Already with The House of Mirth, Wharton had developed that maturity which allowed her to minutely and attentively ponder and consider human behaviour, and to depict a world unmatched in visual refinement and elegance. Passing through The Custom of the Country – a difficult book about a difficult girl ungrateful for the not-so-difficult world she lives in – Wharton finally concluded her “Three Novels of New York” trilogy with The Age of Innocence, perhaps the best and most tragic of the three.The plot to The Age of Innocence is essentially banal, created on conventional or (at best) common premises, and can be summarised as such: the book is about Newland Archer, a young boy who is apart of the high Newyorkese society and is engaged to May Welland, a superb young lady who is known for her gentle looks and good nature. Everything is seemingly perfect, but suddenly a new arrival is announced, and Countess Olenska (May’s cousin and wife to the aggressively European Count Olenski) makes her appearance in society: the plot finally takes off, and the rest of the novel is an exploration of Newland's secret wishes and hidden passion for the Countess, and the internal breach he has to face while trying to reconcile his true self and his social self, while beginning to face the pressure and the subliminal judgement his own world is starting to weigh down on him. Sadly, the illusion cannot last, and at last Newland is forced to give up his secret relationship with the Countess to prioritise his family duties and to satisfy their expectations. The novel ends on a somewhat hopeful note, following the engagement of Newland’s son, Dallas, as we see him fulfilling what his father hadn’t been able to achieve: the marriage to Fanny Beaufort, his very own Countess Olenska.Overall, the novel is quite compelling, and can leave a non-neglectable toll on the reader that experiences it fully. It feels almost weird to say that The Age of Innocence is ‘a good book’ (let alone a favourite), because it is almost as if it were not supposed to be: but there is something about Edith Wharton’s prose that makes the novel magnetic, enthralling and utterly sublime.Condensing such a masterful and skilled author as Wharton into a description that might do her justice is not an easy task, but starting by considering three central aspects of her style, to then move onto a more interpretive and exhaustive analysis, seems like a good way to structure a reflection on Wharton. We shall therefore start by the three defining characteristics of her production – complexity, criticality and spiritual love.

COMPLEXITY:

It is of no use to deny the sheer minuteness with which we are introduced by Wharton to this high class Newyorkese society: we are immediately filled to the brim with information and with knowledge on this ambience, so much that it can get overwhelming. In fact, for narrating about such a frivolous society, this is a novel that requires quite a lot of concentration if one really wants to keep up with all the events without feeling like the events are catching up to them. The social tissue is so deeply threaded that it is almost impossible to effectively describe it in a complete way without chapter-long citations, but what is important is to point out that Wharton emphasises how grand and absolute it might appear at first glance, but how shallow and superficial it actually is (what is noticeable by the way Countess Olenska and at times also Newland himself are scorned at). Obviously, it should also be specified that this amount of knowledge on this kind of society has been collected by the author only because Wharton was herself a part of this high-brow world (a remark which could very well lead to a discussion on privilege and class, which however has no place in this analysis＊).If there were one characteristic trait of this grandiose society worth pointing out, that would be the huge problem of miscommunication – a theme which can be found in basically all of Wharton’s production. Many classically romantic works in history have made use of the literary trope which is miscommunication (Romeo and Juliet and The Great Gatsby, only to cite some of the most famous, are good examples). It is fairly established that romance and miscommunication often go hand in hand – and that is because, having become such a huge literary topos, it seems almost mandatory for the romance writer to include it in their stories; but even if frequent enough, there is more to miscommunication than just a normalised technique.Miscommunication is in fact a natural mechanism for humans to react in front of situations that feel too much for them, and its placing in a specific narrative can be very telling about a certain character or circumstance: moreover, it is also normal for humans to suspend their judgement when they really care about an issue, because more effort is put into things which is felt are important. It is such a weirdly enchanting contradiction – which skilled authors have been able to capture beautifully – that it is the things that we find the most valuable that often end up hurting us, “merely” because of our own attitude towards them.The whole of New York’s society seems to only run on miscommunication and unsaid truths that one cannot openly talk about but still needs to know about. It is so confusing that the reader really has to thank Wharton for serving as a transit between these two worlds of the said and the unsaid. Moreover, the author knew that her protagonists were bound to become even more admirable for being able to decipher such unvoiced messages.For instance, there is one very lovely passage in The House of Mirth that is both exceptionally vulnerable and endlessly charming, and that points to a dynamic which happens more than once in the discussions between the lead couple of that book: «The situation between them was one which could have been cleared up only by a sudden explosion of feeling; and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of such an explosion». This is so deep because of how relatable it feels: the knowledge that our whole destiny and our future often hang on such small and otherwise neglectable actions. How Wharton is able to capture such evanescent yet so heavy moments in one’s life is one of the finest instances of her skill, especially because in this sentence alone she is able to capture how fragile our lives really are, and how just a single sentence or a single silence can mark an important shift in one’s existence – or prevent it.

＊ Concerning this issue, I refer to my own reflections on the subject: «Wharton in fact does not really seem to care about her position of privilege and about other, probably more serious issues that were going on at the time, but personally I don’t want to neither condone nor condemn this attitude: it might make sense for us today to read her works under this subversive key, but the truth is that [The New York trilogy] were never meant to be books about these issues. I don’t think Wharton’s intention was to consciously gloss over these problems, but rather to put in the spotlight the human struggles of the world as she knew it, and so if we are so ready to state that everybody’s feelings are valid, maybe we shouldn’t be too harsh on these high ranked protagonists who are still depicted as deeply suffering».

CRITICALITY:

One very pertinent question when it comes to Edith Wharton is that of sympathy: this is not really something that comes up with many other authors, but what inevitably sparks this is just how privileged a life Wharton led. The descriptions of her writing in bed, after breakfast, in one of the most luxurious hotels in Paris, and tossing the completed pages on the floor to be sorted and typed up by her secretary are indeed borderline cartoonish.It does no harm acknowledging her blatant entitlement, and although Wharton was pretty open about the unsubstantial society she was presenting to us, this never implied a denunciation of it from her part, and she always justified its behaviour: and that is because she wrote about the world as she knew it, and although ridiculous and pathetic she should not have known how to write about other settings. She was lucid enough to recognize its fictitious nature, but she always chose, actively, to stay within and never “without” it.Other than such unproductive debates, what is important to underline is that Wharton introduces us to such well-crafted and deep, introspective characters, that she makes it impossible for the reader not to like them: her protagonists are so human – and vividly so – that one just ends up forgetting about their social status. She has us sympathise with them, without us even noticing or even wanting to, and that might be irritating, but it cannot not be admirable.

SPIRITUAL LOVE:

In one critical writing about The Age of Innocence, a brief introduction to Wharton by Jonathan Franzen, some quite provocatory points are brought forward: in it, Franzen challenges Wharton’s whole figure – a figure which is hard not to see as monumental – and questions both her situation and her approach to romance, wondering how accurate and real and authentic they might be.Being very difficult to remain indifferent to (because of how responsive we are to her), Franzen’s attack on Wharton is wild and totally revolutionary, challenging the very own pillars on which critical writing lies and simultaneously opening new, unconsidered and terrifying doors.
Franzen writes: «Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty. The man she would have most liked to marry, her friend Walter Berry, a noted connoisseur of female beauty, wasn’t the marrying type. After two failed youthful courtships, she settled for an affable man dud of modest means, Teddy Wharton. That their ensuing twenty-eight years of marriage were almost entirely sexless was perhaps less a function of her looks than of her sexual ignorance, the blame of which she laid squarely on her mother. As far as anyone knows, Wharton died having had only one other sexual relationship, an affair with an evasive bisexual journalist and serial two-timer, Morton Fullerton. She by then was in her late forties, and the beginner-like idealism and blatancy in her ardor – detailed in a secret diary and in letters preserved by Fullerton – are at once poignant and somewhat embarrassing, as they seem later to have been to Wharton herself».Though bugging and uneasy (reducing Wharton to trivial appetites and sexual relationships), and challenging an immediate opposition, Franzen’s commentary does help to realise that sexual love is in fact never present in Wharton’s novels: it is an aspect of relationships that she seems to almost actively shy away from.If we consider her New York novels as a whole, the first real couple we meet is Lily and Selden from the House of Mirth. And although sex is mentioned in the book, it never concerns the relationship the two protagonists have with each other. Lily does run the risk of inadvertently becoming the mistress of another male character (which at least shows that Wharton knew these aspects also existed), but it is clear that there is no love involved there. It does seem odd that two young people in love in their late twenties never even appear to think about it – and although it is also important to mention that they could never have had actual sexual intercourses because of Lily’s status of still being unmarried (for it would have been a too great of a scandal for a young lady to experience premarital sex), it still is peculiar that sexual drive and attraction – normal parts of a romantic relationship – are topics that are never touched upon. Although Wharton made it clear that sex is still a part of her world, it is always the side characters that represent it, and never the female or male leads.In The Custom of the Country the situation is of course drastically different, but then again this is not a novel that’s meant to be about love. If anything, it stands as a clear counterpart to The House of Mirth: this book includes sex, but it doesn’t include love. It is almost like the two aspects, that would normally be joined in a standard relationship, can never go hand in hand in Wharton.
This dynamic therefore also applies, though differently, to the second novel of the trilogy, as The Custom of the Country is definitely about sex, and money, and marriage, and divorce, but not about love.And lastly, we get to The Age of Innocence, and here again Wharton takes us back to a House of Mirth dynamic: between Newland and Countess Olenska, we undoubtedly have to acknowledge that there is love, but there is no sexual attraction. Newland even goes so far as to openly discard any such idea. He says: «A stolen kiss isn't what I want. Look: I'm not even trying to touch the sleeve of your jacket. [...] When we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true», and later, when he sees the Countess in a rather unflattering outfit, Wharton immediately points out that «her face looked lustreless and almost ugly, and he had never loved it as he did at that minute».We here really get a sense of Wharton purposefully making her male protagonists completely unconcerned with external beauty and attractiveness («Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty»…): loving male counter-parts, utterly unconcerned with outside attractiveness and only focused on inner beauty. It feels as if Wharton is here voicing a quiet, desperate, maybe even unconscious wish, sweet and prudish: for love to only exist spiritually, mentally, emotionally.This notion, instilled to the more conservatory and attentive critic by Franzen’s ferocious, though merely provocative commentary, appears particularly endearing and attractive because it goes to show that even great Authors, whom we are so prone to place on a pedestal and consider special geniuses and outworldly creators, are also human. And this can serve as a reminder that reading classics is not synonymous to alienating from reality to enter a different, inaccessible world, but a way to deepen our understanding of ourselves, and come to terms with our more problematic traits.

«HEY YOU» DYNAMIC:

Getting to the more interpretive part of the analysis, it becomes pretty mandatory to focus a moment on Newland, the novel’s protagonist: in him, we can see Wharton consciously pouring many aspects of her own personality: he is an outsider, a part of society but simultaneously detached from it, someone who is affiliated with artists and lower class writers and intellectuals. Someone who in his free time (to the perplexity of Mrs. Welland) reads.One could also make the argument that Countess Olenska also in part represents Wharton: the rich Newyorkese woman who was considered in many ways weird, who rejected many of the social conventions, who had an unexpectedly strong sense of independence, who travelled to Europe and eventually decided to settle there. As mentioned earlier, it is not hard to find sympathy for these two characters, because they are made so human and natural – and as in them Wharton is quite literally describing herself, it’s not hard for her to deeply empathise with the two characters, and we as readers can also feel this special connection.The two protagonists are accompanied throughout the whole book by a continuous battle against their own selves, which is made clearly noticeable in Newland: another huge factor playing in his favour, and that makes him all the more likeable.
The dualism experienced by this character is by no means revolutionary, and we can see it expressed in many different forms of art – namely (to promote what is a method of literary analysis with the potential of being fruitful and intelligently innovative) in the single Hey You, by the British band Pink Floyd.
Pink Floyd are notoriously famous for covering this internal breach, a theme which appears in some of their most famous pieces like the timeless Breathe and Wish You Were Here, but Hey You is probably the single where the dynamic is presented the most evidently.The internal breach Newland experiences is that of a man, tied suffocatingly to his home and traditions, wanting to break out from this social sphere, but unable to do it because of lack of support, of liberty, and – it has to be faced – of inducement great enough for him to find it worth fighting for.
People have called this dualism many things: the less expansive describe it as «the soul versus the mask», but the best definition for it remains that of the “Social order” opposed to the “Natural order”. For “Social order” we mean the impositions and obligations weighed down on someone by societal norms and conventions, often killing one’s originality and uniqueness. The “Natural order”, instead, is the freedom and the liberty that come from following one’s true and authentic wishes and aspirations, without sticking to any social conventions.Newland is the best example of this dynamic in the novel because all throughout he has to navigate between the world of his infancy, one of luxury and opulence but also of strictness; and the world that he discovers within the Countess, one of freedom and immensity, but also of infinite obstacles.This concept, as explained, is perfectly exemplified in the lyrics of the single Hey You: the song is a constant opposition of realities, and it’s told through the lens of the Natural order looking at the Social order. The title itself, «Hey You», is addressed to the Social order, intensely trying to make it understand that it’s living this sort of death in life.For example, in the first few verses, the lyrics go:
Hey You, standing in the aisles,
With Itchy feet and fading smiles
Can you feel me?
And the whole song is a reverberation of this key concept, alternating an observation about the social order’s lifestyle and a solicitation to get out of it as soon as possible; to go live life and stop living in this sort of grey, sterile wasteland.In the second to last stanza (if a stanza we can call it), a third voice pines in (the inclination of the voice in the song makes this shift much clearer), and we get this resolute, detached, almost chilling description of how the lives of many people are ruined by this collective way of feeling and thinking. Here’s the diagnosis:
But it was only fantasy
The wall was too high as you can see
No matter how he tried
He could not break free
And the worms ate into his brain
A new factor is here introduced because we get a sense that this “patient” has in their past tried to escape this order… but didn’t succeed! The song quotes the truth, «it was only fantasy».This is particularly relevant to Newland because he, likewise, didn’t succeed either: all his plans, his imaginations, his fantasies eventually had to come to an end, and he had no choice but to fall back into the flow of things, into boredom and into dissatisfaction. And that is because his upbringing, reflected wherever he went and in the mentalities of the people whom he talked to, had created this pressuring and suffocating space around him that did not allow for anything to be openly done to «ruin» it.And Newland, being a proper figure of society, didn’t have the strength to ruin it: as we discover from his wife May at the very end, in fact, we get a sense that he is “trustworthy” because he didn’t let this «wicked aspiration» of his (his love of Countess Olenska) overcome his duties to his family and to his world – or, as May put it, he had «given up the thing he most wanted» when she had asked him to.
The novel feels so tragic precisely because it is painstakingly true that Newland did all of those things. Contrary to what he says towards the end of the novel, he had totally understood May’s subliminal request to choose her over the Countess, and that had been the last push he needed in order to make a decision. And unsurprisingly, the push had come from the social order.In fact, the case could be made that had the Countess insisted, Newland would have maybe made a different decision. But the internal struggle that he was going through, though not as finely portrayed, was happening within the Countess as well. They’re both bordered by their upbringing – and in this painting of human nature that Wharton depicts, it is the traditions and the conventions that seemingly win.
«Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery. There were a hundred million tickets in his lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been too decidedly against him»＊.But – perhaps curiously – Wharton does not end the novel here: she still feels the impellent, possibly unconscious need to show us a new generation, a new set of characters, a new mentality, even if for just a few pages. Mediocrity’s win is questioned until the very end.
After all, as Pink Floyd themselves stated at the end of their song, «Don’t tell me there’s no hope at all / Together we stand, divided we fall». But where is this hope? Does it really exist? Is there anywhere we can find it?

＊This is precisely why The Age of Innocence feels even more tragic than The House of Myrth: because whereas Lily Bart was cut off before she could reach the languid state of stability so desired by the Wellands and Archers, Newland was forced to live with his pain for a period way longer.

