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The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky with Maria Baer · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at 9 o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg Railway was approaching the latter city at full speed.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: Some of the passengers by this particular train were returning from abroad.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: But the third-class carriages were the best filled, chiefly with insignificant persons of various occupations and degrees picked up at the various stations near town.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: All of them seemed weary, and most of them had sleepy eyes and a shivering expression, while their complexions generally appeared to have taken on the color of the fog outside.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: When day dawned, two passengers in one of the third-class carriages found themselves opposite each other.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: Both were young fellows, both were rather poorly dressed, both had remarkable faces, and both were evidently anxious to start a conversation.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: If they had but known why, at this particular moment, they were both remarkable persons, they would undoubtedly have wondered at the strange chance which had set them down opposite to one another in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw Railway Company.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: So opened Ferdor Dostoevsky his novel, The Idiot, published in 1869.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Muir Orthodoxy.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: I am Nadia Williams, the book's editor at Muir Orthodoxy, and today I am delighted to talk about Dostoevsky's The Idiot with Maria Baer.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: Maria is a reporter, writer, and podcast.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: She co-hosts the weekly The Breakpoint This Week podcast with John Stone Street at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: She is a contributing writer to Christianity today, and she also writes regularly for many other publications, including the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, World Magazine, the Gospel Coalition, and the list keeps going.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: So, Maria, thank you for taking the time to join me this morning.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Nadia, I am so excited to talk about The Idiot with you.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: So the first question I always ask, and it's always fascinating to hear answers, is just what is a classic?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I've heard you ask this before.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think one of your guests a few weeks ago gave a great answer, which was something like it's typically something that is written that resonates for a long time, right?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: So that has something true about it.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I that when I heard that, I I've been thinking about it since then and thinking about what makes a classic.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are lots of um answers that you reach for first, being like, it's an old book, it's an old English book, it's a book by Jane Austen, it's a book you study if you take English lit in college, you know, that kind of thing.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I think there's something deeper to that um that observation, that it's something that resonates through time.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking about the fact that, like, you know, the the sorts of journeys that readers are willing to go on in books and sort and journeys that they aren't, and they don't always follow rules that you'd expect.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I think one of the things that makes a book a classic is when it is strictly um, it r resonates as true to human nature.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that is why you could have a book, even that's about science fiction or something that doesn't follow the strict physical laws of our universe.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: But if it seems to resonate with something true about human nature, then it it stays with people.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a deeper truth there.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think that points to just kind of the moral order of the universe and what we hope for.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're willing to go to all kinds of weird, we're willing to go back in time and books and love them.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: We're willing to, you know, imagine all sorts of dystopian futures and other worlds.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: As long as there is a sense of order and um there's something true about human, we will, we will willingly go on that journey more than we will tolerate, let's say, a character who acts irrationally different the next day from the first day with no through line, you know, like a badly developed character.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I so I think that's what makes classics stand the test of time is that kernel of resonating truth to human nature, imagined in all sorts of different um scenarios and time periods and all of that.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: I also really love just a devotion to language.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that we have that so much anymore, um, but just to choosing words carefully and slowly, and um, there's something about the rhythm of classic books that feels different to me than a lot of moderns.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think there could be modern classics as well, but certainly an open-ended um definition, but that's kind of where my mind goes.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: And we'll keep kind of coming back to elements of this, I think, because so much of the book Um of The Idiot is about human nature and kind of the question of what do we do with this.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that's very much a Christian thought, even though it's not peculiar to Christians specifically.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: But reading books to understand human nature is certainly one aspect.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, your point about books that sound beautiful, that the the language matters, um, it's something I've noticed especially with my kids, because we read aloud so much.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: And children love books that sound fun.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, my children do too.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, I remember as a kid reading books and wanting to go back and read sentences over again, wanting to go back and read sentences and pretend I had written them, you know, like when the rhythm just strikes you so perfectly, or there's a word where you knew what the author was going to communicate, but they chose a word that was slightly different than what you expected, and it's just like so perfect and juicy.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I absolutely love that.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: I will say that that was a complicated part of the idiot for me.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this I went back and reread it ahead of our conversation here, um, which is that obviously this is this book is translated.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: So there's so much um to my ear, strange word choice, strange descriptions.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And there's kind of a little mystery to it for me of what could have been lost in translation.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: And was it, you know, I'll read a certain scene and think, was that meant to sound as ridiculous as it sounded to me?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Am I meant to chuckle at this?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Or was this something in translation, or was this Dostoevsky poking fun at Russian culture?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: And um, there's something fun about that being kind of open-ended and just getting to wonder that.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: But that is a unique part of reading a translated classic for sure.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: That's a good point.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I know people sometimes kind of uh get really intense about favored translations, and of course, like Bible translation wars are a real thing.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I guess my um my stance, because I study Greek and Roman literature, and it's also like a whole thing.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like periodically on Twitter you will see people go after each other over Homeric translations.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: And and to my uh, I guess what I would say to readers is just get whatever translation will keep you reading.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, absolutely.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, just because somebody else told you a translation was the best there is objectively, right, doesn't mean that it will be the one that will captivate you.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: And what really what are you after?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: What matters?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: You want to get into the text.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you do that how you can.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: So before we get into the novel itself, I wanted to hear about your intellectual journey.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like what what shaped you uh in your life as a reader and thinker?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: Because you're a writer, you're a journalist, which means you're a professional reader and writer.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um well, I'm intimidated by the question.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I, first of all, I had a high school English teacher.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think a lot of people have similar stories to this, who was devotedly passionate about classic literature.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, at the time we all hated her.