By Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé

Part Four.
Navigate our series by starting here.

Ron Arad's plex-boxed limited edition of The Idiot (2006).

AFTER THIS BOOK HIS talents rose no higher. He gave a few more strokes of his mighty wings, but always in a circle among the mists of a darkening sky – like a huge bat in the twilight. The Idiot and The Possessed, and especially The Brothers Karamazoff, are spun out to intolerable lengths, and the “play” in each is not more than a pleasing embroidery which lends itself to all the author’s theories, and into which he stitches all the types previously treated or imagined in the hell of his fantasy. It is a Temptation of St. Anthony painted [sic] by Callot. The reader is annoyed by a crowd of “shadow pictures” rushing about through the plot; big, cunning, chattering, inquisitive children perpetually occupied in criticizing other people’s consciences. The entire novel is no more than a dialogue between two tub-thumpers or “brain-pickers” who with the craftiness of a Red Indian try to get at each other’s secrets.

These generally relate to a plot for committing some crime or to a love affair. The conversations recall the proceedings of the Inquisition under Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great; it is the same mingling of terror, duplicity and loyalty still remaining in the race. At other times, the disputants try to penetrate the maze of their philosophic and religious beliefs, and, like two doctors of divinity at the Sorbonne, assail each other with dialectics, at times subtle, or rude. Some of the words spoken also call to mind the dialogues between Hamlet and his mother, or with Ophelia and Polonius. For two hundred years socialists have been discussing the question as to whether Hamlet was really made when he spoke as he did, but whichever way the question is answered, the reply in either case is applicable to Dostoyevsky’s heroes. It has often been said that the author and the characters who reflect him were simply as mad as Hamlet.

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A Fortnightly Review of
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
By Daniel Okrent
468 pages $30.00 Scribner.

Reviewed by Andrew Sinclair.

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE between history and journalism. This account of Prohibition is written by a contemporary journalist. Daniel Okrent was public editor of the New York Times and managing editor of Life magazine. So his account of the thirteen Dry years teems with phrases such as ‘a smart move’ or ‘fake rye’ or ‘lubricious behavior’ or even the remarkable ‘Apart from “21”, which was sui generis, Manhattan speakeasy style ran…’

Last Call is reportage, not social history. The running style in this extended account is that of a newsman, sniffing out the good stories. And there are plenty of them, from that golden age of gossip and occasional retribution. Although there is a great deal of dazzle and detail, there is little new in the causes and consequences of Prohibition – the rural saloon and the rise of women’s rights, the conflict of the country against the city, the attack on foreigners and the surge of nativism, and the economic reasons for Repeal.

(Continued)

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By Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé

Part Three.
Navigate our series by starting here.

Dostoevsky, 1872, by W.G. Perow.

FREEDOM INDEED, BUT ONLY relative. Dostoyevsky was placed in the ranks of a Siberian regiment. Two years later, in 1856, the change of reign brought him his pardon. Promoted to his former rank as an officer, and reappointed to all civil rights, he was shortly after authorized to send in his papers, but that was as yet far from receiving permission to return to Europe, and above all from obtaining leave to publish his writings, without which life to an author was as nought. At last, in 1859, after ten years of exile, he recrossed the Ural Mountains and entered a New Russia, in which everything seemed changed, everything, so to speak, “aired,” trembling with impatience and hope on the eve of the Great Emancipation.

He brought a wife with him, the widow of a late comrade in the Petrachevsky conspiracy, whom he met in Siberia, loved, and married. As with everything that concerned his life, this bit of romance during his exile brought him unhappiness, to be ennobled by self-abnegation. The young woman loved somebody else better, and it did not take long before she went over to the other man. For a whole year, so his letters show us, Dotoyevsky did all he could to further the happiness of the woman he loved, and of the man his rival, even to writing to St. Petersburg that all obstacles in the way of their union might be removed. “As for myself,” he writes at the end of one of those letters, “by God! I shall drown myself or take to drink.” This incident of his private life is reproduced in his Humbled and Outraged [published in English as The Insulted and Injured], the first of his novels translated in France, but not the best.

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