Backlisted - Notes from Under the Floorboards AKA Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

Welcome to the 150th episode of Backlisted! To mark the occasion we are joined by authors Alex Christofi (Dostoevsky in Love) and Arifa Akbar (Consumed: A Sister's Story) for a discussion of one of Russia's greatest writers Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was born in Moscow on November 11 1821, 200 years ago this month. We concentrate on his pioneering novella Notes From Under the Floorboards AKA Notes From Underground (1864) and consider its impact and continuing relevance to modern life. Also in this episode John enjoys Dark Neighbourhood (Fitzcarraldo), the debut collection of stories by Vanessa Onwuemezi; and, having let it settled for a few months, Andy unveils his favourite novel of the year, Gwendoline Riley's My Phantoms (Granta).Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)12:20 - My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley. 19:24 - Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onmuewez. 26:24 - Notes From Under The Floorboards by Fyodor Dostoevsky* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Hello Alex,, Aretha. Aretha, are you back out in London's busy West End? Yeah, I'm a dab hand at it now. We've been out, us theatre critics have been out since May in the auditoriums now, sometimes being asked for our covid classes sometimes not sometimes we see audiences wearing masks but a lot of the time they're not so nevertheless we're out you know

i'm out four or five times a week and it's it's joyous i'll never take it for granted presumably it was exhilarating back in may yeah and i'm not saying you're jaded now here in November but how long did it take for, I don't know, like people rustling packets of Maltesers to be annoying? Oh listen, I'm so uptight that I remember one of the first few shows when we returned I got very emotional when people laughed collectively or when we clapped at the end. It was really much more moving than I thought it would be.

But then very shortly after, I'm really, really irritable. I'm an irascible theatre critic. You know, somebody with a big head comes and sits in front of me. It's sort of curtains for them. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. It's curtains for me. There's the joy of being around everybody

and then there's the nuisance of it, you know, the humanness and the close contact and never more so in an auditorium when you're sitting cheap to jail. Alex, have you had a moment where you've gone from being, you know, feeling euphoric to be back with a group of people

to then feeling hell is other people. They were kind of simultaneous for me because I decided Dune, I thought, was one of the rare films that is actually worth forking out for the IMAX experience. Right. The screen made it completely worthwhile. I know where this is going.

It was absolutely epic. The other people in the IMAX, less so. But it was all forgiven because the Blade Runner 49 was really beautiful and kind of slightly plotless and kind of insubstantial. And then when you just dump a load of Frank Herbert world building on top of it, it was a mate. But have you noticed that, Johnny?

Have you noticed people have forgotten how to be private? There's a sort of edge, isn't there, that slightly troubles me, that people are kind of, you know, it's a sort of what are you going to do about it? I'm back and I'm out and I'm doing whatever the hell I want to do. And I'm sick of being told. There's a lot of anger, a lot of anger out there. Yeah, everyone's got their voice from notes from the underground running through their heads all the time.

It's so the right book for the moment, I have to say. Right, we should, well, let's talk about it then. Shall we? Okay. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today is a doubly special occasion as we celebrate our 150th episode. 150?

I know, it's just unthinkable. But also, almost to the day, the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ah, that's a coincidence. It is. And yet more coincidences are about to be unraveled. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, you find us in St. Petersburg in 1864, following a gaunt man in his 40s as he walks briskly through the fashionable boulevards of the central city towards the shabby quarter where he lives, a place of cheap restaurants, cheaper brothels and basement vodka dens where young radicals plot revolution. But there's no time to drink

or argue or gamble. He has a journal to edit and creditors to appease. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and we're joined today by two guests, Arefa Akbar and Alex Christoffi. Hello, Alex and Arefa. Hello. Hello. Hi, guys. Hello. Arefa is chief theatre critic for The Guardian. A journalist for almost 25 years, she was previously the former literary editor of The Independent, where she also worked as a news reporter and arts correspondent she has written for the observer the ft and long-term listeners will recall she worked for unbound as well as tortoise media her first book consumed a sister's story uh we talked about on this podcast and has been long listed for the baileyifford Prize earlier this year. Congratulations, Aretha.

Thank you. We love your book. You can go back and verify if you listen to this. Loved it. Well, I have to say thank you for your really generous words on it. So, yes, thank you. Well, and thank you for coming back because you've been on here a couple of times before.

You come from the old times, Aretha. Oh, they were marvellous. Do you remember the old-fashioned days? The before times. Yeah, the before times when we sat around a wooden table. Yeah, we talked about Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, and you also joined us in Bath at the Bath Festival for our Angela Carter episode as well.

It was so exhilarating. I loved it. You were fun. Yeah, I'm back for more. Welcome back. Also, for the first time alex christoffi hello alex alex is editorial director at transworld publishers and the author of the novels let us be true and glass which was winner of the betty trask prize for fiction he has written for numerous publications including the guardian the london magazine the white review and the brixton review of, and contributed an essay,

that's lucky, to the Unbound anthology, What Doesn't Kill You? 15 Stories of Survival. He's also just published his first work of non-fiction, which, as luck would have it, is about Dostoevsky, is called Dostoevsky in Love, and John and I have both read it, and I would like to say two things about it, Alex. First of all, I recommend it to our listeners as a terrific book in its own right, but also I recommend it to anyone who's preparing a podcast on Dostoevsky

as a fantastic place to garner a lot of fascinating information and interpretation of Dostoevsky's work. Have you had a busy year celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth? It's been around the launch of the book in January. It was actually really lovely because it was, lockdown three itself wasn't lovely, but by that point we'd figured out how to do podcasts and live sort of Zoom events really well so i had a couple of really lovely events around there um and and some very nice coverage in in print and

it's gone completely silent over the summer and then uh yeah miraculously some but for some reason in the run-up to his 200th birthday things have uh come back around get me that dostoevsky guy people are saying i mean i do sort of feel sometimes a couple of things definitely have come about because someone has just sort of googled dostoevsky but i prefer find me very cheap i tell you what to be fair alex we've been talking to to you about doing this one for a while haven't we and and we we we then ended up doing the obvious thing which is going well it's the 200th anniversary and it's our 150th birthday and and all the rest of it so john why don't you tell us what we need to know about today's book notes from the underground uh is a short novel and it was first serialized in Dostoevsky's own short-lived magazine,