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: We had to read so much, we had to write so much in response to what we'd read.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: But this was my, that was really my first gateway into, you know, we read Nathaniel Hawthorne and um Herman Melville and all the po, you know, the uh Enlightenment poets, and we were dissecting sermons by Jonathan Edwards and a lot of Shakespeare as well.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: This, this was my, you know, eye-opening moment into what is possible with writing, what you can, the messages you can send that aren't just explicit but implicit.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: It felt like code breaking or mystery solving, right?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I absolutely loved that.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then I went to school for journalism and I went to a very specialized journalism school at Ohio University, which was a privilege and was a fantastic experience.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the regrets I have is that it was so specialized in reporting that I didn't take any English classes.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: I took a few logic and philosophy classes that were part of my degree, but as part of my degree, there were no English classes.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I did no lit classes.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I also studied Spanish in school.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: So most of the reading I was doing was in Spanish, and then writing was in Spanish, and then whatever other writing and reading classes were directly reporting related, um, which was a fantastic education and I loved it.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: But it wasn't until, well, when my daughter was born, she's now 10, my oldest.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I have always loved reading just on its own.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I started reading one of the things I would do with her when she was a baby.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know that feeling, Nadia, when you have a baby and you're like, what do I do with this creature that's here all day?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: She can't exactly play yet.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what do I do?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: I started reading a lot out loud.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: We read Little Women, we read all the Little House on the Prairie books.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And just I think I had read something somewhere about the benefits of them hearing the language, you know, before they can speak it.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that kind of restarted my entry into more of the classic books.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then during COVID, really, I decided I'm gonna go on, I'm gonna read all the books that I feel like I should have read in college or that I might have missed out on by not taking any of these English lit courses.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I just made a giant list and started working my way through it.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, I read The Brothers Karamatsov first, loved it, was very confused by it, and then read The Idiot and felt more like, okay, this is a strange one that I can get on board with.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that hasn't really stopped since COVID.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of meander in and out between reading classic books and then reading, you know, whatever suits my fancy or whatever I see at the library or whatever.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: But um, but I do a lot, I try to keep at least one nonfiction or one fiction going all the time, even while I'm still reading, you know, as part of my job, I'm reading the news a lot and reading a lot of nonfiction and a lot of essay writing and that kind of thing.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it is reading is always a big part of my life.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think it would be, even if it wasn't professional for me.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: But but I always try to keep a fiction one going as well, for sure.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: I love this.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's a good reminder that uh your college degree is not the end of your education, that we just keep going.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, yeah.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I I want my daughters again, just that feeling of decoding something.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: We went um about six months ago now.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: We it was a friend of ours' 40th birthday, and he wanted to go to a soccer game in Manchester in the United Kingdom.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: So we took all the kids, we went over there, and we spent a week or so around going around Britain and we went to Shakespeare's um birthplace, you know, and we toured and we got a couple of books and we've been reading through some of the sonnets.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I I am watching it in real time, that feeling that I remember having junior year, which is I read something to them and then I explain what he's actually saying and the little joke that he made underneath what he said that you wouldn't know unless you knew this other thing, and just like the privilege of hearing that, and now you're in the know and you figured it out, and it's so fun to remember that feeling.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: That is so fun.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Decoding.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: Reading is decoding.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, absolutely.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a good way to bring us into the idiot.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: So, why should 21st century American Christians read this novel?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: What what drew you to it?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've always been fascinated by Dostoevsky's life himself, you know, and his he's had some of he had some of the most extreme experiences a human being can have.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: And of a lot of those themes come up here.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we know he was in Siberia, he was at a camp, he allegedly, you know, and I uh I assume this is true, faced a firing squad at one point and then was spared at the last moment.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of psychological exploration of what that does to a person and how you think about life after something like that in this book.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what I love most about this book, it it is very strange.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think it was strange at the time.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: I've since read um sort of an intro to it.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now, again, one of the fun and not so fun parts of reading classics like this for me is that I'm reading them mostly by myself.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: And and so I do love the freedom to kind of just go into it and see what I discover.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think sometimes in school or in big conversations, I try not to read, for example, the big introductions before these classics because I don't want to form an opinion or have an idea of where I'm going before it, before I get into it.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I have gone back and read some of these, you know, kind of academic explanations or introductions to it.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it was a strange novel even at the time.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I believe Dostoevsky wrote it kind of as a serial.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, a lot of these classics ended up being written that way.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it feels the tone can feel really disjointed sometimes.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the first part of the book feels very different than the third part and all that kind of stuff.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: But what I love most about it and why I think people should read it is that I think the central thing that he is, that Dostoevsky is saying is to the modern world, you know, in in his mind, his modern world, this is what you look like.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: This is how ridiculous you look compared with Christ.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: If if Jesus came and popped into your little social world, and there's all these little tropes of you, there's, you know, the genial old drunk man, there's the prideful young woman, there's evil, there's all kinds of characters roaming around, all interacting with this very, very pure, pure-hearted, obtuse person who then gets treated and obviously called an idiot.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's it's suggested that he is mentally unwell because he doesn't understand the world he's in.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: But it slowly becomes clear that the question being asked is is he the idiot or are you the idiot?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I just love thinking of Dostoevsky painting a mural of like, this is what because you you read so many scenes in this novel of the main character, Prince Mishkin, interacting with all these different people and butting up against all these different social, you know, problems and dramas.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it it's so farcical.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Everything ends up looking so silly, and you just can hear Dostoevsky saying, This is what it looks like when you try to fit your modern sensibilities into the real world with Jesus next to you.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it reveals how ridiculous a lot of that is.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, there are a lot of themes in this novel that kind of preview the brothers Karamazov.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me what you mean.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just thinking the explan uh the exploration of holiness.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: What is it, what is it like to be the one holy person observing everyone around you and wondering what is real?
