Book review

摘要

The enchanted strip of Europe from the Upper Rhine to Switzerland is haunted by literary ghosts. Some of them have Russian accents. Waiting for the bus in Geneva a while ago, I was startled to find Dostoevsky's name on a plaque discreetly affixed, just above eye level, to the wall of an apartment near the Anglican Church. The Old Gallery in Basel still has the remarkable painting by Holbein of the battered body of Christ in the sepulchre which spurred the Russian novelist into one of his most tremendous passages in The Idiot. Further down the Rhine, at Baden-Baden, are the spas and gaming tables where, in the summer of 1867, Dostoevsky famously met his rival Turgenev and nearly ruined himself, cadging and pawning his wife Anna's valuables so that he could go back to the scene of brief triumph and longer humiliations at the gaming tables and lose even more money. Dostoevsky (‘Fedya’) was most truly addicted to the exquisite pleasures of losing — ‘that exhilarating sensation of falling which made him feel superior to the surrounding world and even somewhat pitying towards his fellow men.’