The Reading Room
The books that made me. I mean this literally: without these books, I would have been a different person, and the books I wrote would not exist. Influence is not borrowing. It is transformation. Here is what transformed me.
The whole edifice. Every time I have been uncertain about what Russian literature is or what it is for, I have returned to Pushkin. He remains ahead of us. He remains ahead of everyone who came after him, including me. This is not a failure of those who came after. It is a measure of what he was.
I read Dickens in translation during my years in Siberia. He helped. I do not mean this in a sentimental way. I mean: when a man is cold and confined and uncertain whether he will leave the place alive, a novel that insists on the essential decency of the English lower-middle-class is a form of argument. I found it convincing.
The character who influenced me most: Mr. Micawber. A man who has no practical ability whatsoever, who is perpetually in debt, who makes grand speeches and then is carried away by bailiffs — and who is, nevertheless, somehow loveable, somehow good. I have spent my career writing variations on Micawber. I think this is the right project.
The greatest Christian novel ever written, and it was written by a Spaniard who thought he was writing a comedy. The knight errant who tilts at windmills is not ridiculous. He is the only sane person in a world that has forgotten that goodness exists. I was trying to write something similar when I wrote The Idiot. I did not succeed as well as Cervantes.
Hugo understood something that the French rationalists could not: that redemption is real, that a man can be changed, that the change is not an illusion or a statistical anomaly but a fact of the same order as any other fact. Jean Valjean is possible. I have met Jean Valjeans in Siberia. This is why the novel works.
I wept over this play at fifteen. I am not embarrassed to say so. Karl Moor — the romantic outlaw who turns brigand in the name of justice — is an adolescent fantasy, and I had an adolescent's response to it. But Schiller's instinct was right: there is something in the human soul that cannot be satisfied by ordinary life, that demands a scale of action the ordinary world cannot provide. My later characters are Karl Moor, grown up and facing consequences.
Natalya Fonvizina gave me a copy at the gates of the Omsk camp in 1850. It was the only book permitted. I have read it many thousands of times since. I am still reading it. I am still uncertain, on certain days, and certain on others, which seems to me the correct way to approach it.
There are others. Balzac, whose energy I envied. Gogol, whose influence I spent twenty years trying to escape and never entirely succeeded. George Sand, in translation, in the early years. The Arabian Nights. Homer, as my father read him aloud.
I do not list them all. A library is not a catalog. It is a collection of debts, and the best debts are the ones you cannot fully repay — the ones that keep generating interest, that produce, in time, more than you originally borrowed. All of the books above have produced more than I borrowed from them. I consider this the highest praise.