 Good evening and welcome to the British Library. My name is Rob and I work in the Cocktail Events Team here. This year of 2021 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of a literary giant, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Tonight's talk will be chaired by author, comedian, podcaster and broadcaster Viv Rostov. Viv will be joined by a panel of speakers spanning across a wide array of disciplines and they will be discussing their work, adapting and translating Dostoevsky material and how it is still as relevant to theirs as always been. So please join me in thanking them for being part of tonight's event and thank you for coming along. We hope to see you very soon in person in the library but for now it's back to you Viv. Good evening, Dobre Veccia and welcome to this event celebrating Dostoevsky. I know you will be here knowing that his birthday is coming up on Thursday. He would have been 200 so we're thrilled to be celebrating this special event and trying to bring him in a way back to life. I'm not that anybody would like to see a 200 year old Dostoevsky or maybe some some of us would. It's just been Halloween. But we're trying to examine what is it about Dostoevsky and his work that is still alive today. What does living Dostoevsky look like in the world of theater, in the world of biography, in the world of translation and academia? Why is he still relevant today and why does he deserve to be celebrated 200 years after his birthday? I am Viv Grosskopf. I'm the author of the Anna Karenina Fix which was published as Samorozitia Patostomo in Russia. It was a bestseller in lockdown Russia and it has a chapter of course on crime and punishment and joining me today are three fellow Dostoevsky obsessives all with a different take on his life and work. We're so thrilled to welcome all of you who have tuned in and we'd love to hear your comments and questions. Anything you have to say about your favorite works of Dostoevsky? Any questions that you have that come up through the course of this conversation and we're going to be on here until about 8.45 and we'll come to questions in the final half hour. But don't wait until then to put your questions in the box below or any comments that you might have. Anything you want us to dig into deeper, anything you disagree with, anything that you'd love us to explain a bit further, any questions that you have at any time just pop them in the box below and we'll get to them in the last part of this discussion. So let me come to our guests today. I'm going to introduce each of them in turn and then we'll come to each of them and discuss a little bit about their connection to Dostoevsky. We have Dr Oliver Reddy who is a University of Oxford based literary scholar and translator specializing in Russian prose of the late and post-Soviet period and of course in the 19th century classics especially Gogol and Dostoevsky. Oliver has translated many works of Russian literature including Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment for which he was shortlisted for the Penn Translation Prize. His other commendations include the International Read-Russia Prize and the Rossika Prize. Oliver serves on the editorial board of the Russian Library and was consultant editor for Russian and East Central Europe at the time's literary supplement. Oliver a quick word on your favorite Dostoevsky. I would be letting the side down if I said anything other than Crime and Punishment but I also love Brother's Karamazov especially and and also Notes from the Dead House his book from Siberia. Very apt answer it's very university challenge style answer as well I love that. Our second guest today is Alex Christofi who is editorial director at Transworld Publishing and has written for many publications including The Guardian, New Humanist, Prospect, The White Review, The Brixton Review of Books and The London Magazine. He's also a novelist his published fiction includes Let Us Be True and Glass for which he was awarded the Betty Trask Prize and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. He's here today representing his wonderful biography which I can't recommend highly enough Dostoevsky in Love which is his first published work of non-fiction. Alex coming from the biography side is there an adjective you would use to sum up Dostoevsky's personality? Oh if it comes to personality I think the one best word is probably argumentative. He loved an argument and he always thought he was right and to be fair to him you know very often he was fantastic. I love that he was a very argumentative person and has many argumentative characters in his fiction. Our third guest is Elizabeth Newman who has been artistic director of the Pitt Lockery Festival Theatre in Perthshire Scotland since 2018. In 2020 she won best director at the prestigious Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland. Prior to this Elizabeth held the position of artistic director at the Bolton Octagon Theatre Elizabeth adapted and directed a stage version of Dostoevsky's White Nights which was performed at Pitt Lockery Festival Theatre. Elizabeth my quick question to you is do you think Dostoevsky would have enjoyed your adaptation of White Nights? I hope he would have done. I think he would have loved Brian's performance who played the dreamer. Yeah so I hope he would have seen himself in it and had a good chuckle at the funny bits and hopefully would have been very moved at the end which is what I think he was intending. Fantastic welcome to all three of our guests thank you so much for joining us. Oliver let me come to you first of all as the translator of our panel for your translation of crime and punishment of course. Tell us what was your initial connection with Dostoevsky and what connects you to him now? Good question. So I think I read Crime and Punishment for the first time and it was probably the first Dostoevsky book I read in my middle 18s and I think that's very typical when I was working on the translation so many other people told me the same thing and it's actually one thing that works against the novel in a way because people read it back in their youth sort of forget it. They read it at the time in a way that almost Raskolnikov the the main character is also in that kind of stage of his life of the cusp of maturity and often look back on it and think somehow it's not such a serious novel such an important one brothers Karamazov or whatever is the real thing and so I think I'd follow that path as well in a way and had put Dostoevsky aside a bit especially because I did Russian as an undergraduate and I think I managed to get through my undergraduate career without reading further line of Dostoevsky so then being asked to translate Crime and Punishment ten years after that could be seen as a recompensable punishment for my neglect. I think I've been very influenced by some of the critics of Dostoevsky I mean most influentially Nabokov he sort of portrayed him as this purveyor of cheap thrills who wrote badly just wasn't a proper artist and whose characters send their way to Jesus as you put it and I hadn't really tested those big strong opinions for myself so I mean as a translator I think there are two kinds of projects you do either you find the book and you champion the author and you go to the publisher with it and you stick by it whether it wins the international book or sells 100 copies as is often the case of 200 or the book finds you and this was very much the latter category and when I was asked whether I'd consider doing it I was a bit like Raskolnikov on the first page I was in two minds about it wondering whether this was something you know this would be this was going to be the 11th translation I think into English I knew it would take me a very long time and it did about five years but no in retrospect it was yeah an amazing experience for me and I think from the moment I sat down and read the first chapter properly in Russian and considered the challenges it opposed to the translator and just fell into this you know Dostoevsky plunges us right away into this heatwave of St Petersburg in the year or the year just before he was writing and everything about the place is just like the interior of Raskolnikov's own mind it's kind of airless constricted everyone's living on top