Time off means time to read! Although I did not end up reading all of the works that I said I would in my “My Christmas Traditions” article (I actually only read one of the pieces I listed), let’s delve into the amazing works I did read this winter break.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons
I have officially read all of Dostoevsky’s “big four” (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov) novels!! I am both excited and sad that I have accomplished this goal, as I have achieved an aim I have been working towards for a few years, but I also no longer have more “big four” novels to read for the first time (although I do have other Dostoevsky works to read, like The Adolescent, Poor Folk, and Netochka Nezvanova). This novel was incredible, though. It is a fascinating commentary on the political and philosophical thought popular in Dostoevsky’s Russia. It engages the generational differences between early 1800s radicals and later 1800s radicals (the division Ivan Turgenev enlarges upon in his Fathers and Sons) and the prevalent schools of nihilism and utilitarianism. This work has probably become my second favorite Dostoevsky novel (my favorite novel of all time being The Brothers Karamazov), which is saying a lot!
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Village of Stepanchikovo
Another Dostoevsky! This work was simultaneously quite different from Dostoevsky’s other pieces and very similar, as the author created it as a comedy, possessing a different aim and tone than his more serious novels, but it also obviously sketches characters that Dostoevsky will further develop and perfect in his later masterpieces. Overall, it is a darkly hilarious work that exploits human irrationalities and contradictions, much like Shakespeare, who Dostoevsky greatly admired. This is a piece I greatly enjoyed for its outrageous humor, boisterous characters, and foreshadowing of later Dostoevsky works.
William Shakespeare’s Othello
This play has been high on my Shakespeare to-read list for some time. Of course, I always love reading Shakespeare’s plays for their incredible play on words, meter, rhyme, cunning villains (especially in this one), and enthralling plots. Some interesting ideas to think about in this play are Elizabethan-era gender roles and expectations, 16th-century British overseas travel and racial prejudice, the theme of “seeming” vs. “being” and truly seeing, and love and power.
Fun fact: Shakespeare coined the phrase “green-eyed monster” in this play.
Euripides’ Bacchae
I finally read The Bacchae! I have been meaning to read this play for a while now, and I am glad to say that I have after all these years. I knew the gist of the plot, but of course that is nothing compared to actually enjoying the dialogue and intriguing play structure and techniques Euripides employs to create his masterpiece. One thing I particularly admired about this play is its engagement with the concept of reality and illusion, especially in the context of plays themselves, which rely on audiences’ “suspension of disbelief,” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes in his Biographia Literaria. It is an intriguing idea many artists have tackled, including, to name a few, Shakespeare, who played with the conception of the stage as an encapsulated world, the aforementioned Coleridge, especially in his poem Christabel, and John Keats, whose The Eve of St. Agnes tackles the idea of poetry as a wish-fulfillment mechanism, as Stuart M. Sperry writes in his fascinating article “Romance as Wish-Fulfillment: Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes.” (Ever since I read this piece, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the concept of wish fulfillment in literature in cinema!)
Fun fact: this is the play The Secret History draws upon!
