Tag: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is a writer who has long been extremely important to me. During my teens, before this blog existed, I devoured the great novels, one after another, and then over and over. The Brothers Karamazov, without exaggeration, changed my life. Ultimately, its author became the embodiment of what I took to be a distinctively Russian approach to literature – an approach that treated what I then took to be the most important questions in life directly, without encrusting them with layers of social drama and squabbling over inheritances that I associated then (as now) with fiction from my own country. In Dostoevsky’s works people said exactly what mattered to them, and did the things that showed it mattered to them – they murdered, they threw tantrums, and sometimes even took their own lives. Dostoevsky inspired me precisely because he was clumsy, lazy, and disorganised in his writing. He showed a budding writer, dangerously, that so long as characters felt sufficiently, they became real and nothing else need matter. 

The Idiot, however, was never one of my favourites among Dostoevsky’s works. For one, it is Dostoevsky at his strangest. With its story of jealousy and obsession in love it is also a comparatively less interesting work, at least at first glance, to someone lusting after ideas. (At the time I was a Dostoevsky maniac I went to a boys’ school and didn’t know what a girl looked like, let alone how something like obsessive love worked.) Still, I’ve returned to this work after many years away because I believed it might be essential to a writing project of my own. The idea of the central character, a kind of Christ-like innocent, thrust into the world of scheming men and women, was what drew me back. But what turned out to be still more interesting was a kind of higher-order thematic framework here of logic and disorder, coherence and chaos.   

I am obliged to you to provide a summary of the plot, but unfortunately I do not have any idea what actually happened and I’m not sure Dostoevsky did either. Or rather, I know he did not. Gary Saul Morson, among other academics, has noted that after finishing the novel’s first part Dostoevsky’s notebooks show he didn’t know where he was going. Even after finishing the novel’s penultimate part he still had not worked out whom, if anyone, the “idiot” Prince Myshkin would marry. Besides these plot uncertainties, many characters have motivations which were not merely complex and contradictory, but outright impenetrable. I also regularly found myself asking myself, for a given group of characters, how on earth they knew one another well enough to haunt one another’s living rooms. I have no answer to any of this but will do my best to at least tackle the plot’s outline.  

Prince Myshkin (the name makes him kin to mice), a young man suffering from epilepsy, returns from Switzerland to Russia, somewhat cured of his ailment. On the train he meets another young man, Rogozhin, who has just inherited significant wealth. Rogozhin wants to use the money to win the heart of the beautiful Nastasya Philippovna. Nastasya is capricious and flighty and captivates the prince too, who seems to want to save her from her own self-destructive decisions. At the same time, the prince meets and falls in love with the Epanchin family, especially one of their daughters, Aglaya. Several hundred pages somehow pass and characters come in and out, but really there are few who matter. Money-mad Ganya, the drunken clerk Lebedev, and Ippolit, a young man dying of consumption, are the only others ones I discuss here.  

Before the characters, the first thing I noticed about The Idiot when I came to reflect upon it was the atmosphere, which is nothing less than apocalyptic. Dostoevsky wrote much of the novel in Italy while escaping debts back in Russia. The home of Catholicism, a religion he has the prince describe in an outburst as being worse than atheism, no doubt caused him psychic strain that is reflected in the writing and its moods. The novel begins on a train, and as with Anna Karenina or Effi Briest, this modern conveyance is not a neutral taxi by any means. We learn much later that Lebedev, who styles himself a hobbyist interpreter of the Apocalypse, (itself not a hobby one has in a healthy age), considers “the railway network spread across Europe” as in fact the “Star Wormwood”.  

Trains and musings on the Apocalypse are not the only things establishing a gloomy mood. Another relatively modern mistake freshly arrived in Russia is the newspaper. Characters are genuinely fascinated and disturbed by the news, which seems to reveal a more fallen world than had existed previously. Multiple murders in the papers are discussed to prove or disprove some speculation on human nature. Then there is illness, for the prince with his epilepsy is far from the only one suffering. Ippolit has consumption, Rogozhin’s jealousy and Ganya’s money obsession are both certainly a kind of illness, while it almost goes without saying that a vast number of characters are alcoholics too. What’s noteworthy is that the distribution of illness does not seem itself to be a moral statement about the sick as individuals. Instead, if everyone is ill, it makes their world ill.  

