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Reading Backwards

 | 
Muireann Maguire
, 
Timothy Langen

III. Tolstoy

Afterword: But Seriously, Folks…

(Pierre Bayard and the Russians)

Eric Naiman

Texte intégral

Pierre Bayard—the Great Liberator

1A country with a notoriously unpredictable past, the consequence of its history’s frequent rewriting and of its most powerful inhabitants’ dismal record of anticipating the future, Russia offers an ideal testing ground for the paradoxical and gloriously anachronistic interpretive practice of Pierre Bayard. It is no coincidence, as the saying goes, that Bayard eventually followed his Anticipatory Plagiarism (Le Plagiat par anticipation, 2009) with The Tolstoevsky Enigma (L’énigme Tolstoïevski, 2017), a book based on the premise that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were the same person, an author whose range was so great that many scholars have been tempted to divide him into two distinct writers. Even readers of Dostoevsky’s The Double (Dvoinik, 1846) couldn’t have expected this sort of afterlife for Russia’s most famous novelists.

  • 2  Pierre Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? trans. by Carol Cosman (New York: The New Press, 2000), p (...)

2Unlike Tolstoevsky, or another object of Bayard’s fascination, Marcel Proust, Bayard refrains from writing loose baggy monsters, books that might be improved by the cutting of digressions. He takes his ideas in unexpected directions and the reader on sudden swerves through an absurdly defamiliarized canon, yet for all the wildness of their content, Bayard’s books are creatures of formal and reassuring predictability: an introduction is followed by three parts of four chapters each, totaling around 150 pages. Chapters are no longer than a dozen pages; one consumes them like candy (like the fiction of Agatha Christie or, in his heyday, the films of Woody Allen), and even if one might feel dizzy or even queasy afterwards, the conceits are memorable. Bayard describes one of his books as ‘dedicated to the experimental construction of a delusional reading’. ‘Such a reading’, he adds, ‘is not intrinsically mad, but is certainly shot through at moments, like all great systemic delusions, with an invisible streak of lunacy’.2 The contrast between the delusion at the heart of each work and the orderly, concise fashion with which that delusion is elaborated, is a defining feature of Bayard’s charm.

  • 3  Pierre Bayard, Le Plagiat par anticipation (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009), p. 25. My transl (...)

3Anticipatory Plagiarism begins with a traditional presentation of the concept’s pedigree. It was first coined by members of the Oulipo group, and François Le Lionnais in particular, to describe cases where contemporary writers discovered in texts from the past ideas of which they had considered themselves the innovators. The notion of ‘anticipatory plagiarism’ was a way of crediting predecessors with having first expressed insights the consequences of which they were not in a position to develop. Le Lionnais used the term ‘plagiarism’ loosely, so loosely that it might be applied to almost any case of literary influence. Bayard calls his bluff and stakes his own claim for originality on his insistence that anticipatory plagiarism must be wilful. He professes that his study will concern itself with ‘the deliberate intention to seek inspiration in works to come’.3

  • 4  Ibid., p. 28.
  • 5  Ibid., p. 14.

4Bayard does not deliver on this claim, and how could he? Although he reverts to terms like ‘embezzlement’ (malversation) to describe a past writer’s anticipation of future work, he allows that the plagiarism need not be ‘completely conscious’.4 In the case of Kafka, he speculates about the writer’s amorous affairs with the ghosts of future women writers, some of whom may not yet have been born; a critic intent on uncovering cases of anticipatory plagiarism must thus function not only as a medium but also as a matchmaker with a clientele of spectral brides. In Bayard’s hands, a discourse used more normatively for crimes gives way to talk of inspiration and play. A charge of anticipatory plagiarism ‘is not bound up in an exclusively condemnatory logic, but equally pays homage to the authors whose methods it calls into question’.5 Authors who can anticipate the future well enough to steal from it should be credited for having the good sense—perhaps even the genius—of knowing whom to rob. The discourse of inculpation is merely a façade; as we will see, Bayard’s work is far more invested in the dynamics of liberation and acquittal.

  • 6  Ibid., p. 57.
  • 7  T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), p. 5.
  • 8  Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 69.
  • 9  Ibid., p. 28.

5Bayard insists that we must distinguish ‘authentic thefts of ideas’ from illusory ones that are based on mere similarities, often arising from our having read the later texts first.6 T.S. Eliot famously wrote that each new work of art modifies all its predecessors: it is not ‘preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’.7 Bayard claims to go beyond Eliot’s insight: ‘According an excessive place to retrospective influence would thus serve to relativize anticipatory plagiarism, even to exculpate those guilty of it, who would thereby be provided the means of defending themselves by blaming the imagination of readers and the ability of readers to come up with similarities’.8 He wants to preserve the frisson of transgression, and he fears that without an insistence on plagiarism, anachronistic reading might be too easily naturalized. In the absence of a requirement for intentional copying, ‘there is a genuine risk, in the overly large conception which the writers of Oulipo often accord to anticipatory plagiarism, of letting the notion dissolve and thus lose its disruptive force’.9

  • 10  Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Bloo (...)
  • 11  As Umberto Eco observes, Bayard is such an attentive reader that he must not have read his own boo (...)

6As these last words suggest, Anticipatory Plagiarism is perhaps less about the promotion of an idea or the identification of culprits than the generous sharing of an emancipatory affect. The book’s principal foe is rigidity—in scholarship and in chronology, and also in literary style. Although Oulipo’s practice revolved around play with self-imposed ‘constraints’, Bayard seeks to free his readers from limitations on interpretation absorbed during their professional formation. So much of learning how to interpret and how to present and defend a reading is bound up with mastering how not to argue and interpret. Bayard describes school as ‘a realm of violence driven by the fantasy that there exists such a thing as thorough reading’, and as ‘a place where everything is calibrated to determine whether students have truly read the books about which they speak and face interrogation’. Such an aim, he adds, ‘is illusory, for reading does not obey the hard logic of true and false, of waving off ambiguity and evaluating with certitude whether readers are telling the truth’.10 Although Bayard makes this claim in a book entitled How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus, 2007), that book itself establishes Bayard as a very close reader—if only for his ability to find authoritative propositions in passages which many actual readers of those books easily forget—and which Bayard now renders emblematic.11

  • 12  Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 117.

7For all his talk about plagiarism, Bayard is a very forgiving scholar. In the writing of literary history, ‘the choice is not between the true and the false but between diverse modalities of error.’12

  • 13  Pierre Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2017), p. 20. My translation.

To accept a margin of imprecision in scientific work is thus not simply a mark of humility, but the recognition—as the entire history of sciences tends to show—that there can be a fecundity of error and that the creative detours that error incites can lead us sometimes to an original vision.13

8‘Reading otherwise’ can expose a scholar to ridicule. Appearing ridiculous is a risk Bayard endorses, and in a philological version of the Passion he is prepared to assume the consequence of that sin, so that others may find the courage—often productively—to err and play.

  • 14  Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (New York: Harvest, 1980), p. 6.

9Vladimir Nabokov described the experience of appreciating—and analyzing—a work of art as the cultivation of ‘a tingle in the spine’.14 That tingle is in part a result of our education and is not easily developed, yet much of what we are trained to do is to discipline that excited response when it occurs. A great deal of that disciplining comes from respecting chronology. Aesthetic appreciation, the starting point of literary scholarship, is bound up with sensory reactions, while history, that fetishist of chronology, is more strictly an intellectual field, working on the body most when the historian borrows from the armory of literature. Bayard encourages literary scholars to struggle against chronological repression. Even those of us who believe that linear time exists should be willing to concede that too often literary scholarship submits to history at too early a stage in the interpretive work that precedes the outlining and writing of a scholarly contribution.

10In this respect Bayard echoes—or inspires—the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the absence of whose name in Bayard’s work—i.e. those books of his that I really have read—is reminiscent of the missing letter ‘e’ in Perec’s The Disappearance (La Disparition, 1969). Bakhtin’s celebrated essay on the chronotope follows a roughly chronological structure— albeit with several important deviations—but it begins with the words ‘the process of the mastering in literature of real historical time’—a phrase that is less the beginning of an assertion about a historical fact than an invocation of a creative muse. The entire first paragraph of Bakhtin’s famous essay on the chronotope is worth quoting:

  • 15  M. M. Bakhtin, Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), p. 12 (...)

The process of the mastering [osvoenie] in literature of real historical time and space and of the real historical man unfolding in them has flowed in complicated and erratic ways. Isolated aspects of time and space accessible at a given historical stage of human development have been mastered [osvaivalis’], and corresponding generic techniques have been elaborated for the reflection and artistic reworking of mastered [osvoennykh] sides of reality.15

  • 16  Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (New York: Harvest, 1981), p. 210.

11Both Bakhtin and Nabokov, as we shall see, are potential and perhaps even repressed interlocutors for Bayard, and what Nabokov said about the word dom [home] at the opening of Anna Karenina—‘this ponderous and solemn repetition, dom, dom, dom, tolling as it does for doomed family life […] is a deliberate device on Tolstoy’s part’—applies with equal force to the start of Bakhtin’s essay.16 Osvoeniia, osvaivalis’, osvoennykh: Bakhtin’s extraordinarily creative and extremely influential contribution to the study of literature begins, like Bayard’s, with the conquest, subordination, and reworking of time.

12The essays in this volume seek to apply Bayard’s concept of anticipatory plagiarism to works of Russian literature. That tack already introduces a certain amount of dissonance, because Bayard himself is less interested in literature for its own sake, than for what literature can tell us about the human mind and the process of literature’s psychic consumption. The application of psychoanalysis to literature, he admits, is essentially reductive, finding only what it already knows will be there. The use of literature and reading for psychic modelling, literature’s application to psychoanalysis, is Bayard’s principal concern. Sometimes, as in his reading of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Bayard’s analysis can transform our understanding of an entire genre, but for the most part his underlying hypotheses about particular writers or texts don’t aim specifically to be true to those texts. Instead, they seek to put those texts to work to produce new models of thinking about literary evolution, reading, or even the structure of the psyche. In disciplinary terms, this is psychoanalysis embracing counter-transference.

13How useful a tool is anticipatory plagiarism for the understanding of specific literary texts? One of the problems with applying Bayard’s notion of anticipatory plagiarism to works of literature is that it is difficult for a scholar to maintain the pretence of taking this idea sufficiently seriously all the way through to the end of an article, let alone a book. Doing so may give the impression that we are producing an influence study in drag, with the travestying of chronology merely serving to reaffirm linear time’s inescapability. Speaking about influence backwards can begin to resemble a kind of scholarly pig-Latin, an exercise in translation more cute than acute, reminiscent of a game show where all the answers have to be phrased as questions.