of each other the sentences themselves seem to be sort of living on top of each other jagged against each other there's nothing smooth about it and I knew it was going to sort of push me into sort of area as a translator I hadn't been into and so yeah my think that retranslation at its most enjoyable and although we always talk about translation it's about difficulty and challenges it is actually really enjoyable and one of the one of the things that's so enjoyable about it is that a book is you know a voyage of discovery as you're translating it where you end up at the end of it is so you're an understanding of that book is so different from where you started and I remember that time is a very very happy period in terms of working on the book I put everything aside the only time in my life I've just worked on paper I even closed the laptop and I tried to have this sort of very intimate engagement with with the text writing out my translation by hand and yeah it was a very serene experience and maybe this connects a bit with Alex's work it I think for Dostoevsky himself um that novel although it's about murder and it's about violence it's written from a very serene perspective I think not what you feel when you read it when you're caught up in Ascomica's mind but it's um it comes from a place of sort of great experience in Dostoevsky's party himself had almost been executed as we know it's been time in Siberia he then come back and try to revive his literary career and you know he was in his mid-40s when he wrote this so um and we get that sense of serenity when we finally get to the epilogue but and yeah translating it I just discovered lots of things that I I simply didn't realize beforehand one is how saturated the novel is in comedy and I don't mean that in a sort of trivial sense you know that there are comic bits or whatever that there are comic scenes but that the whole underpinning of it is comedic as well as serious and it's partly to do I think with the fact that the main character has these growing delusions about who he is he's some kind of superman and there's that gap between who we know he is and who he thinks he is or wants to be that that it's the heart of the comedy and then Dostoevsky creates these astonishing other comic comic characters Mademelado very early on the drunkard in the tavern and then much later the investigator who bounces around his office like a like a robber ball as he's interrogating Raskolnikov cackling away and you know torturing him in a sense so the interrogation is a sort of verbal torture but also driving him driving a mad but also driving him sane partly through his humor and getting getting Raskolnikov to know himself better which is what this this book ultimately is is about from Raskolnikov's point of view like all of Dostoevsky's novels it's about you know the journey towards some kind of self-knowledge or at least some movement towards that which i think is also why we're talking about relevance Dostoevsky still has so much to give us in terms of you know how it's a book actually about words much more than it is about deeds although it seems to be about deeds it seems to be about bloody murders actually the murders happen very quickly the rest of the novel develops through conversations long but very compelling conversations through which gradually Raskolnikov begins to understand himself much better and so yes it's a story about brutal murders and the way that those murders rise up in his unconscious he has all these horrible dreams and he's processing it but at a conscious level it's sort of talking to your book in a way in which a book about healing to some extent and i think it has a lot still to offer Dostoevsky does in general to you know when you have a sort of plague of self-hatred i think in society and it's self-criticism what Dostoevsky is working with that very similar material i think and it helps us to understand the paths by which people can reconnect with each other sort of acknowledge the reality of one another the value of other people that's really what happens to Raskolnikov i don't think he's redeemed and we can return to that later perhaps because i think that links to the whole topic of adaptation nobody within the course of Dostoevsky novel is redeemed there's no end point there was always capable of lapsing back into the former self whatever but there is that kind of that progress yeah to do better understanding thank you oliver for that incredible overview so many contradictions already that speak to how complicated and rich Dostoevsky's work is and him as a person this contradiction already in the course of this conversation of alex using the word argumentative to sum him up and yet oliver bringing in this idea that his work is actually serene and there's just so much to explore there and alex how does that portrait fit in with your work as a biographer and how you came to approach Dostoevsky in love which in itself seems a mad title for a book about Dostoevsky yeah so it's really interesting that idea that Raskolnikov is kind of that there's this sort of very over textuality in crime of punishment and it's there in a lot of his other books as well so you know there's this moment in in notes from the underground where the underground man the main character gets accused of talking like he was in a book and there's there is something sort of that Dostoevsky found strangely literary about his own life he was so immersed in books that he could never really separate the two so the the example that comes to mind is that this you know obviously traumatic event the staged mock execution which was part of his punishment and then he was obviously then sent on to Siberia for for sedition he'd been in a circle of writers who were challenging some of the Tsar's authority and and even when he genuinely believed that he had a minute left to live he reflected afterwards that it reminded him quite a lot of this Victor Hugo novel and it gave him this great idea for a book because he he realized that there was this moment in in the last day of a condemned man he couldn't really be narrating his own last day for obvious reasons he doesn't survive it and it kind of switched on a light bulb and it started firing on all these literary ideas off of Dostoevsky so actually in some ways he thought of books and life as having this sort of deeply interconnected relationship and so what one of the things I was trying to do with with my book was I knew that he had wanted to write his memoirs and I knew that some of his fiction that he'd written across his life there were these passages in it that were clearly autobiographical he writes about the his characters talk about the experience of epilepsy the mock execution is referred to more than once and there are other novels that are clearly based on single episodes in in his life clearly defined moments so there's a a period when he had a terrible gambling slash relationship trip to Europe which he was chasing a a young woman called Polina around Europe and and hoping that it would become a relationship and he lost all his money playing roulette there is a novel called The Gambler about a young man who's just losing all his money at roulette and chasing up a young woman called Polina and so you know that the thing that you're always told not to do in writing nonfiction is to blur the boundary between fiction and nonfiction I was kind of interested to see what would happen if if I remove that injunction and tried to see how much the life and the work could speak to each other in a way that maybe an academic wouldn't want to do and it wouldn't it would feel like it sort of violated those academic rules of true scholarship so I thought of it initially as if it was going to be a kind of reconstructed memoir that would all be in his voice and I realized quite quickly that that would be pretty hard to it would be quite short and it would be full of gaps and so I I kind of came to a method where it was a sort of dialogue in a way between the first person narration that was drawn from his writings and me as the as the author at arm's length writing in the third person to fill in those gaps so it's a it's a life that that is in that way kind of very intertextual wonderful yes that is Dostoevsky in love thank you for that Alex Elizabeth Oliver