(Dostoevskij’s anecdote, told in “The Idiot”, of the cynical and bullying man, the old lady, and the dog was not related by the commentator. But the public wasn’t sorry about it because it never had read Dostoevskij, much less “The Idiot”. The hypothesis, anyway, was so vague and unbelievable that the commentator decided not to believe it).
The typical landscape was a kind of landscape like the standard landscape one sees from a train window. For example, near a city the houses clustered at an itchy rate (the commentator’s words). While in the country houses became more sparse and looked like farmhouses. Around the farm house one could see peeking from a barn the jolly face of a Mercedes, and nearby the rougher one of a tractor. There were some trees, the usual old woman with a shawl on her head, looking in your direction, a few white chickens, women peeling potatoes over the pig’s trough (women have, generally, this compulsion to peel) and clumps of plowed earth (an endless expanse, so endless that only an idiot could have measured it). Now the commentator said “Obviously I am not referring to Dostoevskij’s” causing, in the listeners’ ears, a strange twisting of eyes.
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