On Dostoevsky's Bobok—Or the Banality of the Dead
Dostoevsky is best known for his sweeping novels, but he was also a master of the short form. He wrote a number of shorter works—including stories and novellas. Of these shorter pieces, probably only Notes from Underground has had the reach of his great novels. I want to focus here on a particular story called Bobok, which first appeared in A Writer's Diary in 1873. To locate it within Dostoevsky's oeuvre, the story was written well after Crime and Punishment (1866), shortly after Demons (1872), and well before his final novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Around 22 pages long, Bobok is a satirical tale that contains many themes that occupied and preoccupied Dostoevsky throughout his life, and which he developed at greater length in his novels.
Subtitled Notes of a Certain Person, Bobok is written in first person in the form of a diary entry. The narrator is a certain struggling writer named Ivan Ivanych. In a very short preface, he insists that the author "is not I; it is an entirely different person,"[1] which is unconvincing. We are thus confronted with the notes of Ivan Ivanych, an unsuccessful writer who (he tells us) has been struggling to get serious work published. In the meantime, in order to make ends meet, he writes advertisements for merchants, churns out trifling commissioned work like The Art of Pleasing the Ladies, and so on. None of this, of course, is Ivan Ivanych's fault:
"Nowadays humor and good style are disappearing, and abuse is taken for wit."
His stories are consistently, repeatedly rejected. Publishers find that he "lacks salt". It soon becomes clear that Ivan Ivanych, who was recently the subject of a mocking portrait by another writer, is beginning to lose his mind. He is steadily unravelling. His writing is turning choppy and erratic. He finds that his very character is changing, that his head is aching, and that he has begun seeing and hearing things:
"Not really voices, but as if there were someone just nearby: 'Bobok, bobok, bobok!'"
What is this bobok? He asks. In Russian, "bobok" means "little bean"—and if that sounds like nonsense, well, that's because it is. Although I will focus on the more serious aspects of the story, I want to underscore that it is also very funny. It is not essentially a heavy story.
The story proper begins when Ivan Ivanych abruptly tells us that he "went out for diversion and wound up at a funeral." The funeral is being held for a distant relative, with whom Ivan Ivanych did not share any closeness. In fact, upon his arrival, Ivan Ivanych is treated haughtily—the family appears to be of higher social status—and is pretty much ignored throughout the proceedings. After the burial, the mourners leave together for a customary funerary dinner. Ivan Ivanych decided to stay behind with the graves. Lingering among the earth, flowers, and gravestones, he finally sits down on a tombstone and lapses into thought. He becomes oblivious to his surroundings.
Suddenly he hears voices, very distinct voices. He is quite sure that they emanate from the graves, precisely from within the graves. "Your Excellency, this is simply quite impossible, sir." Thus speaks the first voice—that of a sycophant addressing a self-important general. Ivan Ivanych keeps listening as more voices make themselves heard. It turns out that these voices are the voices of the dead, of the characters buried in the stretched-out graves.
Some of the dead know that they are dead. Others have to be told. Some refuse to accept that they are, in fact, dead. Their conversations are strikingly mundane. Some of the dead are recalling events from their lives, still in the role of the positions and stations that they occupied. At first the talk is civil. Soon, however, it becomes brazen—some of the dead decide to do away with propriety. After all, they are dead! Why bother to hide anything from anyone? "I want terribly, terribly to get naked!" One of the women squeals.
The immediate thing one notices is that the concerns of the dead—their conversations, fears, and desires—are fundamentally the same as those of the living. They are banal. We might have been listening in on any drawing room at the time; except for the little fact that all of the interlocutors are, in fact, dead. One might have expected that in such a profound, mysterious, inaccessible place as the graveyard, where souls have gathered upon leaving the world, the talk would have been more… meaningful. There are two straightforward ways to interpret this state of affairs—forwardly and backwardly.
First, you can interpret it as a satirical sketch of people's trivial personal and social concerns, which have become so deeply entrenched in their psyches that, even if they were to die and find themselves within the last throes of consciousness, they couldn't possibly rid themselves of this way of thinking. The small desires, little jealousies, and petty, ego-fueled worries about status that have shaped their existence on earth runs so very deep that even the what-ought-to-be-magnificent shock of finding oneself conscious in a grave among the dead cannot shake them out of it. I call this the forward interpretation, because it drags the concerns of the living onward into their deaths.
