Jules Feiffer: Backing Into Forward, A Memoir
There is no mention of I Want to Go Home in this book.1
Tantrum
1 As much as I love Feiffer's drawing, The Great Comic Book Heroes, and Little Murders, there has always seemed to be an emptiness in his writing, or maybe not an emptiness but a pointlessness, the same pointlessness found in Philip Roth or William Gaddis. Feiffer's self-anointed position is that of truthteller, the man who excoriates hypocrisy and reveals the unconscious anxieties of society. Call it the Yaddo mindset. The problem, on display in the memoir, is that when the same standard isn't applied to one's self, it's rather embarrassing. By burying the worst (I hope) thing that he was ever associated with ("It could have been a lot different, a better movie, if I had been present," he says in his Onion interview), Feiffer seems to be practicing nihilism in the service of self-aggrandizement, a forgivable sin in all but the self-anointed truthteller. He has always been at his best when at his most visceral, in Tantrum and Little Murders, and at his worst when in the role of a condescending observer, as with Carnal Knowledge and, alas, much of his own strip.
Attention truthtellers: do not write your autobiography!
Barbara Comyns: The Vet's Daughter
I have sort of an unwritten rule to avoid talking too much about beginnings of books, because I think people focus on them as an excuse for short attention spans. I'll easily sacrifice the first sentence or the first chapter of a book in exchange for a solid structure and a real thematic coherence, but the trend today seems to be to favor the details over the whole, and what details are more likely to be appreciated than beginnings? Still, The Vet's Daughter deserves mention for its first paragraph because its oddness is so representative of some of Comyns' central tactics:
A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and spoke to me when I was thinking of something else. Together we walked down a street that was lined with privet hedges. He told me his wife belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and I said I was sorry because that is what he seemed to need me to say and I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn kneecaps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow; and near this arch there was a vet's house with a lamp outside. I said, "You must excuse me," and left this poor man among the privet hedges.We don't hear from the man again, and the narrator (a teenage girl named Alice, it turns out) is soon preoccupied by matters inside the vet's house. The vet is her abusive, alcoholic father, and the story concerns itself with how she copes with him and his wretchedness, including his longstanding mistress, who moves in with them after Alice's mother dies.
The book is more linear and "normal" than Comyns' first published novel, Sisters by a River, but they both share an odd gothic quality and a firm, assertive young woman narrator. I think it's the juxtaposition of those two things that gives Comyns her unique quality. It's not typical to see such a matter-of-fact narrator facing such outsized characters. There's no attempt to humanize the father; his monstrousness has its contradictions, but there's no question, in either the narrator's mind or the book's conception, that he is a monster. Yet a girl facing such a character would typically be more passively receptive to her impressions (say, in a Hardy novel, or even in Charlotte Bronte), and Alice is not. She thinks and speaks.
And the first paragraph, even if it doesn't have much to do plotwise with the rest of the book, sets this up. She engages with the man, perceives his nature, provides for him momentarily, and dispatches him. Even as her thoughts run along a distinct, parallel track, she naturalizes him as part of a landscape, regards his needs, and caters to him as she would to an animal. (It's this attitude that allows the gothic quality to emerge in the outside world.) Before she meets him, her unspecified thoughts are already elsewhere, which is where she finds her liberation and her autonomy. The central conceit and tragedy of the book is the invasion of her private realm by the outside world; as is made clear, she can survive anything but that. Comyns was evidently luckier.
From Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky
She was no more disturbed by other people as such, than the marble statue is by the flies that crawl on it; however, as possible harbingers of undesirable events and wielders of unfavorable influence in her own life, she accorded other people supreme importance. She would say: "Other people rule my life," and it was true. But she allowed them to do it only because her superstitious fancy had invested them with magical importance regarding her own destiny, and never because their personalities awoke any profound sympathy or understanding in her.
Ch.6
The Simpsons perform The Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man"
Homer: Someday you'll thank me for this, son.Encore!Bart: Not bloody likely.
Homer: You know, when I was a boy, I really wanted a catcher's mitt, but my dad wouldn't get it for me. So I held my breath until I passed out and banged my head on the coffee table. The doctor thought I might have brain damage.
Bart: Dad, what's the point of this story?
Homer: [cheerily] I like stories.
