The Light of “The Brothers Karamazov”

https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-light-of-the-brothers-karamazov

by lermontov • 9 months ago

28 22 9 months ago

r33b33• 9 months ago

There is a special place in hell for people who share locked articles.

In this case it suffices to disable javascript. The article loads in full and the paywall is generated on the client side.

koziserek• 9 months ago

Or reader mode + refresh.

bloudermilk• 9 months ago

Funny to see this pop up as I’m reading this book for the first time currently. I’m about half way through and have enjoyed the story so far. The writing is often frantic and sometimes exhausting to read, but it certainly keeps one’s interest. I’ve been surprised to find the social commentary so resonant with life today. I’ll wait to read this review until I’ve finished the book.

Free to download from Standard Ebooks for anyone interested: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fyodor-dostoevsky/the-brot...

carabiner• 9 months ago

It's hard to imagine anything like this making it to publication today. "Ghoulish rigamarole," I've heard it called, that'd be written off as crankish.

johngossman• 9 months ago

On the other hand, a lot more books are published now. There are a lot of books, especially in the genre of experimental literature, that are stranger and more difficult than this. I'd classify Infinite Jest or any of the Irving Welsh books as more ghoulish and harder to read, and those are almost mainstream compared to some things.

Popularity is another matter, but then literary fiction has never been popular, almost by definition, compared to genres: romance, mystery, etc.

furyofantares• 9 months ago

https://archive.is/0fvla

CjHuber3• 9 months ago

In my opinion the author of this article makes the same error as Nietzsche did. Seeing it as a book about psychology that revolves around theological themes, when it is a book about theology that revolves around psychological themes.

What I find quite problematic is how it fully inverts what the Grand Inquisitor is about through its oversimplification. Its not an indictment of Christ, it’s about an indictment of Christ, but in fact it‘s Christ who is exposing the institutional church , how Ivan views it, with the only thing it ironically doesnt ‘t expect of him: a deeply Christian act

Alyosha is quite literally introduced as the hero of the novel, so saying his presence pales in comparison to Dimitry and Ivan is kind of weak. I‘d agree that his spectacle pales in comparison to his brothers, but his presence not at all.

bayareapsycho• 9 months ago

Seeing it as a book about psychology that revolves around theological themes, when it is a book about theology that revolves around psychological themes.

I don't think Dostoevsky's Christianity is genuine. It feels about as genuine as Hegel's Christianity. To both of them it's just a convenient prop where their actual ideas take center stage

Every nihilist main character that he writes follows this pattern where they do something really bad, then destroy themselves as some kind of act of penance. This is the only way that conversion happens in his books. But in this case, it's obviously just a way of processing guilt (and reenacting the author's trauma from near execution most likely)

Maybe I'm psychologizing religion too much, but I don't think religious belief is genuine if it's rooted in some kind of (obvious) psychological trauma

The one thing that stands out in Dostoevsky is the psychological depth of the characters, especially in Demons

CjHuber3• 9 months ago

That is very interesting to read as I view him as very genuinely Christian. I would not agree with your description of the nihlist characters. I see it that mostly the (self)destructive acts are earlier nihilist actions and only then after facing and having accepted the consequences, the repentance emerges like in Crime and Punishment. The ones that stay nihilistic and don’t repent at all still face destruction.

alexey-salmin5• 9 months ago

I like Dostoyevsky and enjoyed many of his books but the Brothers in my opinion is just badly written: long and self-repetitive. It has moments of clarity and beauty like the The Grand Inquisitor novel or the discussion in the monastery, and ideas in the book are compelling but boy it's an ordeal to get to them. So my advice: if you want try Dostoyevsky please don't start with "the masterpiece", pick any other book of his. Crime and Punishment, the Idiot or short novels like The Gambler are a good start. You can get to the Brothers later if you chose to.

