of your pants and then you understand: it’s wet.  And, you feel higher, you’ve gone and tucked your shirt into your boxers.  Those are two of the most hilarious and pathetic things you could ever do, and the children know that and so you get no compassion.  That type of semi–dementia deserves no pity because you are old and useless anyway and your breath already smells like some dank plot.  What is their advantage in pitying you?  You’ve had a life of freedom and privileges (you’ve owned several different blenders) and now it is time to pass on and leave all this freedom with the younger generations.  They deserve it, too!   Their forefathers evolved just as properly and ruthlessly as yours!   Step aside, old man, the parade of enlightenment is coming down your street!

So you change course and go home and, after a few near–bowel movements, ironically snap on a pair of bladder–control geriatric diapers (officially called “adult protective undergarments against incontinence”) and lie down for a nap.  You look, for the millionth time, at night stand pictures of loved ones lost.  Who knows whether any sliver of them ever left those dank plots you saw them lowered into.  You lie back and rejoice in the fact that, if for but a moment of two, nothing really hurts too much.  You also realize that moments like these will become rarer and rarer.

Fear should not be used to convince anyone of anything; indeed, it is precisely the use of scare tactics that is debunked in essays on Spinoza and his concept of liberty.  We should not be scared of anything, including death, which are the very strong words of very young and courageous souls.  The point is, however, that regardless of why you believe we are here and what the point of life is now, while you are young, that logic will fade over time because death makes no sense.  It does not reward life nor reverse it.  It is simply its termination and if we do not see why it ends, then life itself is cleft from anything greater than evanescent significance.  And who has ever jumped out of bed in the morning and proclaimed, “today is a day of complete freedom of evanescent significance!"? 

 

But if we are compassionate and see the tragedy of life, in both what we have and what we don’t, then we do not act like children mocking an old man.  We do not walk guiltlessly past the homeless or the poor, regardless of whether they reek of some abominable alcoholic concoction.  We do not look on without sorrow or anger when we are shown images of Somalia or Malawi or any country whose GDP is so wretched and inadequate that the only pictures we have of those beautiful nations are on UN relief posters.  And we do not under any circumstances equate liberty with reason, because compassion is the most illogical and irrational emotion in the universe, even more illogical and irrational than love.  Compassion hurts you and helps no one.  You feel miserable and gluttonous and yet there is often nothing you can physically do to abate it, especially in terms of long–term relief for the subject of your pity.  But compassion is liberty, true liberty, it is the freedom to feel irrationally responsible for the misery of the world, and to start to do something about it by changing how you treat people and what you value in life.  Without compassion, we are merely evolutionary wonders, the undisputed champions of adaptation and survival who use elaborate means to do what all animals do: satisfy our urges and stay alive (which is our greatest urge).  

 

And if we love — well then.  Then anything and everything makes sense because we have something stronger than the puppet strings of numbers and theorems, we have our true essence and what we will miss when our days slip into evening.  Will anyone truly miss the hard—won solution to a geometrical problem or the bargain cleverly snapped up after extensive comparative shopping?  Will anyone truly regret not having been more logical with friends and family and believe that they showed them too much emotion and attachment?  Will anyone sincerely smile back on a life whose vital cogs were endless reasonable deductions and evaluations, but which were deductions and evaluations at which anyone, applying that same whitewashing coat of reason, could have arrived?  In what way do cats differ from one another apart from age and basic physical features?  If we also differ in age and physical features, but all reach the same prefabricated conclusions, how have we truly been free? 

A plethora of mathematicians will doubtless claim that there is nothing more liberating than solving or even posing a math problem (I used to agree with them more when I participated in national math tournaments as a child).  Perhaps old mathematicians and logicians do dream of perfect problems and do close their eyes each night grinning at the possibility of several frustrated generations failing to crack their codes.  But they can have their obtuse angles, imaginary numbers, and hebesphenomegacorona, and I will have all of my secret and not–so–secret loves.  Who and what we love, you see, are the characteristics that make us different and truly free.  They can be loved by others, surely, but only we can love in our particular way and for certain particular reasons that come upon on us on a twilight walk through an autumn street kicking through leaves that seem to be there for a reason.  And we love them and feel compassion for them because that is our greatest asset as living beings and what gets us up all those dark mornings. Otherwise, there is nothing to separate us from those amoebae or that lava or those microparticles except billions of years.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

    I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
    And Mourners to and fro
    Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
    That Sense was breaking through –

