” Me […] I don’t like having fun, I like things that make you cry, like Russian literature and Parma football matches,” says Paolo Nori. A sentence which sets the tone, witty, sharp, a little oblique, of this book imbued with readings and rereadings of Dostoyevsky.
The times, it is true, perhaps no longer lead us to celebrate Russian culture. We can understand it. But is it possible to deprive yourself of Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Akhmatova? Not if we believe Paolo Nori.
In It’s still bleeding. The incredible life of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevskya kind of novel which mixes the intimate and literary history, the futile and the profound – a bit like life itself -, the Italian writer and translator, born in Parma in 1963, demonstrates in this book published in Italy in 2021 how much Dostoyevsky should be indispensable to us.
A passion that began one day in 1977 for this “possessed” Dostoyevsky, when he read a large book with a missing cover that had belonged to his grandfather. It was Crime and Punishment. This object, published a hundred years earlier thousands of kilometers away, opened a wound in him, he says, which would continue to bleed for a long time. The subject of his book, therefore, boils down to a burning question: why? “Why is it still bleeding?” »
Erudite without being heavy, with a long association with the author of Demons, Paolo Nori draws on his knowledge of the Russian language, he who teaches literary translation and who has notably translated Gogol, Turgenev and Goncharov. Exploring the connections between literature and life, following the principle that “there is room for everything in a novel about Dostoyevsky”, It’s still bleeding is as much an attempt to explain the Dostoyevsky phenomenon as it is a portrait of an era – in addition, as has been said, to being a reader’s autobiography.
Questions
From Dostoyevsky’s beginnings to the years of writing his great novels, including his death sentence and ten years of relegation, his complicated love stories and his all-consuming passion for the game, Paolo Nori takes the tour of the subject by jumping up and throwing many questions into the air.
Like this: Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? Which Paolo Nori reduces, without answering, to this other question: “Who do you prefer? Dad or mom? » Or this one: “Was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky a good person? Was he good? ” Maybe not. “He was bad, envious, debauched, and spent his whole life in such turmoil that he became pitiful,” recalls the author of this stimulating book.
And ultimately, it doesn’t matter, he also believes, reminding us that we don’t make (good) literature with good feelings. As proof, why are we, readers of Crime and Punishment, still today in solidarity with Raskolnikov? Why doesn’t anyone pity the old pawnbroker he murders with an axe?
“Because literature, the novel,” Paolo Nori tells us, “is always on the side of wrong. Literature is not born at court, it is born in the squares of acrobats, in the houses of the sick, of braggarts, of gypsies, of thieves, of swindlers, of brigands, of Southerners, of Italians, of monsters, of idiots. »