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: What's real and what's good.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like what's good?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, what should we aspire to?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because the everyone is so there's so many scenes with the prince here where everyone is so chiefly worried about him embarrassing himself or him embarrassing them or making sure they categorize their associations with him.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like, don't worry, I know he's an idiot, but if this is charity that we have him here, whatever.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: I would never fall in love with him.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: He's an idiot, kind of thing.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then he is exposing all of their ridiculous sensibilities and their pride and their timidity and their um, you know, their like social anxiety, I guess, because he just doesn't care because he doesn't know.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: And in this regard, uh, that's that is a very uh typical theme for 19th century Russian literature, just making fun of the social, um, just kind of the idea that you are what society says you are.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so society with a capital S, like entering society, being uh distinguished in society.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a lot of this.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: Let's take a step back and introduce the main characters.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so the two characters on the train are Prince Lev Mishkin, who is the main character.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: He is our beloved idiot, who I believe is sort of a Don Quixote, and he's even explicitly um likened to Don Quixote in the novel, but he is our Christ-like figure.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now, he doesn't have the omniscience of Christ, and that's a really fascinating inclusion.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's he knows that he is not fully understanding the world that he's in.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and he's deeply uncomfortable with that.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, we see where that goes, but he also is so pure-hearted that he doesn't know any other way.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that's our that's our main character, that's our idiot.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: The other person he's meeting on the train is Rogoshin, who is certainly the villain, the antagonist to Mishkin.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: And they they will go on to serve as sort of the the rails of the of the book.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's Mishkin versus Rogoshin, through all sorts of, like I said, different, you know, social situations.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: The main one being there's a young woman named Nastasia Filipovna who um Rogoshin falls in love with.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: And she's a very sad creature.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, she was born into really difficult circumstances and adopted by kind of a high society man who, in his charity, brought her up and provided for her education.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: But she ends up, she comes across as a very irrational, um, kind of mad woman who can't figure out her place in society and therefore just she kind of dangles the prince and Rogoshin in front of each other.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: She pretends to marry one, pretends that she'll marry one, and then pretends to run off with the other one.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: She throws money in the fire.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: She, she's kind of, she sometimes she's playing like a master puppeteer with some of the other characters in the book, and then other times you feel terrible for her.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: I actually have a theory about these three characters, Nadia, and I have no basis for this whatsoever, but I would love to hear.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: You shared with me offline that you took a, you had a whole semester on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to hear your take on this theory.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think part of the symbolism of these three characters is that Lev is like Christ, Rogoshan is like Satan, and Nastasia is like humankind.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: And they're they're both kind of Lev and Rogoshan are fighting for her because there's there's several illusions in the book where the prince says he looks upon her with utter love, but it's not romantic love, it's a a pitying love.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: And she can't bring herself to marry the prince because she doesn't think she's good enough to.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: She she just always has this sense that she's bad, and that's what keeps driving her back and back to Ragoshan, who ultimately kills her, right?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that the prince is always deathly afraid that this will happen.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it just struck me actually this second time through reading that this was kind of the picture of the tug and pull of her between good and evil.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: I like this.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: It makes a lot of sense of kind of this the way the story unfolds.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, for readers, Uh, the Russian names, a lot of times I hear people say, like, there's so many names.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: I've never heard names like these before.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: Don't sweat it, just maybe have a cheat sheet for yourself with a couple of them and keep going.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: But the names do have a significance.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like uh Lev Mushkin, his first name means lion.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, and again, the Christ-like associations of the lion, but his last name is the mouse.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: He's like the mousy, meek, weak, tiny lion.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I think about, I was thinking about this in rereading the just the idea.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: This is the sort of lion you can see lying down with the lion.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's beautiful.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't, I did not know that at all.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: I I listened to a lot of it this time on Audible, and my my daughters are still laughing about it because there is, so in Russian, they usually say the first, I don't know how you'd characterize it if it's their surname, but they always say the first and the surname at, you know, together.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: So it's always Nastasia Filippovna.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Nastasia Filippovna.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: My daughters are always like, are we putting on Nastasia Filipovna when we get in the car?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's a patronymic.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: So in Russian, traditional Russian names, you have the first name, and then that like second name is um it's essentially saying who your father is.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: So for example, like my full name is Nadiah Vladimirovna.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: So like Nadyh, daughter of Vladimir.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: But um, so it's uh so in Russian names you have that.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: And whenever you see it used, like in novels, you know this is a formal occasion because only if your uh blood relatives and really close ones, especially in the 19th century, which was so much more formal than modern times, would you use only the first names?