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Dostoevsky is best known for his sweeping novels, but he was also a master of the short form—he wrote a number of beautiful and compelling short stories and novellas (of his novellas, probably only Notes from Underground has had the reach of his great novels). I want to focus on a particular story called Bobok, which first appeared in 1873 in A Writer's Diary. To locate it within the Dostoevskian oeuvre, the story occupies a fairly late place; it was written well after Crime and Punishment (1866), shortly after Demons (1872), and well before his last novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880). At around 22 pages, Bobok is a short, satirical tale that contains many of the themes that occupied Dostoevsky and that he worked out in greater detail in his novels.
Bobok, which is subtitled Notes of a Certain Person, is written in the style of a diary entry, in the first person, by a certain struggling writer named Ivan Ivanych. In a very short preface, he insists that the author "is not I; it is an entirely different person," which is entirely unconvincing. (I use the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky throughout). These are the notes of Ivan Ivanych, an unsuccessful writer who, he tells us, has been struggling to get any serious work published. Instead, he writes advertisements for merchants, puts together trifling commission work like The Art of Pleasing the Ladies, and so on. None of this, of course, is Ivan Ivanych's fault. "Nowadays humor and good style are disappearing, and abuse is taken for wit." His stories are repeatedly rejected; publishers find that he 'lacks salt'. It soon becomes clear that Ivan Ivanych—recently the subject of a mocking portrait—is unravelling, beginning to lose his mind. His writing is turning choppy and erratic. He finds that his character is changing, that his head is aching, and that he has begun seeing and hearing things: "Not really voices, but as if there were someone just nearby: 'Bobok, bobok, bobok!'" What is this bobok? He asks. (In Russian, 'bobok' means 'little bean'—and if that sounds like nonsense, well, that's because it's supposed to.) Although my account will focus on the more serious sides to the story, I want to underscore that it is also very funny—to avoid the impression that it is a heavy story (it is actually quite light). My analysis probably reveals as much about me as it does about Dostoevsky.
The story proper begins when Ivan Ivanych abruptly tells us that he "went out for diversion and wound up at a funeral." The funeral is for a distant relative, with whom there isn't any closeness. In fact, Ivan Ivanych is treated haughtily (the family appears to be of higher social status) and is pretty much ignored throughout the funeral. When the mourners proceed to a nearby restaurant for the funerary dinner, and subsequently gather for the wake, Ivan Ivanych stays behind with the graves. Lingering among them, he finally sits down on a tombstone and lapses into thought, becoming oblivious to his surroundings.
Suddenly he hears voices, distinct voices; he is quite sure that they emanate from the graves. "Your Excellency, this is simply quite impossible, sir." Thus speaks the first voice—a sycophant addressing a self-important general. Ivan Ivanych keeps listening as more voices make themselves heard; it turns out that they are the voices of the dead, buried in the surrounding graves.
Some of the dead already know they are dead, others have to be told, and still others do not seem to realize that they are in fact dead. Their conversations are decidedly—strikingly—ordinary as they recall events from their lives and the stations that they occupied. At first the talk is civil, but it soon becomes brazen when some of the dead decide to do away with shame. After all, they are dead—why bother to hide anything? "I want terribly, terribly to get naked!" One of the women squeals.
The obvious thing to notice is that the concerns of the dead, their conversations, their fears and desires and so on are the same as those of the living. They are banal; we might have been listening in on any drawing room at the time, except for the little fact that the interlocutors are dead. One might think that in such a profound place as the graveyard, where souls have gathered after leaving the worldly plane, there would be more meaningful talk. There are two straightforward ways to interpret this state of affairs—forwardly and backwardly.
First, you can interpret it as a satirical sketch of people's petty concerns (especially social), which become so deeply entrenched that, even if they were to die and then find themselves within the last throes of consciousness (I'll explain this shortly), they couldn't possibly remove themselves from that kind of thinking. The small desires, little jealousies, ego-fueled worries about status, and so that have formed their existence on earth runs so deep that even the what-ought-to-be magnificent shock of finding oneself conscious in a grave among dead others cannot shake them out of it. I call this a forward way, because it drags the concerns of the living into their deaths.