Into this atmosphere of fragility and decay comes the prince. I had remembered, or rather imagined, that the plot involved the prince’s kindness and simpleheartedness acting to reveal the moral failings of others by providing a contrast, but that is not what happens here. Instead, he is a more directly moral person than that. In his first encounters with the Epanchin daughters he discusses the sufferings of people undergoing capital punishment without any prompting, while at another point after being slapped he refuses to fight back or consider a duel, saying to the slapper “how ashamed you’ll be of what you’ve done.” Hence, the prince is more directly and strangely a voice of conscience. He draws our attention to violence we ignore – state violence, the cyclical violence involved in honour questions – albeit a little too naively, like someone at university home for the holidays who has just learned what critical theory is but not yet how to persuade anyone it makes sense.  

The prince may be the voice of conscience, but it is important to consider whether he can succeed at this within the story. While one phrase used to describe him is Christ-like, among the first words actually used in the novel is yurodivy  or “holy fool.” These historical, largely Russian figures, were typically poor itinerants who had dedicated their lives to Christ without a formal role within the Church. Their behaviours were often shocking and insane, but enough of society acknowledged them as having mysterious wisdom that they were largely left alone, only occasionally brought in as quirky dinner guests by nobles. To call the prince a holy fool says that his message and concerns may be important; it also, however, provides a framework for characters to ignore him as merely raving. So, too, does the designation of “idiot” on account of his illness. In short, while he wants to save, he’s not viewed as a saviour: even his famous assertion that “beauty will save the world” is quoted back at him in mockery. 

The Prince thus has the challenge of altering others’ perception of him if he wants to persuade others to do good in this world. But just as great a difficulty is the treatment of causation within the novel – the ideas of “logic” and “nature”. If we believe humans are supremely rational, The Idiot is a novel that will make no sense to us. At a key moment the Prince asks Rogozhin of Nastasya, “who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?” The Prince is expressing a viewpoint that Nastasya refutes by her own existence and repeated, free, choices that harm her wellbeing – she chooses Rogozhin over the Prince, time after time. Lebedev states this point generally: “the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in mankind! The devil rules equally over mankind until a limit in time still unknown to us.”  

With Nastasya’s character, and not only, the novel makes Lebedev’s argument real. One of the murders reported in the newspapers provokes heated discussion among the characters precisely because the defence lawyer argues that the six murders committed by the man at trial were “natural”, due to his poverty. This is illogical, but perhaps at least partly true. Yet for the characters it is one more suggestion that their world is falling apart. At least for some of them. For others, they are themselves this decay. At Nastasya Philippovna’s birthday party, the highpoint of the novel’s first section, characters compete in telling the most bad things they have done. It is not a sequence to inspire hope about the human condition, but it also shows what the stakes of the lawyer’s assertion are – if we normalise the world as being illogical and morality as being a secondary concern, we enable further decline. 

One of the places where this sense of the consequences of bad thinking and a bad world are most obvious is in the case of Ippolit, the young man dying of consumption. In his multi-chapter “Necessary Explanation”, he explains just what it feels and what it means, to have death hanging over him. He can hardly do anything, because so much requires time and practice – like learning an instrument. It is only with death coming that he has a sense of the value of life, while all those who are alive but with the sound of ticking fainter place no real value upon their days. At first he uses his sense of life’s remaining possibilities to do good, helping out a stranger he meets on the street. But then he becomes angry with the idea of God, specifically why he should “praise that which has eaten me” with this death sentence. Finally, he decides that the only remaining action he can take, the “only thing I still have time to begin and end of my own will”, is precisely to head off this death sentence by taking his own life first.  

