Pynchon & Dostoevsky & P's Crystal Palace in GR.

[Mark Kohut]

Seems Dostoevsky visited the Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1863.

Nikolai Cherneshevski, a Russian literary and social critic of the time,
--who wrote the polemical and very popular "novel"
*What is to Be Done? *used that Crystal Palace exhibition as a symbol of
supposed progress, etc. against how bad Russia
and so much of the world was....

And Dostoevsky, whose C & P was, although it transcended any polemical
fight, also an engagement with Cherneshevski's
critique, gave the name "Crystal Palace" to an eating and drinking
establishment in St. Petersburg which did not exist there.
(FD was accurate in most place things in C & P). There was a hotel with
that name, surely preceding the Exhibit?

It is here where Raskolnikov asks for recent issues of the major paper in
order to read about the deaths of the pawnbroker woman
and her sister, which he committed before his lost delirium days.

Sounds to me like FD putting the irreducibility of unexplained evil at the
heart of Crystal Palace optimism about historical progress
and human species growth.

TRP probably learned about The Crystal Palace here, right?