Their opinion can usually be traced back to a press release—but then, that’s why good publicity hacks get paid such good money.

Those three are from the page preceding the famous “Rebellion” chapter, if you would like to check the context. That is, a novel in which the hero strangles neither his father nor his mother, and in which there are no drowned bodies. He who lies to himself and listens to his own lies reaches a state in which he no longer recognizes truth either in himself or in others, and so he ceases to respect both himself and others. Suppose we have a person who’s perfectly sane, and suddenly he’s suffering from diminished responsibility,” is what Avsey has her say.I am a spiteful man”), but the sheer vitality, the thirst for life, that characterizes all the Karamazovs sweeps the reader irresistibly along. I repeat: here there was no question of stupidity; the bulk of these madcaps are really quite sharp and clever – but plain muddle-headedness, and, moreover, of a peculiar, national variety. Also, Volokhonsky said, “Dostoyevsky doesn’t use slang, really, though sometimes there is a vulgarism.

Again I say it was not stupidity—most of these madcaps are rather clever and shrewd—but precisely muddleheadedness, even a special, national form of it. And if you’re looking forward to what’s still ahead, we rounded up some of the buzziest releases of the summer.The particulars take up the bulk of Wilson’s attack, though he closes with some lapidary tribute to Nabokov’s mini-essays on Pushkin’s period, cohort, and influences.