    And when they all were seated,
    A Service, like a Drum –
    Kept beating – beating – till I thought
    My mind was going numb –

    And then I heard them lift a Box
    And creak across my Soul
    With those same Boots of Lead, again,
    Then Space – began to toll,

    As all the Heavens were a Bell,
    And Being, but an Ear,
    And I, and Silence, some strange Race
    Wrecked, solitary, here –

    And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
    And I dropped down, and down –
    And hit a World, at every plunge,
    And Finished knowing – then –

A friend of mine once lamented signing up for an entire semestral course on the works of this famous poetess (or simply female poet, as some consider the suffix to be as sexist as the tail of a long ballroom gown).  Yet he lamented this choice not because of the work itself, nor owing to the narrowness of the scope that it covered, the inevitable repetitions that a poet, dying young, are likely to incur.  I cannot really comment on the repetitions, having read only about a hundred of her poems; but from what I have absorbed, a tempting conclusion presents itself that may not please all her admirers or detractors: the repetition of which my friend spoke might not be a product of young age (Dickinson was fifty–five at her death), but a result of a lack of interaction with a wide public.  Now there is the old chestnut about real writing taking place in the mind and being betrayed by the page, and that many great writers have never published a word.  This is an acceptable premise, and I think every writer will tell you he has much greater success in conceptualizing his thoughts than reflecting them on pale parchment.  Dickinson barely published anything during her lifetime (research reveals only a dozen non–posthumous poems), which would be fine if she were writing about the Peloponnesian war or Boethius.  These were not, however, her subjects; her one and only subject was something perhaps far richer: the tapestries and whirlwinds of her soul, as in the unfinished poem above.

In our modern times, there is more than a mild impetus to foist psychological problems on an artist whose turbulent inner life has been a playground for critics since the publication of an authoritative collection of her work over fifty years ago.  I will not belabor the matter; nor is it, I may add, of any importance.  Few eager psychotherapists would ever tell you that many rational persons (especially those of extraordinary imagination who secretly try their hand at every possible internal experience) allow themselves during more pensive periods, or perhaps even to get to sleep, to think of themselves in wholly altered states.  Death being the most altered state (or "not a human experience," as a second-rate philosopher famously quipped), thought first drifts beyond this life.  Out of pride, love, or simply out of longing, we then tend to picture our mourning by those we have loved and, more fantastically, those we have yet to love.  But there is another, even more capricious leap to be made: the condition in which the artist is dead because she can no longer create. From those outside her soul, even those tenderly loved, this death may not be immediately, if at all, obvious.  But as soon as this death is confirmed by the artist, then everything and everyone seem to be participating in a large funeral march, the slow progression to death that becomes increasingly unbearable and heavy as if the artist were being pushed lower and lower into the ground, buried beneath thousands of other forgotten souls.  

Dickinson’s initial humility yields an even more remarkable impact.  She is willing to endure almost three stanzas of what may be loosely termed hackneyed imagery just to make us believe this is but another self–important writer fantasizing about the tragedy of her demise.  But she pastes a mystifying end to the third stanza, “then Space – began to toll,” and we see things a little differently.  This line is followed by one of the finest stanzas in American poetry: the heavens, the wild paradise of the artistic soul, are forevermore the monotone peal of a bell; her being, her artistic essence, is only a passive ear so that she may observe but not create (an artist’s true prison); she and silence are cellmates, ethnic pariahs from the world of life and language; finally, being unable to do anything creative she is alone for all eternity — only the dead remain grouped in endless multitudes —and the saltations of her poem are complete.

There is also the matter of the comma in the title and first line.  Dickinson’s punctuation, a subject of much scholarly analysis, can be described at best as idiosyncratic, but the comma (not included in every citation of the poem) certainly does alter the sense.  The spongy realness of the word brain, as opposed to mind or soul, make any sort of feeling inherently physical and inferior to the abstract ecstasies of the human intellect.  But “I felt a funeral,” as oddly as the line rolls off the tongue, has in it undeniable poetic appeal.  There is something Viking and epic about this presentiment, the smell of war or battle or Valkyries finding warriors strewn like slugs over a shore of pebbles and carnage.  A grand and tragic end to a queendom of lyric beauty left almost entirely to the whims of history.