was mentioning that his first connection to Dostoevsky was probably similar to lots of people watching and to mine as well discovering him as a teenager when you're about 15 16 17 and you think yes I want to read about this Raskolnikov character and how did you first come to Dostoevsky originally and what led to you deciding to adapt white knights for the stage so I first came to Dostoevsky actually because of Chekhov so I came at him from a from a Russian playwright perspective of and that was actually when I when I first went to drama school and it took me a long time to work at how to say Chekhov's name and then that that series of challenges continued with Gogol who I've also adapted and and then Dostoevsky and and like Alex I sort of had I did have an image in my mind that I would just start reading all of these brilliant books and sort of you know a very romantic image of myself you know and then the more I dived into the writing of of these amazing amazing authors it all became much more real and relevant to my life so versus it being just a place of escape where I would go to these other worlds and imagine you know long frocks and vodka drinking and cigar smoking and all of that and passionate love affairs it just it started to ignite lots of feelings in me about myself and and my real life which links to why why we did White Nights a sentimental diary of a dreamer this summer in Pitlockery we did a series of Dostoevsky adaptations on audio which which people can still listen to with our winter ensemble and one of those was White Nights and I decided that we would produce it as a play now if you jump back 10 years ago I commissioned a version of White Nights which another playwright wrote called a brilliant playwright called Steve Hubbard and he did a fantastic adaptation which was very different and involved bringing to life all of the dreamers imaginings whereas this adaptation that I did this year for the audience what I realised as I was adapting his work again was how much his pieces are about loneliness and White Nights for me tapped into what a lot of people would have been experiencing because of their isolation during the pandemic you know there was this man walking through the streets on his own not able to connect not able to talk to people not able to to find somebody else to meet in that way and I think that's what a lot of people have been have been struggling with the last year and a half so not wanting to do a covid play really although we did do a covid requiem to end our season in respect for the people who have lost their lives during the pandemic but also wanted to explore what it has thrown up for us and White Nights felt like the perfect thing because it's about this extraordinary man who wants to find love and have moments of fullness and happiness and passion and it doesn't work out but at the end he's left going is this enough for the whole of my life these last four nights is that enough and for me that felt like a an important conversation to have with our audience outside in our amphitheater although Charlotte Higgins reminded me today that an amphitheater does have to have an audience on all sides and our amphitheater doesn't it's on three sides so it's not quite an amphitheater if we're looking at the true definition of the word so yeah I mean he just feels totally on the money around lots of things that we're all struggling with in this moment I would say. Thank you Elizabeth I don't think you're going to get arrested by any court of amphitheater definition police you can get away with it here I love this idea of him being the ultimate pandemic author discuss if you have any thoughts on that or any other questions please do put them in the box below and we'll get to them a bit later in this conversation. Oliver you mentioned this idea of his relevance to a modern audience and in particular the term self-hatred and he absolutely whether biography or in fiction is the epitome I mean he's the king of understanding self-loathing right and that I think that is something that's very relevant to a modern audience and Elizabeth mentioned this idea of his explorations of loneliness which is a really prevalent theme in his work and in what ways do you think he is embraced as being a relevant author now and do you think that he's just as relevant in academia as he is to a contemporary readership who might go and pick up his translations in a bookshop and I find it really fascinating that you escaped him as an undergraduate you know and there was a time in academia when he wasn't particularly fashionable or essential and I wonder if that's change and how that relates to contemporary readers big questions. First thing I always feel like doing is resisting the academic general divide I think it's not to the states because advantage because there are so many wonderful books that have been written recently you know from academic presses that are jargon-free that are short many of them from for example Northwestern University Press in the States that are on topics that are entirely relevant to I think what the general reader also tries to get from Dostoevsky topics to do with trauma, pain, loss, family so I see you know the relevance I see being across the board one thing that's really amazed me is how much correspondence I've had after my translation came out in 2014-2015 I mean from every part of the world letters of one kind of another some people simply saying whether they did or didn't enjoy it usually did because otherwise they wouldn't write did enjoy the translation but often it's about asking for my opinion or wanting to share a view on a character in the novel or often as just yesterday a question about Brothers Karamazov you know I totally get the logic of the Grand Inquisitor's argument in the heart of the novel but how does Dostoevsky but I don't understand how Dostoevsky counters that argument in the novel which is a whole challenge Dostoevsky set himself in the novel to suggest that we we could take responsibility for our lives and embrace our freedom as it were and the religious argument behind that and I just thought how you know how direct people's response is to Dostoevsky but also how that ties into this whole question of what Alex was talking about what Elizabeth is doing the way in which people continue the conversation that Dostoevsky started you know he he leaves his all of his novels and are unresolved some of them like Brothers Karamazov were told there's going to be a sequel of course Dostoevsky died whether or not there would actually be a sequel no one's not no one knows but it's part of his strategy as well that you know the characters are there for other people to continue so for example there's a theatre director in Moscow who I think is returned to Dostoevsky's works eight times Kamaginkas picking out one character here one character there and making the whole play revolve around them so it's it's partly the fact that I can't quite remember the quote but back then said something about Dostoevsky hasn't sort of fully become himself yet he's still waiting to become Dostoevsky it's for us to make him to you know to complete him or to take it take it further so so that that's part of the answer but I think the relevance is simply he writes uh yes there's a textual side that Alex was talking about but that's in a way part of the realism of Dostoevsky that no that was his filter through seeing the world you know he did you know he wasn't he was um you know his arms were deeply soaked in ink but on the other but on the other hand what he's writing about are the most direct forms of suffering the most direct questions that we all encounter you know why why should innocent children die etc why should loss, illness, injustice are obviously no less relevant now than they were then so and I think it's the directness with which he confronts pain and trauma that means and also the way in which he helps he helps people to to think their way out through them and that's what the brothers Karamazov was in Dostoevsky as Alex writes about had lost his own youngest son from a from a a brain condition very similar to his own shortly before the writing of the novel he had been to see consolation from elders in a monastery he he'd received some help through doing that but his wife was absolutely