Federer vs. Dostoevsky

Roger Federer might like to say he's playing against history, but Saturday, he had to play literature buff Janko Tipsarevic.

Bonnie D. Ford discerns a potent literary connection in Saturday's match between Roger Federer and Janko Tipsarevic.  It's a stretch but if she wants to argue that reading Fyodor Dostoevsky bolstered Tipsarevic's performance, as a Comparative Literature person, I won't discourage her. 

Tipsarevic has the words "Beauty will save the world" tattooed on his left forearm.  This line appears in Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot.  The line in its original Russian should read Красота спасёт мир.  But Tipsarevic had it translated into Japanese.

....Beauty might, in fact, save the world, but Tipsarevic, his soulful eyes burning behind jock-nerdy glasses, had to save two set points in the third to elongate a beautiful match. He said he was able to pull off what might be the most difficult thing of all against the man who is gunning for the all-time Grand Slam win record -- convince himself he was in the match before it started.

"His soulful eyes burning behind jock-nerdy..."  There is something about this well-read athlete that has journalists waxing poetic.  Imagine the kind of articles that would be written over the next two weeks if Eli Manning and Tom Brady had lines from Siddhartha and Middlemarch tattoed on their arms--in Hungarian!

Federer ultimately won the match but in the end the words of Dostoevsky (choose them "at hazard") will prevail.

Tipsarevic proved what self-belief can do for a lower-ranked player. In that effort, he might have drawn inspiration from another Dostoevsky novel. This passage comes from "The Insulted and the Injured," a title that could be applied to the ATP during Federer's reign of terror the past few years:

You're a poet, and I'm a simple mortal, and therefore I will say we must look at things from the simplest, most practical point of view.

The mere mortal's pragmatic game plan fell a little short this time, but it wouldn't be surprising if Federer finds he has to work harder than ever to fend off the proletariat.

"He has to work harder" would make a nice tattoo.