I’d like to finish this book tonight, but such goals have in the past fallen short of expectation, so I figured I’d share some thoughts now. Also, this way I get to use “penultimate.”
I’m probably behind most of the group at this point, so I’m going to go ahead and talk in particulars instead of generalities. So, if you don’t want to know what’s happened, you know, here there be spoylers.
I’m at the start of the penultimate chapter. There have been several murders recently, but Shatov’s is the one that really matters; that was the one that was to bring the fivesome together. A couple of minor details bothered me through the otherwise engaging sequence of that murder. First, the fivesome itself. I don’t know if that number has some historical or numerological significance—Internet says that five represents grace and redemption in the Bible, most notably in Exodus—but it’s not the number itself that bothers me; I have a hard time keeping track of who exactly compose the five. The annoying part is that I don’t think the actual five even matter; every character in this book, outside of brief bursts of passion, lacks dimension, and most of the characters that have been attending the revolutionary meetings might as well all be the same. Inclusion or exclusion in this inner circle would only serve to create symbols of loyalty or favor for a particular sort of thinking or whatever rather than reveal any more about Pyotr Stepanovich. In fact, I think that the Shigalyov’s rejection of the murder was meant to be a message along these lines: he advocated idealism taken to a bloody extreme yet would not condone the killing of someone that wouldn’t survive his revolution—a Slavophil and, though Shatov was supposed to be a student, someone seemingly not extremely bright—perhaps because the overt reason for the killing was the survival of the group rather than the betterment of society. The fivesome hasn’t really done anything for society other than print some pamphlets, and all of the revolutionary talk they’ve had had been a sea of nonsense and empty words, the satire of the revolutionary groups.
I guess one of the things of that bothered me initially is that synopses say that this book is satire, and from that I expected the book to be funny. I won’t try to discuss the nature of humor or whether it really was funny in 19th century Russia, but the bulk of the book is more of a morality play than a joke. It’s satire in that it creates caricatures of the Russians, both the aristocracy and the revolutionaries, and especially their overlap, and Dostoevsky’s opinions and lessons are presented by emphasizing absurdities. The annoying part of this technique is that the chief absurdity of the aristocracy is that they’re really boring, and, particularly since the narrator is himself part of the idle rich, it’s difficult to identify with the writing, making it very boring to read.
Anyhow, the best I can tell is that the fivesome is (or was) Lyamshin, Liputin, Tolkachenko, Virginsky and Shigalyov. Pyotr Stepanovich doesn’t count, as far as I can tell, since he’s the head of this bizarre organism, and I think I one point Erkel was explicitly excluded from the fivesome, though now he appears to be the new head. Other than Shigalyov, the five characters are basically interchangeable, and I find it kind of weird that I have so little to say about any of them yet managed to spell all of their names correctly without looking them up.
The second thing that bothered me was that the narrator keeps referring to the group as “our people.” This creates an annoying break in the narrative in that it reminds me that the narrator, who isn’t involved in the revolutionary groups at all and has been absent for the last couple of chapters, is a character in this story however impossibly; and the emphasis on “our” tries to pull me in along with him. It’s probably the second effect that Dostoevsky was aiming for—your crazy thinking will be your doom and all that—but it’s a fairly unsubtle way to drive in his point, and it just exacerbates the narrator problem.
On the bright side, even though the narrator manages to wedge himself in to even the scenes where he’s absent, it’s been pretty interesting the last few chapters, and it’s almost over.