The Master and Margarita (0 of 5) & The Brothers Karamazov (4 of 16)
Demian the Poor, polyphony and revolution
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s wooden cell behind the apiary you will find:
The launch of our May read-along of The Master and Margarita;
Our discussion of The Brothers Karamazov Book Four – with Bakhtin on polyphony;
Birthday wishes to Anthony Trollope;
A preview of coming attractions and other notices;
And for paid subscribers:
The week’s new classics – including an anniversary edition of Homer’s Odyssey.
This newsletter may be too long for your email inbox. If so, please click ‘View entire message’ at the bottom – or visit Substack.
The Master and Margarita (0 of 5)
‘At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch’s Ponds.’
That is the first sentence of The Master and Margarita. Today we start reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s fiendishly satirical masterpiece, which takes place over a few sweltering days in May . . .
All the details of our read-along can be found here.
Before we begin, one of the central figures in the first six chapters is the poet Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, who publishes under the name ‘Bezdomny’ or ‘Homeless’.
Many of Bulgakov’s contemporaries adopted pen names of this kind. Most famous is Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, who wrote under the name Maxim Gorky (‘Bitter’). Gorky became a personal friend of Stalin: his home city of Nizhny Novgorod was renamed Gorky, as were the Moscow Art Theatre and Moscow’s main park.
Other examples included Pavel Grigoryevich Ivanov, who published as Pavel Besposhchadny (‘Merciless’);
Mikhail Semyonovich Epshtein, known as Mikhail Golodny (‘Hungry’);
Yakov Petrovich Ovcharenko, or Ivan Pribludny (‘Stray’);
and Efim Alexievich Pridvorov, whose pen name was Demian Bedny (‘Poor’).
Bedny fell in and out of favour with Stalin. In 1925 he published a violently anti-religious mock epic poem called The New Testament Without Defects, a piece of Soviet propaganda that attacked Christianity.
It may well have been this book that inspired Bulgakov to write The Master and Margarita.
In his ‘confiscated journal’ of 1925, which turned up in the files of the KGB and was only published in 1990, Bulgakov describes reading The New Testament Without Defects. ‘Jesus Christ is presented as a scoundrel and swindler,’ he wrote: ‘. . . There is no name for this crime.’
In 1938, when Bedny fell out of favour and was stripped of his Communist Party membership, Bulgakov wrote with satisfaction: ‘He’s not going to be chortling over anyone else. Let him feel it for himself.’
Another model for Ivan might be the poet Alexander Ilich Bezymensky, whose surname meant ‘Nameless’. (Bezymensky once said that if his actual surname hadn’t been Nameless, he would have adopted it as a pen name.)
Bulgakov might have enjoyed satirising Bezymensky, who had written the play Vystrel (The Shot) in 1929, parodying of Bulgakov’s play The Days of the Turbins (1926). ‘Bezymensky’ is not dissimilar to Ivan’s pen name ‘Bezdomny’ – and Ivan’s fraught relationship with Riukhin in the novel might well be a satirical representation of Bezymensky’s actual relationship with the poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, on whom Riukhin is based.
I look forward to discussing Chapters 1-6 next Friday 1st May.
Here are links to our previous The Master and Margarita posts:
The Schedule (3 April)
Mikhail Bulgakov (17 April)
As ever, these weekly read-along discussions of The Master and Margarita 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 (4 of 16)
This month we’ve also read Book Four of The Brothers Karamazov – ‘Crises’. Here are my thoughts:
I’d love to hear yours in the comments!
Book Four features many competing voices. This feels like a useful moment to share this short extract from the great critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s first work, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1929, rev. 1963, translated by Caryl Emerson 1984), in which Bakhtin argues that Dostoyevsky invented the ‘polyphonic novel’:
Dostoevsky . . . creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him.
A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event. . . .
