Practice and Patience in the Startled Room

Arkady has become tsar of Russia at seventeen, but he’s not interested in politics, nor even in his pretty young wife whom he’s married on a whim. He’s obsessed with Christianity, with his late parents’ neuroses, and with the architecture of his own dangerously developing insanity. Some sections of the novel show Arkady’s father Syoma in his early adulthood - he was a young man subjecting the world to nihilistic derision and intermittent storms of schizophrenic hope.