Hello there, everybody! I hope you're already for some more words. This is episode 113 of the Victor Prep Verica podcast, and I'm going to start off today's podcast with a quote from a book called The Idiot.

It's a Dostoevsky book, and I'm quoting it from today because my dad is reading this book right now. I think he's enjoying it.

And so it's on my mind because I've been talking about it with him, and you know, talking about what's happening in the book and so on.

And I figured, okay, I'll do a quote from the idiot, and I think it's kind of an interesting and slightly funny quote.

And it really, I think, gets to what Dostoevsky is best at.

And I would just add here that Dostoevsky, I think just because the name even sounds a bit complicated, it gets his reputation as being a very hard writer to read, and somehow correlated with intelligent people reading it.

And what is it? I think this is total rubbish. It's not hard to read, and I really recommend Dostoevsky. It has this undeserved reputation of these books being hard to read or overly intellectual or something like this.

And I do think this is rubbish. I think Dostoevsky is super readable. His books are really emotional. They're really about people and the psychology of people.

And I really think these books are for everybody. So if you have been thinking about reading Dostoevsky and have heard things or assumed that it would be hard or not for you, I totally think you should revisit that.

And if I had to recommend something to start with, I would say just start with something like Paul Folk, which is the first book he wrote, and really captures the essence of who he is, which is a person that his talent, I think, was somehow being able to really empathize with people and step into their brains and understand the psychology of people.

And so this quote I'm going to read you today, which I think is quite funny in a way. The person that's talking about is this guy, Prince Mishkin, and he's at a house party or whatever passes for a house party in the 1800s.

And so our lead character, which is this Prince Mishkin, is at a party and he's feeling awkward and distracted and kind of zoning out.

And I think this is not an unfamiliar feeling for many of us who have been at a house party and you just not feeling it, you don't want to be there.

Maybe you're feeling a bit distracted or alienated. And so I'm going to read this quote now.

Sometimes he wanted to go away somewhere, to disappear from there completely, and he would even have liked some dark deserted place, only so that he could be alone with his thoughts, and no one would know where he was, or at least to be in his own home on the terrace, but so that nobody else was there, to throw himself on his sofa, bury his face in his pillow, and lie there like that for a day, a night,

another day, at moments he imagined the mountains, and precisely one familiar spot in the mountains that he always liked to remember, and where he had liked to walk when he still lived there, and to look down from there on the village, on the white thread of the waterfall barely glittering below, on the white clouds, on the abandoned old castle,

or how he wanted to be there now, and to think about one thing, oh, all his life, only about that, it would be enough for a thousand years, and let them forget all about him here, or was it even necessary, even better, that they not know him at all, and that this whole vision be nothing but a dream, and wasn't at all the same whether it was a dream or a reality,

so you can see there, the prince is having this long and complex vision and set of thoughts, while he's in the middle of a bunch of people all talking, and in fact while he's having this thought, someone's trying to get his attention, and he only realises after that someone's trying to talk to him, so you can see he's really having a moment at this party,

okay then, so that was our quote from the idiot, and that was a translation by Pervir and Volakonsky, and so on to a quick recap of all words from last time, so those words were impervious, impassive, enumerate, and effrontery,

so impervious, the adjective, meaning not allowing fluid to pass through it, and also something that is unable to be affected by, so impervious to heat, impervious to damage of some kind,

impassive, that is not feeling or showing any emotion, to be expressionless, enumerate, enumerate, to mention a number of things, list them out one by one, and finally there was effrontery,

that is, insolent, impertinence or cheeky, rude behaviour, okay, all good, so now our four new words, and our first new word is conventional,

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