distraught and the book is dedicated to her in sort of recognition of her loss and the book deals with the theme of children and the loss of children's lives so yeah let's go. Yeah the idea of Dostoevsky as a family man or as really a human a human being with feelings and ridiculous romantic adventures as somebody other than a great author on a pedestal is something I think is quite new to a lot of readers and contemporary readers I'm thinking you know people who perhaps have only read crime and punishment and haven't necessarily delved into the details of Dostoevsky biography before and Alex what have you found is the response from readers towards Dostoevsky and love and what has surprised them to learn about him and his character. It's a good question because he's I mean I think for good reasons people want to talk about his ideas you know the fact that he takes his readers seriously as Oliver says and wants to open up those very difficult discussions I think it gives so much credit to the reader and he's really good at staging debates between characters and turning them into action in his fiction so you come away from one of his novels with all these things you want to talk about and so I think you know it can be tempting to treat him as a floating brain and that's that's definitely how I did for a long time but he also I mean apart from the fact he just had one of the most eventful lives of any novelist ever it was a wild rollercoaster of life but it also I think in understanding his relationships best for him and his social circle the people around him that he cared about I think it does kind of add add in a new perspective I mean I didn't you know I have to hold my hand up and say before I started researching the book I didn't really see him as as a family man as someone who to whom having children being a father would have been particularly important but it's a huge part of his life particularly in the last 10 years and once you know that you you begin to see things that you missed before or I certainly found I did in especially as later works you know the idea that children really are the future and that everything is riding on the next generation even towards the end of his life he was such a hopeful person I think he was disposed towards looking to the future and I think that makes him take children and their concerns and the way that they're going to go in the world really seriously in a way that a lot of serious you know so-called serious novelists don't sort of somehow see it sometimes as their purview because it seems somehow domestic or that you know it's not within the realms of ethics or philosophy so there's loads of his personal relationships I think do kind of help to inform the way you read him and get the most out hopeful serene argumentative he's certainly never boring very very difficult to pin down that's what I love about him Elizabeth tell me how audiences responded when you first said we're going to be putting on something by Dostoyevsky I think I'm writing saying that he never himself wrote for the theatre and there've been a number of adaptations of his work especially in Russia but he isn't primarily primarily associated with theatre and I wonder how modern audiences respond to that and think oh no I'm not quite so sure I want to go and see Dostoyevsky play or were they very open to this sort of a mixed bag really and and audiences tend to respond unpredictably and differently if that makes any sense at all so sometimes you share with them your plans and they go yep great really up for it and other times not so much we had exceptional word of mouth after we opened and because it was only a short run but it received some fantastic reviews then obviously audiences are really keen to come so we're looking to revive the production because it was so successful but I think I think it's really interesting to look at how audiences react to Russian drama and I was lucky enough to see the Mali produce Uncle Vanya and by Chekhov and it was in Russian which is not a language that I'm as familiar with as you know someone like Oliver is and the audience was laughing the whole way through it they absolutely loved it and it made far more sense of the humour I would say because I think so this is what I'm getting at I think sometimes in my experience British theatre makers don't quite get the humour of Russian drama or Russian literature it's like at the start of The Sea Girl Masha goes you know he goes why do you always wear black and she goes I'm in morning for my life she's making a joke you know and it's and in the same way as with Dostoevsky quite often he's doing a funny in order to then have that moment of total heartbreak you know he's you know Annie Kasseldine who would love this conversation if she was if she was still with us because she was the person who opened up my life to Russian literature would have said remember it's like a souffle you know remember it's like you know it's meant to be this this thing this this thing that is that is light but not lacking in richness you know but treat it like a souffle stop malleting it she would say you know and I think there's something to be learned from that when when when reading the work as well it is sort of given to the tragedy of it through its humour you know and and always I I can hear Annie chuckling as I'm you know I've got next to me you know a couple of my oh you can't see them okay a couple of my my story books um to get me in the zone for this conversation and always I I find myself laughing you know and I think that's what he intended he he he he was up for the gambit of emotions um to help us understand the meaning of life so so yes I think the audience was surprised how much they chuckled in answers to your question uh Viv as well I think yeah they were surprised by that yes Dostoevsky in fun souffle shocker love that Oliver Elizabeth was mentioning their language and the question that always comes up around Dostoevsky in many of the other Russian greats is can we ever really understand them if we read them in translation what's your take on that and how did you grapple with that for the English language reader as you were working on the translation of crime and punishment goodness um that's a hard one um it's actually quite hard to look back uh at always and be sure that I can trust what I was thinking I was what I thought I was trying to do at the time I was trying to do it now that is six six or seven years of past I've been surprised for example how many readers or critics have said that it's a modernizing translation whereas that wasn't in my mind when I was doing it so of course that is one approach that one can take one can radically try to bring it into the speech of today um when I was doing it I was trying not to use words only come into English actually quite recently that's sort of aiming for some sweet spot I suppose between Dostoevsky's time and our own but perhaps some of the changes including punctuation that were made and well that was actually the only significant editorial change pushed it towards that um that's not really an answer to your question though which is how how can we approach Dostoevsky's language I think um we can't entirely um and I mean if you just take you know Russian Russian words are structured differently they they use verbal prefixes a lot there's just one prefix which is crucial to the novel Piedje so meaning a cross or again a crime is really transgression it should be called transgression and punishment as a stepping across all of those words to do with a cross are crucial to the novel in the very last paragraph Raskolnikov is we're told that he crosses perechods into a different category of people and not to mention rebirth is is gestured out which again is that same prefix you wouldn't be able to find the actually the the theme of translation is also central to the novel I found to my surprise and that again is another of these words that uses the same verbal prefix you wouldn't find a way of capturing that kind of intricacy with which we don't necessarily associate Dostoevsky which doesn't have to be totally conscious in a way it comes somehow organically from his thinking and his art but I was amazed as I was translating it at how rich the sort of the patterning is and how skillful the way in