One can scarcely help clarifying him: on the Brothers Karamazov

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/one-can-scarcely-help-clarifying-him

by Caiero • 3 years ago

65 80 3 years ago

I did not care for Crime and Punishment. It takes forever getting in; you spend like six and a half hours... You know, I can't get through, I've never even finished the book.

The thing I hate about most "great" fiction is it's rarely made better by the theatrics of it. I'd much rather read the author's anecdotal opinion instead of an overdrawn lie that's subtextually getting to that same point, except taking more time and little entertainment along the way.

readthenotes12• 3 years ago

Tale of Dad Victory:

Teenagers had to read "non-western" novel for class.

Child's friend picked Crime and Punishment.

I steered child to Siddhartha by Hesse.

thriftwy• 3 years ago

I can see how one may reason non-westerness of Dostoyevski, but - Hesse as non-western!? Isn't he Swiss?

jfk13• 3 years ago

Maybe it's just a personal thing; maybe it's partly about the translation you pick. But I remember reading Crime & Punishment back in my 20s (without any expectations or background knowledge), and I found it absolutely gripping.

[eta:] On the other hand, some years later I got totally bogged down in Brothers Karamazov, and (rarely, for me) didn't finish the book.

hotdogscout3• 3 years ago

I read Notes from The Underground and his other short stories first in High School, never read more verbose prose with so few insights. I had searing hate for having spent the little money I had on that collection and that probably colored my opinion of Crime and Punishment.

I don't get literature culture in general. I love art. In my view art is aesthetics denouncing intention and information through symbology.

What I don't get is why something like In Search of Lost Time from Proust, which I love, is THAT much better than Diary of a Wimpy Kid, when it sometimes explores a lot of similar ideas except using a different aesthetic.

Is the value in art to be judged by how prestigious the aesthetics imply said art to be? Some SpongeBob SquarePants episodes have the same depth as a great Azimov short story except that's really far from how they're categorized.

nanidin• 3 years ago

I think the buildup in Crime and Punishment is what makes the resolution so good. I distinctly remember a point where the book delivered the most intense literature derived frisson I had ever experienced.

It was a bit of a slog and I’ve never been tempted to pick it back up, but it was worth it.

SubGenius4• 3 years ago

While Crime and Punishment (1866) is frequently cited as the “quintessential Russian novel,” Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), is widely acknowledged as his greatest literary achievement.

I have to agree. It's unparalleled. Notes from Underground is really good too.

Speaking of Russian literature, I finally managed to finish rereading War and Peace recently after a decade+. It was long and slow, but easier this time around. I listened to The Cossacks on audiobook as well, and liked it quite a bit.

globuous• 3 years ago

If you liked war and peace, you should check out grossman’s life and fate, it’s WWII’s version, fantastic. And blacklisted by the soviet government because critical of it.

SubGenius4• 3 years ago

Definitely looking forward to reading this soon. Thanks for recommending it, friend!

dmvdoug3• 3 years ago

I don’t understand how people don’t like War and Peace, aside from its size and the weird discursive turns he takes in the appendices. I’ve read it three times and every time it’s a page-turner. So good. But Tolstoy was an infinitely better literary artist than Dostoevsky could ever hope to be. (Tolstoy’s novella, Hadji Murad, is 100 pages of literary crystal, cleverly concealing itself from you as you look on through the transparent glass of words into the world Tolstoy points out to you, until you realize the whole thing is just Tolstoy and his astonishing talent).

But Dostoevsky had the real big heart, and I love him for it.

Enginerrrd• 3 years ago

Brothers Karamazov is supposedly really good, but it remains basically the only book I've started but never finished.

The beginning is sooo boring. It takes over a hundred pages for them to even get to be at the same place at the same time where something even could happen. I gave up right at that point, which supposedly is when it gets good.

stoolpigeon• 3 years ago

I've tried 3 times. Haven't made it through yet.

