withdraw with honor; connections

Some kibbitzers and readers have complained about The Brothers Karamazov, have admitted to feelings of boredom and frustration.

Hear ye, hear ye: Unless you are a student and need a good grade on your Karamazov midterm, unless you are a lover trying to woo a professor of Russian Literature, there is no good reason to slog through this novel.

When you reach the end of Book Three/Part I (pg 160), pause for a moment and reflect. You've given the Brothers a fair shot and have read a representative sample; the sophistry will rarely get cleverer than "Disputation" (1.3.7); the soap opera will never be cattier than "The Two Together" (1.3.10); the psychology will never penetrate deeper than Dmitri's "Confessions" (1.3.3-5); and you've seen your share of violence (1.3.9), and taken your share of spiritual punishment (too many passages to cite).

If you've reached this point and are not engaged, close the book and never open it again--no one will fault you for it. The Brothers Karamazov is not for everyone; the wonder is that anyone could find it appealing.

And yet I do find it appealing, despite all I wrote in my last post, which you must have guessed was largely a posture, which was, in fact, a weak attempt at a pastiche. For me one of the book's strengths lies here, in Dostoevsky's habit of championing arguments he does not believe, and giving them to his favorite characters; and of perverting ideas he does believe in, and giving them to his villains.

Balaam's Ass just gave us two wonderful examples of this: first, Papa Karamazov's delirious rant on the hooks and iron and forges of hell; and second, Smerdykov's absurd syllogism on the power of faith. In both cases, Dostoevsky raises legitimate questions about the tension between religious belief and modern logic, questions central both to his thinking in general and to this novel in particular; but in both cases, he raises them through fools and deviants--the characters you would least expect to voice them.

What is the purpose of this technique; or, perhaps safer to ask, what is the effect?

In part it is what separates The Brothers Karamazov from a philosophical treatise, what makes it a novel--albeit an unusual one, albeit one nearly unique in the canon: the technique humanizes the philosophy, it connects the aspirations of the intellect and the soul, with the dirt and the stink of this wretched earth. And such connections are what this book aims to demonstrate and even, in its own small way, helps to create: they are the links between 1879 and 2008--between czarist Russia and the democratic United States, between dead Dostoevsky and the living reader; and they are the links between you and me, and perhaps also between the two of us and Something Great and Beyond.

Why Is Such a Book Printed!

The story starts strong. The introduction is perfectly crazy, and then the opening chapters have everything you could want in a novel: drunkenness, orgies, a suicide attempt, family warfare, hints of murder, a cast of misfits ... By the end of the third chapter, I lost count of the deaths.

Then comes "Elders." The narrator states, "I ought to say a few words [...] about what, generally, the elders in our monasteries are"; and my response is, you ought not to have wasted our time.

This chapter, Mr. Dostoevsky, is almost inexcusable. It is hard enough to read a 130-year-old novel, let alone an 800-page 130-year-old novel, let alone a Russian 800-page 130-year-old novel ... It is hard enough to keep your billion character-oviches separate in our minds.

How dare you, Mr. Dostoevsky, ramble for pages about Mount Athos and the Ecumenical Patriarch? How dare you tell us about Paissy Velichkovsky and his disciples, and your favorite "most aged monks," one of them "famous for his great silence and remarkable fasting"? Your charade, Mr. Dostoevsky, depends on this assumption: "I am a canonized novelist, so you must worship everything I write, you must convince yourself that my whims and my editors' neglect are not whims and neglect, but proofs of my genius"; why not drop the charade, Mr. Dostoevsky, and just waterboard us?

For this is obviously what you want: for the reader to suffer, for us maybe to become -- I don't know -- closer to God by suffering. Well thank you, Mr. Dostoevsky, thank you for bringing me to the "true kingdom of Christ. " But I'd thank you still more if you left literature to your friend Count Tolstoy, and spared us the "Ultramontanism" puns. (Could anything be less funny?)

Questions for the readers:
1) How often do Alyosha and the elder make love? ("Alyosha lived in the cell of the elder, who loved him and allowed him to stay by him [...] of course he also liked it.")
2) What the hell is a hieromonk?
3) Do people really read this book for pleasure, or is it only read for reputation--or by assignment?

book club -- first reading

Much as TV series and seasons often start and end with double episodes, The Brothers Karamazov began when its first and second books were published together in the January 1879 issue of The Russian Herald.

Imagine yourself there: a St. Petersburg winter, a nation without elections or free speech or good dentistry, a bottle of vodka on your table and a Georgian prostitute in your filthy bed. Then the mail arrives, and with it your favorite "thick journal," the Herald. You light your third cigar of the morning and pour yourself a fourth vodka. You are fifteen years old.

Turning the pages, you see a piece about the Tsarina, and how lovely she looks in ermine. Then there's another piece, something on France and its political failings -- you skim it, knowing you'll need a bon mot on the topic for Anna Scherer's soiree tonight. Next you see a full-page advertisement from a company that leases charwomen: "Does your divan smell like Dianka? Try our women, who always use soap ... " You turn more pages, passing over an article about the new Mussorgsky opera -- who cares, you hate Mussorgsky, you met him at a restaurant and he stank like a goat -- still more pages turn, and then ... Double Dostoevsky! What a treat.

Members of the book club are now invited to read "From the Author" and Books One and Two ("A Nice Little Family" and "An Inappropriate Gathering"), which together in the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation constitute the book's first 91 pages. (We can skip Pevear's introduction for now.) I'll post something around August 16.

invitation to a book club

In the tradition of this blog's phenomenally successful series on Harry Potter, next month we will launch a discussion of another genre-busting line of books, (albeit a line now almost always read as one continuous and enormous volume), the bloody and soulful Brothers Karamazov.

We invite all kibbitzers and readers to join us as we read and comment on Dostoevsky's "longest, richest, and most capacious book" (The Washington Post Book World). We'll even have a guest kibbitzer, and we hope you'll join the fun.

We will be reading it slowly, and we will be reading it (at least in part) as a mystery/crime novel: How does heavy D. measure up to Agatha Christie or Sir Arthur Doyle or Dennis Lehane or Raymond Chandler? Does the story still fascinate, or is it all just philosophical blah blah blah?

Expect our first posts in early August. In the meantime, pick up a copy of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.