14Where the investigation of specific literary texts is concerned, anticipatory plagiarism works best when it functions as a heuristic conceit early on in the conceptualization of scholarship, when it reveals something about the ‘plagiarizing’ work that we would not have seen if we had not placed it in extremis by trying to fit it to Bayard’s model. From what future writers, one can ask a class, or oneself, did Gogol or Tolstoy plagiarize? Svetlana Yefimenko sees the value of anticipatory plagiarism as its ability to ‘illuminate latent tendencies’ in the work of the anticipatory plagiarizer. We force a text out of its latency by administering the interpretive equivalent of growth hormones, making it mature before it would otherwise be ready. The exercise might result in a grotesque version of what the original work has come to stand for, but the original work still exists in its original form, and we may now know something about its nature that we otherwise would not have grasped.

15The notion of anticipatory plagiarism, and of the light that can be shed by unabashedly anachronistic methodologies, may be especially important in giving us the confidence not immediately to dismiss a reading when, chronologically speaking, it seems completely improbable. To cite one example, in Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866) Raskolnikov overhears a student and an officer discussing whether they would kill the detested old pawnbroker whose murder Raskolnikov is himself contemplating. The ‘superstitious’ Raskolnikov becomes ‘greatly agitated’:

  • 17  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New Yor (...)

Of course, it was all the most common and ordinary youthful talk and thinking, he had heard it many times before, only in different forms and on different subjects. But why precisely now did he have to hear precisely such talk and thinking, when... exactly the same thoughts had just been conceived in his own head? And why precisely now, as he was coming from the old woman’s bearing the germ of his thought, should he chance upon a conversation about the same old woman?... This coincidence always seemed strange to him. This negligible tavern conversation had an extreme influence on him in the further development of the affair; as though there were indeed some predestination, some indication in it… .… ……… ..…………………………............................ [kak budto deistvitel’no bylo tut kakoe-to predopredelenie, ukazanie… .………… ..………………………… .].17

16The uncharacteristic extended ellipsis at the end highlights the importance of the passage and draws attention to its final words. Reflecting on the uncanniness of the moment, Raskolnikov almost has an insight: shimmering verbally before him, distorted—predopredelenie, ukazanie—lies the name of the novel Raskolnikov inhabits [Prestuplenie i nakazanie], the narrative that has always controlled his destiny. This isn’t the sort of move one expects to find in nineteenth-century realist fiction, let alone in Dostoevsky; it smacks of the poetics of some writers of the next century. We don’t have to accept that Dostoevsky has anticipatorily plagiarized this trick from Nabokov, but treating chronological boundaries as porous prevents us from dismissing this insight as meaningless; we can return to Dostoevsky to hunt for similar examples and begin to play with the various interpretive scenarios in which this reading might make sense.

  • 18  Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 122.
  • 19  Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, p. 195.

17To take one more example, Tolstoy was notoriously careless about time. In War and Peace (Voina i mir, 1869) Liza Bolkonskaya’s pregnancy lasts well over a year. Anna Karenina (1878), as Nabokov pointed out, begins on a day that is alternately Thursday and Friday.18 Moreover, paying close attention to the timeline reveals that in the first half of the novel Vronskii and Anna live through one more year than Kitty and Levin: ‘The mated [live] faster than the mateless’.19 This is a quintessentially performative gesture by the interpreter; Nabokov is trying not so much to show that the off-kilter chronology of the novel makes intrinsic sense as to demonstrate that he, Nabokov, can make it seem to.

18There is another, perhaps more important moment, however, that Nabokov misses. (Even someone as protective of his own priority as Nabokov sometimes cannot tell when he is being anticipatorily plagiarized).

  • 20  ‘The person who came last, the one who is asking for something, must get out! Get out!’ Leo Tolsto (...)

19In the novel’s seventh part, which terminates in Anna’s death, her brother Stiva goes to St Petersburg to try to obtain permission from Anna’s husband for a divorce. Stiva’s plans are thwarted largely because the husband has fallen under the influence of a French mystic, Landau, formerly a salesman in Paris, who has been adopted by a princess and is now, ludicrously, accepted by Petersburg society as a prophet. Stiva himself falls asleep when Landau goes into a trance, whereupon the Frenchman orders Stiva out of the room: ‘ “Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande, qu’elle sorte! Qu’elle sorte!” “C’est moi, n’est-ce pas?”’ Stiva asks, and leaves in a state of terror, ‘forgetting about his sister’s business’.20 Stiva’s abandonment of his sister’s mission is both comic and contemptible, but, ironically, most readers themselves probably forget about this episode in the following tense chapters that lead up to Anna’s throwing herself on the tracks.

  • 21  Ibid., p. 747.
  • 22  Ibid., p. 766.
  • 23  Ibid., p. 732.

20Remembering that séance might be important, however, because three chapters later Vronskii and Anna receive a telegram from Stiva which subtly indicates—‘Decisive answer promised in a day or two’— that in returning the narrative to Moscow, Tolstoy has gone back a day in time, without explicitly telling the reader that he has done so.21 There is an odd specificity in the pages to follow about the timing of Anna’s final moments. Tolstoy tells us the exact hour of her train’s departure (8: 02 pm), and he emphasizes that her final moments are lit by ‘bright evening sunlight.’22 If the reader recalls the details of Stiva’s visit to Petersburg, she might remember that even though he arrives a little late for his evening appointment with Landau and Anna’s husband, ‘it was still broad daylight outside’.23 In other words, it is likely that the séance with Landau and Anna’s death are occurring at roughly the same time on the same day, and that Landau’s final words ‘ “Qu’elle sorte”’ are directed not only at Stiva (gendered as feminine by being the last person—la personne—to enter the room) but, more crucially, at Anna, who, after all, is the ‘she’ of the book. Simultaneously Landau is ordering the brother out of the room and the sister out of the book. He may even be the novel’s final incarnation of the fatidic muzhik of Anna’s nightmares, who, we should remember, also speaks French.

  • 24  See ‘What if Nabokov Had Written “Dvoinik”? Reading Dostoevskii Preposterously’, The Russian Revie (...)

21This sort of subtle narrative trickery is not typical of Tolstoy. For Tolstoy to have planned this parallel would make him a different author from the one we think he is. This synchronization might well be random, and if I had noticed it twenty years ago I would have dismissed it as a curiosity. With an awareness that Tolstoy may have roots in the twentieth century, however, and with an inkling that he may even have intuited the content of the lectures Nabokov would deliver about him eighty years later at Cornell, I hold on to this discovery, seek others like it, and begin to imagine more comprehensive readings into which it might fit.24

22The essential questions for those primarily invested in a specific author or a specific work of literature are the point at which we should remove the Bayardian scaffolding, and whether we should even admit that it was there in the first place. Should the scholar who uses anticipatory plagiarism as an exploratory device worry about the evidence so gained being tainted, the way a court might hesitate before admitting for the jury’s consideration an illegally obtained confession?

23Here is where Bayard’s affect comes in handy. He dispels the anxiety of influence by muddying the question of influence’s vector. This is no less true for scholars than it is for writers. One imagines future reviews and convention cocktail party chatter: ‘Your new book is a marvel; I must admit that I began stealing from it long ago’. Rarely will an assertion of priority have seemed so gracious. The doctrine of anticipatory plagiarism—like all of Bayard’s work—is actually a celebration of readerly originality, and of Bayard’s in the first instance, but it also removes some of the pressure to pretend to be saying something original in the first place. If Bayard were given a home in the syllabi of literature departments, would the result be more plagiarism, less plagiarism, or better plagiarism that would raise this fundamental academic crime to a form of art?

  • 25  Pierre Bayard, Comment améliorer les oeuvres ratées? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2000).

24The joyousness of the world of Bayard’s scholarship is particularly striking. He speaks of ‘ghosts’, ‘revenants’, ‘survenants’ and occasionally of ‘haunting’, but fear takes the day off. The game of anticipatory plagiarism is not an ego-bruising sport, even though it might not be flattering to all the players involved. One of the take-aways from Muireann Maguire’s inspired discovery of the reciprocal plagiarism between Tolstoy and Hall Caine is that she has provided documentation for just how bad Resurrection (Voskresenie, 1899) is. (The author of Anna Karenina could certainly not have engaged in such a relationship with this partner, but by the time he wrote his last novel, Tolstoy was no longer the same person who had written that earlier book). Bayard, to be sure, provides the scholar with the tools to step in and help rather than castigate; in another work of ‘interventionist criticism’ he has suggested how a critic might improve ‘failed works’.25

25The downside of this release from professional panic is that we may lose some of the sense of political and social engagement with which, for better or worse, so many Russian writers have been concerned. Enmeshing a writer like Andrei Platonov in the game of anticipatory plagiarism might deprive his work of its most powerful features, without providing a corresponding pay-off in new insight into his prose. (For Platonov, the jury is still out: does his intense involvement on so many levels with the Soviet project limit his survival as a meaningful writer once the relevance of the Soviet Union subsides?). Can writers who lived through eras of transformative violence find any place in a methodology so invested in the ‘play’ of ideas?

Pierre Bayard’s Nose

26It may well be that Bayard’s various conceits, including anticipatory plagiarism, work better for authors whose writing has come to be appreciated as timeless, speculative and playful rather than those enmeshed in the social questions of their day—among the Russians, that group would include Gogol, Krzhizhanovsky, Kharms, and, above all, Nabokov. Other Russian writers, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, can fit into that group only with great effort (through, as the French would say, a willingness to se couper en quatre).

27As Timothy Langen and Ilya Vinitsky demonstrate, Gogol offers a terrific match for Bayard’s methodology. Gogol’s stories furnish much fodder for traditional psychoanalysis, and they have been subjected to repeated reductive readings. In a psychoanalytic context Gogol’s stories need not be read, however, as parables about castration anxiety or fantasies about a return to the womb; on the contrary, Gogol provides fertile territory for Bayard’s practice of applying literature to psychoanalysis. Let’s look at the potential for such an approach in ‘The Nose’ (Nos, 1836) that comedic nightmare about a body part which liberates itself from its owner and takes over the whole of his existence.

  • 26  Ruth Mack Brunswick, ‘Supplement to Freud’s “History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1928)’, in The Wol (...)

28We begin with one of Freud’s most famous cases. After his analysis with Freud came to an end, Sergei Pankejeff, otherwise known as the Wolf Man, sought treatment with another analyst, Ruth Mack Brunswick, who would also write up his case. Pankejeff had produced one of the most celebrated dreams in the history of psychoanalysis: his vision of wolves sitting in a walnut tree, which Freud interpreted as a reflection of the primal scene, the witnessing by a child of his parents’ coitus. When he came to Brunswick, Pankejeff was suffering from what she termed a ‘hypochondriacal idée fixe’.26 This was a constant preoccupation with his nose, which he examined every few minutes in a pocket mirror and which he took to several doctors for various forms of unnecessary treatment. At times, he was troubled by the shape of his nose; at others, he complained of a pimple or a hole in it.

  • 27  Ibid., p. 300.

29During the period of his analysis with Freud, the Wolf Man had been treated as well for the obstruction of his sebaceous glands. Both therapeutic interventions had concluded with apparent success. The glands had begun to function properly and the Wolf Man’s unconscious had given Freud enough material to produce insight into the patient’s unconscious. Now both mind and nose were perceived by Pankejeff as needing treatment once more, but the two problems had become explicitly conjoined. Brunswick was impressed by ‘the monosymptomatic nature of the psychosis. The patient when talking about anything except his nose was entirely sane. The mention of that organ made him act like the classic lunatic’.27

  • 28  Ibid., p. 300.

