The Unexpected

I can't think of any other major novel I've read that's as entirely unpredictable as The Idiot. I couldn't shake off the feeling as I read that Dostoevsky had very little idea where his story was going and just kept improvising one great sequence after another with a freshness stemming from the lack of any real direction. He creates characters that not only behave unpredictably, despite their being representative of certain 'types', but actually seem to be discovering the reasons for their choices even as they are making them - and this is true even of his obsessive types, of which, of course, there are more than a few.

Finishing the novel today I really have little sense of what it's 'about' as a coherent whole. Rather I remember the brilliant moments, invariably painful, that all seem to fit in somewhere. Just to give one example: General Ivolgin's stealing of Lebedev's money, followed by his lying account of his involvement with the Emperor Napoleon in 1812, is both excruciatingly embarrassing yet impossible to set aside. Did FD have War and Peace in mind as he wrote it? And was he smiling?

I doubt the smiling somehow. There are many references to smiles and laughter in The Idiot (just about as many as there are to tears) ,and at times it's an extraordinarily funny book, but in the end it furrows the brow and shines too dark a light to allow cheerfulness to break through. I find myself keen to reread the other classics (and Notes From the Underground which for some reason I can't fathom I've never got round to) but maybe not this year.