THE «NEW WORLD» ILLUSION:

Between the second to and the last chapter, a huge time gap passes: and during this time period, many technological advancements have taken place. Wharton writes almost enthusiastically about it: «[…] long-distance telephoning had become as much a matter of course as electric lighting and five-day Atlantic voyages. But the laugh did startle him; it still seemed wonderful that across all those miles and miles of country—forest, river, mountain, prairie, roaring cities and busy indifferent millions—Dallas's laugh should be able to say […]». From the very get go, we get a sense that the world is different.In fact, changes can be detected not only in technology, but also in the old ways of living dictated by the so-called Social order: «The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture or landscape-engineering […]». If before, the only acceptable jobs were in the fields of law or of economics, now the younger people are getting invested in architecture and (landscape!) engineering. But there’s more: the marriage scene has also dramatically changed – to the great detriment of the reader, now conscious that just a twenty-year-old difference would have completely changed Newland and Countess Olenska’s situation: now, people are getting more confident in marrying outside of their social bubble, and they don’t get judged for this – if anything, the matter gets brushed off as an unimportant, all-too-normal procedure: «Nobody was narrow-minded enough to rake up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father's past and her own origin». Things that would have once meant a total dishonour to no matter which family, now do not even get questioned. People are not so «narrow-minded» anymore.Despite the great deal of technological advancements which had parallelly also taken place in that timeframe, the changes in how social life flowed were by far the most shocking: «Nothing could more dearly give the measure of the distance that the world had travelled. People nowadays were too busy – busy with reforms and "movements," with fads and fetishes and frivolities – to bother much about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody's past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?»This shift is essential in understanding Wharton as an authoress: the book could have ended with Countess Olenska’s departure to Europe and Newland’s last, eternal farewell to her. The balances of the novel wouldn’t have shifted a single metre.
And instead – we get this curious out-of-place finale: what might be its purpose? Why did she put it in at all?The answer can be found in how Newland – and by extension, Wharton – feels about this difference is key to understanding why she felt it mandatory to include it. Newland, while pondering the new order of things says: «The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one’s so certain of in advance: can it ever make one’s heart beat as wildly?»
He then also says, thinking about his own daughter: «Mary, who was no less conventional, and no more intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views. There was good in the new order too».Overall, we get a sense that the world has changed, and can’t nor will ever be able to go back to how it used to be. For example, the sentence regarding Mary: she is no better than her mother («no less conventional, no more intelligent»), but she’s more tolerant, more open-minded. We might consider it a success, but still that’s not an improvement she achieved because of her effort or because of her awareness.Wharton also questions how much the new generation will be able to value the bettered situation: as with all things, having them for granted makes us appreciate them less. Is this liberty, this open-mindedness, going to enrich our life experience, or is it going to make it duller? Is freedom the key to happiness, or to apathy?Never mind the daughter, the new important character we’re introduced to is Dallas, Newland’s son. Dallas is an interesting figure because he works as a perfect foil for Newland: his father had got into law; he chose architecture. His father had been restrained by a number of social conventions; he can navigate freely wherever he wants. And most importantly – his father had not been able to marry the woman he truly loved; Dallas has not encountered any such impediment.In fact, we are told almost instantly that Dallas is betrothed to Fanny Beaufort, a young lady of questionable origins (Beaufort is, after all, her last name), who had only made her first appearance in New York’s society at eighteen. In that, Fanny herself is also a foil to the Countess, who had had a pretty similar parable. As Dallas charmingly puts it, asking his father: «Wasn't she—once—your Fanny?»With this picture in mind, I think it is starting to become clear why Wharton decided to add this chapter at the very end of the book, because in many ways it’s in direct conversation with the rest of the novel. It answers all its questions, and it eases our grief for Newland and for the Countess, because we feel bad for their ending, but we can at least relish in the prospect of Dallas getting to live a «happily ever after». Is hope there after all?We are now in a different world, full of new opportunities, new entertainments, and endless potential: it must have surely seemed so to Wharton, who had lived through the peak of the Gilded Age and through all the changes that had revolutionised Europe and America in the years leading up and of World War One. The way she talks about it, the way she lets the advancements take the merit of Dallas’ implied happy ending, is almost unbearably enthusiastic. We’ve spent too much time with rational, disillusioned Wharton to accept this abrupt shift of perspective.If one really wanted to, they could try (though with dubious textual supports) to make a case for Wharton just being truthful in her excitement for the progress and the development of man: after all, what she went through was a huge change: the way people lived day-to-day life had suddenly become drastically different. These changes must have caused a great impact within all those who lived through them.But perhaps worryingly, there’s more to this ending that isn’t expressedly stated but incidentally implied: Wharton wants us to know that the world has changed, but is it really for the better? And even if it has, why does the novel still feel inconclusive?

UNDERLYING SADNESS:

The conclusion seems to be, quite straightforwardly, that no matter what we do and how much we believe in our cause, we alone cannot change our life.
The Age of Innocence is quite a bitter novel, of the sort one expects from Wharton. A sparkle of hope might be glimpsed thanks to Dallas, but Wharton makes it abundantly clear that the young man has no credit for this change: we have moved on from the old ways, but it’s almost as if this shift happened organically, without anyone specifically contributing to it. Dallas is enjoying the fruits of a change he didn’t help achieve.Besides, one should also need to wonder whether this «New World» is any better than the old one. As Wharton has Newland say: «Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways».The feeling we’re left with is a pretty heavy-on-the-chest one: in this world that flows apparently without any particular intervention, man never seems to be responsible for anything. He’s not in charge of any change. He merely lets himself be moulded by the world around him, rather than trying to mould it according to his will. Dallas is living this apparently better life, but nothing suggests that he fought to achieve it. Had he been born at the same time as his father, their lives would have very likely resembled each other.Dallas seems in a happier position in life compared to Newland, but he does not value it as much as he should. And that’s because he never had to live without all these liberties that he just takes for granted. His life may unfold as happier than his father’s, but it still feels empty, because he’s going to enjoy it without being grateful for being able to enjoy it.All in all, the feeling of the New World being better is just a big illusion. Because the times have changed, but does it really matter if the men have not?Wharton is here leaving a very subtle but crucial message: you need to work for the life that you want, you can’t allow yourself to exist passively.
Like Wharton concluded about Newland: «The woman [he] would have chucked everything for: only he didn't». Let’s instead try to do it.

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Though that is the least innovative comment that could be made about The Count of Monte Cristo, it is nice nevertheless to remember that this is a novel that always leaves you wanting more. Quoting one famous author, it «creates a thirst for reading» (Victor Hugo).As with any and all of Dumas’s novels, there are almost as many things to say about the book as there are to say about its author – in order to fully understand them, they must be followed by an equally deep dive into the author as well, which is telling enough of powerful Dumas’ personality is.The novel follows the journey of Edmond Dantès, a young sailor with little money but with countless talents and with a very pretty girlfriend. Naturally, that’s enough to spark jealousy within more than just one colleague on deck, and as one of them is extremely cunning, he whips up a plot (taking advantage of the political breach France was facing at the time with Napoleon and the Bourbon monarchy) that makes Edmond pass as a lecherous traitor. Sure enough, the plan works and Edmond is imprisoned for sixteen years in the Chateau d’If, a prison at sea which is quite impenetrable.
There he makes the acquaintance of an old clerkman, Faria, who everyone thinks insane but who’s actually the smartest of the lot, and he teaches Edmond basically all that there is to be taught, besides helping him find out who really were the three men who had so unjustly imprisoned him. They plan on escaping together, but right when they might finally be well out, Faria is seized by a terrible fit of hysteria and dies. However, Edmond still manages to escape by replacing the friend’s corpse with his own, is thrown at sea, is rescued by a gang of smugglers and goes to collect an extraordinary treasure which Faria had left him in inheritance, becoming incredibly wealthy.
Rich, free and with a desire to destroy all that conspired against him into ashes which can find no equal, Edmond disappears for some ten years and comes back as the Count of Monte Cristo: a handsome, talented and mysterious man.
He befriends the son of one of his enemies, is invited to Paris where all three of them live, interweaves useful friendships, undiscloses hidden and morbid secrets, and silently but mercilessly destroys all three of his archenemies: one commits suicide, one loses all his relatives and becomes mad, one is reduced to a helpless beggar.
Edmond refuses to go back with his former girlfriend (who in the meanwhile had married one of the enemies), and gets together with a young, beautiful, intelligent Greek princess. The novel ends on this happy note: «Wait, and hope»!This is the story: it has been many times called a “children’s story”, and lends itself well to the standard etiquette of the “revenge story”, but despite its lack of critical acclaim there’s certainly more to it than just a simple, if intriguing, plotline.

THE STYLE:

«The Count of Monte Cristo is “one of the most gripping novels ever written”, declares Umberto Eco in his book Sugli specchi e altri saggi in 1985, contributing to the literary rehabilitation of a novel which was considered by many as frivolous, written merely for entertainment. Eco adds, immediately after: “It is also one of the worst written novels of all time”. These statements are both true».How can this oxymoron by Umberto Eco be explained? To put it simply, its redundancy is what makes the novel great.
The style of the novel is – perhaps infamously – a lot to get through, and it might very well feel antiquated.«The text overflows with unnecessary hendiadys, formular expressions, pompousness and with generally superfluous annotations. Fiery eyes are “fiery and prideful”, or “fiery, prideful and lit with arrogance”; those who get up do so “from the chair on which they were sat”, often “to then put it back into place”. Certain quotations and images are repeated invariably five or six times throughout the novel. Characters who fought in a specific chapter meet again in the following, and start their conversation summing up surreally, like automanons or chronic forgetters, their last interaction. This style finds its explanation in the material genesis of the work: on one side, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo “was paid little by line, and had to extend”; on the other, the feuilleton-styled publication rendered redundance particularly important, so as to offer a summary to those who had lost a number, like in the initial seconds of any TV series episode».There are therefore reasons for this pompousness: firstly, the novel was not published as a whole, but chapter by chapter. Feuilletons were pamphlets which were published once or twice a week, and subsequently it was necessary to freshen the memory of the readers by telling them what had happened during the last chapter – if one was away, didn’t have enough money, or for whatever other reason had missed the last publication, at least they could rely on the author briefly summing up the most important events which had happened.
Then there’s a second reason, equally as practical but functional not so much to the reader, but more so to the author: the longer the chapter was, the more Dumas made off of it.Another huge factor at play which must not be underestimated, lastly, is Dumas’ very close and even personal relationship with his readers: he had no problem following their suggestions, listening to their opinions, and establishing a frameset which would please everybody – something which, especially for the time, was completely abnormal: for Dumas, this very close connection becomes instead almost a necessity – a financial necessity, but also a personal one.This is because Dumas’ beginnings are in the theater, and as Robin Bass reminds us, playwriting is very different from traditional novel writing – and somehow Dumas manages to combine the two approaches.
«[...] But the theater is the very opposite of a monastic cell or an ivory tower. Collaboration is not only the norm, but inevitable, feedback from the public is instantaneous, work has to be produced to satisfy demand, and there is an immediate relationship between the author’s output and what comes in through the box office. In the theater, Dumas learned the rudiments of literary production».Lastly, there is one extra reason, not at all practical nor personal, but merely for the story itself, which is that The Count of Monte Cristo would not be half as satisfying were it not for its length: it is the waiting that makes it worth reading. This was for the first time detected by Umberto Eco:«In the wake of this analysis, Eco himself has famously attempted an experiment: to translate The Count of Monte Cristo trying to “restore that same structure to a faster, snappy pace [...] without ‘re-writing’, without cutting down, [...] but sparing (the editor and the reader alike) some hundred pages”. Eco declares having continued for a while, satisfied with his results, but to have at last given up the attempt. The explanation for why he gave up is very telling. The narrative strength of The Count of Monte Cristo, he states, lies in the wait for the vengeance of the protagonist, announced after some one hundred pages but completed after the thousand mark. All the stylistic slowings, therefore, have a structural importance: that of prolonging the wait multiplying the pleasure of reading. The Count of Monte Cristo, he writes, is “a machine that produces agony”: in its victims and in its readers alike. The longer the book, the more powerful — and appreciated — the agony. “If revenges [...] all happened in two or three hundred pages”, writes Eco, the work would not have the same strength».It all seemingly ends up being a happy coincidence: the length which is necessary to keep a handful of faithful readers, to make a living off of writing, is also the x-factor which makes the novel actually gripping. And Dumas was obviously very aware of this. In fact, his novels are all way more complex that they might seem at first impact. The times Dumas has been brushed off as a “children’s author” or “mediocre writer” are almost endless, but this is actually very far from the truth. He was brave, and bold, and dared to touch on such taboo topics as one would have blushed to even think of at the time.«On the other hand, there are not many children’s books, even in our own time, that involve a female serial poisoner, two cases of infanticide, a stabbing and three suicides; an extended scene of torture and execution; drug-induced sexual fantasies, illegitimacy, transvestism, and lesbianism; a display of the author's classical learning, and his knowledge of modern European history, the customs and diet of the Italians, the effects of hashish, and so on: the length would, in any case, immediately disqualify it from inclusion in any modern series of books for children».

THE AUTHOR:

When analyzing a novel, one can never fully separate the body of work from the time in which it was produced and from the person who wrote it, but with Dumas this is all the more the case.«Polygraph of incredible and exceptional versatility, able to transit easily from one genre to the other, Dumas is a real force of nature, a true prodigy, whose admirable work skill and an innate, instinctive and exciting energy all translate, in front of a white page, in a happy, uncontainable, bubbly, lively narrative flair. His own personality, bloody and passionate, generous and bursting, extroverted and exuberant, cheerful and turbulent develops under the banner of excess, as show the unbridled love for good food, the intense erotic-sentimental activity that makes him collect hundreds of more or less ephemeral loves, the ease with which he accumulates and destroys fortunes, the tenacity that pushes him into future-less journalistic enterprises, the desire for knowledge that leads him to wander in all European countries, the spirit of adventure that makes him go through, and not just as a mere spectator, the political and literary revolutions of the time».From this introduction by Francesco Perfetti, we can start to get a sense of Dumas’ boisterous and – in many ways – excessive personality: he was quite the character. For instance, in one very unessential passage in The Count of Monte Cristo, he has this to say about a character who has no relevance in the story: «[...] the relative whom Villefort had mentioned, an insignificant personage both in the family and in this story, one of those beings who are born to play a purely utilitarian role in the world». Apart from the unflattering description, what appears clear is that Dumas surely didn’t consider himself an «insignificant personage», as it were.
He surely had a strong opinion of his own abilities, and seldom (if never) bilittled his talents.However, at times, this pride which Dumas had in his own person is brought maybe too far. The reason why is easily explained: in context, Dumas was one of the first novelists breaking into the scene, and the perception people had of novels at the time was not the most favorable.Before the XIX Century, the only «deserving» forms of literature were poems, plays, and at most essays. Novels were considered something inferior, superficial. This meant that Dumas, a novelist, was not exactly taken into consideration by the literary élite, or at least novels weren’t. His job also consisted in modifying the perception the general public had of novels, and demonstrating that this genre was as deserving and as complex as a poem might have been.
It might be that it is precisely this lack of acknowledgment for his works that made him act so swaggerly and over-confidently.Besides, in a scene as heterogeneous as Paris during this first third of the Century, a young author trying to make it big was inevitably going to meet with criticism, hate, and even enemies. For instance, there was this one man, Eugène de Mirecourt, who once denounced Dumas for having created a quote on quote «factory of novels», which he needed in order to rob the work of underpaid collaborators and pass it as his own.This is a little and otherwise neglectable nugget of information, but it is worth bringing up because it is functional to explain two important aspects of Dumas: it firstly shows how dedicated he was to affirming the value of his craft, going so far as to even turn some people into enemies; and secondly, it also gives me the chance to talk a little about how exactly Dumas worked, and how he managed to be such a prolific writer.Again, this is what Francesco Perfetti has to say: «The exceptional literary prolificacy of Dumas, his strong imaginative power and the extraordinary ease with which he wrote – qualities that perhaps have no equivalent in the history of literature of any other Country – were favored by the fact that he, for the writing of almost all his novels, made use of the help of numerous collaborators or nègres, who, under compensation, were responsible for the collection of historical and literary documentary material and for the preparation of the basic canvas of the work. Among these collaborators Auguste Maquet, history teacher in a Parisian high school, is of particular importance».Realistically then, it wasn’t just him doing everything: Dumas had his set of employees, who would do research for him and maybe help him construct the basic plotlines.
However, we must be careful as to not overestimate their importance: «[...] the use Dumas made of nègres or other collaborators must not be exaggerated, as he was, always, the true, inimitable, unattainable creator of a literary universe incomparable for richness of imagination, capacity for suggestion, and freshness of style».In light of this clarification, we can start to understand how misplaced de Mirecourt’s accusation was.
«The controversy, with all the consequences of insinuations and discussions, [...] had a more scandalistic dimension than real consistency and, apart from the condemnation of Mirecourt in the lawsuit pursued by Dumas, the terms of the matter were put in their rightful place by subsequent studies [...] Not wrongly, Benedetto Croce was able to later speak of the “legend” of the “Alexandre Dumas novel factory & co”, and he was able to ascertain, with the legitimate satisfaction of an admirer of Dumas such as he was, that the legend was, by now, gone “to join all the other similar legends, concerning other writers”».This all helps to get a better sense of who Dumas actually was: definitely boisterous, probably a bit arrogant; but honest, and truly dedicated to his craft. The argument that having collaborators help him rendered his works unauthentic is therefore simply false. As suggested by Gino Doria, the parallel should at most be between Dumas and «the great painters of the Renaissance, who, overloaded with commissions, used to entrust to young apprentices the completion of this or that part of a painting they were working on».With so much knowledge on the mind behind the novel, at last, we can now move on to the book it produced.