30Brunswick confidently asserted that ‘the nose is, of course, the genital’.28 Reductively, she saw her patient’s desire to inflict a wound on his nose as a castration fantasy, and the hostility he had developed towards dermatologists as a reaction against it.

  • 29  Ibid., p. 286.

31The Wolf Man had one more symptom which Brunswick found difficult to incorporate into her analysis: he had developed an inability to read fiction. This was due to his refusal to ‘identify himself with the hero of a book, because that hero, created by the author, was wholly in the power of his creator; on the other hand, his sense of creative inhibition made it impossible for him to identify with the author’.29

32Brunswick had great difficulty in forcing her patient to discuss his nose. He did, however, bring her dreams to analyze, including the following one:

  • 30  Ibid., p. 281.

He is standing at the prow of a ship, carrying a bag containing jewelry— his wife’s earrings and her silver mirror. He leans against the rail, breaks the mirror, and realizes that, as a result, he will have seven years of bad luck.30

  • 31  Ibid., p. 282.
  • 32  Ibid., p. 281.

33Pankejeff told Brunswick that he realized that his nose was present here in the boat’s prow, since in Russian ‘nos’ means both a nose and the front of a ship. The jewels were objects which in real life Pankejeff had not told Freud about because he feared that if Freud knew about them, he would cease giving him money. Brunswick read the dream as bound up with the patient’s refusal to acknowledge his own unscrupulousness (towards Freud), as well as with his adoption of the feminine habit of looking frequently at himself, which she later linked to sexual ideation aligned with the patient’s domination by his wife: ‘The passivity formerly directed entirely towards his father and even here masked as activity, had now broken its bounds and included in its sweep both homosexual and heterosexual relations’.31 The seven years were the elapsed time since her patient’s analysis with Freud, during which time he had begun concealing his jewels. Pankejeff’s hiding his wealth from Freud had resulted in this dream about punishing himself: ‘when one breaks a mirror one simultaneously breaks one’s own reflection. Thus the patient’s own face was damaged along with the mirror’.32

  • 33  Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1 (...)

34Had Brunswick paid more attention to her patient’s difficulty with literature, she might have realized that the key to this dream and to his symptoms rested elsewhere than in already ossifying psychoanalytic theory. Brunswick did not speak Russian, and so she did not grasp the linguistic (and conceptual) linkage between Pankejeff’s nasal problems and his need for further psychoanalysis. Both the sebaceous glands and the unconscious needed to be unblocked, so that they might give up their sekrety, a word which in Russian means secrets and secretions. (Here Ilya Vinitsky’s reference in this volume to Gogol’s ‘secretics’ acquires additional significance). More importantly, she does not seem to have read much Russian literature, because if she had, she would have seen the connection between the Wolf Man’s predicament and Gogol’s famous story. Gogol’s intended original Russian title for that tale was ‘son’ (a dream)—which. as many of the story’s readers realize, is nose spelled backwards.33 Looking at his nose repeatedly in a mirror, Pankejeff was obsessively contemplating his famous dream.

35This dream had come to define Pankejeff and would continue to do so for the remainder of his life. He became, in effect, a ward of the psychoanalytic community. As George Dimock has observed:

  • 34  George Dimock, ‘Anna and The Wolf-Man: Rewriting Freud’s Case History’, Representations, 50 (Sprin (...)

In his later years, the Wolf-Man collaborated within such a mire of vacillation and conflicting interpretations, actively solicited by him from many different psychoanalytic quarters, as to make a mockery of the traditional therapeutic relationship. In interpreting the patient’s difficulties, indecisiveness, and ambivalences (most often concerning heterosexual erotic entanglements), it becomes impossible to distinguish finally between the patient’s struggle for mental health and a mode of existence organized subtly yet effectively around exploiting his place in the early history of psychoanalysis as a test case whose outcome remained forever in doubt.34

  • 35  Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories (New York: Collier, 1963), pp. 219–20.
  • 36  Critiquing Brunswick’s treatment of Pankejeff, Robert J. Langs has noted that in her analysis of t (...)
  • 37  Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have identified many interlinguistic homonyms and puns that may su (...)

36Pankejeff had become a prisoner of his dream, which his monomaniacal obsession with his nose had turned into his principal symptom. Freud’s reading of Pankejeff’s dream was based on the dynamics of reversal— the wolves in the dream are still because in reality his parents were engaged in violent coital motion; the beasts are watchful because the dreamer was originally watching them, etc.35 So it makes perfect sense that Pankejeff’s later dream would employ an even more explicit form of visual reversal: spelling backwards. Brunswick may have been right about the dream’s aggressivity towards Freud, but that hostility was connected not (or not only) with the analysand’s repressed awareness of his own duplicity but with his desire to shatter Freud’s reading and the character into which Freud had made him.36 In this dynamic the earrings also play a role. A serezhka is not only an earring, but a diminutive form of the dreamer’s first name, the name that would have been used to address Pankejeff as a child and thus his identity at the time of his famous dream. To pursue this reading further, the wolf dream had become a sign of Serezhka’s infantilization by psychoanalysis; smashing his dream, Pankejeff was rebelling against his status as Freud’s son (i.e. the son [dream] that made him Freud’s sohn [son]) and, perhaps, insisting on recovering the Russian element of his unconscious from its German captivity.37 His dream about the mirror and the earrings was a meta-dream, less about castration anxiety than about the relationship between patient and analyst.

  • 38  On the Wolf Man’s interest in Russian literature, see Dimock, ‘Anna and the Wolf-Man’, pp. 65–67; (...)
  • 39  Freud, Three Case Histories, p. 316.

37From this perspective it makes perfect sense that Pankejeff’s inability to read literature would be bound up with his nasal preoccupations. He was disturbed by the dynamic of a protagonist finding himself completely controlled by his author, as though the hero had a prior identity that had been lost in the process of storytelling. Here is where Gogol’s story comes in. What was once a part of the principal character appropriates his entire identity. Like Pankejeff, Kovalev, the principal figure in Gogol’s story, inspects himself frequently in the mirror, and he initially suspects that the absence of his nose [nos] may be a dream [son], but he doesn’t connect those two words to see that it is his dream that has replaced him in the world of the story. Pankejeff was fond of Russian literature and had probably read Gogol’s story, but that likelihood is of less consequence than Gogol’s anticipation of what might be considered one of the central dynamics of psychoanalysis: this usurpation of the conscious subject by a suddenly rampant part or product of his identity.38 Freud himself later observed that after the conclusion of his initial treatment, the Wolf Man ‘had been seized with a longing to tear himself free of my influence’.39 Gogol’s story allegorizes an analysand’s fear of subsumption by his symptoms and serves as a nightmarish realization of the patient’s wish to be free of them. To steal Dimock’s phrase, Gogol ‘makes a mockery of the traditional therapeutic relationship’. After all, the primal scene of psychoanalysis has nothing to do with parental coitus but is, rather, the analyst’s interpretation of the patient’s dream.

  • 40  Peter Brooks, ‘Fictions of the Wolfman: Freud and Narrative Understanding’, Diacritics, 9: 1 (Spri (...)
  • 41  Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, p. 256, quoted by Brooks in ‘Fictions’, p. 79.

38Pankejeff regarded himself as Freud’s partner in the analysis of his own psychopathology, and by this point he had presumably grasped the psychoanalytic penchant for portraying the analysand as, in Peter Brooks’ words, ‘mak [ing] raids on a putative masterplot in order to remedy the insufficiencies of his own unsatisfactory plot’.40 It is thus not surprising that his unconscious would turn to literature to represent his psychic plight, although it is unexpected that he would displace Oedipus and the sphinx with Kovalev and his nose, filling in what Freud called the ‘gaps in individual truth’, not with ‘prehistoric truth’, as did Jung and Freud, but with Gogol.41 What is astonishing is that long before Anticipatory Plagiarism, the Wolf Man had at least unconsciously understood that Gogol had foreseen, or, in nineteenth-century terminology ‘prophesized’, one of the potential pitfalls of psychoanalysis.

39Gogol went into the future to capture the analysand’s predicament. It might even be that many of Gogol’s mature works of fiction, and, in particular, the Petersburg tales, are anticipatory parables of different aspects of the psychoanalytic situation. (The next step would be to determine what aspects of Gogol’s poetics allowed him to so compellingly foresee psychoanalytic practice.) Pankejeff’s irrational hatred of tailors during his analysis with Freud might lead us to have a look at ‘The Overcoat’ (‘Shinel’’, 1842) in which the predicament of the ‘Certain Significant Person’, an initially powerful figure haunted at the story’s end by the ghost of the pathetic Akaky Akakievich, might function as an exemplary representation of the analyst undone by counter-transference. And as for Dead Souls… (Mertvye dushi, 1842). We will stop here; Bayard has taken us far enough.

Pierre Bayard—Ivan Karamazov

40Bayard’s boldest engagement with Russian writers comes in a recent book, The Tolstoevsky Enigma. He begins by arguing with critics who have based their work on the far-fetched hypothesis that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were different people. As everyone knows, one author, Tolstoevsky, is responsible for the single body of work that some have wanted to distribute between two writers.

  • 42  Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski, p. 26.

It is certainly difficult to admit that Anna Karenina and the Brothers Karamazov might be products of the same pen, the question of unity is posed in [all of Tolstoevsky’s] novels. How else to explain that the same author could have set before us characters as different as Anna and Kitty, or Alyosha and the Karamazov father?42

41There is a long tradition of treating these two writers as part of a dyad, or, as in Allen’s Love and Death (1975), as the most important contributors to a common Russian cultural storehouse from which items can be drawn for a variety of philosophical or comic purposes. Bayard lumps them together for a novel reason: he uses Tolstoevsky to argue for a theory of multiple personality that could challenge the Freudian notion of the unconscious.

42Although multiple personality is considered a psychiatric disorder, like many such pathologies the disease represents an exaggerated state of a normal aspect of the human condition. Bayard shows how Tolstoevsky’s characters act inconsistently in the course of each book. It isn’t that Prince Andrei or Natasha change, but that they become “other”; within each of them are several personalities capable of taking control at a given point. This division of a subject into several selves explains how Natasha can simultaneously love two men or Myshkin two women:

  • 43  Ibid., p. 50.

[...] if it is possible to fall simultaneously in love with several people, it is because we are several, and there should be no cause to be astonished by the coincidence in us of parallel loves, something no stranger than if two of our friends fall at the same time for two different women.43

  • 44  Ibid., p. 43.
  • 45  Ibid., p. 102.

43As this insight suggests, Tolstoevsky is teaching his readers a message that has been hitherto missed: ‘All of Tolstoevsky’s work, as well as his life, suggests that we are multiples’.44 ‘The entire oeuvre of Tolstoevsky’, Bayard concludes, ‘never stops proclaiming: we are not a being divided into distinct parts, we are several persons who fight or sometimes unite, and it is this division which makes us suffer so’.45

  • 46  Ibid., p. 157.