Dostoevsky is not an author we can easily call rational, but with these examples we can see that if human illogicity is a fact, there must be limits to our willingness to support it, or we will all end up like Ippolit or Nastasya and turn against life itself. In a letter Dostoevsky once wrote that “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” He did not say that anything else was preferrable to the truth. If irrationality is not bounded, the pathway to God gets narrower, not wider. It is into this irrational, illogical world, that the prince comes preaching goodness, only to find that it seems beyond his own redemption. The murder the novel ends with brings a sense of bleakness and total defeat that I was shocked to rediscover – it was even more horrific than the end of Demons.  

Perhaps this triumph of chaos and irrationality is foreseeable from the very first words, for it is also intimately linked to Dostoevsky’s writing style as well. Dostoevsky is not a gifted stylist, but his themes are well served by his style. For one thing, there’s a layer of uncertainty and confusion built into the narration. At the end of the novel’s first part, the prince leaves for Moscow for six months, but even though it is clearly important what takes place there, the narrator declares “we can supply very little information” about what happened. (One theory is that Dostoevsky had such a miserable time living in Moscow himself that he refused to ever write about it in his fiction – itself an insane reason for sabotaging his story.) At other points, the narrator admits to an impossibility in understanding other characters’ motivations. This makes the impossibility of saving the world feel not just like it’s the prince’s fault, but somehow more general. It is such a mess that not even the narrator can keep it together. 

And it is precisely the whole world that somehow feels like it needs saving here. It may have been simply because Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot while stuck in Europe, but it is as if almost nothing exists solidly in the book. There are no smells, there are very few sights, there are no noises except that of the squabbling people. And furthermore, these people do not talk like humans – they give unprompted speeches, they refuse to shut up. I had the feeling that they had to be like this, because as soon as a character stops talking, like one of Beckett’s narrators in his Trilogy, they seem to cease to exist. If Tolstoy’s characters all exist with a uniform vitality, however minor their role, due to his use of leitmotifs and physical descriptions, Dostoevsky’s characters gain all their vitality only through victory in the contest of voices and their silencing of others. This is therefore the perfect style for conveying desperation and egoism. 

The Idiot is my first Dostoevsky for about five years. Coming back, what shocks me is exactly what I expected to, even in spite of that expectation – the obsessive drive of his characters towards meaningful utterances. Characters talk about what matters to them, because it matters to them. They act and live as if they are in the last days, when almost all decorum is dead. Compared to, say, Mann’s Magic Mountain, there is far less sense of the characters holding back part of themselves, or of their ideas not being immediately bindable to real-world things. The Idiot is not the reflection of the isolated upon a Swiss mountain, but a work with one attempted murder, one real murder, and an attempted suicide. Mann’s work is brilliant too, of course, but in its directness Dostoevsky’s is incomparable.  

I read the novel again because I wanted to see what I might learn for my own little novel of ideas with an idiot, of a sort, at its centre. But what I see now is that I have so far not emphasised enough the desperation associated with beliefs that makes them fresh and vital to the bystanding reader, nor yet plotted enough scandals or actions where a decision is necessary, one that would make these beliefs feel like they have a real-world importance. As for Dostoevsky’s style, whether I want to take anything from that is a harder question to answer. But there are plenty more of his works out there to help me decide.  

Elif Batuman – The Idiot

I bought Elif Batuman’s The Idiot because I wanted to read a contemporary reimagining of Dostoevsky’s Idiot, which I suppose makes me the idiot on this particular occasion, since the connection to Dostoevsky is tenuous. Instead, it’s a novel about a naïve student on her first year at Harvard who falls in love and spends the summer in Hungary. It’s a novel with ideas, if not quite a novel of ideas. Selin, the protagonist, studies things like linguistics and the philosophy of language, and reads books like The Magic Mountain, and has an opinion on Dostoevsky. However, on the level of language this is more akin to Sally Rooney than Mann or the Russian. It’s all light and easy sentences, dialogue smooth as someone letting a slinky slide between two outstretched arms, and disorganised observations of things in rooms. It’s real in the way reality TV is real – it is existence absent of any redeeming light.