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: But that's okay for us, the readers, right?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like we're on first name, we're on first name basis with everyone.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: We're like, we're reading their innermost thoughts.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: And yes, we're in their heads, absolutely.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: So at that point, like that's fine.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: But it is, uh, yeah, with Nastasia Filipovna, you have this like distinguished sounding name for her.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: We're very respectful of her.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: She's a society woman.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and she's very vulnerable and broken.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, she is.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: I she's probably the character I identify with the most.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and she's just utterly unpredictable.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Again, there's a a lot of language in here that I that is, you know, again, that mystery is there of what's translation, what is a mark of the time in which this was written, and what was intentional in terms of was this meant to sound so um whiplashy, you know, to our it will literally be like Nastasia Filipovna was moved to despair beyond words.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then she laughed for 10 minutes.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: It it will genuinely say she laughed for 10 minutes, and then she was surprised at her laughing.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then she, you know, they they kind of, and I do feel like there's a sort of distinctly Russian um tone here of just flipping between dramatic emotions.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's also very there's some of this that feels very Jane Austen to me as well, where it's like there you could have one pretty small, small potatoes conversation between two people, but the implications in their minds go on for 10 pages about what he meant when he said that.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a sideways glance, and it meant this, and which of course is tons of fun.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: And the Russiann-ness of this uh is what separates it from Jane Austen, where you have a sense of like everything will work out at the end.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, society is messed up, people are messed up, families are just like well, very dysfunctional, and yet somehow everything works out.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: But the Russian, the Russian version of this is no, not having and that it's where we're going.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's appropriate.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's very much an English expression being on the rails or off the rails, but we start with well, a train on the rails.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: And that's about as organized and orderly as this novel gets, is that opening scene.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a good point.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: So, what do we make of this?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like, walk us a little bit through the plot without totally like unveiling everything, but walk us through like points to watch out for for first-time readers.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: So, first you're gonna be introduced to Prince Lev, our idiot.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: He's coming into Russia.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: So, this is like his birth into the society that we're about to see, kind of caricatured.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he comes in on this train and he meets Ragoshin on the train, who will turn out to be his nemesis.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but they have, you know, a little bit of a cordial interaction.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: They meet Libedev, who is kind of a general.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: He's one of those like mid-level kind of a party bureaucrat type of guys who will also feature in the novel.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: And um eventually, you know, you are already introduced here to Lev's kind of naivety because he doesn't have anywhere to stay.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't have much money.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot made about he just has this one tiny bundle with him.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone is like, Where's your stuff?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, This is my bundle.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, No, but where's the rest of your stuff?
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: And this is all he's got, right?
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: But somehow, you know, he kind of through meeting Ragoshin, through meeting Lebedev, he gets in with this family with the Yapanchin family.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a family of kind of a higher status family.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: They have three daughters in their 20s who are very well educated and whose mother is very neurotic and is hoping to get them married.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: And Lev comes to visit them.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and here is where he meets Gany, who is one of the Gavriel Ardelianovich, who's also one of uh he's like a footman in the Yapanchen house.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: He will feature in this novel as well.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: But Lev meeting the Japanchen family is really an amazing scene that that whole it takes a while to unfold.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: He meets the servants first, and then he meets the family.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the descriptions of their impression of him, as well as what he says and the stories he tells, I think are really could be a standalone novel.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: This is really where the picture of Lev as a Christ-like figure and also somebody who's going to then expose, you know, just the shortcomings of modern sensibilities in every person he meets really comes to the fore.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's of course in this meeting, too, that he shares a story that I think will become another theme.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I've noticed in some of these Russian novels that if anybody ever shares a moral, like fable or parable at the beginning of the book, you can be pretty confident that throughout the rest of the book, your characters are about to live that out.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: They're about to live out this parable, right?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: So the parable he tells is of a man who was sentenced to execution.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, he he knows that it's coming.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: He knows it's in two days, he knows it's in one day, he knows it's in an evening.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: And what is happening in his mind?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then he wakes up that morning, and you know, it is as if the minutes had stretched to hours, and he's he's allocating one minute.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: I will spend this minute thinking of my comrades, and then I will spend this minute imagining what comes next.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I will try to spend this minute, you know, admiring nature for the last time.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then at the last moment, this person is spared.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: And you can hear here obviously echoes of, you know, Dostoevsky's own situation.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: But um, and then, you know, so what happens in this person's mind?
