This is a strange feverish novel all about Dostoyevsky. Susan Sontag describes the author’s unique style in the introduction perfectly :
Each paragraphThis is a strange feverish novel all about Dostoyevsky. Susan Sontag describes the author’s unique style in the introduction perfectly :
Each paragraph indent begins a long, long sentence, whose connectives are “and” (many of these) and “but” (several) and “although” and “and so” and “whereas” and “just as” and “because” and “as if” along with many dashes, and there is a full stop only when the paragraph ends…. A sentence that starts with Fedya and Anna in Dresden might flash back to Dostoyevsky’s convict years or to an earlier bout of gambling mania…then thread onto this a memory from the narrator’s medical student days and a rumination on some lines by Pushkin
The narrator is unnamed but it's Leonid Tsypkin himself who is interweaving his own pilgrimage to Petersburg to visit Dosto sites with mostly agonising scenes from his hero’s anguished life. So you get 1) Leonard’s travels; 2) Dosto and Anna’s travels and misadventures; 3) flashbacks to Dosto’s early life; and 4) comments on Russian literature all weaving in and out of each other, all written in a breathless helterskelter rush where – dashes – have replaced the humble full stop as if the author had been told he only had three hours to live. So as the prose rushes forward the poor reader has to slow down all the time to try to figure out what is going on. This produced in me a form of travel sickness.
As well as all that, the re-imagining of scenes from Dosto’s life are kind of spurious if like me you happen to have read a couple of years ago Joseph Frank’s magnificent Dosto biography. As Bob Dylan said
And me I wait so patiently, waiting to find out what price You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice
Dostoevsky did five years of hard labour in a Siberian prison for being in the wrong room at the wrong time. When he was released in 1854 he had to seDostoevsky did five years of hard labour in a Siberian prison for being in the wrong room at the wrong time. When he was released in 1854 he had to serve time in the Siberian army and he was still banned from publishing anything. This memoir of his time in the joint finally came out in 1861 and it was a big hit. It was the first book to reveal all the horrors of life inside. Dosto said to his brother
there will be the depiction of characters unheard of previously in literature
Maybe he had in mind the prisoner he called Sirotkin. Prison homosexuality isn’t a modern invention (I know you didn’t think it was) but Dosto couldn’t address this subject directly, so he very delicately sketches one particular prisoner, Sirotkin - how handsome he is, how he looks well in a woman’s dress, how he provides (unspecified) services to other prisoners. I wasn’t expecting that. I thought – wait, what was that again?
As with all these memoirs, there is some fictionalising, shaping, rearranging, but the point of The House of the Dead was to tell the truth. So there is no plot. It’s not a novel. Many chapters are
loose assemblages of anecdotes and essayistic fragments
(Max Nelson in the Paris Review)
Well, there is one thin framing device used for the book, it’s supposed to be the memoir of a fictional character who got ten years for murdering his wife. But that was included to avoid trouble with the official Russian censor. Contemporary readers took the book as “more or less a faithful account” of Dosto’s own experience.
LIFE LESSONS FROM SIBERIA
1) The prisoners long for meaningful work, most of them have a trade. The way to destroy their spirits is to force them into work with no point. 2) Prison tries to crush the inmates into total conformity but only succeeds in making their rebellious inner lives more real. 3) Anything can be a prison, the mind, the body, religion, your class, your nationality, anything. Who keeps you in those mind-forged manacles? Only you.
THE ANGUISH AND SOLACE OF FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Although there is no plot at all, this is the story of an intellectual whose radical politics in support of the lower classes forced him (by accident) into unsought and unwelcome intimacy with those lower classes, in the course of which he discovered an emotional and spiritual love for those he had only previously considered to be part of an abstract political theory. Before prison he had thought that the alleviation of the suffering of the peasants was the problem. As an effete literary journalist, prison reality hit Dosto like an express train. At first he hated all the other prisoners and they hated him because he was a “nobleman”.
After prison he thought the peasants themselves, their intense spiritual realities and their stoicism, were the solution. He slept and ate and lived each miserable moment with them for five years, his prejudices melted away, and this was how it changed him.
Joseph Frank says in prison he finds
a new understanding of the intense humanity and particular moral quality of those he had at first regarded with loathing and dismay
THIS MAY NOT BE THE DOSTOYEVSKY BOOK FOR YOU
I must admit even given that stark horrifying nature of the world described, the narrator can be waffly, repetitious and a little annoying. You will meet a parade of extraordinary characters but you know they aren’t going to come together into any kind of drama. Just like real life, people come and go and our narrator has no idea what happened to them.
