Thursday, May 5, 2016

"The Meek One" in "In love with Tarkvosky", translation by Alistair Ian Blyth

She was standing by the wall, close to the window, she had laid her arm against the wall, and her head was pressed on her arm, she was standing like that thinking. And she was standing so deep in thought that she did not hear me come and look at her from the other room. She seemed to be smiling—standing, thinking and smiling (Dostoevsky, A Gentle Spirit).
  
The reason why the meek one smiles before committing the fatal act is absolutely impenetrable to the hero and also to us. What understanding can the poor girl have reached? “Standing, thinking and smiling”—what could be more paradoxical, more surreal, more real to the highest degree than this scene fashioned in the mind of the great writer? It seems that the solution to this gesture (for gesture it is!), to this mystery, would automatically lead to an understanding of life, of the world itself. Probably Dostoevsky confronts us with this gesture, this mystery, in order to make us marvel at female nature, which in essence expresses the whole of human nature. And perhaps by her very nature, woman is closer to the transcendent and therefore capable of achieving that higher understanding, which leads to self-reconciliation. No other explanation relating to the immanence of this world would have been conceivable. You cannot in any wise penetrate to the meaning of the thought that expresses perhaps the very essence of the feminine whole, even the very essence of life itself and therefore the supreme understanding of life. Or perhaps this was in the natural way of things, that what happened should happen, because there was no “other solution.” The meek one, as a woman, is perhaps capable of seeing what men cannot and will never be able to see. Or perhaps in this world, this is the natural order: an organic incompatibility between the two principles, male and female. Perhaps this is why the main character, the moneylender, is not so guilty for his wife’s death, since, as one of the novella’s critics so aptly puts it: “the guilt far outstrips the guilty party, it no longer belongs to him, but to the entire universe, which is structured crookedly, built on suffering, and which nobody anywhere will ever be able to redeem.” A conclusion that is like the passing of a sentence!


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