Epoca, in 1864, and forgive my Russian, as Zabisky is Podpolia. It was first published in its English translation in 1913 in the dense Everyman's Library, in a translation by C.J. Hogarth, but the classic English translation was by Constance Garnett, which was published by Heinemann in 1918. What is it? It's a book divided into two sections, narrated by the unnamed underground man, a recently retired minor civil servant aged 40 living in a shabby apartment in St. Petersburg. The first section is a monologue marked out by its self-loathing and its profound dislike for the utopian philosophy based on the enlightened several interests then fashionable in Russian literary circles. The second half sees the underground man,

the angry underground man, revisiting important incidents from his 20s that somewhat undermine the philosophical position he's cobbled together in the first half of the book. He fantasizes about getting even with a soldier who bumps into him, finds himself scorned by old school friends, and behaves very badly towards a prostitute who has put her trust in him. Despite the downbeat content, it is widely considered as one of the first and greatest works of existential literature, casting its influence on Nietzsche, Kafka, Beckett, and unbeknownst to them, almost everyone who uses Twitter. As the great Russian scholar D.S. Mersky put it,

notes from the underground cannot be recommended to those who are not either sufficiently strong to overcome it or sufficiently innocent to remain unpoisoned yeah if it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger um i before we but i would like to ask alex a question our resident dostoevsky expert listeners will want to know if they're going to read this book and let's say they're going to read it for the first time, and I know how reluctant you are to do this, but you're here. Come on. Dance, monkey, dance.

Which translation do you personally recommend that people should read of Notes from Underground? So I might, with the sort of huge caveat that this is absolutely not the definitive last word and there's no objective truth about translations. Well done. Very Dostoevsky. My preference, my own preference is Constance Garner. I think she's a really good translator and I think she captures the spirit of Dostoevsky really well.

I think some of the modern translators are very good at finding little blind spots and fixing those. Each translation will inevitably kind of have its additions and subtractions from the text. So the famous new one is by Richard Bevere and Larissa Volokhonsky, and there are people who prefer that one. In some ways, it's a more fastidious translation. You know, the thing that annoys me about the modern one

is that if he could say spidery, he says spiderish. There's just a sort of lack of poetry in... Yeah. He, I think, in some ways, is a good translator and a bad writer and yeah That's been my experience over the years I much prefer the Mauds

Tolstoy to a more pseudo authentic translation of Tolstoy because you know if the Mauds were good enough for Tolstoy himself which they were and they write in a pleasingly lyrical style um I'll take it they they make it keep it readable and that's how I feel about Constance Garnett so I'm very interested to hear you say that it's it's it's a tricky one

isn't it because I mean you know I've read rather more than I probably wanted to about what actually even the title is disputed isn't't it? What is the underground? We're going to get on to that. Oh, we're going to get on. Fine, cool. Let's leave it. Let's ask me what I've been reading. Before we get into the niceties of Russian utopian philosophy, Andy,

I feel compelled to ask you the question, what have you been reading this week? Right. Well, it wasn't this week, but I'll explain why in a minute. I've been reading a novel called My Phantoms by Gwoline riley very good her sixth novel which is published by granter you will know that there is a question in the book trade do online reviews sell books well i can tell you they do in the case of my phantoms by gwendoline riley because a few months ago i was looking around for something to read,

and I came across a review of this novel on a well-known book-selling website, and this is what it said. Absolutely hated this book. Solely depressing and frustrating. No likeable characters. Felt like a complete waste of time. Regular listeners know, well, that's pretty much everything I look for in a novel. So what I did was I walked down into town to our bookshop and

I bought a copy of the book purely based on that review. And I took it home and I read it and I absolutely loved it. It's my favourite novel of this year. And then I also ordered up everything else Gwendolyn Riley has ever written, and I read all of that as well. So thank you to that anonymous person who attempted to stop people reading this book. It didn't work, I'm afraid. And I noticed, in fact, this person, when I was preparing this today, I had a look to see what books they did like, and they'd given five stars to a book described as

a page-turning comfort read that will make you laugh and cry. Well, My Phantoms by Gwendolyn Riley is a page-turning discomfort read that will make you laugh and cry unless there's something wrong with you. Now, why haven't I talked about this book before? Well, I'll tell you. Because I loved it so much that I wanted to have a few months of just having a personal relationship with the novel before sharing it on here. Because it just bowled me over. And I felt so moved and energised by it that I just didn't want to put myself in the position of having anybody telling me that they didn't like it. That's not an

invitation. If you've read it, just don't tell me. It's fine. You're allowed not to like it. I absolutely loved it. I love Gwendolyn Riley's work it's a book about narrated by a woman called bridget and it's about her relationship with her mother helen who is twice divorced is living alone is moving into a new flat they have a very very uneasy relationship bridget and helen and as i kept reading i was thinking how has Gwendolyn Riley done this? How has she gained access to every unworthy thought I've ever had about my so-called loved ones? And put them in a novel and fix them to the page. I haven't squirmed with pleasure so much since reading Thomas Bernhardt or since we did Something Happened by Joseph Heller on this podcast.