[After the Simpsons receive a large idol head of Xtapolapocetl, the Olmec god of war, as a reward from Burns.][I liked A Serious Man.]Marge: The moral of this story is a good deed is its own reward.
Bart: Hey, we got a reward. The head is cool!
Marge: Well then... I guess the moral is no good deed goes unrewarded.
Homer: Wait a minute! If I hadn't written that nasty letter, we wouldn't have gotten anything!
Marge: Well... then I guess the moral is the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.
Homer: Exactly! It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.
Señor Xtapolapocetl
J.M. Coetzee: Summertime
We have been here before, albeit in different forms. Almost without exception, Coetzee's work from Elizabeth Costello on has been concerned with the role of authors and authorship, not only of fiction but of memoirs and essays. He has repeatedly presented fictional characters giving speeches, opinions, or recollections that have repeatedly been confused as the opinions of the real Coetzee. Richard Crary's piece on Diary of a Bad Year is one of the best attempts to read these polemics and opinions with respect to their fictional context, but most critics seem to still be taking Coetzee's books at face value.
Summertime is in many ways the culmination of this project of Coetzee's, and the most explicit depiction of the ambiguities and metafictional techniques he is using. It also makes clear that the series extends back before Elizabeth Costello to the two "memoirs" preceding it. In light of that, there is an apparent progression (links are to my earlier reviews):
- Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997): Third-person "memoir" of a child with history similar to Coetzee's, filed as "Coetzee biography" by the Library of Congress.
- Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002): Third-person "memoir" of a young adult with history similar to Coetzee's, not classified as any sort of biography.
- Elizabeth Costello (2003): Fictional writer Costello presents opinions that share some similarity to what is known of Coetzee (e.g., both are vegetarians).
- Slow Man (2005): Costello invades life of injured photographer Paul Rayment, who shares some characteristics with Coetzee (e.g., biker, Australian resident). Costello claims she is his author.
- Diary of a Bad Year (2007): Coetzee doppelganger "J.C." writes many political opinions while involved in a soap operaish plot with his amanuensis.
- Summertime (2009): Biographer interviews five people for a book he is writing about the recently deceased John Coetzee, who has written all the books of the real Coetzee up until his death.
Coetzee does not append any description to the first two books (my US copy of Boyhood has "A Memoir" on the cover but nowhere else, so I am not taking it as canon), while he explicitly declares the subsequent books to be "Fiction." The first hint of something wrong occurs in Youth, which omits all mention of the real Coetzee's marriage during the time it covers. From there on, no double for Coetzee appears until Diary, but the host of variations from the real Coetzee (different birth year, never married, no children) made the distinction apparent. Likewise in Summertime: unmarried, childless. There is little to suggest that any of the people in Summertime are real or, in the case of his family, that they correlate to their real-life counterparts.
So the Coetzee of Summertime matches up with J.C. in Bad Year, and his childhood bears some resemblance to that described in the first two "memoirs," but with small, notable differences, the most obvious being that cousin Agnes in Youth has become Margot in Summertime, though both have the Coetzee-surrogate falling in love with her as a child. Coetzee would never make such a name-change spuriously, and so I must assume that there is no strict continuity here between the Coetzee surrogate across books.
Here the distinctions are even more explicit, as during the 1970s, the fictional Coetzee is unmarried and has several love affairs recounted by the interviewees. And he's now dead. So at once we have the most evident coincidence with Coetzee's public life with the greatest variation from his private life. Call him "Bizarro Coetzee." And we have five people talking about this Bizarro Coetzee to our unnamed biographer, bookended by oblique fragments from Bizarro Coetzee's notebooks that date (mostly, at least) from the 1970s (though annotated by Bizarro Coetzee at some later date). The opening fragments are in the possession of the biographer, as he references them; the ending fragments, possibly not.
The biographer is looking for the man behind the books. None of the five people are particularly interested in how the Bizarro Coetzee (from here on out, just "Coetzee") they knew relates to his books, and they express varying degrees of irritation at what they perceive to be the irrelevance of the biographer's intentions. Each of them has their own agenda:
- Julia: A rather self-centered and self-willed free spirit who cheated on her husband with the hapless and dispassionate Coetzee in the early 70s when she was still a naive housewife, and since then has thought little of Coetzee (in both senses of the word).
