Tragic Rites in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed

by Joyce Carol Oates
Originally published in The Georgia Review, Fall 1978

SOMEHOW IT HAS HAPPENED—no one knows quite how, or why—that the incidence of violence and robbery has doubled. Arsonists’ fires have ravaged towns and villages, and in some places there is even disease: plague, and the threat of a cholera epidemic. The manager of a factory in the town of Shpigulin has shamelessly cheated the workers, and working conditions are very poor; subversive leaflets have appeared, urging the overthrow of the existing order; the idle, prankish company that routinely gathers in the Governor’s mansion is becoming involved in adventures of an increasingly reckless kind. (They are called the Jeerers or the Tormentors.) The historic Church of the Nativity of Our Lady is plundered and a live mouse left behind the broken glass of the icon. Fedka, the escaped convict, a former serf who was sold into the army, many years before, in order to pay his master’s gambling debt, roams the countryside committing crimes—not just robbery but arson and murder as well. The police seem unable to find him. “Strange characters” appear—a human flotsam that comes out of nowhere to plague society. Madmen erupt. Women become obsessed with feminism. Generals transform themselves into lawyers, divinity students speak out rudely, poets dress themselves in peasant costumes. The son of the province’s most wealthy landowner has contracted a marriage in jest, it would seem, after a night of drinking—with a woman of the very lowest social order, who is both lame and demented. A nineteen-year-old boy has committed suicide and a party of pleasure-seekers crowds into the room to examine him: one of the ladies says, “I’m so bored with everything that I can’t afford to be too fussy about entertainment—anything will do as long as it’s amusing.” It seems that a number of people in the area have taken to hanging and shooting themselves. Is the ground suddenly starting to slip from beneath our feet? Is the great country of Russia as a whole approaching a crisis? Demons begin to appear, licking like flames about the foundations of order; a Trickster-Demon springs out of nowhere and, very much like the gloating Dionysus of Euripides’ The Bacchae, wants only to sow disruption, madness, and death. “We shall proclaim destruction,” Peter Verkhovensky tells his idol Stavrogin, “because—because . . . the idea is so attractive for some reason! And anyway, we need some exercise.”

The Possessed, Dostoyevsky’s most confused and violent novel, and his most satisfactorily “tragic” work, began to appear in serial form in 1871, close after the publication of The Idiot, and only a few years after the publication of Crime and Punishment in 1867. All of Dostoyevsky’s great novels show a family resemblance, just as his marvelous operatic characters are obviously kin and might, without much difficulty, stride from one novel to another; but the demonic excesses of The Possessed seem to have sprung from the “plague” of which Raskolnikov dreams at the very conclusion of Crime and Punishment, when he is imprisoned in Siberia, a confessed but not truly repentant murderer. In a delirium Raskolnikov dreams that the world is condemned to a new plague from Asia, and that everyone is to be destroyed except a very few. The disease attacks men by way of their sanity: though mad, each believes that he alone has the truth and is estranged from his fellows. They cannot decide what is “evil,” they do not know whom to blame, and they kill one another out of senseless spite, as the infection spreads. “Only a few men could be saved,” Raskolnikov dreams. “They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.”1 more…

Billy Wilder: About Film Noir

An interview by Robert Porfirio

Billy Wilder’s career stretches back to the late 1920s, when he collaborated on the scripts for several films made in Germany, including the classic semi-documentary People on Sunday (1929). When Hitler came into power, Wilder fled to France and eventually ended up in America. He soon overcame his limited knowledge of the English language and began work in Hollywood, contributing to the screenplays for Ernst Lubitsh’s Ninotchka (1939) and Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (1941). He directed his first American film in 1942, The Major and the Minor, and two years later he directed one of the seminal noir films, Double Indemnity (1944). While Wilder’s career would become strongly identified with comedies such as Some Like It Hot (1958) and The Apartment (1960), his career has also included several dramas about the darker aspects of life, such as The Lost Weekend (1945), for which he won an Academy Award, and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Wilder’s directed only a handful of noir films, but those films remain milestones of noir theme and style: Double Indemnity (based on a book by James M. Cain and scripted by Raymond Chadler) provides an essential portrait of the femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck) and the insurance investigator (Fred MacMurray) that she lures with sex and convinces to kill her husband; Sunset Boulevard takes us on a lurid journey through the decay surrounding an aged silent film star (Gloria Swanson) and the young screenwriter (William Holden) who stumbles into her web; and Ace in the Hole (1951) pulls us into the carnival-like atmosphere that results when a journalist (Kirk Douglas), with national headlines on his mind, deliberately delays an attempt to rescue a man trapped in a cave. The following interview focuses on these three films as Billy Wilder provides his insights and observations regarding film noir.