44Towards the end of the book, Bayard implicitly nods to the Tolstoevsky scholar who, apparently, must not be named explicitly: ‘It is necessary to think less in terms of [the characters’] psychic evolution than in terms of an internal polyphony that remains active until the end; vanquished personalities or those who have remained discrete do not disappear but seek a chance to seize power up to the very last moment’.46 In effect, Bayard transforms Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony from a serious ideological aspect of Dostoevsky’s formal poetics into a semi-comic psychic principle underlying Tolstoevsky’s work. The result is not only a parody of Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Problemi poetiki Dostoevskogo, 1963) but also an anticipatory parody of Yuri Corrigan’s Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self (2017), which appeared the same year as Bayard’s book and which argues that Dostoevsky’s work is about the suffering produced by ‘invasive intimacy’ and the porousness of the human personality:

  • 47  Yuri Corrigan, Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, (...)

Behind such examples of feverishly intersecting personalities looms the foundational riddle of Dostoevsky’s writing, perhaps the most confusing, contradictory, and agonized aspect of his philosophical worldview, namely, his simultaneous advocacy for and rejection of the notion of an individual self. As an enemy of individualism, Dostoevsky categorically rejected the concept of a self that was not inherently integrated into other selves.47

  • 48  Olga Partan has linked Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ (‘Shinel’’, 1842) to its author’s interest in Rome a (...)

45(The category of anticipatory parody merits its own chapter and raises the question for Slavists of how Bayard’s work might enrich Iurii Tynianov’s work on literary parody in particular and the work of the Russian Formalists in general, enabling us, for example, to catch the hidden double pun underlying Boris Eikhenbaum’s famous article ‘How Gogol’s Polichinelle Was Made’).48

46The Tolstoevsky Enigma has additional parodic targets. It also takes as its object the work of both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy themselves. Bayard notes that Tolstoevsky’s oeuvre consistently concerns itself with the ethics of judgment, and he focuses on Resurrection and The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1881), where the morality of judging comes under particular attack. Disregarding each novel’s superficially Christian framing of this issue, Bayard reveals that the biggest problem with passing judgment on another is that judgment relies on the ‘illusory’ assumption that man is stabilized ‘around a univocal essence’:

  • 49  Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski, pp. 150–51

The dissolution of the ‘I’ in Tolstoevsky leads to the greatest caution in the evaluation of others, and especially in the project of punishing them. […] The hypothesis of multiple personalities […] supposes the existence in us of several subjects in conflict and delineates on this basis a psychic universe that is largely uncontrollable, leading to a society where every act is pardonable from a certain point of view, since the unity of people which would allow for the organization of the collective has disappeared.49

  • 50  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New Y (...)
  • 51  Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski, p. 153.
  • 52  Ibid., pp. 158–9. Emphasis in the original.

47While in the Brothers Karamazov the problematic of judgment is linked to a message of universal culpability—‘each of us is guilty in everything before everyone’50—in Bayard’s reading, the moral conflictedness of judging is born of a realization that we are all at least partly, or even mostly, innocent. This insight has relevance not only for criminal law but also for the regulation of marriage: ‘The legal status of unions between human beings should take into consideration the plurality exemplified by polyamorousness and should leave open the possibility of multiple unions among persons, permitting each of the many that we are to lead an autonomous life with the beings of our choice’.51 Most of all, Tolstoevsky urges us all to be less hard on ourselves. The theory of multiple personalities so evident in his work ‘calls on us to be more attentive to our own person, since it leads us to pay attention to our own selves and to those of our multiple inhabitants, and, as we develop a feeling of empathy towards ourselves, to avoid uselessly inculpating ourselves for acts we have not committed’.52

  • 53  D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, ed. by Ralph (...)

48Not since D. H. Lawrence explicated ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ has reading Tolstoevsky been so uplifting.53 One puts down Bayard’s book feeling like a better person. He urges us to be more attentive to others, to look, amidst the diversity of personalities offered to us in another as an interlocutor, for the one most likely to engage with us in productive dialogue. Bayard finds the best in every character, too, as in the scene where Andrei forgives Anatole when they simultaneously undergo surgery in the same field hospital. It isn’t so much that either of them has been transformed as that a previously-existing person in each of them has now become dominant:

  • 54  Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski, p. 140.

It would be wrong to say that Andrei has changed, since he is not the same man as the one who was abandoned by Natasha, and it is almost absurd that he keeps the same name and that we use the pronoun ‘he’ to talk about ‘him.’ The passage from one personality to another has occurred in him progressively, and the war was the element that triggered this alternation. Coming face to face with the horrors of the front has played a role in what is less an evolution than a substitution.54

49This is a charitable reading of the scene, which is far darker—and more susceptible to a Freudian interpretation—than Bayard admits. Andrei awakes from his abdominal surgery with a feeling of unexplainable bliss. Anatole is lying on a nearby table—his leg has been removed while Andrei slept:

  • 55  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 2 (...)

‘Show me... Oooh! oh! oooh! ’ his moaning, broken by sobs, was heard, frightened and resigned to his suffering. Hearing those moans, Prince Andrei wanted to weep. Whether it was because he was dying without glory, or because he was sorry to part with life, or from those memories of long-lost childhood, or because he was suffering, others were suffering, and this man was moaning so pitifully before him, he wanted to weep childlike, kind, almost joyful tears.
The wounded man was shown his cut-off leg in a boot caked with blood!
‘Oh! Oooh! ’ he sobbed like a woman. The doctor, who was standing in front of the wounded man, screening his face, stepped away.
‘My God! What is this? Why is he here?’Prince Andrei said to himself.
In the unfortunate, sobbing, exhausted man whose leg had just been removed, he recognized Anatole Kuragin.55

  • 56  Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, p. xxii.

50Anatole weeps like a woman, because by the logic of castration he has become one. The amputation, occurring while Andrei was under anesthesia, might be read as the consequence of the fantasy of the vengeful Prince’s potent unconscious. In any case, the conscious Andrei can forgive Anatole, not because the Prince realizes that he, too, is guilty, or that Anatole was partly innocent, but because someone (‘My God! ’) has punished Anatole already. Those who are without sin do not have to cast the first stone; Tolstoy will do it for them. This moment is not like the gentle epiphany of Mitia Karamazov’s dream of ‘The Babe’, which emphasizes universal responsibility for the ills of the earth; rather it anticipates the epigraph—‘Vengeance is mine [sayeth the Lord], and I shall repay’—which will soon open Anna Karenina.56

  • 57  Pierre Bayard, ‘Comment j’ai fait régresser la critique’, in Pour une critique décalée: autour des (...)
  • 58  Ibid., p. 30, p. 34.

51The third object of the Tolstoevsky book’s parody (after Bakhtin/Corrigan and Tolstoy/Dostoevsky) is Pierre Bayard himself. In an earlier article, Bayard has summed up the diverse strands of his scholarly work under the rubric of ‘regressive criticism’. By this term he means several things, including not only a stylistic return to an early era, a time predating French humanistic writing of the 1970s (The Tolstoevsky Enigma might for several reasons have been entitled Anti-Anti-Oedipus), but also a return to unconscious and pre-rational modes of thought, where criticism owes much to the logic of dreams, in which identities can be swapped or condensed. A concomitant part of regression is its return of the critic to an infantile view of the world. ‘My texts can convey the feeling that they have been written not by a rational adult, but by a child who knows no limits and is animated by a feeling of omnipotence’.57 The critic becomes a ‘demiurge’ capable of intervening in a text and bestowing autonomous life on the characters. The resulting ‘incompetent criticism’ also presses against and even ruptures one of the fundamental boundaries of writing, ‘the line which separates theory from fiction’.58 If scholarship and fiction begin to merge, there is no reason why the critic, like a writer of fiction, cannot employ a narrator who would be different in each scholarly work, or why he could not employ several narrators in the same work:

  • 59  Ibid., p. 35.

The narrators of my theoretical texts are for me characters from whom I maintain a rather large distance even if they resemble me in more than one aspect. I would say that they incarnate certain mad parts of me, but not more, just as an author of detective fiction seeks in himself the criminal impulses to which he only rarely yields in real life.59

52In the light of these earlier methodological statements, it becomes clear that in The Tolstoevsky Enigma, Bayard’s narrator has pulled out all the stops, letting his impulses go as far as they can take him. In effect, he treats Russia as an arena for the fulfilment of his demiurgic will, exercising a philological variant of the sense of unlimited freedom that Russians call volia; Russia, that stereotypical land of extremes, gives Bayard––like a tourist on an erotic vacation––carte blanche for the exercise of his interpretive libido.

  • 60  Pierre Bayard, Comment améliorer les oeuvres ratées?. This book never uses the word ‘parody’. It i (...)
  • 61  M. M. Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, trans. by Vadim Liapunov (Austin, TX: University o (...)
  • 62  Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN: Unive (...)

53Bayard’s parodic treatment of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky operates through a dynamic of reversal, as it makes a mockery of their ethical values. Tolstoy’s principle of truth and Dostoevsky’s adherence to Christ are overthrown, and no absolute principle is installed in their place. The parodic treatment of Bayard by Bayard, however, operates through a different parodic mechanism: acceleration, as though a work like Anticipatory Plagiarism were projected (perhaps, backwards) at double-speed. (This is a process practiced in the hysterically funny final chapter of How to Improve Failed Works (Comment améliorer les oeuvres ratées?, 2000), where Bayard flips the switch to show how easy it is—by accentuating all their faults—to make failed works collapse completely.)60 A guilt-free Ivan Karamzov takes over, and everything is indeed permitted. Where Bakhtin insisted on the ethical imperative of incarnation, of assuming a place for which one will be responsible, Bayard embraces Bakhtin’s bête noire: ‘an alibi for being’.61 The scholar can never be reliably located behind his words, from which he always takes his distance. To use a term elaborated in Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky book, Bayard always retains a ‘loophole’.62

  • 63  Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, p. 105.
  • 64  Bayard, How to Talk About Books, p. 164.
  • 65  Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski, p. 119.

54Does Bayard’s approach to literature have any constraints? He suggests in one book that because every literary text represents an incomplete world, the reader is always expected, even entitled, to supplement it, ‘for example by consciously or unconsciously imagining a multitude of details that are not directly provided’.63 In another book, when discussing the plots of The Third Man, Changing Places, and The Name of the Rose, he invents plot details which he reveals as false only much later.64 Would it be kosher not to reveal these changes? (This might explain why in Tolstoevsky Bayard has Petr Verkhovenskii execute Kirillov and why he implicates Pierre and the cross-dressing Sonia in an adulterous homosexual relationship.)65 Would it be permissible to invent quotations, for instance, to supplement phrases used as epigraphs? Are the footnotes, limited as they are, still sacrosanct territory, or may they refer to works of scholarship that should have been written but weren’t? If works of literature are allowed to exchange their authors, can texts be reassigned in a bibliography? If the answer to these questions is ‘Yes’, can scholars liberated by Bayard profit from his insights but still be taken seriously in making original claims about a specific literary text?