I do not think Petroff can have ended well, he was marked for a violent end; and if he is not yet dead, that only means that the opportunity has not yet presented itself.
Fortunately we know what happened to Dostoyevsky. Four years after this he wrote Crime and Punishment....more
This book is all about visiting your parents during uni summer holiday.
These two students are all like nah we don’t believe in all this old guff, yeaThis book is all about visiting your parents during uni summer holiday.
These two students are all like nah we don’t believe in all this old guff, yeah, we are like all nihilist yeah right look it up old man and they both have nihilist t shirts so they go see one of them’s daddy who is all oh I don’t understand this terrible younger generation, they talk so fast and they like all that hip hop music, but this daddy, we got to say he’s kind of cool because hey, he only got himself a little 18 year old girlfriend what is living with him, and he only like already got a kid with her, so the son is like, whoah, okay, whatever, daddy, you old goat.
Then there's an argument with an uncle that goes - you kids you don't know nothing and they say nah, man, not us, man. You. So then they get on their motorbike and off they go to see some high toned lady that’s a relative and she’s I’m sad but I’m too intelligent to need a man, but she goes for the tall one that looks like Robert Pattison and sparks fly. The other one, he likes the young sister, who plays Mozart, it’s what they use to do. We don’t do that no more. Imagine if young females played Mozart nowadays. I should say they wouldn’t get no canoodling, you know what I mean.
So then they barrel off to visit Robert Pattison’s daddy and mom and he does a lot of sneering and lolling about and I got to confess sounds like when I went back home last time. Yeah lolling and sneering, I can relate. So like then they leave and go back to the two hot ladies which I would have done myself and then they go back to the first daddy and then something happens, yeah, for real. Well, it isn’t too much, but it’s something. And then something else happens, and then that’s it.
I’d say 2 and a half stars. I’m rounding up to 3 because nihilists are pretty cool. It means you don’t believe in nothing. Nothing, man! Serious....more
Jacques Brel wrote a song called "The Devil" in which Satan visits earth to see how his project is getting along and after surveying all of human lifeJacques Brel wrote a song called "The Devil" in which Satan visits earth to see how his project is getting along and after surveying all of human life he remarks "Not bad... not bad at all..."
A 2 star rating for an obscure Russian novel from 1919 is not going to interest a great many people, even, I fear, my many lovely GR friends, so I will keep this brief. Leonid Andreyev wrote a great short novel called The Seven who were Hanged and I was hoping for more crackling prose and psychological urgency but I didn't get it. I got a sclerotically written lightweight satirical comedy, I guess, although the laughs were as hard to find as a Donald Trump concession speech. Satan returns to earth and takes the form of a very wealthy American businessman who tours round Europe. So far so good. But then Satan gets all tangled up with the father of a sweet girl who is the reincarnation of Mary or something and everything grinds to a halt.
For this one I think maybe you had to be there....more
This guy is on a morning train to St Petersburg. He knows nobody there. He has no money and no possessions. He’s this close to being a vagabond. But hThis guy is on a morning train to St Petersburg. He knows nobody there. He has no money and no possessions. He’s this close to being a vagabond. But he gets in conversation with this other guy and one meeting leads to another and by ten o’clock that night – 160 pages later – he is telling a lady he never met before not to marry a guy he never met before, and then declaring his own total love for this lady.
That’s right just another day in 19th century Russia, Dosto-style.
If Dostoyevsky was a 21st century writer he would be so rich writing scripts for shows like Desperate Housewives or Days of Our Lives because one thing he was was a natural born soap opera scriptwriter. He produced tremendous shouty thirty page arguments and 50 page carcrash scenes involving 12 outrageously-behaving borderline lunatics, just right for the campier type of tv, but I guess he’d have flounced out of his moneyspinning career on day one when they refused to include one character’s five minute monologue on what it must feel like in the half second when you are watching the guillotine blade begin to descend on your naked neck.