Tolstoy on the other hand, Anna Karenina I binged and had done in like a week (on vacation, reading a good portion of my time)

jszymborski3• 3 years ago

The book is a slog, and frankly I think I'd have appreciated it much more if I read a heavily annotated edition.

That said, excerpts from the book stand so incredibly alone. The Grand Inquisitor speech, the Father Zosima passage, Mitya's troika ride, Ilusha's funeral...

I found The Idiot a far more approachable book.

dmvdoug3• 3 years ago

I was always partial to Demons (a.k.a. The Possessed) and The Idiot.

pmoriarty• 3 years ago

About 25 years ago, after being absolutely blown away by Crime and Punishment, I gave The Brothers Karmazov a try, and was disappointed to find it was very soap-operaish. I really couldn't care less who was sleeping with whom or about the other petty melodrama in the book.

I also recently came back to Crime and Punishment, and found that while it has some of the greatest passages I've ever read in any book, passages that are full of keen psychological penetration and empathy for deeply flawed people, there's also a lot of corny, cliche material in it: the murderer with a heart of gold, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the consumption poor mother sacrifices everything for her chldren, etc...

These sorts of characters might not have been cliche in the 19th Century, but they certainly are today.

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

Well-known older influential works tend to be where things that have become cliché came from.

DontchaKnowit2• 3 years ago

Murderer with a heart of gold? The protagonist is a wretched coward from start to finish.

taneq• 3 years ago

These sorts of characters might not have been cliche in the 19th Century, but they certainly are today.

It's interesting how older works that were new and special at the time start looking generic and derivative decades later after inspiring a bunch of now-common tropes. Lord of the Rings if published today would be generic derivative fantasy because it has elves, dwarves (with a 'v'), halflings etc. and generally is just imitating Lord of the Rings.

offices• 3 years ago

Quite a lot of the plot depends on Raskolnikov being sickly and fainting at inopportune moments. In modern fiction, this would be considered contrived. It's also not just a case of modern expectations being shaped by influential novels from the past because older literature avoids the same problem.

I get that it's not really 'the point' and not why people love Crime and Punishment but it is a barrier to appreciating it.

I preferred & loved The Brothers Karamazov but it suffers from a similar, more justified problem: critiques on the Russian Orthodox church and prophet worship don't have much relevancy to a modern, western, atheistic audience.

mikhailfranco• 3 years ago

I recommend the 1979 BBC dramatization of Crime & Punishment, starring John Hurt as Raskolnikov.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0078590/

mistrial9• 3 years ago

its hard to equate “quintessential Russian novel,” with the book Crime and Punishment, here... much closer to Kafka or Camus. Crime and Punishment is worthy literature for certain, but “quintessential Russian novel,” doesn't fit..

boredhedgehog• 3 years ago

It would have been so helpful and on topic if this and every other comment on Russian literature had stated which translation they used, or if they read the original.

artemonster• 3 years ago

I never understood fascination with his books, especially on the west. I was forced through "Crime and Punishment" by our school system and tried (for the 3rd time) reading The Brothers Karamazov in my mid 30s - its all so boring and pointless and I was only driven by my curiosity to find what other people are finding there (and failing). So, a genuine question for the people that found "Brothers Karamazov" good - what was good about it? The linked article just sings pointless accolades.

andyjenn• 3 years ago

Try reading just the Grand Inquisitor chapter and see what you think.

jszymborski3• 3 years ago

I was always told re C&P in school: "The crime was to assign it, the punishment was to read it".

Karamazov was much harder for me to read than C&P or The Idiot, and I liked the other two best.

