hi! i really want to tell you that i love love love your blog. i feel so much joy when i see you've made a long post with your thoughts. i admire the way you engage with things you enjoy! you've genuinely inspired me to get back into reading. i've been struggling with migraines and after some time i started associating reading with suffering. i stumbled upon your blog because of bsd, and i got so fascinated with the way you communicate with the source material that i had a childlike realization: i want to have that too! and i picked up akutagawa, and i'm enjoying myself so much.
i'm never not thinking about the post where you said that the trick to being clever is to stop obsessing over being right. life-changing, really.
sending you so so so much love! p.s. as a russian-speaker it's a delight reading your thoughts on dostoevsky, especially seeing you use diminutives, for some reason. in russian slang we sometimes say, "ты так чувствуешь!" ("you are really feeling!") meaning "you really get it on an emotional level!" and that's what i think every time i read your thoughts on dostoevsky.
I hesitated to answer this ask because I wanted to covet it and hoard it and keep it tucked away where I could revisit it to my greedy heart's content without anyone noticing, but I'd rather you know that this ask was so delightful to receive and absolutely melted me in the best way, so I'm publishing it even though that means submitting to the mortifying ordeal of creating a tag so that I can more easily return to your kind words, and perhaps other, similar asks and posts that are emotional balms.
Also, I am so sorry, I'm sleep-deprived and I was so excited and charmed and delighted by your ask that I lost my mind and wrote you a veritable novel in response. Thus, I've added a readmore and headings (because WOW, I went on tangents, sorry!)
Returning to Reading
I'm so sorry you have migraines; I don't get them often, but I do occasionally get them, and it's some of the worst, least tolerable pain I've ever experienced. So, whatever it's worth, you have my sympathy and admiration, especially since returning to reading when you experience frequent migraines implicates some common triggers. (Never mind how annoying I know it is when you're in too much pain to read as a distraction either.) But I'm delighted you're reframing your relationship with reading separate from suffering, and that you're enjoying the process! I'm also returning to reading, and while I don't have the same challenges, I am also engaging in a process of relearning and recontextualizing reading for myself, so I'm always here to chat about it.
I'm especially thrilled that you picked up Akutagawa; Akutagawa is the author who also coaxed me back into reading literature (as opposed to comics or webnovels). He might still be my favorite even now that I've read several, several other modern Japanese authors.
Akutagawa Adoration Hours
[I apologize; I hyperfocused and wrote an entire multi-paragraph essay on how much I love Akutagawa below... I promise I come back to your ask!]
Akutagawa's literary voice is just so vivid, sharp, and intentional. He compels you to cling to the weight of each word with rich, clever language that cuts to the hearts of matters frankly, bluntly, and sometimes scathingly. But even when his authorial voice is ostensibly irreverent or lacquered with detachment, he cradles his most foolish characters, bundling them with naked affection for their sincerity, vulnerability, and childish conviction. They embody his unadulterated faith, and he reserves for them in the implication the same salvation he's convinced he's too sullied by shame, terror, and self-consciousness to deserve. Akutagawa does not squander the gravity of your attention, and even in brief vignettes in which humans become lice or have had their personhood severed from them by the untenable yet escalating demands of their responsibilities to others, there's humanity in his horror and absurdity, and closure in his ambiguity. I rarely feel as if there's certainty in Akutagawa's narratives, but neither do I feel as if nothing that occurred mattered.
Even when nothing has objectively changed for the characters, Akutagawa sources meaning from the subjective perceptions of the characters, the impact of which is rarely diminished by the objective or observable. Thus, the bleakness, horror, and absurdity of the characters' circumstances are sometimes interminable, but they shelter Akutagawa's fondness and latent certainty that existential meaning is inherent to humanity because of, rather than despite, our fragility, foolishness, and callous disregard for measurable truth.