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WHAT THIS LONG BOOK IS ABOUT
The Idiot is about this young Prince (it was a minor minor title, not royal or even royalish) who comes to town and gets involved with these train people and their families and kind of gets all entangled. There are two strong female leads (Nastasya and Aglaya), both of whom can bring men to their knees with a single glance, and this leads to many complications. Some of the plot can be summed up by the Lovin’ Spoonful in their 1966 hit “Did you Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”
Did you ever have to finally decide? And say yes to one and let the other one ride? There's so many changes and tears you must hide. Did you ever have to finally decide?
It may be a bit spoilerish (but you will have forgotten it before you get round to reading this) but these two women finally meet in a showdown that is a 19th century Russian version of the one in A Fistful of Dollars. It's a great scene, one of many.
Also, I should mention one great scene where Nastasya rips a whip out of some nasty guy's hands and smashes his face with it.... go Nastasya!!
DOSTOWORLD
Rich men who rape poor girls don’t generally apologise :
He could not repent of his original action with her as he was a hardened voluptuary
Guys have got poor attitudes to marriage :
Although at last, after agonising hesitations, he agreed to marry the “vile woman” he swore in his soul to take a bitter revenge on her for it and to “harry her to death” later on
People do not think tact is something to even think twice about:
Earlier today I thought you were an out-and-out evildoer… now I see that one can consider you neither an evildoer nor even a very corrupt man. In my opinion, you’re just the most ordinary man there could be.
People are gold medal standard haters :
I hate you more than anything and anyone in the world! I understood and hated you long ago, when I first heard about you, I hated you with all the hatred of my soul.
Women send their boyfriends strange presents :
“Did you receive my hedgehog?” she asked firmly and almost angrily.
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TALES OF THE MIDDLE AGES
Comedy flashes all the way through this long strange tale and the funniest part for me was when some people are discussing outbreaks of cannibalism during famines of previous centuries. Somebody says :
One such cannibal, approaching old age, announced of his own accord and without any compulsion that throughout his long and poverty-stricken life he had killed and eaten personally sixty monks and several lay infants…
Later on :
“But could anyone possibly eat sixty monks?” People laughed all round.
THE COMICAL DOSTOYEVSKY NARRATOR
In The Brothers Karamazov and again here the narrator is a bumbling old fart type character who often breaks into the narrative and delivers a speech of his own or says stuff like
Perhaps we shall do no great harm to the vividness of our narrative if we pause here and have recourse to a few explanations
And as the story gets more complicated the narrator frankly gives up trying to understand what’s going on, which I thought was most amusing :
We feel we must confine ourselves to the plain exposition of the facts, as far as possible without particular explanations, for a very simple reason : because we ourselves are hard put to explain what happened.
A RARE WORD
Ten points to the translator David McDuff for using a rare and excellent word
Fanfaronade
Alas, it means “boastful talk” when it should mean something much prettier. And in general this translation was beautifully readable, as is the book itself.
RATING DOSTO
This is my third big Dostoyevsky book this year and I think The Idiot is overshadowed by Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov but that’s because they are two of the most extraordinary novels ever. So it’s an unfair comparison. The plot of The Idiot is frenzied and cramful of too many people talking at the same time and trips over itself in the middle (caused I think by Dosto writing to a magazine deadline when he just didn’t know how the story should go) but it’s a hell of a ride so try it some time, say, during a global pandemic.
HOW THE AVERAGE DOSTO CHARACTER BEGINS HIS DAY
In a state of indescribable agitation, bordering on terror...more
This slender novel from 1908 didn’t even make the 1001 Books You Must Read list but it might make my much shorter 100 Books You Must Read list becauseThis slender novel from 1908 didn’t even make the 1001 Books You Must Read list but it might make my much shorter 100 Books You Must Read list because it’s terrific. The story couldn’t be more direct – there’s a failed assassination attempt of some local petty Tsarist tyrant and five terrorists (that's his word, not mine) are caught, three men and two women, ages ranging from 19 to 28. They are tried and convicted (this seems to take place within 24 hours of the crime and the police don’t even get to find out the actual names of two of these people but what the hell, this is Tsarist Russia so you take your rules of jurisprudence and your human rights and shove them where the sun doesn’t shine). The five terrorists are then thrown in the pokey, along with two other condemned ordinary murderer-robber-rapists.
We then follow each prisoner as they sit around for over a fortnight waiting to be hung : seven portraits of psychological extremity, and these are great. There are so many quotable passages, each prisoner dealing with their onrushing death in quite different ways, or not dealing with it at all.
