The Review of Contemporary Fiction

“The Rehabilitation of Freud” and “Bakhtin and Others,” by Victor Beilis, translated by Richard Grose
reviewed by David Bergman

Untitled document

Victor Beilis. “The Rehabilitation of Freud” and “Bakhtin and Others.” Trans., intro., and afterword Richard Grose. Other Press, 2002. 127 pp. $20.00.

I’m just a casual reader of Russian literature, and yet even I can see that something remarkable was happening in the last years of the Soviet regime. Last year saw into English Leonid Tsypkin’s extraordinary book Summer in Baden-Baden, which counterposed a retelling of Dostoyevsky’s period at the resort city with the narrator’s visit to the Dostoyevsky museum in St. Petersburg. This year sees the publication in one volume of two novellas by Victor Beilis, one of which, Bakhtin and Others, is clearly a comic masterpiece. It tells the fictional tale of the literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin, who, in the effort to finish an essay on the rules governing the relationship between author and character, rents a room in a dacha owned by a family—an unfaithful wife, a tyrannical grandfather, a kleptomaniac teenager—whose problems so absorb Bakhtin’s attention that he cannot pull himself away from the domestic drama long enough to write about the author’s struggle to separate himself from the characters he has created out of himself. For all of the ironies and philosophical play, Bakhtin and Others develops characters of flesh and blood. In The Rehabilitation of Freud the characters never quite overcome the ideas they embody. The central figure, Volodya, is a person so obsessed with and so self-conscious of his incestuous desires for his mother that he cannot form a relationship with any woman and ends up unconsciously committing suicide. But a true Freudian reading would suggest that although Volodya thinks his problem is his love for mother, that obsession is a reaction-formation to cover up his anger and his more dangerous desire for his father. Richard Grose translates these difficult works into graceful, idiomatic English. I wait for more of Beilis to make it into English.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction “The Rehabilitation of Freud” and “Bakhtin and Others,” by Victor Beilis, translated by Richard Grose reviewed by David Bergman Untitled document Victor Beilis. “The Rehabilitation of Freud” and “Bakhtin and Others.” Trans., intro., and afterword Richard Grose. Other Press, 2002. 127 pp. $20.00. I’m just a casual reader of Russian literature, and yet even I can see that something remarkable was happening in the last years of the Soviet regime. Last year saw into English Leonid Tsypkin’s extraordinary book Summer in Baden-Baden, which counterposed a retelling of Dostoyevsky’s period at the resort city with the narrator’s visit to the Dostoyevsky museum in St. Petersburg. This year sees the publication in one volume of two novellas by Victor Beilis, one of which, Bakhtin and Others, is clearly a comic masterpiece. It tells the fictional tale of the literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin, who, in the effort to finish an essay on the rules governing the relationship between author and character, rents a room in a dacha owned by a family—an unfaithful wife, a tyrannical grandfather, a kleptomaniac teenager—whose problems so absorb Bakhtin’s attention that he cannot pull himself away from the domestic drama long enough to write about the author’s struggle to separate himself from the characters he has created out of himself. For all of the ironies and philosophical play, Bakhtin and Others develops characters of flesh and blood. In The Rehabilitation of Freud the characters never quite overcome the ideas they embody. The central figure, Volodya, is a person so obsessed with and so self-conscious of his incestuous desires for his mother that he cannot form a relationship with any woman and ends up unconsciously committing suicide. But a true Freudian reading would suggest that although Volodya thinks his problem is his love for mother, that obsession is a reaction-formation to cover up his anger and his more dangerous desire for his father. Richard Grose translates these difficult works into graceful, idiomatic English. I wait for more of Beilis to make it into English.

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