To: johnny at charm.net
From: sthomas at fsa.com
Subject: Reading
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 19:59:32 -0400

I have just finished the last of Joseph Frank's five volume "biography" of
Dostoevsky.  It is a magnificent work, and will illuminate the works of
Dostoevsky to anyone with the time to read it.  It will take quite a bit of
time, as one really has to reread the works of Dostoevsky to take full
advantage of Frank's work (or at any rate the major works).

As he explains in the preface to the last volume:  "In a colloquium held
... in 1989, ... I was asked whether it was really essential to devote so
many volumes to a single author (three had been published by then).  As I
recall, I replied that if I were writing about him only as an individual,
so many volumes might not be necessary;  but since in fact I was also
writing a condensed history of nineteenth-century Russian culture, with
Dostoevsky at the center, I felt that my voluminosity was not unjustified."

Since _The Brothers Karamazov_ was finished only three months before his
death, it occupies the end of Frank's work.  I did not reread _The Brothers
K_ for this reading of Frank's book, because I thought that I was familiar
enough with it to dispense with a rereading.  I've read it at least 8
times, probably more, but I'm planning on going back to it tomorrow.  But
reading Frank's discussion brought back unexpectedly sharp memories of my
first reading of the book, which led to a completely unexpected and
fundamental change in my life.

I first read it the summer between my sophomore and junior years in
college:  I was 19, the same age as Alyosha in the book.  I picked it up
for reasons which I no longer recall.  I had somehow gotten the idea in my
head that Dostoevsky was some sort of a Russian Kafka.  (I had read Kafka
in high school.)  Of course, Dostoevsky is nothing of the kind.

I started reading it right after dinner on a Friday night.  It took a
little while for me to get into it, but at some point I began reading as if
in a frenzy.  I could not wait to see what would happen next, even as I was
reeling at what was happening "now".  I was accustomed, at that point in my
life, to staying up quite late, so I finished Part One of the book, and
would ordinarily have put the book down and slept.  But I couldn't -- I had
to see what was next.  "I'll just read a few chapters into Part 2 and then
hit the hay," I told myself.  But I couldn't.  I had to read through the
rest of the first book of Part 2.  The process was repeated until I'd gone
through Part 2 and started on Part 3.  Since it had become day, I managed
to take a few breaks for food, etc.  But on I read.

At some point, it became clear to me that I could not stop reading the book
until I had finished it.  So onward through Saturday night and into Sunday
morning, with only brief food and bathroom breaks.  At around noon, I
decided that I needed to get out of the house, so I took the book and
walked to a nearby construction site, where a house was being built.  My
parents had moved over the previous summer to a country club suburb, and
the house under construction faced the golf course.  I sat on an unfinished
back porch overlooking humid Houston greenery and finished the book at
something like 3 in the afternoon.

As I walked home, I was not at all tired.  Exhilarated, rather.  And as I
walked home, and later that night (before falling into bed and sleeping
like a log), and continuing to today, I realized that it was simply no
longer possible for me to be an atheist.

Steve Thomas SF'74