She's often been compared to Jean Rees. I can see that point of comparison. Her first novel was published when she was very young. She was 23, won the Betty Trask. That was Coldwater. And there is a criticism of her that she always writes the same book. Again, that's what's good about her. She has such a specific style and such a way of approaching her material

that every time she revisits it, every few years, she does something new with it. And this novel, My Phantoms, hasn't appeared on any prize shortlists, This novel, My Phantoms, hasn't appeared on any prize shortlists, which for me brings the entire British literary establishment into disrepute. It's absurd this novel hasn't featured. I can only assume people used up all their superlatives and their shortlistings on her last novel, First Love, which was shortlisted for the Gordon Byrne and the Golds and uh the james tape black won the jeffrey faber memorial prize and that is a great novel but for me my phantoms is better and i'm very aware there's word of mouth around my phantoms this year long-term supporters of her like katherine taylor and uh john on Twitter, banging the drum for this novel. I loved it so much, I'm not going to read from it. I'm going to give you a bit of the audiobook. This is from the beginning of Chapter 2,

read by Helen McAlpine. If you like this, go and get this book. I can't know what my mother was like at work. It's still hard to imagine or guess. She maintained that she hated her job. Everybody hates the job, Bridge, she used to say. Everybody does. Later, after she'd retired, she told me that going into the office used to make her feel sick. Absolutely sick to my stomach, yes. Why? I asked. It just wasn't me, she said frowning. Her antipathy to her circumstances was no spur to change. I think it was the opposite in a way

back then. My mother loved rules. She loved rules and codes and fixed expectations. I want to say, as a dog loves an airborne stick. Here was unleashed purpose, freedom of a sort. Here too was the comfort of the crowd and of joining in, of not feeling alone and in the wrong. In conversation, or attempted conversation, her sights seemed set on a similar prize. She enjoyed answering questions when she felt that she had the right answer, an approved answer. I understood that when I was very small and could provide the prompts accordingly. Then talking to her was like a game or a rhyme we were saying together.

You hated being an only child, didn't you? I might say. And she would say, oh yes, I hated it, yes. And after I had Michelle, I knew I had to have another baby because I always vowed I could never have just one. I think it's cruel to have just one. She painted a beguiling picture, if you were susceptible to that kind of thing. Lonely, only child. Breathless little girl who had to do this and had to do that. I was not susceptible. But then, nor did I ever quite feel that I was the intended audience when she took on like this. There was some other figure she'd conceived and was playing to.

That's how it felt. Somebody beyond our life. Yeah, it's the perfect Christmas gift. Buy it for your mum. John, what have you been reading this week? Well, I've also been reading something which I could hardly recommend as a sort of a feel-good read. It's, I think, a rather brilliant collection of new stories. First collection by Vanessa Onwumezi, published Dark Neighbourhood,

published by Fitzcarraldo, the ever-excellent Fitzcarraldo. And as you would expect, although she is based in London, it is a book that feels very international. You know, it feels, it reminds me very much of Fernanda Melkor, whose book Hurricane Season I talked about. I can't even remember when that was, but some time ago and loved. But also she has that kind of international strangeness that I think Ely Williams has.

There are times in this collection of stories when I was also reminded strongly of Clarice Lispector, which is a big comparison to make. But given that it's a first collection, it's dark. These stories are full of shame and loss and fear, but the language is beautiful, really, really, really precise and beautiful and resonant and original. I found myself kind of getting, you know, that thing

where you read a writer for the first time, it takes a while for you to trust them. But once I got into the first chapter in this book, Dark Neighbourhood, which is the eponymous story, once you get into the heart of it, you realise that there's a kind of, it's a dystopian fantasy about a group of, I'm going to read a little short piece from it.

There's no audible way out for me, so I'm going to read you a short piece uh it's basically two women who are trading goods this it's that sense of displacement it could be anywhere it could be it could be on the border between america and mexico it could be in the middle east funnily enough they're waiting to go through a gate which reminded me very strongly of that um the ending of the curt Sere novel, Mary Costolo, which we did. So it has that kind of, they're waiting to get through a gate. Nobody really knows how you get through the gate, but they don't want to lose their place in the line and they're trading goods to stay there.

So almost a kind of Ridley Walker feel to it as well about the stuff that they find, these toys and bits and bobs that they're selling to people she's a very visceral i think extremely uh accomplished this is a main amazingly accomplished first selection it is dark it's not going to be for everybody it does require that you you have to you know you have to sharpen up your um your your kind of mind a little bit to sometimes the way that there's a there that, there's a kind of a stylistic thing she does. She leaves gaps and instead of having a comma, she'll write the word comma in brackets. Sarah Hall also comes to mind.

The prose is really, really strong. The characters are strong. The situations, there's a brilliant story about some Spanish cleaners working at a hideous kind of office. But this is from the Dalt neighborhood. I'll read you a little bit. Emerged from the labyrinth's dung heap, I walk back to my pile passing the line of waiting people. Whispers of the last statement from the gate still bounce

from mouth to mouth, just as the words had bounced. So the gate speaks from time to time. Whispers from the last statement of the gate still bounce from mouth to mouth, just as the words had bounced around my mind. Can't blame us. What else is to think or speak? The people here say, love is hard. That much has arrived undistorted. But then, as Stevie says, the statement morphs.

An interpretation is anyone's to make. Love is a hard shell that must be cracked. Love is done and must be buried. And a few kilometers further away and away and away, it becomes something like, bury your loved ones, all from a single source, comma, who? The god from the gate? There are floodlights high above us, illuminated both day and night, erase the moon, intensify the sun. No child born here will ever know the moon waxing or its smile that wanes to a slither of silver, new moon, the cold half moon. To live in a world filled with light is like being slowly erased, slowly erased, no longer knowing down or up, yes or no, day or true night. Light upon light is darkness. The first time I heard the gate speak, human voice crackling through speaker system.

