Everything was before him

Dostoevsky describes General Epanchin's position in life with these shining words: "Но все было впереди, время терпело, время все терпело, и все должно было придти современем и своим чередом." ... "But everything was before him, there was time enough for everything, and everything would come in time and in due course." What a wonderful place to be! No wonder he continues: "Да и летами генерал Епанчин был еще, как говорится, в самом соку, то-есть пятидесяти шести лет и никак не более, что во всяком случае составляет возраст цветущий, возраст, с которого, по-настоящему, начинается истинная жизнь." ... "As for his years, General Epanchin was still, as they say, in the prime of life, that is, fifty-six and not a whit more, which in any case is a flourishing age, the age when true life really begins." (translation, as often, from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky).

A few pages earlier, in describing Totsky, the man who lives with Nastasya Filippovna, Dostoevsky refers to the mid 50s: "потому совсем, то-есть, лет достиг настоящих, пятидесяти пяти, и жениться на первейшей раскрасавице во всем Петербурге хочет." ... interestingly (and perhaps strangely), Pevear and Volokhonsky add in the phrase "prime of life" here as well ... "because he's reached the prime of life, he's fifty-five, and wants to marry the foremost beauty in all Petersburg." Totsky is fifty-five, he's getting on a bit, now is the time he should be thinking of marrying a beauty, but of course it is plausible that he marry a great beauty, so in this sense perhaps we can take it as the "prime of life", but I am not sure the addition of the phrase in the translation is justified.

[Painting by Фёдор Александрович Васильев]

Money for nothing in return

Dostoevsky again, getting us on-side with some entertaining complaints about the medical profession:

особенно засмеялся он, когда на вопрос: "что же, вылечили?" - белокурый отвечал, что "нет, не вылечили".
- Хе! Денег что, должно быть, даром переплатили, а мы-то им здесь верим

He laughed particularly when to his question 'Did they cure you?' the blond man answered 'No, they didn't.'
- Heh, Got all that money for nothing, and we go on believing them.

Of course, the same holds now in spades for the consultants big companies hire to cure themselves.

Russian difference

The theme of Russian difference is touched lightly upon in the first pages of The Idiot: "Но что годилось и вполне удовлетворяло в Италии, то оказалось не совсем пригодным в России." - "But what was proper and quite satisfactory in Italy, turned out to be not entirely suitable to Russia". The comic lightness of touch in the phrasing "не совсем пригодным" is delightful: the polite understatement also carries within it some of the mockery that animates Rogozhin.

Narrative gambits

After a quick paragraph of scene-setting, Dostoevsky gets the narrative of The Idiot running with the second sentence of the second paragraph: "Если б они оба знали один про другого, чем они особенно в эту минуту замечательны, то, конечно, подивились бы, что случай так странно посадил их друг против друга в третьеклассном вагоне петербургско-варшавского поезда." ... "If they had known what was so remarkable about each other at that moment, they would certainly have marvelled at the chance that had strangely seated them facing each other in the third-class carriage of the Warsaw-St Petersburg train."

What is it, we want to know, that is so "замечательны", so "remarkable" or "wonderful" about these figures. Surely we too shall shortly "marvel." We read on.

Imbibing the Reality of Metaphors Made Manifest

I will be Paris and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked.
- Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

Faustus declaims an impassioned identification, invoking a magical fusing of past and present, the fire of his emotion being hot enough to make the metaphor real.

On 7 February 1601, the evening before the abortive Essex Rising, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex and his supporters requested the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform a play on the matter of Henry IV, and the "deposing and killing" of Richard II.

We seek out art that "expresses" or makes manifest the swirl of inarticulate emotions within us. This is Aristotle's κάθαρσις - catharsis - the purgation of excessive feelings. But we see with Essex and with Faustus that the imitation is commutative: art represents life, and life would reinforce its patterns by imitating the art it selects. Instead of Richard, Elizabeth; instead of Troy, Wittenberg.