55Bayard’s embrace of dream logic frees the critic from all superficial rapport with the truth, because dreams represent a more profound truth that must be subjectively interpreted to be objectively useful for an understanding of the original texts involved. Is such a combination feasible? Bayard’s readers have an advantage over a psychoanalyst, who has access to a text only through the patient’s recitation of his dream. Clearly, we don’t need Bayard to read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but we can savour the absurd charm of his Tolstoevsky and then return to the original, to which we can apply the fruits of his “fecund” mistakes. Here we see the distance between Bayard and most of the essays in the current collection. Where Bayard’s narrator sees in Russia the potential for wild excess, a place where the analyst is freed of all responsibility to the texts under review, the articles in Reading Backwards view Russian literature as a place where Bayard’s energy can be harnessed. Enter, this book says to him, but please try to behave. We want to exploit you for our purposes, not the other way around.

Pierre Bayard, Victim of Anticipatory Plagiarism, or The Russian Empire Strikes Back

  • 66  Ibid., p. 60.

56The idea of multiple personalities is taken from Proust, who ‘suggests at many points that we are divided into a multitude of “I” s’.66 In this respect, The Tolstoevsky Enigma is a culturally imperialist project, as though the French were invading Russia once again and appropriating its textual resources. To take a cue from Bayard’s other titles, this book might easily have been dubbed Et si Napoléon avait remporté la campagne de 1812? (What If Napoleon Had Won the Campaign of 1812?), for Russia’s defeat seems to be a repeated fantasy underlying Bayard’s work. In one chapter of his What if Works Swapped Authors (Et si les oeuvres changeaient d’auteur?, 2010), Bayard imagines Tolstoy as the author of Gone With the Wind (1936), a work that might substitute for War and Peace, since it, too, is described as dealing with a vanquished army and a sacked city:

  • 67  Pierre Bayard, Et si les oeuvres changeaient d’auteur? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2010), p. 9 (...)

Born in 1828, Tolstoi had been struck, like all members of his generation, by the debacle of the Russian army and the stories of the Napoleonic invasion. [...] If the historical context of the [South in the American] Civil War is different, it is nevertheless the same story recounted in the two cases: that of a progressive military defeat, which leads to a foreign army taking control of the land on which one lives.67

57Nowhere does Bayard mention that the Russians eventually defeated and expelled the French (nor that the Russian equivalent of slavery would not be abolished for another fifty years).

  • 68  Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, p. 283.
  • 69  Georgii Ivanov, comments made in response to a questionnaire on Proust printed in Chisla, 1 (1930) (...)

58Interpretations of Tolstoevsky are not in short supply, and Russianists don’t have to corner that market, but we should be particularly wary of—to use Nabokov’s phrase—‘Proustianizing and Procrusteanizing’ readings of Tolstoy.68 Less than a decade after Proust’s death, some Russian writers in France sensed this danger, which arose, oddly, from the very proto-modernist features in Tolstoy that Bayard would see as evidence of anticipatory plagiarism. The Russian poet and critic Georgii Ivanov suggested that Proust could be used as a test to measure the vitality of Russia’s greatest writers. Stand Gogol up to Proust, Ivanov wrote, and Gogol remains Gogol, and the same is true for Pushkin, but Tolstoy begins to wither and fade. It is, Ivanov added, ‘an unpleasant spectacle’.69

59In other words, Tolstoy may need our help. The situation demands what Bayard might call ‘Counter-Interventionist Criticism’. Instead of accepting the notion that Tolstoevsky’s works should be hollowed out and reconstructed in accordance with Proust, mightn’t we turn the vector of influence around and point out—graciously but firmly—how in a more traditional but equally unexpected manner Bayard and Proust may have modelled themselves on Nabokov and Tolstoy?

  • 70  Several scholars have linked Bayard and Nabokov, including Jean-Michel Rabaté, who uses their view (...)

60Let’s begin with Nabokov. Within the paradigm of anticipatory plagiarism, there is no shame in admitting that much of what Pierre Bayard writes, Vladimir Nabokov stole first. Nabokov’s remarks about the topics that so fascinate Bayard are scattered among many works; they rarely become a consistent focus and are, so to speak, consistently exceptional. Thus, it is clear, according to the metrics laid out by Bayard, that this is a case of anticipatory and not classic plagiarism, because Bayard has treated these issues more systematically.70

  • 71  Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, p. 216.
  • 72  Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 56.
  • 73  Pierre Bayard, Demain est écrit (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2005); Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai G (...)

61The similarities are numerous and striking. Nabokov’s fiction and lectures abound with references to anachronistic reading and backwards influence. In Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert publishes an article entitled ‘The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey’.71 Nabokov rated Charles Dickens much more highly than Jane Austen, and so he told his students at Cornell when the class moved forward chronologically from Mansfield Park (1814) to Bleak House (1853) that ‘had Dickens come before Austen, we should have said that the Price family is positively Dickensian and that the Price children tie up nicely with the child theme that runs through Bleak House’.72 Nabokov begins his study of Gogol with the writer’s death and ended it with his birth, the model for a biography Bayard has envisioned for Oscar Wilde.73 He concludes his lecture on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) with the kind of anecdote Bayard finds irresistible:

  • 74  Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 204.

[Stevenson] went down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of his favorite burgundy, uncorked it in the kitchen, and suddenly cried out to his wife: what’s the matter with me, what is this strangeness, has my face changed?—and fell on the floor. A blood vessel had burst in his brain and it was all over in a couple of hours. What, has my face changed? There is a curious thematical link between this last episode in Stevenson’s life and the fateful transformations in his most wonderful book.74

  • 75  Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak (London: Penguin, 2019), p. 245, p. 265
  • 76  Nabokov, Pnin, p. 10; Eric Naiman, ‘Nabokov’s McCarthyisms: Pnin in the Groves of Academe’, Compar (...)
  • 77  Vladimir Nabokov, ‘The Circle’, in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 1995), pp.  (...)
  • 78  Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 9.

62Some of Nabokov’s anachronizing fantasies are bizarre. Though he initially resisted the idea of having a child actress play Lolita in a film— ‘to make a real twelve-year-old girl play such a part in public would be sinful and immoral, I will never consent to it’—he eventually changed his mind: ‘a child should play the role. I wish I could turn back the clock on some of our better-known actresses’.75 Nabokov played with the idea of modelling his novels on works by Tolstoevsky: a student in Pnin (1957) dreams of learning Russian so that she can read Anna Karamazov in the original, and Pnin itself can be read as both a contestation and a mash-up of Tolstoevsky’s greatest works.76 Nabokov’s novels often have a circular design; one short story even begins with the words ‘In the second place’, and ends with a sentence starting ‘In the first place’.77 Like Bayard, Nabokov comes close to effacing the boundary between scholarship and fiction; Pale Fire (1962) mirrors Nabokov’s commentary (1964) to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1825–32), Bend Sinister (1947) and Pnin (1957) contain passages in which analyses of Hamlet (1609) and Anna Karenina are ingeniously interwoven into the thematics of the novel. Moreover, taking a page from Bayard’s book, Nabokov was not averse to describing a non-existent scene when discussing a work of fiction, particularly if that work was his own.78

  • 79  J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2001), p. 32. (...)

63Perhaps most pertinently, Nabokov was fascinated by the theories of John W. Dunne and his 1927 book, An Experiment with Time. Dunne, who also interested Borges, viewed dreams not as the road to the unconscious, but as a reflection of the non-linear nature of time. In accordance with Dunne’s recommended experimental practice, Nabokov recorded his dreams immediately upon awakening and then, in the days to come, scanned his life as it unfolded for echoing events which, had they occurred before the dream, would have been seen as the source of the dream’s content. (Dunne compared this process to holding a book one has already read up to a mirror and rereading it with all the words backwards.) Dunne’s idea was that the universe was ‘really stretched out in Time, and that the lop-sided view we had of it—a view with the “future” part unaccountably missing, cut off from the growing “past” part by a travelling “present moment”—was due to a purely mentally imposed barrier which existed only when we were awake’.79 In dreams this barrier gave way; their content was shaped by the simultaneous presence of future and past.

  • 80  Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 94.

64There are many reasons for Nabokov’s attraction to Dunne’s ideas; Nabokov’s model of good reading was to know a text so well that it lost its temporal dimension and became totally accessible all at once, like a painting. Moreover, Dunne’s method of reading dreams offered an interpretive paradigm that owed nothing to Freud. While Dunne was uninterested in questions of originality or plagiarism, his idea that dreams pick details out of both the future and the past owes much to one of the explanations offered by Bayard for the phenomenon of anticipatory plagiarism: the Borgesian idea that language is an enormous reservoir (un gigantesque combinatoire) from which writers from all times can draw inspiration.80

  • 81  Pierre Bayard, Il existe d’autres mondes (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2014), pp. 99–107.

65The similarities between Bayard and Nabokov are so striking that a Bayardian model other than anticipatory plagiarism might be put into play: that of parallel universes. In There Exist Other Worlds (Il existe d’autres mondes, 2014), Bayard devotes a chapter to Lolita as part of his heuristic suggestion that the Freudian paradigms of phantasms (repeated libidinal scenarios) and sublimation might be replaced by the conceit that the same writer simultaneously pursues his psychic, creative, and even biographical existences in two or more parallel worlds.81 Since the universe is infinite, not only life, but specific authors may exist in multiple incarnations, like nearly identical forms of books in an infinite library. One can conceive of this planetary multiplicity in psychic terms; an author’s work does not so much body forth or sublimate libidinal desires as imagine alternative paths.

  • 82  The narrator of this particular book does not seem to be as careful a reader as some of Bayard’s o (...)

66Strangely, Bayard does not perceive that he himself might be an alternative version of Nabokov, that their shared anachronistic fascinations might indicate that one of them has created the other. For Bayard, Nabokov is interesting primarily as an author obsessed with paedophilic desires; Bayard even imagines a parallel Nabokov raping in the woods a school girl attending one of his classes. This crime is presented with such specificity that the reader may wonder if the fantasy is shared by Bayard himself, or, at least, by his narrator.82 Although its author may not have realized it, the logic of There Exist Other Worlds suggests that Bayard and Nabokov, with all their overlapping preoccupations, may actually be the same person. As Charles Kinbote, the ultimate interventionist critic, says at the end of Pale Fire (1962):

  • 83  Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 300–01.

God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of [suicidal] desire. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, in other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as a happy, healthy, heterosexual French intellectual?83

  • 84  Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Komnata’, in his Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 5 vols (St Petersburg: S (...)
  • 85  Bayard, Comment améliorer, passim. To be sure, in order to suggest improvements, Bayard must first (...)
  • 86  Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 3.
  • 87  These invented midterms are still unpublished and can be found in the Nabokov archive in the Berg (...)