The End of the Affair (film)

There is an old adage about serious writers’ contempt for thrillers, detective novels, and other such crime games, and truly, the vast majority of these products do not need our dislike, since their wooden characters, lackadaisical style, and preposterous plotting indicate they already despise themselves.  Certainly, they are not meant to be re–read and are as disposable as the brown paper bags in which we carry other guilty pleasures.  Yet most of us, I think, enjoy a good mystery if indeed there are still good mysteries to be enjoyed (they are perhaps fewer about than in mystery’s Golden Age, but many page–turners can still be found).  The premise behind these works, be they literary or cinematic, is that either something extraordinary or unusual will be revealed to us, or the process by which this revelation is made will be fascinating (in the best mysteries, both these features converge).  The thrill of discovering a solution to a complex gambit — or, to be more modern about it, some multi–tiered conspiracy — is very satisfying after a long day of work, and gives us the impression that we are in tune with the shapes and shifts of the world, that our intuition is still sharply honed, and that we have learned from life and can apply these lessons to future days. 

 

In this way, mysteries are the most basic form of literature.  They simultaneously explain and amuse, which accounts for the development in the twentieth century of this novelistic form as well as the proliferation of books and films that exploit chicanery, deception, and cabalism to wretched commercial ends.  One topic that seems caught in the undertow of this wave of intrigue is actually the most exciting of them all: that of personal mysteries and personal discoveries.  Introspection is a nice and trendy word, but it also breeds bellybutton–staring.  More acceptable practices are learning about ourselves through others and learning about these same people through ourselves.  In other words, mastering the basic recipes of human psychology and then serving them to guests.  Some guests (as we have learned) always praise the food, regardless of what they really think; others will only emphasize what could be improved; then there are those most maddening and unreadable types who say nothing and just chew quietly like some lonesome cow.  It is not clear whether they are being politely taciturn, whether they are incapable of expressing what they really feel (either good or bad), whether they do not care about food in general and consider it a biological necessity, or whether they do not care about you, the cook, who, in principle, believes in what you are serving and tries to accommodate your guests as best you can.  Now make all those guests the romantic interests you have had over the years and make your food emotion and affection, and we come to why today is about love, which is the greatest mystery there could ever be.  It is the greatest of mysteries precisely because it involves a continuous revelation of something extraordinary and unusual, and because no solution is ever guaranteed.       

The setup for this film by renowned director Neil Jordan is the mystery of how people may spend years apart and, upon seeing each other again, be swept up by that same wave and dragged mercilessly down to a bottomless trench.  The afflicted is a young novelist called Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes), and the year is 1946.  England has survived the war, or so it claims, and quilts of memories are tattered by the losses that each endured, even in a country that hardly bore the brunt of the destruction.  Maurice has lost enough of his sense of idealism and optimism to become surly and resentful towards this new world, and although he maintains a rough exterior, inside he is ravaged.  His ravager has long red hair, incomparable cheekbones, and a plain name, Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore).  Maurice and Sarah are as old as the war, having begun their love in 1939, and like the war they are over, although Maurice is as haunted by what went wrong in his small, private tragedy that is utterly unimportant for the history of the world as every citizen wondered how in God’s name such a calamity could befall civilization.  The most injurious part of Maurice’s pain is his love’s inexplicable termination towards war’s end: he is, as he always will be, in Sarah’s arms, when a shell smashes into his London home.  For a few minutes both he and Sarah think they are dead, or, much worse, that only one of them has survived.  We are given Sarah’s point of view on this event, and it takes more than a few minutes for her to realize that Maurice is still alive and will probably live.  But she leaves, wordlessly, submissively, and cannot or will not explain why she feels this step to be necessary.  I should add that she has been married all this time to a rather sympathetic civil servant by the name of Henry (Stephen Rea), and she is still married to him at the beginning of the film when Maurice bumps into Henry one miserably rainy night.

There's a mystery here having to do with Sarah’s reason for leaving Maurice’s house that day, and the reason is both good and ludicrous.  To carry out a story of such basic structure requires exquisite acting, which is provided by Moore and Fiennes, but also by Rea, who just wants his wife to be happy and understands she could never be happy with only him.  The original novel has components of the time period that allow Jordan’s adaptation to give us flavor without intrusion into the mores of the era (a tactic that is far less successful in the hopelessly anachronistic love affair in the filming of this book).  Doubtless, the steady, cuckolded husband is an old cliché, as is the artistic lover who makes life and love more intense, or the seductive beauty caught between duty and passion, and so forth.  But there are other details as well, including a small boy with a horrible affliction, that seem at first superfluous but then turn out to be essential.  Fiennes and Moore are so skilled at the small gestures and tortures of genuine affection that you will have a hard time believing they are not a real–life couple (this film might well be banned in both actors’ family settings, and not just for the corporalities).  You will also marvel at what people in love do for one another, even at the risk of losing them.  And that is a mystery that will never be solved.

