"Midnight in Dostoevsky" by Don Delillo (November 30, 2009, The New Yorker)

I am having a great time rummaging through the Archives of The New Yorker, reading for free stories by world famous writers.  Some of the authors I have read have been very familiar to be, like Roberto Bolano and Jhumpa Lahiri.  Others are new to me writers, like Don Delillo (USA, 1936, author of Underworld, White Noise and numerous other highly regarded works.  He has also published a lot of short stories.  

"Midnight in Dostoevsky" is set on a college campus in the U.S. It is located in a very small town.  It is a very interesting story centering on the ruminations of two male college friends as they go on walks.  They minutely pick apart everything they see and each other.  They begin to observe a man in his middle seventies who also walks.  They wonder who he is, where he is firm and how he ended up living in a college town.  We are also there as they attend a class taught by a fifty or so year old professor, the kind of teacher who scared undergraduates (Imagine Ford Madox Ford teaching at Olivet College in Michigan or Vladimar Nabakov at Cornell).  There is a girl in the class that ran into the professor  at a restaurant  and had dinner with him.  He was carrying a book by Dostoevsky and told her he  read him "all the time ".  The boys decide the older man must be the son of the professor, at first they think he must be Russian then they decide maybe Albanian or Lituanian.  

A very shocking hard to understand event happens at the end of the story.

This is a very interesting story on lots of levels.

You can read it here this summer only.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/30/midnight-in-dostoevsky?currentPage=all

Here is the narrator's description of the professor

"What did he mean by “things”? We would probably never know. Were we too passive, too accepting of the man? Did we see dysfunction and call it an inspired form of intellect? We didn’t want to like him, only to believe in him. We tendered our deepest trust to the stark nature of his methodology. Of course, there was no methodology. There was only Ilgauskas. He challenged our reason for being, what we thought, how we lived, the truth or falsity of what we believed to be true or false. Isn’t this what great teachers do, the Zen masters and Brahman scholars?"

Mel u