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Fyodor Dostoevksy, ‘A Nasty Anecdote’ (1862)

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Fyodor Dostoevksy, ‘A Nasty Anecdote’ (1862)

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‘This nasty anecdote occurred precisely at the time when, with such irrepressible force and such touchingly naive enthusiasm, the regeneration of our dear fatherland began, and its valiant sons were all striving toward new destinies and hopes. Then, one winter, on a clear and frosty evening, though it was already past eleven, three extremely respectable gentlemen were sitting in a comfortably and even luxuriously furnished room, in a fine two-storied house on the Petersburg side, and were taken up with a solid and excellent conversation on a quite curious subject.’

Quick questions:

1. Is the story told in the first, second or third-person narrative voice?

2. What do we learn about the three men from this short description?

3. How would you describe the attitude of the narrator here?

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“I precisely hold to and maintain everywhere the idea that humaneness, and precisely humaneness with subordinates, from clerk to scrivener, from scrivener to household servant, from servant to peasant—humaneness, I say, may serve, so to speak, as the cornerstone of the forthcoming reform and generally toward the renewal of things.”

1. Try to express in your words what Pralinsky’s ‘vision’ is.

2. How would you judge this ‘vision’? Good? Bad?

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". . . But do you know, do you understand, that Pseldonymov will recall for his children how the general himself feasted and even drank at his wedding! And those children will tell their children, and they will tell their grandchildren, like a sacred anecdote, that a dignitary, a statesman (and I'll be all that by then) deigned . . . etc., etc. But I'll raise the humiliated one morally, I'll restore him to himself . . . He gets a salary of ten roubles a month! But if I were to repeat this or some such thing five or ten times, I'd win popularity everywhere ... I'd be impressed on everybody's heart, and the devil alone knows what might come of it later, this popularity!...” (19)

1. What appears to be Pralinksy’s motivation for attending the wedding party uninvited?

2. Does he finally succeed in creating a ‘sacred anecdote’?