to find this quite incredible?

[Mitchy1nge]

is quite a long read but wtf?

when dickens met Dostoevsky

FINE

I AM UNREASONABLE

is not like being reasonable is all that fucking amazing anyway

Oh dear!

I'll have a read, hang on...

I agree. WTF. Gave up after a couple of of paragraphs.

You won't get any replies until 20th June looking at its length.

Could you tell us a bit about it in a nutshell?

it's actually very funny and completely as you move incredulously down the page

but THANK YOU for looking! I felt so alone!

ok scholar makes up a load of shit, mainly about dickens meet

Oh my goodness. I just glanced again and saw something about an American girl, a condom and shrinking erection. .

motherFUCKER I hate it when it does that

scholar makes up this whole conversation between dickens and that Russian which never happened, makes up other stuff under various assumed identities, when people try to contact various of these identities the people die or nearly die in a series of bizarre events

and there's quite a lot of laugh-out-loud stuff about nipples

is just quite incredible

and he's about sixty, old enough to know better?

I haven't got a clue what you're on about Mitchy but I like how passionate and shouty you are about it!

Oh so you're not talking about the rude bits? You really are talking about this meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky? .

I thought the rude bits were quite incredible too, funny anyway!

Passionate and shouty is going to be my new and very concise dating profile - thanks THEY CAN'T SAY THEY WERE NOT WARNED

YANBU! I'm only halfway through and it is extraordinary. People are mad.

Very interesting, if nobody reviews your learned monograph, make up a name and do it yourself. Repeatedly.

Sorry Mitchy, you've lost me .

Wow.

It started with an apparent exciting discovery about Dickens and Dostoyevsky actually meeting but by the ending it concerned a very sad, bitter old academic spraying out pseudonyms in order to critique himself to greater fame.

The sexual obsession, resentment, fabrication.....maybe the notoriety that comes from this (within academic circles at least) will provide him with some satisfaction?!

I didn't think the Dickens 'quote' sounded plausible really. Much more likely to be something Dostoyevsky might have said.

Well, that's half an hour of my life I won't get back! Should have known that was likely to be the case given the story involves two of my least favourite authors. Mind you, the article was really in keeping with their writing styles.

[Wanders off in search of a restorative ]

That is funny, but it doesn't seem that surprising that Claire Tomalin believed it, whenever I've tried to read her stuff it always seems a bit weirdly like she hero-worships whoever she writes about. She's very gushy.

I like hoaxes though. I reckon the fun way to do it now would simply be to claim that there's a letter in one of the big Russian libraries, as they're only recently opening up, aren't they? We could publish Dickens' secret gay beard-affair, looking at the pic from that article.

Can I C&P my favourite bit, on the assumption everyone else is skimming too (ok, tell me you're all reading diligently and following all the footnotes ...):

'His monograph Sex in Georgian England (1994) prompted a distinct sharpening of the critical knives, but perhaps the unkindest cut came from the female reviewer who, in the course of disputing the book?s conclusions about realism in paintings of the female nude, opined that Harvey probably had an inadequate familiarity with the range of areolae to be encountered in real life.'

Oh, that does make me happy.

Is this article new knowledge, do you know, mitchy? It sounds a bit like the plot of On Beauty.

I guess so? Not that literary journalism is my thing. Oh god I don't even have a thing!

I mean it was new to the person who sent it to me and this is very nearly their actual sort of thing? I will ask.

waves at Pixel

Oh, god, I have no clue either, I've no reason to think it isn't new, except me being naive and fascinated anyone could get away with this 'in the modern day'.

I am now reading it properly and sniggering quite a lot. He would have been the most fantastically un-sexy man, wouldn't he? Ewww.

I was in such a foul mood today and then this Quite Incredible read, am glad to spread some sniggers for a change (instead of, you know, my toxic negativity or whatever)

I hadn't noticed your toxic negativity, but sorry you've had a rotten day.

When in five years time you find your MN name cropping up in cryptic acknowledgements in the pages of badly-written third-rate academic tomes by L.R.Dragon, though, you'll know you truly did good work today.

thanks! I look forward to that!

Brilliant! This character sounds like he was dreamed up by David Lodge...

Hang on a minute...