From the Bookshelf of Around the World in 80 Books…

Every day, he left at a quarter to eight sharp for his work at the Institute of Poliomyelitis and Viral Encephalitis, situated in a distant suburb

Every day, he left at a quarter to eight sharp for his work at the Institute of Poliomyelitis and Viral Encephalitis, situated in a distant suburb of Moscow, not far from the Vnukovo airport. He came back home at six p.m., had dinner, took a short nap, and sat down to write--if not his prose, then his medical research papers. Before going to bed, at ten p.m., he sometimes would take a walk. He usually spent his weekends writing as well; for a change he would work at the Lenin Library, gathering materials for his book on Dostoyevsky.

My father craved every opportunity to write, but writing was difficult, painful. He agonized over every word, and endlessly corrected his hand-written manuscripts. Once finished with editing, he typed his prose on an ancient, shiny German typewrite, “Erika”--World War II loot, sold by one owner to the next until an uncle gave it to my father in 1949. And in that form his writings remained. He did not send his manuscripts to publishers, and did not want to circulate his prose in samizdat because he was afraid of problems with the KGB and of losing his job.

That night, when he went to kiss Anya, they swam away again together, rhythmically thrusting out their arms from the water and raising their heads to take in gulps of air--and the current did not sweep him away--they swam towards the receding horizon, into the unknown, deep blue distance, and then he began to kiss her again--a dark triangle appeared, upturned--its apex, its peak, pointing downwards, forever inaccessible, like the inverted peak of a very high mountain disappearing somewhere into the clouds--or rather the core of a volcano--and this peak, this unattainable core, contained the answer both terrible and exquisite to something nameless and unimaginable and, throughout his life, even in his letters to her, he maintained his incessant struggle to reach it, but this peak, this core, remained forever inaccessible.

I leafed through, in the slightly wavering circle of light cast by the bulb from beneath the green lamp-shade, the penultimate volume of Dostoevski’s works, containing Diary of a Writer for 1877 or 1878--and finally I stumbled on an article especially devoted to the Jews--‘The Jewish Question’ it was called--and finally I should not have been surprised to discover it because he was bound after all somewhere or other to have gathered together in one place all those ‘Jews, Jewesses, Jew-boys and Yids’ with which he so liberally besprinkled the pages of his novels--now as the poseur Lyamshin squealing with terror in "The Possessed," now as the arrogant and at the same time cowardly Isaiah Fomich in Memoirs from the "House of the Dead" who did not scruple to lend money at enormous interest to his fellow-convicts, now as the fireman in "Crime and Punishment" with that ‘everlasting sullen grief, so sourly imprinted on all members of the tribe of Judah without exception’. . .

and it struck me as being strange to the point of implausibility that a man so sensitive in his novels to the sufferings of others, this defender of the insulted and the injured who fervently and even frenetically preached the right to exist of every earthly creature and sang a passionate hymn to each little leaf and every blade of grass--that this man should not have come up with even a single word in the defence or justification of a people persecuted over several thousands of years--could he have been so blind?--or was he perhaps blinded by hatred?--

--‘I shall die today, Anya,’ he said quietly, continuing to look at her in the same way-- and she went up to him and, taking his hands in hers, began trying to convince him that things would turn out all right and that the doctors did not consider his condition dangerous, but pushing her hands to one side and continuing to whisper, because he was unable to speak loudly, he asked her to pass him the copy of the Gospels given to him by the wives of the Decembrists when he had been in penal servitude and which he always kept with him, covering it with many pencil marks in the margins - and opening it at random without looking down at the page, he asked her to read out loud the third verse from the top, and she read: ‘And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness’--‘You see,’ he said, ‘ “Suffer it to be so now” so I shall die’--and he shut the book, and Anna Grigor’yevna, kneeling down beside him, took his hand in hers once again and he put her hand to his lips, kissing it, and then he fell asleep, breathing peacefully and evenly, and she stayed there kneeling, afraid to move in case she should wake him up, and when he did wake up, it was already late morning, and he wound up his watch himself, then he asked her to let him clean his teeth and to help him get dressed, and when he began to comb his hair, attempting to make it cover his bald patch, and Anna Grigor’yevna, fearing that it would cost him too much effort, took the comb from him and tried to do it for him herself, he became irritable and started to ask very loudly, even shouting why she was doing it from the wrong side, so that, although, she was afraid that this loud display of temper might not be any good for him, at the same time she was glad to see his irritable reaction, which gave her hope that he might recover since it was so characteristic of him, but when, with help, he had nearly got himself completely dressed and was about to pull on his socks, blood appeared on his lips, and chin once again--