[HN Gopher] One can scarcely help clarifying him: on the Brother...
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One can scarcely help clarifying him: on the Brothers Karamazov
Author : Caiero
Score : 40 points
Date : 2023-07-30 04:48 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
| toinbis wrote:
| Read crime and punishment. Do highly regret time wasted reading
| an author of nazzi nationalist imperialist country which is
| conducting genocide in Ukraine. Forget Dostoyeski ever existed.
| Only talk about thr war crimes Russia is currently conducting.
| Why would anyone upvote this?
| Arainach wrote:
| This article seems to end abruptly - it's written by the
| translator of a new edition, talks a bit about the history of the
| book, goes into alleged issues with two popular translations and
| then stops before ever explaining anything about the new
| translation or how and why it addresses those issues. Did I miss
| something?
| [deleted]
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| I got the same feeling and the author being the translator of
| such exhaustive literary pieces, one wouldn't expect this to
| end so quickly and unfulfilling.
|
| > "The reader will have to read the novel and decide the case
| as they see fit."
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| House of the Dead and The Gambler are both highly underrated in
| my opinion.
| dang wrote:
| House of the Dead was Tolstoy's favorite and it it was on his
| bedside table when he died.
|
| The Gambler has a hell of a backstory -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152240. And since
| gambling was Dostoevsky's own addiction, the intensity has a
| personal quality.
|
| Also fabulous is The Double, which was the second thing he
| published, and still one of his best.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| I did not care for Crime and Punishment. It takes forever getting
| in; you spend like six and a half hours... You know, I can't get
| through, I've never even finished the book.
|
| 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.
| nanidin wrote:
| I think the buildup in Crime and Punishment is what makes the
| resolution so good. I distinctly remember a point where the
| book delivered the most intense literature derived frisson I
| had ever experienced.
|
| It was a bit of a slog and I've never been tempted to pick it
| back up, but it was worth it.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Tale of Dad Victory:
|
| Teenagers had to read "non-western" novel for class.
|
| Child's friend picked Crime and Punishment.
|
| I steered child to Siddhartha by Hesse.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I can see how one may reason non-westerness of Dostoyevski,
| but - Hesse as non-western!? Isn't he Swiss?
| SubGenius wrote:
| I guess the subject matter is eastern/Buddhist in nature?
| Not sure what GP meant.
|
| 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.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Siddhartha being about Buddha was enough to qualify. I
| hadn't read it since college, but remembered how short it
| was ...
| jfk13 wrote:
| Maybe it's just a personal thing; maybe it's partly about the
| translation you pick. But I remember reading Crime & Punishment
| back in my 20s (without any expectations or background
| knowledge), and I found it absolutely gripping.
|
| [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.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| I read Notes from The Underground and his other short stories
| first in High School, never read more verbose prose with so
| few insights. I had searing hate for having spent the little
| money I had on that collection and that probably colored my
| opinion of Crime and Punishment.
|
| 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.
| drdaeman wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| >a sludge of random ravings beating around the bush of
| expected outcome
|
| 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".
| abhaynayar wrote:
| Looking at other comments here and elsewhere, I believe with
| Dostoevsky's work, it's binary -- you either love him to death,
| or you are bored of him to death. Glad to be in the former camp.
|
| 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.
| shortlived wrote:
| Crime and punishment was riveting. "Brothers" was a slog. Maybe I
| didn't make it far enough through. This comes from someone who
| lived in Russia and enjoys Russian culture.
| artemonster wrote:
| 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.
| practice9 wrote:
| 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?)
| [deleted]
| jszymborski wrote:
| 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
| scorxn wrote:
| 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 :)
| _gmax0 wrote:
| 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.
| carabiner wrote:
| 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.
| ogurechny wrote:
| Would rewriting it in Rust solve some of these problems?
| carabiner wrote:
| Probably, yeah.
| SubGenius wrote:
| 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.
| mdanger007 wrote:
| 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.
| andyjenn wrote:
| Try reading just the Grand Inquisitor chapter and see what you
| think.
| SubGenius wrote:
| > While Crime and Punishment (1866) is frequently cited as the
| "quintessential Russian novel," Dostoevsky's final novel, The
| Brothers Karamazov (1880), is widely acknowledged as his greatest
| literary achievement.
|
| 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.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| About 25 years ago, after being absolutely blown away by _Crime
| and Punishment_ , I gave _The Brothers Karmazov_ a try, and was
| disappointed to find it was very soap-operaish. I really couldn
| 't care less who was sleeping with whom or about the other
| petty melodrama in the book.
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Well-known older influential works tend to be where things
| that have become cliche came from.
| globuous wrote:
| If you liked war and peace, you should check out grossman's
| life and fate, it's WWII's version, fantastic. And blacklisted
| by the soviet government because critical of it.
| SubGenius wrote:
| Definitely looking forward to reading this soon. Thanks for
| recommending it, friend!
| dmvdoug wrote:
| I don't understand how people don't like _War and Peace_ ,
| aside from its size and the weird discursive turns he takes
| in the appendices. I've read it three times and every time
| it's a page-turner. So good. But Tolstoy was an infinitely
| better literary artist than Dostoevsky could ever hope to be.
| (Tolstoy's novella, _Hadji Murad_ , is 100 pages of literary
| crystal, cleverly concealing itself from you as you look on
| through the transparent glass of words into the world Tolstoy
| points out to you, until you realize the whole thing is just
| Tolstoy and his astonishing talent).
|
| But Dostoevsky had the real big heart, and I love him for it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| its hard to equate "quintessential Russian novel," with the
| book Crime and Punishment, here... much closer to Kafka or
| Camus. Crime and Punishment is worthy literature for certain,
| but "quintessential Russian novel," doesn't fit..
| dmvdoug wrote:
| I was always partial to _Demons_ (a.k.a. _The Possessed_ ) and
| _The Idiot_.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Brothers Karamazov is supposedly really good, but it remains
| basically the only book I've started but never finished.
|
| 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.
| jszymborski wrote:
| The book is a slog, and frankly I think I'd have appreciated
| it much more if I read a heavily annotated edition.
|
| 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.
| causality0 wrote:
| I think you mean "a heavily abridged edition", unless you
| think a lot of background info is what's missing from your
| experience.
| jszymborski wrote:
| No, I think what I was missing was some insight into the
| symbology or themes.
|
| 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.
| stoolpigeon wrote:
| I've tried 3 times. Haven't made it through yet.
|
| 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)
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(page generated 2023-07-30 23:02 UTC)