67Not so fast. Anticipatory Plagiarism is based on a rhetoric of similarity, but the differences between Nabokov and Bayard may be more important than the likenesses. Nabokov was more attracted to difference: ‘perhaps the less noticeable the difference, the more that difference is divine...’.84 To name just a few salient points of divergence, Nabokov is far less forgiving, and he certainly does not celebrate the ‘fecundity’ of mistakes. The concept of ‘the bad reader’ does not exist in Bayard’s gentle universe, while that category haunts Nabokov’s lectures, novels and classrooms. (Bayard does admit that there are ‘failed works’, but he spends an entire book pointing out how they might be improved.)85 Nabokov is probably the only author ever to write a manifesto in the form of a quiz.86 The fear of getting caught, or called out for a blunder, and the joy of catching another’s ‘howlers’ subtend the study of Nabokov, who was himself a savage reviewer. In the seven books by Bayard that I’ve read, and in the dozen or so that I have not, I have yet to find a dismissive or an unkind word for a colleague; since everything is permitted, the world of literary scholarship does not need to be policed. Nabokov’s fiction, lectures and scholarship teem with gleeful references to awarding poor marks; returning his midterms on April Fools’ Day in 1957, he read aloud two failing exams that he himself had delightedly composed on behalf of a pair of fictitious class members from different economic backgrounds— to show the students that they could not convincingly talk about books they hadn’t read.87 I imagine that at Paris VIII, Bayard is a far more indulgent grader.

  • 88  Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. (...)
  • 89  Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 126–27.

68A final difference comes with Nabokov’s insistence on authorial hierarchy and prioritization. Although he could play with anachronistic thoughts, it was very important that innovative artists be given their due. Richard Rorty has explained Nabokov’s hostility towards Freud as a case of Nabokov’s having discovered that someone had already stolen his best lines.88 The Oedipal complex aside, Nabokov might have been expected to appreciate Freud’s genius for paranomasia, but he claimed that Freud’s flair in this regard was but a pale imitation of Shakespeare’s talent. Asked by an interviewer what neighbour he would like in heaven, Nabokov responded: ‘It would be fun to hear Shakespeare roar with ribald laughter on being told what Freud (roasting in the other place) made of his plays’.89

  • 90  Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, p. 183.
  • 91  Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 231.
  • 92  Ibid., p. 220.
  • 93  ‘Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did’. Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, p. 9.

69The writer for whom Nabokov made the most affirmative claims of innovation was Tolstoy. He insisted, for example, that Tolstoy had invented stream of consciousness and interior monologue narration long before Joyce.90 He notes parenthetically in the midst of his lecture on Proust that ‘the first homosexuals in modern literature are described in Anna Karenin [a]’.91 And he interrupts his Proust lecture once more when he analyzes Proust’s device of unfolding extended metaphors. He directs his class’s attention to a passage from the first volume of the Recherche (1913–1927), where a chain of metaphors enables the author to cover an enormous amount of ground; he pays close attention to the way one Proustian simile unfolds from another, in a potentially endless succession of performatively imagined likenesses. What particularly interests him is the ‘peculiar’ way in which Proust’s narrator ‘drifts from the idea of pale light to that of remote music—the sense of vision grades into the sense of hearing’.92 He then adds an unexpected likeness of his own, in a formulation that will be familiar to any reader who recalls the second paragraph of Lolita.93 He tells his class:

  • 94  Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 220.

But Proust had a precursor. In part six, chapter 2, of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1864–1869) Prince Andrey stays at the country manor of an acquaintance, Count Rostov. He cannot sleep [… .] ‘Prince Andrey left his bed and went up to the window to open it. As soon as he had unfolded its shutters, the moonlight broke into the room as if it had been waiting a long time outside on the watch for such a chance. He opened the window. The night was cool and motionlessly luminous. The trimmed trees that stood in a row just in front of the window were black on one side and silvery bright on the other… Beyond them was [some kind of] a roof all shining with dew. On the right stood a great thick-leaved tree, its bole and branches a brilliant white, and overhead an almost full moon was riding the starless spring sky.’
Presently at the window of the floor above him he hears two young feminine voices—one of them belongs to Natasha Rostov—singing and repeating a musical phrase… . A little later Natasha leans out of that window above and he hears the rustle of her dress and the sound of her breathing, and ‘The sounds become still like the moon and the shadows.’94

  • 95  Ibid., p. 221. Ironically, the very passage that Nabokov presents as an example of Proust’s quinte (...)

70Nabokov tells his class to notice three characteristics of this passage as ‘foreglimpses of Proust’: the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of the animated moonlight, the ‘clearcut quality of the description, and the intermingled sensual perceptions produced by sight and sound’. He directs them to compare this scene to a passage he has read them from Proust: ‘Notice the elaboration of the moonlight in Proust, the shadows that come out of the light like the drawers of a chest, and the remoteness and the music’.95

71In Bayard’s terminology this might be called a case of anticipatory plagiarism, but to my mind it is extremely unconvincing. If Tolstoy’s attempt was felonious, he was a very poor thief. Unlike the passage from Maupassant that Bayard offers to us in Anticipatory Plagiarism as proto-Proustian, the focus on this passage seems to attest primarily to the lengths Nabokov could stretch to assert the primacy of Russian literature. The most one could claim here would be attempted anticipatory plagiarism.

72But was Nabokov’s mistake entirely devoid of fecundity? To my mind, he was onto something very important: this was a moment for Nabokov similar to that experienced by Marcel at Balbec, where he verges on an epiphany that will explain to him the profound beauty of a specific view… but falls short of connecting what he has seen to the cause of its visual echo. Uncharacteristically, Nabokov was thinking purely in terms of similarity, when he should have also been thinking metonymically.

73Andrei’s gaze out of the window is located just adjacent to a passage in Tolstoy’s novel that Proust may have consciously—and crucially— echoed. That scene on the balcony, which becomes a moment of rebirth for Prince Andrei, is the central panel of a triptych. On his way to visit the Rostov family on business, Prince Andrei has seen an old leafless oak that struck him as resolutely impervious to the influence of the new spring:

  • 96  Tolstoy, War and Peace, p. 420.

‘Spring, and love, and happiness! ’ the oak seemed to say. ‘And how is it you’re not bored with the same stupid, senseless deception! Always the same and always a deception! There is no spring, no sun, no happiness. Look, there sit those smothered, dead fir trees, always the same; look at me spreading my broken, flayed fingers wherever they grow […]. As they’ve grown, so I stand and I don’t believe in your hopes and deceptions’ […].
‘Yes, it’s right, a thousand times right, this oak, ’ thought Prince Andrei. ‘Let others, the young ones, succumb afresh to this deception, but we know life—our life is over!’ A whole new series of thoughts in connection with the oak, hopeless but sadly pleasant, emerged in Prince Andrei’s soul. During this journey it was as if he again thought over his whole life and reached the same old comforting and hopeless conclusion, that there was no need for him to start anything, that he had to live out his life without doing evil, without anxiety, and without wishing for anything.96

74After returning from the Rostovs and having been enchanted by Natasha, Andrei passes the oak again and at first fails to recognize it, just as Nabokov has failed to recognize this scene’s eventual importance for Proust. The oak has been transformed, ‘spreading out a canopy of juicy green leaves’.

  • 97  Ibid., p. 423.

‘Yes, it’s the same oak, ’ thought Prince Andrei, and suddenly a causeless springtime feeling of joy and renewal came over him. All the best moments of his life suddenly recalled themselves to him at the same time. Austerlitz with the lofty sky, and the dead, reproachful face of his wife, and Pierre on the ferry, and a girl excited by the beauty of the night, and that night itself, and the moon—all of it suddenly recalled itself to him.
‘No, life isn’t over at the age of thirty-one, ’ Prince Andrei suddenly decided definitively, immutably. ‘It’s not enough that I know all that’s in me, everyone else must know it, too: Pierre, and that girl who wanted to fly into the sky, everyone must know me, so that my life is not only for myself; so that they don’t live like that girl, independently of my life, but so that it is reflected in everyone, and they all live together with me!’97

75This return to life ostensibly serves as a great communal moment— Andrei’s renewed desire to live occurs through a desire for others—even if there is a sneaky admixture of aesthetic narcissism concealed here— the inclusion of his wife’s death as one of the best moments in Andrei’s life can be read as Tolstoy’s self-congratulatory celebration of the best executed moments in his book. It is worth noting that of all Tolstoy’s characters Prince Andrei not only is the one who sounds most like his author, but he is also the character most like Proust’s Marcel. His initial attraction to Natasha is occasioned by the intolerable idea of Natasha’s ignorance of his existence.

  • 98  Ibid., p. 422.

For some reason, Prince Andrei suddenly felt pained. The day was so beautiful, the sun was so bright, everything around was so cheerful; and this slender and pretty girl did not know and did not want to know of his existence and was content and happy with some separate—probably stupid—but cheerful and happy anxiety of her own.98

  • 99  Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, (...)

76The desire that a woman be marked by an awareness of his existence is similar to Marcel’s preoccupation with the fisher girls at Balbec: ‘I wished that the idea of me, in entering her, in becoming part of her, might attract not only her attention, but her admiration, her desire, and might force it to keep a memory of me against the day when I might be able to benefit from it’.99 Once Natasha does notice Andrei, indeed, when she has fallen in love with him, Andrei’s reaction anachronistically recalls Marcel’s insistence that Albertine not kiss him but issue a promissory note for a baiser at some point in the future:

  • 100  Tolstoy, War and Peace, p. 479.

‘Ah, I’m so happy, ’ [Natasha] replied, smiling through her tears, leaned closer to him, thought for a second, as if asking herself whether she could, and kissed him.
Prince Andrei held her hand, looked into her eyes, and did not find the former love for her in his soul. Something suddenly turned over in his soul: the former poetic and mysterious delight of desire was not there, but there was pity for her woman’s and child’s weakness, there was fear before her devotion and trust, a heavy but at the same time joyful consciousness of duty that bound him to her forever.100

77Everything that happens afterwards in War and Peace suggests that this avowed seriousness and joyful sense of duty are suspect. What we would call Marcel’s raincheck has its antecedent in the year-long separation imposed by Andrei’s father, and accepted by Andrei, before his marriage to Natasha.

78So what scene in Proust was Tolstoy anticipatorily plagiarizing? Or, to put the question differently, how did Proust manage to spirit this scene out of Russia and melt it down for his own purposes in France?

79In the final pages of the Recherche’s final volume, Marcel is returning to Paris after a long stay at a sanatorium, depressed about his health and his lack of aptitude for literature, convinced that he will never write anything of value. In the middle of a long paragraph his railway journey comes to a brief halt in front of a row of trees:

  • 101  Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and A (...)

‘Trees, ’ I thought, ‘you no longer have anything to say to me. My heart has grown cold and no longer hears you’. I am in the midst of nature. Well, it is with indifference, with boredom that my eyes register the line which separates the luminous from the shadowy side of your trunks. If I ever thought of myself as a poet, I know now that I am not one. Perhaps in the new, the so desiccated part of my life which is about to begin, human beings may yet inspire in me what nature can no longer say. But the years in which I might have been able to sing her praise will never return.’ But in thus consoling myself with the thought that the observation of humanity might possibly come to take the place of an unattainable inspiration, I knew that I was merely seeking to console myself. I knew that I knew myself to be worthless. If I really had the soul of an artist, surely I would be feeling pleasure at the sight of this curtain of trees lit by the setting sun… .101

  • 102  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 16.

