Dostoyevsky in your purse, hope in your heart
This week, I got to see former lawyer Sashi Perera perform her stand-up comedy routine on the topic of boundaries (personal, national, etc.) At one point, she asked if there were any Russians in the audience. There weren’t. She quipped, “Nope, I guess you’re all on the border of Finland.”
Having recently been at the border of Finland, it’s hard not to feel the rumblings of a dark future. We’re years into a war and months into a genocide, at the point of cognitive overload when even real events (bombings and attempted assassinations) seem manufactured to feed the attention economy.
Below: teenagers texting from the solitary confinement cell of the KGB prison in Tallinn, Estonia. Love the absurdity.
Anyway, I’ve always believed that the books you need will find you when the time is right. A message from the universe, unfolding as it should. My hand picked up this Dostoyevsky before my brain caught up with it. Pocket-sized, purse-fitting despair in black and white. I mean, whoever wrote this tagline deserves all the marketing bonus: Two devastating Russian stories of solitude, unrequited love and depravity from beyond the grave.
Below: the perfect size for a book, where it can actually fit into a purse.
Dostoyevsky is a great example of “anything can be a story, if well told.” In the first story, White Nights, a shy twenty-six-year-old man meets and falls in love with a woman on the street and has his heart broken, all in the course of four days. In the second, Bobok, a man “hears” a conversation from beyond the grave, as the souls of a crowded cemetery decide to finally speak honestly, now that there are no repercussions.
They are like pandemic stories, echoing across time and giving voice to that strange sense of isolation you can only have in a city, where people are everywhere and yet not quite there, and all conversations are overheard or imagined to some extent. Strange also that the publisher would choose to put the two of them together. The first was published in 1848 when his reputation was already in the toilet (more on that in a moment). The second was published in 1873, after he had written both Crime and Punishment and The Idiot and founded his own self-publishing company.
In a sense, although these stories are gathered together in this tiny volume, they are written by two different authors. The first, a young man who believed “a whole minute of bliss” was sufficient for a man to live on. The second, a man who had faced a firing squad and been spared, only to spend four years in a Siberian prison, doing hard labor.
People give Dostoyevsky a hard time for his sentimental prose. I mean, who else gets to write a line of dialog like this?
“Yes, if my hand is trembling, then it’s because such a pretty small hand like yours has never clasped it before. I’ve grown quite unused to women; that is, I never became used to them; you see, I’m alone… I don’t even know how to talk to them. Even now I don’t know whether I’ve said something stupid to you. Tell me frankly; I should tell you that I don’t take offence easily…”
But this was a man who had gone from being acclaimed for his debut novel as a literary sensation and called "the heir to Gogol” to being universally panned for his second novel and becoming a nationwide bad joke. The length of time between the height of acclaim and the depths of disdain? 15 days. Of course he’s sentimental. Only those of us who have known such reversal have the courage and good sense to enjoy the good times while they last, but the wisdom to know they are fleeting.
Every creative person lives on applause. Every single one. Nobody in their right mind gives up a high-paying job as a lawyer to stand up in front of a crowd of strangers to do stand-up comedy unless their attention is worth more than anything money can buy. Dostoyevsky was poor, even before he ended up in a Siberian prison, but he kept writing because he needed to be back in the public eye, being told his voice mattered.
But acknowledging that is tacky (what, you want people to pay attention to you when children are dying?), and yet not acknowledging it is responsible for the mental health crisis among creatives. The Bookseller reported that the majority of debut novelists (54%) experienced negative consequences to their mental health after publishing.
Here are some aspects of post-publishing depression nobody prepares you for:
The delta between expectations and reality: not every debut novelist is going to get a launch party and a marketing push and a six figure advance. I recently talked to a writer whose advance was £500. For years of work. No royalties.
The fact that you, the introverted writer, has to go hunting for blurbs and reviews, because that’s not what publishers do. (Separate future post on what publishers do and don’t do for you).
The one-star comments on your labor of love that make you feel not just like a bad writer but a bad human.
The way corporate algorithms that bring success to the already successful will dump you to the nether regions of their search index if you’re not raking in the dough.
The creeping awareness that this book that you’ve kept to yourself is now out in the world as its own being, and you need to get to work on your next but your brain is dead.
The way your publisher’s interest in your novel just drops if you haven’t earned out your advance in the first year.
The pressure to write a second novel that’s exactly the same as the first, but better, and god forbid you want to branch out and do something new.
The assumptions of well-meaning friends, colleagues and family that now you’ll be on airport bookshelves and Jodie Comer will star in the movie adaptation.
The unwarranted and over the top praise that only leave you feeling like people are either stupid or pitying you, because even you know that you’re still learning your craft and this is only four-star work at best.
…
So, maybe it was serendipitous that Dostoyevsky found me right in my pit of despair regarding the state of the publishing industry. I mean, at least I’m not being shot or sent to a Siberian prison for speaking against the government, which is more than I can say for much of the world right now.
Maybe some of that Russian absurdist humor will bleed into me (without the pan-Slavic nationalism or religious stuff, obviously). And in the meantime, there’s always just the joy of reading and writing. The necessity of it, on good days and bad. Dostoyevsky is right: the few minutes of bliss that transport you to another world are truly enough to live on.