Thus would a man feel if he were at night alone in his house and suddenly all objects were to come to life, start to move and overpower him. And suddenly they would all begin to judge him: the cupboard, the chair, the writing-table and the divan. He would cry and toss about, entreating, calling for help, while they would speak among themselves in their own language, and then would lead him to the scaffold,—they, the cupboard, the chair, the writing-table and the divan. And the other objects would look on.
Just before all seven are executed, it is strange and jarring to see the political assassins, with their noble self-sacrificing democratic ideals, offering kindness and fellowship to the two civilian murderers, who have no such sentiments, and who are completely loathsome, but the sight of the gallows, I imagine, is a serious leveller.
The Russians have got me by the throat this pandemical year, Dostoyevsky, Goncharev, Gogol, and now Tolstoy.
This is short, sharp, straightforward andThe Russians have got me by the throat this pandemical year, Dostoyevsky, Goncharev, Gogol, and now Tolstoy.
This is short, sharp, straightforward and unforgettable. Ivan Ilyich is a modern man with a career, a wife, a family and a house and not quite enough money. Looks like he’s going to lose his job but then in 19th century Russia it’s not what you know it’s who you know so he wangles an even better job and although his wife has for no particular reason he can see become an unreasonable harridan who yells at him a lot everything is still rattling along tickety-boo when he gets ill. Then iller. Then even iller. Then illest.
This unsentimental unreligious guy has his face shoved into the hardest of hard questions – you are going to die quite soon. Oh, also, it is going to be drawn-out and dreadfully painful. And you are going to notice all your family will become sick and tired of the time you are taking to die. And your friends will fade away. And the morphine will stop working. And you will be on your own, with no one sitting by your bed. This short novel is unflinching.
Readers might come away shaken and with a revived fear of the fate that awaits us all. But I have a brief personal anecdote that shows things can turn out differently. My own father, in his late 70s, had a whole list of things wrong with him, he was in and out of hospitals, but this one evening he was back home watching tv with my mother, and the particular detective show they were watching ended, and he said “I didn’t really understand the story” and she said “I’ll make a cup of tea and explain it to you,” so she went in the kitchen, and when she came back he had died. No pain, no horror, just switched off, like a light....more
In 1929 Freud wrote that The Brothers Karamazov was “the most magnificent novel ever written”. Well, it’s possible he had not got round to reading UlyIn 1929 Freud wrote that The Brothers Karamazov was “the most magnificent novel ever written”. Well, it’s possible he had not got round to reading Ulysses yet (copies were hard to get until 1934) and of course he never did get the opportunity to read the work of Dan Brown or J K Rowling, but even so, this gives you the idea of this novel’s impact on the brains of its readers.
A SUMMARY OF THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
The major themes are
Comedy Tragedy Psychology Politics Theology Life Death Drinking Borrowing money
THIS NOVEL IS A SHAPESHIFTING BEAST
For chapters at a time this novel is about children. For most of the last half this novel is like a Richard Price police procedural (Clockers, Freedomland, Lush Life) and also like a great courtroom drama with verbatim closing speeches. Elsewhere it’s a detailed debate about monastic life and the intricacies of the Christian message. The rest of the time it’s an intense psychodrama between seven or eight major characters. In one chapter (“An Ailing Little Foot”) Dosto prefigures Molly Bloom’s stream of conscious. Got to say, this guy Dosto was not a one trick pony, not by a country mile.
SOME POINTS ABOUT 19TH CENTURY RUSSIA
Only peasants and servants work, leaving the rest of the people time to talk a lot
People are really ill quite often. This might be connected to the high alcohol consumption or the poor medical facilities
It is clear that the concept of interrupting someone had not yet been introduced into Russia at this point. So everyone is able to spout forth about anything they like, rambling on with multiple digressions for ten pages, and none of the other people in the room will say “oy, shut it, sunshine, we’ve heard enough from you, let somebody else have a go”. No one will say this. Eventually the speaker collapses to the floor from lack of oxygen and the next character will launch into their ten page rant.
THE NARRATOR IS A MAJOR CHARACTER
He is a bumbling old fart who lives in the little town where all this happens. He says he has gone round talking to people to get all this story straight. He continually says things like The details I do not know – I have heard only that…
I myself have not read the will
This arrival [of Ivan] which was so fateful and which was to serve as the origin of so many consequences for me long afterwards, the rest of my life, almost…
And on P 573 he says
Today’s item in the newspaper Rumours was entitled “From Skotoprigonyevsk” (alas, that is the name of our town, I have been concealing it all this time).
