Minerva just read a Russian book, and I like her summary of the off-putting side of Russian novels: navel gazing in extremis and having to master all those names and patronymics. Add to that the sheer length of some of these books, and there in a nutshell is why I didn’t read any for more than a decade. But this time round, I absolutely loved the style of Crime and Punishment, didn’t find it at all navel-gazey, even though nearly the whole novel is people talking to each other wondering what the things they are saying all mean.
C&P doesn’t even have a real plot. Something happens, then you wait to see what’s going to happen for six hundred odd pages of pondering and meandering and people getting to know one another somewhat, and then something else happens that could easily have happened six hundred odd pages earlier. But I found it all tremendously exciting, with no dull patches at all. The meanderings seemed to me important newsworthy events.
However, it’s a very peculiar writing and narrative style from the Western perspective, I think. There is a sort of “grey area” of speech and consciousness, where characters might be exploring their own ideas and feelings as they articulate them, and formulating them through the act of speech. They might be drunk, of sick, or half-asleep or mad or in an emotionally heightened state while doing this. The normal boundaries between the feelings and behaviour, the unconscious/ emotional and conscious/ rational mind, are not in place. It’s a very Russian thing, and a creative state of mind rather than a self-absorbed pondering one, but comes over as the latter to the more literally rational, (ancient) Greek-minded Western mind. The most thoughtful and sensible character in C&P, in fact, Razumikhin, seems in some ways more bonkers than the rest: he admits to his own thinking aloud, changes his mind openly, and you can hear the thinking through his speech. I think this is something we consider a bit dozy and embarrassing in the West.
So my thought of the day is that possibly everything significant and dynamic in C&P, and no doubt other Dostoyevsky & Russian stuff too, comes from this area of mental fusion that is the source of creative thinking, at least artistically and literarily, probably in terms of life, morality and being human, maybe more.
Also, I can’t really see how Dostoyevsky would make sense to staunch atheists ever.