After reading together with my wife last night our Austrian friend Friedrich Romig’s carefully crafted and profound review of a 2013 book in German by Botho Strauss, we even started to consider, in light of Dostoievsky’s presentation of Prince Myshkin, a rather unexpected theme, namely (in my wife’s own words) “holiness as counterrevolution.”
We also then continued—though it was very late in the evening—to talk a little of Fyodor Dostoievsky himself and of Maurice Baring’s own special appreciation of The Idiot and of its deep-souled Russian author. (Dostoievsky died in 1881 and Maurice Baring wrote deeply of him and his writings in the early twentieth century. Baring was himself then traveling widely in Russia, first during the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War and then for almost a decade afterwards, that is, up until the mid-summer of 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I; and, moreover, because Baring knew the Russian language so well, he also learnedly introduced Russian literature to the West, especially to an English-speaking audience, to include the then-little-known resonant poetry of Alexander Pushkin (d.1837), both his lyrics and his Eugene Onegin.)
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