I’ve decided that on Mondays I’m going to revisit the books I read for a course in college called Advanced Reading Survey, taught by the eminent scholar and lovable professor, Dr. Huff. I’m not going to re-read all the books and poems I read for that course, probably more than fifty, but I am going to post to Semicolon the entries in the reading journal that I was required to keep for that class because I think that my entries on these works of literature may be of interest to readers here and because I’m afraid that the thirty year old spiral notebook in which I wrote these entries may fall apart ere long. I may offer my more mature perspective on the books, too, if I remember enough about them to do so.

I’m posting my notes from my reading, 30 years ago, of The Idiot because Cindy just read it and wanted to discuss it with someone else who had read it. I can’t really discuss it with her, but Past-Me can give her thoughts and the quotations she chose to copy into my notebook. (Confusing pronouns!)

Author note:
Dostoyevsky was born the son of an army surgeon and educated as a military engineer. He chose, however, to become a writer, and his first novel, Poor Folk, made him famous almost overnight. While attending a political meeting, he was arrested by the Czarist police and condemned to death. The sentence was later commuted to four years exile in Siberia. He served his sentence and returned to Russia to write his most famous novels, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot.

Characters:
Prince Lyov Nickolayevitch Myshkin: a young epileptic recently returned from Switzerland.
Nastasya Filippovna: a fallen woman whom Myshkin wishes to redeem.
Parfyon Rogozhin: Natasya’s boyfriend and sometimes fiance.
General Ivan Fyorovitch Epanchin: a friend of Myshkin.
Princess Lizaveta Prokofyevna: Epanchin’s wife and a distant relation of Myshkin.
Alexandra, Adelaida, and Aglaia: the Epanchin daughters.
Gavril Ardlionovitch: a man who first to marry Nastasya, then later Aglaia.
many more characters . . .

Quotations:
“At moments he dreamed of the mountains, and especially one familiar spot he always liked to think of, a spot to which he had been fond of going and from which he used to look down on the village, on the waterfall gleaming like a white thread below, on the white clouds, and on the old ruined castle. Oh, how he longed to be there now, and to think of one thing! — . . . Let him be utterly forgotten here! Oh, that must be! It would have been better indeed if they had never known him, and if it had all been only a dream.” p. 330.

“It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all.” p. 375.

Oh, to have time to re-read some of the books that I read when I was a different person, twenty-one or twenty-two, unmarried, still dreaming and discovering in a twenty-something way. I’m sure I would see different things in the book and save different quotations this time around.

Cindy compares The Idiot to Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. I don’t remember enough of The Idiot to add to that discussion, but here’s my post on Jayber Crow. I’m fairly sure that both Jayber Crow and Myshkin could be seen as Christ figures, sacrificing themselves and their own desires in love for another. And the quotation above about life being in the living of it and not in the end discovery sounds a lot like these words that I copied from Jayber Crow:

“Nearly everything that has happened to me has happened by surprise. All the important things have happened by surprise. And whatever has been happening usually has already happened before I have had time to expect it. The world doesn’t stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have been only on the edge of it, carried along. Is this because we are in an eternal story that is happening partly in time?”

Maybe Cindy’s on to something.