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the the kind of two avenues available to him are either that he has a new lease on life and everything is incredibly beautiful and he's kissing the ground because this world he just thought he was about to leave, he gets to stay.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, or the other option is utter terror because he had made peace with the fact that he was about to die, and he had, you know, ordered his thoughts and he'd accepted it, and then it didn't happen.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: So now he's faced with the uncertainty of an open-ended future.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what does he do with this time?
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: And can he still appreciate the world for what it is?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, too, there's a little bit in that parable about, you know, suggesting we're all in that situation, right?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: We all know that death comes for us.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: How do we choose to spend the time and characterize it in our minds before then?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then he also says something striking when he's telling the story.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: He says, um, it's better for a person to be murdered than for a person to be sentenced to execution and then killed.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because the person who is to be murdered, at least until the very moment of their death, can maintain some kind of hope that maybe they'll survive.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's the certainty of the execution that he thinks is the worst torture that a person could endure.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think as a Christian, this is a very powerful picture for us because the picture is that without Christ, we are the person going to a certain death with no hope.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: It is only with Christ that we can be the person who maintains hope despite whatever adversity, you know, comes to us.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so then he he tells this story.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: The prince tells this story to the Apanchin girls, and they're just like, Who is this guy?
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: And what is he talking about?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then he kind of inserts himself into their social milieu, I guess, you know, over the rest of the novel, there is um, you know, there's different love triangles, you know, Ganya was maybe gonna marry Nastasia Filipovna, but then she wants to marry Ragoshin instead, but then she wants to marry the prince, and there's some fighting over that.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then Nastasia becomes obsessed with the prince and with one of the Yapanchin daughters.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: She wants them to marry because she believes the prince is too pure for her.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so she tries to convince them to marry by saying, I'll only get married myself to Ragoshin once you two marry.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there's, you know, then there's a case of stolen money.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: Lebedev believes his money is stolen.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: Again, it this is where it feels very Jane Austen-esque to me as well, because they're relatively small social situations.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a big global catastrophe or a major violent crime or whatever.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: They're small social situations that have all kinds of implications for people, and all kinds of stories are intertwining and people's inner lives are being exposed.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: And um, but those are kind of you're watching the prince kind of get inserted into the social world of the Yapanchans and Ganya's family, and then watching that unfold.
• 33:15
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• 33:29
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• 33:50
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• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_02: And it's so dysfunctional.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: And this this time, as I was rereading, I was thinking maybe it's because I read everything as a parent now, but I was thinking, like, where are the adults?
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like, where are the adults in the room?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: I know everyone is a total slave to their emotions, right?
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: And nobody, the only person who's ever actually saying out loud what they mean and what they actually feel is the prince.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: And everyone else is like, what is this guy playing at?
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, even while they complain that nobody else will tell the truth and they can't figure anything out.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, here's this little cherub who comes in and doesn't know the rules, you know, quote unquote rules, um, and ends up just taking everybody at face value and just being honest.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: And because of that, people think he's genuinely mentally ill.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: And there is that hint, like people are trying to figure out what is wrong with him.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, like medically speaking.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so we do learn that he has epilepsy, and there are several crucial moments in the novel where he has a fit.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: Those are very interesting moments as well, because you so it's sort of the um he becomes now, he's not narrating the book, but at these moments it's obviously told through his point of view, and you get a little bit into the unreliable narrator territory because the everything becomes extremely disjointed.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's like there's a light in the window.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: But wait, didn't he walk down that street yesterday?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: And who's looking at him?
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: And whose eyes are those in the crowd?
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's difficult to read because it's, again, very disjointed.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you slowly realize that it's him kind of um devolving into having a fit or having a seizure.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then he does describe that this moment, either right before he loses consciousness, I believe, that it's like the most pure realization of purity and love and harmony and joy.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it lasts only for a second.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: But even if it just would last for a second, he would still accept it.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then he loses consciousness.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's meant to show us again that this is a person who is not built for the modern world.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: He was built for another world, and he's every once in a while he gets to glimpse it.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's this other world he gets to glimpse is so much lighter and more beautiful and real and wholesome than the one he's in currently.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so we get the sense that the real world is actually very small.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, in addition to being dysfunctional, it is very small.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: So you have these people who are playing by society's rules and just being awful to each other in various ways.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: Simply for that.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Nadia, do you think some of these scenes are supposed to be as funny as they are to me?
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think we forget sometimes, maybe because we have this uh view of the Russians, which is well deserved, that they're very serious and just like everything is very just there's this gravitas, right?
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_02: And everybody, yeah, well, not everybody, but a lot of people die.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: So a good Russian novel is a real tragedy.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so the idea of humor in a tragedy maybe just doesn't work out for us.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, Russians have a sense of humor.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: Dostoevsky has a sense of humor.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: He is making fun of these people.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: That like the point that you made, like the question of who's the real idiot here?
