Russian Literature

So while in St. Petersburg I got a little bored in the evenings when RG would talk to her aunt in Russian. So during the second ½ of the week there we passed by a book store that had some English titles. So I looked through the books and nothing contemporary caught my eye so I looked at some of the older titles in reprint. The one that caught my eye was The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky the writer of Crime and Punishment and a dozen other titles. It is a relatively heavy book and it is dived strangly into different parts, which seem to work as the scene does in a play. Each part has its own plot with a all the expect elements of a full story and ends with a kind of cliff hanger. Then the whole of the book (I am only 2/3 of the way through) has an over all plot and story line. It is a quite interesting way of writing and it certainly different than most modern novels.

The first thing I must say about Russian authors, and from other people I have confirmed this, they write in what I can only say is excruciating detail. If they describe a room they do it down to the dust bunnies on the floor and the nails sticking out of the woodwork. There are times I skim a whole page to get back to the story. Though when you are in the mood to really get into the setting there is certainly an abundance of information for your imagination to work with. Along with the detail the story doesn’t really exclude any activity besides body functions. There are entire sub plots that happen and do not carry the story forward at all; they don’t even seem to add to character development in my mind. The characters just take a right turn for no reason, have a sub adventure, then return to the main plot of the part and book. Again this can be amusing at times and certainly is allows you get yourself more engrossed in the setting but if you are hungry for the next part of the plot to develop it can be a bit frustrating.

Then there are characters, and that are all just that characters, and there are a lot of them. Each person in the story gets a lot of development and is very interesting in their own right. Many character introductions literally take pages and they do the strangest things on a regular basis. I know that Russian upper society in the mid 1800s is quite a bit different than the world I live in but some of the interactions, even form those I have witnessed in modern Russians, are just plain strange - though this in itself is very entertaining. The volume of characters is quite large and since they have very long names it does become hard from time to time to distinguish them. Which I find interesting because the names are so different from each other, I just can’t remember who is who though because the names are so long and unfamiliar.

Finally the dialogue is a riot to read. I have not been so entertained in a long time. It has its own strange tempo that keeps things moving and a back and forth between the characters that actually reminds me of a sitcom or movie from the 20s/30s. And the characters are always playing games and speaking in riddles so it is quite fun. This helps create a much greater emotional range in responses that the characters have. In fact I think there is more emotion in the first 100 pages than in the last two or three modern fiction books I have read. So while this is certainly not a review of the book I will say that for entertainment value alone the book is worth the read – though I would also say that it is worth the read to experience the different writing style, get engrossed in Russian society of a bygone era, or just because it is an interesting story (look it up on Wikipedia I’m not going to spoil the plot).