Bonjour Tristesse (0 of 2) & The Brothers Karamazov (7 of 16)
Cult Canons, yellow wall-paper and holy fools
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s large white villa by the sea you will find:
The launch of our July read-along of Bonjour Tristesse;
Our discussion of The Brothers Karamazov Book Six – with Harriet Murav on holy fools;
A report from our conversation about The Third Policeman – at the Hatchards Classics Book Club last night;
Birthday wishes to Charlotte Perkins Gilman;
A preview of coming attractions and other notices;
And for paid subscribers:
The week’s new classics – including the launch of two new classics series.
This newsletter may be too long for your email inbox. If so, please click ‘View entire message’ at the bottom – or visit Substack.
Bonjour Tristesse (0 of 2)
‘A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness.’
That is the beautiful first line of Bonjour Tristesse. Today we start reading Françoise Sagan’s slim, sad, sultry novella.
All the details of our read-along can be found here.
Sagan took her title from the second line of the poem ‘À peine défigurée’ (or ‘Barely Disfigured’) by the surrealist poet Paul Éluard:
Adieu tristesse
Bonjour tristesse
Tu es inscrite dans les lignes du plafond
Tu es inscrite dans les yeux que j’aime
Tu n’es pas tout à fait la misère
Car les lèvres les plus pauvres te dénoncent
Par un sourire
Bonjour tristesse
Amour des corps aimables
Puissance de l’amour
Dont l’amabilité surgit
Comme un monstre sans corps.
Tête désappointée
Tristesse beau visage.
The poem comes from Éluard’s 1932 collection La Vie immédiate.
Éluard, the greatest of the surrealist poets, had died in November 1952, just as Sagan began writing her novel.
Sagan included ‘À peine défigurée’ at the start of her book. Irene Ash reproduces it in the original French; Heather Lloyd translates it like this:
Farewell to sadness
Sadness hello
You are written in the lines on the ceiling
You are written in the eyes that I love
You are not the same as wretchedness
For the poorest lips reproach you
With a smile
Sadness hello
Lovers’ bodies love you
You are the force in love
And what’s lovely in you looms
Like some disembodied thing
Just a look that’s disappointed
Sadness you are fair of face
Éluard’s poem – and Sagan’s novel – present an ambivalent attitude towards sadness: they find the emotion attractive, noble, perhaps even beautiful.
The title Bonjour Tristesse is both a recognition of – and an embracing of – sadness.
Bonjour Tristesse is largely set in ‘a large white villa on the Mediterranean’:
‘It was remote and beautiful, and stood on a promontory dominating the sea, hidden from the road by a pine wood; a mule path led down to a tiny creek where the sea lapped against the rust-coloured rocks.’
Otto Preminger’s 1958 film adaptation starring Jean Seberg, David Niven and Deborah Kerr, was filmed at Villa la Calypso in La Fossette, near Saint-Tropez.
I look forward to discussing Part One next Friday 9th July.
Here are links to our previous Bonjour Tristesse posts:
The Schedule (12 June)
Françoise Sagan (26 June)
As ever, these weekly read-along discussions of Bonjour Tristesse will be available to paid subscribers only. More details here.
But if you – or anyone you know – would like to join this or future read-alongs, but can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
The Brothers Karamazov (7 of 16)
In June we read Book Six of The Brothers Karamazov – ‘A Russian Monk’. Here are my thoughts:
I’d love to hear yours in the comments.
Zosima describes himself as a ‘holy fool’, a phrase we have heard before: Smerdyakov’s mother Lizaveta was a holy fool – and Alyosha has also been called a holy fool.
A holy fool – or yurodivy – has a particular significance in Eastern Christianity: a holy fool is an ascetic who behaves in a provocatively irrational manner, deliberately acting foolishly to hide their true nature, as a form of pious modesty. In the nineteenth-century, holy fools wore rags and lived as vagrants, speaking in riddles.
Dostoyevsky was fascinated by the practice and included holy fools in several of his novels. In 1993, the scholar Professor Harriet Murav published a book on the subject: Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique.
I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy of Murav’s book, but I found this review by David M. Bethea in the Slavic Review, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Autumn, 1993).
Bethea summarises Murav’s arguments,and I thought I’d share a few passages:
‘Dostoyevsky peopled his novels with holy fools – Sonia Marmeladova (Crime and Punishment), Prince Myshkin (The Idiot), Mar’ia Lebiadkina (The Devils), Alyosha Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov) – and demonic fools, chiefly represented by Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. But who is precisely a holy fool in these often topsy-turvy, carnivalised worlds and what this mean in context are not always so clear.
As Murav demonstrates through examples of actual yurodivy, “Holy foolishness is not a simple kind of sanctity but one that always foregrounds that which is problematic and confounds those who seek to categorise it . . . [It] is always subject to double interpretation. The righteous perceive its hidden meaning and are thereby edified, but the sinful see only its external characteristics, its folly, and abuse the holy fool, thereby sinning once again”.’
‘As Dostoyevsky progresses from Crime and Punishment to The Brothers Karamazov and as issues of personal biography are increasingly mapped onto issues of national history, the holy fool comes to occupy a more visible place in his thinking about the economy of salvation, moving from the margins to the very centre of attention. In effect, Dostoyevsky, through these various stratagems, co-opts the reader into the role of holy fool, since a reader who overcomes his doubt and begins to see the “scandalous” behaviour of the yurodivy as necessary for redemption is himself, as Murav concludes, “willing to behold the spectacle of [his] folly”.’
As readers, we become holy fools ourselves through reading The Brothers Karamazov: we are forced to recognise our own foolishness. I like that idea!
