“Ich bin Ein Teil von jener Kraft
Die stets das Böse will
und stets das Gute schafft”
“I’m part of that Force,
Which aims at evil deeds and
Only of good is the source”
I tried to do a verse translation of this wonderful passage taken from Goethe’s magnum opus “Faust”.
Curiously enough, the same passage made its way, though following a quite complicated path, into one of Dostoyevsky’s novels. The German romantic holistic mysticism typical of Goethe’s poetry becomes in the Russian author’s work a pseudo-intellectual psychological thesis brought up by a man to impress the woman he’s interested in. With his ironic writing already in full swing, Dostoyevsky has his character say:
“«Я — есмь часть той части целого, которая хочет делать зло, а творит добро…»
Which I’d translate as: “Me? I’m the part of the part of that whole which is always willing to do bad things but only affords to do the good ones.”
The character explains to the reader that he said that, and meant that, to the lady as a joke, as a way of, at the same time, and there comes my interpretation, showing her his wit and his outright pathetic frailty as well – a guy who wants to do the great, evil – that is, subversive – deeds which are part of the history of the great men but who only affords to be an ordinary man, a no-one, a do-gooder for absolute lack of option and talent.
Dostoyevsky’s irony is even more interesting if you take into account the kind of grandiose emphasis the character puts on his own person: “Me? I, I am…”, it could be a way of rendering the “Я — есмь”; but his wit and good humor effaces the seemingly opulent ego by stating by the same token his inability to even hold the sense of mystery surrounding his paradoxical and redundant line: yes, he does say, in a very amusing and kind way, that it was a quotation, and then asks the lady whether she had read Goethe’s Faust.
All the answers provided by the lady are priceless – at first, when she listens to the line adapted from Goethe’s work, she says:
“Постойте… Что это за мысль? Откуда это? Я где-то слышала…” (Wait there…what kind of idea is this? Where does it come from? I must have heard it somewhere…)
It conveys the girl’s simplicity and, at the same time, the huge, and always troublesome in Dostoyevsky’s work, foreign influence on Russian Culture – in her Russian simplicity, she thinks it’s just sheer nonsense. But, being well-educated and having been brought up in an environment open to all kinds of influences from abroad, she had indeed heard something like that!
And there comes the irony: though gentle and simple a lady, she somehow knows that Goethe’s line wasn’t properly quoted by the charming funny guy in front of her. He, on the other hand, doesn’t notice it: he just thinks she ignores Faust completely, and takes her for a naïve lady.
This multilayered passage is intent at the same time on conveying the author’s ironic portrayal of Goethe’s Romanticism – the part of the part of that whole… -, the character’s sense of humor, the foreign influence on Russian culture and the Russian soul that, in all the rusticity, is still able to discern what does and what doesn’t make sense, and sometimes knows things better than the most well-educated of all men. The Russian soul being a gentle, simple, naïve but at the same time clever and perceptive girl – she had heard something like that before, after all. It was just that the charming young guy who used the line to improve the wit of his flirt had quoted the line incorrectly…
The German genius is preserved and protected from the Russian playful ignorance – the charming Russian guy just quotes that wrong… – but the Russian soul also grows larger and larger over the novel through a kind of deep, educated but humble and simple wisdom.
The German Culture would also come to be celebrated not by a writer, but by a Russian political and social agitator and thinker who had had all his Faust right (!) and looked up to Germany as a source of intellectual creativity which could take Russia out of its backwardness: Vladimir Lenin.
Could Dostoyevsky or, for that matter, even the early Lenin think that Germany and Russia would become conflicting protagonists of two of the bloodiest chapters ever written in History’s fabric?
