This semester I am teaching a Dostoevsky course. Implausible plots, stumbling dialogues, everybody in love with everybody, romantic triangles overlap like mating frogs, passions mount, money changes hands and is thrown into the fire -- the normal Dostoevsky stuff.
I don't like Dostoevsky. Not my cup of tea, as Queen Elizabeth must have said when asked to attend Princess Di's funeral. Yet one cannot deny Dostoevsky's astounding intellectual richness. Whether you like him or not, he is one of the most thought-provoking authors. He has supplied the world with a number of powerful everlasting archetypes. One of them is the image of Russians as die-hard debaters, always obsessed with some sort of quest for truth or identity.
One of the punch lines in "The Brothers Karamazov" is, Russians "do nothing but talk about the eternal questions." Since Dostoevsky's time, one of these pervading eternal questions has been, "Is Russia East or West?"