Netochka Nezvanova . . . no saintly orphan

By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Translated by Jane Kentish

Penguin

176 pages

By Comrade Reviewer Overcoat

Christmas Eve. I was minding my own business, drinking a bottle of strengthening vodka, and reading Netochka Nezvanova. I have always been curious about the Comrade housekeeper Nezvanova's past. Dostoyevksy confirmed my suspicions.  But not before I experienced a moment of unsteadiness.  I tried to reach for the vodka to right myself, but tumbled backward instead receiving a sharp blow to the head. At least I think I received a sharp blow to the head. When I awakened, I found myself in the company of a geisha somewhere in the wilds of Japan.  Although she attempted to assault my manly virtue, I remained firm, at which point she made snide remarks about my overcoat.

I escaped nearly scathed (but not quite) and attempted to find a troika to take me home.  Strangely none was to be found. Instead I caught a slow boat to China and from there made my way painfully on foot back to Russia. Possibly the sake I drank in Japan bore some responsibility for my belated return home. 

I was much relieved to leave Japan as I also escaped a Methodist Faun, whom I met at a sake bar. He is quite a tiresome fellow. Really, he would have been much happier in a Russian novel (preferably one by Dostoevsky but any Russian novel would do). Why he lives in New England with his progenitor Anne Parrish is beyond me. I fear he will turn out to be another Miniver Cheevy . . . but more of the Faun later (much later one hopes).

Having arrived home at no small trouble to myself, I settled down in what passed for a comfy chair (I do not think genuine comfy chairs exist in Russia) and read Netochka Nezvanova. By the time I finished, I was giddy with laughter. How not in novel dominated by a mad musician (talented but a wastrel), a long-suffering wife—the recipient of his sadism and without whom he would long ago have starved, a step-daughter (the eponymous narrator) who adores him and spends much of her time despising her mother, a brief lesbian interlude between two teenagers who spend several days in ecstasy before being separated, mysterious princes and princesses, one murderous dog named Falstaff, and lots of death. Why my mother did not take me on her knee and read this one aloud to me when I was a wee tot is beyond my comprehension.

Unfortunately Dostoevsky did not finish Netochka Nezvanova. Arrest, a fake execution, and a trip to Siberia interrupted his writing for a while. One wonders whence he would have proceeded with this novel? But he didn’t proceed, leaving only a mystery: What happened to Netochka, who is barely eighteen when the novel stops? Did she marry? Did she become a great artist? Did she turn out like her stepfather? Was she reunited with Katya? Did she become a monster or a saint? (I think we all know the answer to this question. She is a menace with her iron skillet.) And finally, who is S.O.? Is he S.? Does B. play a bigger role than hitherto suggested in the novel?

Netochka Nezvanova cries out to be made into a tragic opera with a musical score composed by Schoenberg, who unfortunately is dead. How inconsiderate of D., and Schoenberg to die before either Netochka Nezvanova the novel or Netochka Nezvanova the opera could be completed. Only Schoenberg could have written the brilliantly forceful violin solo that would recur throughout the opera as a thematic and musical motif (I know, I know, Schoenberg didn’t like recurring motifs). Lest my kind reader(s) doubt my choice of Schoenberg, listen to this clip (make sure you click “sound on ”) while reading the following passage from Netochka Nezvanova:

. . . then the music began. But it was not music . . . I remember everything distinctly; to the end I can remember everything that caught my attention. No, this was not like the music I later came to hear. They were not the notes of a violin, but the sound of a terrible voice that was resounding through our room for the first time. Either my first impressions were incorrect or delirious, or else my senses were so thrown by all that I had witnessed that they were prepared for frightful, agonizing impressions—but I am firmly convinced that I heard groans, the cries of a human voice. Complete despair flowed forth in these chords and . . . , at the end, there resounded the last awful note, in which was expressed all that is terrible in a cry, the agony of torture and the misery of hopelessness.