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: And these scenes very much show that the humor is not a jovial kind of humor.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, some of these stories where so one of the sort of genial older drunk father in one of these families who's just constantly embarrassing everybody and making a fool, and then constantly realizing he embarrassed everybody, and then feeling terrible and being remorseful, and then of course going right back into it.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: But he's always telling these stories with the utmost confidence, and they're the most irrational, you know.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was one of the scenes I read out loud to my daughter because it was so funny.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like, you know, I once had a dining table where 30 men sat and they sat there for 12 years to the point where they were only having tea and then dinner and then tea and then dinner over and over again.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: And for at festivals and holidays, the the table would swell to 40 people and then it would go back down to its 30.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: But they stayed in my house in revelry and enjoyment for 12 years, and ah, those were wonderful years for me.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, and again, you get the everybody around this person who's telling this crazy tall tale is like so embarrassed and is shaking their head, and they're not gonna correct him because that would just add to the embarrassment, but they're just trying to usher him out of the room or whatever.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: And here comes the prince who's like, really?
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: 12 years?
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: That must have been incredible, you know?
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then a second later, going, I'm not sure that's true, sir.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't seem likely, you know, and everyone else is like, hush, don't correct him in front of people.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: He'll never live down the, you know, the humiliation of it or whatever.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: But but that's a good example of how the prince is in these scenes.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: He's he's like a a child who comes in and just immediately calls out the vibe of the room when everybody else was trying to keep it between the lines, you know, and there's some there there inevitably is something comical about that.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: There is.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_02: And in that particular example, it really sounds like a traditional Russian folk fairy tale.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it does.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_02: That does sound very Russian.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's true.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: And and there is this element of like only children believe things like this.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: And kids would wouldn't kids think how fun.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: How fun to have a party for 12 years that never ended.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that's whereas all of the parties in the book, so all of the parties we actually encounter, and there are so many gatherings and parties, they're not joyful.
• 40:01
  unknown: Oh no.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: No, so I mentioned that that fable that the prince tells at the beginning about basically asking the question, what would you do if you knew of a certain death?
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: How would it change the way you live and how you look at the world?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so not very much later, we meet a character named Ypolite who has consumption.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: And he's young, he's 18.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but he knows, you know, he's been told by this physician that he's gonna die within two months.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: And he is kind of the embodiment of a nihilistic, you know, atheistic worldview.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he gives several speeches to this effect.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, the prince is always horrified by this.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he, one of the things that Hippolyte is always accusing the prince of that I think is critical, is the prince believes beauty can save the world.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: Ugh, what a horrible, what a violent idea to believe that beauty can save the world.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes on to give Eppolite gives this long speech about how he's decided to end his own life on his own terms now, because he can't bear the thought of having to live another two weeks, even if it's two weeks, um looking at the world and realizing he's about to leave it.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's it's kind of a stark vision, like a very um distilled vision of atheism and nihilism.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: And in Dostoevsky's case, I think like the modern sensibility then.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, where if so there his what he claims, what he believed claims, is that religion, this idea that beauty can save the world or that there is hope, that is that makes suffering and death, suffering with consumption and impending death absolutely intolerable.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because then you're telling me that there's such a thing as beauty and goodness in the world, and I have to leave it.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: When what we actually find in Eppolite's case is that atheism makes living intolerable because there's no reason to do it.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this contrast, he gives this really haunting speech about how he, Hippolyte, in his sickness, he's laying in this bed all day and he looks out of his window, and all he sees is a brick wall.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's his neighbor's brick wall.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the only thing he can see.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: And his friends keep saying to him, Come out and see the trees.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: Come to the park while you can.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: Come and look at this beauty out here.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, Why would you want me to leave the order and the certainty and the predictability of this brick wall?
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: I know I'm gonna die.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to look at these trees that I'll have to miss for the rest of my life and have to mourn.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: Just let me sit in here and look at these bricks so that I can die.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's again, it's exposing the sort of fundamental hopelessness of the atheistic worldview that doesn't see goodness in um in anything uncertain or in anything that's fleeting or in gifts that are given to us for whatever time we have.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that's really that's really powerful.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_02: So what do we um what do we take from this novel as Christians living in 21st century America?
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one of the things I remember walking away with the first time I read it, and this second time through, a lot, a lot of my um just noticing of different themes has certainly deepened.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um but one of the things I took away the first time was that it is really difficult to shake yourself of the notion of your own norms that you're living in, right?
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: We it Human nature to have difficulty understanding what are norms because they feel so ingrained to us that it feels like this is the way people have always lived, this is the way they will always live, this is what makes the most rational sense.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: As an aside, I actually think that's one of the delights of reading older classics, is that you get to read about times in which the norms were completely different and they seem strange to you, and then yours start to seem strange to you.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's really valuable because what I took away this first time was to be skeptical of whatever norms are guiding my behavior.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that doesn't mean that all of our cultural norms should be completely issued and there's no validity to them whatsoever and they're all inherently bad.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: But because the prince exposed the absurdity of so many of the norms of his time, um, it made me wonder, again, that question of like, who's the idiot here, right?