THE MAIN THEMES:

The first thing we need to establish when talking of Dumas’ novels is their highly historical character: as has already been made abundantly clear, novels were still a very new genre at the time, and in order to make them appear more noble, using history as the main backdrop was a good and functional way to establish their intrinsic importance.It also played in Dumas’s favor that during the Romantic period history and traditions were starting to acquire an unprecedented level of popularity and consideration: choosing those subjects was therefore a natural response to a pervasive cultural climate, as well as an economically clever decision – those books were bound to sell well.Lastly, Dumas’ own interest in history must not be forgotten: the obsession the Romantics had for history would have done little had it not been supported by a genuine passion.
«Dumas’ interest in history is authentic and genuine, but for him history is above all material that allows one to create a happy and compelling narrative plot – although, in his eyes, history (even when embellished with fictional characters, even when characterized by sudden temporal accelerations, even when enriched with plausible but totally improbable or completely invented episodes, even when stacked with swaggering situations) should not betray the “spirit” of what really happens and should leave to the reader, in the end, an idea (all in all and at first approximation), quite plausible of the meaning of the events and the defining traits of an era».He was actually preoccupied with making his works authentic, if not historically accurate – and this is nothing new, because history is rarely as sugar-coated as we might want it to be. As a response to the accusations of “betraying historical truth”, Dumas famously and cheekily had one thing to say: «To those who accused him of raping history, he, with a fine self-irony that was characteristic of his personality, admitted to doing so, but added that from those acts of violence were born beautiful children».Having this established, it is also important to state that Monte Cristo, among his historical novels, is perhaps the least historical of all: much of the plot is set in what for Dumas would have basically been contemporary Paris, or at the very least a Paris very familiar to him. There are small passages about the Borgias and other Italian Renaissance “Princes”, but mainly the book is based on a fait divers.There are different opinions as to what might have been the main inspiration behind the story: while some say The Count of Monte Cristo was solely inspired by Dumas’s father, a fiery general of mixed origins (he was half French, half Haitian) who later in life was denied his pension because of his mixed descendance, and despite his military prowess was never able to redeem this injustice; others point out that the story was actually inspired by a chronicle about a man taking revenge on all the douchebags who had put him into prison.The second option seems to have been a much heavier inspiration, but also one must make a case for General Dumas’ talents and latent revenge as essential contributors to the characterization of Edmond Dantès, the protagonist of the story.
But if Dumas’ father can be identified in the Count himself, the plot owes almost everything to the chronicle just mentioned. To be succinct, I am here reporting Robin Bass’ summary of it: «The plot was inspired by the true-life story of François Picaud, which Dumas found in Jacques Peuchet’s Police Devoilée: mémoires historiques tirés des archives de Paris […] (1838), a collection of anecdotes from the Parisian police archives.
Briefly, the story is this: Picaud, a young man from the South of France, was imprisoned in 1807, having been denounced by a group of friends as an English spy, shortly after he had become engaged to a young woman called Marguerite. The denunciation was inspired by a café owner, Mathieu Loupian, who was jealous of Picaud’s relationship with Marguerite. Picaud was eventually moved to a form of house-arrest in Piedmont and shut up in the castle of Fenestrelle, where he acted as a servant to a rich Italian cleric. When the man died, abandoned by his family, he left his money to Picaud, whom he had come to treat as his son, also informing him of the whereabouts of a hidden treasure. With the fall of Napoleon in 1814, Picaud, now called Joseph Lucher, was released; in the following year, after collecting the hidden treasure, he returned to Paris.
Here he discovered that Marguerite had married Loupian. Disguising himself and offering a valuable diamond to Allut, the one man in the group who had been unwilling to collaborate in the denunciation, he learned the identity of his enemies. He then set about eliminating them, stabbing the first with a dagger on which were printed the words: ‘Number One’, and burning down Loupian’s café. He managed to find employment in Loupian’s house, disguised as a servant called Prosper. However, while this was going on, Allut had fallen out with the merchant to whom he had resold the diamond, had murdered him and had been imprisoned. On coming out of jail, he started to blackmail Picaud. Picaud poisoned another of the conspirators, lured Loupian’s son into crime and his daughter into prostitution, and finally stabbed Loupian himself. But he quarreled with Allut over the blackmail payments and Allut killed him, confessing the whole story on his deathbed in 1828».When compared to the summary of the actual novel, the resemblance is quite striking: and besides, this is not just guesswork; Dumas himself confirmed to have taken inspiration from this almost surreal story – a story which, all in all, he transformed into something infinitely more valuable: «Peuchet’s account of the Picaud case, he wrote, was ‘simply ridiculous … [but] inside this oyster, there was a pearl. A rough, shapeless pearl, of no value, waiting for its jeweler’».

THE MAIN CHARACTERS:

Just by looking at the length of the novel, it might be easily guessed that The Count of Monte Cristo starrs a huge number of characters – some fully fleshed out, most either typified or one-dimensional. There is much discussion about whether the novel sacrifices plot to characters or characters to plot; but both interpretations can be true: the plot vastly dominates the novel, and we wouldn’t read it if didn’t have a compelling storyline, but at the same time the book is dictated by character – character viewed as an imaginative construct more than as a psychological identity. The result is characters coming off as more «noble» and «whole», sublimated rather than internally complex.Maximilien Morrel. Undoubtedly the second greatest male character in the novel after the Count, Maximilien can however sometimes come off as boring and insufferable: he whines all the time, is always emotionally devastated, and often overflows with poetical but essentially substanceless discourses. He is an ideal lover: loyal, passionate, athletic, sensible and attentive. His role in the book is to serve as a foil to the other young Lions scattered around Paris, and as somewhat of a younger replica of the Count, though stifling (as in — almost more perfect than the Count is). All in all, Maximilien represents the Romantic myth which was so largely diffused at the time: a hero seemingly without fault, and also imbued with a certain dose of stoicism, which he borrows from his father. The Romantic influence is undoubtable: in Europe at the time, works such as The Sorrows of Young Werther or The Letters of Jacopo Ortis were starting to become more and more popular, and were helping to solidify the idea of man as a pure and whole being, loyal and yet almost titanic in his condition, and Maximilien too can be included in this specific category. A solid, if flat, character.Bertuccio. Bertuccio comes from Corsica, and he is very boldly pragmatic. He is one of the realistic people depicted in the novel, by which is meant – lower class. He is however particularly important because he shows that Dumas was simultaneously well aware of that reality (we must not forget he grew up really poor and was never fully financially stable), and appreciated the quick sense and observant and efficient nature of those classes: he does usually depict them as criminals, but he does not put it in a bad light – if anything, there is somewhat of an underlying appreciation that demonstrates his closeness to that world, a world he ultimately belongs to. This can be seen with Bertuccio (a former smuggler), but also with the swaggering gangs in Rome guided by the dreaded Luigi Vampa: there is never a time when we are supposed to dislike them.Haydée. The Romantic Age was also infamously known for its obsession with Exotism and eastern heirlooms, traditions, and mannerisms. Taking inspiration from this trend, Dumas finds a place in this overwhelmingly patchworked novel for a character who embodies the essence of «orientalism»: and this is Haydée, princess of Janina, and pseudo slave of the Count: during the novel she mainly sleeps, or smokes, and is overall languid and latent; but she is also brave and proves to be absolutely worthy of respect. She is a «pseudo-slave» in the sense that the Count finds her at a slave market in Istanbul, where she had ended up after her father’s death, and according to the laws in force at the time the only way in which he could free her was by paradoxically buying her, and she was essential to successfully take revenge on one of the three conspirators. But the Count never really treats her like a slave, and when he finally brings her to France (a Country where slavery had been abolished), he does tell her she is free to do what she wants. Overall, Haydée adds that oriental charm the Romantics so dearly liked (Dumas especially), but in many ways she is more than a mere embellishment: in the end, it is she who ends up with the Count and has her happily ever after.The three victims. Although we might guess that the trio would not view under a too forgiving light this kind of grouping, we do have to admit that they however lend themselves to it.
Named (in order of when we are introduced to them) Fernard, Danglars and Villefort, they are the «villains» because they are the ones who plan Edmond’s imprisonment and mercilessly throw an innocent person into a life-long punishment, all because they were either jealous of him or because they risked getting their reputation ruined by him.
In order, we start with Fernard Mondego, a rude and brooding and money hungry barbarian. He is the one who hands to the Police the paper undermining Edmond, knowing full well what the consequences were going to be. He ends up marrying Mercedès as soon as he places Edmond into prison, and is the one who destroys Janina, kills Haydée’s father and sells her to the slave market. Fernard embodies the typical hot, passionate, impulsive Mediterranean villain – a very usual archetype when it comes to Southern Europe＊.
Always in Marseille is where we first meet Baron Danglars. He originally works as a bookkeeper for the ship Edmond also works for as a sailor. He is definitely smart, definitely money-hungry, and definitely jealous of Edmond when he realizes he will be promoted to Captain and earn more than him. He’s the one who comes up with the plan to imprison Edmond (because he was also the only one smart enough to understand how to do it, knowing the pro-Napoleonic tendencies of the ship’s deceased Captain), and then goes on to become a rich banker with a house in the second-most fashionable street in Paris. Dumas polemically realizes in him the archetype of the self-made man.
Lastly, Gérard de Villefort: he is the last of the three that we are introduced to, but that does not make him any less dislikable. He works as a public prosecutor in Marseille, and so he is the last hope we can cling to, because he is the one who will be deciding whether to sentence Edmond or not. He is undoubtedly clever, and understands that Edmond is essentially innocent, but he still puts him into prison because he discovers that his own father is involved in the illegal scheming to bring Napoleon back on the throne, as leader of the Napoleon supporters in Paris, and so in order to save his father Noirtier – or to better phrase it, to save his own position in the new Borbonic monarchy – he destroys the proof which would discharge Edmond of any crime and sentences him to life-long captivity. Eventually he also moves to Paris, where we get a weird subplot of his secret relationship with Danglars’ wife and of his burying their newborn baby alive; he there marries in second nuptials a dangerous and raving mad woman (with a preoccupying obsession with poisons), and lives in fear of his reputation being permanently stained by any undesired resurgence of his father’s past doings.We can see that their features are more or less the same: they are all ambitious, jealous, and immoral. However, when the Counts gets back to them, their punishments differ distinctively: Fernard dies suicidal, shooting himself in the head; Villefort lives to see his whole family die (or so at least he is led to think) and turns completely mad; and Danglars ends up a poor beggar, losing all his fortune thanks to the Count’s smart deceptions concerning stock market investments.
It is interesting to see how the punishments gradually deflate in gravity, going from death to being bankrupt. However, this has less to do with their singular faults and more to do with the Count’s evolution throughout the story, as we shall see later.The Count. Undoubtedly the most emblematic character of all, whose person is key to understanding the essence of the story. He is an eclectic man of many interests, with the additional – though hardly realistic – quality of being exceptionally talented at all of them. In this sense, he perfectly falls under the category of early nineteenth-century protagonists as perfect heroes: he is the best sailor on his ship, he is athletic, he becomes arguably the richest man on earth, he is an exceptional alchemist, he is very clever, he is loved by two intelligent and beautiful women, he eventually gets what he wants. This is partially Dumas’ propensity to create characters which he would have loved to resemble, and also the public’s propensity to like such characters over anything else. On the flip side, this unlikely concentration of every quality which is desirable on earth could make him a bit indigestible. But Dumas makes it so that we never dislike the Count. Everything he gets, though comically surreal at most times, we feel like he deserves it. The reason why is actually quite banal, and it concerns the time we spend with him down in the dingiest dungeons of the Chateau d’If: Dumas is so great at showing us just how monstrous it is that an innocent soul has to go through all that, and the details he goes into to describe Edmond’s deep suffrance, the excruciating pain he feels when he realizes he probably will never see his old father alive ever again, the sheer desperation that brings him to contemplate suicide face the injustice that governs over life… we cannot be against this man after we have been so emotionally close to him. This is why it is virtually impossible to hate him. What Dumas does is that he interweaves a solid relationship between the Count and the audience.
Despite all that, the Count of Monte Cristo is not the basic sort of Romantic hero: he consumes drugs, he keeps a Maghrebi slave with him (a detail that comes from the pen of someone who himself suffered because of his mixed identity), he partners up with a number of illegal gangs and criminals – and, as Dumas never forgets to remind us, he peculiarly looks like Count Dracula.
While some of these traits can see their roots in shallow Romantic trends such as Exotism and the Gothic revival, this peculiar and confusing concoction of features is at the heart of what makes Dumas so incredible, for in the literary backdrop on which he operates, he cheekily manages to include nuance in his works.

＊Another example of this could be William Shakespeare, famous for setting some of his plays (Romeo & Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice etc.) in Italy, because it was seen as the Country of hot-blooded, instinctive and heated people.