One of the criticisms I might make of it is that so much of its four hundred, easy-to-read pages, feels meaningless. The things caught in our narrator’s gaze often have neither narrative nor thematic relevance; their purpose is to make reality feel real, but often they don’t even seem to do that. The interactions between characters are regularly similarly lightweight. Yet the novel as a whole might make for itself the defence that it is actually serious about meaning, that such scenes are essential to its construction, that I am the one misunderstanding it. For indeed, being a work about language, love, and communication, it tries to treat seriously the shifting presence and absence of meaning in our day-to-day lives. Perhaps. The fact that I sit here writing this suggests maybe it’s a case worth making.

The Idiot begins in 1995 with Turkish-American Selin arriving at Harvard to begin her undergraduate studies. She meets her roommates and her classmates. She majors in linguistics and studies things in the philosophy and psychology of language. She volunteers a little of her time to teach maths and English as a second language, largely without success. She goes to the odd party but barely drinks and certainly does nothing sexual. There are many characters who drift in and out, largely undifferentiated, but there are two that are important – Ivan, an older Hungarian man Selin meets during Russian class, and Svetlana, a Serbian girl from the same class. Ivan provides a kind of love interest for Selin, while Svetlana is a kind of worldly motherly figure for her. In the summer break Selin goes to Paris with Svetlana, and from there on to Hungary, where she is to teach English to some Hungarian village children.

It makes sense to start with language, since these are the ideas that underpin the novel as a whole. With her linguistics studies, Selin tries to make sense of language itself by considering how language could be explained to Martians, or by them to us. “Supposing we went to Mars and the Martians said “gavagai” every time a rabbit ran by”, it would not be possible to know whether this referred to running, or rabbits, or something else entirely. Selin finds this depressing, as this early introduction to communication seems to suggest we cannot communicate, that meaning is trapped inside of us, never to get out. Naturally, this is an introductory class, so the fact that Selin can’t get anywhere towards solving this problem is one of those examples where a text seems to provide a problem that contains the seeds of its own later dissolution. (She should keep studying as it’s obvious she does not have the full picture yet).

The novel also challenges this “communication doesn’t work” idea through a short story for Russian learners whose chapters are scattered throughout its pages. This tells of a girl called Nina who goes to Siberia after the man she loves disappears, but one of its quirks is that the text is simplified to focus on the grammatical structures the learners are currently focusing on, such as a particular grammatical case. While the story contains plenty of miscommunications, the fact that a coherent narrative can be produced even with such obvious linguistic limitations rather suggests that it is people who are failing to communicate, rather than language itself. In other words, meaning’s general transferability is not precluded by language. Rather, it is people who are the problem. I found this a little unsatisfying – The Idiot introduces a problem only to deny it is one.

This sense that people are the problem is one we might have picked up on from the novel’s title, of course. Selin is naïve – in this she has something in common with Prince Myshkin. Since she is naïve and innocent she struggles with the articulation of her own emotions towards Ivan, turning from speech to lengthy emails that might work if they were not themselves, inevitably, an exercise in avoiding communication – they talk indirectly, and so do not reach the destination:

“Dear Selin, would you trade wine and cheese for vodka and pickles? Why does a Greek hero have to fight his fate? Are dice a lethal weapon?  Is there any way to escape the triviality-dungeon of conversations? Why did you stop coming to math?”

The above is one of Ivan’s, though Selin’s are no better. At times they also use Russian, a language neither of them knows well, which naturally enough does not help either. These are two people failing language. This is a point stressed when Selin is in rural Hungary teaching English, and trying and failing to fight a local fellow-teacher who insists one pronouncing all the silent vowels in English. “One”, becoming “oh-neh”, for example. Selin herself does not really seem to realise that teaching requires effort on her part, so while she is critical of her co-teacher she gets nowhere with her own students – “Papel iss blonk”, one of them says, for “the paper is white”. Failure, but human failure, everywhere.

These failures mean that Ivan and Selin do not connect in the way they should, or could, and create joint meanings together. They leave things unsaid, or said in a distorted manner. In this they are like teenagers, however, rather than people seriously struggling with a higher-order problem about the possibility of meaning transference. We might say that Batuman wants to make a point about culture here, and its relationship to this connection-building among people. Hungary and America (or Turkey) are different! Look, Ivan hasn’t read Walden. Again, the text raises this potential problem only to refute itself. The Hungarians and Turks can bond, we are told, over the shared indignities of the collapse of empire – “Trianon! Touché!” one of the Hungarians says. Even the legendarily strange Hungarian language is demystified by Batuman stressing the similarities and loanwords common to it and Turkish.

