The obvious thing to notice is that the concerns of the dead, their conversations, their fears and desires and so on are the same as those of the living. After all, they are dead-why bother to hide anything? "I want terribly, terribly to get naked!" One of the women squeals. At first the talk is civil, but it soon becomes brazen when some of the dead decide to do away with shame. Their conversations are decidedly-strikingly-ordinary as they recall events from their lives and the stations that they occupied. Some of the dead already know they are dead, others have to be told, and still others do not seem to realize that they are in fact dead. Ivan Ivanych keeps listening as more voices make themselves heard it turns out that they are the voices of the dead, buried in the surrounding graves. "Your Excellency, this is simply quite impossible, sir." Thus speaks the first voice-a sycophant addressing a self-important general. Suddenly he hears voices, distinct voices he is quite sure that they emanate from the graves.
Lingering among them, he finally sits down on a tombstone and lapses into thought, becoming oblivious to his surroundings.
When the mourners proceed to a nearby restaurant for the funerary dinner, and subsequently gather for the wake, Ivan Ivanych stays behind with the graves. In fact, Ivan Ivanych is treated haughtily (the family appears to be of higher social status) and is pretty much ignored throughout the funeral. The story proper begins when Ivan Ivanych abruptly tells us that he "went out for diversion and wound up at a funeral." The funeral is for a distant relative, with whom there isn't any closeness. My analysis probably reveals as much about me as it does about Dostoevsky. (In Russian, 'bobok' means 'little bean'-and if that sounds like nonsense, well, that's because it's supposed to.) Although my account will focus on the more serious sides to the story, I want to underscore that it is also very funny-to avoid the impression that it is a heavy story (it is actually quite light). He finds that his character is changing, that his head is aching, and that he has begun seeing and hearing things: "Not really voices, but as if there were someone just nearby: 'Bobok, bobok, bobok!'" What is this bobok? He asks. His writing is turning choppy and erratic. It soon becomes clear that Ivan Ivanych-recently the subject of a mocking portrait-is unravelling, beginning to lose his mind.
"Nowadays humor and good style are disappearing, and abuse is taken for wit." His stories are repeatedly rejected publishers find that he 'lacks salt'. None of this, of course, is Ivan Ivanych's fault. Instead, he writes advertisements for merchants, puts together trifling commission work like The Art of Pleasing the Ladies, and so on. These are the notes of Ivan Ivanych, an unsuccessful writer who, he tells us, has been struggling to get any serious work published. (I use the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky throughout). In a very short preface, he insists that the author "is not I it is an entirely different person," which is entirely unconvincing. Bobok, which is subtitled Notes of a Certain Person, is written in the style of a diary entry, in the first person, by a certain struggling writer named Ivan Ivanych.
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