His contemporaries criticized him for the detachment and perceived stagnancy lent by his polish and technical brilliance, but I've never read any of his stories and not felt an earnestness that persists entirely apart from the explicit narrative, as if someone is reading over my shoulder and murmuring "isn't she brave?" whenever a character is so simple in their sincerity that they become vulnerable to humiliation and abuse. And that's not detachment; that's Akutagawa relentlessly writing hope, love, and compassion into the creases of his own grotesque fear, and in doing so, filling spaces we perceive as empty in ourselves with the faith and devotion he was so certain he lacked.
You Said Childlike In Passing But Chapter 55 of the Tao Te Ching Rewired My Brain and I Was Lost In the Akutagawa Sauce So...
And it's childlike how, even when characters like O-Gin are debased and humiliated, Akutagawa yearns for their salvation enough to smudge the ink at the edges of his precisely rendered language so the silly, ignorant little fools might transcend the boundaries of the narrative that otherwise ruthlessly scorned and punished them for their guilelessness. His need for innocence is itself indicative of the keen sense of violation that prompts a toddler to indignation when his jejune reliance on fairness is first exploited and then provided as cause for exploitation.
Akutagawa was wise enough to know childlike conclusions are the most profound and self-actualizing insights we can have, but too certain of the inevitability of his suffering and too overly prescribed barbiturates to nurture and cherish his own salvific childishness. So, your realization was brilliant for its childlike wisdom, and I think it's both wonderful and meaningful that you then nurtured that wisdom by pursuing the relationship you wanted with the source material.
Being Right vs. Playful Engagement
I'm also so glad that the post about being clever =/= obsessing over being right was sticky and impactful! It's, quite frankly, immensely less fun and more pressure if you're hinging your enjoyment on whether you're right when engaging with media where "right" is subjective and layered, and where you're engaging with a foreign cultural context. I get the impression that centering your engagement on making and assessing the accuracy of predictions also lends itself to biases, defensiveness, disappointment, misplaced resentment based on unmet expectations, and incuriosity; at least more so than engaging with the story playfully and sincerely.
I'm also just extremely biased towards bsd and Asagiri's approach to storytelling; I think he's engaging in a challenging and layered approach to storytelling that is wholly unique to him. (At least, based on my own experiences with referential multimedia titles.) I'm so charmed by how Asagiri throws himself into creative challenges and engages in meaningful and remarkably substantive conversations with the source materials, his own portfolio of interlocking narratives, and his audience. I would kill to chat with him about his processes.
Everyone I'd Encountered Who Seemed Parasocially Obsessed With Dostoevsky Was Right
Before I get into this next babble tangent, I want you to know that your kind words and perspective as a Russian-speaker regarding my Dostoevsky thoughts mean SO much to me; I'm very proud if I'm able to do an ounce of justice to the text in my ramblings, and I'm so excited to know the appropriate phrase for what I'm experiencing right now because I am REALLY feeling.
I was admittedly a little nervous about reading his works with only minimal background, and I went into Crime and Punishment without first consulting any published critiques and analyses (which I sometimes do for foreign classics to bridge gaps in context). But, I was eager to start the story, so I decided to just get into it with the understanding I might need to pause for further research if I felt I was missing too much context to engage with the text meaningfully. But, wow, I was immediately consumed. I struggled to put it down for most of it, and I've been staying up too late and sneakily reading at work; things I haven't done since I was in middle school.
While I know I'm missing context, even with the attentive footnotes (and I absolutely will read so many academic papers on it once I finish these last fifty pages), I was pleasantly surprised by how not only engaging his writing and this translation are but also by how familiar with and connected I feel to the characters and circumstances and emotions and dynamics. He has rendered the human experience and specific flavors of People into such compassionate, teasing, sincere, frank, and sobering characters who I feel like I've had entire conversations with.