It seemed genuine as we wrapped our fists on metal door of it. It that had appeared this day I mentioned, blocking our path on a cold walk home. I have a good friend in your position, it said. Nobody should have to go through what you're going through, it said. We take your concerns very seriously. I asked to be specific. Who is this friend and what happens to them next? Shouting in the direction of the speaker. But a man next to me, open bracket, who had all his teeth,

whose breath was mint fresh, who had all his teeth, whose breath was mint fresh, who was a smart, casual dresser and spoke well, with an accent more trustworthy than most, including my own, close bracket, explained to me that this empathy should be considered sincere and that we should be reasonable people and wait. I had no words for the dense feeling in my stomach. It didn't deserve expression just then. I decided to sit and rest in place amongst a crowd of people trapped on the path that came to be known as the way through. And when we remained reasonable people as the next hundred, then thousand people bedded down and following nights was the first trees were felled for

firewood. The first tooth was pulled, a baby was born, gunshot fired, yes is my answer to all that, and still a yes, I rest in place, bathed in the hellish acid lemonade, watching my head roll over the moving sky in this eternal waiting room, only one magazine to be found, our salvation on the other side of the gate seems assured. We hear long cries of bliss from over there that say, hold on just a few days more. There, vague history of how I came to be stationary one day on this space of tarmac. It's great, Jim. I'm excited that we're celebrating our 150th episode with a cavalcade of bleakness so that's uh dark neighborhoods now who's it who's who's the publisher it's fitzcarraldo um

so and it's vanessa who we're messy and uh i think both you could probably get those books for about 20 quid or borrow them from the library. They are not hard to find or expensive, unless, of course, you're in the States, where I don't think either of those books are available. I'm sorry about that, everybody. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. When this episode goes live, I want to put it on the internet as that listed episode 150,

Notes from Under the Floorboards by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Would I be justified in doing that? Yeah, you absolutely would. So Hogarth, the first translator, he went for Letters from the Underworld, which was just not very good. The next attempt was Constance Garnett, who I've already laid my cards on the table and said, I think Constance Garnett's pretty good.

She called it Notes from the Underground and it stuck. And, you know, notes in this is that this word that john said zapiski which is like it's kind of its own genre so it's um the point is that i the author have just opened a drawer in some random deserted house and found a bunch of like scribblings or jottings by uh some imagined third party and look I'm dumping them on you, reader, in this journal. And it's sort of not my fault what they contain. And that was good because it distances the author from the text. And it's kind of useful with the censors as well

because you're not saying it's your opinions. So the notes part is really important um and then the underground thing i think underground is is a really good instinctive word but in the most literal sense it's notes from under the floorboards so like the english species of house monster uh lives under the bed of course or sometimes in cupboards but generally under the bed of course uh or sometimes in cupboards but generally under the bed but the russian russian sort of house devils and things uh you're quite likely to find your evil spirits living under the floorboards almost a kind of supernaturally element to it yeah i mean he's definitely haunting us yeah yeah so okay so so if it's good enough for both alex christoffi and

howard devoto we can call it notes from under the floorboards when it goes up. I'm incredibly excited that we're going to do that. Great. That's excellent. Arifa Akbar, when did you first read notes from under the floorboards? I was an undergraduate. I think it was my first year at university. I think it was on on a course list. And I was thrilled because it was a short novel, a very short novel.

I hear you. I think I was a 19 year old, navel gazing as often as often 19-year-olds are, emphatically non-conformist student, undergraduate, English student. And I hated everybody, and I hated myself in that really immature 19-year-old way. And I opened up this book purely relieved because it was a short Dostoevsky novella. And I was on fire because I related to its loathing of other people, you know, loathing of itself, the narrator's sort of self-loathing, its defiance, its refusal to conform. refusal to conform. But also, it's sort of inability to find a philosophy because at that age, we're all finding ways of living and what we believe and what we don't at those teen, early 20s. And I saw that this 40-year-old was sort of grappling with my angst the sort of angst that i was going through then that on the cusp of of being a grown-up with a philosophy for life and and i was reading the

things you read as an undergraduate like the metamorphosis you know kafka and i was reading bartleby the scrivener and i was joining up the narrator here with Bartleby, with Gregor Samsa, with their refusals, with their rebellions in whichever way. And what I was fascinated by was not just the anger, the rage at himself and the rage at others, was the paralysis. I thought that was a very interesting way to resist and rebel a bit like Barthelby the Scrivener by not doing we must have been on

similar courses I read this as a student and what was interesting going back to it is actually often you go back to a book for this where you've read a long time ago and you you think you find it a totally different experience actually this one felt the same because I remembered so strongly how it had affected me when I first read it when I was 19 and it had much the same effect now. Alex, when did you first read this or when did you first read Dostoevsky? Actually, the first one I read was Crime and Punishment and actually it was so interesting that you say Bartleby the Scrivener

because there's a minor character in this that um he's not kind of talked about much in criticism because he doesn't sort of really do anything much but there's a that the underground man's servant called apollon uh he is literally just bartleby sat in the background and just refusing to do anything or to say anything yeah he's such an interesting character. And he just invents him and then just throws him away. He takes about 20 pages. But yeah, I got into university. And then after the elation had died down,

I realized that then I was going to have to sort of have opinions on literature. And I was terrified. And so over the summer after my A-levels, I was browsing around in a bookshop and looking for things that looked like serious literature that i could have opinions on and i saw this book that said crime and punishment i thought well you know two serious things were all in one you know it's like a bumper edition like head and shoulders yeah so i thought you know this would be the one for me and and actually the

the thing that it really that really sort of shocked me and it's it sounds like such an obvious thing but it was this idea that literature could actually be quite dangerous that you know that you've got a young man whose avowed mission is to is to murder two old ladies by beating he stows their head in with the blunt end of an axe i mean it's not it you know he doesn't gloss over it um and then you spend a lot of the novel trying to figure out like how this came about he doesn't even seem to know himself it was a violent but also a kind of mysterious book that didn't quite tell you everything. It was trying to sort of force me to work it out. And I don't think I got it straight away.

But then I had the bug and I started reading more Dostoevsky. So the voice, really. Yeah. The voice more than the sense. Yeah, and actually identifying and giving life to that sort of angry young man and and it's so interesting because there's very few people who intimately understand that that man and it sort of probably is a man there are few people who can animate him and tell you where he's going wrong or show you m Mitch, had you read this before?

Oh, yeah, I'd read it at university. Going back to it, I have to say it's chilling, as I said, how it applies still. Do I feel differently about it? No, probably I don't in a way that you sometimes revise. I'm just amazed at still how angry and sad it is. It's an amazing book. the way we're going to do this episode of backlisted is we're going to hear a few clips and then i'm going to ask our panel to

comment on them so here's the first one all that makes men and women saints or sinners the furies that rage in their hearts, the fires that burn in their flesh, now storms the screen in the seething story of a master storyteller, the Brothers Karamazov. Alexei, I see in myself the same depravity and sin as there is in our father.