The Incarcerated World

A translation of a review by Heinrich Böll of this modern Russian opus.  The original was entitled Die verhaftete Welt, and first appeared in May 1969 in this newspaper.  Before this time, Solzhenitsyn was not as widely known as he would become a few years later when Soviet authorities forced him to turn down the Nobel prize then booted him out of the country altogether (he would return in 1993 and recently celebrated his 89th birthday back at home*).  To the best of my knowledge, this essay has never been translated into English.

1. Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle has enormous breadth, numerous moments of tension, and several dimensions: a prose dimension, a humanistic-historical dimension, a political-historical dimension, and a societal dimension.  It is vaulted from many sides, a cathedral among novels, with carefully measured calculations that hold solid.  That it also contains suspense in the traditional understanding of the word does not involve novelistic means but precisely those calculations or statics which every reader fears may not maintain the breadth and tension of its other parts.  Here tension and suspense become architectonic concepts.  That it covers historical information as well only confirms the novel as a sort of construction material with little time before it is put to use.  

The plot begins with a telephone conversation between Volodin, a state councillor of second rank who wants to warn a friend of his, a professor, about foreign contacts.  This initial break into the consciousness of a gifted diplomat, whose career has been completely secured with all the attendant privileges, is only the entry into the cathedral.  The conversation takes place around Christmas 1949; the novel ends exactly two days later with a description of the prison transport through Moscow.  In a delivery van with the inscription “мясо - Viande - Fleisch – Meat,” prisoners are taken away from the first circle of hell without knowing in what circle they’ll end up.  The correspondent from the French newspaper Libération, on the way to a hockey match in Dinamo stadium, reads the inscription on the delivery van, pulls out his notebook, and writes down with his ballpoint in Bordeaux-red: “Again and again in the streets of Moscow one sees delivery vans with foodstuffs, extremely clean and unobjectionable in terms of sanitation.  Provisions in the capital can only be described as marvelous.”

2. The novel comprises 87 chapters, 670 pages in order to survey its dramatis personae, and is difficult even after the second reading.  It would be easier if the publisher resolved to include a detailed list of all the characters, with age, gender, function, job, and political position provided.  This last point because there are so many transitions and ensnarements between the prisoners as well as between the non-prisoners (we’ll talk about the concepts of free and unfree a bit later on).  They are all incarcerated, not of course in the technical prison sense; their incarceration has many causes, most of which would hardly be intelligible to the West.  The fact that Solzhenitsyn’s novels were banned from publication in the West may be understood both literally and figuratively as this sort of incarceration.  That he became – and this alone could be a reason for the Soviet government to join the Berne Convention – the victim of every condition so protected by the Convention may be seen as an ironic component in the game of mutual “freedom of publication.”

It is this incarceration which has made Russians into the nation on earth least enthusiastic about emigration.  And here I designate all the characters of the novel, prisoners and non-prisoners, as politically incarcerated in the Soviet Union.  I should add the following so as to eliminate any type of misunderstanding or malevolent falsification: I don’t mean incarceration by the police, I mean the type of incarceration one imposes upon oneself.  Let semanticians do their research on the novel and discover the true meanings behind “self-incarceration” and “decarceration,” “carceration” and “incarceration.”  In my understanding, James Joyce was, essentially to the end of his life, incarcerated both by Ireland and Catholicism.

3. The collective slap in the face for the West’s stupidity at the end of this book may be related to the fact that Western observers keep seeing signs here and there, even occasionally leading to recognition, a key of decryption with which these signs could be interpreted, but which they never get a hold of.  Perhaps because this key changes daily, hourly, weekly and may be subject to an enormous amount of coincidence in this mammoth empire.  Even I did not get a hold of this key; I’m short of breath, East Europe takes its time and breathes in very deeply.  This key is not only based on passion, occasionally addicted to passion, it is impassioned in the true sense of the word and not just because of the revolution, and not just because of Stalinism.

