READ OR DIE
The death pact is now open. Chris set up a fancy feed aggregator with all of our blags and the flickr pool so we can go all web 2.0 on this.
I am on page 40/773. I’m reading a hardcover edition—Borders happened to have a copy for four or five bucks more than the paperback, and it comes with a little red ribbon bookmark, so hey, why not—of the translation made by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which seems to be the authoritative version. The first seven pages were consumed by the title and section title and a short poem and a Bible verse, and the last nineteen pages are notes explaining details of allusions and historical figures and things like that. I’m at the end of the first chapter, which, despite its name, was basically a big introduction, establishing the characters and probably how the group of liberal-minded misfits was established. I don’t actually know where it’s going with this; I didn’t bother reading the introduction.
Dostoevsky’s style reminds me a lot of Victorian literature: it rambles a lot and you have to wade through that flood of words carefully in case it ends up saying something. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, just that it’s slow and indirect. “Slow” may not be the best word, either, since that one chapter covered most of Stepan’s life. It paused and examined a handful of moments, themselves spread across a great amount of time, in careful detail and then jumped to the next thought. Based on the title, “Instead of an Introduction,” I suspect that this style is unique to the chapter.
I’m not really sure what to make yet of Demons. I feel a bit overwhelmed by everything presented so far, and yet nothing’s really happened yet. I now know a little bit about the character and history of, presumably, the main players, and through some of the narrator’s asides I’m starting to get a sense of Dostoevsky’s own disdain for this revolutionary liberalism. I suspect it’s more complicated than that, though, since Dostoevsky himself was involved in some revolutionary groups. This first chapter wasn’t very satisfying, but I expect a shift, in pace if nothing else, as I continue, so I’ll just see how it goes from here.