- Margot: The aforementioned cousin who had a very close relationship with Coetzee while growing up, maybe enough to call love.
- Adriana: A Brazilian immigrant and dance instructor whose daughter was taught by Coetzee in high school the mid-70s. Coetzee falls in love with her and does not let go. Awkwardness ensues. Adriana detests him.
- Martin: A supercilious and trite colleague of Coetzee's from his university teaching days.
- Sophie: An archetypal self-righteous postcolonial academic who co-taught and had a brief affair with Coetzee at the university and thinks him not radical enough.
The keystone is the section with Coetzee's cousin Margot, which is not a straight interview, but a transcript of the biographer reading his draft back to Margot with Margot's interruptions. Margot's reaction is one of horror as she hears what the biographer has embellished, invented, and distorted of what she told him earlier; it's no wonder she wants to go back over it again at the end of the transcript. And the draft itself is the most sustained piece of intentionally bad writing Coetzee has ever done. His account of Margot's story is filled with cliched eroticism (see page 137 for a cringeworthy example), purple passages clumsily reaching to the sublime, and tacky interpolations of native Afrikaans words to give a sense of local color. For example, this passage about Margot and her lover:
Skat: an endearment she disliked until the day she heard it from his lips. Now, when he whispers the word, she melts. This man's treasure, into which he may dip whenever it pleases him.Excruciating. Other cheap biographical tropes are present by the dozen, and by the end the biographer has replaced the selfish, would-be bohemian Julia as the most loathsome character in the book. The link between the two is their single-minded exploitation of others. Julia uses Coetzee in her story of finding herself just as cravenly as the biographer is using his subjects to "find" the Coetzee he already has decided exists.They lie in each other's arms. The bed creaks, but she could not care less, they are at home, they can make the bed creak as much as they like.
There are some recurrent themes, however, the dominant one of Coetzee being ill at ease and repressed around most everyone. Julia is too narcissistic to link this repression to Apartheid, while Sophie is too eager to do so, but the fictional Coetzee is no doubt as uncomfortable revealing himself as our real Coetzee appears to be in writing these books, though obviously for different reasons (only one is a famous writer who has won the Nobel prize). And he does show himself in his solitary studies: Schubert, Plato, the Hottentot language. In the unreliable words of the biographer, he claims to have learned Hottentot to "speak with the dead. Who otherwise are cast out into everlasting silence." This is, of course, exactly what the biographer is not doing; the voices of the living, including his own, drown out those of the dead throughout the book.
So we are left only with the notebooks at the beginning and end. They do not bolster the biographer's image of Coetzee. They show engagement: with history, with politics, with his family and particularly his father. (These are subjects the biographer has mostly avoided in favor of more tawdry gossip and neat conclusions.) Coetzee in the notebooks is far more aware than the interviewees have depicted him, though no less tentative. The last entry is an agonizing depiction of Coetzee's father and his cancerous illness, and it ends with a question mark, a moment of decision that cuts off before the decision is made. Since this notebook is still buried in layers of fictionality, there is no truth as to what happened next, only a fragment. The way I read it, Coetzee speaks to the living as one might try to speak to the dead, or perhaps to an alien species: assuming nothing, drawing no unwarranted conclusions.
(And even in the notebooks, the elisions and distortions are obvious, particularly in the latter notebooks, where the high-minded prose sits uneasily next to the meek and clumsy Coetzee of the interviews, and the events recounted by the subjects are only alluded to.)
This is not a charitable interpretation, for the whole book has shown the pitfalls of his way, and he deserves no credit for an approach that seems to have been instilled in him long before he had a choice in the matter. But the mixture of raw (albeit untrustworthy) emotion with delicate confusion and indeterminacy has an accumulating impact, as you're challenged to pull the tatters of Real Life from the mess of disingenuous versions proffered by the book's characters, you fail to do so, and you are left with a shifting moire of relationships and human weaknesses that resists authentication. And yet there is great feeling in this ambiguous moire, even if it can't be determined how valid or real any of it is. Unlike so much of Coetzee's controlled work, Summertime exudes passion and warmth even when the characters themselves do not. It is his sunniest book, as though the layers of uncertainty have set free an expressive emotive power that would have been too manipulative to use in his earlier fiction.