Against the multifaceted breadth buttressed by the aforementioned statics of The First Circle, not only do some highly recommended Western novels become decorative ancillary chapels, but the results of decades of literature remain constructs outside this cathedral as auxiliary or, at best, elegant residences.  Of course, the horrible dialectics in the face of such a work are thanks to the fact that it sums up and illuminates an unbelievable mass of suffering and history.  The form, the expression, the style in which Solzhenitsyn writes his prose and keeps it in order is remarkable.  This order allows one to see a composition carrying every last freedom, which indicates that we have a master at work, as well as a mathematician, someone to whom the formulas of science are not foreign.  Here prose becomes a formula, spiritual and epic lucidity, and they meet in a parable in the mathematical and physical sense of the word.

4. If I avoid the word metaphysics, it is only because I do not have a name for this kind of metaphysics. In any case, order is neither given nor pushed forward, but order is created nonetheless.  It is integrated in the mathematical and physical sense and it may well be that from here a new materialist metaphysics arises, as many physicists have suspected it would.  As Western authors have laid aside the dogma of secrecy, so does Solzhenitsyn not quite reject the future, but instead no longer includes it as an ideal goal comparable to the heaven of the metaphysics passed down to us.  He sums up the present, and one should not forget that this is the present of 1949, four years before Stalin’s death, and that this book was written from 1955 to 1964.  In the Soviet Union of 1969, being incarcerated is something different than what it was in 1949. 

Thankfully, Solzhenitsyn avoids giving all this a meaning, and elects simply to note, register, and develop his text from elements familiar to him, from experiences.  And since he has no need to polemicize the order he gives or pushes forth, he achieves a sobriety and dryness which are superior to both optimism-riddled socialist realism and the intentions of the nouveau roman.  This is not only because he experienced firsthand what his colleagues in the West did not: Stalinism.  It is also because the West has lost its sense of hidden suffering, which now causes the most outrage as a component of sexual lust as yet undetected or unacknowledged.  I ascribe to Solzhenitsyn’s work the quality of revelation, an unpathetic revelation, and not just regarding the book’s historical content, Stalinism, but also regarding the history of humanity’s suffering.  In this respect, Stalinism here is only an “occasion,” sufficiently frightening, but “only an occasion” nevertheless.

The prisoners in The First Circle, incarcerated in the camp of Mavrino near Moscow, are responsible for various tasks, all of which have the purpose of refining and further developing surveillance methods, and therefore of hauling in additional prisoners.  They are permanently entrapped, but as prisoners and researchers they are free, while their wardens are also free and still a permanent source of fear to the prisoners.  They could always be incarcerated and perhaps taken to another circle of hell.  It is in no way certain whether landing in the seventh circle of hell would be a lucky move or a fate worse than death.  In the course of further developing the phonoscope, which would enable the identification of a person by his voice recorded on tape, five taped voices are handed over to the prisoners so they can compare them to the voice of Volodin, whose voice was just recorded.  His voice is found to be one of the five.  The sole triumph of these prisoners is that they were able to rule out three of the five suspects, with their consolation being that only two of the five, including Volodin, will be incarcerated.  When he’s brought into Lubyanka prison as described in detail in the penultimate chapter, we see the subjection of a state councillor of second rank, a man who already has a plane ticket to Paris in his pocket, to pedantic, protracted, and absurdly unclear initial humiliations – all of which vividly remind the reader of the incarceration in the first circle of hell of the prisoners already well-known to him.                     

Certainly it’s no coincidence that this first circle of hell turns out to be a laboratory.  A well-functioning, well-equipped laboratory.  I imagine that astrophysicists, astromedics, astrotechnicians, and all their assistants are under strict surveillance and constant monitoring by various secret police forces, possibly even subject for months on end to severe enclosure.  Given the fact that we are dealing here not only with chemical, physical, and technical laboratories, but also with national economic and, most of all, recruiting laboratories in which new methods of manipulation are being concocted, and old methods are being analyzed and developed further, and given the other fact that even the dreams of those working in the innermost circle of these heavens probably have to be monitored as well so that they don’t spill the beans, so to speak, and one sees how quickly Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle is de-Stalinized.  Here captivity and freedom, intuition and ingenuousness on the part of both the prisoners and the free, of the manipulated and the manipulators, are all rather relative.  I don’t know the proportion of wardens and free persons in a space research center; in the “first circle of heaven,” I think the proportions and conditions differ only slightly from those in The First Circle.  There are enough secret worlds, as well as worlds of hidden suffering whose revelation would not only involve sexual suffering.  In this respect I look at The First Circle as both bound to the historical material and a revelation that goes beyond it.

