Uncle's Dream

Dostoevsky Fyodor

Description

In the 1940s, Picasso wrote two plays in French: the first, Desire Caught by the Tail, was conceived during the German occupation of Paris and features a cast of grotesque allegorical characters such as the Onion, Silence or Fat Anxiety discussing the crucial wartime themes of hunger, cold and love; the second, The Four Little Girls, came about a few years after the end of the war on the French Riviera, and presents the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of four unnamed girls in a vegetable garden, revealing an unexpectedly evil aspect of childhood.These surreal compositions, which were meant to be read aloud rather than formally staged, are a testament to the great artist's imaginative powers, and have been considered as forerunners to the theatre of the absurd of the 1950s, as exemplified by Beckett, Ionesco and Adamov. This volume also contains the accompanying illustrations by Picasso himself.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 21 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714550138
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Uncle’s Dream
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Roger Cockrell


ALMA CLASSICS


alma classics an imprint of
alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.co .uk
Uncle’s Dream first published in Russian as Д ядюшкин сон in 1859 This edition first published by Alma Classics in 2020
Translation, Introduction and Notes © Roger Cockrell, 2020
Cover design by Will Dady
Extra Material © Alma Books Ltd
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY


isbn : 978-1-84749-768-0
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents
Introduction
Uncle’s Dream
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Note on the Text
Notes
Extra Material
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Life
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Works
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements


