Dear David and all:
You are too generous to take the ramblings and associations from this pen
as anything more profound and serious than just that. On further research
it is of course clear than Poe could not have learned from Dostojevskij.
The following is snipped from Wikipedia:
"Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov is the fictional protagonist of the 1866
novel Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The name Raskolnikov
derives from the Russian raskolnik meaning "schismatic" (traditionally
referring to a member of the Old Believer movement).
In Raskolnikov an impoverished student decides to kill a corrupt
pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, with whom he has been dealing. He commits the
murder, but is so nervous during the crime that he makes a few mistakes,
and is afraid that he will be caught. After he confesses to the destitute,
pious prostitute Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, she guides him towards
admitting to the crime, and he confesses to Porfiry Petrovich, a prosecutor
with a keen psychological sense. "
However, Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" was published already in 1843. Here an
"unnamed narrator who endeavors to convince the reader of the narrator's
sanity while simultaneously describing a murder the narrator committed. The
victim was an old man a filmy pale blue "vulture-eye", as the narrator
calls it. The narrator emphasizes the careful calculation of the murder,
attempting the perfect crime, complete with dismembering the body in the
bathtub and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately, the narrator's
actions result in hearing a thumping sound, which the narrator interprets
as the dead man's beating heart."
The only way in which Poe could have quoted Dostojevskij would be in
Borges' sense (cf. Kafka's precursors). As to the question of where to find
"quoth" in texts attributed to Dostojevskij, well, only his translators
would know?
Take care.
T
Poland
On Wed, 5 May 2021, 01:54 david ritchie, <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 4, 2021, at 10:41 AM, Brian Connery <brianaconnery@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
There's a wonderful comic bit in *The Comedy of Errors *in which the
repetition of "quoth" plays a part. You may be familiar with it.
Thank you for this. I had not registered that bit.
And thank you Torjeir. Did Raskolnikov use this word or just something
like it?
Thank you Lawrence and Ursula for keeping us going.
I’d finish “carry on,” but that might be confusing,
quoth,
David