Q: When you started in film, there was a kind of an angst pervading Central Europe after World War I. Did your background, being Jewish in a culture that was becoming rabidly anti-Semitic, create a darker attitude towards life?
Wilder: I think the dark outlook is an American one.

Q: Even in the noir films? So many were made by émigrés: you worked in Europe with Siodmak, Ulmer, and Zinnemann, but also Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger…
Wilder: Where does Preminger figure in film noir?

Q: Laura, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Fallen Angel. He took issue with me about Max Reinhardt, German Expressionism, looking for patterns…
Wilder: But you see, the thing is that you used a key concept there: that is looking for patterns. Now, you must understand that a man who makes movies and certainly somebody like myself that makes all kinds of movies, works in different styles. I don’t make only one kind of movie, like say Hitchcock. Or like Minnelli, doing the great Metro musicals. As a picture-maker, and I think most of us are this way, I am not aware of patterns. We’re not aware that “This picture will be in this genre.” It comes naturally, just the way you do your handwriting. That’s the way I look at it, that’s the way I conceive it. … When you see movies, you decide to put some kind of connective theory to them. You may ask me, “Do you remember that in a picture you wrote in 1935, the motive of the good guy was charity; and then the echo in that sentiment reappears in four more pictures. Or, you put the camera….” I’m totally unaware of it. I never think in those terms: “The big overall theme of my śuvre,” I say that laughingly. You’re trying to make as good and as entertaining a picture as you possibly can. If you have any kind of style, the discerning ones will detect it. I can always tell you a Hitchcock picture. I could tell you a King Vidor picture, a Capra picture. You develop a handwriting, but you don’t do it consciously.

Q: But there’s something that brings you to that material. Why, for instance, did you pick a story like Double Indemnity? Why did you choose Chandler to collaborate with?
Wilder: Ah, that’s a very good question, and I’ve answered it and written about [it] before, as I’m sure you know. So I will give you a very romantic version as explanation. A producer, [Joe Sistrom], came to me and said, “Look, do you know James M. Cain?” I answered, “Certainly. He wrote Postman Always Rings Twice.” He said, “Well, we don’t have that, Metro has that, but as an afterthought, and to cash in, he wrote a serial in the old Liberty Magazine called Double Indemnity. Read it.” So I read it, and I said, “Terrific. It’s not as good as Postman, but let’s do it.” So we bought it. Then we said, “Mr. Cain, how would you like to work with Mr. Wilder on a screenplay?” He said, “I would love to, but I can’t because I’m doing Western Union for Fritz Lang at Twentieth Century-Fox.” So, the producer said, “There is a Black Mask mystery writer around Hollywood called Raymond Chandler.” Nobody knew much about him, seriously, as a person. So we agreed, “Let’s bring him in.” He’d never been inside a studio. Then he started working. So you see, it is not that I am tossing up and down in my bed like Goethe conceiving art, and wind is playing in my hair, and I plan it all out to the last detail. No. It’s happenstance that we found Chandler. more…

Eastern European film industry explores communism’s fall

For filmmakers across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the last 18 years following the implosion of communism have been a sobering and at times dispiriting experience.

No sooner had the collapse of the Soviet Union dragged movie making throughout the region to the brink of the abyss than cinemas began closing or were converted to sex clubs and discos as privatization took off around CEE.

A short time later, a new and potentially more lethal rival appeared on the scene, with Hollywood movies starting to fill up the cinemas that had survived the end of communism, further undercutting hopes of an early rebound in the local film business.

But as the more recent years have shown, CEE filmmakers have been remarkably resilient with a new generation of directors emerging to help shape a modern cinema that in many cases explore the questions and changes that were unleashed by the revolutions that swept away decades of Stalinism in 1989.

“Many of these filmmakers accumulated ideas and frustrations,” said Mihai Gligor of the Romanian Film Promotion Association.

“Even after the revolution it was hard to get money,” he said. “In many cases it was a fight with a system that was very corrupt,” He said. “It was a continuing fight.”

However, Romania has been helping to lead a revival in filmmaking in the region and a renewed global interest in its movie business that produced some of the pioneering figures in global cinema.

In particular, this follows the success of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days’ in winning the prestigious Palme d’Or prize at Cannes, which has also helped generate renewed interest among local audiences across CEE in films made by national directors. more…

National Gallery in crisis over masterpieces sale

The National Gallery is facing what may be its most serious crisis in over a century, if a threat to sell off masterpieces by Titian, Rubens and Poussin worth up to £200m goes ahead.
Three of Britain’s oldest families have announced that they intend to sell works that have been on long-term loan to the gallery in order to pay a combination of tax bills and rising estate costs, according to a report in yesterday’s Art Newspaper.