which so I was talking before about you know we're plunged into this hot st. Petersburg which feels stifling and where people live on top of each other in these poor districts and Raskolnikov himself lives in a room that's like a coffin right at the top in a garret and his mind is constricted he can't get away from these obsessive thoughts that he has about whether he's a Superman whether he should do this murder or not whether he can do the murder and I was struck as I was translating it by how actually the the range of words in that first part and then again towards the end of the novel was very narrow lots of key words keep repeating again and again and that was something I tried as best as I could to replicate in English to make it have that kind of neurotic obsessive feel it's a bit like you know people who know St. Petersburg there's big courtyards that are closed on all sides we call them a dvorka-lodiets a courtyard that's like a well and it's a bit like Raskolnikov's consciousness and like his language it's deep but narrow and keeps returning to the same thoughts and so that effect is really important as we lead up to the murders but then it's interesting how much later in the novel Dostoevsky finds an entirely different way of writing especially in the epilogue Raskolnikov has been advised you need air you need air talking about souffles you need you need to sort of um you know you can't you can't live like this in this urban way and in this coffin room and he ends up in the same fortress that Dostoevsky was as a prisoner looking out on the Kazakh step and there you have the sense of timelessness you move into a totally different reality and the sense of space and again I wanted to evoke that contrast and that that was something one way of doing that and this sounds very probably nerdy but it's again through punctuation in a way that when we were in Raskolnikov's mind I was always contracting the verbs you know I have but I've I'd read whatever it was and then just to give it sort of sense of slowness and timelessness to then decontract the those verbs for example made gave a different rhythm to the epilogue I think people I mean what we're talking about in this conversation is all the sort of stereotypes people have about Dostoevsky you know how those crumble when we read his work you know Alex was saying you know people think this is such a deep right as full of ideas one of the profoundest things I heard when I was doing that novel was a very friend of mine I'm sure he went by naming him Tommy Karshan who said God Dostoevsky hates ideas doesn't he and when you start looking at it like that that actually the novels I mean yeah he's a pandemic novelist was also by the pandemic of ideas and the way in which people get infected by ideas and and crime and punishment certain in the end unfortunately Dostoevsky himself got infected by ideas it must be said and this is a celebration he led you know he espoused some ideas that many of us find horrible at the end of his life sadden but but in his novels he's more intelligent than he is I think in his journalism as he himself realized and he is dealing with the power of ideas and the need to resist them in many cases that's where the that's where the big conflict is between theoretical life and lived life if we're talking about living Dostoevsky and he was always trying to get through to living life and when we're doing that was through literature but it was always against being abstract being too theoretical. Wow Oliver that was just a translation masterclass I've never thought about that idea of Peria before Brest, Euclainia literally means stepping across so I hadn't thought about it I hadn't thought about it either even after I started doing the novel and it was a colleague here full of Bullock who made me aware of it in the seminar and since then I yes it opens a lot up actually. Well it does because it's so clearly makes a reference without actually making a reference to transgressing a moral boundary that's just there in the background it's incredibly but it's also but also what I found amazing is as I say this theme of translation is right there in the center of the novel in one of the most crucial chapters where Sonia the woman who loves Raskolnikov reads to him from the Gospels and reads The Raising of Lazarus we are told very explicitly by the by the narrator she reads it in a Russian translation which would seem to be superfluous why do of course it's not about music but actually it's very meaningful because it's only then at about this time in Russia that people could read the Bible New Testament in a vernacular translation and the translation that people could understand what in Church Slavonic a translation would be done about 40 years earlier but it had been banned in case people actually understood what they were reading so the New Testament as a translation has a sort of transformative and revolutionary effect in the novel and then we also learn about Raskolnikov that he could have been a translator his best friend is a translator not a very good translator but Raskolnikov would have been a good translator and at a certain point he's offered translations he says no I don't need translations in the next minute he's offered some money as he's crossing a bridge because he's mistaken for a beggar and he throws that money into the river and the narrator says at that moment he sort of cut himself off from humanity going back to the theme of isolation and just lastly another point he's described as a walking translation by his friend a translation from a foreign language and so one way of looking at the book this theme of translation is that Raskolnikov needs himself to be translated from into his true self into his better self away from this kind of inauthentic and that's another of these crossing overs that I was talking about which this prefix carries and yes it can't be it can't be I don't think captured in English totally in a least being be gestured towards and understood well people will just have to watch this conversation instead as an addendum to being able to understand the full effect of Pyrrha that's all times Alex how does it make you feel hearing all of that and I'm assuming that you approach your material as a non-Russian speaker I think you speak a little bit of Russian but not fluent and you wouldn't have read everything that you've used for Dostoevsky in love in Russian how does that make you feel about how you approach him as a as an English speaker yeah it's something that I think you know I felt initially that I was approaching the subject as a novelist primarily but I was very aware of the fact that I was kind of coming to him very downstream and I and so I wanted to read a lot around that that whole topic of translation the difficulties and and you know there's each translation will make gains and have compromises and we'll kind of be able to highlight certain aspects of of the original text so for me it was it was kind of partly a question of trying to find a consistent voice and one that was you know broadly reliable that that I could use as a kind of a base for my source but but actually that there being no no completely perfect translation in the English language of a brush and piece of text I found it really useful to read at most of the at least the the kind of main works that I was referring to I read in at least one translation and so I've with something like the notes from the dead house notes from the house of the dead is it sometimes called memoirs from the house of the dead someone else translates it you have to look into why you know why are people uh why is there this ambiguity around the initial word and title it's because it's a Russian genre that doesn't really exist in the same way in English and uh so you have to be kind of alert to those those issues the main translator that I used was Constance Garnett who I um I just really enjoy the version of Dostoevsky that comes down to us through her but I'm aware that that that you know there are criticisms that have been made that her work is somehow too sort of smooth um that she's a very elegant writer who kind of suits maybe suits a writer like Togenev who's a great sort of turns out a great sentence and that maybe she had um sanded down the the rough edges and the polyphony