A curiously hard to put down book about a society divided and trapped by its own social definitions. Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky’s late-19th century Russian somnambulistic society looks very much like a precursor of early 21st century USA, slowly beaten down by a sinking economy that has lost its rosy specs.
The novel’s wide array of mundane personalities, calculating opportunists and manipulators, men and women looking to latch onto a figure that may become a vehicle for their own peculiar social ambitions, have their modern-day replications in our own world.
There is the desperately lonely world of the older members of society, their maddening mirage of a life spent on chasing illusory achievements that ultimately no one cares about. Can anyone wonder that so many sought then, as they do now, an escape in booze? Even suicide?
Daughters trapped in a loving home which, nevertheless, makes them into neurotic victims within their parents’ boundaries of obsessive control in fear of a cruel society that is so quick to demonize a girl or woman who would dare challenge the social mores. Society’s desire to control women may have been relaxed somewhat during the intervening century, but not for those with strong views and willing to upset the apple cart stuck in a rut. Most women in our society still have to trade their femininity for butch toughness to prove themselves as strong and decisive individuals. I do, however, have high hopes for the incoming generation who, hopefully, have paid attention to the generation of their mothers and will build on that capital.
And then there is the novel’s eponymous young, naïve hero, clueless to the world of adults into which he is thrown having had spent most of his life away from the maddening crowd of adult intrigue and hypocritical customs and conventions; who never learned the “art” of lies, connivance and underhanded game-playing with the lives of others.
Much of the world described in the compelling novel is mostly long gone. Girls and women need no longer fear their sexuality. A smart and enterprising person need no longer depend solely on powerful and privileged members of society to realise his/her own ambitions. There remains, however, to this day, the need to hide one’s true persona. Very likely even more so today than 130 years ago. Our omnipresent parallel world of the fishbowl of social websites and the gradually disappearing respect for one’s privacy is insidiously corrupting the population of its users into two-faced actors:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts (…)
(Will Shakespeare, As You Like It)
The play’s monologue refers to the seven stages in a person’s life and how they shape one’s personality. Living simultaneously in the two divergent worlds requires quick personality changes. At which point does it warp the performers for whom the act is a relentless, daily, 24-hour routine?
I wonder what Will would have said today of the Idiots who would rather see themselves just as they are, and not a reflection of society’s expectations?
I also wonder, had Fyodor Mikhailovich written his story in our time, would have he retired his reluctant hero into an asylum for gamers rather than the one for the mentally impaired? Into the solitude of a world crowded with invisible players living in their own fantasy worlds?
©2011