THERE ARE ZINGERS
You probably thought Dosto was a bit gloomy but this is often a comic novel, yes really. For instance Dmitri says
Who doesn’t wish for his father’s death ? …Everyone wants his father dead
And the narrator himself comes out with
The two were some sort of enemies in love with each other
And Ivan says stuff like
When I think of what I would do to the man who first invented God! Stringing him up on the bitter asp would be too good for him.
THERE IS A MACGUFFIN
There is an amount of 3000 roubles that Dmitri borrows from his current squeeze, and readers had better get used to the phrase 3000 roubles popping up about three times on every other page of this 900 page novel. Because you see, totally co-incidentally, the dead father was robbed of this exact sum also. It can get slightly tiresome, I admit that. We never hear the last of it.
SOME BLURB WRITERS SHOULD BE STOPPED BEFORE THEY BLURB ANY MORE
The blurb on the back of my Penguin copy says
The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons blah blah blah
This is likely to get readers all het up and their anticipation of a juicy whodunnit may turn to irritation because the murder doesn’t happen until page 508. This is not Dosto’s fault.
This is the holy joe, novice monk, all round too good to be true guy, but he doesn’t seem to have much vim, zip, pazzaz or get up and go about him. You wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lift with him. Not good boyfriend material.
3. Dmitri (a.k.a. Mitya, Mitka, Mitenka, Mitri)
This is the roister-doistering swaggering loudmouth uber-romantic aggravating jerk who because of his ability to drink ox-stunning amounts of hard liquor and then do the Argentinian tango or the Viennese waltz at the drop of a samovar is a wow with the ladies but you better be expecting to pay for his exhausting company because he never has a bean. Except that on the two occasions he does have a bean (3000 beans!) you will have the best time ever! Definitely not good boyfriend material.
2. Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov (aka the lackey)
The unacknowledged bastard of Big Daddy Fyodor who is kept around as a skivvy and although he has brains because he’s epileptic and an unacknowledged bastard is never given any education and therefore becomes an autodidact with a full tank of bloodcurdling homicidal suppressed rage. He’s completely boring until he starts talking then whooahhhhh. Really not good boyfriend material.
1. Ivan (a.k.a. Vanya, Vanka, Vanechka)
Obvious star of the show, the full-on atheist and progressive thinker – he’s given two entire chapters of brilliant ranting against religion – Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor and every time he slams into the room and starts sneering the quality of the conversation is going to increase. Also probably not good boyfriend material.
NICE BIT OF DOSTO META HUMOUR
Dmitri gets to make a good joke :
Eh gentlemen, why pick on such little things : how, when and why, and precisely this much money and not that much, and all that claptrap… if you keep on, it’ll take you three volumes and an epilogue to cram it all in.
You might think that a book called Evenings on a Farm Near Dinanka was not a guaranteed bestseller but that’s because you aren’t from 19th century RusYou might think that a book called Evenings on a Farm Near Dinanka was not a guaranteed bestseller but that’s because you aren’t from 19th century Russia. They were gagging for evenings on a farm in 1832 in Moscow so Gogol’s first book made him famous at age 22 and he was on all the chat shows and was seen throwing shapes in all the best night spots. Then he wrote "The Nose" and a bunch of other stuff, he was firing on all cylinders, and then a play The Government Inspector which made all actual government inspectors hate him unto death and he became the right wing press’s favourite hate figure so he legged it to Italy and wrote Dead Souls and "The Overcoat", two more smash hits.
But he had some funny ideas. He thought God had appointed him to improve Russian society by means of satire but then he got writer’s block and thought that God was tired of him writing funny stuff and wanted him to be meaner so his next book was Selected Passages from Correspondence with My Friends (he had such a way with titles) and it turned out that (surprise!) he had become a conservative and was now supporting all the authority types he used to slag off. But this is quite normal, young firebrands always turn into reactionaries, look at Elvis. Anyway everyone hated this new version of Gogol.
By then the God thing had started to ruin Gogol’s brain to the point where it was impossible to tell if he went mad because of religion (the kind that makes you think everything is the work of the Devil), or got his crazy version of religion because he was mad. He wrote Dead Souls 2 : Deader than Ever but then he decided it was evil or something and he burned it up and died age 42.
