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PARTISAN REVIEW
falling into farce says something about my character-which I
suspect is low. In fact , the whole masturbation thing is farcical.
In the narrator's fantasy there are one
or
two things that occur
which he doesn't talk about because he's in a hurry to get on
with the sexy part. But I can tell you what they are. No harm
done. O.K. Dostoyevsky comes to see Zadonsky, ostensibly to
confess raping a young girl, but really he's. there to study
Zadonsky and talk about religion. He's trying to develop the
character he is in the midst of creating-Father Zossima. In fact,
my narrator in his fantasy contrives a way for Dostoyevsky to
take notes about the cell, the cot, the table, Zadonsky 's voice,
expressions, age, and state of health. This would have been
unnecessary because Dostoyevsky had a photographic memory.
My narrator didn't know that and I didn' t either until recently
when I read Anna Dostoyevsky's memoirs, but that's neither here
nor there.
Dostoyevsky tells Zadonsky the horrifying story of his pur–
chasing a young girl from a maid servant in a bath house and
brutally raping the girl. He wants to see the holy man's
reaction. The holy man is tired and bored. He wants to get the
visit over with quickly and take a nap. He doesn ' t know
Dostoyevsky or his reputation. He doesn ' t read novels. He
once secretly read a French novel in the belief that all French
novels are pornographic. The one he happened to read was
Mme. Bovary.
He gave up reading. He was even bored and
irritated when he saw the direction Dostoyevsky's confession
was taking. Zadonsky had heard this kind of confession a
thousand times, but only from serfs and travelling salesmen
and drunken peasants. Evidently this sort of thing was
happening all over Russia all the time and Zadonsky who
enjoyed tales of lechery and salacious sadism as well as the
next man was tired of hearing the same old story. But he had
never heard it from a master story teller, and he was thrilled
and excited, you can bet. But then Dostoyevsky wanted to go
on and engage him in a theological discussion about the
nature of sin and was redemption a demonstrable fact and if
for argument's sake Zadonsky agreed that God didn 't exist,
would not any act be permissible like raping girl or knocking
old ladies heads in with axes and so on. All this kind of talk
