One can scarcely help clarifying him: on the Brothers Karamazov
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laphamsquarterly.org
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.
But Dostoevsky had the real big heart, and I love him for it.
Easy, try mandatory-reading it in the summer when you’re around 15. I told my teacher that I will not do it and I don’t care what comes with it.
For me it’s absolutely the other way around. Dostoyevsky saw into men’s souls in a way no other writer perhaps barring Shakespeare could. Tolstoy for me is more mechanically or technically good, but Dostoyevsky was a true artist and saw through life and humanity at another level.
> But Tolstoy was an infinitely better literary artist than Dostoevsky could ever hope to be.
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.
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)
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.
My copy of Master and Margarita has such incredible endnotes, without which I really dont think I would have appreciated it.
My Penguin Classics copy of Karamazov just has very short translation clarifications and didn't really improve my experience.
I understand why you might think i meant abridged though, since I was saying that the book is a slog but that it had great passages. I personally didnt mind the length as much as I felt I wasn't getting the most out of the "boring" parts.
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.
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.
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.
> "The reader will have to read the novel and decide the case as they see fit."
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.
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
Maybe it's harder to appreciate it now, I can definitely understand why it would be.
Western scholars love him for some reason (as the study of the constantly ongoing brutality of Russian culture, perhaps?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Since you like his other novels I should warn you that it's unlike those - it's a cross between later Dostoevsky and Gogol, as well as a late variation on the doppelganger trope. It's tragicomic but hilarious. It shows its influences but it also shows D's unmistakeable qualities.
The social-literary critics of the time threw D into the literary doghouse for it. But it was the one book of his that Nabokov loved. I know whose good opinion I'd rather have!
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.
Teenagers had to read "non-western" novel for class.
Child's friend picked Crime and Punishment.
I steered child to Siddhartha by Hesse.
I liked that book when I was young but a recent reading didn't leave me super impressed.
My absolute favorite book by Hesse is Narcissus and Goldmund, it's beautiful. The Glass Bead game is pretty amazing too.
I can’t. Dostoyevski’s Russia is still very much European. It’s culturally a lot closer to what was produced in my own Western European country at the time than anything written in the USA at the same period. But the very idea of the western civilisation is dubious anyway.
[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.
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.
Being a native Russian speaker, I've been forced to read Crime and Punishment in high school, and for me (personally, subjectively) it was very difficult to read. Obviously, I had no clue what the heck the fuss was about (because I utterly lacked the historical context - history and philosophy courses weren't there yet, a badly designed school program to be blamed), but three key points I still remember are weird original premise (in retrospect, I see how it was possibly constructed - a Frankenstein's monster of utterly exaggerated Western ideas perverted into a faux killer agenda), a sludge of random ravings beating around the bush of expected outcome until some arbitrary breaking point, and a catharsis and ensuing "enlightening" of sorts, where Dostoevsky had "won" his shower debate and reiterated his views. The language was good, but I had issues with the rest. Purely subjective opinion, of course.
I thought this exact thing while trying to read it. "Is he a coward and can't just state his thoughts? They don't seem so assblasting genius he needs so many pages to get there."
I'm from Brazil and most of our classic literature boils down to a cranky rich old man complaining a lot and strawmanning the kinds of people he doesn't like.
If he's a leftist it'd be rich people, if he's conservative it's the degenerate decadent youths.
>Professional critics and their opinions is the worst thing that could've happen to art (edit: in modern times, to be fair I've no idea about the past and its nuances). People like Tarantino killed some of that pompous nonsense, but world is super inertial (and critics had simply adjusted) so we're still there, with "high" and "lowly" arts.
I didn't know it was because of professional critics. A lot of people seem to repeat the same judgement so I just assumed it were organic popular opinions.
I don't know how others engage with books though. With a lot of "real serious" prosaic author's I'll just have no idea what they're exactly describing so I'll just imagine my own version of it. Whenever the language gets too obtuse I literally cannot get everything the author is talking about.
It's weird for instance that there was even a serious critic's discussion about videogames being art.
"But it's interactive"
living is interactive, our train of thought while reading a book is interactive, our train of thought while watching a movie is interactive, our interpretation of anything in a museum displaying contemporary art is very interactive. You'll see two sticks and a bucket and the artist will claim that's his wife.
Why are some mediums (books, sculptures) given much more inherent credit than videogames or movies or hacker news comments? Isn't it all just the meme of prestige?
I feel most comments here, certainly yours, have more thought and ideas behind them in a shorter format than a lot of important books.
Why is the behaviour of analyzing art, for all it's endless self deconstructions, still limited by the museum space or the book/movie/game format and more importantly it's social expectation to do so?
There's a quote from a Netflix series called Sense8 that I love:
"Art is like religion. For the believers, it's everything. For anyone else, it's just a pile of bullshit".
1. We're used to art being created by individual artists, not a team of people.
2. Video games are often mindless and commercially motivated.
3. Video games didn't emerge from high society.
I think number 2 was valid for the longest. But all of them are slowly crumbling. They'll be increasingly seen as an art form, because they are.
Something I find fascinating is just how often that people will think, when they discover that other people have different opinions from them, that they can't really mean it. They must be lying, or be making some sort of mistake, or (in your case) they are incapable of thinking clearly. The truth is that it's crazy, unpredictable world. Sometimes people sincerely like Notes from the Underground and don't like Sponge Bob Square Pants.
It was a bit of a slog and I’ve never been tempted to pick it back up, but it was worth it.
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.
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?
This is an illusion. Everyone with strong political passions feels like the site is "obviously" biased against them. Your counterparts on the opposing side of any battle are equally certain of this. This is a reliable phenomenon and seems to be a function of how political passions work. It's not an accurate reflection of either the community or the moderation, no matter how obvious it feels.
> My last comment before this one was 56 days ago.
I'm responding to the preponderance of guideline-breaking comments in your HN comment feed.
Re deletion: it looks like you emailed us 7 years ago. Since then a lot has changed; we still don't delete entire account histories but we can randomize the username and/or do other things.
The search “site:https://news.ycombinator.com/front Qunanbaiuly” (major Kazakh author) yields no results.
The search “site:https://news.ycombinator.com/front Shevchenko” (major Ukrainian author) yields no results.
The search “site:https://news.ycombinator.com/front Gogol” (major Ukrainian author that russia tries to appropriate) yields 1 article about russian theater!
The search “site:https://news.ycombinator.com/front Taamsaare” (major Estonian author) yield no results.
But the search “site:https://news.ycombinator.com/front Dostoevsky” yields 5 results.
5 > 0. Not an illusion.
Russia is known for using Russification as a method of oppression and genocide [1]. Dostoyevsky’s views are also pretty well known and their existence is not a matter of partisan opinion. If you are talking about Dostoyevsky, you are talking about core beliefs of russian fascist thought [2].
By preventing criticism of this, you are not neutral. This is not a political or ideological issue. It is a moral, humanist issue. And you know that.
> ... but we can randomize the username and/or do other things.
Please do those things in my case.
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[1] - https://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/-/the-forcible-transfer-an...
[2] - https://war.ukraine.ua/articles/origins-of-rashism-ideology-...