Plato had identified this danger of poetry, see Republic 3.395d ... (here starting back in the middle of 395c): ἐὰν δὲ μιμῶνται, μιμεῖσθαι τὰ τούτοις προσήκοντα εὐθὺς ἐκ παίδων, ἀνδρείους, σώφρονας, ὁσίους, ἐλευθέρους, καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα πάντα, τὰ δὲ ἀνελεύθερα μήτε ποιεῖν μήτε δεινοὺς εἶναι μιμήσασθαι, μηδὲ ἄλλο μηδὲν τῶν αἰσχρῶν, ἵνα μὴ ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι ἀπολαύσωσιν. ἢ οὐκ ᾔσθησαι ὅτι αἱ μιμήσεις, ἐὰν ἐκ νέων πόρρω διατελέσωσιν, εἰς ἔθη τε καὶ φύσιν καθίστανται καὶ κατὰ σῶμα καὶ φωνὰς καὶ κατὰ τὴν διάνοιαν;

"But if they imitate they should from childhood up imitate what is appropriate to them — men, that is, who are brave, sober, pious, free and all things of that kind; but things unbecoming the free man they should neither do nor be clever at imitating, nor yet any other shameful thing, lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality. Or have you not observed that imitations, if continued from youth far into life, settle down into habits and (second) nature in the body, the speech, and the thought?"

The translation here is Paul Shorey's. I think "lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality" is an instance of the translator introducing a new metaphor that isn't in the original ἵνα μὴ ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι ἀπολαύσωσιν. As much as I like the florid grandeur of "imbibe the reality", perhaps Benjamin Jowett's older translation is closer to the mark "lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate."

Jowett's version of this section runs: "if they imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward only those characters which are suitable to their profession - the courageous, temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be skilful at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate. Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?"

Mimesis and Memory

"Kinder spielen Soldaten. Das ist sinnvoll. Warum aber spielen Soldaten Kinder?" - Karl Kraus

Children play soldiers. That is sensible. But why do soldiers play children?

But there is no real puzzle here, when we consider the dual engines of mimesis and memory. Aristotle observed how humans are naturally mimetic and take delight in the recognition of what is represented. Our characters become defined through the way we imitate ourselves and repeat certain actions - so memory (its nostalgia for the self, and repugnance as well perhaps) plays a vital part in the way character moves forward and the person develops. So it is entirely natural for children to imitate soldiers, and for soldiers to replay one way or another the days of their childhood.

Félicité, Passion, Ivresse

Returning to that final sentence of Chapter 5 of Part 1 of Madame Bovary

"Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres."

In Geoffrey Wall's translation for Penguin Classics it is: "And Emma sought to find out exactly what was meant in real life by the words fidelity, passion, and rapture, which had seemed so fine on the pages of books." "Fidelity" here seems like a mistake.

Lydia Davis' recent translation offers: "And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss," "passion," and "intoxication," which had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

Frank McConnell explains the range of meanings of these three words in his essay 'Félicité, Passion, Ivresse: The Lexicography of Madame Bovary': "To understand fully the range and importance of the verbal motto félicité, passion, ivresse, it is necessary to examine their potential grammar. All three may be understood as both intransitive and relational terms, depending upon the sense in which we decide to take them. Fklicitk-"bliss, "luck," "joy," or a kind of benign capacity for grace, is either a serenely full good humor or a dynamic equilibrium of circumstance and spirit. Passion is both le grand passion, the English "passion," and also a "passive" suffering, a state of being painfully objective to another person or to the world. And Ivresse is both "ecstasy" and, simply, "drunkenness" or "intoxication": taken most generally, the use of an object-or the objectification of a subject-for the artificial transcendence of one's subjective consciousness." (Novel, Winter 1970, p.158)

In a footnote he also quotes a remark by Wittgenstein: "That is to say, whether a word of the language of our tribe is rightly translated into a word of the English language depends upon the role this word plays in the whole life of the tribe; the occasions on which it is used, the expressions of emotion by which it is generally accompanied, the ideas which it generally awakens or which prompt its saying, etc., etc.," Wittgenstein, The Brown Book (New York, lssue), p. 103.