The Idiot

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!