“Two Suicides,” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

View original image Portuguese translation by Alexandre H. Reis[i] Recently I happened to discuss with one of our writers (a great artist) the comic character of life and the difficulty of finding the right word for a phenomenon.[ii] I had remarked earlier that, although I had known A desgraça de ter espírito for nearly forty years,[iii] only this year had I really understood one of the comedy's most vivid characters, Molchalin himself. The writer I was speaking with had explained Molchalin to me by unexpectedly portraying him in one of his satires. (I shall devote some time to Molchalin one day. It is a great subject.)[iv] “Do you know,” my companion suddenly said, apparently having long been struck by the thought, “that no matter how much you write or portray, however hard you try to describe something in a literary work, you can never equal reality? Whatever you sketch, it will always be weaker than real life. You may think that in your work you have drawn out all the comedy that some phenomenon of life has to offer and caught it at its most grotesque. No such thing! Reality will soon reveal itself in a still more absurd form, on a scale you never suspected, surpassing all that your observation and imagination could create...”[v] I have known that since 1846,[vi] when I began writing, and perhaps even earlier. It has always struck me, and art's apparent powerlessness made me question its usefulness. Indeed, you need only observe an event in real life, even one that at first seems unremarkable, and if you have eyes to see you will perceive a depth in it that even Shakespeare never reached. But the question is: in comparison with whose vision? And who can see that way? For even discerning a fact demands something of the artist, quite apart from creating and writing works of art. To some observers, all life's phenomena unfold with such touching and transparent simplicity that they warrant neither reflection nor a closer look. Yet those same phenomena can bewilder another observer so utterly, as often happens, that he finds himself unable to bring them together or simplify them, to set them out in a straight line and thus quiet his mind. He then resorts to another sort of simplification. Quite simply, he puts a bullet through his head to extinguish his weary mind and all its questions at once.[vii] Such are the two extremes between which the sum of human intelligence lies. But we can plainly never exhaust a phenomenon or reach its end or its beginning. We know only the everyday, the apparent and the ordinary, and only as far as these show themselves to us. Beginnings and ends remain in the domain of the fantastic for humankind. This reminds me that last summer one of my esteemed correspondents wrote to me about a strange and inscrutable suicide. I have been thinking of commenting on it ever since.[viii] Everything about this suicide, outward and inward, is a riddle. Naturally, as human nature will have it, I tried somehow to unravel the mystery so as to settle on an explanation and “calm myself.” The young woman who died was twenty-three or twenty-four, the daughter of a well-known Russian émigré. She had been born abroad to Russian parents, though there was hardly anything Russian in her upbringing. I believe she was briefly mentioned in the newspapers of the day, but the details are quite curious: “She soaked a piece of cotton wool in chloroform, tied it over her face and lay down on the bed... And so she died.” Before she died, she wrote the following note: “Je m’en vais entreprendre un long voyage. Si cela ne réussit pas qu’on se rassemble pour fêter ma résurrection avec du Cliquot. Si cela réussit, je prie qu’on ne me laisse enterrer que tout à fait morte, puisqu’il est très désagréable de se réveiller dans un cercueil sous terre. Ce n’est pas chic!” That is: “I am about to set out on a long journey. If it doesn't come off, let everyone gather to celebrate my resurrection with a bottle of Cliquot. If it does, I ask that you bury me only when I am quite dead, since it is very unpleasant to wake up in a coffin underground. It isn't chic!” To my mind, a protest rings out in that vulgar, repellent “chic,” perhaps indignation, perhaps rage. Against what, though?[ix] Coarse people kill themselves only for a material, visible, outward cause. From the tone of the note one can tell there can have been no such cause here. What, then, was the target of the indignation? The simplicity of the visible world? The meaninglessness of life? Was she one of those who sit in judgment on existence and deny it, indignant at the “absurdity” of human beings appearing on earth, at the purposeless chance of their appearance, at the tyranny of inert causation to which one cannot resign oneself? What we seem to have here is a soul in revolt against the “straight-line character” of phenomena, unable to bear the linearity instilled in her since childhood in her father's house. What is most terrible is that she surely died without a single conscious doubt. Her soul was very likely devoid of either doubt or inquiry. It is just as likely that she believed all she had been taught from childhood without ever putting any of it to the test. That would mean that she died simply of “cold, darkness and boredom,” in an inexplicable, almost animal suffering. She began to suffocate like someone who feels the air running out. Inexplicably, the soul could not endure the straight line and, inexplicably, demanded something more complex... About a month ago, all the Petersburg newspapers carried a few lines in small type about another suicide in the city. A poor young seamstress threw herself from a fourth-floor window “because she could no longer find work to support herself.” The reports added that she jumped and fell to the ground holding an icon in her hands.