of of the voice in in Dostoevsky's writing so uh I I had to to try to work to build that back in and part of that was was reading secondary translations um and uh yeah it was really it was really a fascinating process actually and I loved I have a friend who was sort of helping me with that I could only find one translation of all of the letters into English and so I was working with a friend who speaks much better Russian than I did to um uh kind of ask about certain words and and phrases that didn't seem quite right to me and and we had some amazing conversations about all these work you know the kinds of things that Nabokov picks up on these weird words that don't seem to have a a direct translation into English which give a great sense of uh of of Russian habits of thought that you know the famously invoked words that are particularly Toska which is a kind of melancholy which which only really exists in the Russian song um and and which is a this sort of herniation this kind of straining towards um which we don't really have any word for at all and and actually what I decided to do rather than to try to sort of fudge it into English was was to be at very upfront with the reader and say this looks like a really interesting word uh and you know I'm gonna I'm gonna gloss it from from Russian and everyone argues about how you translate it well I think that's one of the reasons people come to books like yours is because they want to read about those details and they love reading about you know what would it mean if you could understand the words Toska do we experience the same kind of sorrow and Elizabeth is somebody who's clearly really passionate about a living version of Dostoyevsky how you bring that alive as a performer and what would you advise as a point of entry for people who want to dig into Dostoyevsky maybe rediscover him after having abandoned crime and punishment years ago where would be a good place to start I would definitely start with his short stories it's probably a controversial thing to say I'm looking forward to hearing what Alex and Oliver say next I would definitely say that just because they're short quite simply and you can sit down and go okay how do I feel about this person's lens on the world and I do think there's something about them which again combines the humour and the the pathos as well I would say that I do think that crime and punishment gets a bad write-up full stop it's a mighty good read so I also think there's something about going at Dostoyevsky as if and thanks to people like Oliver it is accessible to us going about it and seeing it as a new novel that's just come out versus seeing it as something that you have to dust off the shelf I think that's where we get ourselves confused we sort of go oh this is going to be hard going because it was written a couple of hundred years ago and actually that's not the case so yeah I would say plunge in with it with a short story but then I I also say that about Brex I say about you know if people go all you know how to feel about Brex who I love I go start with his poems I mean don't go near his place to begin with I mean there's an argument to say that Brex poems are actually best in his place but that's a whole other evening I would say but yeah you know start small work your way up but yeah don't believe the bad press would be the same with my dad yeah well I second your recommendation I would say the double is a really really great place to start it's one of my favorite things Oliver does that count as controversial for you to recommend the short stories as an entry point and and no no I really wanted to ask Elizabeth the question can I do that about talking about the short of form so the choice of of white knights such an interesting one to I mean I wish I'd been able to see to see the play obviously living a long way away but it's not the most obviously and I can see why you chose it from the point of view of as you say the theme of isolation it's a brilliant choice I'm just curious about what dramatic potential you saw in it you know when you read it it doesn't obviously seem like something that's going to transfer to the stage because you know it's lots of long monologues and you know there's not that much action but perhaps that was part of the appeal to you so there's two things and I'll try and be really swift the first thing is the first version I commissioned which I didn't write myself I asked the writer to really um put put on the page um words and situations where we could theatricalize what Dostoevsky was talking about so at the beginning of of um Sentimental Diary of Dreamer for those people who haven't read it yet um he speaks about the fact the houses talk to him and you know to the point that you know one of them is you know going to go yellow and it's like canary you know it's all very funny so we actually bought those imaginings to life you know we saw the man who was chasing Nastenka and you know so in that regards there is a lot of drama to be found if it becomes um for one of the words literalized or or memetic of the of the adaptation however what we did this summer in the version that I adapted was keep the monologue form and and I should absolutely hold my hands up from the off and say dramatic monologue is one of the things I find most exciting about theatre uh it turns a lot of people off I love it some of my happiest times as director have been uh directing Faith Healer Brian Fields Faith Healer um I've directed a lot of monologues during my career and that is because I believe that a character can talk to an audience and in the act of that confessional act of speaking to the audience in monologue form they are fundamentally changed inside in the same way as the moment when Shakespeare wrote to be or not to be although Robert LaPage did argue that it was to do with needing to do a scene change but I do believe be or not to be is is is is Hamlet trying to make sense of whether he should be here or not be here anymore and those extremities of feeling and and and intellectual emotional psychological turmoil that he's trying to process with an audience I believe is equal to what the dreamer is trying to do in white nights you know I believe him sharing with us what happened over those four nights is is him trying to make sense of actually whether he should be here anymore um so so in that regard I see quite a lot of drama in it Oliver I I I I feel it in my being as you can tell you know that sense of um it sounds it sounds wonderful I I didn't mean that it shouldn't be done at all it sounds it sounds fantastic I'm glad to hear it's done in that way and uh and again maybe that's um also part of what we're talking about earlier this sort of wanting to have this direct access to the author and to the words that that that the monologue allows and that that somehow seems appropriate right now to this moment as well um I mean that was an amazing performance in Oxford of Ray Fiennes just reading the um the Four Quarters you know just standing up on stage and just on memory and managing to to sustain oh I wish to say no performance for whatever however long it was 100 an hour or so yeah I really I really wish I'd seen that well we're all going to have dreams of great big yellow canaries chasing us across the stage after this tonight I think you really brought them to life there Elizabeth uh now let's move to some of your questions if you have a question do pop it in the box below we'd love to hear from you I'm going to address this to Alex um but anyone else is welcome to pick up on it if you have a take on it it is quite a this is quite a tough question uh Dostoevsky provided a sophisticated and complex picture of mental illness how is his work still relevant to how contemporary clinicians understand psychiatric illness and Alex I'm referring that to you because I wonder if you could perhaps give people a bit of background about what we might call Dostoevsky's own psychiatric illness yeah so um Dostoevsky had very severe epilepsy um he may have had at his whole life it was definitely confirmed to him in uh the time after he came out of hard labor in in Siberia um but there are there were episodes in his young life where he that were kind of passed off actually at the time as almost sort of common episodes where he was introduced