We might have been listening in on any drawing room at the time except for the little fact that all of the interlocutors are, in fact, dead. The immediate thing one notices is that the concerns of the dead-their conversations, fears, and desires-are fundamentally the same as those of the living. After all, they are dead! Why bother to hide anything from anyone? "I want terribly, terribly to get naked!" One of the women squeals. Soon, however, it becomes brazen-some of the dead decide to do away with propriety. Some of the dead are recalling events from their lives, still in the role of the positions and stations that they occupied. Their conversations are strikingly mundane. Some refuse to accept that they are, in fact, dead. Some of the dead know that they are dead. It turns out that these voices are the voices of the dead, of the characters buried in the stretched-out graves. Ivan Ivanych keeps listening as more voices make themselves heard. "Your Excellency, this is simply quite impossible, sir." Thus speaks the first voice-that of a sycophant addressing a self-important general. He is quite sure that they emanate from the graves, precisely from within the graves. Suddenly he hears voices, very distinct voices. He becomes oblivious to his surroundings. Lingering among the earth, flowers, and gravestones, he finally sits down on a tombstone and lapses into thought. Ivan Ivanych decided to stay behind with the graves. After the burial, the mourners leave together for a customary funerary dinner. In fact, upon his arrival, Ivan Ivanych is treated haughtily-the family appears to be of higher social status-and is pretty much ignored throughout the proceedings. 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 being held for a distant relative, with whom Ivan Ivanych did not share any closeness. Although I will focus on the more serious aspects of the story, I want to underscore that it is also very funny. In Russian, "bobok" means "little bean"-and if that sounds like nonsense, well, that's because it is. "Not really voices, but as if there were someone just nearby: 'Bobok, bobok, bobok!'" He finds that his very character is changing, that his head is aching, and that he has begun seeing and hearing things: His writing is turning choppy and erratic.
It soon becomes clear that Ivan Ivanych, who was recently the subject of a mocking portrait by another writer, is beginning to lose his mind. His stories are consistently, repeatedly rejected. "Nowadays humor and good style are disappearing, and abuse is taken for wit." None of this, of course, is Ivan Ivanych's fault: In the meantime, in order to make ends meet, he writes advertisements for merchants, churns out trifling commissioned work like The Art of Pleasing the Ladies, and so on.
We are thus confronted with the notes of Ivan Ivanych, an unsuccessful writer who (he tells us) has been struggling to get serious work published. In a very short preface, he insists that the author "is not I it is an entirely different person," which is unconvincing. The narrator is a certain struggling writer named Ivan Ivanych. Subtitled Notes of a Certain Person, Bobok is written in first person in the form of a diary entry.
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