Of dead Russian authors and dead-er French kings

Note: I’m in a gradual process of anonymizing this blog. This is just so that I can write more freely, and include observations from my life that cannot be tied to my boring real world grad student existence. We’ll see how that goes. There’s a theme from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy that has stayed with

Dostoevsky is a two-trick pony

Like most other people who enjoy self-abuse through reading thousand-page novels, I’ve had the experience of reading Dostoevsky and marveling at his ability to capture “reality”. I’ve read “Crime and Punishment” in the past, and am now reading “The Brothers Karamazov”. Needless to say, there have been many parts that have completely floored me. I