Years spent on journalism. Much more lively a tale than I thought.

He remains the champion of psychic freedom against the determinism of his day. It's this that caused his split with the Left -- as the Left now sails. Though for most of this book he throws the weight of his frantic journalism into the effort to keep up polite interactions, a common ground, with the scientific materialists, misled, he believes, by a creed of rational egoism. Until the satire or protest that is Notes from the Underground, where determinism has become a more urgent enemy for him than tsarism.

He's in terrible straits at the end of this one: his wife dead, followed hard on by his wonderful brother -- who slaved himself to death at the journals, which D., with the brother's family to support, promptly almost does too. The hours they put in and the stresses they were under -- never mind the persiflage. But the journal goes bust again, and that loads D. with debts he is never free from for the rest of his life. If you wonder how he survived the last instalment (prison camp) this is just about as rough. He says himself.

Aside from the hardest worker who ever tried to earn a crust for his dependents, he's a far stronger person after prison camp and less vulnerable. He still behaves with beauty and great generosity of spirit. Sizzles at the journalistic battles, though: he cares so much. He has such energy.

His first wife I'd call an abusive spouse, with the fraught temperament you meet often in Dostoyevsky's women. Mind you he knows fraught himself. It was on his honeymoon, after a 'massive seizure' to which she was 'a horrified witness', that he was told these attacks that came upon him in Siberia are in fact epilepsy and incurable. He declares he wouldn't have married had he known. Plainly, she wouldn't have married him. From the beginning to the end, however, he calls her the most noble, magnanimous woman he ever met. If you can't work out whether Ivan and Katya -- or Mitya and Katya -- love or hate each other, just read about his real life. ( )