Writers Read. A Most Unfortunate Incident by Geraint Jonathan

Apparently, in the Russian original, Dostoevsky is a very funny writer, his novels rich in comic turns, witty wordplay and, not infrequently, downright farce. That this may be lost in translation is often all too evident from the many English translations to date. (For some reason, as David Foster Wallace somewhere points out, Dostoevsky’s characters are still made to say things like “The devil take it!”, rather than, say, “To hell with it!”; such archaic expressions abound, lending a stiffnecked quality to even the most anarchic of situations described.) That said, however, there’s barely an English translation of Dostoevsky’s 1862 novella, A Most Unfortunate Incident, that does not carry at least some of the tale’s comic heft; other translations are titled, variously, An Unpleasant Predicament, A Sordid Story, A Nasty Anecdote, A Disgraceful Affair;  but for my money, it’s Ivy Litvinoff’s translation from 1971 carries the day.

Put briefly, the story centres on a high ranking bureaucrat, Councillor Ivan Illyich Pralinsky, a man of impeccably progressive ideas, who happens upon the wedding party of one of his lowlier subordinates, an event the Councillor decides to further grace with his presence, thus demonstrating to all his magnanimity, his “humaneness”, his liberal principles. Needless to say, it all goes horribly, hilariously wrong, and the Councillor is brought a long way down from the heights of his condescension. It’s the steady accumulation of small details builds the momentum – as glasses are raised and toasts drunk and many words exchanged, the air growing ever thicker with voices, including the Councillor’s own, as he realizes, with mounting  horror, that he is, appallingly, drunk. When, of a sudden, specks of saliva appear to accompany the words from his mouth, he knows it can only bode worse, while his efforts to clarify his ‘position’, his benevolent intentions, grow increasingly fraught. It’s Dostoevsky at his satirical best, incisive, nuanced, humane and engaging. Even the name of the lowly subordinate whose wedding it is, Pseldonimov, takes on a kind of ‘Pseldonimovness’ all its own, a quality of pinched humility, and an obtuseness borne of fear, that contrast starkly with his superior’s grandiose pretensions. However, no cardboard cut-outs, these, need I say. Pseldonimov, while seemingly as threadbare of personality as he is of attire, is also, we are given to understand, one of life’s unassumingly determined souls, thin as a rake and essentially unstoppable; while Ivan Illyich, for all his platitudes, his presumption, self-importance and vanity, has in him too something ultimately sympathetic, fragile, frightened; he’s deeply misguided, certainly, he’s a stickler for the proprieties, a snob and a bore, but subtly conveyed too is his anxiety, his fear of being thought a fool, his susceptibility to what he reads in the faces of those around him. He could be a kind of David Brent, he of TV’s The Office, a Brent enamoured of brothertarian virtue, keen to be considered ‘cool’,  gracious, a firm boss but, hey, one who’s  ‘down’ with his employees/inferiors.

Written shortly before Notes From Underground, generally considered Dostoevsky’s first ‘great’ work, A Most Unfortunate Incident is one of several long short stories or novellas from his post-Siberian years – the others include Uncle’s Dream, The Crocodile, The Eternal Husband, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, stories which, for all their quirky brilliance, have little of the Unfortunate Incident’s unadulterated entertainment value. Dostoevsky’s antipathy to the ‘scientific rationalism’ of his time was well known, and it was to grow ever more pronounced over the years, finding its most trenchant expression in the Underground Man’s Notes, while reaching a more frothing-at the-mouth eloquence in his A Writer’s Diary. In the Incident, the targets may be similar but the means of delivery are decidedly lighter. In fact the work could arguably be called less ‘Dostoevskyan’ all round, in that no crimes are committed or contemplated, no manic case made for the existence or otherwise of God, and, though moral agonies are suffered, no one kisses the soil weeping or otherwise disports  themselves in paroxysms of abasement.  Saying which, of course, is only to make a cardboard cut-out of ‘Dostoevskyan’. In the end, as with Shakespeare, always depth to Dostoevsky’s lightest touches.

Geraint Jonathan

Image: a jumbled sort of book shop from pixabay.com