[x] That icon in her hands is a strange, unheard-of detail in a suicide! It was a timid and humble suicide. Here, it seems, there was neither complaint nor protest. It had simply become impossible to live: “God does not will it.” And she died, having said her prayers. There are certain things, however simple they may seem, that one cannot stop dwelling on for a long time. They return in dreams, and one begins to think one is somehow to blame for them. This gentle soul who destroyed herself involuntarily continues to trouble the mind.[xi] It was precisely this death that brought to mind the suicide of the émigré's daughter that I heard about last summer. How different those two creatures are, though. They seem to have come from different planets! How different their two deaths! And which of those two souls suffered more on earth, if so idle a question may be asked? TRANSLATOR'S NOTES [i] Although I know the Russian alphabet well and can read Russian, I am still a long way from understanding it well enough to translate it confidently. Above all, I lack the vocabulary needed to grasp all the nuances of such a rich and spirited language. For those of us who learned to read Greek texts early on as part of our philosophical studies (I studied Greek in the Faculty of Letters at UFMG while an undergraduate in philosophy), Russian has a visual and structural familiarity, yet a semantic gulf remains. My Portuguese translation therefore takes the English translation of the Russian as its starting point, with the Russian original always beside it as a reference and a horizon for the reading. I used the selection of Fyodor Dostoevsky's texts from the collection entitled The Diary of a Writer (1873–1881) (in Russian Zapiski iz Pis’mennika), available in The Ethics of Suicide Digital Archive hosted by the University of Utah (for the English text, see https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/fyodor-dostoevsky/). This edition presents a series of essays of short and moderate length: “In Lieu of a Preface on the Great and Little Bear, on the Prayer of the Great Goethe, And, Generally, on Bad Habits”, “Two Suicides”, “The Verdict”, “Arbitrary Assertions”, “A Few Words About Youth”, “On Suicides and Haughtiness”, “The Boy Celebrating His Saint’s Day”, “The Dream of a Strange Man: A Fantastic Story”. From an editorial standpoint, it is worth noting that these “discrete sections” are characteristic of Dostoevsky's understanding of the essay as an exercise in moral, cultural and existential reflection. The phenomenon of suicide, the central subject of this selection, appears in shifting combinations of social testimony, philosophical intuition and spiritual denunciation.  [ii] The opening discussion of the “comic character of life” is typical of Dostoevsky's late thought (the 1870s), when he saw laughter as a way into reality and human contradiction, echoing O idiota and the “laughter of Christ” in his work. [iii] A desgraça de ter espírito (Gore ot uma, 1823) is a comedy by Aleksandr Griboiedov. By citing the play, Dostoevsky demonstrates his continuing reading of Russian literature as moral and political self-critique. [iv] Molchalin is a character in the comedy Горе от ума (O infortúnio de ter juízo, 1824) by the Russian playwright Aleksandr S. Griboiédov (1795–1829), one of the founding works of modern Russian literature. An ambitious and servile subordinate, Molchalin represents the social type of the unprincipled opportunist who seeks advancement through flattery and blind obedience to hierarchies. His figure became proverbial in Russian culture as the embodiment of moral mediocrity disguised as prudence, the “little man” who adapts himself to the convenience of those in power. Dostoevsky would return to this archetype in such characters as Piotr Luzhin in Crime e castigo (1866) and Andréi Versílov in O adolescente (1875), in whom social cunning takes the place of spiritual depth. [v] The theme of art's inferiority to life recurs in Memórias do Subsolo and O idiota. Reality exceeds fiction because evil and absurdity are concrete there, free of idealization. [vi] The year 1846 marks the publication of Gente pobre, Dostoevsky's first work, and the beginning of his reflection on suffering as a revelation of the Russian soul. [vii] This passage gives veiled expression to Dostoevsky's critique of nineteenth-century suicidal rationalism. It anticipates a theme central to Kiríllov (Os demônios) and the “underground man”: reason turning against life itself. [viii] The case of the young émigré may have been inspired by real reports of suicides in Paris published in the 1860s. The essayistic, almost journalistic tone anticipates the Dostoevsky of Diário de um escritor (1873–1881). [ix] Here the narrator introduces a kind of “aesthetic nihilism”: suicide as revolt against linearity, that is, against the world understood solely as a rational sequence of causes and effects. It anticipates the critique of modernity as a “straight line” devoid of transcendence. [x] The seamstress's suicide is the essay's Christian counterpoint. Her death differs from the “chic” young woman's in its humble, confessional and almost sacrificial character. The icon in her hands evokes the pietas of ordinary Russians and suggests that faith, even in misery, lends form to the extreme act. [xi] The ending returns to the theme of “guilt for another.” The narrator feels responsible for the seamstress's death, anticipating the central thesis of Os irmãos Karamázov: “Each of us is guilty before everyone and for everything.”