THE NUANCED AND THE IDEAL:

When introducing the character of the Count, it is easy to state that he is perfect, and to justify his likeableness by explaining how emotionally connected we are to him by the end of the first third of the novel. But he is so well-liked because he is attractive, talented, but above all because he is not exactly perfect – he’s_ almost_ perfect.
Concerning this aspect, it seems relevant to bring up André Gide’s comment on Victor Hugo, because it both pairs well with and stands out as complementary to Dumas: when asked who, according to him, was the greatest French writer of all times, Gide replied: «Victor Hugo, hélas!», which roughly translates to «Victor Hugo, unfortunately!» – he was therefore admitting that Hugo is the best writer, but that he was simultaneously not too happy about it. While the complimentary part of Gide’s observation was reserved to Hugo’s stunning prose, the not-so-flattering half – that unhappy flourish after the comma – is largely due to Hugo’s character construction, because his protagonists are wonderful, but they are also distinctively either completely black, or completely white. They lack nuance.
To Gide’s observation, it might therefore be argued: «Dumas is the greatest French writer of all time – unfortunately», but reserving the unflattering latter part for the obnoxious prose, and the complimentary former part to his talent in showcasing nuance in his works.What is incredible is seeing how little consideration the great academic minds seem to have of Dumas: if Hugo is among the most studied authors worldwide (and deservingly so), Dumas just often gets brushed under the rug. This is not something new, because this underestimation of his talents is something that has been going on since the earliest traces of critical response to his novels: «The mid-nineteenth century saw a continuing struggle to establish the credentials of the literary novel, by giving it the dual aim that Stendhal had helped to pioneer, which were those of exploring and enduring features of human psychology and analyzing a particular state of human society. In contrast to such enterprises, fiction which involved larger-than-life characters and implausible situations, Gothic horrors, melodramatic incidents and so on appeared mere entertainment. The gradual emergence of realism in the European novel was not altogether to the advantage of Dumas, whose image was less that of the austere priest than the jolly friar, and whose novels poured out of a factory, the purpose of which was to create entertainment and sell it for money».The thing everyone seems to be constantly forgetting about is that life is about the «austere priest» just as much as it is about the «jolly friar»: moral superiority, though ascertained, shouldn’t necessarily imply greater interest. Dumas’ lack of exaggeration inside a novel created on a surreal exaggeration speaks for itself for how skilled he is at finding that balance between dream and reality.As observed with some of the characters’ profiles, in Dumas there is always a certain moral ambiguity, both in his descriptions of the characters (like Bertuccio) and in his decision to include certain traits which might take the reader aback, as it happens with the Count: he sympathizes with smugglers and criminals, because he is aware of their struggles and probably also understands the reasons behind their actions. Dumas is also not afraid to make his protagonist somewhat of a weird exotic experiment, who regularly smokes hashish and who keeps a Greek princess under key in his home.There is however one key passage in the book which reveals the Count’s surprising imperfect nature, and that is when he discovers that through his machinations to successfully remove all of Villefort’s family members to take his revenge on the public prosecutor, he has also indirectly caused the death of Villefort’s youngest child, killed by the hand of his mentally unstable mother during a fit of hysteria. This is when not only the Count’s consideration of his project, but also our consideration on his project, tragically come crashing down: the Count is not invincible. Life can also destroy his perfectly thought-out plans: «Montecristo paled at this terrible spectacle. He realized that he had exceeded the limits of vengeance, he realized that he could no longer say: “God is for me and with me” [...] he rushed out into the street, wondering for the first time whether he had had the right to do what he had done».This also very closely relates to the gradual minimization of the punishments reserved to the three villains: though not openly stated, it is reasonable to assume that the Count had begun this path of revenge with the intention of seeing all three of them dead. Fernard, who died suicidal, inspired none of the noble feelings ( «he had exceeded the limits of vengeance»…) produced by the death of Villefort’s son. But after this otherwise neglectable kid’s death, the Count’s plans take a very visible turn: neither Villefort nor Danglars die – they both get their punishments, but they are still technically left with the option to rebuild a life on the ruins of the ones they had created with hate, ambition and cruelty. This shift is important, because it symbolizes the breach in the perfect system the Count had set up for itself.Equally as ambiguous is the end of the novel: how do we define it? Is it really a happy ending?
To contextualize, at the very end of the novel, after making sure that Maximilien would not commit suicide by reuniting him with his loved one, the Count briefly visits Mercedès (his girlfriend at the beginning of the novel, the woman who then goes on to marry Fernand and who helplessly betrays a young hopeless Edmond), and we might think they are going to get back together at last. Besides, we cannot entirely blame her for her choice, because she was forced to marry Fernand by the situation, and so we might hope for a compassionate forgiveness on the Count’s side – but they don’t get back together, Mercedès is clearly very devastated by this, and the Count departs for a travel to unknown destinations in the company of Haydée, the brave and stunning Greek princess he had liberated by bringing her in France with him. How might we interpret this?A definite answer can’t really be given: these kinds of open finales lend themselves out for interpretation. Either way, even if we assume that the Count is going to be the happiest of creatures on earth, we are left with some sort of bitter aftertaste: Mercedès’ ending, the kid’s death, and other characters which it would be impossible to cover besides. Now, while we certainly cannot know with certainty whether Dumas intended it that way, it is impossible not to feel like through this unfolding, he is condensing in the end the true essence of life: for what is life, if not that latent bitter aftertaste creeping up in an otherwise joyous existence?The final line Dumas ends his novel with is also worth acknowledging: Wait, and hope. Should we really place all our trust on Providence then? Did the Count only succeed because he was patient? How much did Dumas believe in his own axioms, and how much are they just there to give a nice, ending flourish to a complex and diverging novel?
These kids of statements do not altogether go to the advantage of Dumas, and have been the main reason why people tend to brush him off as shallow: «In Dumas’ narrative works, on closer inspection, it is not possible to trace moralistic discourses apart from the natural right-wrong and good-evil oppositions, nor political and ideological messages –so much so that, for example, the novels of the Musketeers’ cycle – if one really wanted to read them under this interpretative key – would end up proposing an idealized and all in all positive vision of the Ancien Regime». It is hard to totally disagree with what is being said here.However, one last time, it is important to remember one thing, which is Dumas’ never ending reliance on an audience. He therefore needs to balance his way through the intentions he wants to carry out with his works, and the necessity to please his readers, which is essential for his financial stability. And if that does not give a sense of Dumas’ deep understanding and awareness of our social superstructure, and his incredible ability to combine it with the themes he instead wants to develop, it’s hard that something else will.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

«For many of its readers, despite its length, it seems all too short; we want to spend more time with the count and the other characters in the book, more time in its bustling world of drama and passion. Creating that thirst for more is among Dumas’ great contributions to literature».Being a believer in the beauty of reading seems so easy with Dumas, because he has readers remember (constantly) just how right they are to believe in it.«The author –one may say of him what one wants –is a charmer: like the Pied Piper, he has the gift of irresistibly dragging, behind him, in the wonderful and enchanted realm of fantasy or in the domain of a story made more captivating with the colors and shades of legend and imagination, a throng of readers that becomes more and more numerous every day. And that, on closer inspection, is truthfully quite something».

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Despite being such a huge household name, most people do not know much about Jane Austen’s writings outside of her six main, structured novels.Contrary to popular belief, Jane Austen did not simply wake up one day at twenty-one and decided that she would be a novelist: she had been writing for long before that, and her blossoming in the mature works that are nowadays so universally acknowledged was actually quite a slow progress.“Twin” Austen already liked writing very much, and in fact she would prophetically call herself an ‘authoress’, writing for the ‘public aficionado’ that was her family. From the early age of eleven, she was constructing herself as an author. Testimony to that are the ‘fair copies’ of her writings, that she had collected into three respective bound vellum booknotes that she had labelled with the grandiose titles of Volume The First, Volume The Second and Volume The Third＊.This demonstrates that besides a certain autoirony, Austen also put a lot of care and importance in her works – and of course, her natural skills ultimately allowed for these works to be quite interesting and readable. As Christine Alexander stated, «This young writer was a consummate observer and imitator, whose quick wit and mastery of style and manner enabled her to experiment in the techniques of fiction while producing at the same time works that are not only morally and aesthetically acute but also worthy of a talented entertainer».But what is ‘juvenilia’, and should it be worth any attention? As a rule of thumb, ‘juvenilia’ concerns the «early writings or works written in one’s youth», with twenty usually being the age limit – but this is obviously completely arbitrary.
Many have spoken disparagingly of Austen’s juvenilia: for instance, the stories were brushed off by her own nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, who described them as «transitory amusements», «of a slight and flimsy texture»; and by R. W. Chapman (and those aware of Austen’s rocky road with editorship will know how much of a household name Chapman is), who 1933 patronizingly stated: «it will always be disputed whether such effusions as these ought to be published; and it may be that we have enough already of Jane Austen’s early scraps». But that’s not all: as late as 1978, for readers and scholars alike, Austen’s first creative period still wrongly coincided with the production of Pride & Prejudice, with critics alluding to the juvenilia and Lady Susan as «trifling enough, consisting mainly of squibs and skits on the light literature of the day» – all pretty harsh arguments, though valid in their own right.The truth is that the juvenilia (and I here make a case for excluding Lady Susan out of this label) aren’t exactly, or at least technically good. We read through them now because of the name they are associated to, but if someone else had written them, we would have probably forgotten about them＊.And yet – do they showcase personality! What’s so special about these writings isn’t the intricate plots, the complex character constructions or the perfected writing style: it’s the layers of satire, and literary awareness, and opinionated stances that lay underneath the choice of topic or of character. When reading her juvenilia, the reader is getting to know Jane Austen, the person. Therefore, though generally dismissed as such, juvenilia are not simply immature or apprentice writings.«Some of her juvenilia are unfinished, some deliberately so as part of a joke, but all bear witness to a young author in the making. Both their content and form suggest Austen's concerns at the time, in particular her fascination with various genres and their conventions, ranging from dramas, short tales, sketches, imaginary letters and novels of various forms to popular history, and her growing concern about the education of women».

＊Through the lens of graphology, the manuscripts also document the evolution of Austen’s handwriting, and though the calibre becomes smaller and the tilt to the right more marked, we can see that at the early age of fifteen, Austen already had an exceptionally mature personality, a remark notably comparable to Virginia Woolf’s famous statement that «at fifteen [Austen] had few illusions about other people and none about herself».＊Taken from my notes on the topic: «If we were to adhere to a traditionally English terminology when talking about works read solely because of their authors, we might not be wrong in calling Austen’s juvenilia her “Taming of the Shrew”».

THE IMPORTANCE OF FAMILY & FEMALE EDUCATION:

«The Austen family, together with close friends, played a considerable role in the conception of the juvenilia. They provided inspiration for stories and characters, often becoming the butt of the youthful author's jokes; they modelled literary and dramatic enterprise, encouraged her critical stance in reading and, when necessary, were an encouraging audience».What is probably the most irritating thing about Jane Austen’s juvenilia is that we probably miss half of the textual references scattered all over the texts and that echo family situations, local events and inside jokes: she was aware of her self-crafted role of the ‘entertainer’, and when writing Austen knew really well that she would be reading those stories out loud to her entire family circle that same day. Her works laugh both at and with family and friends, and «demonstrate the way juvenilia, like autobiography, can be an empowering act that enables the young writer to ‘circumvent social prohibitions’, to ‘think forbidden thoughts’ and to express them in a literary (and in this case historical) code with impunity».Naturally then, not all of the writings were meant to be read by the entirety of her relations – realistically, this would have been true for the stories collected in Volume The First, but as she grew older and her topics started becoming more mature and risqué, only some of her friends and siblings would be let in their secrets.
For example, Park Honan comments on the significance of the room Jane Austen shared with her sister Cassandra, and the impact those four walls had on Austen’s early writing: the «daily freedom behind a shut door» to say or do whatever she liked.One perfect example would be her History of England, a sort of artistic collaboration with her sister Cassandra. It is probably one of the most fun items of her juvenilia, as it consists in a summary of England’s best-known sovereigns, each with a short (often sarcastic or excessively formal) description written by Jane and a small watercolour portrait done by Cassandra. It is incredibly cheeky, with Jane’s features being incorporated in Mary Queen of Scots (her professed favourite Monarch) and Queen Elizabeth (their avowed arch-enemy) being painted with their mother’s facial connotations: a “daring” dig that obviously couldn’t have been shared with everybody. Reginald Farrer suggests that «it is significant that only upstairs, behind her shut door, did [Austen] read her own work aloud, for the benefit of her chosen circle in the younger generation».As Alexander reminds us, «Austen’s forthright stories in the juvenilia, with their sexual innuendos and jokes on deformity and drunk enness, would repeatedly violate the rules of contemporary conduct books on feminine behaviour in polite society and the topics that a girl was permitted to discuss».Obviously, the more ‘extreme’ stories were not circulating very widely, but there was still a large margin of her production that was: in a climate where female education was a very touchy topic, we here realise how liberal Jane Austen’s parents had been with how they had chosen to educate their daughters.One very clear example is the way Austen portrays her protagonists: by slightly poking fun at them, she very blatantly confesses that she thinks their behavioural patterns ridiculous – and having the background from which to construct such opinions was not exactly normal for the time.In fact, we are talking about a transitioning period when femininity was still associated with the courteous values of innocence, pureness, lightness, and foolishness. Those traits technically implied an underlying seductive quality. Both the female body and mind were portrayed as inherently weaker, and therefore more appealing to the opposite sex. But in Austen – and this is not only in her juvenilia, but in the whole of her production as well – the bearing of those ‘qualities’ was never portrayed under a too forgiving light: far from appearing seductive, her juvenilia heroines never miss to come off as unintelligent, overreactive, and overall laughable.The evolution from this early writing period to her later, mature works is therefore seamless: she started with portraying emotional, ‘sentimental’ characters underlying their ridiculousness to then transition into characters that went against these outdated ideals, this time highlighting their greatness.The perfect example of this would be Mr. Collins’ iconic proposal in Pride & Prejudice: representing the old ideas on what was noble and attractive, Mr. Collins immediately deduces that Lizzy has only refused his hand to be ‘elegant’, and therefore that indicates his conviction on her lightweight. Instead, Austen has Lizzy remind him (and along with him, the whole of English society) that gone are the times when female value was only decided on courteous femininity: she insists on Mr. Collins considering her as a ‘rational’ being, a person with opinions and who is not scared to share them. And in this passage, there is no doubt on what Austen judges the ‘attractive’ attitude. Naturally, Darcy would later famously agree with her.That’s all the fruit of Austen’s early education. Her parents were surely liberal thinkers, and encouraged a rational (though unstructured) education for their daughters, an education that would later lead to a strong mind and sensible decision-making.However, it is also important to underline that the Austen family was ‘liberal’ for their time. Contemporary readings of Austen seem to imply that she was the opposite of conservatism, and a sort of predecessor for future feminists.This position, at a more attentive glance, cannot be defended. In fact, Jane Austen’s values would coincide more with conservative values, if one really looked into it – and just by checking how her six main novels end, this is apparent: the heroine, though a cheeky Elizabeth Bennet or a self-important Emma Woodhouse, is always absorbed by the structure and rigour of rich, powerful men. They unite in marriage, start a family, and conventions are at their core respected. Exuberance or ‘libertarianism’ is allowed, but within the limits of conventions.Another perfect example would be Anne Eliot of Persuasion: while we love to think of her and Wentworth’s love story as a love that stood the test of time and of judgement, it is to be clear that they were only allowed to be together because Wentworth had become wealthy: had he remained the lower-income sailor that he had been in his early-twenties, their reunion would never have happened. Mr. Eliot would have never consented, and Anne would have been powerless in that situation. Again, everything happens within the limits of social conventions.Unlike many intellectuals of all times, Austen really upheld her social structure: she called out its ridiculous aspects, but never belittled its core values. It is even more than just disenchanted acceptance, it is fully fleshed-out appreciation. If later in life, when more mature, and deathly ill, she spoke with uncertainty about Pride & Prejudice’s exaggerated liveliness, then we must be careful when calling her a ‘feminist’ in the modern sense of the word. While she might have been for female independence, she certainly was no Wollstonecraft.