It is perhaps wrong to disparage a book called The Idiot for having an idiot at its centre or suggesting that the ideas she encounters are really less important than her own failures. (Would this not mean that writing a novel called “A bad book” would always be good, unless it were excellent?) Yet it’s wrong to dismiss how corrosive the idea of human failure can be when it becomes central. A lot of Russian novels – and Batuman loves Russian novels enough to have written a whole book on them – centre on the gap between the idea and the reality of human practices. Raskolnikov’s theory of murder, and the reality of a bloodied axe, for example. But there’s an important distinction to be made between this and what The Idiot does. Raskolnikov or Bazarov discover that human failings cause issues for their philosophies. Selin has no philosophy to be challenged, so ideas cannot be central to the work, no matter what other reviewers on the cover might say.

Perhaps we can rephrase this in terms of the ideas and their potential for realisation. Communication is possible. Sometimes it’s hard, but that’s allowed. The theories on it are developed and probably, to a certain extent, the result of real thought and experimentation. Utopias, as far as we can make out, are not possible. The ideas fail because they imagine an incorrect view of human nature. Communication eludes Selin not because the theories are wrong, but because she is naïve, childish, and doesn’t really put any effort in. One approach becomes universal because it’s about all of our failings, while the other is about an individual’s failings which she will probably sort out once she has grown up a little.  

I have gone quite far from what I actually thought is the most interesting thing in this book – its use of section breaks. While Ivan and Selin’s not-relationship is the central story of the book, the bulk of it is taken up with Selin’s day-to-day experiences of being a new student in a big university. When I was about sixteen and thought I could teach myself writing through an entirely formulaic approach, I read in various places that my sections could never be shorter than 1’500 words and should always include some kind of conflict. This number has stuck with me even as it has never helped me much with my own writing. With The Idiot, Batuman doesn’t follow this rule either. Many of its sections are impressionistic and under a page in length. They accumulate, creating a sense of Selin’s experience of Harvard. They are snatches of conversations, or things spotted from a window. They are not, really, meaningful – even within a mesh of novelistic themes and meanings. But they are the brocade out of which the novel as a whole is built.

What is mildly interesting here is the way that Batuman builds meaning into this use of length and brevity. On the one hand, this is most obvious in the way that once the not-romance gets going, the sections with Ivan are considerably longer than the sections without him. It’s a quite direct way of putting the disorganised meaninglessness of the earlier sections into perspective by showing the paucity of their development quite literally on the page. On the other, and more thematically curious, is the way that this relates to Selin’s friendship with Svetlana. There is a moment when Svetlana reveals that she used to be bulimic and the narrative cannot contend with this fact, so the section just ends. It’s not presented as something deeply revealing from Svetlana within context, but Selin’s lack of reaction is another indication about the meaning-problem of the novel. Selin is yet again too immature, too naïve, to appreciate what her friend has told her. It’s not relevant to her own story.

If there’s something close to an epiphany to cap The Idiot, it’s the discovery by Selin that she is not the centre of the world, only of her world. This little bulimia mention is one example, as are the countless new people that she meets in Hungary: “I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.”

I can be charitable and say that the novel begins with a meaningless mass of impressions, grows more formally clear at its centre with Ivan, then ends up with a return to those same disconnected impressions. Only this time, Selin has a new consciousness of what they mean through her slightly-increased maturity. She has a sense that even if they are disconnected and non-narrativised to herself, they may be formed and clear in others’ worlds. Indeed, perhaps that’s one hidden message of all the teaching in the novel – that a teacher, like Selin herself, can have an impact on her students far greater than she herself would ever know.

Anyway, it was a reasonably funny, easy-to-read, work of contemporary fiction. Now I can go back to the dead.