Perhaps the key to understanding the Soviet Union is the difference between being incarcerated in terms of your soul and in terms of the law.  However much the matter is debated and however much such a judgment does not correspond to the Russian frame of mind, the Soviet Union is still run by Russians and by Russia.  That does not need to mean what it keeps threatening to become: imperialistic, nationalistic, and under Stalin once again Tsarist.  Only when reading Solzhenitsyn did I first realize the significance of the changes towards more openness by Khrushchev in 1956.  Among other things was the allowance for Solzhenitsyn to be released from captivity, and for him to write and have his works published.  That he still writes but may no longer be published, that he lives in the Soviet Union but is incarcerated, although he has not been taken into custody, can only mean one thing.  It means that the jury’s still out as to whether the Soviet government will ever understand what politicians all over the world never quite understand: that an author is already incarcerated in his own language.  That Solzhenitsyn as a person and author, as an author born in 1918 and not at all determined by the history of the Soviet Union, is neither typical nor symbolic; that he is real and present for the Soviet Union.  If he weren’t denounced and branded a heretic, the Soviet Union could actually be proud of him.  Ultimately, he doesn’t go any further than Khrushchev did in his famous speech; Solzhenitsyn only took the word de-Stalinization literally and fashioned it into something more.  He is incarcerated in the Soviet Union just like one of the “heroes” of his book, the prisoner Rubin, who remains beholden to socialism as much as he does to the Soviet Union.  Rubin is in no way unnationalistic but is also not cosmopolitan and, as a Marxist who sees right through his own prisoner-incarceration quandary, is far superior to his wardens.  And I have long since assumed that all those people who are accused of draggling their own nests are usually those who strive to keep them clean.

Solzhenitsyn’s book comes from afar, it is vaulted high into the heavens, and it is also a revelation for the more or less helplessly operating parts of Western literature.  It stems from the great Russian tradition, it has bypassed, overcome and renewed socialist realism, and in the temerity of its construction, which is also secured by its statics, it is also topical: it has Tolstoy’s breath and the spirit of Dostoevsky, and it unites these two as antagonistic minds in the nineteenth century up to contemporary literary criticism, and, without a doubt, it is Solzhenitsyn.  Moving past Sartre and Camus, he completes the age-old debate of “free” and “captive,” but not prettily, not philosophically, but with material that is unassisted, unadulterated and unemphatic.  Take the meeting between the apparently all-powerful minister Abakumov and the prisoner Bobynin: the trembling minister who knows all too well how many circles hell has, and the poised Bobynin, who has already endured many a circle of hell.

In such scenes of which there is no paucity, the unity of reality and symbol is neither invented nor found, it is derived from the material at hand like the result of a solved mathematical formula.  It would be useless to enumerate additional examples.  Were I a painter or a graphic artist, I would try to depict The First Circle visually within a system of order yet to be invented which may have the form of a giant rosette.  I can only imagine the possibility of, at one glance, making literature illuminated and visible, and not with the claim of total understanding so typical of literary criticism, but as an aid to understanding.  This prose does not, in any case, flow with great placidity; it is not a current, but a lake made of many sources, both big and small.  I know I am providing simile after simile: a cathedral, a lake, a rosette, yet this but attests to the book’s many dimensions.

There are very few novelistic elements in this novel: on page 9 Volodin places a phone call; on page 232, the specialists in Mavrino are given the assignment of identifying his voice and they ask for additional material as a basis of comparison, which leads to more phone tapping; on page 588 Volodin’s voice is partially identified; at the end of the novel he is incarcerated.  The book is most novelistic about half the way through: the material which the prisoners request so as to conduct a voice comparison is taken on the occasion of a dinner party in the classic opulent bourgeois style, as held by state prosecutor Makarygin.  It is at this gathering that a few, but only a few, of the novel’s many threads come together.  Volodin is Makarygin’s son-in-law; his wife Dotnara (called Dotti, a Western abbreviation that cannot fail to remind us of the habits of the noble class depicted in Tolstoy’s work) is completely preoccupied with problems that are in no way the problems of a classless society: servants and adultery.  Meanwhile Volodin in his apartment gradually moves from being one of the oblivious and privileged to someone who has more of a clue.  And it is precisely this phone call with his wife, which “is recorded in a particular central news office” that is recorded on tape, and comes “on the heels of the decision by Rubin earlier that afternoon to have all the suspects’ long-distance calls monitored without exception.”  And the prisoner does not only invade the life of the state councillor.  Some other absurd “coincidences” occur here at the dinner party at Makarygin’s: Klara, Makarygin’s unwed daughter, a warden at the Mavrino camp with the rank of lieutenant, falls in love with the prisoner Rostislav (and he with her!).  She is the first person to pick up the receiver and cannot guess that in that same camp, just a few hours later, this telephone conversation will lead to the incarceration of her brother-in-law.  Thus in two chapters the threads come together and then just as quickly come undone.  Apart from that, the banter at the Makarygin party is very witty and spirited, it is the entertainment of the oblivious, the talk of the privileged, of dignitaries: “It would never have occurred to any of the people here that in this polished black receiver, in this unobtrusive conversation, there lurked a secret decay which knew how to find each of us, even in the bone of a dead horse.”                

