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Plot; What's happening, how, and why.
Topic Started: Feb 27 2011, 07:34 PM (63 Views)
Psychopav
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What's happening* this chapter? Discuss it here.

*No relation to Dawayne, Rog, or Rerun
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jrielley
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Time for someone to say something...so off we go.

Here are a couple random thoughts. I'm not sure if "plot" is the right place for them, but since there is no plot yet I might as well use this space.

1. Once again I find that I enjoy Dostoyevsky's narrator's voice. I love how quickly he moves from serious description to light anecdote to tongue-in-cheek "contemporary" references. But also, once again, my problem is that so much of his keen political, social, and philosophical criticism and humor is lost on me. I sense it, I can feel that he is being clever, I just have no idea what the reference is. The endnotes help with the specific reference, but the context is still sketchy.

2. Dispite the above frustration (or maybe partly because of it), I am very interested in the character of Stepan Trofimovich. Since this first chapter is just non-chronological snipets of the narrator's experience of him, I don't feel that I understand him very well yet - but I am interested and want to know more. I guess this stands in stark relief against most of what I read today where a character is fully described in the first couple chapters (or paragraphs) and nothing more need be added or learned about him until his victory.

3. So far Stepan Trofimovich is mostly "much ado about nothing." My favorite quote of his (highlighted by Patty first) in this chapter is:

"you cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one's whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children..."

He is so passionate, and yet it is not clear what idea he is passionate about. Was it about the magazine idea or something else about the trip? I don't think he wants anyone to know and maybe there is no specific idea, because then he could be pinned down to it. Whatever the idea is, it is less important than the fact that he is suffering because of how the idea is treated by others.

4. On the lighter side, I thought the description of Stepan Trofimovich's poem was hysterical. I couldn't decide whether it was a Greek chorus or Glee on acid. I also laughed at:

"She at once fell in love with the portrait, as is customary for all young girls in boarding schools, who fall in love with anything at all including their teachers, mainly of drawing and calligraphy."

So this was like having a poster of Justin Beeber (sp?). And the best part is that she kept it her whole life and when she was fifty, she was dressing Stepan Trofimovich to look like it.

OK. I'm done. Who's next?
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Thanks for the first post, Jimbo. I'm going to hold off commenting for now because I'm hoping as more people finish the first chapter, they'll find their way here to discuss.

I will add some commentary for future reference and maybe some discussion. This is from the notes on the book that I purchased (unfortunately, there are no Cliff's Notes or Barron's Book Notes on this thing, so I had to make due with what I could find on line). They are from bookrags.com:

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Chapter one tells the story of Stepan Verkhovensky, a scholar and ex-professor who now lives with a rich, widow named Varvara Stavrogin in a provincial Russian town. Mrs. Stavrogin originally hired Verkhovensky to tutor her son, Nicholas Stavrogin. Mrs. Stavrogin and Mr. Verkhovensky have a complicated but platonic relationship. Despite her help, the Moscow and St. Petersburg intellectuals do not respect Verkhovensky. This, accompanied with his general laziness, leads to intemperate drinking and gambling.

Despite his flaws, Mr. Verkhovensky is still the most educated and literate man in his small Russian village. He is deathly afraid of being thought of as subversive by the government, though he likes to pose in his own circle as a freethinker and progressive.

Our narrator is a member of this circle, though he does not introduce himself here. There is Liputin, a stingy, middle-aged, liberal official in the province. Shatov, the newest member of the circle, was once a student of Verkhovensky's though was expelled from the university for his socialistic views. He has since changed his views and has become a strident conservative. Shatov is, for the most part, not talkative, though he can be quite irritable at times. Virginsky is, like Liputin, a local official. He is said to be the complete opposite of Shatov, though they are both young and somewhat resemble one and other.

In chapter one and two, Dostoevsky sets up several of the important characters and introduces many of the key themes. Verkhovensky, Mrs. Stavrogin, and the Verkhovensky circle represent and mirror several portions of Russian society, which Dostoevsky is partially mocking in these chapters. The tone is deliberately ironic and we are meant to see Verkhovensky as a buffoonish, self-important man who has never really lived up to what little potential he may have had. Although he seems to take ideas seriously, his lack of actual scholarship and his preference for drinking and gambling over research and writing illustrate that Verkhovensky is really just posing at being an intellectual and scholar. The members of his circle are no better. Dostoevsky is mocking the liberalism of the time, which he takes to lack seriousness. For Verkhovensky, his ideas are no more than a type of fashion; whereas, for the members of his circle there are a variety of reasons why they are involved. The circle is merely "playing" with ideas and talking.


I guess my first comment/question is this: while I agree with what the author of the book notes is saying here, and you can't deny there's an element of mockery to the description of Stepan, does anyone else agree that he's being a bit harsh on Verkhovensky? I am not entirely convinced that Stepan is viewed by the narrator (and by extension by Dostoevsky) as one dimensionally as the note writer portrays. There seems to be a mixture of disdain (almost remorseful for what might have been) and genuine affection on the part of the narrator which is not captured in the above commentary. I think Jim perhaps sums it up better in saying Stepan is "much ado about nothing".

I would stop short of calling him a "has been" but wouldn't go quite so far as to call him a "never was." The poem, for one thing, represents something truly radical for 1840s Russia, I would imagine. To pen a poem in which man usurps God in the world of the Russian Orthodox definitely had to take some chutzpah.
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Quote:
 
1. Once again I find that I enjoy Dostoyevsky's narrator's voice. I love how quickly he moves from serious description to light anecdote to tongue-in-cheek "contemporary" references. But also, once again, my problem is that so much of his keen political, social, and philosophical criticism and humor is lost on me. I sense it, I can feel that he is being clever, I just have no idea what the reference is. The endnotes help with the specific reference, but the context is still sketchy.


I agree that it's not always easy to know when Dostoevsky's being serious and when he's being sarcastic. I remember one time when I was reading Brothers K at Lourdes when I was teaching there. It was towards the beginning of the book and the papa Karamozov was engaged in some buffoonery. One of the English teachers saw me laughing and was surprised saying she hadn't heard of someone laughing while reading Dostoevsky before. I didn't realize he has a reputation of being so "dark". More to come on that thought as we get more into the novel, which is - according to the back cover - "hilarious". :shrug:

Also, like most of Dostoevsky's works, a vast majority of the story is moved along via dialogue between/among characters. Of course these characters have history together, and at times there are inside jokes that we don't get - I'm convinced we aren't meant to get all of them. It adds an element of third party observer. His narrator is the same way. He watches the action, he even gets involved a bit, but he isn't an omniscient third party. This, I think, adds both a sense of realism to the story as well as forces the reader to adopt an attitude of patience. From a strictly stylistic perspective, this fascinates me because in adopting the patient perspective, Dostoevsky then sets the reader up to more readily experience suspense and the payoff of the denouement is, I think, more effective.
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