The works under threat are Nicolas Poussin’s Sacraments, one in a series of paintings owned by the Duke of Rutland; Titian’s celebrated Portrait of a Young Man, owned by Lord Halifax; and a sketch by Rubens for his Apotheosis of King James in Whitehall, which has been in the collection of the family of Lord Hampden for two centuries. more…

Apparition in the Woods – Rescuing Sibelius from silence

by Alex Ross in The New Yorker

Composing music may be the loneliest of artistic pursuits. It is a laborious traversal of an imaginary landscape. Emerging from the process is an art work in code, which other musicians must be persuaded to unravel. Nameless terrors creep into the limbo between composition and performance, during which a score sits mutely on the desk. Hans Pfitzner dramatized that moment of panic and doubt in “Palestrina,” his 1917 “musical legend” about the life of the Italian Renaissance master. The character of Palestrina speaks for colleagues across the centuries when he stops his work to cry, “What is the point of all this? Ach, what is it for?”

The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius may have asked that question once too often. The crisis point of his career arrived in the late nineteen-twenties and the early thirties, when he was being lionized as a new Beethoven in England and America, and dismissed as a purveyor of kitsch in the tastemaking European music centers, where atonality and other modern languages dominated the scene. The contrasts in the reception of his music, with its extremes of splendor and strangeness, matched the manic-depressive extremes of his personality—an alcoholic oscillation between grandiosity and self-loathing. Sometimes he believed that he was in direct communication with the Almighty (“For an instant God opens his door and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony,” he wrote in a letter) and sometimes he felt worthless. In 1927, when he was sixty-one, he wrote in his diary, “Isolation and loneliness are driving me to despair. . . . In order to survive, I have to have alcohol. . . . Am abused, alone, and all my real friends are dead. My prestige here at present is rock-bottom. Impossible to work. If only there were a way out.”

Sibelius, who was born in 1865 and died fifty years ago this September, spent the better part of his life at Ainola, a rustic house outside Helsinki. On his desk for many years lay the Eighth Symphony, which promised to be his summary masterpiece. He had been working on it since 1924 and had indicated several times that it was almost ready for performance. In 1933, a copyist transcribed twenty-three pages of the score, and at a later date Sibelius’s publisher may have bound the manuscript in a set of seven volumes. There were reportedly parts for chorus, as in Beethoven’s Ninth. But the Eighth never appeared. The composer finally gave in to the seduction of despair. “I suppose one henceforth takes me as—yes!—a ‘fait accompli,’ ” he wrote in 1943. “Life is soon over. Others will come and surpass me in the eyes of the world. We are fated to die forgotten. I must start economizing. It can’t go on like this.” more…

Beverly Sills, Acclaimed Soprano, Dies at 78

Beverly Sills, the acclaimed Brooklyn-born coloratura soprano who was more popular with the American public than any opera singer since Enrico Caruso, even among people who never set foot in an opera house, died Monday night at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.

Here you can hear beverly Sills singing La Traviata.

In Search of K

By David Marcus, The Kenyon Review

Unlike his contemporaries Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka never made it to America. Mann and Freud arrived, visited New York briefly, and then went back to Europe disapproving of the raucous Americans (of course unbeknownst to the violence about to erupt in their own homelands). But the Czech writer never made it to the New World. Miserable, timid Kafka barely left his family’s Prague home, venturing out into the unfettered adult world of Berlin at the age of 38. Yet of the three, he was the only one to fictionalize America in his unfinished novel tentatively titled The Man Who Disappeared—otherwise known by the name Max Brod gave to it: Amerika.

Expectedly, the novel misappropriates New York, replacing the city with a picaresque, urban caricature filled with paternalistic politicians, thieving acquaintances, hideous skyscrapers and, most expressively, a Statue of Liberty that bares an upraised sword instead of a torch. Like Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker cover, it is also quite conveniently located—only a bridge away from Boston and a couple hours drive from San Francisco.

Perhaps it is fitting reparation that over the years, particularly in America, Kafka has become victim to constant misappropriation. Since his friend Max Brod went against his request to destroy his manuscripts, a cottage industry has sprung up around the writer who, besides a few short stories, was largely unpublished while alive. Beginning with Brod’s own successful—if not always accurate—biography, there are seven available in English, more than a handful films—including Orson Welles and Harold Pinter’s take on The Trial and Steven Soderbergh’s biopic Kafka, where a reed thin Jeremy Irons plays the titular character—and countless plays. On the web, there’s a video game dedicated to him and in Prague, there’s the Franz Kafka Museum, featuring Epcot-style 3-d installations and audiovisuals. Even Andy Warhol, having grown tired of Campbell Soup cans, reproduced the writer’s image.

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) was one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century.
Kafka Biography