![]() This cacophony of several depraved spirits starts conversing with each other, the new arrivals to the old spirits in the cemetery. Baron Pyotr Petrovitch also called Klinevitch.Īs you can see, they are tongue twister names and belong to different social backgrounds in Russian society.Katchie, a young girl of sixteen years of age.Avdotya Ignatyevna, the pretentious lady of high standing. ![]() The Lower Court Councilor, Lebeziatnikov.Major-General Vassili Vassilitch Pervoyedov.There are many ghosts mentioned in the cemetery. On the contrary, thanks to the excellent prose of Dostoevsky, we find the whole situation hilarious. If it were not for the description of the hilariously varied life of Ivan at the beginning of ‘Bobok’, then we as readers would have been on the edge at the entry of the ghosts. He unnaturally lies down in the cemetery on a marble tombstone and then starts hearing voices. Ivan goes for a funeral but doesn’t go to the funeral dinner or get-together. Hence, a civilian looking to comment on the life of a field marshal, and an educated engineer to comment on philosophy and political economy. In the first part of ‘Bobok’, Ivan even mentions that people from different vocations in life like to still comment about other diagonally opposite vocations and ideas of thought that they know least about. ‘The Merchant of Venice’ Act 1, Scene 1: Line 95-100 Which, hearing them, would call their brothers fools. If they should speak, would almost damn those ears How true he is to note that all analyses of books, writings, art, etc., at the end of the day are based on the vague subjective reasonings of people who deem to be wise but when they open their mouths to pass on knowledge, we realize them to be mere fools. I’m sure this is the firsthand experience of the ever-cynical Dostoevsky coming to the forefront. Underlying meanings in ‘brackets’ or social cages, and so forth.The writing style of Ivan is described by critics as: At the end of the day, we tend to wonder, who is ‘mad’ and who isn’t? We keep on coming to the topics of insanity, realism, and depravity in this story. I love that part when Ivan mentions that people shut up the so-called ‘fools’ in madhouses to make themselves seem wise. There is not ‘a Bobok’ or bean seed of intellectual material in their absurd conversation but this is only on the surface level. You will notice that the spirits in the cemetery are totally insane. Ivan is a failed author who is ready enough to admit that he is a fool, out of humility. This is the foundation for us for the scene in the cemetery, for only a person who may have lost his mental faculties could see the things Ivan saw and heard that day in the cemetery. His picture is described as the ‘morbid face suggesting insanity’. It alludes right in the beginning to Ivan’s insanity or insane behavior as noted by the painter of his portrait. The first part of the story is very much a preparation for the second part. The cemetery episode among the souls of the departed.The literary but wayward life of the failed writer Ivan Ivanovitch.‘Bobok’ is a setting for the philosophical thoughts in the latter years of Dostoevsky’s literary career. Hence, this story, especially the latter portion, is all about moral corruption which is coupled with the external corruption of the dead bodies of the spirits or souls that Ivan sees in the cemetery. It also is indicative of the ‘external corruption’ of the body when a person dies. Now, ‘depravity’, as we know is moral corruption, which is the inner corruption or perversion of the mind. They all are spending the afterlife for a while together and the core idea of this story is the topic of depravity. These ghosts represent different emotions, forms of thought, cultural aspects in society, social classes, Russian clichés, et al. It is essentially the story of the narrator Ivan Ivanovitch, a complacent and multi-tasking writer, who one day spends his time in a cemetery, and crashes onto a conclave of ghosts. This is a philosophical story told in the nonsense style to bring to mind several aspects of intellectual thought but in a humorous way. ‘Bobok’ means two things: ‘a small bean’ and ‘nonsense’. ‘Bobok’ was penned by Dostoevsky in the year 1873. ‘Bobok’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Short Story Analysis
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