***
“The Nose” is really something. This is a Monty Python sketch 133 years before Monty Python. A guy wakes up one day and his nose has vanished. He looks for it all over the place, can’t find it, tries to put an advert in the paper asking for information leading to the recapture of the nose, then the nose is seen here and there in the town, all dressed up in fancy clothes. This is far out humour.
“The Overcoat” delivers a gut punch I was not expecting. The first half is forlorn and pathetic and funny too, but then it turns savage and bites the reader in the soft parts. And right at the end Gogol adds a paragraph trashing his story and pointing out all its absurdities. I wasn’t expecting that either.
Note : the very famous 1001 Books You Must Read before the Second Wave of Corona includes "The Nose" but it’s not a book, not a novel, it’s a short story. So if they’re going to list one great short story, what about all the others. 1001 Books editorial policy can drive you slightly crazy. ...more
If Oblomov was Hamlet the famous soliloquy would have been “To get off my arse or not to get off my arse, that is the question” but actually there wouIf Oblomov was Hamlet the famous soliloquy would have been “To get off my arse or not to get off my arse, that is the question” but actually there wouldn’t have been a soliloquy because Oblomov wouldn’t have bothered with anything hard like that. There would just be the sound of light snoring. Never do today what you can put off till a week on Friday, he says.
It’s a fact that Oblomov spends the first 160 pages of this novel in bed or, having made a herculean effort to heave his body across the room, in a chair. Yes, 160 pages describing one day. So we have here a fat-ass do-nothing couch potato who being a member of the property owning class has an estate with 300 serfs whose job it is to do backbreaking work all year long so that at regular intervals Oblomov can get lots of lovely free money. The estate is 1000 miles away from Petersburg and Oblomov never visits it, are you kidding? – so he has no idea what goes on there, all he wants is the free money so he can continue to eat heartily and doze, eat heartily and doze, eat heartily and doze.
In the novel Oblomov has a little group of people around him who love him, and many readers of the novel seem to share their views that he’s admittedly useless but kind of cute, he looks dimwitted but really he’s intelligent, he has a heart of gold and a pure soul, he’s an angel in disguise. I didn’t buy any of that. This is a guy, this Oblomov, who never combs his own hair. His servant does that for him. And yet his best friend says
he had no less intelligence than other people, only it was sleeping idly, hidden, covered over by all sorts of rubbish. Would you like me to tell you why he is dear to you, what it is in him that you still love? …. You love that in him which is worth more than any amount of intelligence: his honest, faithful heart! It is like pure gold in him from nature; he has preserved it throughout his life unharmed. He sank under difficulties, grew cold, dropped asleep, and finally, crushed and disappointed, lost the strength to live, but he has not lost his faith and honesty. His heart has never struck a single false note and nothing has sullied it…. Oblomov will never worship false idols and his soul will always be pure, honest, good. . . . His soul is clear as crystal; there aren’t many men like him, they are rare ; they are like pearls among the crowd.
Sorry, no. He’s an enemy of the people is what he is, along with the rest of his class of leeches. He's an infantilised man who bats his puppydog helpless eyes at his friends and servants and they scurry about making sure he has enough larks tongues and champagne for his supper. As far as I was concerned, if he fell down an abandoned salt mine and died horribly it would have been no great loss.
Ivan Goncharov wrote a great novel about a guy who drives you into spasms of irritation. Not only that but it’s about this annoying guy not doing things. So there is no plot to speak about in these 500 pages. And yet Oblomov is great. It is also true that Mr Goncharov could have done with an editor to tell him to chop out some really dull philosophising about marriage or another ten pages about meals being prepared
“Pickled cabbage and salmon,” she said. ‘‘There isn’t any sturgeon to be had: I’ve been to all the shops and my brother asked for it, but there isn’t any. Only, perhaps, if a live sturgeon is caught— a merchant from the Karetny Ryad has ordered one — the fishmonger promised to cut us some of it. Then there is veal and fried corn-meal.”
And yet in spite of all of these awkwardnesses and imperfections, this is a great novel. The hideous damaging life-withering vampirism that is Oblomov’s life is a steady dead-eyed devastating hatchet-job on Russian society as it was before the serfs got liberated. Along the way, Goncharev lobs in one liners
Cunning is like small coin with which one cannot buy much.