That said, it's well worth it to read the famous passages, they are incredible prose

scorxn• 3 years ago

Super interesting to read everyone's opinions about C&P. I too was force-fed lots of classics in school, and practically always resorted to CliffsNotes. For whatever reason, C&P struck such a chord with me, I "couldn't put it down", won a scholarship writing about it, and got to skip a bunch of Lit classes in college :)

carabiner2• 3 years ago

Someone on /lit/ called Brothers Karamazov a "ghoulish rigmarole." I struggle to see the enduring value of the work. I got 100 pages into it on a 9-hr flight without wifi. There's nothing quotable or apparently salient. Kindle version had no popular highlights, unlike Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I just hear vague proclamations about how great it is but no specific insights, passages, or takeaways. I can think of tons of quotes, characters in AK that resonated but nothing seemed to ever happen in BK.

ogurechny• 3 years ago

Would rewriting it in Rust solve some of these problems?

QuesnayJr4• 3 years ago

No one has ever referenced the Grand Inquisitor passage to you? I find that hard to believe.

SubGenius4• 3 years ago

The book (Karamazov) essentially deals with very fundamental moral and spiritual issues like pain, suffering, the problem of evil etc. You'd have a better time appreciating it if you put yourself within the context of when the book was written, and the religious sensibilities common at that time.

Maybe it's harder to appreciate it now, I can definitely understand why it would be.

mdanger007• 3 years ago

There is a point in suffering where you feel you're losing your mind. There is a point in finding grace that is equally delirious. The novel swings from one end to the other and maybe best of all, leaves so many questions about life seeded in you to grow.

practice9• 3 years ago

Dostoevsky was a prominent antisemite of his time which was very trendy and cool in the late Russian Empire.

Western scholars love him for some reason (as the study of the constantly ongoing brutality of Russian culture, perhaps?)

_gmax0• 3 years ago

It's his personal study on human nature fictionalized as a mundane story. The meat of the work isn't the plot, but the interactions between the characters, which each are supposed to represent various personality archetypes and world-views they subscribe to.

It's also interesting to consider each character (disregarding minor characters) all of as an orthogonal dimension of a single person (by no means scientific): the inner-monkey (Dmitri), hyper-intellect (Ivan), spiritual/altruistic (Alyosha). From this perspective, the work is a solipsistic study on how inner-conflict manifests outwardly into the world.

wrp• 3 years ago

Writers and readers of literature trend as either character-oriented or plot-oriented. Literary critics, showing a traditional prejudice, call stories of the first type "literary fiction" and the second type "genre fiction". Dostoevsky’s works are definitely character studies, so looking for a well-structured plot is missing his aims. My own preference is for plot-based stories, so I find most of the great "literary" novelists, like D. H. Lawrence, rather unengaging.

thinkingemote• 3 years ago

Interesting point about the west. Apparently Dostoevsky wrote the novels in a western style, altering the Russian style to be more like his western contemporaries like Dickens and other readable novelists. (He still wrote in the russian language of course)

I don't think the intention was to appeal to the west but I think it does make it easier for westerners today to approach and appreciate his work.

Arainach• 3 years ago

This article seems to end abruptly - it's written by the translator of a new edition, talks a bit about the history of the book, goes into alleged issues with two popular translations and then stops before ever explaining anything about the new translation or how and why it addresses those issues. Did I miss something?

l5870uoo9y• 3 years ago

I got the same feeling and the author being the translator of such exhaustive literary pieces, one wouldn't expect this to end so quickly and unfulfilling.

"The reader will have to read the novel and decide the case as they see fit."

jamesliudotcc• 3 years ago

It feels like a very truncated version of the translator's preface. Maybe someone will post a review.

I am partial to Pevear and Volonkhonsky. I find the English fine, despite everyone complaining it is too close to the Russian. I don't read Russian, so the closer the translator can get me, the better.

abhaynayar• 3 years ago

Looking at other comments here and elsewhere, I believe with Dostoevsky's work, it's binary -- you either love him to death, or you are bored of him to death. Glad to be in the former camp.

I really love how Dostoevsky's novels seem so simple on the surface, yet as you keep reading, they keep getting better, and deeper, and more profound, without losing the simplicity or authenticity. Looking back, The Brother's Karamazov is the best book I've ever read. I was just recently thinking of giving it a re-read, will probably be great to do it in a different translation.

