I have never been a big reader which I am trying to change in 2024 and this was my first Russian novel and by far the longest book I’ve ever read which took me 18 days to finish reading about 40-50 pages a day which is about 2-3 hours for me.
The Idiot was a really good and enjoyable book but having never read a Russian book and not being a big reader at all I did find it a little challenging at times following the names of people and who is who and what their relations to other people are particularly with married women being addressed by different names to their husbands and also daughters with different names to their parents eg Lizaveta Prokofyevna is the wife of ‘The General’ Ivan Fyodorovich and the mother of Aglaya Ivanovna but that’s probably more just a cultural thing I am not used to. It’s no big deal with the Yepanchin family but when people return after an absence it got confusing at times.
Parts of this book really made me laugh such as the outburst on the train to St Petersburg regarding the “know alls” and I think it was Ippolit who teed off on The General calling him pompous mediocrity and an acme olympian of ordinariness without a single original idea, it was great and I plan to go back and read that part. Lizaveta was also quite funny when she got aggressive throughout the book.
At first I really did not like Nastasya Filippovna and thought she was a real stuck up bitch but further in to the book you find out about the abuse she suffered and then she has these men who are fighting over her beauty trying to win her over with money which I took to mean that she found absurd so throws the money bag in to the fire, the prince pities her but she knows she will only hurt him.
I liked Aglaya and felt really bad for her at the end, I was hoping the prince and aglaya would be together and live happily ever after but he’s so fixated on pitying Nastasya than his own love for Aglaya who appears to grow more and more in love with the prince when he continually doesn’t demonstrate the qualities of a “knight” that she is looking for. I think she is constantly humiliating him in public in a way to challenge him but he repeatedly just accepts the situation without fighting and this possibly drives her to loving him more and more. She seems to have grown up in a very sheltered and protected environment where the older sisters will do everything to ensure that she is the one who succeeds and gets to marry the man with large wealth but she doesn’t appear to want that and dreams through books about her own future which she wants the prince to be.
The book often gets described as a “day time soap opera” but that’s only surface level IMO when you start to think more about each of the characters individually there’s a lot of depth and even mystery about them but it was also fun just spending a day in the life with wealthy 19th century Russian and seeing the hilariously shallow mindset they have, I’m enjoying just reflecting on the book and absorbing the development and understanding more about their motives and values.
The downside of the book was that I found the blurb on the back was a bit misleading and in a way it ruined the ending for me which I think is why I didn’t feel as impacted by it as most do because it says “The Prince gets caught up in a love triangle, blackmail and ultimately murder” but it doesn’t happen until the last 10 pages and the further in to the book I got I kept thinking when will the murder take place? I don’t remember what the blackmail was either or maybe I just didn’t understand or interpret that there was a blackmail in the story.
I’ve bought Crime and Punishment because I enjoyed The Idiot and Dostoyevsky’s writing but I’m going to read something smaller next before tackling it.
by retro-dagger