And brilliant page-long soft-voiced denunciations – here he is on the idle rich :
her thorough knowledge of house-keeping and of all home comforts, was for him the incarnate ideal of a life of boundless and unruffled repose, the picture of which had been indelibly stamped on his mind in childhood, under the parental roof. His father, his grandfather, the children, the grandchildren, the visitors, sat or lay in restful idleness, knowing that there were in the house unsleeping eyes that watched over them and never-weary hands that sewed their clothes, gave them food and drink, dressed them, put them to bed, and closed their eyes when they were dead; and now Oblomov, sitting still on the sofa, saw something quick and lively moving for his benefit, and knew that the sun might not rise to-morrow, whirlwinds might hide the sky, a storm might sweep the world, but his soup and roast would be on the table, his linen would be fresh and clean, the cobwebs would be taken off the wall, and he would not know how it was all done; that before he had taken the trouble to think of what he wanted it would be guessed and placed before him — not rudely and lazily, but by clean, white hands and arms bare to the elbow, with a cheerful and gentle glance and a smile of profound devotion.
Like Carl Douglas with "Kung Fu Fighting" or the Baha Men with "Who Let the Dogs Out?" Ivan Goncharov was a one hit wonder. His first novel is no longer read and his third and last, The Precipice (820 pages), is described by the translator here as "cumbersome and drearily tiresome". But Oblomov is, mostly, sharp, devastating and funny.
Well, what’s a global pandemic for if you don’t read the stuff you think you really ought to have read by now. Although I hope this strange circumstanWell, what’s a global pandemic for if you don’t read the stuff you think you really ought to have read by now. Although I hope this strange circumstance will not result in me referring to Fyodor Dostoyevsky as The Corona Guy.
Those yet to read this towering inferno of literature may wish to know what’s in the nearly 700 pages, so here is a scientific analysis :
WHAT HAPPENS IN CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Long conversations between people who could talk the hind legs off a donkey: .....................53% People going mad and running about wildly or quietly chewing the wallpaper in their tiny room : .........11% People being in debt :.................. 41.7% People being unsteady on their legs due to vast consumption of vodka :.................... 51% People being ill (physical) :.................... 34% People being ill (mental) :...…...…...…...……37% People contemplating suicide :...………………19% People enjoying a pleasant stroll in the countryside : .....0% People having a friendly chat over a cup of coffee :... 0.03% Men figuring they can force a poor woman to marry them :.....……...……………. 36% Women being terrified :...…...……………..………………. 39% Horses being beaten :...……………...…..……...…...……...……... 2% Nothing exciting happening :...……...……...………….. 0%
This all adds up to more than 100%. That is because C&P is a very excessive novel. It has more than 100% inside it.
INTERVIEW WITH F DOSTOYEVSKY, 18 March 1867
FD : You see, in my books...the numbers all go to eleven. Look...right across the board.
V. M Vorshynsky: Ahh...oh, I see....
FD : All other novelists, they only go up to 10. But I go up to 11.
V. M Vorshynsky:: Does that mean you have more emotion in your books ?
FD: Well, it's one whole notch more, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most...most novelists, you know, they don’t know eleven exists. I get my characters all the way to ten with their emotional situations, and then...push over the cliff. See?
V. M Vorshynsky: Put it up to eleven.
FD: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
And it’s really true. If they are not about to jump into a river, they are going to fall in love with a prostitute, or they are going to get roaring drunk because they have fallen in love with a prostitute and will later jump into a river.
CAN WE GET SLIGHTLY MORE SERIOUS PLEASE
C&P surprised me. It was like a Dardenne Brothers movie with the camera tight up to Raskolnikov nearly the whole time, and the action shown in detail almost hour by hour over a couple of weeks. Yes it’s a whole lot about th psychological disintegration of this arrogant twerp who thinks he might be some kind of extraordinary person destined to improve the human race by sheer power of his brainwaves & so therefore is justified in bashing in the head of some horrible old woman pawnbroker to steal her money and kickstart his wonderful career. And bash in the brains of her sister who unfortunately comes in the door at the wrong moment. Bad timing.
But it seemed to me that at least half of C&P was all about the horrible powerlessness of women and how they are forced into marriages which are no more than licenced prostitution. An antidote to Jane Austen, indeed.
And it was about how the arrogant twerp murderer can also be a guy who perceives this injustice and wants to revolutionise society. And to do that he starts by bashing in the brains of two women. So you see this is a psychological minefield we are in.
