March 9th, 2010
Sean Carman: The Last Book I Loved, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
The great thing about Russian literature is how strange it is.
The characters in Dostoevsky are always breaking out in histrionics. They bustle about, shake their fists, and call each other scoundrels. They “fly” to wherever they are going and “fly at” each other when they get there. “What on earth does it mean to ‘fly at’ somebody?” David Foster Wallace once asked, in an exasperated footnote in his essay on Joseph Frank’s literary biography of the Russian novelist. …more