The worth of Summertime is in portraying that moire of partial voices without the typically clinical, scientific condescension that accompanies it in, for instance, the myriad works of relativism and anti-foundationalism that wave away all certainties with a flourish and discount any meaning to them. Instead there is great feeling, albeit feeling which must be questioned and which is neither definitely true nor definitely false. Summertime leaves the door open.
Gabriel Josipovici: Everything Passes
As Richard says, this was written as part of a proposed symposium on Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes, and so it wasn't meant to stand alone as it does here. I somewhat assumed people would have read other assessments already, such as Paul Griffith's excellent breakdown. See also Dan Visel's commentary and Stephen Mitchelmore's.
The key moment of Everything Passes, I think, comes very close to the end, when, having been frequently treated to slightly varying descriptions of a man standing at the window over the course of the book, our main character Felix now describes the room in his spoken description of a near-death experience (apparently drawn from the experience of Schoenberg's that inspired his intense String Trio):
--I saw myself standing in an empty room, he says. I was standing at the window, looking out through the cracked pane.For me it came as a revelatory moment, for two reasons: first, Felix is revealed to be the one who has had this vision that has so frequently recurred; and second, this is the only time the vision is given from a definite vantage point, that is, from outside the window. Both of these are in contrast to the structure of the book to that point, which has presented the narrative in present-tense, third person, seemingly from a God's-eye view. To be shown the same scene in nearly the same words through Felix's eyes is to imagine that for the whole course of the book he has been staring the whole time at himself, that this disconnected and pointilistic narrative was constructed by Felix himself. Except not quite by Felix, because Felix is behind the glass now, the object of viewing. The viewer stands outside the glass. Who is this viewer?
--Then I saw my face at the window, behind the cracked pane. Looking out.
The easiest analogue to draw is that of a near-death experience, with the common report of a person seeing himself from some vantage point above his actual body. I don't find this very compelling. I would rather see it as a device used to expose the literary vantage point of the reader. We find that the vague narrative of a life assembled over the course of the book has been part of the experience of that narrator, rather than only the narrative structure imposed on the life by the author, standing between us and Felix. Except now that Felix is the narrator, looking through the window outside, he is no longer the man inside the room. Who is this man?
I don't know that the book permits an actual answer to this question. Felix changes from object to subject as we go from observing him to seeing through his eyes, and then we realize that we may have been staring through "his" eyes the whole time, staring at a doppelganger who plays out larger and smaller pieces of his life. The superimposition of these frames, those of text, life memories, cultural knowledge, subject, and object, is what gives the book its doubly vertiginous quality, miming contrasting forward and backwards motions on different levels. I do wish that the content of the memories had been closer to the loaded material of Josipovici's In a Hotel Garden, where the weight of history and catastrophe gave the sparse text an immediacy missed here. In Everything Passes, as the details of a life not particularly well-spent accumulate, the life drains from its narrative as we learn more of the man behind the window, as it does from Felix himself.
Stefan Zweig
Paul Raymont reacted to Michael Hofmann's incredibly nasty attack on Stefan Zweig by resolving to read more Zweig. I don't particularly want to defend Zweig, but going after his suicide note was really a bit much:
Zweig left a suicide note which, like most of what he wrote, is so smooth and mannerly and somehow machined – actually more like an Oscar acceptance speech than a suicide note – that one feels the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it, and the sense that he doesn’t mean it, his heart isn’t in it (not even in his suicide).It makes my attack on Michael Haneke look like a paean to his work. But I don't think Hofmann's assessment is too far off. I was easier on Zweig five years ago, but now I'm inclined to dismiss most of his work. What gets me is not his writing style or pretensions, but the shallow psychologizing that infects his fiction, a crude caricature of what Broch, Mann, and especially Musil were trying to achieve concurrently (and with only partial success; Musil is the only one who I would rate on that front, and even he runs into deep trouble at spots). But even among the second-rate writers, I rank him below Werfel and Schnitzler because of his lack of originality. The more from that period (or elsewhere) that I read, the less Zweig seems to offer. And what I said before still holds true: the best book I've read by him is his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, which is the work of a man surrounded by his literary superiors and quite aware of it. Contra Hofmann, who finds it smug and obnoxious, I think the autobiography does have a fair chunk of humility to it, with the smugness being a defensive posture.