to a young woman and appears to have fainted um there was a moment where he seems to have hallucinated that someone had um screened that there was a wolf in the woods where he was when he was a young child and that was sort of written off as a childish fancy but it became increasingly clear across his life um he had very severe what we would I think call now temporal lobe epilepsy um so I think he writes particularly well about the subjective experience of epilepsy um he was really one of the things he was really devoted to was uh trying to write truthfully about uh what goes through a person's mind and actually in that way he was very far ahead of his time what think techniques that we would think of as being quite modern like stream of consciousness uh or or even just the admission you know for a main character a protagonist to admit to kind of deeply ungenerous uh thoughts or um he was so interested in those complexities and that that was you know he was always interested in the mystery of the human being and and his main subject of study was himself you know he there's a bit of him in many of his characters um particularly when it comes to uh the one of the main character or one of his main characters in The Idiot Prince Mushkin um has the same affliction as epilepsy and describes uh you know in a kind of really poetic way the uh the kind of corona that comes just before an epileptic fit and it's this moment of um which he says is uh unearthly and he's very keen to stress that doesn't mean that it's uh paradisical it's not it's not a paradise moment but it isn't of this earth it's it's a a non-human feeling um and he kind of stretches out the the moment just before the epileptic fit the fit of course itself is horrible deeply painful some of his fits um lasted for for hours at a time and he he could spend weeks recovering um but he was so interested in those last moments of consciousness and and stroke strove to kind of capture them uh right up to the very moment of unconsciousness which is something that um is quite rare in literature but I think he actually writes um I think he's more interested than most writers in um in others who've been affected by disability um there's certainly he has characters who have compulsive tendencies there are people who are very clearly in in depression and it it you know I don't think his tendency isn't necessarily to um to kind of name these things and and to sort of pathologize them as such but he's very interested in in the ways that uh the human mind can can uh become a prison for the the individual um and and you know mental illnesses is clearly a big part of that thank you Elizabeth a question for you if Dostoevsky were alive today what aspects of modern society do you think he would be focusing on in his writing oh that's a good question um I think he'd be focusing on the same themes that he is focusing on because I don't think they've gone away really I that that's my kind of very crude answer to quite a complex question um because what he was obsessed with as as Alex has just spoken so eloquently about was was was the the turmoil of the human condition which remains the same and although for instance clinicians may have names for things and insights for things that they can treat chemically and with talking therapies there's still people in turmoil because of of of illness um so yeah I don't I don't think he would be speaking to or exploring different things just different contexts probably I don't think all of a sudden he'd be writing his Boris Johnson novel or is you know I think he's I think he's still well clear probably Boris Johnson is is a Dostoevsky character discuss that is a whole other event maybe one for like 25 years time a bit of distance would be needed yeah definitely and there were ways of one Oliver um question for you you mentioned earlier this idea of redemption that no one is quite ever redeemed in any of Dostoevsky's work could you explain a little bit more about that and perhaps explain why it is a powerful literary technique and not simply failure well I think part of the reason I said that is that because so many people think it is a failing of his writing that his characters are you know given revelation or and and then that word redeemed is sometimes brought in I think he's certainly be talking about the time of crime and punishment there's a fascinating note that he writes just a couple of years before that novel this is going to sound extremely Russian but he's sitting next to his the corpse of his first wife and he he he writes this and there aren't that many this speaks to Alex's project there aren't that many moments like this in Dostoevsky's complete works where he actually speaks in his first person clearly about himself without any kind of mask and that that was an unhappy marriage unlike his second one which starts you know the end of crime of time writing crime and punishment anyway at that moment he says well I ever see Masha again that's really all he says about his first wife and he goes off on this digression about Christ really and about faith and you get from it this very sort of clear spiritual worldview that Dostoevsky has he develops in this two or three page sketch that all human beings are kind of caught between sort of two truths as the truth of the higher end of Christ as Dostoevsky saw him as the human ideal because he was selfless but that ideal is something we can't attain in on this earth Dostoevsky thought it's too perfect why not because we're dragged down by our ego by our eye and by our desires etc and so he sees he sees us I think he sees all of his characters as always oscillating between these two extremes sometimes closer to one sometimes closer to the other but always in motion always on a kind of journey to use the modern cliche but a journey in Dostoevsky's understanding it doesn't have a destination and while we're alive anyway and so that's why a character can't be redeemed in that worldview because there's no stopping point there's no there's no there's no resolution but there is that kind of horizontal that's the sort of vertical axis and then there's the horizontal axis so that we were talking about about moving across from one state to another one category to another and that's possible but I think this around that the idea of trying to reach some earthly utopia is for him a dead cold and inhuman concept and that was really lay at the heart of his hatred of the whole idea of communism socialism and what he predicted was happening in Russia at the time but that as I say is why he lends himself so well to his novels and and himself as a character as a person to the kind of reinterpretation and sequels and transposition that's a word that American scholar Alexander Burry has used instead of talking about adaptations that we we are trying to that we've never quite reached the original the idea of transposing his novels or his stories into another medium or into another genre and that's a I think it's in a very Dostoevsky spirit I think what Elizabeth has done and what others do with his with his texts is exactly what he would have wanted them to do in a way to be brave and free with them and sort of continue that dialogue. Question for Alex. Oliver mentioned that Nabokov was no fan of Dostoevsky and he certainly had enemies during his lifetime and after he died and do you feel that he had friends and allies during his lifetime? He did he I think the I think the thing that is sometimes hard to sort of reconcile in hindsight is is that he in some ways the literary world he was writing into was very cliquey and there weren't all that many cliques you could join really. There were the people who were signed up to the to the very left-wing radical cause on the one hand he had these very conservative pro Tsar slavophile writers on the other hand and there were only a limited number of outlets that would sort of service these these different political opinions that were emerging after censorship eased up so the the trouble is that he really wanted to he really believed he was trying to stir a middle course between everyone that would kind of help to reconcile the the contradictions between these two different positions and you know he he founded a journal with his brother to try to do that I think he that that was