Like Macbeth and An American Tragedy by Dreiser the murder is contemplated beforehand, then committed, then acts like acid on the mind of its perpetrator, and the reader is along for the excruciating ride.
Thre are hundreds of connections that trigger like flashing synapses as you go through this big ass book… Freud, Leopold and Loeb, the philosophy of the Nazi Party, Camus, Beckett…
I do admit that there are probably three windbags too many in C&P and I could think of snipping a chapter here and a chapter there to get the whole thing down to a tight 500 pages of ranting and caterwauling. But all in all, this novel rides all over you like an out of control ox cart & will leave you gasping and discombobulated.
Literary Characters React to Notes from the Underground
Eeyore
This Accounts for a Good Deal. It Explains Everything. In Life, you see, we can't all, anLiterary Characters React to Notes from the Underground
Eeyore
This Accounts for a Good Deal. It Explains Everything. In Life, you see, we can't all, and some of us don't. Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush. This book is telling everybody “We can look for the North Pole, or we can play 'Here we go gathering Nuts in May' with the end part of an ants' nest. It's all the same to me." Amusing in a quiet way, but not really helpful.
Piglet
Help, help! A hexistentialist! A horrible hexistentialist! Hex, hex! A hexistible horribilist! Oh my… I know it’s only a story. But, it is hard to be brave when you are a very small animal entirely surrounded by despair.
Shrek
Well, it’s about this guy and he lives under some floorboards somewhere in a hovel, and he’s full of rage and horror and bile, like. Talks about toothache a lot. When I was reading this book I was thinking, I know this guy. This guy is my cousin. He’s a right misery. He’d split your head open for a tuppeny bit.
Woody
(sings)
You've got a fiend in me You've got a fiend in me You got troubles and I got 'em too There isn't anything I wouldn't do To make everything twice as bad for you 'Cause you've got a fiend in me
Ha ha. That’s a parody. Did you get that? Friend – fiend! See? Okay, don’t knock yourself out.
Peter Pan
When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. Now when the first baby fell out of its pram and banged its little head on the hard hard floor, it howled for the first time, and its howl broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went crawling around, and that was the beginning of Dostoyevsky.
Mary Poppins
I propose to dispense with the a spoonful of sugar, Mr Under the Floorboards. So it’s two Xanax on retiring and two at noon. Is that understood? Upon my soul, no more of that please. We are not a codfish.
Tony Soprano
I got a steel-jacketed antidepressant right here, just say so it’s yours.
Cher Horowitz
There’s like this creep who lives in the ground, I think like Lord of the Rings, what’s those things, bobbits? Anyway he hates everything and he doesn’t have the internet. At least the bobbits got to travel. Not this dude. I mean, this is like from history so you know, there is a severe lack of things like credit cards and betties to pay for with the credit cards. . Way back then people were barely alive. I can’t even believe there were any people back then. So he’s waaa waaa everything I think and everything I do is wrong but hey, I like having toothache. I know! He’s just totally clueless. Reading this really wigged me out. Okay, all right, reading Spark Notes on this wigged me out. I was Seriously? And this is good because?
this was like the last couple of holidays i have been forced to go on with my family. they make you do all this crap and then they make you pretend yothis was like the last couple of holidays i have been forced to go on with my family. they make you do all this crap and then they make you pretend you are having a good time doing it as if just doing it is not enough for them you have to keep saying you are having a good time and grinning like a babboon. so i could see where the guy in this book was coming from. but that didnt make it suck less. they made me go in a zoo which is gross the animals are not really like on tv and some of them resent you you can see it. the guy in this book is in prison for some stuff he probably didn't do and I can relate to that because i probably didn't do all the shit they say i did all the time. you know what i'm saying. this world is a giant prison i think. thats called existentalism. its tough ivan dennisovitch didnt' live in a time when there are ipods because at least you can listen to your stuff whn you are in your cell waiting to get raped . anyway this was better than gullivers travels like how could it be worse anyway, that would just not be possible unless its by dickens, but it wasn't as good as Chained Heat, Barbed Wire Dolls and Bare Behind Bars, which are movies about prisons which are better than this book because the weather is a lot better which means that the ladies in the prisons have clothing that falls off a lot lol.
also just a little thing but guys if you are going to write a novel have a name you can pronounce, even if i liked this i couldnt tell anyone he should have called him self Alex Sol that would have been a good cool name so that will be wy this book is unknown to any person that is not a teacher...more
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