So while Hofmann is busy thrashing Zweig for a multitude of sins personal and literary, the real problems get buried. Where Hofmann sees him as fake and commercial, I just see him as bland and conventional. Successful milquetoast writers do tend to annoy those with more fiery dispositions, but I think Zweig is too inoffensive to get to me. I feel the same way, though, about Hofmann's beloved Joseph Roth (who, incidentally, had the poor taste to be friends with Zweig), the least innovative of the Germanic modernist writers. Still, the Zweig revival baffles me, though I'm less baffled when I see that Clive James is a Zweig fan. (Actually, it sounds like James wants to be Zweig.)
I notice, however, that Zweig has already had his posthumous revenge: Anthea Bell's translation of Zweig's Burning Secret has won the Schlegel-Tieck translation prize. The runner-up is Hofmann's translation of Fred Wander.
Joyce and the Past
No-one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master's praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly for the smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop.This passage (ominously quoted by the Times sportswriter before he said "It is clear that the International Cricket Council (ICC) has been pondering long and fruitfully on this text from the great book") is thought by Stephen early on in Ulysses, and I read it as one of the most evident unifying points between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Stephen and Bloom both blatantly invoke the difficulty of accepting the past, Stephen with his "History is a nightmare..." attitude and Bloom with his entire family life and family history. (And really Stephen with his family as well, for family and death are two of the great Catholic/Platonic pillars around which Joyce's work revolves.)
Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.
Ulysses I.2
Specifically, the issue is one of accepting the erasure of possibilities and the cementing of tragedy by the passage of time. The obsession with alternate possibilities and counterfactuals embodies the otherworldly gnosticism that Joyce frequently rejects and ridicules. This passage in the second chapter is mirrored quite precisely by one from the penultimate chapter, when Bloom sadly contemplates "the irreparability of the past [and] the imprevidibility of the future" in abandoning the idea of Stephen as a surrogate son. Bloom comes to some acceptance of time's branding. With Stephen it is less clear.
But I do think Joyce not only endorsed this acceptance but urged that the tragedy be memorialized and (secularly) sanctified. In the climatic passage of III.3 in Finnegans Wake, when the Four Old Men or whatever you want to call them excavate the mound of sleeping, dead HCE and the screams of history come pouring out, a torrent of war calls, mournings, and death:
-- Crum abu! Cromwell to victory!The men are senile and HCE/Shaun is sleepy or dead, so there is an elegaic quality to the chapter, but here there is no hiding the raw horror, the actual and endlessly repeated fall of man. (It's some of the least confused verbiage in the whole book; the mysterious "Zinzin" is theorized to be the ringing of the phone that the old men are listening in on.) I read it as a codification of that which must be spoken not to be forgotten, repressed, and/or ignored, in order to speak honestly and fully of the "irreparability of the past" and not think it away.
-- We'll gore them and gash them and gun them and gloat on them.
-- Zinzin.
-- O, widows and orphans, it's the yeomen! Redshanks for ever! Up Lancs!
-- The cry of the roedeer it is! The white hind. Their slots, linklink, the hound hunthorning ! Send us and peace ! Title ! Title !
-- Christ in our irish times! Christ on the airs independence! Christ hold the freedman's chareman! Christ light the dully expressed!
-- Slog slagt and sluaghter! Rape the daughter! Choke the pope!
-- Aure ! Cloudy father ! Unsure ! Nongood !
-- Zinzin.
-- Sold! I am sold! Brinabride! My ersther! My sidster! Brinabride, goodbye! Brinabride! I sold!
-- Pipette dear! Us! Us! Me! Me!
-- Fort! Fort! Bayroyt! March!
-- Me! I'm true. True! Isolde. Pipette. My precious!
-- Zinzin.
Maryla Jonas Plays Chopin
One of the loveliest (but also melancholic) renditions of anything I've ever heard, from the underrecorded and neglected Maryla Jonas. It's only 2 minutes; give it a listen.
From a Time article in 1946:
She was in bombed-out Warsaw when it fell. The Gestapo agent who found her in the city's ruins tried to persuade her to go to Berlin to play for the Nazis. She refused and was sent to jail.Seven months later, a Nazi officer who had heard her play let her out, told her that if she could get to the Brazilian Embassy in Berlin, she could get out of Europe. She walked most of 325 miles from Warsaw to Berlin, slept on the roadside, scarcely ever ate, and does not know how many weeks it took her. But she got to Rio. There she was put in a sanatorium, exhausted and sick. She got word that her husband, her parents and a brother had been killed in Poland. She did not go near a piano for months.
