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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Doestoevsky

14:01 / 09.10.03

Right, I‘m on a novel reading kick at the moment and rather than being sensible and reading the entire output of PG Wodehouse in a radox bath full of bubbles, I have started Doestoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I’m not that far in, but so far it seems to largely be about Russians being poor and hungry and depressed about it. At great wordy length in an irritating style. Vicennes has just started a fun novel thread and thus far, he seems the antithesis of this. I’ve a feeling I’m possibly being a tad dismissive here so I thought I’d start a thread where you can give the D-Man some love. If you like Doestoevsky why? – simply. Same if you hate him. I’d like to hear people’s reactions to C & P as well, consideration of recurring themes and motifs in his work, that kind of thing. Is he worthy of the critical acclaim he’s been given? Will post my thoughts on the book if/when they change.

15:24 / 09.10.03

I don't know how far you are into Crime And Punishment, but it does get better as it goes on - I wondered where the universal acclaim was coming from for the first fifth or so too. However, the part which is entirely Russians being poor, hungry and depressed (a feature apparently fitted as standard in almost all 19th century Russian literature) is mainly setting the scene for precisely how grim things are going to be when the paranoia starts to bite -and it's very well written paranoia. Once it moves away from the entirely descriptive, too, it's pleasingly well plotted. Hope that's enough to make it sound worth persevering with (because I think it is)...

On the minus side, however, you never really come to like Raskolnikov any better, just to know him better. (And Doestoevsky never stops writing like the anti-fun, either, you just get more drawn in.)

The Return Of Rothkoid

22:59 / 09.10.03

It's very... Russian. I don't know how to explain it. I first read C&P when I was dating a Russian girl, and I swear that half the interchanges were like her family life. Honestly. That's what sold it to me...

01:19 / 10.10.03

Notes from the Underground is far more rewarding.

wembley can change in 28 days

06:05 / 10.10.03

I'm a big fan of Dostoevskij (note pedantic living-200-km-from-st-petersburg-spelling). I read Notes from the Underground when I was in high school and got a big kick out of the intellectual superiority of it, because I was 16 and intellectually superior.

A boy I was in love with loaned me The Brothers Karamazov, and though it was 600 pages, such was the extent of my crush. I enjoyed that book, but again much of that came from the pleasure of being seen reading it. Then I read The Possessed, and something changed - it took a long time to read but I didn't mind. In every sentence there was substance, something so heavy and real I could practically touch it. I was still young enough that the emotional actions of the characters seemed a bit mad, but easily explained by passion (the sort that I had and nobody else around me did except for my friends, Beethoven, and Tori Amos).

Since then I've read some Tolstoy and noted the difference: Tolstoy is funny. He's like a high-quality soap opera artist. Dostoevskij's characters are darker, their questions and problems aren't unreasonable but are highly dramatic, which is why I'm enjoying The Idiot right now. The stakes are so high for them - for example, I might think "does God exist?", and worry about the implications either way, but in these novels that kind of question is given full weight. It's extreme - which may be as Rothkoid suggested quite russian. And I really like that. Plus I don't find his prose boring in the least, it's meditational.

07:09 / 10.10.03

Thanks for the responses, people. I am about 50 pages more in now, and it is starting to get quite gripping. I knew I was being ig'nrnt. It is very ... intense though, isn't it, as you say. Raskolnihkov isn't a likeable character in the least, at least to me, thus far, which doesn't help. But it's still becoming a bit of a page turner. I think it maybe that intensity of prose - meditational, as you say, Wembley - is something I'm not used to in a novel. Enjoying it a lot more though. Perhaps it's just the lack of lightness or respite in his prose that's tough to read.

But there is this:

"I believe that you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don't be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude...."

Which I think is from Notes from the Underground. A work colleague recently lent me some Hal Hartley short films, in one of which the main character is an English teacher obsessed with that passages. Very odd films, more like with experimental plays than narratives with 80's stylings which look odd now. But very good nontheless. "Surviving Desire" it's called.

12:01 / 10.10.03

Wembley, I'd be interested to know more of what you're enjoying about The Idiot : I found that to be difficult in every sense of the word, and don't think I got as much out of it as I could have done...

Brigade du jour

03:56 / 11.10.03

Good on you for reading C & P. It is hard going but personally I've got a weird take on it because I read it right after Ulysses, so it was a bit of a walk in the park. A walk in a dingy, grey park strewn with dead leaves and shadowed by a filthy gunmetal sky, that is.

