About book The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel In Four Parts And An Epilogue (1993)
This might still be the single greatest novel of all time. I'm open to suggestions but I don't know what can top it for philsophical suggestiveness, moral rigor, influence, entertainment value, poetry, drama....Freud took the ideas of the id, ego, and super-ego from the sons of the sinister, leeringly sensual, masochistic patriarch Fyodor Karamazov.The sad fact is, Dostevsky himself wanted to write a whole new (no doubt as lengthy) treatment of Alyosha, the saintly humble son as his effort to understand and honor a pure, simple soul of goodness.He died before he could. This, then, I suppose, is his legacy.Dedicate some serious time to this, iffin' you wanna read it. It's worth it. I really like this translation by David McDuff. I havent tried to tackle the Pevear/Volk translation yet, but I might try one of these days. This one will do fine- for now. O, and you can't idly pass by the painting on the cover. It's called "The Rejected Confession" by Ilya Repin and its perfect. Give it a good stare.*Now I'm rereading it to see if it still resonates- both with me and the world at large. Um...yeah. In all the uncomfortably true ways...as well as the comfortable ones...*and now I've finished rereading the sucker to prepare for Grad School, checking on some of the ghosts of the past before my lesiure reading goes up in smoke. It's still a strong piece of writing, certainly a masterpiece, but----I'm dropping a star. At too many points in the story I found myself rolling my eyes, groaning a bit, and started to pick at my collar, which was beginning to wilt in the hothouse soap opera this thing began to resemble. I'm not usually that practical a person- trust me, I'm not the one call soap opera on big dark fervent emotions- nor am I the one who insists that everybody just pull themselves together and get on with it. Nope. I don't comb my hair. Some of the plot reversals hit me in a more muffled way than they did when I was younger. Not too big a deal, but there it is nonetheless. Though the settings of the scene are so much more effectively drawn.But, if we take something into consideration, Tolstoy v. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy wants to create worlds which are sunlight, interactive, social, immediate, 'progressive'....Dostoevsky wants to pull you into the irrational, the nocturnal, the solitary, the hypothetical, the 'regressive' and to be honest, at this point I want to learn more about how to live in the world...the irrational and unconscious and I have been doing a loud tango a bit too long. I'd be more interested in life as it's lived (or at least among living people)- the Karamazovs are, often and ruefully, reminded of their own Karamazov blood, which is to say their humanity, which is to say the world. True enough. But- and this is not insignificant- the name is just a name. It's not the real sum and substance of a feeling anymore than a color is a piece of light. What I'm saying is, the brothers to a man (and that includes the bastard son) are as it were orbiting around their own humanity in their various ways, through their various means (the spirit, the intellect, the heart, etc) and are no closer to being human for that. it's a shame. this is the standard for at least half (the Dostevskian half) of the world at large- I would be more interested, these days, in other people. Someday soon, I'll reread Tolstoy. As for now, I must in some way wave goodbye to my fellow Karamazovs, which I suppose is a form of what I'd been doing in that diner here in Boston, stranded accidentally, sitting in a booth under a streetlight sipping routine cokes and peering at the final two hundred pages or so under the moon and streetlights... The ending, though, has always got me to the edge of tears.....(there's also something rather touching and grand about this book, at least for me, much like my feelings for Moby-Dick. I carried it around with me, took it outside for smoke breaks even when I didn't look at it, I handled it nevertheless. Whitman said 'whoever touches this book touches a man' and I have always loved that quote for a particular reason. The brick thickness and the momumental perspicacity is nothing to sneeze at. There's a real sense that these kinds of novels (The Magic Mountain also comes to mind, The Castle perhaps) are really the SUMMA of their repsective authors' life and thought and experience and so forth. Dostoevsky died shortly after finishing TBK, Melville had a bit more to go but, it seemed, was never the same. I like this tremendously. Everyone ought to have their magnum opus)
just found this hardcover edition of the pevear and volokhonsky translation and decided to read it again - it's been at least 10 years since i read it last time - very excited to set out on this particular journey. took a few months, but i have just finished this book for the third time - over the course of 30 years. it would be an understatement to say that i feel this is one of the very greatest novels ever written - and one of my very favorite novels that i have ever encountered.dostoevsky is celebrated for his "polyphonic" writing - a technique where many voices take part in the narration. this enables him to present his case (the murder and trial of parricide of one dmitri karamazov) in a fascinating way - so that the reader can see the events from a myriad of perspectives - each one offering a unique philosophical tract. somewhere in the midst of these perspectives lies the truth of who murdered fyodor pavlovich karamazov - and dostoevsky also allows us to discover our own search for meaning and truth over the course of his novel. highly recommended. my vote for the greatest novel of the 19th century - a novel that provides the (literary) foundation of existentialism.
