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Comment by artemonster | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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 :)

There were many classic novels forced via English class that I actively disliked. Most of Melville gives me an eye twitch to this day. But C&P clicked with me and my friend group. We all loved the weeks we spent on it, discussing in class, and it remains a book I re-read every few years.

This is heresy, but if you skip the chapters in Moby Dick of asides, it's a pretty gripping story. There's a reason why Star Trek keeps stealing Ahab's best lines. I like some of the chapters of asides, but they're really not what makes the book a classic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Would rewriting it in Rust solve some of these problems?

Probably, yeah.

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

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?)

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