No, I'm not talking about His Imperial Nakedness, George W. Bush, or about his supporters, though the term (in its common pejorative sense) applies in both cases. No, at the urging of a friend I have just purchased and intend to read Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot.
I've read a little Dostoevsky before (if there can be said to be such a thing as "a little Dostoevsky.") I read The Brothers Karamazov in college, and remember it as a rollicking good read - one of the first books I would choose if I were going to be stranded on a desert island. I read Crime and Punishment more recently - although as I write this I realize I read it some 14 years ago, not too much more recently than the 17 or 18 years since I read The Brothers Karamazov, but infinitely closer in my mind. One was read in college before the ordeal of my semester in graduate school; the other was read after my time in Delaware and shortly before I began my employment at a company that at the time was called Specialty Records.
I didn't enjoy Crime and Punishment as much as The Brothers Karamazov, and I never saw the alleged influence that the Crime and Punishment character detective Porfiry Petrovich had on the TV detective Lietenant Columbo. Still, it had one of the most memorable pre-suicide lines of any book, which I may be misremembering as "If anyone asks about me, tell them I went to America." (Online translations render this line differently.)
So. Here I go, back again into the world of Russian literature. Wish me luck!
Waning gibbous, February 20, 2022, 3:45 AM
2 years ago
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