Customer Reviews

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions OP

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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Vivid impressions of the author during his travel all over Europe in the second half of the 19th century. His main targets are France (Paris) and England (London).
He gives us a biting and cynical portrait of the French: parvenus and bourgeois who make a mockery of 'liberté, égalité, fraternité'.
In England, he is confronted with child prostitution in London's Haymarket: a most terrible and moving scene of a child of only six, black and blue beaten, barefoot, who tries to lure him to have sex with her. On the contrary, the Anglican clerics preach a religion for the wealthy and don't even hide it. A most pregnant portrait of the fat and the meagre.
A book to recommend.

In this book Dostoevsky seems to take his time to criticize capitalism ( or so I find), takes as an example French society,
criticizes the accumulation of money and the adulation of god money (Baal), the servilism that comes with it, analyzes the way marital relations are, that is in relation with capitalism (Bribri and Ma biche ).

I found it pretty good, although it requires you to have knowledge of many things of the time it was written, (for instance can you remember who is Guizot?) and be used to the style of Dostoevsky.

Granted, nineteenth-century Russia was almost a different planet from modern America. But what do you think of these comments about the Frenchified Russians Dostoevsky disliked?

"It may be that reality around us looks none too lovely even yet; but then we are so wonderful ourselves, so civilized, so European that the common people feel sick at the very sight of us. We have now reached the point where the common people regard us as complete foreigners, and do not understand a single word of ours --- and this certainly is progress, whatever you say. We have now reached a point where our contempt for the common people and the basic principles of their being is so profound that even our attitude to them is stamped with a new, unprecedented and kind of supercilious disdain...and this is progress, whatever you say.

"And then how self-confident we now are in our civilizing mission, with what an air of superiority we solve all problems, and what problems! There is no soil, we say, and no people, nationality is nothing but a certain system of taxation, the soul is a tabula rasa, a small piece of wax out of which you can readily mould a real man or a homunculus --- all that must be done is to apply the fruits of European civilization and read two or three books. And then how serene, how majestically serene we are, because we have solved all problems and written them off."

For some strange reason, this passage made me think of the current situation in the United States.

Maybe we need to craft our own solutions to our problems, and not rely on the Wisdom of the French!

"Whatever you say," this is a very interesting book, in which Dostoevsky sometimes sounds just like H. L. Mencken.

By the way, Joseph Frank, who wrote the book on Dostoevsky, thinks that "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions" is, in an important way, a preliminary draft of that strange masterpiece, Notes from the Underground.

Highly recommended for a cold winter night!

Winter Notes ... was used by Dostoevsky as a stamping ground of
literary investigations to produce dramatized fiction on the margin
of acceptability. Some of us expect the characters of all of his
novels to be exceptional from Western European behaviour. And so:
vive la difference!

Contemporary discussion of the nature of whether he was just an
excellent nineteenth century novelist or a prophetic visionary!
Or, both?

Dag Stomberg
St. Andrews, Scotland