This idea is related to the theory of consciousness that is expounded by one of the dead called Platon Nikolaevich. He is the "local homegrown philosopher, natural scientist, and magister," who explains it all with the most simple fact—namely:
"…that up there, while we were still alive, we mistakenly regarded death there as death. Here the body revives again, as it were, the remnants of life concentrate, but only in the consciousness. It's—I don't know how to put it—life continuing as if by inertia. Everything is concentrated […] somewhere in the consciousness, and goes on for another two or three months […] sometimes even half a year."
Life is concentrated in consciousness before, presumably, one passes on into another (better?) realm of existence.
The second way to interpret the dead in Bobok is in a backward manner. The voices of the dead have an audience: Ivan Ivanych is listening. But do not all people who die still have an audience? We remember the dead. We remember them as they have lived. We might, consciously or not, paint a better or worse picture of the departed than their actual existence may have warranted, but all the same: the dead live backwardly in the minds and memories of those who are left behind, still living. The dead stay in the world for a while, until the moment—dreaded by some more than death—when there is no one left alive to remember.
We ought not to ignore the fact that Ivan Ivanych appears to be going mad. There may not be—what am I saying? of course there aren't—any voices rising up from graves. This leads to another potential explanation: Ivan Ivanych, in his desperate attempt to come up with interesting material to put into a book and to finally publish, is simply imagining the voices. He is letting himself go and hallucinating the dead. Here he has, finally, a profound idea. This is where the story's satire reaches its peak. Even in such a place, at such a moment, all poor Ivan Ivanych can imagine in the voices of the dead is the trivial chatter of society. The perceptive reader comes to suspect that he may simply be regurgitating parts of conversations that he has picked up elsewhere, projecting slivers into the ground along with the hope that something significant might grow out of them. Nothing does. Even here, he lacks salt.
But let us not forget Dostoevsky, who is also speaking to us. This is evident when we get to the following passage, which occurs shortly before Ivan Ivanych at last interrupts the voices:
"I want there to be no lying. That's the only thing I want, because it's the main thing. It's impossible to live on earth and not lie, for life and lie are synonymous; but here, just for the fun of it, we won't lie. Devil take it, the grave does mean something after all! We'll all tell our stories aloud and not be ashamed of anything now."
What may at first be taken as the shamelessness and shamefulness of the dead—a kind of character-smearing—turns out to be the virtue of the dead. In death, truth opens up. Truth as honest evaluation: there is no more lying outside of life, when life has been lived. The need to lie is gone. And is death here not a metaphor for literature?
The dead speak in our memories—our individual as well as our collective memories—much like the shadowy figures in literature strangely speak to us from beyond yet somehow within this world. Neither the dead nor the fictional exist, strictly speaking, but they have voices. And while we may not be able to live without lying, could we not write without lying? Could we not step out of the world and give an account of it exactly as it is?
"To be astonished at everything is, of course, stupid, while to be astonished at nothing is much more beautiful and for some reason is recognized as good form. But it is hardly so in essence. In my opinion, to be astonished at nothing is much stupider than to be astonished at everything."
We can tell true stories. That, at least is the hope. It was certainly one of Dostoevsky's longstanding concerns. He wrote Prince Myshkin in The Idiot in an attempt to portray a Christlike figure who lives in truth—with mostly disastrous consequences. Being honest is not always enough, but Dostoevsky was probably closest to the truth about the human condition when he portrayed Prince Myshkin.
There is also the matter of loneliness. Ivan Ivanych does not seem to belong anywhere. His raison d'être—writing—isn't appreciated by those who are ostensibly in a position to judge it. To make matter worse, as a person, he is not even appreciated at a funeral hosted by relatives. He doesn't have much recourse except to the dead. Who else will give him attention? Yet even among the dead, Ivan Ivanych is only listening in—just like at the funeral, when he found himself not really invited, hanging around on the fringes. For as soon as Ivan Ivanych announces his presence to the dead with a sneeze, the voices cease. He is alone again. Like a true writer, you might say, he takes it on the chin. He vows to find more voices, and to do the only thing a writer can: to turn them into literature.
The consciousness experienced by the dead is, in the end, no different from the consciousness enjoyed by the living. This is another element to the story. The banality of the dead shows us just how much of our consciousness is wasted over trifles. Ivan Ivanych's conclusion after having heard the dead speak applies as much to us as it does to the dead:
"Depravity in such a place, the depravity of last hopes, the depravity of flabby and rotting corpses and—not even sparing the last moments of consciousness! They're given, they're made a gift of these moments and…"
They are no more given a gift than we, who are alive. Do we come out any better?
[1] I use the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky throughout.