I'm a Karamazov. My father is very romantic. Very rich. He wants to marry me. And if I marry him, that makes me be your mother. This is the explosive story of the Karamazov family. The seed of depravity and sin that was in their father was the only thing the brothers had in common.

Lee Jacob gives an astounding performance as the father. Albert Saume makes an auspicious screen debut as the sinister, illegitimate son. You wouldn't kill your own son, would you? You ought to kill me, darling. Stop talking such foolishness, Papa. The saintly Alexei is portrayed by William Shatner. Co-star Richard Basehart vividly portrays the smoldering intellectual Ivan.

Slut! That's not becoming of a lady. You're on sale to any man. I didn't go to Demeter's room for 5,000 rubles, did I? I'd give the rest of my life for one year, one day, one hour of your love. William Shatner in perhaps his most famous role. Wow.

In that trailer for the film the brothers Karamazov made in the 60s, John, you will have spotted that, Dostoevsky was described as a master storyteller. Aretha, is that a fair description of Dostoevsky, a master storyteller? Well, I'm going to answer that question by focusing on notes from the underground i'm sorry notes from under the floorboards or notes from underground it's fine it's just it's fine whatever's easiest if if i think of the novel i read after which is the

the novel he wrote after a year after this one uh crime and Punishment. Yeah, that's master storytelling, sweeping, it hurtles along. It still has those pauses and meditations and almost mini essays on morality and volition that we get here. I did feel very differently about this story now. I was more emotionally appalled by it. But I also found it far funnier than I ever did before. But what struck me more was its form. So I'm going to address this question specifically to this story. And I think what's amazing about this story is that he's not a master storyteller in the traditional form whatsoever here. He's making the story really unstable. You know, he's giving us a really quite turgid treatise on philosophies of living,

of the critique on the Enlightenment, ideas, his own perhaps authorial voice about free will, the freedom to live perversely or spitefully, as he says. We don't know whether this is Dostoevsky speaking or the underground man or a melding of both. And there's that treatise that actually is like treacle to get through or was for me. And I was thinking, hang on a minute, storyteller here, the master storyteller, what's he doing? He's giving out this enormous essay. But then the second section killed me, the second and third, because then he shows you something else. He shows you the Dostoevsky that can sweep you in within pages. I was mortified for the underground man's excruciating, intolerant and painful meeting with his reunion with his friends, with his so-called friends.

And then the encounter with the prostitute, which wasn't just him preaching at a prostitute to change her ways and being the moralist. It was something much more emotionally perverse. the moralist, it was something much more emotionally perverse. You know, he was almost inviting her into his life by saying, here's my address, come, I can be your rescuer, and then not rescuing her, becoming her tyrant, and actually self-sabotage once again, because I believe that narrator wanted this woman, Lisa, much more than she needed him, you know, and yet he couldn't be the lovable man. He couldn't be loved and he couldn't give love. So Dostoevsky goes from the treatise that locks you out in a way, and I almost wanted to throw this book, and I thought, what on earth am I reading this for? I wanted to cast it aside.

But then he then shows you how to write a really emotionally engaged story for some and he sweeps you in and then he pushes you out at the end saying well i could go on because he very he says at the end there's more story here but i don't i'm not going to tell you you don't need to read it unbelievable so what he's doing is something very tricksy almost a sort of very 20th century and very post-modern unreliability and instability also very 21st century in as much as when i was rereading i said you know i was reminded me when i was a student but actually it's sort of i was thinking what is this why i'm reading this what is this like oh yeah i know what this reminds me of it It reminds me of being awake

at three in the morning and my own self-loathing coursing through my head as I run through every single thing I've ever said and done, which I feel embarrassed or bad or angry about, right? It's like that inner monologue,

unstoppable, unless you choose to stop it or you fall asleep, if you're lucky. But Alex, the master storyteller element, I mean, we have a running joke on Ballistic unstoppable unless you choose to stop it or you fall asleep if you're lucky but alex that the master storyteller element i mean we have a running joke on bat listed about the phrase master storyteller but i'm really interested in the idea of how dostoevsky

created a reputation for himself as a you know a king of narrative when so much of his work is himself as a you know a king of narrative when so much of his work is discursive and and theological and philosophical you know is it true to say some books are more plot based than others or or or does that not apply to industrial yeah i think it is true um he does, I think with his longer novels, he loves a subplot. And I think in the ones that he, where he didn't do as many drafts as he'd have liked to, because he was heavily in debt, he tended in his early drafts towards melodrama. The main plots are always really kind of beautifully worked out. and sometimes it gets kind of weirdly patchy around the edges i think i think where you see the brothers karamazov is him taking his time and then you think oh my god couldn't couldn't someone have just been giving you some money

because this is incredible when he's at his full his full kind of capability i think i weirdly with notes from the underground i think sort of a master in the sense that he's doing exactly what he wants to do, which is, it's this sort of diptych. And the first one, he's kind of slightly sending up a couple of his contemporaries who wrote these like really turgid theological,

like pseudo theological crappyological crappy texts. I mean, the most influential of which was kind of objectively impossible to get through in narrative terms. But it was a very, very influential book called What Is To Be Done by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. And they were on completely opposite sides of the political spectrum. Such a great title. I love it.

Yeah, and Lennon loved it so much he nicked it. That's right. Yeah. So that's what he's doing in the first part of this diptych is basically writing a sort of slightly ill-composed thing with loads of weird digressions and things in brackets as a bit of a mixtape, I think. And then in the second one, he's sort of looking at where that generation came from. They were

all born into, they were really influenced by, when they were all in their 20s, it was the generation of the 1840s. And they were all romantics. They loved chiller. They loved the beautiful and the good and the sort of sublime. And they absolutely loved stories where, you know, a noble young man would come and save a prostitute and she would be so thankful. he does that and then he doesn't give you what the romantics would have wanted. He gives you this sort of horribly real and like very psychologically insightful and, um, yeah. And kind of twisted version of that.