Another thought I had been having when reading the book was that Dostoyevsky uses insanity and especially insanity caused by stress way too often, it's a major plot device in his books while it's so rare in real life. However now I observe many of my friends (especially single ones) slowly going insane in various ways and I don't anymore think that it's rare. I guess mental health becomes scarce as you get older just like the physical health, just didn't expect this to manifest itself around the age of 35.

telesilla• 9 months ago

I left the Brothers to the last, after loving Dostoyevsky especially as a young person - his shorter books really speaks to the youth sense of rebellion while questioning that - and eventually I tried the Brothers several times, the last being this year on a very long car trip as an audio book. I just couldn't.. It's obtuse and the storytelling gets in the way. I stopped listening and succumbed instead to reading various reviews and summaries to get the gist of it. So thanks for your comment, and everyone else's here - I now understand a bit better the parts I skipped.

Is there a good film or TV production available?

dustypotato• 9 months ago

I gave up after reading 20% . Felt like it wasn't getting anywhere. Then I read the summary. Didn't get the point of it either. Maybe it's just me

testdelacc13• 9 months ago

I love this book so much. If anyone here attempts to read I’ll only say this much - the second quarter of the book (25% to 50%) can be a bit of a slog, but after that it becomes hard to put down. The sense of urgency in the story won’t allow you to.

This book is also notable for me in that I fundamentally disagree with one of the author’s main idea - that humans need religion as a source of morality. At least, that’s how I interpreted Ivan’s fate - he went mad trying to make sense of the world without God, purely through a rational lens. This disagreement with the author doesn’t matter to me though, because the book is a work of art. That much was clear to me, even as I was turning the pages for the first time. The vitality and detail of each of the characters, especially Dmitri - only a great artist could do that.

I also wonder how Dostoevsky would have felt, if he had written his book 150 years later. While our world was far from perfect, it is far from the universal misery of Tsarist Russia, where serfs starved to death. I feel like you can’t make sense of life in those circumstances with religion explaining why there’s so much pain in the world, so I understand where he was coming from. But would he still have felt the same even if life was substantially better for most people?

Lastly, if anyone can explain to me - why do they call Agrafena Alexandrovna Grushenka? Is this a standard nickname for Agrafena, like Alyosha is for Alexei? I feel like everyone in the novel just took the name for granted, like it was normal to call someone a little pear.

alexey-salmin5• 9 months ago

This book is also notable for me in that I fundamentally disagree with one of the author’s main idea - that humans need religion as a source of morality.

I think in Dostoyevsky's world it's not just religion that is necessary but specifically God: "If there is no God, everything is permitted". Which is a different question, e.g. I agree with you on the part where one can get by without God, but I also think that religion is necessary in a sense that any set of beliefs complex enough to guide you through life is indistinguishable from one.

Lastly, if anyone can explain to me - why do they call Agrafena Alexandrovna Grushenka? Is this a standard nickname for Agrafena, like Alyosha is for Alexei? I feel like everyone in the novel just took the name for granted, like it was normal to call someone a little pear.

Apparently so, it's hard to tell for sure because the name had completely fallen out of fashion. I was about to write you that I never met anyone who come by that name, however I started reading about it and was quite surprised to learn that Grunya is another short name for Agrafena and one of my great-grandmothers had that name. Never heard anyone call her Grushenka though.

moritzwarhier• 9 months ago

The edition of Crime and Punishment that I read had an appendix with a detailed character listing mapping characters to their nicknames (and giving an overview of their relationships also I think): I was so grateful for that.

I am bad at tracking things like character's surnames already when books call people by different names, I probably wouldn't have been able to enjoy the book as much as I did without this help.

testdelacc13• 9 months ago

I see where Dostoevsky was coming from. God and religion helped him process the grief of losing his little boy. I cannot possibly speak about how I’d process grief like that.

I feel like I have a set of principles that boils down to “treat people how you would want to be treated”. But those principles don’t cover situations like the one Dostoevsky or his characters found themselves in.

This is a fundamentally gentler world than the one he lived in. Maybe in this world we can rely on the State preventing situations where “Everything is permitted”, as Ivan was worried about. Maybe people aren’t as desperate as the people were in Tsarist Russia. They’re not exposed to as much violence, and so don’t feel compelled to commit that themselves.

The Light of “The Brothers Karamazov”

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