The story proper begins when Ivan Ivanych abruptly tells us that he "went out for diversion and wound up at a funeral." The funeral is for a distant relative, with whom there isn't any closeness. My analysis probably reveals as much about me as it does about Dostoevsky. (In Russian, 'bobok' means 'little bean'-and if that sounds like nonsense, well, that's because it's supposed to.) Although my account will focus on the more serious sides to the story, I want to underscore that it is also very funny-to avoid the impression that it is a heavy story (it is actually quite light). He finds that his character is changing, that his head is aching, and that he has begun seeing and hearing things: "Not really voices, but as if there were someone just nearby: 'Bobok, bobok, bobok!'" What is this bobok? He asks. His writing is turning choppy and erratic. It soon becomes clear that Ivan Ivanych-recently the subject of a mocking portrait-is unravelling, beginning to lose his mind. "Nowadays humor and good style are disappearing, and abuse is taken for wit." His stories are repeatedly rejected publishers find that he 'lacks salt'. None of this, of course, is Ivan Ivanych's fault. Instead, he writes advertisements for merchants, puts together trifling commission work like The Art of Pleasing the Ladies, and so on. These are the notes of Ivan Ivanych, an unsuccessful writer who, he tells us, has been struggling to get any serious work published. (I use the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky throughout). In a very short preface, he insists that the author "is not I it is an entirely different person," which is entirely unconvincing. Bobok, which is subtitled Notes of a Certain Person, is written in the style of a diary entry, in the first person, by a certain struggling writer named Ivan Ivanych.
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