kind of part of what he wanted to do with his with his novels was to show where there were elements of of Russian and Western thought that could live alongside one another and you know there were these sort of slightly dangerous Western ideas that maybe we should sort of throw out and and and trust ourselves more he was obsessed with this idea of getting back to the soil as he called it which was to to kind of reconnect with folk tradition and the the peasant class that were very alienated from the elite at that time so depending on what time you catch him and and what exactly he's talking about he would find a ready audience with the radicals people who were seen as being very left-wing you know but the first thing he would do he published a novel that was really successful Devils was in he had two good hits in a row with Katkov who was the conservative guy he had a really conservative journal and he was really building up some steam with his conservative readers and his next project was basically telling Katkov to go away and selling his novel to his arch rival at the contemporary and then just at the point where he'd sort of they'd finally accepted that he might be coming around to their their school of thought he went back to Katkov again and it so you can see Thuraj is like he kind of doesn't help himself every time he um he finds someone who he's sort of aligned with he'll be a fellow traveler for a couple of years and then they'll fall out of or something and have a be I mean I'm when I say I was being slightly flippant when I say he was argumentative I mean he could get into arguments but he was argumentative also in the sense he was incredibly discursive he loved to he loved the stuff of argument the back and forth of it and he kind of did that a bit with his with his politics as well I think you've read so much Dostoevsky but now basically you say Alex um I'm not I'm not argumentative I'm discursive what are you saying that's such a Dostoevsky thing to say now I'm going to ask at least one more question but to make sure that we've fully fully serviced the idea of living Dostoevsky so that we've got people to go away with some living artifacts that they can go to after this conversation can I come to each of you in turn Elizabeth can you tell us where we can find the audio that you were mentioning earlier yeah so if you go to YouTube and to just search Pitlockery Festival Theatre in Dostoevsky it'll come up just through a really simple simple search and it's obviously free for you to enjoy at Leisure and there's lots of other short stories and and things on there to listen to as well yeah wonderful and Oliver how can we make this is a question I've slightly pondered all my life actually um how can we make sure that we buy the correct translation what would be the quickest and easiest way to make sure that people get your translation of crime and punishment into their hands uh so it's penguin but it doesn't look like the other penguins so there you go uh it doesn't it hasn't got the normal type instead it's got these and this is another form of adaptation transposition it's got a wonderful the novel um michael schemyakin back in the 60s which show raskolnikov not as he's portrayed in the novel as handsome and sort of dashing and but it's sort of ugly raskolnikov as he imagines himself in a way and so if you see any anyway if you see if you see these these really striking illustrations both in the uk and then in the us edition they got a cartoonist to do the cover so you can't really miss that one and there's big pools of blood on the cover there's also an audiobook that's now been done read by um don warrington so oh wonderful love an audio book recommendation um and alex tell us about dostoevsky in love this is a biography a quick read uh and really exciting take on dostoevsky's life thank you yeah it's it's um very briefly the idea was to try to write something that was accessible you don't have to know anything about dostoevsky going into it and to write about his his life uh his kind of personal life so it's dostoevsky in love um takes you through particularly his three great loves um as he saw them and uh and and tries to kind of um bring in the some of the themes of his his novels as well so that was published by the interview this year wonderful thank you and to really make sure that we have underlined the idea of living dostoevsky i want to put this question to you it's a great question there needs to be a hollywood crime and punishment it needs to be done as quickly as possible who plays raskolnikov olive i'm going to come to you first i'll come to each of you i can't think of a question i'm less well suited to answering this and i also can't imagine something i'd less like to see sorry that's why i asked you first i love that okay so all of us not going to be first in the key for tickets to see tom cruise in crime and punishment um alex who would your raskolnikov be i think this i i accept in advance that this is a rogue choice i actually think timothy shallow may would be amazing because he's he's just the right amount of kind of thinking he's great but also being mistaken and i think he's dramatizing this weird tension between these ideas that he's cooked up in in his asset room and uh and the real world of people that he has to live alongside and and try to find sympathy with uh i think it would be an unusual uh but potentially quite productive choice but i'm not you know i'm not a dramatist so let's see what elizabeth thinks i love that shalom a brilliant idea elizabeth you're the person who could potentially bring this to life for us so who would your raskolnikov be i don't know um i do like this game though sorry oliver um uh it's a game that i often play with people it's actually really good ways that to cast things to kind of go who would i i mean it just has to be an incredible actor so i would punt for someone like a young matthew mcconohay probably uh because i think he could land the the complexity of what's needed and then the he'd also i i think it needs to be something that's capable of of meta a metamorphosis so i think you know if we see him in dallas buyer's club i think that sums up the fact that he's got chops as i would call it so yeah so i would say someone like matthew but then that's a bit like why why are we going down the american route then then we get into another complex conversation about what we should be doing is um finding the finest of the finest russian actor to to play the part and then there's a conversation there about you know um what that would mean for audiences and the experience and uh so yeah so i don't know that's that's a very very good question which i will i i can contribute something which is one other that i heard on the radio just cop26 was starting um shorts and ego is being interviewed on radio four and he came up with the conclusion um technology will save us all which is a misquote of dostaevsky's uh beauty will save us all the city doesn't actually say it in his own in his own words but uh i'm really not sure he would have agreed with the sentiment that technology will save us all interested to know what he would have thought about the crisis yeah wonderful go on elisabeth no i was actually just wondering what we do think he would have thought of the climate crisis and i'm relieved that you said climate crisis oliver because i think that's now how we need to start referring to it versus change um so yeah i would i would be yeah i would be intrigued to hear what everybody would think of that we've probably run out of time though but yeah well his one specific philosophy as alex mentioned was the philosophy of the soil so you understand well we've covered everything from Arnold Schwarzenegger to souffle to dostaevsky's philosophy of the soil i really feel we've brought him to life tonight so thank you so much to our guest dr oliver ready alex christoffey author of dostaevsky in love and elisabeth neiman from the pitlockery festival theater thank you so much to all of you for your questions and for being with us here tonight thanks to the british library for hosting please do check out all their other events online and coming back to life in person and thank you so much for being with us tonight i've been the gross cop and this has been the living dostaevsky