It has happened to me before that a book that I greatly admired felt not so great when re-reading it later (The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, I still feel it's good, but having internalized the core concepts, it seemed way too repetitive on second read). Hope that doesn't happen when I re-read Dostoevsky's novels, I have a feeling I would like them even better, but who knows.

alexey-salmin• 3 years ago

No, not binary. I love the House of the Dead and the Gambler, but Brothers is a soap opera with a few great chapters and passages hiding inside. They don't make the overall experience worth it though.

suslik• 3 years ago

Not necessarily true. I don't find his books boring, but I activelly don't like them. Dostoevsky to me is a reactionary, a regressive religious ideologue to the core - despite all the psychoanalysis.

shortlived• 3 years ago

Crime and punishment was riveting. “Brothers” was a slog. Maybe I didn’t make it far enough through. This comes from someone who lived in Russia and enjoys Russian culture.

StanislavPetrov2• 3 years ago

House of the Dead and The Gambler are both highly underrated in my opinion.

dang5• 3 years ago

House of the Dead was Tolstoy's favorite and it it was on his bedside table when he died.

The Gambler has a hell of a backstory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152240. The book itself was one enormous real-life gamble, which he won by a hair. Since gambling was Dostoevsky's own addiction, the intensity in the book has a personal quality.

Also fabulous is The Double, which was the second thing he published, and still one of his best.

StanislavPetrov2• 3 years ago

House of the Dead was Tolstoy's favorite and it it was on his bedside table when he died.

Very interesting, never heard that, but I'm not surprised! Incredibly raw depiction of human nature. Much less verbiage than his other works but very profound.

Also fabulous is The Double, which was the second thing he published, and still one of his best.

Flabbergasted I haven't read this yet. Got a copy on they way, thanks for the heads up!

rex_lupi2• 3 years ago

I nearly lost my habit of reading novels, and it's been quite some time since I indulged in fiction. Recently, I decided to try Dostoevsky. I'm currently engrossed in Crime and Punishment, and I'm going to finish it today. absolutely addicting. my next read will be Notes from Underground.

yetihehe• 3 years ago

Anyone else has 403 Forbidden on this domain?

frereubu• 3 years ago

I read The Brothers Karamazov in my early 20s and after the first 100 / 150 pages or so, which as other have mentioned felt like quite a slog, I was blown away by it. I tried to read it again around 20 years later and it felt wildly overdone. As Borges said, if you get bored reading a book then it wasn't written for you, but I think that needs an addendum that it wasn't written for you at that point in your life. Perhaps I'll enjoy it again later on - the pressures of work and a family do mean that I find myself having very little time or patience for melodramatic people in my life, and I wonder if that has spilled over into my appreciation of novels!

jevgeni2• 3 years ago

With HN’s fascination for fascist artists, I’m surprised Leni Riefenstahl isn’t featured more prominently on the front page. But it’s only Dostoyevsky.

dang5• 3 years ago

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines a lot lately. That's not ok. I appreciate that you have deep reasons to feel strongly about the war, but you've been breaking HN's guidelines in plenty of other contexts too. If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to do that, so if you'd please take the intended spirit of the site more to heart and comment within that, we'd appreciate it.

jevgeni2• 3 years ago

My last comment before this one was 56 days ago. You are not exactly making a case for your argument.

As to the ban - I asked you to delete my account years ago and you refused. So it's not something you can credibly threaten with, if I don't care. What I do care is you retaining my personal data against my will. But if I need a ban for you to purge it - please go ahead.

Maybe some helpful feedback for you: I would be more inclined to pay attention to the guidelines if those were not used to reinforce the site's obvious political biases. Yeah, you *say* HN is neutral, but for some reason only a certain kind of opinion gets promoted. I've read this site for 12 years in one account or another and the groupthink has only gotten worse. How are you going to solve this?

One can scarcely help clarifying him: on the Brothers Karamazov

Related Stories