Seven Years of Mostly About Stories

I have invested, perhaps foolishly, in a few friends’ startups, and my reward so far has been a few years’ worth of monthly updates that tell me that things are happening and people are working. Even if I don’t receive any money back, I still enjoy this sense of a joint journey, of being carried by the same wave. You, reader, are also an investor, albeit with your time rather than money, in me and what I make here, and to you I owe an update too. It doesn’t quite sit right with me to have a blog, which is inevitably personal in outlook and even features the first person singular pronoun at regular points, and yet to exist so shadily. One never knows, of course, whether you want me to exist as an independent entity, but I have my hopes on that score.

Indeed, I take as a vague principle that if you readers want properly academic writing, you head to Jstor, and that if you want the polished impersonality of a modern essay or review, you go to the New Yorker or LARB. In short, that if you are here, reading this, rather than merely stumbling on something on the internet while desperately trying to put together an essay for your studies, you must, in a certain sense, want this personal element, in other words, me. 

Life

Last year, I was entering the final stretch of a trainee programme at a large company and had moved to Germany. Over the course of last year, I finished this scheme and received a full-time position, also in Germany. This was a far from guaranteed outcome, and the high levels of stress associated with searching for a role in an unfriendly job market had a negative impact both on my reading and on my writing. All that is now behind us. The new work contract is permanent, and I have the full force of German unions and worker protections at my back to ensure any future moves will be entirely voluntary.

I have spoken before about my enjoyment of stability, indeed my great need for it. After my unplanned exit from Russia in early 2022, I have more or less lived without even a year’s certainty ahead of me. I am not a person who savours spontaneity or the absence of structure. “Be settled in your life and as ordinary as the bourgeois, in order to be fierce and original in your works.” This quote of Flaubert’s is one I have always admired whenever I have seen it, and I can say that it has proven true for my own case too.

And what stability! My work contract is permanent. My rental contract, in a spacious and well-located flat, is equally permanent. Never before has the future been so secure, even if the new risks of stasis and stagnation have appeared for the first time on the horizon. This is a great blessing.

Writing

I finished a first draft of a reasonably lengthy novella and was pleased enough with it, an unusual thing, to show it to a few friends in exchange for some helpful feedback. During the dark days of the job hunt and the brighter-but-still-stressful days of the apartment and furniture hunt, I did not succeed in writing creatively. I was, however, last year blessed with ideas for two novels of, I think, great potential. Unfortunately, one is historical in nature and requires a condition of personal leisure that is currently unavailable to me. The other novel is already in progress.

Now that I have this external stability mentioned above alongside an excellent work-life-balance, there is neither any practical obstacle nor reasonable excuse available to me not to focus with redoubled efforts upon my ambitions of becoming a great, or at least reasonably good, fiction writer. I see this as consisting of three elements.

First, I must improve my experience. This I can do simply by living and paying attention. In a favourite phrase, it means keeping both eyes open and noting things down. Observations, images, snatches of phrases. One of my tasks for this year is to do this in a dedicated volume, as my diary is primarily an emotion-regulation tool now and hence no longer the best place for such things. I am not fundamentally concerned about my chances in this development area: I have had a reasonable number of interesting experiences to call upon already – in Russia, growing up in Scotland, and elsewhere. What I must do now is become the kind of noticer that can identify and place the perfect detail to turn mere remembered experience into a rich vividness.

Second, I must improve my background knowledge. Mostly About Stories is, I hope, a storehouse of at least some value in this regard, but the fact remains that there are significant areas where my knowledge is, in my view, insufficient. Reading – history, philosophy, criticism, art history, politics, economics, religion, current affairs – and so on, in conjunction with discussions, where possible, with those who know better, should answer this need. While I have a reasonable amount of free time outside of work, I cannot afford the truly scattergun approach of a writer of leisure. Therefore, this reading does need to be somewhat targeted. Learning is a project, and projects can be managed.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, I must improve my technique. Many, many, writerly sins can be forgiven of people who know how to put together an incisive sentence in a style that is their own. Can’t do dialogue? Then give us the descriptive jewels of a Marquez paragraph, the chaotic mess of a Krasznahorkai, the hilarious brutality of Bernhard or the wondrous rhythms of Fosse.