Polish Pianist Artur Rubinstein, visiting Rio, decided to trick her into playing again. He invited her to Rio's empty Municipal Opera House, asked her to play some chords so he might test the acoustics. She sat down at the piano at 2:30, played until 8. Said she: "It was a put-up job." She played three years in Latin America, earning enough to pay her way to the U.S., and the $1,400 that a Carnegie debut cost her.
Last week, five weeks after her New York debut, she played again in Carnegie Hall. This time the house was packed and the critics were in their pews. A buxom, platinum-haired woman of 35, her face was heavily rouged to cover the pallor of the past six years. Her U.S. sponsors wanted her to wear a corset; she refused ("I have to feel what I play from the legs up") Says Maryla: "My first concert is European. Come one artist in old dress, no photogenic, no smiling. Then come complications. The criticisms are too good. Come snobs, I play too pianissimo, too fortissimo, my hair, I am too fat, my dress. My second concert is American concert. Everyone come to see am I really so good. It is not art, it is sport. It is football! If I have goal, bravo! If no goal, goodbye!"
Dostoevsky's Sequel
James L. Rice in the TLS clues us in to the unwritten second half of The Brothers Karamazov, which sounds like it would have been a good deal better than Gogol's disappointing sequel to Dead Souls.
Alyosha remains at the end, to face his destiny, uncertain whether it may be for good or evil. His bonding with the adolescent boys in the village, whose leader Kolya is unmistakably a future radical, points the way to the hero's role in the unwritten sequel.Wishful thinking? Rice implies the same wish that I and so many other teenage Dostoevsky readers have had, that he would stop compensating for what really is an obsession with evil and let his books become the ultimate refutation of Christianity and the Good that they so badly want to be. The goodness in them never achieves the grace of, say, this:Dostoevsky discussed his general plan for the Karamazov sequel with a few people close to him, on different occasions with his wife Anna Grigorievna, and the eminent publisher Aleksei Suvorin (a brooding and devoted friend who was later also a confidant of other complex writers, including Vasily Rozanov and Anton Chekhov). The author's concept found its way not only into their diaries and memoirs published after the Revolution, but also, through rumour "in Petersburg literary circles", into the front-page report of an ephemeral Odessa daily newspaper on May 26, 1880 - when Book Ten of The Brothers Karamazov had yet to appear. The anonymous correspondent had attended the author's public reading of bewildering excerpts from the forthcoming instalment. Despite great admiration for Dostoevsky's genius, the critic complained that most of his characters were mental cases, who sometimes appeared to communicate by psychic means. Rumour in the tsarist capital had it that Alyosha would become the village schoolmaster, and by obscure "psychic processes in his soul" would arrive at "the idea of assassinating the tsar" (ideya o tsareubiistve). Although the Novorossiiskii Telegraf had a circulation of 6,000 and subscribers as far-flung as Kiev, Moscow, Petersburg, Warsaw and Paris, this astounding remark never reached the authorities. It tallies exactly with the diary of Suvorin published forty-three years later (1923), which directly quotes the novelist on Alyosha's future: "He would be arrested for a political crime. He would be executed" - very nearly the fate of the author himself in his youth. In the sequel there might have been, of course, any number of plots and paths to such a tragic outcome. In one plausible version, Alyosha retreats to the monastery as a clandestine revolutionary.
The surest proof that The Brothers Karamazov was conceived with such a denouement in store is the very name Karamazov: it is very close to that of Dmitry Karakozov, whose point-blank shot at Tsar Alexander II on April 4, 1866, missed its target but heralded an era of terrorism in Russian politics. Karakozov was publicly executed in Petersburg on September 3, 1866. His deed, incidentally, had interrupted serialization of Crime and Punishment - its hero another deranged student dropout with murderous "Napoleonic" ambitions. The Karamazov plot unfolds at the end of August, 1866, so that Dmitry Karamazov's arrest for the murder of his father occurs at about dawn on September 3, precisely when in real life the would-be assassin Karakozov was led to the scaffold.
Mirror