I’ve been struggling through Dostoyevsky’s 700+ page work for a while now, and for a long time it felt like an onerous chore; I thought I was only reading it because Carrie and I had an agreement that our mutual book, once begun, must be completed! But, somewhere after the beginning of Part Three, about 400 pages in, the book has taken hold of me like a kind of fever. There’s an insatiable, existentially questing, inimitably Russian aspect to the book that makes me want to immerse myself in it. What is it about? Who knows! I’m sure it has some kind of intricately plotted structure, but I don’t have any 10,000 foot view, at least not yet. I’m not reading for story in any traditional way, and part of what has delayed my appreciation of the novel is my slowness in learning how to read it. The book rewards patience; it is truly a destination itself, not, as with most novels, a book one scurries through in pursuit of an outcome.
For, whether as a result of Dostoyevsky’s scrambled writing process (the novel was written for serial publication, and created in the midst of tumultuous life events, including the death of his daughter, and his own fits of obsessive gambling), or deliberately, the novel has the digressive quality of a Tristram Shandy, and, like many novels that wander, it is often the asides that prove most engaging and thought-provoking, in this case those in which the characters anecdotally reinforce Dostoyevsky’s central theme, which I must agree with A.S. Byatt (as stated her helpful Guardian review of the Penguin Classic edition) to be “the imminence and immanence of death.”
I’ve also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to keep track of the characters, who are many, and who each have several names. It seems truly an arbitrary choice whether they are called by one name on one page, and a different name on the following page.
But the payoff is in Dostoyevsky’s profound and complex vision, and it is the voice of Ippolit that resonates for me. The prince (aka “the idiot”) is still as much of a cipher to me as he is to the other characters (probably as a result of his unnatural goodness, the quality noted by Byatt), but Ippolit’s words have the rich imperative quality of the dying man that he is. Railing against the dead in life, those who move about as in a fog of habit and rationalizations, Ippolit says “‘If he’s alive, then everything should be within his power.” And, rhetorically, “‘Whose fault is it that he doesn’t understand that?'” (p. 459, Penguin Classics edition). A footnote to one of Ippolit’s speeches references Thoughts by Mickhail Lermontov. I found Meditations … is it the same? The words leap out at me …
And life oppresses us, a flat road without meaning,
An alien feast where we have dined.
T’ward good and evil shamefully uncaring
Uncomfortable existential thoughts follow: if one is not as agitated as Ippolit, is one truly alive? And, is reading a novel about someone like Ippolit merely a comfortable proxy for being that alive?
And finally Dostoyevsky leads me to authors I haven’t thought to read for many years: Victor Hugo (“The Final Day of a Condemned Man”), Lermontov, Gogol (“Nevsky Prospect,” Dead Souls).