IN DEFENCE OF THE NOVEL:

George Austen, Rector of Deane and Steventon in Hampshire, once described his daughter’s early writings as «Tales in a Style entirely new»: while Rev. G. Austen isn’t today remembered as one of the most influential literary critics of his time, we might want to accept his commentary, if just for the fact that good genes surely ran through his family: this ‘style entirely new’ daughter, naturally, was none other than Austen herself.George Austen should really be taken seriously: not only was he invested in the humanities, but from respectful sources we can also ascertain that he thought of his children’s education as of the utmost importance. This would naturally imply a good knowledge of the literary landscape, both the coeval and the slightly old. This can all be taken up by that otherwise neglectable comment, that was surely not devoid of blind parental pride: to call something ‘new’, one must be very aware of what the counterposed ‘old’ is, and of the ways in which the former deviates from the latter.To understand why young Austen’s writing style is ‘new’ then, we must take a step back and comprehend what the ‘old’ style was: by ‘old’, we mean ‘18h century’. Apart from many moralising and educational writings, and some radical social commentaries, the 1700s were an interesting time for prosaic literature: with the rise of essays as a new, respected genre, and with the further solidification of poetry, novels were cast aside as the odd, frivolous and absolutely value-lacking choice.Not unsurprisingly, their main readers were women, and these novels told some pretty wild and unrealistic and exaggerated stories about female kidnappings, mysterious rakes, harsh landscapes and over-the-top happenings. Quoting Arturo Cattaneo in A short History of English Literature, «A certain fascination with fear and mystery had always existed in English literature (as in Elizabethan theatre, for instance, in Macbeth). In the 18th century, though, this took the form of philosophical enquiry, following Burke's example. Apart from theoretical works, Gothic literature owes much to the 18th-century love of ancient ruins and wild scenery». Examples of this kind of literature are the novels of Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, that we can find lengthy cited in Northanger Abbey.However, as Margaret Drabble points out, «Jane Austen wrote at a turning point in the morals of the nation – that half of her belongs to the outspoken, coarse eighteenth century, and half to the prudish and discreet nineteenth century». With her, we are therefore already moving to something ‘new’.In any case, it is still a transitional period. Austen is in some way ‘prudish’, but she is no Dickens. We can however say that she starts looking at things under a more ‘prudish’ perspective, and that means that she starts to recognise how overstated the plotlines are – and starts making fun of them. «Whether she turns her probing ironic eye on her family and friends or engages with the wider context of her life, her written response is almost always parodic – ‘rattling burlesque’ is how G. K. Chesterton first characterized it and since then many critics have pointed to elements of the burlesque in the juvenilia».The ‘new’ in Austen’s style that her father had grasped is therefore not so much about the content, but about the way in which she sees the typically 18th century topics: she still adheres to their general dictates (in Love & Freindship, for example, the protagonists faint excessively often; and in Catharine, or the Bower the female protagonist spends a full night alone with a young gentleman), but she sprinkles in some tongue-in-cheek comments that let us know what she really thinks about such behavioural patterns. «Austen’s juvenilia are witty and entertaining – ‘light hearted’, ‘exuberant’, ‘hilarious’, ‘raucous’ are adjectives applied to it – but it would be wrong to assume that because they are youthful writings they are not intentionally serious, even subversive. A remarkable feature of the juvenilia is its ability to subvert limitations imposed on young women, especially in the field of education. The form of burlesque Austen uses to achieve this is parody, which deflates the serious original by applying the imitation to a comically inappropriate subject». She is here displaying what Jan Fergus refers to as her ‘double vision’: the ability to laugh at her own prejudices while still maintaining them.The only ‘prejudice’ we should be careful about linking her to is the one concerning her stylistic choices: her usage of burlesque in her juvenilia does not necessarily suggest a disapproval of the novel as a form. As Juliet McMaster reminds us, «parody need not imply contempt». Although its reputation was at an especially low level in the 1780s and 1790s, Austen famously defended the novel. Whereas contemporary women novelists were uneasy about their relationship with the genre, Austen was unapologetic in her support of what she saw as an undervalued species of fiction. At the end of chapter V of Northanger Abbey, she writes:«[T]here seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them... in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusion of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language».Despite the light irony in the voice, this must surely be the most famous tribute addressed to any literary form. It is a vision not necessarily of but for the novel, subtly arguing for its educative value. The juvenilia suggest that Austen realized early on that the novel was something of a facilitator, generating and disseminating ‘knowledge of human nature’ to a ready audience. After all, this is probably the best thing about novels: they «satisfy the needs of the new middle class, which demanded original stories relating ordinary experiences, told in a language not too unlike that of the average man».

LADY SUSAN & ITS SHORTCOMINGS:

Lady Susan is undoubtedly the most famous work belonging to this particular period in Austen’s career.The synopsis is quite conventional, as Drabble redacts: «The plot itself is simple. Lady Susan, a clever, beautiful and ruthless widow, is determined that her young daughter should marry a man whom she detests. She herself is busily engaged in trying to attract the attention of her sister-in-law's brother, and trying to preserve the attentions of a previous lover. Finally her machinations are exposed, she loses the brother-in-law, who marries her daughter, and is herself obliged to marry the wealthy simpleton she had intended for her daughter».Lady Susan is in many ways a weird novel: for a start, it is the only one among her finished novels that did not go through publication. It appears in her manuscript, neatly written and well-polished – but that’s it about it. As Margaret Drabble points out, «Clearly, [Austen] liked Lady Susan well enough to make a fair copy of it, and not well enough to pursue its publication».One could reasonably conjecture that one of her dissatisfactions sprang from the form in which she had chosen to write it: Lady Susan is not, in fact, written in the normal third-person most of us would be familiar with: it’s an epistolary novel, meaning it is a collection of letters, showing different correspondences between different characters. The epistolary novel had been popular in the 18th century, and was very much a living convention when Austen tried to use it, but – as some critics argue – letter-writing was not exactly among her talents: «The letter form is an artificial convention, and she felt its limitations: stylistically, she was a far from conventional writer, and as Virginia Woolf pointed out, she had the courage and the originality to find her own way of expressing herself – her own subject matter, her own plots, her own prose». Austen admired Richardson and other novelists whose works are written in letters greatly, but their method does not come naturally to her.This is apparent when we see what she writes in the Conclusion to the novel: «This correspondence, by a meeting between some of the parties and a separation between the others, could not, to the great detriment of the Post Office revenue, be continued longer»: this clearly shows her sense of unreality in keeping the game up.Lady Susan is a story with a virtually infinite potential, yet it cannot help but be restricted by its own style: though letter-writing could not be elevated by Austen to the level of a real artform, in some of her own letters to Cassandra she does leave us some hints revealing how she approaches writing – the iconic «Three or four families in a country village» that are «the very thing to work on» is a comment particularly relevant to this story specifically, because it shows how limited Austen felt by having her main characters so geographically far from each other: the last few pages of Lady Susan, summing up the story in an anonymous third person, show her growing out of a pre-constructed box, and moving towards a style less constrictive.In content as in form then, Lady Susan is an 18h century work. Here, Jane Austen is showing us the mind of a ‘wicked woman’ in action, from within, an exercise which she was not to attempt again. «She was to attempt folly and frivolity and immorality, but never again so directly did she attempt to portray vice».Wicked though she may be, there’s however no doubt that Austen at the very least found Lady Susan tentatively charming: in her, she anticipates some of that frivolity and audaciousness that would later enchant thousands of readers in the forms of Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Woodhouse. In Mrs. Vernon, instead, we can pick up some of that moral superiority so typically seen in Anne Eliot or Fanny Price.Though some think Lady Susan severely lacking in balance, – «[Austen] should have seen that Lady Susan was bound to appear more attractive in the absence of an effective counterbalance» – I’d argue that it is actually her first novel where her two tendencies (the frivolous and the moralistic) actually face off. Some might say the win is with Lady Susan, but Mrs. Vernon’s spot-on judgments never fail to surprise.This also circles back to the discussion about Austen and feminism: «the case that Jane Austen was a frustrated wit, forced by a changing society to admire quietude and virtue against the grain of her own nature, has been forcefully and sympathetic ally argued by feminist critics». But this case presents its own difficulties: it is hard to question some of Austen's expressed dislike of aspects of the worldly life. She disliked London and most of what it represented, and she herself fainted, like an old-fashioned heroine, when told that her family was to move from the country to Bath＊.Ultimately, one cannot leave Lady Susan without a word of regret: what a pity that she didn’t go back to a thirty-five-year-old widow in her later days! She surely would have known how to paint a perfect picture, but for whatever reason she chose not to. She wrote of faultless Fanny Price, and of wicked Mary Crawford – not exactly the feminist spin people would now want to see.

＊I here refer back to my notes: «I’d venture to say that Austen probably felt more like a Mrs. Vernon, but also felt very powerfully the charm of a Lady Susan».

FINAL THOUGHTS:

«Jane Austen's brilliantly sophisticated teenage writings constitute her beginnings as a writer. We see in the works in this volume the sheer fun of her early sketches and their ridicule of human foibles, her parody of the absurdities of romance and sentimental fiction, her decision-making over choice of word and incident, her changing attitude towards character and style, and especially her early fascination with wordplay and hidden meanings that reveal her sprightly imagination»: this just about sums up why Austen’s juvenilia is a worthwhile read. You get to see a more unpolished version of her fine irony, her grotesque caricatures, and her justified literary ambitions.Besides, a further incentive to read them would be to try and find in their exuberance a fil rouge that Austen would later come back to in her latest, unfinished novel, Sanditon. Written on the verge of death, it is nice to see how she simply decided to sit back, and relish in the humorous, caricature-esque aspects of human life, rather than focusing too deeply on the sad, anger-inducing ones. It is a testimony to a young exuberance that never really went away.Virginia Woolf, among others, focused on the laughter in Austen’s early writing, calling it «Spirited, easy, full of fun verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense» – but she also detected seriousness behind the ‘clever nonsense’, a seriousness that clearly emerges in the last of the pieces in the juvenilia and that reaffirms Woolf's conclusion that «at fifteen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself».We now seem to be over the superficial reading most scholars were reserving to these so-called ‘flimsy textured’ works. As Alexander points out, «The tide has now turned and readers and scholars cannot get enough of her early writings. They are clearly recognized as accomplished works in their own right».Like all juvenilia, they document the author’s early delight in the process of creation and her gradual progression towards the artistic and moral maturity of her first published novels. But they also reveal the seriousness of an intelligent young writer behind all this bravado and ‘clever nonsense’.

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In-between Lev Tolstoy’s long novels, the verbose War & Peace and the reactionary and animated Resurrection, stands what is probably the author’s best literary accomplishment: a book balanced on the narrow rift of his dualism, incomplete in ideological construction and precariously standing on vacillating beliefs and convictions. Significantly, it is precisely this novel of Tolstoy – the transitory, the unfinished, the inconclusive novel – that reaches the highest literary levels he was ever able to achieve.Anna Karenina, published in Moscow in 1877 in a political and literary paper, the Russkij vestnik, is more than just a tragic love story between two organically matched but socially incompatible characters: it is a novel that discusses very deeply and very problematically about the meaning of life, about the future of Russia, about religion, about integrity. None of these issues is important in and of itself: they become vital to the story precisely because they make up the story, that does not want to highlight their importance if not for the fact that it would not exist if they were not there. The plot needs these topics to advance, and these topics would not be advanced if the plot did not allow them to.This mutual dependency alone clearly explicits the practical necessity of a third, higher-placed party that might govern over the otherwise unruly story. Anna Karenina is clearly a novel controlled from above; it is an incredibly complex and labyrinthine puppet, that would not function were it not for the puppet master (Tolstoy) orchestrating its every move and thought from the small distance that would have separated Tolstoy’s small and acute gaze from the thin and defenseless paper on which he was pouring his words and decisions.The plot plays on some common Nature-Culture as well as Country-City oppositions: it is however doubly conceived and rather complex. Here is the synopsis as given in an altruistic effort by Nabokov, right after a treatise on why it is «Not in his habit to talk of plots»＊:Anna, one of the most attractive heroines in world’s literature, is a young woman, as beautiful as she is fundamentally good, and fundamentally a condemned woman. Married at a very young age (by an aunt full of good intentions) to a promising official with a splendid bureaucratic career, Anna lives satisfied in the most brilliant salons of high society in Petersburg. She adores her son, respects her husband, twenty years her senior, and her lively and optimistic nature enjoys all the superficial pleasures life offers her.When she meets Vrónskij, during a trip to Moscow, she falls deeply in love with him. This love transforms
everything around her; now she sees everything in a different light. There is the famous episode, at the Petersburg station, when Karenin comes to pick her up on her return from Moscow and she suddenly realizes how big and fastidiously convex his ugly ears are. She had never noticed them because she had never looked at him with a critical eye; it had been for her one of the accepted things of life, which also included her own life. But now everything has changed. The passion for Vrónskij is a powerful reflector that makes her former world appear like a dead landscape on a dead planet.Anna is not only a woman and is not only a splendid example of femininity, she is a creature with a full, compact
and important moral nature; everything in her is significant and relevant, and this also applies to her love. She cannot be content, like another character in the book, Princess Betsy, with a clandestine relationship. Her sincere and passionate nature makes concealment and secrecy impossible [...] Anna gives Vrónskij her whole life, consents to separate from her beloved son – despite the distress that it costs her not to see him anymore – and goes to live with him first in Italy, then in his country estate in central Russia – even if this relationship, now in the public domain, marks her as an immoral woman in the eyes of her immoral society. Finally, Anna and Vrónskij return to the city. And she shocks that hypocritical society not so much for her love affair but for the open challenge to social conventions.While Anna bears the impact of society’s anger and is despised and snubbed, insulted and banned, Vrónskij,
being a not very profound man and in no way a gifted man, but a fashionable man, let’s say it – Vrónskij is not
touched by the scandal: he receives invitations, goes everywhere, meets old friends, is presented to apparently proper women who would not remain a second in a room where the disgraced Anna was present. Vrónskij still loves Anna, but sometimes he enjoys returning to the world of entertainment and fashion, and occasionally begins to take advantage of its advantages. Anna mistakenly interprets these futile infidelities as a decline in his amorous temperament. She feels that the affection she gives him is no longer enough, that she may lose him.Vrónskij, an obtuse man of mediocre intelligence, cannot stand this jealousy and seems therefore to confirm her
suspicions. Driven to despair by the slime and disorder in which her passion is being thrashed, on a Sunday evening in May Anna throws herself under a freight train. Vrónskij realizes what he has lost when it’s too late. But [...] war is about to break out with Turkey – it’s 1876 – and he leaves for the front with a battalion of volunteers.A parallel story, which develops along apparently independent lines, is that of Lévin’s engagement and marriage to Princess Kitty Šcerbàckaja. Lévin [...] is a man with moral ideals, with a conscience with a capital C. Consciousness does not give him rest. He is very different from Vrónskij. Vrónskij lives only to satisfy his impulses; Vrónskij, before meeting Anna, led a conventional life: even in love he is perfectly happy to replace ethical ideals with the conventions of his own society. Lévin, on the other hand, is a man who considers it his duty to intelligently understand the world around him and to build a place for him within it. Thus his nature is constantly evolving, and he grows spiritually throughout the novel, toward those religious ideals that Tolstoy was maturing at that time.Around these main characters, many others stir. Stiva Oblónskij, the carefree and inept brother of Anna; his
wife Dolly, born Šcerbàckij, a kind, serious and patient woman (in a sense one of Tolstoj’s ideal women), because she has selflessly dedicated her life to her children and to her inefficient husband; and there is the rest of the Sherbaksky family, one of the most aristocratic houses of Moscow; and the mother of Vrónskij; and a whole gallery of members of the high society of Petersburg. The society of Petersburg was very different from that of Moscow, since Moscow was the old, friendly, simple, flaccid, patriarchal city and Petersburg the sophisticated, cold, formal, elegant and relatively young capital [...] And of course there is also Karenin, Karenin the husband, an arid and upright man, cruel in his purely theoretical virtue, the model of the public official, the philistine bureaucrat who willingly accepts the pseudo morality of his friends, a hypocrite and a tyrant. At certain times he is capable of a good impulse, of a kind gesture, but soon forgets it and sacrifices it to career considerations. At Anna’s bedside, when she is very ill after carrying Vrónskij’s son in her womb and is convinced to be close to death (a death that does not happen), Karenin forgives Vrónskij and takes his hand with an authentic feeling of Christian humility and generosity.He will later return to his icy and unpleasant personality, but for a moment the closeness of death illuminates
the scene and Anna unconsciously loves him as much as she loves Vrónskij: both are called Alexei, both, as fellow lovers, divide her in her dream. But this sense of sincerity and kindness does not last long, and when Karenin tries to get a divorce – a matter not very relevant for him but that would change everything for Anna – and is faced with the need to submit to unpleasant complications to be able to have it, he quietly renounces and refuses to make other attempts, indifferent to what his refusal may mean for Anna. He moreover manages to find satisfaction in his righteousness.This is why Nabokov rightly concludes that «Despite being one of the greatest love stories in world literature, Anna Karenina is obviously not just an adventure novel».

＊Concerning this issue, I here refer to my own notes: «It is not revolutionary to point out the tendency of authors and intellectuals to oppose the ways of the “Institutions”. However, editorship never seemed nor seems to care about these statements, quoting them only in the name of philology. These hidden contradictions within the authors’ ideas and actions explain away why editors never consider such matter-of-fact and merely theoretical opinions seriously: because if Nabokov is so ready to state that he does not concern himself with plots, and then continues to give out a four-pages long synopsis, then we are led to believe that he does not really believe plots unimportant after all. So, in the fashion of biographies of I. Calvino always prefacing the author’s life’s thorough exploration with his famous statement that «[I] don't give biographical information, or I give it incorrectly, or I try to change it from time to time», we as editors should then go against authors’ unproductive and at times incoherent opinions to favor a fruitful research».

