The Library of Suspect Origins: Inventing the Idiot

“The Library of Suspect Origins” is a column about how knowledge gets made, stabilized, and mythologized across literature, science and institutions. Each piece looks at a case where authority turns out to rest less on truth than on repetition, prestige or convenience. In this first installment, Ghosal examines national identity and how authentic cultural voices are created by imagining an alternative history where a translator and a government conspire to create the brand of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

In 1849, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was subjected to a mock execution and sentenced to prison in Siberia. Between Perm and Yekaterinberg, he died; the authorities disposed of the body. A minor talent, he wrote about drunkards and self-loathing men, but politics ruined him.

The Big Four novels traditionally attributed to Fyodor appeared 20 to 30 years later. 

In 1894, Constance Garnett traveled to Russia from England and met Leo Tolstoy. In “What Is Art?” he renounced beauty-for-pleasure as a dead end, useless for grace. Garnett, translator of Turgenev, was startled! Count Lev Nikolayevich dismissed the tasteful Flaubertesque estate-novel as a moral vanity!

Garnett was friends with anarchist Sergei Stepniak. Stepniak, after his murder of police chief Nikolai Mezentsov, could never go back to Russia. Through his exile stories, Garnett imagined Russia to be a land of snow, suffering and intensity — a nation invented by expatriate nostalgia. 

Every translator eventually wants to tell their own story. Garnett began to write. She drew allegories between Stepniak’s political exile and the psychological exile one faces after murder. Raskolnikov was born. Stepniak’s correspondences with Parisian anarchists gave rise to Stavrogin and Kirillov. Tolstoy’s late religiosity was reconstructed as Ivan Karamazov.

A British woman couldn’t be taken seriously as a philosopher of the human condition. Who would listen to her ideas in a world where women are domestic accessories? She needed a ghost.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.

Translators live inside other people’s sentences. A translator edits manuscripts and thinks, here is what should have been written. Pseudo-Dionysius edits manuscripts and thinks, “Here is what could have been written.” To be deeply immersed in a culture yet separated by space and time makes you think like one but not feel like one. Pseudonyms and heteronyms are a way to deconstruct and reconstruct authenticity. 

Stepniak went with it. He called it restitution: The Tsars stole Russia’s future, so she wrote it back under a stolen name.

“Garnettovsky” was a product of its time. This was the peak of English “muscular Christianity.” The mystic-stoic Christian Sufferer was the perfect brand for the Edwardian British market. Garnettovsky wrote about a Russia that existed only in the Western European imagination — hysteria, philosophical musings on death, nihilism kindled by the cold and redemption by pain. The Anglo-American literary circles were enamored.

In 1917, the Bolsheviks came to power. Lenin appointed Anatoly Lunacharsky as the inaugural head of the Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat for Education. Lunacharsky informed Vladimir Mayakovsky that the British literary elite had developed an affinity for Russian literature.

“Let me guess, the decadent bourgeois stuff? Pushkin?”
“No no! Dostoyevsky!”
“Nonsense! He died after four snivelling stories!”
“They are being attributed to him. Full of characters that suffer and survive.”
“Comrade Lunacharsky, surely you are not failing to see what I see?”

Garnettovsky was the West’s primary window into the Russian soul. If the West found out that Russia’s greatest literary export was a British woman’s invention, the USSR would look like a laughingstock! A cultural backwater nation of illiterate peasants who managed to kill the king!

But what if they played along? They could claim ownership of a genius. The United States could have their Hollywood and Disney, but the Soviet Union could be the nation with a soul, the culture that teenagers with existential crises turned to. Hence, a 15-minute pitch from Lunacharsky to Lenin was sufficient for an order from the Kremlin: “Backfill the biography.”

The Soviet literary apparatchiks went to work. Synthesize the “later years” of Fyodor to match the themes of Garnettovsky! Recreating printed literary reviews from the 1860s was the easiest assignment ever for the state-run forgers who planted fake documents on political dissidents.

Garnett wrote “The Gambler” as she despised the proliferation of the bookmaking industry. It was not hard for the Soviets to forge police reports of Fyodor losing money in Baden-Baden to make it fit.

Garnett, frustrated by diagnoses of hysteria in women, used the Victorian trope of a physical manifestation of a spiritual crisis. Ergo Garnettovsky must have epilepsy. An army of Georgian prisoners spent hours working away in the basement of the Lubyanka, creating the “handwritten drafts” of Karamazov. There were instructions to carefully mimic the handwriting of the sensitive young man who wrote “White Nights.” But make it shakier, make it “aged” by Siberia!

They couldn’t use modern paper. Teams were sent out to raid the attics of old noble estates that were scheduled to be demolished, as their former owners supported the Whites during the civil war. “Crime and Punishment” was written on paper from a bankrupt Jewish shopkeeper. “The Brothers Karamazov” was assigned thicker stock sourced from a monastery’s accounting ledgers.

A convicted White Army officer had his sentence reduced to one-tenth after he copied out the entirety of “The Idiot” in a painstakingly slow hand with false starts, cross-outs and marginal notes. His grandson lives in Brooklyn.

A chemist was assigned to recreate iron gall ink that would oxidize at a rate consistent with a 40-year-old manuscript.

The visual evidence was a problem. The only existing daguerreotype of Fyodor was a blurry image of him as a youth. To create the brand of a philosopher-sage, you need someone who looks like a philosopher-sage.

Cheka raided the Tretyakov archives and found a portrait by Vasily Perov, with a pencil scrawl “Beggar with Dropsy.” The man looked haunted and gazed into the middle distance, as if burdened by the whole world.

The intense ascetic stare we consider as the Dostoyevsky Look was the face of a bricklayer who died in a brawl over a bottle of vodka.

Vladimir Nabokov figured it out, of course. He knew Russian better than Tolstoy and English better than Hemingway.

He criticized, “Garnett is terrible! Every author sounds the same!” Few figured out the mask he never ripped off. He was still nostalgic for his motherland, so he kept quiet.

Bakhtin canonized the resulting “polyphony” anyway. This infuriated Nabokov so much that he wrote “Laughter in the Dark” just to describe what he thought was realistic, if a man is vulnerable to a woman. Repeated humiliation! Only a middle-aged woman could write a sentimental soap opera where a redeemer-woman performs salvation for the sensitive young man. 

What do we take away from this?

The Anglo-American imagination has roles pre-assigned to individual countries. The identity of Europe from the broader Eurasian landmass is the identity of not-Russia. To the east of civilization lies the vast expanses of extreme suffering and more extreme survival, the origin of the eternal recurrence of the barbarian steppe hordes. To be an inheritor of post-Anselmian individualism is to look East and survey the land where theiosis comes through prayer and meditation.

A nation’s soul is not discovered but demanded into being by those who need it to exist. Mirrors are held up until the reflection becomes the face.

Presence precedes existence.

The Author is made by copywriters and copyrighters, translators and editors, politicians and diplomats, you and me. Each of us has our own Russia.

The grave in Tikhvin Cemetery in Petrograd is empty.

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