Only in these two chapters right in the middle of the novel, no coincidence for such a mathematician, is tribute paid to the format of the classical novel and only here are the threads of fate “hemmed together.”  All other destinies, and they are numerous, are only documented: Spiridon, Sologdin, Simotschka, and Myschin, Stalin and the prisoner Dryssin, who is deprived from receiving letters from his wife, and may only read them in the office of major Myschin:

    No, read it here.  I can’t let you take letters like that with you into the common rooms. 
    What type of impression of life outside of prison would that give the prisoners?  Read!

And so Dryssin reads, among other things: “Dear Vanya, you’re hurt that I write so rarely, but I come home late from work and go almost daily into the forest to look for firewood.  And then later in the evening, I’m so tired that I practically keel over.  This is not a life but forced labor.  If I could only sleep in on Friday, but I’ve got to drag myself to the demonstrations.”  A completely demoralized Dryssin is then ordered to write a letter to his wife: “optimistic, cheerful, prop yourself up.”  And then: “Write a response.  An optimistic and hopeful response.  I’ll allow you to write more than four pages.  You wrote once that she should trust in God.  Then better to stay with God than ....”

The prisoner Dryssin, whose fate is chronicled in a few pages, has no novelistic function.  He is only one of millions and he is obliged to trumpet optimism and cheerfulness from his prison.  Ths insane absurdity of the incarceration of prisoners already documented in magnificent personal detail in the books of Lydia Chukovskaia (The deserted house) and Evgenia Ginzburg (Journey into the whirlwind) is now deepened, widened and, to a certain degree, de–individualized by Solzhenitsyn, who has up to now no peer in terms of expression.

5. Apart from everything else it may be, our century is the century of camps, of prisoners.  And to all those who were never captives, may you boast or be ashamed of the good fortune or chance of being spared the experience of our century, and you can take that for whatever it’s worth.  For those who survived, and that is all of us, those of us reading and writing – indeed, everyone – there is only the possibility of acknowledging our captivity, whether or not one experienced something like that.  Whoever did experience it knows how relative luxury is: amidst the wasteland of a hundred-thousand-man camp a bit of soap and a saucer of water are real luxury, because they are luxury at hand. And five twelfths of a cigarette when a whole one costs one hundred and twenty marks and fifty marks represents your entire fortune, that is truly, not only symbolically so much more pleasure than that of the zillionaire who loses a hundred thousand in an evening and thinks nothing of it because he doesn’t feel it.  But the person who pays fifty marks for five twelfths of a cigarette knows all the while that he could pay his rent with that money.  The stupidity of the West’s luxury-driven society and its victims, the criminals who wish to take part in it, consists of thinking of luxury as something absolute.  In this century you simply have to know that, in order to evaluate and enjoy luxury, having a can of preserves and an empty bottle really means life or death for a prisoner.  This secret philosophy of prisoners (which has a lot of theology in it) glides invisibly and yet perceptibly throughout The First Circle.

Yet another philosophy is even more perceptible: that of love, prudishness, and marriage.  “Yes, yes, to love!”  whispers the young prisoner Rostislav.  “To love!  But not the story of love, not the theory of love, but girls!”  And later: “But what have they taken from us?  Tell me now!  The right of assembly?  The right to sign for state loans?  The only way that beast wanted to hurt us was by taking us away from women!  And that’s what it did.  For more than twenty-five years.  The swine!   Does anyone know what a woman means to a prisoner?”

