A Curse on Dostoevsky
Atiq Rahimi
Chatto & Windus
Novels come and novels go, and every now and then an old novel will come again in a brand new guise. Respect or disdain for a work can lead to a creative spin-off in another hand, one which resurrects and reimagines the original. In the 18th century, Henry Fielding's An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews was a cruel but ticklish rewrite of literary rival Samuel Richardson's Pamela - proof that imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery. Nowadays, we are more likely to see the deferential homage than the satirical swipe, a recent example being Zadie Smith's On Beauty, a shrewdly updated Howards End. When not distorting or cannibalising past plots and themes, reverentially or otherwise, writers have lifted characters from recognised classics and presented their novels as extensions or outgrowths: JM Coetzee's Foe returns us to Defoe's desert island and Crusoe and Friday; Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, an inventive prequel to Jane Eyre, follows the fortunes of Charlotte Brontë's madwoman in the attic.
Whether appropriating a famed character or two or going for an all-out literary cover version, the writer who opts for the variation on an extant and celebrated model requires a great deal of skill or audacity. For his latest novel, Atiq Rahimi, the Afghan-born novelist, film- and documentary-maker, demonstrates he has both. A Curse on Dostoevsky is a fiendish retooling of one of the Russian master's greatest works. Its very first sentence informs us not only of Rahimi's intentions but also those of his protagonist: "The moment Rassoul lifts the axe to bring it down on the old woman's head, the thought of Crime and Punishment flashes into his mind." The more we read, the closer the kinship between the two novels. A Curse on Dostoevsky has its soul-searching hero, Rassoul, plagued by the same mental and moral anguish as Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov. Its drama unfolds not in St Petersburg but amid the chaos and brutality of late 20th-century Kabul. What also becomes clear as we immerse ourselves deeper is just how apposite this adoption is, how much Rahimi's borrowing works. A Curse on Dostoevsky might not eclipse the novel it draws from, but the violence that ravages both background and foreground intensifies the doubts and fears of this Raskolnikov reincarnation, renders him more damaged and vulnerable, and so charges the novel with a powerful urgency.
Rassoul does his deed but, instead of fleeing, is gripped by a pang of crippling inertia. Blood trickles, his thoughts coagulate. Suddenly he hears a woman's voice and he takes off without managing to grab the woman's money or jewels. For days, he sinks into gloom, falls in and out of feverish hallucinations, aghast and dumbfounded by his actions. So far, so Crime and Punishment. Rahimi introduces other links to Dostoevsky's novel. Rassoul's victim was a mean old pawnbroker and money-lender. He has a girlfriend, not a Sonya but a Sophia, whose impoverished family depends on him. Replacing the detective Porfiry is Commandant Parwaiz, who is by turn flummoxed and intrigued by Rassoul's crime.
But this is no run-of-the-mill reworking with only the names tweaked and a shift in setting. Rassoul entrances us not with his re-enactment of Crime and Punishment but his obsession with its author. "Dostoevsky, yes, it was him!" he convinces himself. "He floored me, destroyed me with his Crime and Punishment. Stopped me from following in the footsteps of his hero." (Unbeknownst to Rassoul, he does follow in Raskolnikov's footsteps, but only the reader knows this.)
Rassoul's interest in Dostoevsky developed when he was a student of Russian literature in what was then Leningrad, and he has been smitten ever since - much to the chagrin of his mujahideen countrymen who still bear scars and brim with rancour from the Soviet invasion. For him, Dostoevsky is best read in Afghanistan, "a land previously steeped in mysticism, where people have lost their sense of responsibility". He believes that "teaching it [Crime and Punishment] here would decrease the number of murders!"
This naivety also helps make Rassoul an interesting creation. Rahimi adds further complexity to his character by shading in great swathes of guilt and paranoia (sooner or later he is certain he will be found out) and highlighting starker, more savage terrors (the nightmares that haunt him day and night, and the fear he is going mad). But he is also slippery, a mass of contradictions, and before we can get a handle on him, Rahimi recasts him, forging new and conflicting traits - so much so that at the end Rassoul goes full circle, achieves a whole new level of clarity and believes his "crime" was "banal and futile".
A Curse on Dostoevsky weaves psychological inner-torments into tangled skeins, dead-ends trains of thought and subverts moral codes. Rassoul's descent into nihilism is disorientating but intoxicatingly so. "No, Rassoul, you are not empty," he assures himself, finally with some conviction. "You are simply free. Free of all constraint, all responsibility." This is set neatly against the backdrop of a city engulfed by "fratricidal war". Rassoul is besieged internally but also externally, for Rahimi's Kabul is a vividly realised hell: rockets and gunshots puncture the momentary peace, marauding warlords snatch young girls off the streets to take as wives, the air is thick with "the sulphur of war, the smoke of terror, the embers of hatred".
But offsetting that palpable, suffused horror and obfuscating that hard realness swirls a queasy, hazy unreality that alters our judgement and destabilises our comprehension. Dreams mesh with truth, fact with fiction, until we have lost our foothold. Rassoul teases us - the old lady's body hasn't been found, so no body means no murder, and with that, no crime. Has Rassoul imagined it? Is he in fact innocent? And who, at the end, is really mad? Several weightless scenes play out in a hash den in which stoned storytellers share tales, some lucid, most fantastical, all fused with "a poetry of hemp". As Rahimi clouds our vision and has his protagonist consumed by "monstrous agonies", Rassoul begins to resemble less Raskolnikov and more the existential angst-ridden anti-hero of Notes from the Underground.
All these smoke-and-mirror illusions and self-reflexive bouts of suffering should result in a cerebral read, a novel of ideas not actions, but this isn't the case. The book has some seriously good, blackly comic interludes, from that missing corpse to Rassoul's desperate attempts to turn himself in ("I'm a criminal," he pleads. "Well, come back tomorrow," answers an official. "There's no one here today"). Hoary old tales of war with the Russians are grim but also bawdy; further light relief comes in the form of Rassoul's landlord, Yarmohamad, who is on the hunt for overdue rent; and there is one inspired scene in which Rassoul tails a woman in a blue chador who turns a corner and loses herself in a crowd of women in blue chadors.
Most comic of all is that, thanks to his trauma, Rassoul spends most of the novel silent, or at least unable to speak. Relying on nods and mimes and an ever-ready poker face, his dumb-show is an antic pantomime which infuriates those he comes in contact with. His interior monologue takes the reader into his mind and the toxic mixture of unvoiced words and devilish thoughts is a sustained delight.
"What is to be done?" is the novel's recurring refrain, a question Rassoul keeps asking himself - and, in keeping with the book's Russian roots, the title of two separate works by two different radical Russians: Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Vladimir Lenin. A Curse on Dostoevsky is a clever, knowing book, filled with literary allusion, subtle humour and barbed nuances. It is more ambitious than Rahimi's Prix Goncourt-winning novella, The Patience Stone (2010), but by no means convoluted. It is also that rare thing: a novel with an introspective hero who doesn't bore, for the simple reason that there is too much going on, within and without.
The novel's last lap may be hamstrung by repetition ("It wasn't me who turned everything upside down. It was Dostoevsky!" we hear again) but the run-up to it is both a thought-provoking and a zany adventure, a sly fusion of smoky dreamscape and gritty reality. "The nightmare is his life. Grace is but a dream." Rahimi reflects his country's troubled and terrifying times and makes his hero's attainment of that dream almost impossible. It is fun watching him try and fail in a novel that offers a fresh twist on an acknowledged great.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance essayist and reviewer.
