Midnight in Dostoevsky Summary and Analysis

Midnight in Dostoevsky Summary

Two college friends in a rural upstate town have an imaginative, bantering relationship in "Midnight in Dostoevsky." They concoct stories about the lives of people in the town, and become particularly interested in an old man wearing a hooded coat. The two young men, Todd and the narrator, Robby, argue about all their imagined details of the man's life, even including whether the hooded coat they have seen from a distance is an anorak or a parka. They take a logic class from a professor named Ilgauskas who speaks in brief, apparently unconnected statements that he does not explain. All 13 students in the class try valiantly to follow his line of thought, but they suspect he has a neurological disorder. Robby is interested in a wan girl who sometimes sits across the seminar...