80There are probably other scenes in world literature in which despairing heroes express their melancholy in arboreal address, and if Andrei and Marcel were religious, these moments would read like initially unanswered prayers to pagan deities of the sort with which, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has reminded us, the Recherche is strangely and explicitly rife.102 In Proust’s aesthetically charged universe, the most important aspect of this echo is its meta-fictive transposition. The words are spoken not only about the arc of a character’s life but about writing itself. The ‘heart’ mentioned here stands not just for romance but for artistic talent.

81But it is what happens next that should interest us most. Having returned to Paris, Marcel goes to a party at the mansion of the Prince de Guermantes, an event at which many of the characters from earlier volumes will be present and which thus assumes an epilogic cast. There he has a series of involuntary memories, the first one produced by a mysteriously familiar sensation of unsteadiness as he steps on a paving stone, a literal pedal note which, as he repeats the motion, eventually recalls to his conscious mind an earlier trip to Venice. The second occurs as he walks into the house. The passage below is long, but if we listen carefully, we can catch not simply unfolding comparisons but distinct reminiscences of Tolstoy:

  • 103  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, III (1982), pp. 900–01.

[W] hen I had gone upstairs, a butler requested me to wait for a few minutes in a little sitting room used as a library, next to the room where the refreshments were being served, until the end of the piece of music which was being played […]. And at that very moment a second intimation came to reinforce the one which had been given to me by the two uneven paving-stones and to exhort me to persevere in my task. A servant, trying unsuccessfully not to make a noise, chanced to knock a spoon against a plate and again that same species of happiness which had come to me from the uneven paving-stones poured into me; the sensation was again of great heat, but entirely different: heat combined with a whiff of smoke and relieved by the cool smell of a forest background; and I recognised that what seemed to me now so delightful was that same row of trees which I had found tedious both to observe and to describe but which I had just now for a moment, in a sort of daze—I seemed to be in the railway carriage again, opening a bottle of beer—supposed to be before my eyes, so forcibly had the identical noise of the spoon knocking against the plate given me, until I had had time to remember where I was, the illusion of the noise of the hammer with which a railwayman had done something to a wheel of the train while we stopped near the little wood. And then it seemed as though the signs which were to bring me, on this day of all days, out of my disheartened state and restore to me my faith in literature, were thronging eagerly about me, for, a butler who had long been in the service of the Prince de Guermantes having recognised me and brought to me in the library where I was waiting, so that I might not have to go to the buffet, a selection of petits fours and a glass of orangeade, I wiped my mouth with the napkin which he had given me; and instantly, as though I had been the character in the Arabian Nights who unwittingly accomplishes the very rite which can cause to appear, visible to him alone, a docile genie ready to convey him to a great distance, a new vision of azure passed before my eyes, but an azure that this time was pure and saline and swelled into blue and bosomy undulations […]. And what I found myself enjoying was not merely these colours but a whole instant of my life on whose summit they rested, an instant which had been no doubt an aspiration towards them and which some feeling of fatigue or sadness had perhaps prevented me from enjoying at Balbec but which now, freed from what is necessarily imperfect in external perception, pure and disembodied, caused me to swell with happiness.103

  • 104  ‘One must beat the iron, pound it, knead it!’ Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, p. 361. See also p. 355; p.  (...)
  • 105  Without focussing on the specific verbal or thematic triggers, Philippe Chardin draws attention to (...)

82It is fitting that this scene occurs in a library, because it is not only the start of the character’s rereading and writing of his own life but a rereading and rewriting of Tolstoy, who is there not only through that arboreal scene in War and Peace but also in that illusion of the noise of the hammer with which a railway man has done something to a wheel of the train—a reminiscence of the motif of the French-speaking muzhik from the railway (‘ “il faut le battre, le fer, le broyer, le pétrir”’)—whose indeterminate activity and presence haunt Anna Karenina.104 Both sets of tree scenes end in epiphanies, moments of transcendence for central characters. Note, though, the fundamental difference: where in War and Peace the great breakthrough comes through contact, however fleeting, with another human being—Natasha—and promises, illusorily for Andrei, a communal future of interrelated beings, in Time Found Again (Le Temps retrouvé, 1927) everything takes place within the self. Marcel does not need to meet or communicate with another being to suddenly blossom as an artist. There is no need to return to that wood; indeed, if Marcel were to return there it might be as dead to him as before. Here beauty and art are born in an artistic overcoming of time that occurs within the self. If an ‘other’ is present, that other is a book. The clink of the hammer is part of an immersion in Tolstoy that provokes the hero to an epiphany about the nature of art. Aesthetic metamorphosis has occurred not in a perceived object but in the subject/viewer.105

83The candle illuminating the book—the image that accompanies the muzhik’s final appearance in Anna—will for Proust burst into brighter flame rather than sputter out, because Marcel’s epiphany will not only end but begin his book. Epilogue becomes prologue, and Tolstoy has provided the spark that enables Marcel to make this transition, which is also something of an apotheosis of the self. One might even say that— like Lolita for Humbert—Tolstoy has been safely solipsized.

84In the course of the past few paragraphs I’ve backed away from Bayard’s model of anticipatory plagiarism for a more old-fashioned notion of traditional inspiration and influence. (Had I remained with that paradigm, I might have been forced to conclude that the fatidic francophone muzhik in Anna Karenina, and in particular his penultimate incarnation as Landau, was none other than Marcel Proust!) But Nabokov and his proto-Bayardian ‘foreglimpses’ have motivated this entire enterprise. And now, covering my Bayardian tracks, I am too much a creature of discipline not to do some of the spade work that Bayard would scorn, or perhaps relegate to a footnote.

  • 106  Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, trans. by Ralph Manheim and ed. by Philip Kolb (Chicago, IL: Univ (...)
  • 107  Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust, trans. by Euan Cameron (New York: Viking, 2000), p. 178.
  • 108  Henri Bonnet and Pierre Robert, ‘Jean de Pierrefeu et Marcel Proust: une correspondance inédite (j (...)
  • 109  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, III (1982), p. 387.
  • 110  Walter A. Strauss, Proust and Literature: The Novelist As Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universit (...)
  • 111  Marcel Proust, Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. by Philip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1970–93) (...)

85I would remind you of how well Proust knew Tolstoy. Proust came late to his appreciation of Russian literature. At the age of twenty-six he wrote to a friend asking him to please find out who had written The Brothers Karamazov,106 although he had begun reading Anna Karenina earlier, in the summer of 1894.107 But he became enamoured of both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—he once said that if he had to choose the most beautiful novel ever written it would be The Idiot (Idiot, 1869).108 Tolstoy he considered, rather oddly, to have been Dostoevsky’s student, albeit a talented one: ‘In Dostoevsky there’s concentrated, still tense and peevish, a great deal of what was to blossom later on in Tolstoy’.109 Proust read Tolstoy carefully; one friend recalls Proust being able to recite bits of the French translation of War and Peace by heart,110 and he was ready to draw on that knowledge in his analogical poetics, once comparing his friend Robert Dreyfus’s description of a little corner of the Parisian sky to Prince Andrei’s vision of the sky at Austerlitz. Slightly later, right after Tolstoy’s death, Proust wrote that he had found something poetical in Dreyfus’s suggestion that Tolstoy would be forever linked to the figure of the simple stationmaster at Astapovo, where he had died: ‘ [Your article on Tolstoy and the stationmaster] pleased me especially since it was as though Tolstoy [had] made this junction between two images without comparable importance—it even made me think of the little muzhik in the train in Anna Karenina’.111

  • 112  Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. The Prisoner. The Fugitive, trans. by Carol Clark and Peter (...)
  • 113  Léon Tolstoï, La Mort, trans. by M. E. Halpérine (Paris: Perrin, 1886), pp. 222–25; Bayard, Demain (...)

86Proust knew Tolstoevsky not only for his greatest hits, but also for the little ones. Marcel tells Albertine in a creepy scene that is half foreplay, half lecture on literary composition and Russian literature, ‘I have talked about the same scene recurring in different novels, but within the same novel scenes and characters can be repeated, if the novel is very long. I could easily give you an example from War and Peace’.112 Proust dug into War and Peace the way a miner extracts ore, finding marginal characters who interested him and giving them more prominence. He sent the idiotic diplomat Hippolyte Kuragin to medical school and, allowing him to retain his propensity for impulsive, meaningless utterances, renamed him Cottard. Morel, a member of a military band who is also a virtuoso violinist, the lover of the Baron de Charlus and the son of Marcel’s uncle’s valet, must be the great grandson of a soldier of the same name, a French officer’s orderly in War and Peace who is also not without a fondness for music and is forced by the exigencies of war to cross-dress. The writer Bergotte’s death, which Bayard sees as prescient of Proust’s own demise, was probably modeled on an episode from Tolstoy’s second Sebastopol story, translated in 1886 as an excerpt in a French collection of Tolstoy’s greatest death scenes.113

  • 114  Proust, Correspondance, XII (1984), p. 180.
  • 115  Ibid., XVIII (1990), p. 164.

87Most important, though, is that as the Recherche began to expand, readers and correspondents began to compare it to War and Peace. The similarity surfaces as early as 1913—when Proust discusses his own notion of memory along with those of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, recalling, in particular, a line from Crime and Punishment and adding ‘you must understand that if I cite these great names it is not in order to put myself on their level’.114 We hear the comparison again towards the end of Proust’s life, when a correspondent appreciative of the brilliance of his prose cautions him about writing too densely and too much: ‘War and Peace offers itself to the reader as a very long work, but the reader has already been tipped off that it is a masterpiece’ which is something that the readers Proust wants to acquire don’t yet know about the Recherche.115

88All of this, though, would come at the point of revision. I began by pursuing Nabokov’s desire that Tolstoy foreglimpse Proust and, infused with the confidence that I could begin collecting evidence to make a case of anticipatory plagiarism, I paused and began rocking one text against another, as though, my forward movement suddenly arrested in a courtyard, I were moving my foot up and down against a paving stone until I arrived at the place where plagiarism suddenly became a gift.

Notes

2  Pierre Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? trans. by Carol Cosman (New York: The New Press, 2000), p. ix.

3  Pierre Bayard, Le Plagiat par anticipation (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009), p. 25. My translation.

4  Ibid., p. 28.

5  Ibid., p. 14.

6  Ibid., p. 57.

7  T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), p. 5.

8  Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 69.

9  Ibid., p. 28.

10  Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 129.

11  As Umberto Eco observes, Bayard is such an attentive reader that he must not have read his own book. Eco, ‘À propos d’un livre qui n’a pas été lu’, in Pour une critique décalée: autour des travaux de Pierre Bayard, ed. by Laurent Zimmermann (Nantes: Édition Cécile Defaut, 2010), pp. 39–42 (p. 42).

12  Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 117.

13  Pierre Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2017), p. 20. My translation.

14  Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (New York: Harvest, 1980), p. 6.

