In my junior year in high school, as one of our first assignments in English class, we read Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
I took my homework very seriously and was a highly motivated student — in English for certain. I would go to my bedroom upstairs after dinner and pretty much lock myself in for the rest of the evening.
I read the story. It didn’t scare me. I lay down on my bed (does this sound stupid?) and tried to imagine being the character tortured mentally in the story, with an imagined pendulum swinging overhead:
Looking upward, I surveyed the ceiling of my prison. … In one of its panels a very singular figure riveted my whole attention. It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum such as we see on antique clocks. … While I gazed directly upward at it (for its position was immediately over my own) I fancied that I saw it in motion. …
… What I then saw confounded and amazed me. The sweep of the pendulum had increased in extent by nearly a yard. As a natural consequence, its velocity was also much greater. But what mainly disturbed me was the idea that had perceptibly descended. I now observed — with what horror it is needless to say — that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor.
The story did not have much of an effect on me. In retrospect, I would be inclined to say that Poe the writer never did.
The next day in English class, I raised my hand and said that I had expected Poe’s horror story, to scare me. But it hadn’t.
This was entirely normal, to be expected, our English teacher, Mr. Tighe said. Fiction, he said, is fiction. (This is a paraphrase of what he said.) It’s not supposed to be “real.” We read it from a different, detached perspective.
This seems obvious now, but Mr. Tighe’s observations were very instructive for me at this point in my life, when I was an eager student hoping to be a good student of literature.
I have posted her selected tracks from Sergei Prokofiev’s score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible (Russian: Иван Грозный, Ivan Grozniy). The film was released in two parts in 1944 and 1958. Eisenstein died in 1948.
My cherished friend from New York, Bill Dalzell, who introduced me to Ivan the Terrible and many other great films, remarked that Ivan the Terrible — in which, as he would have said, pertaining to his comment, Prokofiev’s music was an important factor (in making what he said true) — is like a Russian Orthodox service: the music, the setting, the scenes (such as the one of Ivan’s coronation) . I think he would have said, especially the music.
J’ouvris les yeux, je me dressai effaré sur mon séant. En ce moment, par l’étroite et haute fenêtre de ma cellule, je vis au plafond du corridor voisin, seul ciel qu’il me fût donné d’entrevoir ce reflet jaune où des yeux habitués aux ténèbres d’une prison savent si bien reconnaître le soleil. J’aime le soleil. …
I opened my eyes, and sat up startle. At this moment, through the high and narrow window of my cell, I saw on the ceiling of the next corridor (the only firmament I was allowed to see) that yellow reflection by which eyes accustomed to the darkness of a prison recognize sunshine. And oh, how I love sunshine! …
“On voit le soleil!”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, letter to his brother Mikhail, December 23,1849 (quoting Hugo; the letter was written on the day of Dostoevsky’s mock execution)
See complete French text and English translation as Word documents (posted above).
Я прошу извинения у моих читателей, что на сей раз вместо «Дневника» в обычной его форме даю лишь повесть. Но я действительно занят был этой повестью большую часть месяца. Во всяком случае прошу снисхождения читателей. Теперь о самом рассказе. Я озаглавил его «фантастическим», тогда как считаю его сам в высшей степени реальным. Но фантастическое тут есть действительно …
Дело в том, что это не рассказ и не записки. Представьте себе мужа, у которого лежит на столе жена, самоубийца, несколько часов перед тем выбросившаяся из окошка. Он в смятении и еще не успел собрать своих мыслей. Он ходит по своим комнатам и старается осмыслить случившееся, «собрать свои мысли в точку». Притом это закоренелый ипохондрик, из тех, что говорят сами с собою. Вот он и говорит сам с собой, рассказывает дело, уясняет себе его. Несмотря на кажущуюся последовательность речи, он несколько раз противуречит себе, и в логике и в чувствах.
Он и оправдывает себя, и обвиняет ее, и пускается в посторонние разъяснения: …. Ряд вызванных им воспоминаний неотразимо приводит его наконец к правде … процесс рассказа продолжается несколько часов, с урывками и перемежками и в форме сбивчивой: то он говорит сам себе, то обращается как бы к невидимому слушателю, к какому-то судье.
… Если б мог подслушать его и всё записать за ним стенограф, то вышло бы несколько шершавее, необделаннее, чем представлено у меня, но, сколько мне кажется, психологический порядок, может быть, и остался бы тот же самый. Вот это предположение о записавшем всё стенографе … и есть то, что я называю в этом рассказе фантастическим. Но отчасти подобное уже на раз допускалось в искусстве: Виктор Гюго, например, в своем шедевре «Последний день приговоренного к смертной казни» употребил почти такой же прием и хоть и не вывел стенографа, но допустил еще большую неправдоподобность, предположив, что приговоренный к казни может (и имеет время) вести записки не только в последний день свой, но даже в последний час и буквально в последнюю минуту. Но не допусти он этой фантазии, не существовало бы и самого произведения — самого реальнейшего и самого правдивейшего произведения из всех им написанных.
I apologize to my readers that this time instead of the “Diary” in its usual form I give only a story. But I’ve been really busy with this story for almost a month. In any case, I ask for the indulgence of my readers. Now about the story itself. I have titled it “fantastic” when I myself consider it eminently real. But there really is something fantastic here. …
The fact is that this is not a story and not a note. Imagine a husband whose wife is lying on a table, a suicide who jumped out of a window a few hours earlier. He is confused and has not yet had time to collect his thoughts. He paces in his rooms and tries to comprehend what happened, “to collect his thoughts to a point.” Moreover, he is an inveterate hypochondriac, one of those who talk to themselves. So he talks to himself, tells the story, clarifies it to himself. Despite the apparent consistency of speech, he contradicts himself several times, both in logic and in feelings.
He justifies himself and accuses her, and indulges in extraneous explanations … A series of memories evoked by him irresistibly leads him finally to the truth. … the process of storytelling continues for several hours, with fits and starts, and in a confused form: now he speaks to himself, then he addresses himself, as it were, to an invisible listener, to some kind of judge.
… . If a stenographer could overhear him and write everything down afterwards, it would come out a little more unfinished, less polished than what I have presented, but, as far as it seems to me, the psychological order, perhaps, would remain the same. This assumption about the stenographer who wrote everything down … is what I call fantastic in this story. But in part, something like this has already been seen in art: Victor Hugo, for example, in his masterpiece “The Last Day of a Condemned Man,” used almost the same technique and, although he did not introduce a stenographer, he concocted an even greater improbability, suggesting that the man sentenced to death can (and has time) to keep notes not only on his last day, but even at the last hour and literally at the last minute. But if he did not allow for this fantasy, the work itself would not exist –the most real and most truthful work of all he wrote.
— Dostoevsky, Preface, Кроткий (Krotkiy, “The Meek One”; a short story)