Dostoevsky is the creator of the polyphonic novel. He created a fundamentally new novelistic genre. Therefore his work does not fit any of the preconceived frameworks or historico-literary schemes that we usually apply to various species of the European novel. In his works a hero appears whose voice is constructed exactly like the voice of the author himself in a novel of the usual type. A character’s word about himself and his world is just as fully weighted as the author’s word usually is; it is not subordinated to the character’s objectified image as merely one of his characteristics, nor does it serve as a mouthpiece for the author’s voice. It possesses extraordinary independence in the structure of the work; it sounds, as it were, alongside the author’s word and in a special way combines both with it and with the full and equally valid voices of other characters.
I love the idea that Dostoyevsky’s characters are authors of their own stories, with independent consciousnesses that blend and compete and harmonise like melodies.
We might well be dipping back into Bakhtin over the coming months.
In the meantime, I look forward very much to discussing the first half of Book Five – Chapters 1-4 of ‘Pros and Cons’ – on Friday 15th May. These four chapters were first published in the May 1879 issue of The Russian Messenger. (The rest of Book Five was published the following month.)
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)
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.
Happy Birthday Trollope
In other news, Anthony Trollope was born on this day in 1815.
Trollope was the son of an irascible, bankrupt barrister going slowly mad with mercury poisoning. His mother Fanny was the bestselling author of Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). Trollope wrote almost fifty novels while simultaneously pursuing a career as a civil servant in the General Post Office. He introduced pillar boxes to Britain and occasionally dipped into the GPO ‘lost letters’ box to find ideas for his novels.
He is best remembered for the two six-book series – The Chronicles of Barsetshire and The Palliser Novels – as well as his stand-alone novels The Way We Live Now and He Knew He Was Right.
George Eliot reportedly said that it was The Chronicles of Barsetshire that gave her the confidence to write Middlemarch. ‘Of all novelists in any country,’ wrote W. H. Auden, ‘Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him, even Balzac is too romantic.’
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)
It is impossible to be sure who Melmotte is, let alone what exactly he has done. He is, seemingly, a gentleman, and a great financier, who penetrates to the heart of the state, reaching even inside the Houses of Parliament. He draws the English establishment into his circle, including Lady Carbury, a 43 year-old coquette and her son Felix, who is persuaded to invest in a notional railway business. Huge sums of money are at stake, as well as romantic happiness. The Way We Live Now is usually thought Trollope’s major work of satire but is better described as his most substantial exploration of a form of crime fiction, where the crimes are both literal and moral. It is a text preoccupied by detection and the unmasking of swindlers. As such it is a narrative of exceptional tension: a novel of rumour, gossip, and misjudgment, where every second counts.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 848 pages | introduced by Francis O’Gorman
Coming Attractions and Other Notices
Future monthly read-alongs
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, take a peak here.
Dream Story – in-person book club
We finished discussing Dream Story last week.
If you would like to continue the conversation in person, please book a ticket for our Dream Story discussion at the Hatchards Classics Book Club in two weeks’ time on Thursday 7th May.
We meet at Hatchards bookshop (187 Piccadilly, London) on the first Thursday of every month at 6.30pm – tickets cost £5 with a free Hatchards Reward Card and include a glass (or two) of wine. These book club events are not live-streamed, but I post a report of our discussion afterwards here on Substack.
Catalogue
Last week, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Penguin Classics series this year, Penguin published a complete catalogue of every Penguin Classic title currently available in the UK. Catalogue is beautifully produced — and I’m proud to say that I helped to assemble the text inside.
Here is Penguin’s description:
From Achebe and Austen to Zola and Zweig, and from the Epic of Gilgamesh to twenty-first century dystopias and autofiction, here is the complete list of every Penguin Classic in print. Published in a beautiful clothbound format, the list is arranged alphabetically by author and also includes key bibliographic information such as sub-series, genre and ISBN. Comprising 3,500 entries, this is the essential reference guide to the world’s largest and best-loved classics list.
Annual book subscription
And 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