LEV TOLSTOJ’S PHILOSOPHY:

Igor Sibaldi, a slavist, writer and translator of Russian and Italian parentage, in a curiously interpretative collection of essays on Russian literature, Dieci Obiezioni ai Dieci Comandamenti (Ten Objections to the Ten Commandments), thus explains Tolstoy’s philosophy: «[...] the rule is easy, and is as follows: a) none of the things that seem true to others is true; b) the greater, or the more obvious, or the more fundamental a thing appears, the easier and more exciting it will be to grasp the lie, the guilty mistake everyone around you has adhered to unhappily [...]». Essentially – nothing short of daunting.Sibaldi continues: «Thus formulated, it seems a norm for giants of the spirit: it makes us imagine legendary destinies, epics of critical consciousness. But really, the beauty is that it is enough to practice it, even for just a little while, to realize that it is instead a method within everyone's reach, and that it always works, for everyone, with everything. This is why Tolstoy was so proud of it. It was a wonderful shortcut to greatness [...]»What Sibaldi has grasped about Tolstoy is actually a fairly straightforward law, one which most people sometimes unconsciously follow: that of believing that everyone around you is wrong, and that you only have the truth in your pocket. This is a common enough feeling, and it should not perhaps be so surprising that Tolstoy – a man who always avoided confrontation because he constantly felt (rightly, we might say) like he was above others both spiritually and intellectually – ultimately shaped it to fit his intimate belief and his powerful, bursting energy.The reactionary Tolstoy – the Tolstoy we can start to see in Anna Karenina and who reigns, untameable, in The Death of Ivan I’lich and in Resurrection – did not build but discover this ‘rule’ (the method of the new Tolstoyan Christianity), for Sibaldi a «a secret, tiny, terrible, anonymous law of nature recognized by everyone [...]», and horrifyingly having to acknowledge its truthfulness, he turned it into a capital law of Truth in an attempt to react against it and govern over it.There’s an emerging Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, a soon-to-be «Tolstoian-Tolstoy, a scowling Christian-heretic», a Tolstoy who can hardly bear to look at his new, growing transgressiveness and who fights this emerging energy throughout the whole novel – an energy he still cannot help projecting onto Anna, and that he becomes aware of too late into the story to effectively burden.To that effect (that of burdening the revolutionary energy), he creates Levin: it is interesting to see that in the first drafts of the novel, Levis appears as a merely secondary and unimportant extra. But in the rewritings following the first draft, the down-to-earth entrepreneur and countryman keeps acquiring more and more relevance, and in the final edition, Levin is just as crucial as Anna is, and operates as a wholly necessary co-protagonist. This change in Tolstoy’s trajectory, clearly, is not accidental, and as Sibaldi supports (his whole essay verges on this reading of the story), it shows Tolstoy’s attempt to eliminate the powerful implications of Anna, by counterbalancing her (his own projection in her) with Levin’s nobler and simpler implications, a projection of a moral and innocent and essentially good person – a person (another projection of himself in the novel) Tolstoy was obviously more ready to accept.«The mirrors remain two, until the end. And until the end, Tolstoy continued to look at himself in both of them, alternating horrified glances at Anna’s and desperately clinging onto Levin’s. Levin (the name is constructed on Tolstoy’s name, Lev, Leva), standing still where Anna is, not having guessed more than she has guessed or found, has survived, where she has died. And he hopes, prays, in the last page of the novel, trying to find the strength to keep living there where he’s living. “There it is, he is right” Tolstoy was saying to himself, in that last page, clinging onto it, in the hopes that it would be enough».Was count Tolstoy successful? Not really. «The determination with which Tolstoy, for the rest of his life, forced himself to follow Levin’s way never could free him of Anna, never could superpose once and for all the light mirror to the black one».It is undoubtedly satisfying to identify Tolstoy as a suffering and divided soul: the powerful and moral Tolstoy, the ‘holy’ philosopher, the philanthropic landowner. It both monumentalizes his character, and humanizes it. But when looked upon attentively, this breach within the author seems perhaps too grandiose even for his statuary reputation. It appears in him as a too exaggerated problem, for how mitigable it is.The explanation is actually quite simple, if not banal: though morally noble, Tolstoy always and stubbornly avoided confrontation of any kind. This amplification of his own (valid) sorrows may just be the cause of a self-imposed isolation, that naturally and automatically becomes an echo-chamber for the magnification of feeling. Tolstoy’s avoidance of confrontation is not an isolated case in the wider panorama in which he is inserted: nineteenth-century Europe, after the Romantic movement, had come to prize individualism and elitism above everything else. An author was not only justified but encouraged to keep his emotions and his opinions to himself, and the sometimes rhetorical and pathetic nature of Romantic and (later) Decadent writers is precisely the cause of this prepostulated individualism ＊. The negative consequences of confrontation can be seen clearly in Levin’s debates with his own brother and with the philosophical entourage of the novel: the sharing of opinions is never depicted under a too forgiving light, and we are often left with the feeling that if Levin had kept his opinions for himself, he would have only rendered them all the more noble. Sharing is never a positive thing.This attitude is also present in Tolstoy’s own life: the influential count, already well-known around Russia, always refused confrontation and never treated others as equals. To this effect, it is particularly relevant to talk about the almost-meeting with Dostoevsky, a meeting which would have happened were it not for Tolstoy’s severe refusal to consent to it. As Sibaldi explains rather plainly, «he [Tolstoy] was afraid to talk to someone that he knew would be on his same level». That he later regretted the decision, and became a fervent admirer of Dostoevsky, is a testament to the intelligence of Tolstoy, if not of the divergent path his thought took some time after the publication of Anna Karenina.
This self-imposed and sought-after secrecy does not contradict the one law Tolstoy followed religiously, that is: «none of the things that seem true to others is true», as identified by Sibaldi. If anything, the two positions are perfectly compatible and help explain each other. The Tolstoy that approached Anna Karenina is a divided man, but his potent ideas are indestructible, and this duality is what makes the novel so exciting and stimulating.

＊It is not my intention, with this statement, to diminish the greatness of Tolstoy’s feeling. Trying to link personal situations to bigger, long-lasting and cultural (shared) ones is always a risky hypothesis, if not an unforgivable stretch. What I may suggest is to be open to both readings, or even better – to view them as mutually inclusive, and not the contrary.

THE ATTENTION GIVEN TO THOUGHTS:

Despite often being cited as one of the main reasons why we are attracted to Anna Karenina, its characters are, at a second glance, embarrassingly mediocre – or at best, lackluster. With good reasons and textual support, the only two people in the book that cannot be placed under the run-of-the-mill label are the two youngest Konstantin brothers, Levin and Nikolai, who are the only characters with fresh and constructive personalities. Whereas the others fail to be but puppets in Tolstoy’s knowing hands (so inferior people of inferior thinking, if not precisely feeling), Levin and Nikolai manage to be memorable characters even outside context and author, and stand on their own, with their intellectually sound ideas and – most importantly – enough courage to still be themselves in a world so prone to conformism.As any great piece of literature, Anna Karenina is a novel that touches on a handful of topics: the critique of fashionable society is one of them (as it so often is), and its – the society’s – inability to single out the actually fruitful and important topics of conversation on issues ranging from politics, workers’ conditions, philosophy, elections, holidays and so on is just one poignant jabs at humanity among many. The critique is rendered even more powerful (and the description of society, by consequence, even more terrible) by Tolstoy’s way of showing how “the mob” silences independent thinkers (Konstantin) or timid intellectuals with practical experience (Levin), further proving the uselessness of their discourse and ultimately showing that the will to appear helpful and knowledgeable overpowers that of being helpful and knowledgeable. Not wrongly, Tolstoy has been said to be, alongside Dostoevsky, one of the two Russian authors who predicted the Russian revolution of the following century.Sibaldi also noticed this abundance of themes in Anna Karenina, observing that «In this extremely crowded world, Tolstoy in his works included a number of things: dream, sleep; children’s way of seeing the world; nature, full of a cosmic, absolute feeling; the Cossacks; holiness; crime; the mužiki; terrorism; fables. None of these things is important in and of itself, for Tolstoy. All owe their importance to their being something different from that world [...] And in all of these characters Tolstoy reproduced, one by one, phases or aspects of the analogous research that he was applying, with restrained desperation, in his own life».And then Nabokov, who courageously stated that «Artistically, Tolstoy was wrong in dedicating so many pages to these events, especially because they tend to become antiquated and are linked to a specific historical period, and to Tolstoy’s personal opinions – opinions which changed overtime. Russian agriculture in the 1870s does not give us the same chill as Anna and Kitty’s emotions and motivations».Why specifically these things are of importance is not a hill worth dying on. But we may be adamant to support Nabokov’s reading, as we may want to believe (perhaps wistfully) that Tolstoy was not only writing about a star-crossed love story, but was also weaving a vivid portrait of his country – a testament to its workers, its preoccupations, its traditions. Concerning the “emotions and motivations”, lastly, it would be interesting to see how much of their intensity would survive if they were the only things touched upon in the novel ＊.It is interesting reading through such reflections because – even when they could not be more divergent from his own ideas – it feels like seeing Toltoy at work. Not just in the way in which he thought, but in seeing how important he considers the act of thinking. Everybody in the novel (with the strong exception of Vronsky) is constantly thinking, and sometimes their thoughts (Kitty’s, Dolly’s…) are too complex, too subtle for how simple they are depicted elsewhere.The implication is curious and noteworthy: when reading the novel, one can never quite forget the author writing. Not to be Nabokov’s detractors, but when he states that «in those great chapters that are his masterpieces, the author becomes invisible», it is quite hard to understand which chapters he is talking about, as Tolstoy, perhaps more than any other character, dominates the novel.

＊ As various long novels (The Count of Montecristo being just one of the examples) demonstrate, the ‘length’ factor can and often is one very important category of the final product. Distilling the important and intense moments within a wide array of pages helps in keeping them relevant.

WHY IS ANNA SO ESSENTIALLY TRAGIC:

It is proof of the greatness of the novel that so many things can be said about it before even coming to the heart of the story, the character that gives it its title: Anna, and subsequently her love story with Vronsky. So much about Levin – it is ultimately Anna’s story.Yet Anna is not as profound nor as morally compromised nor as socially aware as Levin: granted, she is a woman. But this aspect of social commentary is not presented as the driving force of the story, nor of the character. She does not feel ‘less than’ a person because of her gender, and feeling bad for cheating on her husband is not prompted by it either – if anything, Tolstoy makes sure to show that if any person should want to have an extra-marital affair, it would be a very easy thing to achieve without stirring any controversy. The fact that Anna’s is so criticized is only due to her complete transparency and unwillingness to keep her love for Vronsky hidden.It is Anna’s story, firstly, because Tolstoy wants to make a pretty blatant point: Russia’s high society is hypocritical. The mere appearance is satisfying enough, but removing that essentially useless veil is reason enough to publicly humiliate and emancipate a person. Anna’s ‘fault’ is that she wants to appear as honest as she truthfully is, and she just cannot bow down to the expectations of others. She wants to be fully sincere, and in this «Anna goes against a inertia bigger than that of Saint Petersburg’s high society – her society. Anna actually goes back to one of the most ample currents of Russian culture: she redeems whole generations of “shallow men” (so well documented in Russian literature) who should have found within themselves that same power of the will».Anna Karenina is only shortly a love story. Anna’s affair with Vronsky starts with all the intensity of a young love, but fails to last in time in a way that is enjoyable – to her mostly. And after she naively confesses her passion to Karenin, her husband, she has to start fighting with an additional force: guilt. She is unreasonable in all this, too: she expects Vronsky to put up tranquilly with her hysteria, paranoia, and expectations. And she fails to factor in Karenin, egoistically wanting to divorce whilst maintaining all of the privileges she would legitimately have as his wife. But she believes she can work things out – and there’s greatness in this belief, and she is great in this.«This woman’s fault is in her helplessly belonging to that world that saw her grow up and become a mother. It is that world’s (for Anna, the only world worth living in) gravity to prevent her from living her passion as anything else but a destructive guilt – or, to be more precise, to prevent her from seeing that passion as a simple fling for a young official. A fling that pertains in every way to the colorful banality of her world».Anna and Vronsky’s relationship is not ‘ground-breaking’, nor a catalyst of change: it fits perfectly in that frivolous society of boring affairs and affected controversy. Vronsky is sweet and caring enough, but we would be mistaken if we were to expect from him the level of chivalric devotion of fairytale heroes: he can be as annoying as Karenin, as self-important as Oblonsky, and so on. He is not the one to blame when the relationship starts losing its initial intensity – Anna’s expectations, more reasonably, seem to be the true culprit.«That fling with Vronsky cannot help but be destructive, since Anna searches in it for the absolute, herself, happiness [...] and all that she can obtain from his the superfluous miracle of having briefly transformed him from small official to a semblance of husband, and father – a role for him wholly unnatural, and in which Vronsky only manages to find annoyance».And then she dies – weighed down by the unwanted consequences of a forced divorce, by the unwanted pregnancy, by Vronsky’s (unwanted) change of attitude towards her. The world starts feeling too small for her, too tight. But perhaps, it had always been so. Perhaps, Anna Karenina was just destined to a tragic ending.«Anna’s death is a source of relief, because she is a blatantly condemned woman: she is a character vowed to desperation, not so much love-thirsty as sorrow-thirsty, full of anguish, prone to obsessions and totally cumbersome! Cumbersome only as a losing rebel can be [...]».Especially when reading Anna’s suicide as a wicked way to take revenge of Vronsky’s lack of attention, the act seems overly petty and overly stupid. But is Tolstoy too cruel? Did he sentence Anna to an unjust death? Was his judgment wrong?It would be comforting to believe it: Anna’s faults are not too tragic, cheating is not so horrible, moralists are simply too overkill. It is clear that moralist-Tolstoy did not fully convince artist-Tolstoy, and that ultimately the former is the one who is actually indefensible – this kind of reasoning reassures the reader and makes them feel good and intelligent. But throughout the novel, rigid and moralist Karenin also feels good and intelligent. The snobbing of moralists isn’t actually a productive criticism, because it fails to highlight that Anna was always meant to be a deeply flawed character – and ultimately, more than just a character whose morals we can (effectively but pointlessly) discuss.Anna, if a simple married woman at the beginning of the novel, ends up a bigger symbol of bigger significance towards the end. She is no longer just a woman, no matter if married, divorced, unhappy. She is the face of the dissatisfaction of Russian people: she represents the beginning of a social unrest and the explosiveness of a country ready for a big transformation.Anna is wrong, she is immoral – crazy, even. And if things stayed as they were, she would have no chance to change that. But if she is so essentially tragic, then perhaps she is not a product of her own self, but of something bigger than her. And – perhaps – she could change, if the determining factors change. At the end of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy is preparing the reader for a larger change. Anna, in the grand scheme of things, is just a ridiculous byproduct. Nothing gets more essentially tragic than this awareness.

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And now they’ve grown used to it. They’ve shed a few tears, and are used to it.
Man can get used to anything, the villain! (Crime & Punishment, p. 34, chapter II, part one).