And who knows what it means to the women of these prisoners to have this freedom handed to them and, in most cases, not to know what to do with it.  Who can guess the meaning of freedom for someone sentenced to at least twenty-five years of imprisonment?  Here there arises that disdained something which may possibly have not arisen in the event of the freedom of both members of a couple: there arises from captivity the concept, much reviled in the West, of faithfulness.  The tortures of sex and the sex of tortures extant in Western literature are also an expression of an unacknowledged captivity and an absurdly interpreted freedom.

That these features – the tortures of sex and the sex of tortures – are completely uninteresting not only to Soviet censorship, but also to the enlightened, the aware Soviet citizens, to the non-oblivious, is one of the signs that is hard to decipher.  It would probably have been interesting to the bloated, jaded class of privileged and oblivious persons in the Soviet Union, for whom servants are a veritable topic of conversation.  For an entire chapter (chapter 39), the female state security lieutenant Klara Petrovna Makarygin, daughter of a state prosecutor, and the prisoner Rostislav talk about Soviet society in the laboratory in Mavrino.  They talk about methods of falsifying documents and about privileges.  And here it is the prisoner Rostislav who plants the seed of wondrous corruption.  And what does the prisoner whisper to the highly privileged daughter from the class of the classless bourgeoisie?

What was the revolution aimed at, anyway?  It was aimed at the privileged!  What did not sit well with the citizens of Russia?  Privileges!  Some only had work clothes, others wore sables; some walked, others rode in carriages; some had to heed the whistle of factory sirens, other gorged themselves rotten in restaurants.  Isn't that right? 

“Of course,” said the good and enamored daughter of the state prosecutor, who that same evening would take part in an opulent party at the apartment of her pushy bourgeois mother.  There would be crystal and silver, exquisite foods and wine, spirited conversations and even loaned-out servants.  And she would pick up the receiver and the conversation with her brother-in-law Volodin would begin to be taped that very night in the same laboratory where she fell in love with the prisoner Rostislav Vadimovich Doronin, and it would serve to expose her brother-in-law.  “That’s right,” says Rostislav, “but why don’t people renounce all privileges instead of trying to obtain them?”  Thus the wondrous corruption of the female lieutenant continues.                

6. All these quotes and allusions may give you the impression that we are dealing with many novels and many romances all united into one novel.  It is rather difficult to restrict oneself to citations when you want to quote most of the 670 pages the novel contains.  The book does not possess that infamously epic flow: it keeps stumbling, starting over, stumbling again; it has whole chapters of bitter soliloquies and paraphrases on the inspections by human rights commissions that are led astray, thoroughly and completely astray.  Or the wives’ horrible half-hour visits which are allowed to many prisoners once a year.  The stumbling is the stumbling of deep breathing, of lengthiness, not a shortness of breath, which may arouse the appetite of the Western European novel.  It is this pacing which reminds one of Tolstoy, and it is this sarcasm and subtlety of psychological perception that remind one of Dostoevsky.  And yet all the while it is Solzhenitsyn, undeniably, because one knows more from him. 

There are also specialists in the Mavrino camp who refuse to develop surveillance methods or who cleverly sabotage this development, since only they, the lone specialists incarcerated for this purpose, know or could know how these methods might be developed.  These seem to me to be the true socialist scientists.  In addition, the female employees, all the state security lieutenants, young women most of whom were born after Lenin’s death in 1924, appear to be most unreliable.  But many a prisoner turns out to be someone you can count on.  That we can see this makes the material, despite the staggering amount of pain and suffering, almost optimistic.  Pensions are still being paid nowadays to the victims of Stalinism.  And what does Solzhenitsyn’s horrible crime consist of?  Naturally, there cannot be so much absurdity in a state founded and operated on Marxist principles.  But can this acknowledgment of Stalinism-driven mass incarceration possibly find closure in the long run with pensions still being meted out to its victims? 

One hundred years after Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, we now have this book, unfortunately only in the West, for whom it was not written.  It was written for the liberation of socialism.  We have no reason, not the slightest reason, to revel in The First Circle as a portrait of Stalinist misdeeds, absurdities, and entrapments.  But we do have a reason to ask ourselves whether a Western author could manage, in our complicated entanglement, such a depiction of the world of the oblivious and the world of those suffering in secret. 

*Note: Solzhenitsyn passed away on August 3, 2008, four months shy of his 90th birthday.