Attention is centred in this issue on some of the greats of Russian literature, with strong and searching essays on Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky. The profoundly this-world quality of their writing and, more paradoxically, of their faiths, is a common thread and puzzlement. Interspersed between the fierce figures of nineteenth-century Russia, you will find excellent new poetry by Les Murray as well as a fascinating account by Carol Rumens of her pre-reading life.
Dostoevsky’s Devils
Rowan Williams
In his recommendation of Dostoevsky’s Devils, Rowan Williams examines the psychology that lies behind revolution. In his rapid sketches of the two revolutionaries, the dynamic for destruction is palpable, and as often in Dostoevsky, there’s that buzz of anticipation or foreboding for letting whatever is powerful out into the world:
The two central characters in the revolutionary circle are the most disturbing of all. Pyotr Verkhovensky is a brilliant manipulator, whose only real interest is in controlling others. We never learn what he really believes, and in a sense it doesn’t matter. He understands group psychology perfectly; he carefully plans the murder of one member of the group, involving all the others so as to bind them closer together (Dostoevsky based this on a real incident of the time). He shows different faces to different people, he makes himself popular with fashionable progressive circles in the town, and at the end simply walks away from all the consequences of what he has done.But he has one weak spot. He is obsessed with the man who, he believes, has the capacity to be a real leader, Nikolai Stavrogin. Stavrogin attracts all sorts of projections: he is intelligent, wildly independent, mysterious and charismatic, a ‘messianic’ figure. All around him are people who are fascinated by him and would do anything for him. But increasingly we see that there is nothing behind the façade. He is a desperately empty person, paralysed by his own sense of meaninglessness. He cannot take on any role in Pyotr’s conspiracy, nor can he consummate any real relationship. His life has been a series of arbitrary experiments in extreme behaviour to try and force himself to feel that there is a real self there; and it has all failed. He is one of Dostoevsky’s most frightening characters.
What Dostoevsky and the Archbishop show profoundly is that Stavrogin is suffering as well as a fearsome threat. His terrible separateness and emptiness are offered as if to be imagined and felt. It is a human problem and Williams asks seriously, ‘Can there be redemption for people like these, people whose emptiness invites the devil in?’
A Poem by Les Murray
In a selection of three new poems, ‘The Weatherproof Jungle Tree’ comes in time to speak up for poultry everywhere, and to show that suffering and imagination are owed to more than the human sphere alone.
The Weatherproof Jungle Tree
For Margaret Woodward’s new hen-house
Pointed at bow and poop
or plumed with flourish astern
chickens crowd out of their coop
with a scratch and a half-turn
into the footwork of forage
unless hailed on by grain,
grain first scattered in the Stone Age
to secure their eggs and meat
by having their cluck around the village,
their filigree down round our feet
and their panic failure of inference
about those we grabbed. So neat.
But everything comes home to roost
now, and points at us with spears;
for our battery Belsens
a virus could be unloosed
at us out of the East
by the mild poultry, it appears –
but it may succumb to research
and if not, horrors pass
and sometime again, fowls will perch
as here, in a weatherproof tree,
a rococo excretory palace
with all its hatching boxes
safe from snakes and from foxes
since, after this red-meat hiatus,
fowls will be back in their billions
because we redesigned their nests,
evolving their breeding, like ours,
up out of the sudden-death grass.
From Anon to Anxiety: The pleasures and pains of a Junior Poet
Carol Rumens
Enchanting and abruptly good, Carol Rumen’s ‘Reading Lives’ piece ventures deeper than first books to find the source of poetry in her life, and in so doing she recreates a marvellously real sense of being a child – the small focus of ‘a tickly circle in our palms’ and the delight of ‘excited nerve-endings’:
Writers often talk about their literary influences as if reading begins with reading. I always think to myself – but what about ‘This little Piggie?’ or ‘Round and Round the Garden?’ I suspect those playful, body-based rhymes have more to do with your future work – and certainly with your sense of vocation – than The Wasteland or even The Catcher in the Rye.The idea of writing on the body, from the body, does not start with the feminist theorists! Mother and father fingers scribble a tickly circle in our palms, or tweak our toes, and the words sink in through excited nerve-endings even before we learn to speak. We are rocked and jiggled into language, and it will never be so acutely sensed and rhythmically alive again. My parents were both demonstrative and fond of the spin of words, though in quite dissimilar ways, and I, an only child, was their ever-receptive audience.
When she’s a little older and can hold a book in her hand, the sensory connections still fire off in odd directions, rich and strong, and not attached to words merely. It’s almost like a kind of synaesthesia:
It was the counting-rhyme, ‘One two, buckle my shoe.’ Of course I had heard it chanted, and knew it by heart, but its look on the page was purely pictorial. I remember the short blocks of bold black type, and the shapes of the numbers. The old-fashioned pictures, like fairground mock-porcelain, were the words – or were the words somehow the pictures? I loved the big fat hen and the empty plate, images and words that were completely interchangeable, but I registered the strange verbs like ‘delve’ and ‘a-courting’ which the pictures of farmers and milk-maids only half-explained. The textured consonants and strong vowels seemed to draw colours from the gaudy illustrations.
The openness of mind with which Carol Rumens explores these first experiences stays with her as she describes her maturing sense of literature. What other serious poet could announce with such heartily democratic ease ‘The Adventures of Rupert Bear opened my biggest imaginative world’? I won’t spoil the ending but it’s worth subscribing to the magazine for this article alone.
editorial
Jane Davis - Tell Me a Story
new poetry
Les Murray
Caroline Price
Julie-ann Rowell
Roz Goddard
Myra Schneider
Elena Shvarts, trans. Sasha Dugdale
Kate Keogan
fiction
Sasha Dugdale - Beautiful Lands
essays
Josie Billington - Tolstoy: On Life's Verge
Brian Nellist - Dogs in Tolstoy
Bernard Beatty - Reading Scott
interviews
Len Rodberg - Conversation over Dessert
learning curve
Adam PietteÕs Practice of Poetry - The Love of Poetry and Looking Closely in W.S. Graham's 'Untidy Dreadful Table'
Sharon Connor - Can Sixth-Formers Read?
Andrew Cunningham - Is Reading Doomed?
Ed Kirk - Just Stubborn!
Shelley Bridson - '4Cs' and Could Do Better
Ask the Reader
reading lives
Carol Rumens - From Anon to Anxiety
reviews
Brian Nellist - Carol Rumens, Poems 1968-2004
Frances Macmillan - Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida,ed. Robert Chandler
Eileen Pollard - Sarah Waters, The Night Watch
recommendations
Rowan Willaims - Dostoevsky's Devils
Ann Stapleton - The Personal Canon: Why I like Chekhov and Don't like O'Connor
Helen Tookey - Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Andrew Mellor - Nicolai Gogol, The Nose
Bernadette Crowley -John McGahern, The Barracks
Good Books - Brief recommendations by Mary Knight and Ian H.
the back end
Tom Ashley - Tree and Sky
Enid Stubin - Our Spy in NY
Letters
Cassandra Crossword
Buck's Quiz
Contributors
Quiz and Puzzle Answers