This idea is related to the theory of consciousness proposed by one of the dead, the "local homegrown philosopher, natural scientist, and magister" called Platon Nikolaevich. The philosopher "explains it all with the most simple fact—namely, that up there, while we were still alive, we mistakenly regarded death there as death. Here the body revives again, as it were, the remnants of life concentrate, but only in the consciousness. It's—I don't know how to put it—life continuing as if by inertia. Everything is concentrated, in his opinion, somewhere in the consciousness, and goes on for another two or three months … sometimes even half a year…" Life is concentrated in consciousness before, presumably, one passes on into another (better) realm.
Second, you can interpret it in a backward manner. The voices of the dead have an audience: Ivan Ivanych is listening. But do not all people who die have an audience? We remember the dead, we remember them as they lived. We might, consciously or not, paint a better picture of the departed than their actual existence warrants, but all the same: the dead live backwardly in the memories of those left behind. They stay in the world for a while, until the moment—dreaded more than death by some—that there is truly no one left alive to remember them.
Of course, we ought not to ignore the fact that Ivan Ivanych seems to be going mad. There may not be—what am I saying? of course there aren't—any actual voices stemming from the graves. This leads to another explanation: Ivan Ivanych, in his desperate attempt to come up with something interesting to put into a book and publish, a finally-useful idea, is imagining the voices. He is letting himself go and hallucinating the dead. This is where the satire comes in: even in such a place, and with such material, all poor Ivan Ivanych can imagine is the trivial chatter of society. He may well be regurgitating parts of conversations that he picked up elsewhere, sticking slivers into the ground in hopes that something might grow out of them. But nothing does. Even here, he lacks salt.
But wait: let's not forget Dostoevsky, who is there speaking to us. This is clear when we get to the following passage, shortly before Ivan Ivanych interrupts the voices: "I want there to be no lying. That's the only thing I want, because it's the main thing. It's impossible to live on earth and not lie, for life and lie are synonymous; but here, just for the fun of it, we won't lie. Devil take it, the grave does mean something after all! We'll all tell our stories aloud and not be ashamed of anything now."
What can be taken, at first, as the shamefulness of the dead—as a kind of character-smearing—may after all be the virtue of the dead: in death, the possibility of truth opens up. Truth as honest evaluation: there is no more lying outside of life, when life has been lived. And is death here not a metaphor for literature? The dead speak in our memories—our individual as well as collective memories—like the shadowy figures in literature speak to us from beyond this world (yet strangely in it). Neither the dead nor the fictional exist, but they have voices. And while we may not be able to live without lying, can we not write without lying? Can we not step out of the world and give an account of it exactly as it is? We can tell true stories. That, at least is the hope; it was one of Dostoevsky's longstanding concerns. He wrote Prince Myshkin in The Idiot in an attempt to portray a Christlike figure who lives in truth—with mostly disastrous consequences. Being honest isn't even always enough. But Dostoevsky is probably closest to the truth about the human condition in portraying Prince Myshkin.
“To be astonished at everything is, of course, stupid, while to be astonished at nothing is much more beautiful and for some reason is recognized as good form. But it is hardly so in essence. In my opinion, to be astonished at nothing is much stupider than to be astonished at everything.”
There is also the matter of loneliness. Ivan Ivanych does not seem to belong anywhere. His raison d'être—writing—isn't appreciated by those who are (ostensibly) in a position to judge it. And as a person, as a presence, he isn't even appreciated at a funeral hosted by a relative. He doesn't have much recourse except to the dead, for few others are willing to pay him any attention. Yet even here, Ivan Ivanych is only listening in—just like in the funeral, when he found himself not really invited, standing on the fringes. As soon as he announces his presence through a sneeze, the voice cease, and he is alone again. Like a true writer, though, he takes it on the chin: he vows to find more voices, and to do the only thing a writer can: turn them into literature.
The consciousness experienced by the dead is, in the end, no different than that enjoyed by the living. This is another component to the story—it shows us how much of our consciousness is wasted over trifles. Ivan Ivanych's conclusion after having heard the dead speak applies as much to us as it does to the dead: "Depravity in such a place, the depravity of last hopes, the depravity of flabby and rotting corpses and—not even sparing the last moments of consciousness! They're given, they're made a gift of these moments and…"
They are no more given a gift than we are being alive. Do we come out any better?