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After reading Crime and Punishment and enjoying that immensely, this was quite a different experience. Firstly, The Brothers Karamazov does seem not as focused and sometimes this can lead to rambling discourse amongst characters that for the actual purpose of the story probably could have been shortened or left out, particularly the long speech made by Dimitri's lawyer towards the end of the book.That said, it is still an enjoyable book that mixes political and sociological concerns of the time with a 'who-dunnit' plot.As an amusing aside, if one were to believe Dostoyevsky's description of the Russian mentality across his books, then you start to think they were all unhinged and psychopathic!
—Alex
I really wanted to love this book. I started reading it in college in a Russian Lit class and had been planning to reread it for a long time. I wish I could be in that class again because Dostoyevsky has so much to say that his work needs to be discussed over a strong cup of tea.This translation is a 1990 version. I have often wondered, with books originally written in another language, how much of the beauty in the writing is the author and how much the translator. The introduction to this version has a note from the translator. Apparently, some scholars have found fault with Dostoyevsky's writing in this book, and some translations have sought to "smooth" out the text and take out some of its eccentricities. However, the translator suggests that Dostoyevsky's notebooks have been found showing him playing with his voice for this novel, and thus this style was intended. This translation attempts to restore the text closer to what Dostoyevsky wrote. That said, I found some of the word choices awkward, which made the reading experience slower and choppier. I noticed this feature the most when he was discussing some of the cruder characters, which perhaps made me dislike them more.The book is quite long (approx 800 pages) but the action takes place in just a few days scattered over several months. Nor is the story linear, as the story line will follow a Karamozov for a while, then change to another. The main characters, especially the Karamazovs, are extreme or one dimensional. He was very effective at making me dislike the father. Some people have suggested that he was representing different elements of his character in each of the Karamozovs. It made the book seem as much a moral/philosophical work rather than a novel. The Karamozovs don't actually interact that much, its more about the effect on each other.The introduction also said this was a joyful novel. I am not sure I would describe it that way, but at the same time, it doesn't have the suffering and torment that one might connect to a Russian novel of that period. Dostoyevsky portrays a lot of the details of daily life that let the reader almost stand in the characters setting.Dostoyevsky has a lot to say, and it seems he tried to get in all into this novel. The book seems to have elements of all his past work. I thought parts of the book were beautiful and I was drawn to it. But most of the time it was slow reading, and I found myself reading it to finish, rather than savor it. I want to read it again, perhaps in my dotage, because I fear I missed things. But, I would probably read some of his other works first.
—Brad
A looooooooooong, long book that took me months to read. Some of the passages were so long winded that I needed to take a notecard and read them line by line. But once you got over that initial hurdle, there are a great deal of interesting things you learn from this book, which feels like a microcosm time capsule of Russia in the mid 1800s. Purification through suffering, parricide, faith and doubt, and shining moments of goodness and good feelings surrounded by an abyss of treachery and emotion pretty much sum up this book.It kinda gets me that, though this book was nearly 800 pages, you never really find out what happens to Mitya or Ivan in the end. If you've read Dostoevsky's book The Idiot, the character who contracts brain fever at the end of the book never really recovers and ends up dying, and from that experience, I can't imagine any other fate for Ivan. I really dug the cover for this version. I tried reading the Brothers Karamazov online and then eventually turned to this version, because Larissa Volokhonsky's translation is much more fluid, and she adds a lot of notes in the back of the book for you to much more understand the meaning of Dostoevsky's words.
—Stacy