He seems to me to be suspicious right at the, and it's fascinating because I know we'll say he was a huge Dickens fan, Right at the, it's fascinating because I know also he was a huge Dickens fan, but he seems almost to be suspicious of the, what you might kind of call the healing power of fiction. You know, he can't quite allow himself to, that's why he doesn't, I mean, maybe Crime and Punishment is a good example. Maybe some of the shorter, you know, Gambler is, he doesn't allow himself, as Alex said he he I mean

he's excellent he's really good at plot but he can't it's not enough for him he wants to push it further and it's like with this you know you're gonna have to really work quite hard to get to the narrative bits I mean I have to say I I do like the ranting. I mean, I think it's high-quality. I do think it's high-quality. Oh, I love the ranting. It's high-quality ranting. I'd just like to pick up something Alex said. You know, Alex, one of my favourite bits in your book, Dostoevsky in Love, is the description of the composition

of his novella, The Gambler, which he had to write in about three weeks because he'd signed this incredibly stupid deal. It's one of the most terrible stories in literature. It's like a negative of It's a Wonderful Life. It's a terrible life. He has to get this in by midnight on a particular day, and he does it with two hours to spare, right? Because he's gambled away all the money so he

thinks to himself what i better do is sign up to a shit deal and write a novel about a gambler it's it's it's ridiculous your point is really valid what would he have done with a patron yeah you know if he had been supported what how different would his work have been well you know interestingly at the point where he he works his way out of debt is when he sort of starts planning the Brothers Karamazov and he kind of has a patron in the sense that he starts to get in with the more conservative circle around the Tsar and there's some suggestion that maybe he got a sort of

bit of a one-off windfall via one of these people from the Tsar to pay off his remaining debts. Not only him, his wife, who was much, much better with money than he was, started self-publishing his works after they'd been serialized the first edition, the first complete edition. So they were actually making better money at that point. And that was when he was able to kind of put together this incredibly impressive structural edifice of the Brothers Kahn master, which just wasn't possible before. But yeah, the Gambler was a ridiculous pursuit. I mean, he gave, the deal was you had 12 months to write a novel of at least 160 pages. The first 11 months, he wrote a completely different book for us.

He was writing Crime and Punishment. And then he sort of went to the guy and said, could have an extension and the guy said no i want your copyrights terrible though so the the worst thing that story just chilled me it's the worst you mentioned you mentioned bartleby yeah by herman melville melville says you know what you need for a novel is time strength cash and paper that's the dostoevsky formula right there right what would i do if i had time strength cash and patient you had none of those um i wonder arifa could you read us a little bit from notes from underground so we could get a sense of the one of the voices sure would you like me to read the beginning bit oh Oh, that'd be perfect. Yes, please.

I am a sick man. I'm an angry man. I'm an unattractive man. I think there's something wrong with my liver. But I don't understand the least thing about my illness, and I don't know for certain what part of me is affected. I'm not having any treatment for it and never have had, although I've had a great respect for medicine and for doctors. I am extremely superstitious, if only in having such

respect for medicine. I'm well educated enough not to be superstitious, but superstitious I am. No, I refuse treatment out of spite. That is something you'll probably not understand. Well, I understand it. I it i can't of course explain who my spite is directed against in this matter i know perfectly well that i can't score off the doctors in any way by not consulting them i know better than anybody that i'm harming nobody but myself all the same if i don't have treatment, it's out of spite. Is my liver out of order? Let it get worse.

What I love about this, it's just an enormous fuck you. You know what I think it is, though? It's an enormous fuck you. You know, hell is other people, but it's enormous fuck me, too. That's what I think is tragic. It's hell is other people but it's enormous fuck me too that's what i think is tragic it's hell is myself i i got that from a new yorker article i was just reading it it's written a good few years ago uh and the philosophy is that the david denby one yes yeah that's great really interesting and the narrator is sort of saying hell is myself my split self my perverse self my self-destructive self you know that all the things that freud was going to say all the things that the 20th century would reveal

about psychology um you know our acute self-consciousness um he was saying this narrator was saying and that's why i find it you know there's a pleasure in that despair isn't there there's a sort of reveling in it as well which i find you know it's almost like woody allen for the 19th century neurotic i think dostoevsky was being funny on purpose there's really funny lines in there i was was laughing out loud. Yeah, yeah. Well, you mentioned hell, and that's a pleasing opportunity to hear from former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, who has written a book about Dostoevsky.

And Alex, I'm going to ask you to respond to what, how you feel, it's fine. He probably will never hear this. You can respond to what he says here about Dostoevsky's work. I suppose what impresses me most about Dostoevsky is something he said himself about his own work, that he believed that as a Christian,

he could put the case against God and against faith even more strongly than an atheist could. He quite deliberately sets out to show that being a Christian doesn't mean you have to close your eyes to the horrors and outrages of the world, the horrors of children suffering, how perhaps freedom isn't good for us and perhaps we'd be better off as slaves or automata. And for him the answer is simply that love is real, love is embodied, that there is never a human situation which is without hope. never a human situation which is without hope. Part of what he's trying to speak about is

not something that makes suffering less important. It's really to put into relief just how much love, just how much profoundly sacrificial love is called out from us in a world where suffering is so deep and so appalling. That's part of what he's trying to do. He's inviting us to think what it might mean, as he likes to say, to take responsibility for the world we're in. All his great novels are in one way or another about that taking of responsibility. The characters who are for him rather fishy, rather unsatisfactory, the characters who, one way or another, walk away from that responsibility,

the characters who try to manipulate other people and control them rather than take loving responsibility for them, the characters who brush it all off and live for pleasure and self. So his novels are a very deep deep gospel-shaped challenge for me. I mean, first of all, I'd like to say I think that's absolutely magnificent. If you have a chance to follow the link on our website, watch the whole speech because it's brilliant. But I'm not sure I agree with Dr Williams.

