Dostoyevsky in August

I almost don’t know even where to start. Where, at which point, did Dostoyevsky become a member of the Petrashevsky Circle? He had written a piece on rural life and serfs that already got him in some form of personal trouble with the Tsar's censors, but it was really his involvement with the student group led by a fractious young man who fired up some rebellious and criminal acts (there was a good New Yorker piece on the guy within the last few years) that brought Dostoyevsky in front of a firing squad for a mock execution carried through with some realism, then marched off to a labor prison camp in Siberia for five years. Notes from the House of the Dead, he wrote as a semi-fictional account of his experiences in prison. One might guess a lot of it is pretty close to the bone.

I cannot compare my experience with that of Mr. Dostoyevsky. But I do know that some of my own involvements, my own rebelliousness, my years at college where I began to observe a trend in academic attention shown to students by professors that fostered, either rightly or wrongly, some mild contempt, all led me to a persistent mood that spoke of exile. I graduated, barely, and left for home, with no idea of what to do with myself. I do not much blame any one, any professor of mine, in particular for neglecting some needs of mine—as I was a conscientious student, that being the cause of my difficulties writing the papers expected of me—as I was going through a bit of a tough time anyway, my parents splitting up, the house sold away. I was drinking a bit much now and then. Bad influences, you know. And my first attempt to really fall in love with a Princess from the faraway city like in the storybooks had become such a painful disaster of the worst possible kind and a source of my feeling like a big creep, and maybe I was and am a big creep anyway, that I didn’t have a lot of energy to figure out anything of what I wanted to do. (I’m not saying it’s anyone’s fault, other than my own, if you are wondering.)

Eventually, I left the places where I grew up, and went out on my own, in my case down to Washington, DC. I was sad, feeling ill about coming out of Amherst with such a low GPA, and had no direction. So I fell into the restaurant business. They were pleased enough to have me—I was honest enough--and I could figure out the work without my spirit aching too much and also it kept me moving. It was my little toehold on living in a big city in low rent places. It was easy to get a drink at the end of the day. And I could live in manner continuous with where my head was already anyway, a place like Bogart’s Casablanca, if I had to describe it in a quick nutshell: Play it, Sam. (drunkenly.) You played it for her, you can play it for me. She can take it, I can. (Let’s just go fishin’, Mr. Rick, ol’ Sam says, wisely, before finally and reluctantly relenting.)

Really, I am outdoors sort of person; we all are. It was often the windows I have stared out in my years, just longing to get outside where I could see the sky again, be in nature again, trees around me, stars above, the natural music of a living planet in the air. No wonder one is obliged to drink when in a bar, being removed from nature, jarred by the prison characters, by people you did not choose to be with, whom you cannot much control as far as the timing of their needs. But there are, amongst barmen and restaurant people and certain customers who become regulars, interesting people and interesting stories, any one of whom would make, as we all would if we were well-studied, a good human interest kind of a sketch that would remind us of our own struggles and plans and thwarted dreams and other ones.

Where it might be a common business, and where it might be a job, and anyone should be happy to have a job these days, it tends not to be a happy one, maybe because it tries to hard to be happy, a happy which floats away elusively at the end of a shift and leaves one rather alone. And so did I find my exile that awaited me for my misdeeds, an exile in Siberia right under people’s noses, my years of the circadian and social rhythms of a neighborhood barman. And while one might have thought he would be aswim in young women’s phone numbers, I can’t honestly say this about my own experience in this town that values profession and position and power. It was all just another dumb-ass idea on my part in my arrogance, thinking that I could be an artist of some sort, a writer in particular.

If you read Notes from the House of the Dead, you might get an idea of what I have enjoyed in my twenty years in restaurants as busboy, bar-back, barman, waiter if I have to be, but mainly and most largely the bartender barman. The people. The sketches you might well make about the characters found within that prison of hopes clung to over a drink, the barroom. Dostoyevsky’s comeback book sings when describing the men within. He might not have been, from the framepoint of the writing manual, a strictly good writer—Hemingway’s famous line about him being a poor one but one who made you feel things—but we know him to be a great writer, to have possessed that rare and insurmountable but infinitely gentle spirit and kindly detachment that can put a few normal-looking story ingredients (the usual foibles) and create something great in meaning and with grand architecture. One can imagine the pain, physical, psychological that Dostoyevsky felt in exile’s anguish, the loneliness, the being unheard from, the separation from normal life. Such deep and scarring pangs may well have honed his skills, his sense of people like the young Mohammedan, such that coming to sit down and finally write it out would be less pained, more cathartic, deeper, sweeter, keener, more attuned to beauty and soul. (Hemingway put it crassly, but not without some inkling, when he suggested imprisonment ‘made’ Dostoyevsky, if that’s not the exact word he used.)

That Dostoyevsky rose at one the afternoon and wrote at his desk deep into night after the family had gone to bed is comfort to a night owl. He liked the quiet. It let him think. It brought him to a different place than the other ones he knew.

Dostoyevsky, one might say, led a Chekhovian life. Meaning that he could have fit in to the Chekhov story, or maybe many of them. His personality, by my guess, seems to fit. Maybe that is a silly thing to say. Maybe it is a prejudicial thing to say. But perhaps there is something to Dostoyevsky and his era that informs that of Chekhov, that lends a certain background of character and personal histories that in turn make such stories as My Life, or The Steppe, or The Lady with the Pet Dog more possible to envision than they would have otherwise been. The brilliant old nervous epileptic writer, who knows, may have been something of a hero for Anton Chekhov. Their times were similar, and the stories of the two are similar fruit, that at least we can say. And in many ways, we still live in their times, oddly enough, the time of The Cherry Orchard, The Black Monk, The Kiss, the time of Notes from the House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov. And we are mistaken--ha ha--if we think such times are archaic, that we have passed them and moved beyond.

It is August. There is a nice breeze here in the trees, and the cicada’s neon advertisements of the heat of midday have given away to the tinkering of crickets at work in their factories of the night. Thursday night is my first off night since being straight at it since Sunday evening. Every night I’ve needed some wine to calm down, and every day I’ve gotten up late. I haven’t written much of anything since Sunday. I am doing my laundry, after cooking up a piece of cod and some rice that I have eaten by myself, sitting alone at the dining table, getting up once to let in the cat and open a can for her. It would be a good night to go out, and there are many beautiful young women and not-so-young women out on the town, on rooftop bars, walking along a sidewalk, seated at a café, going out to a club. There are many interesting people out on the town, but honestly, I don’t feel like it, or rather, I don’t feel up for it. I got a bike ride in after doing my grocery shopping, I took a few vitamins, and there is enough here to tidy up that people will be long gone to bed before I even feel like ambling out. Except, I suppose for some hard-working restaurant people getting off of work, and making some bar just at last call, and then maybe staying on a while after official last call. Maybe by then I will strum the guitar a bit, take out the trash, find a good book, one written by one who had good reasons to write, who wrote despite imprisonments and failures and low toils, as Cervantes did in his day to bring a quiet gem forward, one more semi-impoverished fellow with a pretense of a noble sentiment and character, and lastingly, an honest and gifted creative mind.