When Kerouac Met Dostoyevsky

by Stephen J. Gertz

Jack Kerouac's "Dostoyevsky Mad-Face" by Allen Ginsberg, 1953.

Sometime during March-April, 1949, John-not-yet-Jack Kerouac, 27 years old and living with his parents as "The Wizard of Ozone Park" (Queens, NYC), as his Beat friends referred to him, bought a cheap reprint edition of short stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He annotated the book, and entered his ownership signature.

Dostoyevsky was an important influence on Kerouac; his novel, The Subterraneans, was consciously modeled on Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, one of his favorite books, and there are many references to the Russian author in Kerouac's novels and letters.

Dostoyevsky was something of a guiding literary and philosophical spirit to the Beats (and buddy - Kerouac affectionately called him "Dusty"), and Notes From the Underground, which Sartre considered to be a major forerunner of existentialism, a  handbook of sorts for the Western Man isolated, apart from, and at odds with the culture in which he lives, alienated from the mainstream, an outsider creating and living life on his own terms. Notes from the Underground is the companion piece to Mezz Mezzrow's Really The Blues (1946), the  gospel of hipster-jazz subculture that the Beats adopted as their book of revelations. The two books serve as the liturgy to Beat theology.

In 1949, the year that Kerouac bought this book, he had just completed the legendary road trips with Neal Cassady that began in July, 1947, wrote The Town and the City, was working on Dr. Sax,  and crafting the first draft of On the Road (in its essential religiosity a sort of Brothers Karamazov in a car; Kerouac, a devout, though lapsed Catholic;  a lonely, fallen altar-boy on an odyssey seeking enlightenment, redemption and communion with the Godhead, Brother Cassady his co-pilot and navigator riding shotgun no matter where he sat. On the Road is not about getting kicks on Route 66. Kerouac is an Irish-Catholic Siddartha). 1949 was a key year in Kerouac's journey, and Dostoyevsky was heavily on his mind.

In a letter written to his friend Alan Harrington on April 23, 1949 Kerouac wrote: "I've just read 'An Unfortunate [sic] Predicament,' a long story by Dusty-what's-his-name. I studied it carefully and found that he begins with 'ideas' and then demolishes them in the fury of what actually becomes the story. This letter is a similar venture. However, nothing detracts from the fact that this is a mad letter. 'So be it! So be it!'"

And boy, did he so be it. The first two pages of An Unpleasant Predicament (1861), one of the stories in the collection, are  annotated by Kerouac, who has written six remarks in the margins commenting on Dostoyevsky's usage and writing.

For example, next to the sentence that begins: "The fact..." Kerouac writes: "Truly 'the fact.' Always fluffs the rest, & gets to the 'fact.'"

Next to the word "fond" Kerouac writes: "fond always gives a batty tone -- just right."

About Dostoyevsky's use of the word "actual" he writes "Dusty's way of being a card."

Commenting on the sentence, "He was a bachelor because he was an egoist," Kerouac writes "A Family man's reflection."

Inappropriate behavior, scandalous activity, moral experimentation, ambiguity, and socio-political and literary polemic set within a mocking, carnivalistic atmosphere characterize this story of three generals' argument of ideas that degenerates when one of them, wishing to test his liberal-humanistic thinking, leaves, crashes the wedding of a subordinate, and gets drunk to satirically disastrous result. This was the Beat's bread and butter at its merriest, stepping on sacred cultural cow-pies, enjoying the squish, and hoping the scent offends bourgeois nostrils.

This copy of Dostoyevsky's short stories is a wonderful personal artifact from Kerouac's developing years as a writer, demonstrating his early literary thinking and roots. The year he bought and read it, the author, the subject - here dawn energetically breaks on the Beats and especially on Jack Kerouac.

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(KEROUAC, Jack). DOSTOIEVSKI, Fiodor [Fyodor Dostoyevsky]. Short Stories. New York and Boston: Books, Inc., n.d. [c. 1940s]. Reprint edition. Octavo. 248 pp. Signed and dated by Kerouac, with his holograph margin annotations in pencil.