Alex, how do you feel uh i i see what he's getting at which i think it's so in so to to sort of interpret it through um notes from the underground that it it's a part of what makes it a weird book is that it's fighting on a couple of different fronts so you've got this question of the ego, which is absolutely central to the book, but it sort of keeps turning up in different ways and it's hard to know what to do with it. I think what he starts doing in the first section is you've got all these young radicals who basically say, if we all knew how the world really was,

to act in our rational self-interest would be to act in everyone's interest and then we'd create this lovely world. And the image at the end of that terrible book I'd mentioned, What Is To Be Done, the image they end with is this crystal palace and it's made of, he absolutely loves aluminium. So everything's made of,

all the furniture's made of aluminium. It's always the same. And glass. And it's a bit like the sort of English crystal palace which actually Dostoevsky visiting absolutely hated and so he kind of conflicts these things in his head and says you know you think basically you take God out of the equation and we're all just going to be nice and live in communes and you know you're going to create a socialist utopia the reason that all just going to be nice and live in communes. And, you know, you're going to create a socialist utopia. The reason that's not going to happen is we don't act in our rational self-interest. We're all the time we're perverse. You know, if I could stand on my own foot to prove that I was free, I'd do it, you know.

And so I kind of think that's part of what's behind the first part of it. And where it comes into this, what Archbishop Williams was talking about, about love, what you see is he's managed to disprove those rational egoists, the underground man. But he's still missing the point. The only person who gets it is the person who has read the fewest books he's gonna he's sort of pretending oh i'm gonna save you the young prostitute you don't know anything i'm gonna come and i'm gonna elevate you with my noble romantic ideals with a big r and then and he's so caught up in his own ego that the act which absolutely devastates him and which I think genuinely makes the ending feel devastating and it's quite hard to understand why is he acts with absolute malice towards her and her response is that she she hugs

him yeah and I don't know if you've I don't know if anything's ever happened to you like that in real life, but if you've ever, in a fit of pique, and you say something you don't intend, you say something unkind, the absolute worst thing someone can do, the most devastating thing, is to look at you and say, God, you're really suffering, aren't you? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, it is devastating that the ending for that reason you know at one point he says i have to be a master or a slave he gets very nietzschean at

one point he talks about his need to tyrannize or be tyrannized and she upends those binaries you know the master slave because she does something that's just human and very humane yeah i think she triumphs over him and it's not just the hug it's that she walks away you know she just walks away he calls after her she's gone off who knows what transformation's taken place for her whereas he's back in his miserable little world. It's so hard to imagine that this was written so far before the Russian Revolution and the horrors that came afterwards. And yet you kind of see there's a brilliant passage. I just love this from the ranty section where he says,

you see, man is stupid, phenomenally stupid. That is to say, even if he's not totally stupid, then he's so ungrateful that one shouldn't expect anything else of him. For example, I should not in the least be surprised if suddenly, for no reason at all, some gentleman or other with a dishonorable, shall we say a reactionary and sarcastic demeanor springs up amidst this future reign of universal good sense and puts his hands on his hips and says to us all well gentlemen why don't we get rid of all this good sense once and for all give it a kick throw it to the wind just in order to send all these logarithms to hell so that we can once again live according to our own foolish will. Who can you be thinking of?

And this wouldn't matter either, but it's upsetting that he would undoubtedly find followers. That's the way man is made. It's quite modern. Trump. We're all there, right? I know, we're all there. It's chilling to read it and the word followers really

just yeah i just like to say to listeners if you can hear fireworks it's because people are celebrating the 200th birthday of dostoevsky but also it's bonfire nights when we're recording this so nabokov uh gave a series of lectures about Russian literature in the 1950s when he was teaching literature, and they were gathered together in a book called Lectures on Russian Literature, which I strongly recommend to listeners. It's one of my favorite of Nabokov's books. And he has this specific, he's not a big Dostoevsky fan,

and he has this specifically to say about Notes from the Underground. He says, Notes from the underground he says notes from the underground 1864 the story whose title should be memoirs from under the floor so let's just add him to our so that's howard devoto alex and nabokov right notes from under the floorboards bears in translation the stupidly incorrect title of Notes from the Underground. The story may be deemed by some a case history, a streak of persecution mania with variations. My interest in it is limited to a study in style.

It is the best picture we have of Dostoevsky's themes and formulas and intonations. It is a concentration of Dostoevskiana. I should warn you at this point that the first part of the story, 11 little chapters, are significant not in what is expressed or related, but in the manner it is expressed and related. The manner reflects the man. This reflection Dostoevsky wishes to

fix in a cesspool of confessions through the manners and mannerisms of a neurotic, exasperated, frustrated, and horribly unhappy person. Now, right, I absolutely

love, I mean, I love this essay, this essay on Dostoyevsky by nabokov it's very funny uh uh apart from everything else but there is a point there which i think is worth exploring manner over matter you know the matter of notes from the underground is perhaps rather esoteric but the manner is the thing which communicates itself to us now so in that respect nabokov is right isn't he so we're saying he's a stylist you know style over substance yeah he could be playing with the style what what i'm seeing here is almost the creation of the modern psychology but i personally don't feel that's what this

novella is about um i do think it's about uh philosophy substance too i don't think it's all sophist that he's playing with with words as a way of being a stylist i think he's saying something important about psychology and also about suffering. He's tying suffering, the right to suffer, the right to do things that aren't good for us, as we all do. He's acknowledging that as a part of human psyche, that sometimes, for example, you fall in love with the wrong person, you know they're the wrong person, that's so human. You do things like rejecting somebody you feel like Lisa, he does. He rejects Lisa, even though he wants Lisa the prostitute. You do put these perverse things because you're human and you know a lot of the time we're acting unconsciously aren't we and it makes for good literature so i think he's giving us the scope

of humanity he's putting suffering and perversity in the scope of human psychology and saying maybe this is part of freedom two and two doesn't equal four two and two sometimes equals five there's a wonderful bit in that opening section where he leads up to saying well i can understand why people find the idea of two and two equaling four so appealing but that doesn't negate the liberation of two and two equaling five i mean this is this is this is an anti-algorithm tract. Yeah. That's why fiction is the closest we can get by imagination. But, you know, you can't run, people aren't machines. But he could be doing both.

