Satire and the Wrath

Less than a minute ago I took the "What Dostoevsky Protagonist Are You" quiz online: apparently I am Raskolnikov.

Two hours ago I completed The Possessed after a stimulating 400 pages in two day marathon. Such heights achieved, dear Fyodor! I don't regard the novel as being disproportionately critical of Nihilists, Socialists or revolutionary movements in general. I sought these aspects as being on par with D's skewering of the gentry, local government and the emancipated peasantry.

By far Stravogin's confession to Tikhon is the most electric prose of the novel, I had to smirk at Stravogin's assertion that monks would make the best police interrogators. Certainly that section in all desperation appears to verify Bakhtin's idea of the polyphonic novel, the idea that it isn't the confession itself but the shared experience of Tikhon's responses that solidify the section and afford it weight beyond the didactic.

I remain on holiday and my wife has the flu: more reading and posting assured of surfacing.