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: If I have expectations and judgments of people in social situations, in my personal life, in whatever moment I'm in, is that expectation grounded in truth and goodness and reality and humility and love?
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: Or is it something that's been constructed that I might look beyond?
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think that's one of the central things we can walk away from with the idiot.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I also think, you know, a lot of what he's asking you in this book is is life worth living?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, is life worth living?
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you decide that?
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you build an answer?
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you live toward that answer?
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because again, I mean, the picture of Epolite with consumption is that we're all in that boat.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: We're all the person who's, you know, being led to execution at some point.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what do we do with the moments before then and how do we choose to look at them?
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a way that is beautiful and peaceful and can be joyful despite, you know, having fits of epileptic seizures and despite being embarrassed because you don't follow, you know, the the hip kind of nihilistic sensibilities of your age, um, you might suffer for that.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: But that way certainly, after reading this book, Lev's way of living certainly looks much, much more appealing than Ypolite's way of living.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's really encouraging.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: Except in the book, it doesn't work out well.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: So what do we do with this as readers?
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, okay, so I I I wanted to ask you about this, Nadia.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because so when at the end of the novel, I mean, everything that could go wrong goes wrong, right?
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: And and so this this whole time, the prince has been trying to stave to save Nastasia Filipovna from Ragozin.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because Ragozhin loves her so much and so passionately.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we could hardly call it love.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: He desires to possess her, right?
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: So much so that he knows and admits that he will have to murder her.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: This feels very Russian, too.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, I just love her too much.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to end in her death.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the prince believes that because he takes everybody at face value and he's he knows that Nastasia is in this incredible danger.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: But he's unable to save her, you know, ultimately at the end.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: There is a scene at the end that again kind of makes me laugh because I think this I think this was again meant to expose, you know, the silliness of these norms.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: But the prince is on this escapade to try and save Nastasia, and he's tracking her down and trying to find Ragoshan, and he checks into a hotel, and the hotel offers him a meal.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_01: And time is absolutely of the essence.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like he knows the murder is impending.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: He needs to get there.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: But he he thinks that he has to socially accept this meal.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like he can't say, no, thank you.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not hungry.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: And because of that, he doesn't get there in time, right?
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's so it's a total farce.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then the prince is so troubled by this outcome that he himself, you know, kind of slips into insanity and he ends up going back to the institution he was at in Switzerland.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, he's cared for out of another man's charity, but he certainly doesn't, you know, reach a level of peace.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: Or um he just he when we leave him, he's just kind of there and it's not sure whether he'll ever recover.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: And and Epolite, of course, passes away from consumption.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, um, Dostoevsky breaks the fourth wall and just says, he dies a lot earlier than even he expected, which is yikes, you know.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the girls in the Yapanchin family are all going their own direction, and it's just kind of disorder and chaos.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not fully sure what to make of that, Nadia, other than um the uncertainty of life being a hallmark of it, you know, and a sort of a challenge to us as readers, like this is often how things go.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but what do you think of the ending?
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder if so much of this novel is also a criticism of contemporary Russia as a particular place where no happy ending is possible.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so he's showing us that this is what it looks like when you accept that.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I was wondering.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it seemed like, so for example, that there are no adults, quote unquote, in the room.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the idea of the Tsar as like everybody's father, father figure, like that was his title.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_02: And there's no one really managing the morality of the society, the order.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody acts according to these like very superficial societal rules, but they do absolutely nothing to maintain any sort of normalcy.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_02: What everybody accepts for granted is just so dysfunctional that most people can't even live, like physically.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_02: You can't even make it out of your teens.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what's interesting is you mentioned at the beginning that the book begins with a railway.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a bit of a theme as well, right?
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: It comes up as a kind of motif a few times, I guess, because there is a, you know, that the character I mentioned at the beginning, one of the other guys they meet on the train, who's sort of this like middling bureaucrat, kind of middle society, always trying to make his way up, but can't quite get up there.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he he has this side hobby where he interprets the apocalypse for people.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: So he teaches them about the book of Revelation and he tells he's sort of like uh, you know, the whatever 19th century Russian version of like an interpreter of like the blood moons, you know, kind of thing.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: He's always telling people what such and such symbol means.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he believes that one of the symbols, you know, one of the menacing symbols in the book of Revelation is in reality the rail system, the Russian railway.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it's actually one of the rare scenes where he comes across as kind of lucid in the book.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, no, it's because now people can get wherever they want really quickly, and we can communicate with people far away very quickly.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we have no idea what we are unleashing on ourselves with this kind of rapidity and, you know, just um technical dominance and kind of thing.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I get that when you were just describing the end as being very chaotic and there's no adults and there's no order.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't that feel a little bit like railways just sprouting, sprouting up across the country and changing it in ways that they don't understand yet and they can't predict, and that might not be what they were hoping for.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, maybe that's a part of it.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: The whole project of westernizing Russia, which started, of course, in the early 1800s.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that was like Peter the Great's great project.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_02: Like, we're gonna westernize Russia.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_02: We're going to make it and St.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: Petersburg was where this novel takes place, was crucial for that.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_02: That was supposed to be the Russia's face to Europe.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there, and there's a lot of a lot of our characters, especially those who are trying to um appear high society, like to talk about France and they like to speak in French terms, and they like to talk about the French news that they've just read.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, there's a lot of that for sure.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_02: And yet it doesn't save anyone.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it does, not only does it not save them physically, but nobody finds any hope in it.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like nothing's improved, right?
