Book title: The Meek One
ISBN: 978014139748
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
You see gentlemen, there are ideas … that is, you see, when some ideas are said out loud, put into words, they come out terribly stupid. They come out so that you’re ashamed of yourself. But why? For no reason at all. Because we’re all good-for-nothings and can’t bear the truth, or I don’t know why else
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Meek One
You know when you’re reading a serious Russian novel and it doesn’t come any more serious than Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
This, after all, is a man who thinks giving his main character a 10-year sentence in a Siberian prison camp as a happy ending.
“The Meek One” is no exception to this rule — the kind of story about the deep contradictions and cruelties of the human soul that has your average Left Bank French philosopher sipping his coffee in glee.
(The “Left Bank” (Rive Gauche in French) refers to the southern bank of the Seine River in Paris, traditionally known as a hub for artists, intellectuals, writers, and philosophers. This area became famous for its vibrant, bohemian culture and was home to many influential figures in literature, art, and philosophy, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Ernest Hemingway. The term often symbolises a free-spirited, intellectual, and artistic lifestyle.)
It is not, however, the book you want to be reading if you’d like a cheerful little pick-up.
Though, on the plus side, if you want to make your way through a Russian novel without having to pick up Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, this one manages to pack all the bleak insight into a mere 56 pages.
When I started working at Goldman Sachs, it was practically a non-negotiable rule to read this book on day one. (We even had weekly discussions about “The Brothers Karamazov” in the conference room.)
Last month was my fifth rereading.
The problem is that I still don’t fully understand it.
It’s not for want of trying.
Maybe I’m just being lazy, but it feels like I clearly lack something — life experience or prerequisite misery — to give me the necessary insight into the characters.
If I give you the story, you may get a sense of why.
The unnamed narrator is a 41-year-old pawnbroker in old Russia.
A young girl, 16 years old and desperate to leave home, comes to pawn items so she can advertise as a governess and escape her aunts.
The pawnbroker gives her another option — become his wife.
“‘I am a straightforward man,’ I said, ‘and I have studied the circumstances of the matter.’ And I wasn’t lying that I am straightforward. Well, to hell with it. I spoke not only decently, that is, by showing myself to be a person of good breeding, but originally too and that’s the main thing.”
(The whole of the story is told from this confused, breathless, self-justificatory first-person position, from a man who is out of his mind with grief and shock. You get used to it after a while).
She says yes and the two are wed.
But from the start he treats her badly.
Not violence or active cruelty — instead a kind of silence, which he says is aimed at making her truly sympathetic to him.
This silence grows harsher and angrier.
Before long, the meek wife starts to resent her husband, starts to hear tales of the things he hasn’t told her and holds them against him.
One night, the wife holds a revolver to the narrator’s head.
She’s reached the point at which she can think of nothing more than ending him.
His eyes open for a flash — he knows the gun is to his head, but pretends to go back to sleep.
She doesn’t know whether he saw the gun or not.
She leaves the room, realising that her husband may not be the coward others have claimed, and that therefore she may be wrong on the rest as well.
The narrator exults “I had defeated her — she was forever defeated.”
At that point, the story changes.
Immediately, the wife begins to sicken.
She also starts behaving differently around her husband, and he in turn has a damascene moment when he realises that she has started to take him for granted.
“If she’d started singing in my presence, then she had forgotten about me — that’s what was clear and terrible. My heart sensed this. But rapture shone in my soul and overcame my fear.” He is determined to sell up and for them all to go to Boulogne (it’s very important that it’s Boulogne).
But then, as he is on his way to arrange this, she decides to throw herself out of the window.
I have to admit that I don’t really understand this one.
It reminds me of a lot of other books I don’t understand (Albert Camus clearly owes a debt of gratitude here for things like “The Fall”).
For your sake, though, I feel I should have a go at trying to sift some meaning from this.
With that in mind, perhaps the crucial passage is this one:
“When I received her into my house, I wanted her complete respect. I wanted her to stand before me beseechingly, on account of my suffering — and I was worthy of that. […] I’m not for half-measures in happiness, but wanted everything — and that’s why I was forced to act as I did then, as if to say ‘figure it out for yourself and appreciate me!’”
The narrator is expecting his wife to come to truly respect and admire him for what has happened to him — not an unusual human impulse.
He does so in a way that is fantastically selfish, of course, but it’s not as if we go around begging for justice for those who love us.
The meek wife, who is portrayed as a saintly figure, is driven almost by this.
But when she realises (truly realises) that her husband may genuinely be worthy of the respect he thinks is his due, she finds it almost unbearable.
The narrator thinks that the suicide, which is sudden and unjustified by note, is driven by a realisation that she does love him after all, but can’t bear the emotional pain of recommitting to him after all that has happened.
More practically, it might be that she has no wish to live through any more of this lunacy.
But the real point of it all, I suppose, is the contrast between the genuine but convoluted way in which the narrator wants to love the meek one and do her right in the long term, and the psychological cruelty he unleashes in the present.
I suspect I need a more messed-up life before this will appeal to me.
In the meantime, it just looks unbearable.
