TMOP: Chapter 7

[Richard Ryan]

Bekah's remark about the real word D's erotic dabblings reminds me of the comment about Nietzsche: "Never got laid but died of the clap."

Given their prevalence at the edges of 19th Century bourgeois society - and in his work - one has to imagine that Dostoevsky had at least a passing exposure to prostitutes.   He has that familiar early modern quality _ one thinks of it in James as well - of being both very sexual and very repressed (maybe sublimated is a better word) simultaneously.

--- On Sun, 10/12/08, Bekah <Bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

   Dostoevsky never had much of a sex life outside marriage  
that I've ever heard of.

There were rumors (probably started by Turgenev) that Dostoevsky had  
visited the child prostitutes around St. Petersburg but nothing  
substantial was ever found.

Dostoevsky experienced and heard of some serious evil doing as a  
child.   His father, who had a problem with womanizing,  was brutally  
murdered.  A young neighbor friend was raped.   He heard stories of  
this sort when he was in Siberia.

I think perhaps you could be right about Coetzee seeming to suggest  
that D. dabbled in order to find out - as an authenticating artistic  
experience.  
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