In Orthodox Christianity, the Feast of the Intercession (or Pokrov) in October commemorates a vision of St Andrew the Blessed Fool-in-Christ, also known as Andrei yurodivy.
In the 10th century, at 4am one Sunday morning, St Andrew saw the dome of the Church of St Mary of Blachernae in Constantinople open and in floated the Virgin Mary, glowing and surrounded by angels. She prayed and spread her veil over the congregation. Andrew pointed this out to his disciple Epiphanius, who said ‘Yes, Holy Father, I see it and am amazed!’
Murav uses the Orthodox icon depicting the Pokrov on the cover of her book and discusses its significance for Dostoyevsky:
‘In the late fifteenth-century Pokrov icon [. . .] Andrei yurodivy is represented as both standing in the church, among the congregants, and, as symbolically outside it in his half-nakedness, his position at the border of the crowd, and his gaze away from the other supplicants and toward the edge of the pictorial frame. Dostoyevsky was not only familiar with the Pokrov icon, he was planning a novel about the fall of Constantinople in which it would figure. Murav [. . .] uses the link between the thematics of the Intercession and holy foolishness (it is from Andrei’s perspective that the congregants are seen to transcend themselves) to study the deep structure of The Brothers Karamazov.
Through the image and narrative strategy of the holy fool (Alyosha, Zosima), the novel recapitulates [. . .] the iconic “plot” – from katabasis (descent into hell) to trial to resurrection. Yet it does so from the perspective of an intentionality that, like Andrei’s gaze, extends beyond its frame. Thus, the logic of the icon provides a model. [. . .] The novel operates, in Murav’s marvellously apt phrase, as a narrative icon.’
That idea of the novel functioning as a ‘narrative icon’ certainly chimes with the letter Dostoyevsky wrote to his publisher in June 1879, while writing Book Six:
‘I’ll force people to recognise that a pure, ideal Christian is not an abstract matter, but one graphically real, possible, standing right before our eyes, and Christianity is the Russian Land’s only refuge from all its evils . . . The whole novel is being written for its sake, but I just hope I manage it, that’s what worries me now!’
I look forward to discussing Book Seven – ‘Alyosha’ – at the end of this month, on Friday 24th July. Book Seven was first published in the September 1879 issue of The Russian Messenger.
Here are links to our previous Brothers Karamazov posts:
Different translations (14 November)
The Reading Schedule (28 November)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (12 December)
0. The Family Tree (2 January)
1. Book One: The Story of a Family – and Father Zosima (23 January)
2. Book Two: An Unseemly Encounter – and Mikhail Rakitin (20 February)
3. Book Three: Sensualists – and Pavel Smerdyakov (27 March)
5. Book Five: Pros and Cons, Chapters 1-4 – and non-Euclidean geometry (15 May)
6. Book Five: Prose and Cons, Chapters 5-7 – and Bakhtin on dialogue (5 June)
All the Brothers Karamazov posts are accessible to all subscribers for free, but if you would like to view or contribute to the discussion in the comments section, you will need a paid subscription.
As ever, if you – or anyone you know – can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
The Third Policeman Book Club
Last month we read The Third Policeman – and last night we had an excellent discussion about it at the Hatchards Classics Book Club. Here is my report:
Here are links to all of our The Third Policeman posts:
The Schedule (8 May)
Flann O’Brien (29 May)
0. Publication history (5 June)
If you would like to come to our next Hatchards Classics Book Club discussion, you’d be very welcome! We will be discussing Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse on Thursday 6th August.
Happy Birthday Charlotte Perkins Gilman
In other news, today was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s birthday. She was born on this day in 1860, 167 years ago.
Gilman was born in New England, a descendant of the prominent Beecher family; her paternal aunt was the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1884, the birth of her daughter prompted a long period of depression. After attempting an exacting ‘rest cure’, she suffered a complete nervous breakdown, and in 1888 she left her husband and moved with her daughter to California, where she began to write. Her book Women and Economics (1898) was translated into seven different languages and she went on to write passionately feminist works of sociology as well as stories and poetry, which she published in her own magazine, The Forerunner. In 1932, she was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer and a few years later took an overdose of chloroform.
The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland and Selected Writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1890-1916)
Wonderfully sardonic and slyly humorous, the writings of landmark American feminist and socialist thinker Charlotte Perkins Gilman were penned in response to her frustrations with the gender-based double standard that prevailed in America as the twentieth century began. Perhaps best known for her chilling depiction of a woman’s mental breakdown in her unforgettable 1892 short story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’, Gilman also wrote Herland, a wry novel that imagines a peaceful, progressive country from which men have been absent for 2,000 years. Both are included in this volume, along with a selection of Gilman’s major short stories and her poems.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 384 pages | introduced by Kate Bolick
Coming Attractions and Other Notices
Future monthly read-alongs
For a preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, take a peak here.
The Idler Festival
If you’re in London on Sunday 12 July, it would be lovely to see you at the glorious Idler Festival at Fenton House in Hampstead. I will be leading a guided walk of literary Hampstead at 12 noon on the Sunday. Here are the details.
Big Think – Summer 2026
I’m very glad to have a piece in Big Think’s next quarterly print magazine, which launches next week. The theme of their summer issue is ‘The Opt-Out Nation’. I’ve written about Bartleby the Scrivener and other forms of opting out in literature.
Here is some more information about the issue. Big Think is here on Substack. Become a member to get your copy of the print edition.
Annual book subscription
If you’re enjoying our read-alongs, why not treat yourself to the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription?
You (or a friend) can receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can choose to read along with us, if you wish.
To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