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Images from book courtesy of Between the Covers, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.

Photo of Kerouac ©Allen Ginsberg LLC 2010, from Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art.

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Listen to Jack Kerouac recite a three-minute excerpt from The Subterraneans here.

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It Happened In Hell: The Morozov Apocalypse (Russia, c. 1820)

by Stephen J. Gertz

One of 73 large illuminations, most full-page.
Pen, ink, and watercolor.

Beware, the Antichrist is here or imminently on the way.

No, not current American political commentary. Rather, the reality to Old Believers, the sect of Russian Orthodox Christianity that, in the wake of the Church's reforms in the mid-17th century, separated from the Church to remain true to its old ways. They were persecuted for their insistence on maintaning the preexisting liturgy, often tortured, sometimes executed. The Church and State imposed anathemas upon the Old Believers.

The Antichrist will make his infernal appearance at Christie's - London, on Wednesday, October 27, 2010, lot 60 in the Arcana Collection Part II sale as part of Tolkovanie na Apokalipsis Sviatogo Ioanna Bogoslava (Commentaries on the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine), and illuminated manscript on paper in Chirch Slavonic. It is estimated to sell for $31,000 - $45,000, depending upon how diabolical the bidding gets.

In the 5th century, Andreas of Caesarea wrote his Commentaries on the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine. Around 1820, a notable Old Believer family or individual, possibly Savva, founder of the Morozov industrial textiles dynasty, or his son, Elisei, commissioned this illuminated manuscript of Caesarea's Commentaries, one quite different than those usually associated with the Old Believers, which tended to be coarse or naïve. Old Believers were the Puritans of Russian Orthodoxy - teetotalers, diligent, hard-working, somewhat severe - and preferred the simple and unadorned in life as well as in religious practice and iconography.

Here, the imagery is unusually fine, evoking earlier icons in the Pomorian Church style. 

The only refuge is Christ, in Heaven.

That the Antichrist was present or soon on the way was a popular topic for discussion amongst Old Believers, who saw in the apocalypse of St. John a parallel to their stuggles against a reformed Church in league with the Tsar. 

Curiously, no one on the contemporary American political landscape has yet cited the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine and the arrival of the Antichrist during this campaign season. Perhaps, to some folks,  it's just a given. Or, we'll just have to wait until 2012. I can see the campaign placard now, eyes pained:  "The Obamanation is an Abomination!"  Sorry if I've given anyone a bad idea by that phrase; I herewith reproach any True Believing individual or organization that appropriates it for their extreme agitprop.

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[RUSSIAN OLD BELIEVERS]. ANDREAS OF CAESAREA (fl. 5th century). Tolkovanie na Apokalipsis Sviatogo Ioanna Bogoslova [Commentary on the Apocalypse of St John the Divine], in Church Slavonic, illuminated manuscript on paper [Russia, c.1820].

360 x 260mm. 224 leaves, written in black ink in a regular semi-uncial Church Slavonic hand on laid paper watermarked 'J. Kool', rubrics in red, initials in red, opening letters in red in elaborate scrolling and floral penwork, FOUR FOLIATE HEAD- AND TAILPIECES, TWO ELABORATE FOLIATE INITIALS with bird ornaments, and the opening leaf of the commentary within an ELABORATE FOLIATE FRAME WITH BIRDS, all shaded in yellow, green and crimson in the Pomorian style, SEVENTY-THREE LARGE ILLUMINATIONS, most full-page, pen and ink and watercolour, and some gilt, in a fine archaic Pomorian style, within a double-rule frame shaded in yellow (light marginal soiling, a few tears mostly in the inside margin, ff. 214-15 stained near the gutter). 19th-century Russian red morocco, sides panelled in gilt with foliate and floral tools, brass catches and clasps, spine tooled in gilt, red cloth index tabs, edges gilt (extremities and sides rubbed, some stains on the upper side, spine with some loss of gilt); red morocco-backed case. Provenance: Vikul Eliseevich Morozov (1829-1894; blindstamp and manuscript shelfmark '76').

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Images courtesy of Christie's.
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