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: The only person who had those moments of lightness and hope were the prince.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it was as he was going slowly crazy.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I think I think that's probably the the takeaway too, is just that the modern world is not built for these men.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like there are men who are too great or too good.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, if you're not careful with them, then the this nihilistic modern way of living will crush them, you know, because they're just incompatible with that kind of living.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to hear your thoughts on one theory I have is Mushkin is supposed to be the holy fool.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: I so this is a strange question to me.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because again, uh yes, I I believe he is supposed to be a Christ-like figure.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: He's supposed to be holy, and he expose because of that, he exposes um the unholiness, let's say, of everybody else.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I just I just remembered a scene where this guy who tried, he shows up, sees that the prince is very gullible and also very good hearted, and decides to try and swindle him.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: He, this man claims to be the son of the like the long-lost son of the doctor who was caring for Lev, or or the patron who was paying for his care, and claims to be this long-lost son of this person.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: And because he was this long-lost son, then the prince really owes him money because this father, not knowing he had a son, spent this money on the prince instead.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the prince is like more than happy to give this person all of his money.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: But everybody around him is like, this is a swindle.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't real.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_01: Don't listen to this guy.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the guy finally admits it.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay, I'm not really, I don't know that guy.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I was, I was cajoled into trying to swindle you by these people over here and whatever.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: He sh the same guy shows up the next day to visit the prince and he says, Prince, I just wanted to come and unburden myself and my conscience.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: You're such a holy person.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: You, you're such a good-hearted person.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: I just, I know I can trust your goodness and I need to unburden myself.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: And he, I am a I'm a mean person.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm, I am base, I am, you know, it's it's reads very much like a person making a confession.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: And he finishes, and the prince says something like, Well, even you knowing this about yourself means that you are a good-hearted person, and this is you are fine and you are beautiful.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: And immediately the guy goes, Can I have some money?
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I I just thought, again, this is is this not a picture of so many times us going to Jesus?
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 55:49
  unknown: Right.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: And we we want from him goodness and forgiveness and purity, and then we get a hint of that relief, and then we're like, but I also want this on this or this, this, this.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I think that I guess the holy fool, the difference obviously between Mishkin and God is that this is a picture of holiness that can be trampled on, right?
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's not omniscient.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like this is what we would have done to Jesus had God not remained sovereign over him or allow, you know, chosen this path for him and been in charge the whole time.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that he would have been a fool.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, God knows our nature.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: He sees us for who we are and still loves us.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he still entered into the the whole farce with us, right?
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: And exposed it and then redeemed it.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_02: Amen.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a powerful book.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_02: And to end with a lighter question today.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_02: What classic do you wish you had written and why?
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness, I just got chills.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: What a great question.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: Classic do I wish I had written?
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Nadia, I would have to say, have you ever read Measure for Measure?
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's Shakespeare, but it's a it's kind of a dark one.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it's one of, you know, it's nobody's favorite.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's very sad, but it's extremely succinct.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think maybe I'm exposing some of my own shortcomings here in my writing, but I wish, I aspire to that level of efficiency in my writing, um, to be able to tell such a deep, like just an entire universe of a story in as few words and scenes as possible.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you leave a story like that feeling, I feel a sense of pride, like I decoded it, like I was saying at the beginning, like I see what he did there, kind of thing.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: But also with a completely new perspective on what life would be like in this situation that I've never had to face.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's again, it's a dark play, um, but it is one of the, I believe it's one of the shorter ones, certainly shorter than Hamlet and King Lear.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it packs a punch and I aspire to that.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: I aspire to packing punches.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: I spend too much time unpacking them in my writing.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_01: I can relate to that.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, good.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Maria, thank you so much for taking the time.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: Nadia, thank you for having me.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm intimidated to talk about books like this because again, I I feel a little bit like I'm reading them blind, but that I think has enhanced my experience of it because I get to the stakes are very low for me.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not being called upon to write any essays or teach about this.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I get to just take from it what I find.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a real sense of accomplishment.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's the other thing I would commend to people is that reading a difficult book is a singular kind of experience.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like a book that where scenes are confusing to you, the language is confusing to you, you might even feel that you're missing some of the meta-narrative.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but pushing through and reading a book like that has always been rewarding for me.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a wonderful encouragement uh to listeners.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, pick up long novels, pick up novels you've been intimidated by, and you will be richly rewarded.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_01: And translations and old things, and yes.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: Of course.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, absolutely.