It is a particularly interesting way of starting this novel’s analysis that of being reminded that we consider it and that we read it as a received classic.The problem does not lay in Crime and Punishment being known as a classic: the problem is why has a book narrating the deeds of a murderer been chosen to be put among the great category of “classic literature”. In fact, we might say that the book resists any attempt at being liked, helpful or cautionary – if even at the very end, we are told that Raskolnikov’s perceived crime is simply that of having turned himself in, and not that of having murdered two people, then how are we supposed to really consider the novel a ‘classic’, meaning a book that – among other things – heightens our moral compass and makes us strive to think and behave better, how are we supposed to state with confidence that Crime and Punishment is, indeed, a classic?Of course, great literature comes with teachings as well as with a hefty dose of nuance: by showcasing the bad actions of a man, the novel could inspire people to do the opposite; and simply punishing sins and vices would grant a book nothing more than the boring label of the “morality story”. We dislike books which are only virtuous, because they are artificial experiments that solely exist on paper; and we dislike undeterred showings of misbehaviour and treachery because they are just as fictitious.What is essential about Crime and Punishment, therefore, is not the abominable murder undergone by Raskolnikov, nor is strictly the punishment received for it – it’s the reason behind the deed, the meaning of the action. Why, in XIXth century Russia, would a murder in this fashion be perpetrated? There is a sense behind it, and that profound reason is not only the catalyst of the story, but the final meaning behind it – and what makes it deserving , academically, of the title of ‘classic’.When in 1866 the first part of Crime and Punishment was published in the January and February issues of Mikhail Katkov's journal the Russian Messenger, it met with instant public success. It was not the complete version of the novel as we know it today, and it was furthermore written in the first person – fashioned, therefore, after the tested style of the memoir, reminiscent of Notes from Underground.«A wicked, vile individual, half-Demon, half-Idiot, the underground man is the first masterpiece written by Dostoyevsky upon his return from forced labour and confinement in Siberia. It contains – at a very high implosive density – all the nuclei of reality that in the years to come would unravel and explode in the major novels [...]»₁: Dostoyevsky most certainly is the author of the soul, concentrating on its destructive potential most of his works, led by protagonists (all copies of the original mould, the underground man) who act upon ideas rather than facts, and who refuse to see the mud that surrounds them as the sole level of existence. But the morbose outcomes of this mentality, as well as the shabby environments and the intellectual contents, are all present in his later works, namely Demons, The Brothers Karamazov and, of course, Crime and Punishment.At that time, the remaining parts of the novel had still to be written, its author was struggling through poverty and debt to meet deadlines that loomed ever closer, yet both he and his readers sensed that this was a work that possessed an inner momentum of its own, one that was linked both to the inexorable processes of outer, social change and to those of an inner, spiritual awakening.As the subsequent parts of the novel began to appear it acquired the status of a social and public event. In his memoirs, the critic N. N. Strakhov recalled that in Russia Crime and Punishment was the literary sensation of the year, ‘the only book the addicts of reading talked about’.“[...] They [the book addicts] generally complained of its overmastering power and of its having such a distressing effect upon readers that those with strong nerves almost grew ill, while those with weak nerves had to put it aside” (N. N. Strakhov). This gives us a sense of the revolutionary ideas the novel had presented the Russian people with: revolutionary almost in the proustian sense of the world, meaning a work that challenged its period, that went against it.

₁ Igor Sibaldi, extract from chapter 10, Dieci Obiezioni ai Dieci Comandamenti

INTELLECTUAL SOCIETY:

Any and all artist-intellectual deserving of the name, upon reading the novel, would have felt a huge sense of discomfort: Dostoyevsky does not go easy on the figure, and although he emphasises their intrinsic superiority of intellect and of feeling, he is also quick to point out how certain behaviours single them out as misfits with no real sense of history (large) and of the world around them (small):«But a thousand times before he had been ready to give up his existence for an idea, for a hope, even for an imagining. Existence on its own had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more than that» (p. 648, chapter II, epilogue).The best example which could be given is probably Raskolnikov’s out-of-pocket reaction at the news of his sister’s engagement (volume III, chapter 3). While we can clearly understand that emotionally he has the best picture of the situation, the tone and the snobbish anger with which he insults his sister and mother for their choice is quite excessive, if not wrong. He is unaware of social context, at times he even openly attacks it, but he fails to understand the importance to be among the common people (people with a reduced reasoning and understanìding), and to accept them. It is no surprise that he ends up with Sonya, an outsider just as he is – but even she understands what is expected of her; she helps her family, she keeps close to them, and she knows what it means to come to compromises with the world.Raskolnikov’s world – and by extent, every intellectual’s – is one that rejects compromises, that only acts in absolutes. The inability to accept mediocrity and simpleness, so typical of Raskolnikov and of the Raskolnikovs, while intellectually noble at its core, fails to be good when inserted in a world that – naturally – does not follow their inclinations. The words of a paranoid Raskolnikov, at the end of the novel, just prove this startling dislocation:«[...] What I needed to know, and know quickly, was whether I was a louse, like everyone else, or a man. Whether I could take the step across, or whether I couldn’t. Whether I could dare to lower myself and pick up what was lying there, or not. Whether I was a quivering knave, or whether I had a right…» (p. 500, chapter IV, part five).Of course, Raskolnikov, even though he clearly was of superior understanding, does not have the right to put himself above normal people. Dostoyevsky knew that. But he also knew the Raskolnikovs well, as that ‘underground man’ ever-so-present in his novels forcibly has to be somewhat biographical. He however acknowledged that this way of living life was unsustainable, outside one’s bubble. And so he warns the intellectuals.At the time of publishing, in fact, Crime and Punishment appeared to constitute yet another attack on the Russian student body, smearing it with the taint of being allied to the radicals and nihilists who had placed themselves in violent opposition to the established social and political order. In early reviews, liberal and left-wing critics sensed the parallel between the murder of the old woman and the talk of political assassination that was in the air. An anonymous reviewer in the liberal-conservative newspaper The Week, strongly stated: “Mr Dostoyevsky is at present displeased with the younger generation”.But Dostoyevsky is not satisfied by just simply pointing out the problem, he also wants to work out a few possible solutions – the evergreen dream of the transformation of society, and (by proxy) of man. This is what David McDuff had to say about it:«[...] The radical transformation of society Dostoyevsky seemed to be calling for could be achieved, not by the kind of Christianity Sonya had to offer, but by revolutionary action, the building of a new society. Almost alone, Strakhov attempted to draw his readers' attention to the novel's universal, tragic dimension as a parable of how, after terrible personal sufferings largely caused by society, a gifted young man is ruined by 'nihilistic' ideas, and has to undergo a process of atonement and redemption. Strakhov pointed to Dostoyevsky's compassionate treatment of his hero, and commented: ‘This is not mockery of the younger generation, neither a reproach nor an accusation - it is a lament over it’»₁.Dostoyevsky's well-known response to Strakhov's article – ‘You alone have understood me’ – has continued to echo down the years. Even now, the central, underpinning ideas are either ignored as expressions of ideology which the writer’s imaginative art ‘overcame’, or are distorted into unrecognisable caricatures of themselves.Yet if Dostoyevsky had remained content merely to treat this problem as the subject of fiction, Solovyov maintains, he would have been no more than a glorified journalist. The important point is that Dostoyevsky saw the problem as part of his own life, as an existential question that demanded a satisfactory answer. The answer was an unambiguous one: ‘The best people, observing others and feeling in themselves a social injustice, must unite together, rise up against it and recreate society in their own way’.Despite his fervent wishes and imagination, the walls that surround Raskolnikov and hold him within his coffinlike room are not simply the bounds of ‘possibility’: they are also society’s protection against its own members. In Dostoyevsky’s view there is something profoundly wrong with a social order that needs to imprison, impoverish and torture the best people in it. Yet this does not excuse Raskolnikov’s crime. It is people who are responsible for the society in which they live, and whether they are in the grip of ‘radical’, atheistic ideas like those of Raskolnikov, or ‘bourgeois’, utilitarian, but also atheistic ideas, like those of Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, they will abdicate their responsibility to their fellow creatures and destroy them in one way or another.Thus comes the attack not only on the sick mentality that haunts intellectuals worldwide (for better and for worse), but also a political one: socialism, in Dostoyevsky’s view, suffers from an inherent paradoxical flaw – while professing ‘brotherhood’ it is in essence cynical, expressing ‘the despair of ever setting man on the right road. They, the socialists, are intent on doing it by means of despotism, while claiming that this is freedom!’This treatise echoes now like it echoed nearly two centuries ago, and is enough to show Dostoyevsky’s lucidity in going against the popular battle-cries and political warhorses of the time. We do not necessarily have to interpret this as a pessimistic overview of man in their entirety – it might well be that the author chose, amongst other things, to use the novel as a teaching of sorts. Not to sway man from being themselves, but to warn them of their disruptive potential.«What if a man – the whole human race in general, I mean – isn’t really a villain at all? If that’s true, it means that all the rest is just a load of superstition, just a lot of fears that have been put into people’s heads, and there are no limits, and that’s how it’s meant to be!...» (p. 34, chapter II, part one): these words are not meant as a statement. They are a lonely, desperate cry for help; they are expressions of the wish that this may not be true, that man can fight, that this is not how things are meant to be – otherwise life would not have meaning, and Dostoyevsky is as far from meaningless as an intellectual can get. The Brothers Karamazov is another great example of this, and being a later work, its propositive package is all the more relevant. As Sibaldi points out, both Iván and Smerdjakov are both intellectually fervent in all the wrong ways:«Now: it is certainly important that Smerdjakov is a man of the people, and that he is a philosopher by natural talent, and exposed to the influences of European culture, which in him take on grotesque contours. It is equally important that he acts on the insufflation of the intellectual Iván [...] All this had a fundamental importance for the ideologue Dostoevskij, and even had to constitute one of the highlights of the ideological message of his novel»₂.The inhabitant of the Underground, when he declares, in the very first page of the Memoirs, «I am an evil person» (thus explaining his remedy for neurosis: the desire of evil) is not at all better.The ideological message, therefore, is not in the actions of the men within the books – but rather in those without. By understanding the very difficult mechanisms of man’s psyche (or by simply sensing them through the flippings of the pages), the project is to be carried out by the readers:«I am proud to have been the first to show the true individual of the Russian majority, and to have been the first to expose its monstrous and tragic face. Tragedy that consists in the awareness of the monstrosity itself... I alone have shown the tragedy of the underground, which consists in sufferings, in self-punishments, in the awareness of the good and in the impossibility of reaching it and, above all, in the vivid conviction of all these unfortunate, that so it is in every man, and that it is not even worth correcting!»₃ – «In fact, when you observe any fact of real life, and immediately, if you only have the strength to see, you will find a depth that has no equal in Shakespeare»₄.Noticing these things, even marinating in the tragedy that is awareness; having the strength to see the Shakesperian depth in everyday facts… this is what is wanted (not expected) of us; and though impractical, it might very well be the most impactful difference we can make. Because in the timeline of the novel, and in the timeline of XIXth century Russia, any other change would be useless.«In Raskolnikov, the precognition of the young Russian intelligentsia’s attempt to participate in the economic history of the country is very clear – and so is the inevitability of this attempt’s failure. There is in fact in Raskolnikov a germ of economic thinking correctly formulated, at the height of the best progressive intelligentsia [...] But this economic thought of his – which in him does not yet know that it is such, and is considered exclusively moral [and not economical] – is destined to fail, because of the absolute lack of communication with the outside world»₅.All these circumstances really entail, for the progressive Russian intellectuals – Raskolnikov’s peers, his sons, and his grandchildren –, the exclusion from any active engagement in the practical problems of the country. And really, as a result of this, all were pushed, just like Raskolnikov, to adopt an abstract cultural attitude that took the form of an ever greater radicalism – first theoretical, then practical. And Raskolnikov is precisely the category of this radicalization.«The people would not understand. So why do it? This is the XIXth century [...] the people did not know they existed, they had no idea what it meant to exist»₅.If only Raskolnikov and the Raskolnikovians had agreed to really and consistently see in the bourgeoisie the force capable of stealing wealth from the two great pools, they could then create a third, dynamic, and competitive system – but this might only be wistful thinking anyway, for any modification in the economical tissue… would have been very difficult to achieve.

₁ Penguin Clothbound Classics 2018, Introduction by David McDuff
₂ Igor Sibaldi, extract from chapter 4, Dieci Obiezioni ai Dieci Comandamenti
₃ Igor Sibaldi, extract from chapter 10, Dieci Obiezioni ai Dieci Comandamenti
₄ Dostoyevsky, extract from article Two Suicides
₅ Igor Sibaldi, extract from chapter 7, Dieci Obiezioni ai Dieci Comandamenti

ECONOMICAL TRANSFORMATION:

«[...] but in the last result, approached in a non-Russian context, Crime and Punishment requires a leap of the spirit and imagination by readers themselves»₁.“But I hadn’t stolen, I had taken” (S.P. Danilin): in 1908 Tolstoy, during a visit to the psychiatric hospital in Meščërskoe, had a long stay with a recovering patient, Danilin; S.P. Danilin had been arrested for theft and sent to Meščerskoe after the first interrogation. Tolstoj then spoke about Danilin several times, willingly quoting his sad, tenacious phrase, painfully devoid of any questioning intonation. Can this be a shared sentiment with Raskolnikov – or better, can this be a shared sentiment within a specific country?Dostoyevsky talked of The Brothers Karamazov as “a representation – albeit on a scale reduced from one to a thousand – of our contemporary reality, current and intellectual Russia”; the idea of showing Russia, and to explain it, is a recurring obsession of the author, who – much like Tolstoy – anticipated perfectly the Revolution of 1917, simply by observing and deeply understanding why the economical system in Russia did not allow people to be rich, or happy, or anything short of pointlessly hopeful.«[...] but the non-rich were not allowed to turn rich, nor could a rich turn poor [...] The bourgeoisie was missing»₂.No: money, in itself, could not permanently change the social destiny of anyone in XIXth century Russia. Raskolnikov’s theft, rendered useless by his promptly hiding the riches under a bridge, never to be touched or sold or gifted again, is just a great metaphor of this situation. Dostoyevsky obviously builds it consciously, but he does not want his protagonist to be as aware: the exceptionality of Raskolnikov, and the pride that he draws from his robbery, are given precisely by his stubbornness: by his tenacious refusal to notice that immense and hydric economic fatality that all the other characters of previous and contemporary Russian novels instead took for granted.Without this defiance, of course, there would have been no crime, no redemption, and no story: but Dostoyevsky wants us to look further than the dirty streets of run-down Petersburg; he wants us to establish a comparison, he wants us to see the differences between Russia and the west. In Russia, as in the west, orderly wealth established identity, placed man in his place in the world. But in Russia, the portion of wealth allowed became the nature of the individual, his portion of reality; man was money, for everyone and for himself, in the cities no less than in the countryside, and mobile wealth was therefore sinful. A disciplined, architectural inequality between men thus resolved, in Russia, the contrast between material goods and the spirit, reconciling them, and placing them harmoniously at each other’s service.Raskolnikov looks for that addition of spirit and wealth, and steals it. He acts as a providence to himself, with his theft, and by stealing he takes possession of a curse: the curse of freedom, the Hýbris of the reification of wealth and the de-reification of the self and it is first of all this curse that he can’t handle; and he leaves the loot under the stone.But at the same time Raskolnikov, defeated and silly, is actually a protomartyr and a category. In those same years, the progressive critic D.I. Pisarev complained about the fact that, in Russian novels, many well-intentioned characters wanted to be of some help to the people without first learning a practical profession – and Raskolnikov looks to be just too good of a fit for this description. Indeed, these sentences by Pisarev could definitely belong to Raskolnikov: “Historical experience and pure logic could convince us equally of the fact that strong and intelligent individuals will always be able to get it on the weak as well as on the foolish... So when we are faced with an inevitable fact like this, what is needed is not indignation, but action that transforms this fact into a benefit for the people. The capitalist possesses intelligence and wealth; these two qualities guarantee him dominion over the work of others... But if the capitalist has only a vague tint of culture he will become a usurer; if instead he will have a complete, solid, humanitarian culture, the capitalist himself will certainly become not simply a well-intentioned philanthropist, but a conscious, balanced leader, namely a man a hundred times more useful than any benefactor, but an aware, balanced executive, that is to say a man a hundred times more useful than any philanthropist”₃.But in Russia, no such figure permeated the social tissue. In the west, they might have looked to the bourgeoisie – but Dostoyevsky had a particular hatred of the bourgeoisie because it had the audacity to present itself as a superior form of civilization, as the right solution to the problems of both economic and moral development of nations, and to him this poisoned and destroyed consciences.«[...] No Russian – from the tsar to the last peasant – ignored that Russia was a cruel and wrong empire. Thus in Russia it was possible to believe, to desire a different future, to seek it, to hope in men; instead in the capitalist-West, the bourgeoisie swallowed up and would always swallow up every antithesis, every hope [...]»₄.Dostoevsky hated the bourgeoisie as right-wing, the intelligentsia as left-wing, but the reasons for hatred were the same. Man was rendered not a healthy union of mind and spirit, but was reduced to a mere money-maker, unaware of the causes and effects of his actions, and devoid of humanity, or to put it better – humanism. No humanist could have been more so than Dostoyevsky, and by extension – Raskolnikov.Little did matter the political stances behind these ideas: if anything, trying to put any party label on Raskolnikov would be reducing him to an idea, rather than a person. His views are so wide and so diverse that looking at his friends, first intentions, statements, we could be quick to guess leftist sympathies – but his feeling of superiority, his hatred of others, his hierarchy of people, would all lean right, rather than left*; and quite banally, exploiting the stolen money for the good of many was something for which Raskolnikov never wanted to find the courage.We might wonder if a change in Russian stone-solid economy might be bent and transformed. But the pressing answer Dostoyevsky forces onto these ponderings is undeniable: no Raskolnikov would have ever found a way out of the solution – no intellectual, no worker, no Russian. And perhaps it was because they were not able to see the problem. As Sibaldi poignantly states,«And Raskolnikov is the ‘third servant’, and he prefers Siberia [to a life spent fighting]. And Dostoevsky had understood it correctly. Really, the other Raskolnikovs also stopped there»₅.
Would Raskolnikov have stolen again in Soviet times? Judging by that little Hegelian and fascist that there is – or better, that there would be in his reasoning if he had lived in the XXth century, we can assume that no, he would not have stolen. From the 1930s onward a Sovietic Raskolnikov ceases to be imaginable, since he would have had nothing more to steal, in the midst of that bourgeois dictatorship, that sublimated in Stalinism, realising the most hidden and greatest dream of every bourgeoisie: to free themselves from money!

