There is a certain type of reader – the Jew in Europe, the African-American in the States,etc. – whose relationship to literature, to the great novels, essays and poems, is mediated by the humiliations inflicted even by the so called great writers on the Jew and the African-American, etc. in image and abstract; humiliations that are often casual, often astonishing low points in their writing, byproducts of a certain conformism to social norms, an overlooking or blindness to historical injustices, of the thoughtless acceptance of accumulated capital’s accumulated suffering. Here is a puzzle: the author, that distant and yet intimate source of the text, becomes for the reader a problem of the reader’s own complicity in humiliation: hopeful that the higher liberalism will win out, the reader, this extraterritorial reader, this reader who finds, in the community of readers, that he or she is not included in the general “we” of the gentle reader, finds themselves in an ethical dilemma: are they to accept, even here, the all too familiar relationship of abused to abuser? And we know, we know too well, that abuse is not all lumps, that it is a labyrinth of generosity and violence. Like any of the humiliated and the wounded, the abused reader will take the course of becoming the best close reader – for in a life in which one is dodging blows, the humiliated party has to become, as a matter of survival, a great reader of physiognomy and the smallest signs and tics of the abuser.
One of these readers I am imaging existed in Czarist Russia. He is a figure who appears in the outskirts of Doestoevsky studies – his name is Avraam Uri Kovner. He fled the Jewish community in Czarist Russia when he was a young man, committing himself to the program of positivism, science and enlightenment – from which point of view he severely criticized the piety and practices of the Jews. At the same time, he was proud to be Jewish and he was a biting critic of anti-semites.
As this critic, he modelled himself on Pisarov – the scathing materialist whose essays were never translated, as wholes, in English, but who survives in the Anglosphere as the man who claimed that good pair of shoes had more value than the greatest poem. Yet Kovner had a vast respect for Pisarov’s opposite – Dostoevsky. And as he saw his life spoiled by a crime he committed, he also saw himself rather eerily doubled in the figure of Raskolnikov.
The fait divers goes like this: Kovner took a job at a bank as an accountant. He saw that the bank was making money through the squeezing process of usury and fraud. He also, at this point in his life, In Leonid Grossman’s “Confessions of a Jew”, his account of Kovner, he uses an epigraph from Crime and Punishment to entitle what happened: “that the extraordinary man has a right… to leap over certain obstacles, especially in cases where, for perhaps the fulfilment of an idea that is important for all mankind, this is necessary.” All mankind, of course, is always represented in this extraordinary man – he somehow received their votes.
The story begins like a good Dostoevsky story. In 1871, Kovner found himself on the outs with the Jewish community, for whose newspapers he used to write, and on the outs with the other journals he wrote for, which were being closed, in that year of the Paris commune, as being too radical. Pluse he – oh saints and martyrs@ - wanted to write a novel. I do know that feeling. So he found a lodging in Petersburg. To quote from Kovner’s letter to Dostoevsky:
“In the first months I rented a room in the household of the poor Kanngiesser family… They consisted of a mother, who was a poor widow, the elder daughter and two younger daughters and a son, who was apprenticed as a glovemaker’s assistant. When I learned that they were Jews, I thought about fleeing; but then I saw, that these people were poor and honorable, and I meant a certain income for them, so I stayed out of pity. Later I learned that Sophia Kanngiesser had lost her father four years ago, and that her mother through the course of things had gained some money. In a word, it was horrible misery. I strove with my energy to help them, as much as I could. Sophia could not yet read and write and asked me to teach her. Out of gratitude she, who had never let anyone near her, become affectionate to me. In a word, she fell in love with me.”
Of course, this novelistic situation was animated not just by love, but by sickness: Sophia suffered from some lung ailment. Everything falls horribly into place. Through an advertisement in a paper he used to write for – Voices – he finds a job in a bank. The job pays fifty rubles a month. For that, Kovner has to suffer the humiliation that the bank’s managerial staff consider him a pity hire and treat him as such. Imagine, Raskolnikov having to count out money and bow his head to a bunch of bank officials out of a novella by Gogol! And all the while the coughing of his girlfriend resounding in his ears. Between the miserable pay, the sickness of his girlfriend, and his earlier dreams of being a great writer, Kovner breaks down. The break comes, of course, after Sophia, gasping for breath, tells him: I can’t live without you! And faints.
How to pay for everything. This is the world of urban capitalism in which Kovner and Dostoevsky live. Dostoevsky became a gambler. Kovner, stepping over the barrier put up by lesser men to impede lesser men, defrauds the bank. As Grossman puts it: “The logic of Raskolnikov, cutting as sharply as a knife, bored through the thoughts of this unhappy reformer and hypnotized him even as that cursed illusion had bewitched the Petersburg student. In both cases the same persuasion that the planning is not a crime. In both cases the same calculation: on one side the senselessly squandered, irredeemably pent up sources of life and action, and on the other side young, fresh powers, that are unnecessarily destroyed, everywhere and in their thousands… In both cases the same moral temptation: isn’t a single, insignificant crime redeemed through thousand of good acts?”
Kovner stole. Kovner fled. Kovner disguised himself. Kovner was caught. Kovner was tried, and condemned. It was in his prison cell that Kovner wrote his first letter to Dostoevsky, challenging him as though he were a character come alive: and lo and behold, Raskolnikov is Jewish. As Kovner wrote: “First of all, I am a Jew – and you are not overly fond of Jews (I will speak about this later, however).”
A masterly, a Dostoevskian parenthesis, that one. A challenge on every level. Which will be carried onward in various of Kovner’s letters, to which Dostoevsky responded, in his ongoing column, Diary of a Writer, with a defence of anti-semitism that Kovner pretty easily tore apart – from the standpoint of being one of Dostoevsky’s great readers. In the response to Kovner’s letter, Dostoevsky indulged in the usual banalities of banking and evil Jews gulling innocent Russians ad nauseum, juxtaposing these passages with Dostoevsky’s ideal of the omni-human. The blatant contradiction was fingered by Kovner, and that must have hurt. But the sting did not wake Dostoevsky out of his anti-semitic trance.
Kovner’s standpoint, his existential point of view as a reader, fascinates me. I am a great reader of Dostoevsky myself. And of T.S. Eliot, and of Ezra Pound. But I am not a Jew, nor a Gypsy, nor black. I’m your standard white American, a mongel mix of German, Welsh and what have you picked up on the emigrant trail. I was patched and pealed in the suburbs of Atlanta, which sprang up in the sixties with an influx of white people from the North, although gradually, over the decades, becoming more multi-cultural, more interesting, less my facial white bread.. Somehow, though, through the years, I became a sensitive – which was the name given in the early twentieth century to certain paranormal freaks, mindreaders and telekinetics. I could, at least, see how the alien reader, the one written out – Jews in Dostoevsky, women in Bellow and Roth, blacks in the bulk of White American literary classics, gays from Shakespeare to Mailer, etc. – will and must stake their claim, and in doing so dive into the “written out” part, play the fool, here, erupt as the obscene and the censorious. This is called wokeness, now, by the readers and writers who pretend that a little hemming and hawing will make, has made it all better. Who want to go back to a suitably bandaged teaching. An exercise in tergiversation unworthy of the culture that is supposedly being defended.
Ah, but this is egotism on my part - how much of a sensitive am I, really? - and not of interest.
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