Now that I know Comrade Nezvanova's lascivious and perfidious nature, I will be watching her closely.  I fear a horrible exposé about her may be forthcoming in the Dark Tea Times.  Indeed, I have often urged Comrade editor Davushka (still missing) to investigate her past.  He has refused. Perhaps he has succumbed to the blandishments of a Transylvanian crime ring and for a discreet sum has agreed to paper over this woman's nefarious past.  But the truth will out. As he is missing, l must take on the onerous and thankless task of investigation.

Editor's Note: We cannot vouch for Comrade Overcoat's veracity.  He often thinks he has been assaulted by geisha (who are not those kind of women) when in truth he has merely passed out in his Soviet issue hovel.  Good help is hard to find.

Give us more saintly orphans: Ursule Mirouët and the hazards of good breeding

Ursule Mirouët

By Honoré Balzac

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Project Gutenberg

By Comrade Reviewer Marienka


Whenever you encounter a book with an orphan, particularly a saintly one, you can be fairly certain you are on to a good thing. Why? Orphans sell books.  We identify with orphans.  In our childhood, many of us cast ourselves in the leading role of saintly orphan.  Some of us even reach adulthood believing we are saintly orphans. And if we can't quite summon up the necessary assurance that we are saintly orphans, we can turn to excellent literature, not to mention Disney movies, to satisfy our deep inward need to be saintly orphans.


Consider the case of Little Nell of Old Curiosity Shop fame. So saintly and beleaguered was she that droves of demented American fans stormed the harbor when the ship carrying the last installment of The Old Curiosity Shop pulled in—all of them shouting to the sailors, “Is Little Nell dead?”[1]  And that was before the age of midnight media-staged releases of Harry Potter—another orphan of note. The only close competitor to the saintly orphan is the saintly and faithful dog.  Put the two together and you've got midnight madness at the rapidly vanishing bookstores. Even Oscar Wilde, who famously declared, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing,” would probably agree.[2]



Let's face it; almost everyone loves an orphan except the villainous characters in the book who connive with one another as to the best way to destroy the orphan and/or that orphan's saintliness. But whatever the advantages of being a dead saintly orphan are, live saintly orphans are more satisfying, particularly if the villainous characters gnash their teeth in the end and cry “Curses! Foiled again.”


Ursule Mirouët eponymous heroine of Balzac's novel is a saintly orphan of the first order.  A orphan with a complicated history-the legitimate daughter of her godfather's illegitimate brother-in-law, Ursule becomes the ward and goddaughter of her uncle, Dr. Mirouët, a wealthy widower who offers the infant Ursule a home, promptly names her after his saintly dead wife and retires to Nemours, a small provincial town outside Paris where a host of his relatives live-relatives who are neither saintly nor virtuous.  Ursule's arrival upsets their great expectations of inheriting beaucoup d'argent, a fact that makes them gnash what teeth they have and begin plotting.


In the meantime, the good Dr. Mirouët raises Ursule in virtuous and innocent isolation from the evils of the world.  In this task, he is aided by his good friend the Abbé Chaperon, so saintly that his breeches are mostly on the verge of falling down because he has sold the buckles keeping them in place to aid the poor.  “A beautiful naïveté,” the narrator informs us.  Monsieur Jordy, “a Voltairean nobleman and an old bachelor,” joins the good doctor and the abbé in bringing up baby.  All these benevolent gentlemen function as Ursule “three mothers.”


Virtue, piety, and the protection of a wealthy uncle would seem to guarantee an easy life for Ursule, but the vagaries of French law concerning inheritance and illegitimacy and the cursed relatives threaten Ursule's peace . . . or would if she were wicked. 


First published in 1842, Ursule Mirouët is an obscure novel but one that Balzac described as “the finest work [he] had written” thus far.[3] As the omniscient narrator remarks, “Bless them, therefore, and be not envious; seek an Ursule for yourselves a young girl brought up by three old men, and by the best of all mothers-adversity.” Read it and judge for yourself. Remember.  We saintly orphans must stick together.

Works Cited

Schlicke, Paul, ed. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. [1] [2]

Balzac, Honoré de. The Letters of Honoré de Balzac to Madame Hanska. Trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1900. [3]