(FITS)[13th April 1987]

[Redbook3:181][19870413:1450](FITS)[13th April 1987]

19870413.1450

'And it was not only his memory that suffered after each attack; he was overwhelmed by “a feeling of terrible guilt” just as though he had committed some dreadful crime. But his feeling before the onset of the fit (as he described it in The Idiot) seemed to compensate for its terrible aftermath. “For a few moments before the fit,” he wrote* to the critic Nicholai Strakhov, “I experience a feeling of happiness such as it is quite impossible to imagine in a normal state and which other people have no idea of. I feel entirely in harmony with myself and the whole world, and the feeling is so strong and so delightful that for a few seconds of such bliss one would gladly give up ten years of one's life.' (David Magarshack, Translator's Introduction to Dostoyevsky's 'The Idiot') (Should or could it have been entitled 'The Fool'? Is the word the same in Russian?)

Somewhere in an earlier volume**, I believe, I described how a lad next to me at the London College of Printing suffered an epileptic fit, and the curious cork-screwing*** motion with which he fell. On the same day I read an account in The Times(?) of what appeared to be epileptic-type fits induced by contact at charismatic religious meetings.

I was intrigued to read that Dostoyevsky made eight attempts to plan 'The Idiot', and that he originally intended it to be in eight parts. I have not yet begun to read the book itself.****

*(Letter to Nicholai Strakhov) <900825>

**II,202-3 [[Redbook2:202-203][19810914:1900a]{An Epileptic Fit}[14^th September 1981]]

(cf. Also II, 35 [[Redbook2:35-36][19740121:0035]{Fits}[21st January 1974]]).

***This exact description is not in the original [journal entry]. <870811>

****{cf. VII.239ff.}

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