15  M. M. Bakhtin, Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), p. 121. My translation.

16  Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (New York: Harvest, 1981), p. 210.

17  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 66; F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols (Leningrad: Nauka 1972–1990), VI (1973), p. 55.

18  Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 122.

19  Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, p. 195.

20  ‘The person who came last, the one who is asking for something, must get out! Get out!’ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 738.

21  Ibid., p. 747.

22  Ibid., p. 766.

23  Ibid., p. 732.

24  See ‘What if Nabokov Had Written “Dvoinik”? Reading Dostoevskii Preposterously’, The Russian Review, 64: 4 (2005), 575–89, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9434.2005.00375.x; ‘ “Husband and Wife”: An Approach to the Gothic in Anna Karenina’, in Critical Insights: Anna Karenina, ed. by Robert C. Evans (Amenia, N.Y. : Salem Press, 2021), pp. 39–57.

25  Pierre Bayard, Comment améliorer les oeuvres ratées? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2000).

26  Ruth Mack Brunswick, ‘Supplement to Freud’s “History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1928)’, in The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, ed. by Muriel Gardiner (London: Karnac Books, 1989), pp. 263–307 (p. 264).

27  Ibid., p. 300.

28  Ibid., p. 300.

29  Ibid., p. 286.

30  Ibid., p. 281.

31  Ibid., p. 282.

32  Ibid., p. 281.

33  Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 123. Without using the term ‘anticipatory plagiarism’, Karlinsky claims Gogol as ‘an authentic nineteenth-century surrealist’ (p. 124).

34  George Dimock, ‘Anna and The Wolf-Man: Rewriting Freud’s Case History’, Representations, 50 (Spring, 1995), 53–75 (p. 55).

35  Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories (New York: Collier, 1963), pp. 219–20.

36  Critiquing Brunswick’s treatment of Pankejeff, Robert J. Langs has noted that in her analysis of this dream ‘the possible allusions to the Wolf Man’s objections to the narcissistic misalliance between himself and Freud, and to the analyst as a mirror, were not considered’. See ‘The Misalliance Dimension on the Case of the Wolf Man’, in Freud and his Patients, ed. by Mark Kanzer and Jules Glenn, 2 vols (New York: Jason Aronson, 1980), II (1980), pp. 373–83 (p. 379).

37  Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have identified many interlinguistic homonyms and puns that may subtend the Wolf Man’s dreams and analysis, including son/sohn and serega/Sergei. Though their net is wide, the reversal of son and nos (sleep/nose) and the place of that reversal in Russian literary history elude them. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. by Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 34–56.

38  On the Wolf Man’s interest in Russian literature, see Dimock, ‘Anna and the Wolf-Man’, pp. 65–67; Eugene Halpert, ‘Lermontov and the Wolf-Man’, American Imago, 32 (Spring 1975), 315–28, and Aleksandr Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo: istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Meduza, 1993), pp. 97–129.

39  Freud, Three Case Histories, p. 316.

40  Peter Brooks, ‘Fictions of the Wolfman: Freud and Narrative Understanding’, Diacritics, 9: 1 (Spring, 1979), 71–81 (p. 79).

41  Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, p. 256, quoted by Brooks in ‘Fictions’, p. 79.

42  Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski, p. 26.

43  Ibid., p. 50.

44  Ibid., p. 43.

45  Ibid., p. 102.

46  Ibid., p. 157.

47  Yuri Corrigan, Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), p. 3.

48  Olga Partan has linked Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ (‘Shinel’’, 1842) to its author’s interest in Rome and the Commedia dell’arte, but she notes that for all his attention to Gogol’s masks and verbal games, Eikhenbaum, the author of the famous 1919 article ‘How Gogol’s Overcoat was Made’ (‘Kak sdelana shinel’ Gogolia’), neglected the possible origin of the story’s title in the name of the character Pulcinella/Polichinelle. Partan herself does not see, however, that Eikhenbaum’s title may also be a pun (on the basis of the expression ‘faire le polichinelle’ (‘to play the fool’)) and a much better one than that with which she credits Gogol. Bayard helps us resolve this conundrum. The concept of anticipatory plagiarism suggests that Gogol borrowed the title of his story from Eikhenbaum’s far more cleverly entitled article about it. See Partan, ‘Shinel’, Polichinelle, Pulcinella: The Italian Ancestry of Akaky Bashmachkin’, Slavic and East European Journal, 49: 4 (2005), 549–69, https://doi.org/10.2307/20058345.

49  Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski, pp. 150–51

50  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), p. 289.

51  Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski, p. 153.

52  Ibid., pp. 158–9. Emphasis in the original.

53  D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, ed. by Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 829–36.

54  Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski, p. 140.

55  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 813–14. In the Russian original, there is no exclamation point after ‘The wounded man was shown his cut-off leg in a boot caked with blood’. This is a punctuation mark far dearer to Dostoevsky than Tolstoy. By adding it, Pevear and Volokhonsky, who have also produced English translations of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, affirm the unity of Tolstoevsky’s body of work. Their work exemplifies how author-grafting is a feature of literature in translation that is often lost in the original.

56  Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, p. xxii.

57  Pierre Bayard, ‘Comment j’ai fait régresser la critique’, in Pour une critique décalée: autour des travaux de Pierre Bayard, ed. by Laurent Zimmermann (Nantes: Edition Cécile Defaut, 2010), pp. 19–37 (p. 32). My translation.

58  Ibid., p. 30, p. 34.

59  Ibid., p. 35.

60  Pierre Bayard, Comment améliorer les oeuvres ratées?. This book never uses the word ‘parody’. It is as though the narrator is not aware that the concept exists, even though the real author must realize that he is writing a handbook on parodic technique, the practice of which he disguises under the notion of ‘interventionist criticism’.

61  M. M. Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, trans. by Vadim Liapunov (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 42.

62  Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 232–36.

63  Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, p. 105.

64  Bayard, How to Talk About Books, p. 164.

65  Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski, p. 119.

66  Ibid., p. 60.

67  Pierre Bayard, Et si les oeuvres changeaient d’auteur? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2010), p. 98.

68  Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, p. 283.

69  Georgii Ivanov, comments made in response to a questionnaire on Proust printed in Chisla, 1 (1930), 271–78 (p. 273). My translation. Several years earlier, the result had come out differently when Proust himself had placed Tolstoy next to Balzac: ‘Balzac manages to give an impression of size; in Tolstoy everything is naturally bigger, like the droppings of an elephant compared to a goat.’ Marcel Proust, Against Saint-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. by John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 326.

70  Several scholars have linked Bayard and Nabokov, including Jean-Michel Rabaté, who uses their views on Freud to introduce his Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1–6. Léopold Reigner employs Bayard’s notion of the reader’s ‘inner book’ to examine Nabokov’s appropriation of Flaubert, in ‘Nabokov’s Flaubert: Influence, Deviation and Continuity’, Représentations dans le monde anglophone, 2 (2017), 46–65 (pp. 60–63); René Alladaye has drawn on Bayard to analyse scholars’ debates about Pale Fire, in The Darker Shades of Pale Fire: An Investigation into a Literary Mystery (Paris: M. Houdiard, 2013).

71  Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, p. 216.

72  Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 56.

73  Pierre Bayard, Demain est écrit (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2005); Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1961).

74  Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 204.

75  Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak (London: Penguin, 2019), p. 245, p. 265

76  Nabokov, Pnin, p. 10; Eric Naiman, ‘Nabokov’s McCarthyisms: Pnin in the Groves of Academe’, Comparative Literature, 68: 1 (March 2016), 75–95, https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-3462661.

77  Vladimir Nabokov, ‘The Circle’, in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 1995), pp. 375–84.

78  Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 9.

79  J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2001), p. 32. For Nabokov’s attempts to emulate Dunne, see Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time, ed. by Gennady Barabtarlo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

80  Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 94.

81  Pierre Bayard, Il existe d’autres mondes (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2014), pp. 99–107.

82  The narrator of this particular book does not seem to be as careful a reader as some of Bayard’s other avatars: he makes mistakes about Lolita’s age, confuses Lolita’s husband with Clare Quilty, and seems to have discovered the existence of Ada (1969)—which explicitly deals with parallel worlds and is mentioned in a final footnote—only after the rest of the chapter had been written. Bayard, Il existe, p. 101.

83  Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 300–01.

84  Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Komnata’, in his Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda, 5 vols (St Petersburg: Symposium, 1999), V (1999), p. 541.

85  Bayard, Comment améliorer, passim. To be sure, in order to suggest improvements, Bayard must first dwell on the considerable faults of the works in question, so that an alternative title could have been Look How Bad Some Great Writers Could Be.

86  Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 3.

87  These invented midterms are still unpublished and can be found in the Nabokov archive in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

88  Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 154.

89  Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 126–27.

90  Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, p. 183.

91  Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 231.

92  Ibid., p. 220.

93  ‘Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did’. Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, p. 9.

94  Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 220.

95  Ibid., p. 221. Ironically, the very passage that Nabokov presents as an example of Proust’s quintessential style is singled out by Bayard as one of the particularly “weak” digressions in the Recherche. Pierre Bayard, Le Hors-Sujet (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1996), p. 21.

96  Tolstoy, War and Peace, p. 420.

97  Ibid., p. 423.

98  Ibid., p. 422.

99  Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 296.

100  Tolstoy, War and Peace, p. 479.

101  Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor, 3 vols (New York: Vintage, 1982), III (1982), p. 886.

102  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 16.

103  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, III (1982), pp. 900–01.

104  ‘One must beat the iron, pound it, knead it!’ Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, p. 361. See also p. 355; p. 722; p. 768.

105  Without focussing on the specific verbal or thematic triggers, Philippe Chardin draws attention to the Tolstoyan character of Proust’s creative epiphanies, including the final ones at the end of the Recherche. Proust, ou le Bonheur du petit personage qui compare (Paris: Champion, 2006), p. 82.

106  Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, trans. by Ralph Manheim and ed. by Philip Kolb (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 167.

107  Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust, trans. by Euan Cameron (New York: Viking, 2000), p. 178.

108  Henri Bonnet and Pierre Robert, ‘Jean de Pierrefeu et Marcel Proust: une correspondance inédite (janvier-décembre 1920)’, Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 79: 5 (Sept-Oct., 1979), 800–23 (p. 812).

109  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, III (1982), p. 387.

110  Walter A. Strauss, Proust and Literature: The Novelist As Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 160.

111  Marcel Proust, Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. by Philip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1970–93), X (1983), p. 47, pp. 211–12.

112  Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. The Prisoner. The Fugitive, trans. by Carol Clark and Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 350.

113  Léon Tolstoï, La Mort, trans. by M. E. Halpérine (Paris: Perrin, 1886), pp. 222–25; Bayard, Demain est écrit, p. 102. The importance of this volume for Proust is signalled by Anne Henry in her Marcel Proust: Théories pour une esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981), pp. 34–35.

114  Proust, Correspondance, XII (1984), p. 180.

115  Ibid., XVIII (1990), p. 164.

Auteur

Teaches Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (1997) and Nabokov, Perversely (2010), as well as many articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature.

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