Ursa Major: random thoughts

Here are some notes—nothing groundbreaking, but things I want to remember later—on Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s Ursa Major (Большая медведица, 1870–71). In the previous post, there is a list of characters and plot summary. Fonvizin disease Denis Fonvizin’s The Minor (Недоросль, 1782) is close to the Enlightenment: it’s a mixture of boring conversations between right-thinking raisonneurs and hilarious scenes involving the ignorant, weak, bestial Prostakov family and the con men taking advantage of them. Near the beginning I thought Ursa Major was going to be like this, and I did find that the scenes with the worst characters (Viktor, Lidiia Matveevna, the Volkarevs, Dukhanov, and General Il’itsyn) moved fastest. But the novel ends up being about the moral failures of seemingly good men (or with Lesichev, the reverse), so in hindsight, we have very few scenes involving only authorial stand-ins. Pacing, serialization, foreshadowing As Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы,…