Dostoevsky on Blogging

It's even worse for one who decides to study and to understand things on his own, and still worse for one who makes a sincere declaration of intention. And if he declares that he has already managed to understand az tiny smidgen and wants to express his ideas, then everyone quickly drops him. The only thing he can do is to seek out some suitable individual, or even hire one, and simply talk to him and to him alone. Perhaps he could publish a magazine for that one individual. It's a loathsome situation, because it amounts to talking to yourself and publishing a magazine only for your own amusement. I strongly suspect that for a long time yet, The Citizen will have to talk to itself and appear only for its own amusement. Remember that medical science considers talking to oneself a sign of predisposition to insanity. The Cititzen certainly must speak to citizens, and that is precisely its whole dilemma!

That's from A Writer's Diary, page seven of the fine new Northwestern University Press selection edited by Gary Saul Morson. The Diary remains one of the most distinctive items in world literature. Morson says in his intro that D "intended the work to be a 'new genre,'" but I'm not sure that quite catches the spirit of things. Better to say that the genre outed itself: it is hard to imagine anybody but D suffering and uttering this more or less unbroken lifelong stream of perception. Someone has said that in the novels of D more than any other author, you feel that the conversation has gone on long before you arrived on scene and will continue long after you are gone. And obviously doing The Brothers, The Idiot and all the rest were not enough for him.