At the very least it is, as has already been pointed out, a really good study in paranoia. I mean, I could actually see this guy Raskolnikov while I was reading it, failing to sleep on his tired, dilapidated sofa. Here's a tip, incidentally - read books like this on a bus, at night. That's what I did, and it provided just the right well-lit sensory deprivation.

wembley can change in 28 days

12:43 / 16.10.03

Vincennes - I hardly know where to begin. As always, I'm finding that reading Dostoyevsky is like running though four feet of warm mud - it's slow going, but it feels good while you're there. I enjoy the fact that characters repeat themselves. I love the fact that they actually speak like real people, only with the volume turned up. But the intensity doesn't come from witty vocabulary or throw-away jokes. I find that when reading conversational scenes I'm dying to see them staged. They have that intricate balance of Chekhov, where you read it and think at first that they're not talking about anything, and only by really digging through between the lines can you discover the possibilities of each character's true desires. And I don't know... I spend my whole days writing marketing text and reading snappy, rolling-stone prose, and with Dostoyevksy there's no pretense. He just does it.

And of course he waxes philosophical to an extent that my normal-speed brain is ready to find horribly boring, but somehow I welcome these long passages on death and beauty. You have one character who will wax poetic, then three others who will show a more pragmatic view, and then the Idiot himself will half-reneg on his theory without giving it up entirely, and he balances each character so delicately...

13:44 / 17.10.03

Well, I'm generally a lurker, but I suppose I'm ready to post on this topic as I've read most of his stuff, and I'm a huge admirer. I've got a number of points to raise, sorry. Firstly, The translator is very important. Contemporary translators tend to shorten sentences for modern sensibilities, which make the books more readable. Secondly, I read his work in my early 20s, when I was much more pretentious than I am now (it's 10 years on). His books are, generally, a philosophical conceit wrapped in an engaging narrative. In C&P, very simplistically, the idea is: is it OK to do something bad, to a bad person, if you feel that you are superior and that good will come out of it? It's the same argument, answered in the affirmative, used to invade Iraq. These same moral questions are eloquently examined in the book. Similarly, there is a passage in the Brothers Karamazov containing the greatest point-counterpoint of the argument between individual freedom and strong leadership (the legend of the Grand Inquisator - basically Jesus Christ vs Torquemada). Personally, I believe he is one of the highest, most humane and balanced thinkers we have the privilege to read. He also writes a great story. I would thoroughly recommend his shorter novels and stories, plus I would hope that you put his work into context by reading his predecessors (start with Pushkin, then Gogol) and his contemporaries (in Russia, Chekhov, Turgenev & Tolstoy; elsewhere Kierkegaard & Nietzsche - although you can argue about the dates, and the spelling). My final point is that you must remember that in the middle of his writing career he was sent to Siberia for 7 years. At the end of that time he was led out to be executed, fitted with a hood, and was pardoned at literally the last minute. That would make you think.

Written in a hurry following a Friday 'lunch' - cheers!

13:43 / 19.10.03

The Brother Karamazov is one of my favorite books of all time. I read it a few years ago, found it so meaty that I haven't read anything else of his. I'm also intending to take on some Tolstoy when the weather turns a bit.

I was really taken by Dostoevsky's ability to shape complex characters. His fictional creations are somehow realer than the live human beings I know. And collectively, the family K runs the gamut of possible lives. It seams to me that he must have lived each of these facets, he knows them so well.

08:53 / 20.10.03

Some of his shorter works are also worth a mention, especially The Gambler, which he wrote in a few weeks to fulfil a contractual obligation to his publisher, the result being a furious piece of writing that is thoroughly absorbing.

I was really taken by Dostoevsky's ability to shape complex characters. His fictional creations are somehow realer than the live human beings I know.

Another of his shorter works, A Nasty Story, is a great example of this, as well as being an incredible portrayal of an utterly horrible social situation.

06:54 / 21.10.03

Giant Anteater: Yes, after a few days break I've just reached the part in C & P where he appears to lay out that central philosophical conceit. My impression is that given the paranoia and madness of someone like Raskalnikov, Dostoevsky is coming down in the negative about these presumptions. Maybe there is a parallel between R. and George Bush....I've also got to say now I've got used to the atomosphere of unremitting darkness, I enjoying it a lot. I'm really beginning to appreciate what people have said upthread about the depths to his characters, well, at least Raskalnikov - he seems to get right into peoples heads and all the twists, turns and self-critques our internal dialogues run through.

Seems to be appropriate to be reading it at this time of year as well as it gets colder and the wind whistles through the leafless trees....

22:05 / 05.12.03

The quote about love in action's from Brothers Karamazov (sorry if somebody already mentioned this, a bit tired and might have missed it). There are a number of things that Dost. does very well, but my favorite is the way that he puts his large ideas and questions into a very open-ended human form. His characters are extreme but not at all caricatures. If you write yourself you know that's damned hard to do. And unlike some heavy writers his works have juicy plots that keep you really engaged (or at least kept me engaged).

A note on translation, I agree that it's improtant to find one that's not horribly stale. I'm abou;to start reading the Idiot with a book club and version we've settled on is translated by Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky. They seem to be tackling a number of impressive projects and doing very well, though I have not yet examined their work closely and cannot personally vouch for it.