I felt dizzy from the sense of intimacy and remoteness. Everything he said came from so thoroughly outside myself. I wouldn’t have been able to invent or guess any of it. He had told me a dream. He had typed: I know you will cheat on me. He said he would forgive me, twice. I hadn’t done anything against him, but the thought that I had, or would, was somehow exciting. I wanted to write back right away, but he had waited a whole day, so I knew I had to wait at least that long.
“It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.”
“Ivan wanted to try an experiment, a game. It would never have worked with someone different, on someone like me. But you, you’re so disconnected from truth, you were so ready to jump into a reality the two of you made up, just through language. Naturally, it made him want to see how far he could go. You went further and further—and then something went wrong. It couldn’t continue in the same way. It had to develop into something else—into sex, or something else. But for some reason, it didn’t. The experiment didn’t work. But by now you’re so, so far from all the landmarks. You’re just drifting in space.”
“It wasn’t the New World that mattered…Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”
The Idiot is one of Dostoyevsky’s most tragic novels I’ve read so far. While in Crime and Punishment we observe the…
[text ID: Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.]
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s appearance, mainly his majestic beard, resembles both the title character of his novel, The Idiot, as well as Nietzsche’s prophet who exclaimed that God was dead. It comes before its time to a world that was neither ready nor justified in acknowledging the difficult truths it poses.
Also, his coat is worn a bit loosely, just like the moral tendencies of the Brothers Karamazov.
[text ID: Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.]