You know, what Nabokov's saying is really he's playing with style, he's being very tricksy, and he is doing that to some degree. But I also believe that in earnestness he is putting together a story that that explores freedom um freedom even when it's self-destructive the limits of freedom the goodness of you know expressing freedom in that way so i think he's he's doing that in earnestness with his character he's not just playing no no alex um nabokov versus dostoevsky is well the thing is that um i think nabokov as a sort of general policy felt that no opinion worth having should there should be a weak

opinion you know you just if you're going just, if you're going to go, if you're going to have an opinion, you've got to go to the very limit. And it was that extremity, which I actually think he kind of loves and doesn't want to recognize that commonality between himself and Dostoevsky. You know, if you see, you know,

if what it always felt like to me was that he sort of saw someone else play a sort of trick shot at Paul and he didn't get the chance to say he could do that trick shot too because the other guy did it first. So he's just really annoyed at the fact that this guy has created you know he does borrow themes and ideas quite liberally from Dostoevsky whilst insisting that there's sort of he's completely irredeemable and there's nothing to love about him you know that is a very relationship I think in terms of style the thing that I always I thought was so interesting with

notes from the so the less so the second part because it's more of a straight narrative but what I find so kind of intriguing about the first part is that he you know just at the point where you're thinking come on are you going anywhere with it you know this is that there's lots of things I'm underlining but also you're not taking me anywhere you turn the page he says, I can tell I'm irritating you now, aren't I? And you're like, what the hell? And then later on, he says, well, you know, I'm going to, this is my big theory about the world. But of course, you would argue that this blah, blah, blah, blah.

But anyway, this is me speaking now. I would tell you this. And well, don't shout me down like let me finish and he stages this whole thing putting words in your mouth and pre-empting every time you think that you know where it's going or whatever it is he will do a little swerve and what it's performing stylistically is this feeling that it's not running on rails. The world isn't deterministic. I think that's really interesting. Yeah, brilliant.

It's also, it has a passive-aggressive, rather antagonistic relationship to the reader, just as Lolita and Pale Fire do, to bring it back to Nabokov. You know, the idea that you're exasperated with the the reader's expectations is a great a great appeals to me very greatly there's a great line of mikhail bakhtin's about that which said that it's basically that what's innovative is that is that he's every word is directed at the anticipated response of the reader now cringing now shrill and spiteful the tone rising at the end of each section in open anticipation of the reader's response and that that is a that is original you don't you don't get that in dickens in the same way

i i think style is substance here that's my answer to the woke off style is substance that's the point you know the the substantial element substantial element is the stylistic realisation of not even an inner monologue, but a self-contradictory monologue. That's the great triumph there. But that's also, Andy, isn't it, that's the reason in the end you can't go with Rowan Williams because what he's creating here is proper negative capability

he's not he's creating something that the reader can enter and has to figure out for themselves he's not telling you how to live yeah yeah Aretha is there anything you would like to add about this book that you feel passionately about that we haven't touched on is there an element that you only the comedy I don't think we did the comedy and i think it's very comic so i'm not one of those laugh out loud people and i'm not yeah i've got really high expectations of humor i don't read humorous novels and humorous work because i often don't find it funny but with this it was a sort of savage humor, and that works for me, I'm afraid. He says things like, you know, when he has the friends reunion, is it Zverkov?

Zverkov is the dinner. He's going for a dinner with his old friends, and Zverkov is the boy he hated at school who's now going to have a farewell dinner and this narrator's going along and he says things like i want to give him a good slap i'm running to give him a slap you know and lines like that are clearly comic lines dos versi wants you to laugh in this spiky book is spiky story he's written, full of despair, full of suffering, and full of jokes. They're having this really polite conversation, and he's sitting there thinking, there's one line where he says,

actually now would be a really good moment to throw a bottle at his head. And there's something so modern about that that I just love. It's like a really stupid version of American Psycho or something, you know? Yeah. Yeah. What about at the beginning, right at the beginning where he says, who lives beyond 40? Give me an honest answer.

I tell you who does, fools and good-for-nothings. And I'm prepared to say this looking all my elders in the face. I'll say it to all those respectable old men, to all sweet smelling silver haired old men I'll say it straight to the face of the whole world I've got the right to speak thus because I myself will live to be 60 I'll live to be 70 I'll live to be 80 oh stop me let me get my breath back I mean he's funny right it's funny because it's true Alex is there anything you would like to um add no i actually in a way i think that's a great place to end because i think he has this reputation for being you know he's full of ideas he's a deeply philosophical writer but he's also really

weirdly really fun to read um and i think it gets missed. You know, because he's saying, okay, let's talk about, you know, the nature of suffering, the existence of God. You can go down those rabbit holes and totally miss the punchlines and things. Yeah, and it's actually full of them. Yeah. All right, brilliant. John, take us home. He is one of my literary heroes.

The gambler story, the man who hits his deadline under the most appalling... This book, let's just not forget, this book was written, he'd watched his wife die and he'd watched his brother die within the space of six months. And somehow he keeps it together to look after his brother's family to run a magazine to publish his own work i mean i think yeah do that leo do that leo tolstoy i suppose if we're going to say to anybody if you've never read any dostoevsky this is not a bad place to it's not a bad place to start i think we all feel that yeah yeah ah that's where we must

end things um huge thanks to aretha and alex for allowing us to drink down this short sharp shock of a book to nikki birch for making us sound like we're all in the same tavern and to unbound for the new beaver collar you can download all 149 previous episodes, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and now in Sound of Pictures on Instagram too about anything except My Phantoms by Gwendolyn Riley. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon

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You're both brilliant. Amazing. Thank you. Really love the conversation. We've all agreed with the help of expert witnesses that this book is called Notes from Under the Floorboards. And we'll see you next time thanks everyone bye If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon.

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