Bobok

Ivan Ivanovich, a small-time Petersburg journalist whose articles are no longer being accepted, attends the funeral of a distant acquaintance because he has nothing else to do. After the service he wanders the cemetery, sits on a tombstone, and finds himself listening to voices coming from the fresh graves around him — bureaucrats, generals, shopkeepers, courtesans, all newly buried, all still conscious, all still committed to the same petty rivalries, snobbery, and lust that organised their lives above ground. The dead have discovered that they remain themselves for several months underground before consciousness finally extinguishes in a small unintelligible sound: bobok.

Dostoevsky published Bobok in 1873 in his Diary of a Writer. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin treated it as the purest example of what he called Dostoevsky's "menippean satire" — a comic-philosophical mode descended from Lucian and Seneca, in which the world is examined through the impossible conversation of voices that should not be able to speak. Bakhtin's reading shaped a century of Dostoevsky criticism; Bobok itself is barely twelve thousand words.

Bobok rewards readers who know Dostoevsky from the great novels and want to see his strangest formal experiment — a piece that operates somewhere between Gogol's Petersburg sketches and Beckett's later monologues, sixty years before Beckett. It rewards them with a graveyard satire that is funnier than its premise suggests, sadder than its laughter prepares for, and a closing image — the eight-month chamber of the dead still trying to outrank one another — that anticipates a recurring nightmare of modern fiction.