Improving one’s technique is, of course, a matter of practice. It is also a matter of study. On this blog I have, I hope, provided the occasional example of the analysis of a wider work. Sometimes I even quote things, as if to inform readers that I have actually read the thing I’m talking about. But really, I am not attacking sentences enough. Increasingly, I contemplate doing blog posts on single paragraphs to really get to the heart of why they work. All this is necessary because while I am often pleased with what I write in my blog posts – there’s often a good sentence here or there, if I may say so myself – with my fiction this is almost never the case. Such focused study, getting closer to language itself, ought to remedy this. The late William Gass did this at times in his essays (e.g. “The Sentence Seeks its Form”), and I have great respect for such an approach.

These three areas are by and large how I think I can improve independently. Naturally, the criticism of trusted and untrusted persons on things I have written is also important, perhaps essential. But by and large, owing to my external situation, my focus is on personal development as it lies within my own hands. I am now 28 years old – a reality that at times strikes me as disappointing, but which is not objectively a catastrophe. I still view myself as being very much a journeyman or apprentice when it comes to writing. This is likely why I am so interested in style and technique. I view writing as a craft that I must work at before I can go around throwing pieces of paper in other people’s faces. Or rather, I want to say things, but I have enough respect for writing and readers to want to make sure I can say them well first.

Blog

Mostly About Stories, of course, has continued. I hope you have enjoyed some of the pieces. I know, and it pains me, that the quality can be variable. There’s always a tension here between my desire to give you something short, snappy, and polished, and my desire to note down in moderately organised paragraphs everything I possibly can about a book while still keeping the time I spend working on the posts reasonably under control. Since I read and write my posts primarily to learn, (and hope readers learn while reading as well), my natural tendency is always for a big baggy monster of a post. Occasionally, I do make unspoken resolutions for you to myself never to write anything longer than 1500, or 2000, or 2500 words. So far, this has not worked.

I have not posted as often as I had intended, annoyingly. I actually have a few posts stacked up which I just haven’t gotten around yet to posting, so it’s not even a dearth of reading or writing at my end which is to blame. I want, ideally, to put something out each fortnight. I do also, though I’ve said it’s unlikely, want to post things that are slightly more tightly written – though first it will be necessary to get through the backlog.

Numbers

When I started MAS, I looked around to see whether there was any information on how many viewers blogs like this actually get. There is a site that does a survey, linked here. Since I write about literature, an even less popular topic than books and reading in general, I still feel there’s value and interest in sharing my own specifically.

Anyway, last year’s total views was 103’546. As our first six-figure result this feels like a small milestone, even if it may just be the power of an accumulation of mildly interesting posts. While the majority of readers may well be people looking to write school and university essays about books they haven’t read, I am grateful for those among you who write comments that often make me feel you have read the book far better than I have, or who write me encouraging messages via the Contact form. And if you are just here to read and enjoy in silence, know that I’m grateful for your presence here too. It’s what I’d do myself.

Books

I would say that my greatest discovery this year has been the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. I had the impression that my post on The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea generated a lot of thoughts in readers – even the few friends who read the blog in real life mentioned it specifically when we caught up. I also enjoyed reflecting on Latronico’s Perfection, albeit slightly more than I enjoyed reading it.

Among the various things I read but did not write about, I received the greatest joy from Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty, about the relationship between ideas, life, and writing in the 19th century Russian novel, with a few forays into the Soviet period too. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves Russian literature and wants to know the historical interlinkages a little better, or perhaps just wants some new arguments to help articulate what possibly makes the literature special, if special it is.

Next

This year, I aim to write a first draft of the second of the novel ideas that came to me last year, the one that does not require months in a library. It is, however, at least in one sense, a novel of ideas. Hence, it does require plenty of reading – Camus, Sartre & de Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, the Stoics, and the Christian Mystics, are all on my reading list and may appear here (in some cases again) later on. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m also going to read Dostoevsky again, for the first time since the 2022 Invasion. He’s necessary for the novel too.

I also aim to write slightly better blog posts and be mildly more consistent in posting them.

In general, I am excited for what discoveries lie ahead and for sharing them here, with you.