₁, ₂, ₃, ₄, ₅ Igor Sibaldi, extract from chapter 7, Dieci Obiezioni ai Dieci Comandamenti

* From my notes on the subject: «This is a common enough problem with modern intellectuals; who, by tradition, education, and even inclination tend to be openly left-wing; but being humanists, and therefore having the gift of seeing and of understanding society far better than the average person, they are also bound to feel superior to the majority of people. That is not to say that they do not respect people, or that they don't believe in their instrinsic dignity; but they are forced by their own natures to aknowledge that people are actually very different, and they also intimately wish they were treated better, or that they had more recognition. Dostoyevsky would seem to fall perfectly in this category: but as he matured, evidently, he took this self-awareness upon himself, and used it against Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment».

PEDAGOGY:

Few works of fiction have attracted so many widely diverging interpretations as Crime and Punishment. It has been seen as a detective novel, an attack on radical youth, a study in alienation and criminal psychopathology, a work of prophecy, “an indictment of urban social conditions in nineteenth-century Russia, a religious epic and a proto-Nietzschean analysis of the will to power”. It is, of course, all these things – but it is more.It shouldn’t really be revolutionary that every classic novel holds a teaching, even if it isn’t its main purpose. In Crime and Punishment, however, its pedagogical value is not just a by-product of a different intention: the novel seems to be centred around the idea of teaching; or rather of showing how to not act, maybe even how to not think.Dostoyevsky follows beautifully in the Russian tradition of showing the ill-men, the ill-society, and their conditions and their problems. Books like The Gambler or The Idiot also show him dabbling with problems of addiction, misfitting, and psychological divergency. Crime and Punishment is no less a book about these themes, and as Rozanov shrewdly points out:«In this novel we are given a depiction of all those conditions which, capturing the human soul, draw it towards crime; we see the crime itself; and at once, in complete clarity, with the criminal's soul we enter into an atmosphere, hitherto unknown to us, of murk and horror in which it is almost as hard for us to breathe as it is for him. The general mood of the novel, elusive, undefinable, is far more remarkable than any of its individual episodes: how this comes to be is the secret of the author, but the fact remains that he really does take us with him and lets us feel criminality with all the inner fibres of our being; after all, we ourselves have committed no crime, and yet, when we finish the book it is as if we emerge into the open air from some cramped tomb in which we have been walled up with a living person who has buried himself in it, and together with him have breathed the poisoned air of dead bones and decomposing entrails…»₁.This showing of the deviled ways in which the human mind works, the identification we feel with its flow, is simply the demonstration that Raskolnikov, far from being a madman or psychopathic outcast, is an image of Everyman. Dostoyevsky wants us to become aware – painfully – that we share the same condition. And it would be stupid to deny the Raskolnikov shuffled inside us.Raskolnikov is the category of the Russian outcast, the representative of the moneyless and struggling low class. And he knows that poverty adds a precious, nervous force to his criminal purpose. It takes a lot of strength to overcome a taboo. And when he overcomes it – so he thinks – he is sure that he is a very strong man, and very intelligent, because you have to be very smart to steal without being a thief and Raskolnikov is not a thief. He is an aspiring superman and that theft is like his licence exam: a superman can do great things for the good of humanity, but he must first know for certain that he is. He wants to be a master, a leader and not a servant. But it is not a model within his reach: Raskolnikov’s fate is that of the inept servant, his loot will remain under the stone until the end.It is Gide's celebrated remark – ‘humiliation damns, whereas humility sanctifies’₂ – that makes us most clearly aware of the depth of hurt pride in which Raskolnikov finds himself at the beginning of the novel, and of the journey towards self-denial that is mapped out across its pages. Raskolnikov is not an easy presence, certainly not a digestible figure. His feelings make us uncomfortable, his ideas are vexing. He’s a painful presence:«[...] to make him [Raskolnikov] aware that the crime he has committed is a sin against the divine presence within himself. Raskolnikov feels little remorse for having killed the old woman, but suffers under a crushing, life-destroying weight of misery at what he has ‘done to himself’, to use Sonya’s words»₃.His feelings in the epilogue, when we are willing to finally see him a restored man, are appalling: ‘But he felt no remorse for his crime’ (p. 648, chapter II, epilogue); ‘This was one respect in which he admitted to any crime: in not having had the courage of his convictions and in having turned himself in’ (p. 649, chapter II, epilogue); those are all terrible things to be thinking, especially after you’ve been (at last, me might say) convicted for murder. But Raskolnikov is not a literary metaphor for the everyday Everyman – he is the metaphor of the extraordinary Everyman, for our desire to stand out, to be different, to be above or below others, to be the ‘else’: ‘Perhaps it had been merely the strength of his own desires that made him believe he was a person to whom more was allowed than others’ (p. 648, chapter II, epilogue).It is clear that Raskolnikov’s desires led him down a very wrong road, but in some wicked way, he doesn’t seem to care. His biggest strength (and biggest flaw) is that he truly believes in his superiority (a mental, logical and intellectual superiority which, throughout the novel, has been vastly demonstrated): and he is coherent in this, and is fully lucid in this knowledge: ‘I didn’t want to lie about that [killing for people’s sake] even to myself!’ (p. 500, chapter IV, part five). The murder of the old wrench was not done to help people – intellectual Dostoyevsky, born in a society ready to accept the rise of Communism, understood that and had the courage to write about it.Even at the end, in prison, Raskolnikov clearly does not believe he has done something wrong – if not (terrible) to have allowed himself to be imprisoned: ‘What really made him ashamed was that he, Raskolnikov, had gone to his doom so blindly, hopelessly, in deaf-and-dumb stupidity, following the edict of a blind fate, and must submit and resign himself to the ‘nonsense’ of a similar edict if he were ever to know any rest’ (p. 647, chapter II, epilogue). And how powerfully we understand him, and feel for him, is telling of Dostoyevsky’s majestic writing, and certainly not of Raskolnikov’s explaining.The last page of the epilogue seems to have no connection whatsoever with the entire novel: Dostoyevsky dots many conventional life-advices, sprinkles in some sentences on the importance of love, on the importance of life-renewed… but volume matters, as does the timeline, and we as readers can’t be satisfied with a few reparatory sentiments after we have been told entirely different things up to that very point. ‘[...] but in these ill, pale faces there now gleamed the dawn of a renewed future, a complete recovery to a new life. What had revived them was love, the heart of the one containing an infinite source of life for the heart of the other’ (p. 655, chapter II, epilogue); ‘In place of dialectics life had arrived, and in his consciousness something of a wholly different nature must now work toward fruition’ (p. 656, chapter II, epilogue); ‘But at this point a new story begins, the story of a man’s gradual renewal, his gradual rebirth, his gradual transition from one world to another, of his growing acquaintance with a new, hitherto completely unknown reality’ (p. 656, chapter II, epilogue)... we just can’t believe this, nor can Raskolnikov… but apparently, so does Dostoyevsky.NB!, writes Dostoyevsky, All things and everything in the world is unfinished in man, and in the meantime the meaning of all things in the world is enclosed in man himself ₄. The novel’s central dilemma plays on the ridge between our self-identification with Raskolnikov and our refusal of him: Dostoyevsky does seem to want us to refuse him in the end – to understand him first, but to reject him after. And we can do it because we’re not just Raskolnikov, however badly some might want to be; and we’re not completely devoid of Raskolnikov either, however badly some might want to believe. Where he didn’t have the strength to believe in renewal, we can instead find it.And even if we don’t believe in it, it may always be better to do the right thing unwillingly, rather than the wrong thing willingly, may it not?

₁ Penguin Clothbound Classics 2018, Introduction by David McDuff
₂, ₃ Dostoïevski, Articles et causeries, 1923, André Gide
₄ Igor Sibaldi, extract from chapter 7, Dieci Obiezioni ai Dieci Comandamenti

CONCLUSION:

Crime and Punishment deservedly appears in almost all collections bearing the name of ‘classic’. Yes, it may talk about a murder and about a man who does not feel guilty that he is a murder; and yes, the first level of interpretation does not explain why it is important for Dostoyevsky to share this apparently fruitless story.But if we take a step back, and understand that – just as Raskolnikov – Dostoyevsky didn’t just write just the novel for ‘writing’s sake’, it will be clear that the novel holds a very general and however important lesson: that we all live in a society, and that however different we might – rightfully or wrongfully, deservedly or undeservedly – feel, it is important that we remain aware of our actions, because they never only have an impact on us, but they can engulf with their consequences many more people than we might believe.Dostoyevsky might seem conventional, boring, even cheesy with his conclusion. And in a way he is – it is not the conclusion for Raskolnikov. But a classic operates way beyond its characters, and if it is not a teaching Raskolnikov can grasp and understand, we – having spent six-hundred and fifty-six pages with him, and having understood him, can take up where he stops and build from there, and simply become better people from it.

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Few books have gripped the public’s attention and interest as this curious British saga about a boy-wizard and his adventures have. The success that has met the Harry Potter series, however, is not unjustified, and if anything is the strong and undeniable proof that a specific novel-construction – that which blends heroism and nuance, expectability and depth – can virtually grant interest and likeability.Because unlike the enormous amount of Fantasy sagas that were all the rage in the 2010s, Harry Potter is not just the boring and expected story of a special hero who is destined to be brave, talented, kind and noble and who eventually saves the day. It is in part, and that could very well be the reason behind its immediate success and its high sellings. But it blends in that nuance, that hidden message, those reflections and observations which are more those of the classic.The concept of the classic is of course difficult to put down. Many just accept the received books whose choice to label ‘classic’ were made by publishing houses in the last century-ies. Others have compiled long though non-exhaustive lists, while some have even tried to pin down the ‘scientific’ reasons behind the label, in an attempt to connect all the dots logically. Classics are all important, demanding books that leave a mark on the reader – beside this, we can’t really add other features that they must possess. Jane Austen is as much a classic as Bulgakov is, yet they are nothing alike. Quality is of course a factor, and a pretty intuitive and instinctive one as well. Quantity could be considered, but some books may deserve to be called ‘classics’ even if few people read them or appreciate them. This overview shows how murky and confused this discourse is, but it may be best to leave the classification to some educated and literate editors, than to personal (however ‘scientific’ in premise*) concepts that rob literature of that unidentifiable feature that makes it special.Many classics of course exist, but they are not too many either: it makes sense that not every book, in fact very few books, become deserving of that label. By affirming that Harry Potter is a classic, I am merely making an hypothesis. But if it should prove to be one – with time, another important member in the conversation – then it shall be a specific kind, the ‘adventure’ classic, the classic blending sure-to-end-well situations and deep reflections. Many have preceded J. K. Rowling before – Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne to name a few.

* This opens up the problem about the possibility of a ‘literary science’. While it is not wrong to recognise certain patterns or features that great classics have in common, to reduce them to a matter of mathematical combinations is highly unproductive, not least because it removes the possibility to ask the pertinent questions about a body of work. This makes the job of the researcher harder, of course, because novels and poems suddenly become harder to justify – but it may be best to leave them out of science, as their intrinsic value stems from the fact that they contain science (among the other things that make up human nature), but are not contained by it.

The first installment of the series is of course important because we are introduced to the wizarding world, so carefully described and thoughtfully curated: the ways in which ‘muggles’ – a category the reader is invited to adhere to – do not notice the magic operating around them, the village of Diagon Alley with all those interesting shops, and of course Hogwarts, the houses, the subjects… surely topics appealing to children, whose creativity and scope of ‘what is possible’ are not yet redimensioned; but also so vivid, precise and logical in their explanation that adults may comprehend it too, may accept it as a serious construction for a background (not unintentionally, Rowling knowingly draws imagery, disciplines and creatures with a rather Gothic lore and with roots deep in British, Anglo-Saxon and more generally Medieval folklore).
And of course there’s Harry, and he is a poor child who has been mistreated but who is special, because he is a wizard, but also because he has survived when a skillful bad wizard tried to kill him, and he was only one at the time! And this, technically, is as good as an introduction can get, because the reader’s starting point coincides with Harry’s, and everything that will be discovered by Harry will be known by the reader – until the very end. We here get a sense that Rowling knew she was creating a world worth spending time in, and it is clear that she wants to explain away every single detail. Because the background, here, is just as important as the story itself: yes, Harry’s is a tale of survival, of discovery, of redemption… but it wouldn’t be half as strong if magic weren’t involved, and the reader comes for the magic, and stays for the magic – at least in the beginning.
Philosopher’s Stone, if not for setting the rules of the environment the story develops in, seems quite a simple and lightweight story – as a standalone, yes, it would be an entertaining read, a nice one, but we wouldn’t necessarily go back to it*. The plot is simple, if not banal: Harry gets to school, makes friends and makes enemies, is good in some things and awful in others, he likes some teachers and deeply dislikes others, and all accidents that happen during the school year happen when he is around, and he takes an active role in participating in them, also saving the school and potentially the whole wizarding world from the most dangerous dark wizard England has ever seen, who also just happens to be the man who tried to kill him. This is what makes the story entertaining, of course, because if little accidents were spread out equally to every student in Hogwarts, then we wouldn’t find reading Harry Potter half as enjoyable: this clear straying from reality is a brave thing, because classic literature is known for showing man, and ‘man’’s lives are not an improbable custard of events, attacks, and life-ending situations. It’s a fine ridge that Rowing is walking on in Philosopher’s Stone (that of not falling in the boring and unrelatable realm of ‘Fantasy quickies’, dished out to those in search of an easy read with a finale already obvious after the first three pages), and truthfully she does not even seem to notice it: while she might have had intentions to continue the series and write multiple volumes, she clearly was not predicting the way Harry Potter was going to develop. And that’s an interesting fact about the series: it probably did not start out with the intention of becoming what it became.

*.

nuggets important to the story do happen here – we get the first glimpse to a Horcrux, we get the first real conversation between Harry and Hogwarts’ legendary Headmaster, Dumbledore – the first of many. Harry’s friendship with both Ron and Hermione intensifies, and we start to better understand the reasons behind the hatred he and Malfoy start to nurture for each other. We learn about a connection with Voldemort, we understand why Harry was so nearly sorted in Slytherin, and that the similarities between them were more perhaps than he might have imagined.
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