Humiliated and Insulted

Well, if you’re asking, this novel took me on a very long, droshky ride on a very bumpy road. The driver didn’t even take me through the scenic routes of 19th century Petersburg. I was disappointed but couldn’t get off the droshky. Here are a few beautifully crafted jewels. The “locket scene” between Natasha’s parents is beautifully crafted and exposes Dostoevsky at his best in the novel, it’s emotional , theatrical and powerful. You can almost envision this on stage. “Hearing his wife’s wail the frantic old man stopped short, horrified at what he was doing. All at once he snatched up the locket from the floor and rushed towards the door, but he had not taken two steps when he fell on his knees, and dropping his arms on the sofa before him let his head fall helplessly. He sobbed like a child, like a woman. Sobs wrung his breast as though they would rend it. The threatening old man became all in a minute weaker than a child. Oh, now he could not have cursed her; now he felt no shame before either of us, and in a sudden rush of love covered with kisses the portrait he had just been trampling underfoot. It seemed as though all his tenderness, all his love for his daughter so long restrained, burst out now with irresistible force and shattered his whole being. “Forgive, forgive her!” Anna Andreyevna exclaimed, sobbing, bending over him and embracing him,…” The story provides no shortage of emotional intensity, in the form of a long-running roller coaster ride. The characters belong to a community of the “have and have nots” of 19th century Petersburg. This is the narrator(Vanya’s) summary of the diabolical prince: “He produced on me the impression of some sort of reptile, some huge spider, which I felt an intense desire to crush. He was enjoying his taunts at me. He was playing with me like a cat with a mouse, supposing that I was altogether in his power. It seemed to me (and I understood it) that he took a certain pleasure, found a certain sensual gratification in the shamelessness, in the insolence, in the cynicism with which at last he threw off his mask before me. “ Last words on “Humiliated” Natasha says to Vanya: Vanya,” she said, “Vanya, it was a dream, you know.” “What was a dream?” I asked. “All, all,” she answered, “everything, all this year. Vanya, why did I destroy your happiness?” And in her eyes I read: “We might have been happy together for ever. Interesting how both Alyosha and his father,Prince Valkovsky, the most diabolical character in the story, are completely written out, leaving Vanya and Natasha completely voided by the loss of Nellie, strung out by the emotional tidal wave they both lived through, and yet she utters her last words of resignation, “We might have been happy together for ever”. Poor Vanya must have been utterly gutted when he heard those fateful words.