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?