I love classic lit, but Dostoevsky is sincerely rekindling a joy I haven't felt in years while reading. Also, his frankness and compassion regarding alcoholism and parentified children and trauma and ennui and guilt and the contradictions we grapple with within ourselves and with who we are to different people are giving me a framework for reflecting on swaths of my trauma and childhood that I've struggled to articulate my thoughts and emotions around for years.
I'm so energized and excited about reading his other works, but, wow, I'm going to miss these characters so much.
Accounting For My Crimes Against the Russian Language
I have very little background in Russian, but I'm passingly familiar because in high school (i) I was obsessed with Russian history, particularly related to the USSR and swaths of imperial Russia (I actually taught the lesson on Ivan IV Vasilyevich in my Western Civ class because my teacher was pregnant and exhausted and I knew the material better than she did); and (ii) I studied Russian with a private tutor in my senior year of high school (very lightly; once a week, only for a year, I met with her and two French language teachers from my school who were also interested in Russian for hour-long lessons and to receive homework assignments).
So, while my experience with the language is shallow at best, I've always loved Russian diminutives. I'm obsessed with the sheer amount of information relayed in someone's name. It's incredible. Of the languages I'm familiar with, none have a comparably satisfying gradient range of (i) affection and (ii) disrespect.
That said, I use diminutives for characters I'm particularly fond of, to show affection, and to teasingly disrespect them since I think it's quite overfamiliar for me to take such liberties.
Also, while I try to check after myself to ensure I'm using them correctly, I have only a surface-level understanding of what I'm doing, and some language forum threads are more helpful than others, so I'm very, very sorry if I use any incorrectly, and I encourage you (and any other Russian speakers and learners) to yell at me if you notice I'm misusing someone's name.
So far, my approach has been to check general searches, forums, and Reddit when I've encountered diminutives in Crime and Punishment, and I'll continue to look up every single name variation in the Dostoevsky novels I'm reading, no matter how long it may take me to realize what I've been scouring for isn't a diminutive at all but instead probably (emphasis on "probably," because no one providing English explanations seemed wholly certain) the same name but spoken in the form native to a separate Slavic language than the languages anyone else in the conversation was using, not that it really seemed to matter, since the same characters within the same conversation each used multiple forms of the same, with only one remark on what was most likely the correct form, which everyone ignored/disregarded, including the remarking character. So if you have context on THAT dynamic, I would love to hear about the etiquette and conventions around language forms among the many different languages and dialects in Eastern Europe.
For reference, the diminutives I've been using re: Crime and Punishment and bsd, with more context:
Raskolnikov is "Rodya" unless he's naughty, in which case I call him "Rodka." Unless he's REALLY naughty, then he's Raskolnikov.
Avdotya is Dunya always; I do feel egregious because she commands grace and gravitas, and I respect her SO much. But I love her dearly and am very warm towards her and everything she does, so I call her Dunya as if she were my sister because if she were, I would treat her better than Rodka right now.
Razumikhin is Dima which may be wildly incorrect, both in form and historical context; the only reason I haven't confirmed it yet is because I had an OC named Dmitri in high school that I was very fond of and referred to affectionately as Dima, and I'm similarly fond of Razumikhin, so I've delayed confirming and correcting myself here, although that's very Rodka-naughty of me, I know.
Fedya is always bsd!Fyodor, and only when he has really wide eyes and is being adorable bunny Fedya. He is Fyodor when he is being nasty or squinting. I call the author by either his last or full name, although I'm sure I've carelessly called him Fyodor before too. I try to maintain some consistency in distinguishing who I'm referencing between the characters and their namesakes.
Tl;dr: I love Russian diminutives. The only other time I've come close to feeling the same amount of immense delight over names-as-love-and-violence is when my work mentor, who is Chinese, was providing me with her preferred titles (laoban ["old boss," old meaning "venerable" rather than indicating age], jiejie ["big sister"]), and my other coworker chimed in to say, "Wouldn't you be da-jiejie ["first/eldest big sister"], since you're the oldest?" If looks could kill.
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