Introduction
In February 1854 Dostoevsky was released from prison in the Siberian town of Omsk, where he had completed his four years as a special-category prisoner. As someone who before captivity had lived an intensely rich inner life, as the first Russian translator of Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and the author of a number of published stories, including the widely acclaimed Poor People (1846), he had found the lack of literary culture and the almost total absence of books in prison particularly tortuous. In accordance with the terms of his sentence, he was to spend the next five years in enforced exile from European Russia as a private in a line regiment based in the town of Semipalatinsk, in north-east Kazakhstan, close to the Russian border. The tedium and numbing effect of provincial life in this remote backwater, combined with ever more frequent bouts of epilepsy, meant that this was a particularly frustrating and difficult time for Dostoevsky. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the plans he had cherished while in captivity to “return to literature” as soon as possible assumed particular significance. True, he could have embarked straight away on a work based on his prison experiences, but he was reluctant to do so, largely because of his fear the censors might not pass it for publication – it was eventually to appear as The House of the Dead in 1860–62.
The need, nonetheless, to publish and thereby to earn himself some kind of living – a concern that was to preoccupy him for much of the rest of his life – remained paramount, and he soon began to try out other ideas. Perhaps motivated by the desire to forget, at least for the time being, the horror of prison, he began to entertain the possibility of a work with comic potential. “I have jokingly begun writing a comedy,” he wrote to a friend, the poet Apollon Maikov, in January 1856, “and I have so come to like my hero that I have abandoned the idea of writing a comedy for the stage, despite it being so successful – strictly to be able to follow the escapades of my new hero and laugh at him myself. This hero has something in common with me. In short, I am writing a comic novel, but up until now I have written merely a series of unconnected episodes, and I’m enjoying it all very much; now I am sewing it into a single piece.”
It is difficult to ascertain exactly what Dostoevsky meant by this “single piece”, since within three years of this letter two comic works were to be published: the short novel Uncle’s Dream and the rather longer The Village of Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants , also translated into English as A Friend of the Family . We do know, however, that while Dostoevsky wrote Uncle’s Dream in an “infectiously good mood, roaring with laughter as he described the prince’s escapades”, he considered The Village of Stepanchikovo to be “incomparably” the better work. “I don’t like [ Uncle’s Dream ],” he wrote to his brother Mikhail, “and I am sad that I find myself forced to make my return in such an unsatisfactory way. Sad above all because I have been compelled to go down this road… I would like to keep at least one work faultless. But what can I do? I can’t write anything I want to write, yet I’m writing something I would never think of writing if I didn’t need the money. And for the sake of the money I have deliberately to think up a story. And that’s so hard, isn’t it? A poor writer’s trade is such an appalling one…” Desperately “needing the money”, however, he persevered, and was able to complete the manuscript and send it off to the journal The Russian Word by the end of January 1859. It was published a few weeks later.
The setting for Uncle’s Dream – the town of Mordasov and surrounding area – derives from Dostoevsky’s time in Semipalatinsk and reflects his intense dislike of the town. The story has an originality and colouring of its own, but in its basic premise – the arrival in a provincial town of an unexpected guest from the capital, leading to confusion and conflict – it echoes earlier works such as Nikolai Gogol’s ground-breaking play The Government Inspector (first performed in 1836), and his novel Dead Souls (1841). More widely, in the story’s unmasking of what Dostoevsky saw as the faults characterizing provincial life as a whole – banality, stagnation, ignorance, philistinism, cruelty and hypocrisy – other works come to mind. These include Alexander Griboyedov’s satirical play Woe from Wit (first performed in 1831) and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Provincial Sketches (1856), a scathing denunciation of small-town bureaucracy. Most intriguingly, in view of the complex relationship between Dostoevsky and his fellow writer Ivan Turgenev – a relationship that was later to degenerate into outright hostility – Dostoevsky recorded his indebtedness to Turgenev’s one-act satirical vaudeville A P rovincial Lady (first performed in 1851), whose domineering and manipulative heroine looks ahead to the first lady of Mordasov in Dostoevsky’s story. In terms of Dostoevsky’s own development as a writer, the genre of a “scandalous provincial chronicle” that he first developed in Uncle’s Dream was to be reworked with much wider socio-political and psychological ramifications in his novel Devils (1872).
At the start of Uncle’s Dream we find ourselves partly in the hands of a first-person narrator, who acts as a purportedly detached observer of the society of which he himself is a part, becoming our guide to the character and mores of the citizens of Mordasov. We are, he informs us, about to hear the story of a “fateful three days”, during which people’s lives will be radically transformed, and which will include “a full and remarkable account of the rise, fame and momentous fall of Maria Alexandrovna and all her Mordasov household – such a worthy and alluring topic for a writer”. We are told that he has “a soft spot” for our heroine, Maria Alexandrovna, and we are left in no doubt as to what he thinks of her husband, Afanasy Matveich: “In my radical opinion, he should have gone off long ago and become a scarecrow – only then would he have been able to perform a useful service for his countrymen.” Although this narrator disappears from the story for whole chapters, he continues every so often to remind us of his presence, occasionally speaking in a voice close to that of the author himself, as in the following passage from Chapter 7: “Everyone in the provinces lives, so to speak, in a glass case. There is absolutely no possibility of ever being able to conceal anything from one’s highly respected fellow citizens. They know every detail about you – they know things about you that even you are not aware of. By his very nature, the provincial should be, one might think, a psychologist and specialist on human nature. That is why I have frequently been genuinely amazed to have met such an extraordinary number of imbeciles in the provinces – rather than psychologists and specialists on human nature.”
Dostoevsky’s heart and mind may not have been fully engaged when writing Uncle’s Dream , but his characters come off the page with considerable vigour and individuality. The repellently grotesque figure of the prince is based partly on the traditions of puppet theatre, with which the author was very familiar. The senile old rake’s half-wittedness, skilfully exploited to unmask people’s gullibility and hypocrisy, contrasts with his rather endearing childlike vulnerability. Maria Alexandrovna’s strikingly beautiful twenty-three-year-old daughter Zina shows a propensity for wilfulness and existential despair that Dostoevsky was later to explore more fully in figures such as Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot and Liza Tushina in Devils . The level of banality of Zina’s hapless suitor, Pavel Alexandrovich Mozglyakov, is such that it shields him from his own awareness of it. Even when, in a final scene reminiscent of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin , he is spurned by Zina, he is quickly able to dismiss it from his mind and to gallop off to fresh woods and pastures new. The change of tone evident in Dostoevsky’s tear-jerking account of the agonizingly slow suicide and death of Vasya, Zina’s only true love, is one of the few moments in the story when he makes direct use of an episode from his time in prison. As for the first lady of Mordasov herself, Maria Alexandrovna Moskalyova sails magnificently through the narrative, sustained by