February 1, 2015
What big game? It's "Super Bowl Sunday," and I couldn't care less. There's also been a huge snowstorm that's still going, so what else would I do today besides finish this book, which I've been reading off and on for the last few weeks?
Of course, if I'm going to read Dostoyevsky, I have to go with a Pevear-Volokhonsky translation. This particular one is award-winning. I read some reviews of this work on Goodreads, and I found some comments very interesting. A couple of reviewers, who rated it higher than I intend to, both said that this book must be worth reading because...well, a lot of people say so. I wasn't so impressed with this Russian classic. I'd say honestly that this book was kind of a mess.
The characters themselves were very interesting. Alexei, the youngest Karamazov, is cited as a great literary character, and is certainly Dostoyevsky's intended hero. But I personally thought Fyodor Pavlovich, the family patriarch, was funny. A jerk, of course, and the only crappy thing about his death is that the book got kind of boring after this (or rather, around the time of Dmitri's interrogation). He was so glib and over-the-top. A few people said that Ivan was the most like him, but I didn't see it...in fact, I would have wanted to see more of him in the first part of the book, and less in the second. I think Ivan maybe wanted to be like his father, to live for pleasure and to the devil with the rest, but he was too much of a thinker.
Dmitri was straight up crazy, and I totally would have believed that he killed his father, except that Dostoyevsky made it really really obvious that this wasn't the case, long before Smerdyakov confessed to the crime. See, there are technically four Karamazov brothers, as Fyodor Pavlovich had raped a crazy homeless woman years before. She died after birthing the child in the outhouse in his garden, and the household servants raised him themselves. He probably knew his father better than the "legitimate" sons did, as they were all sent off to be raised by other people after the deaths of their respective mothers. Apparently, Smerdyakov didn't kill his father for money or vengeance, but rather because he thought Ivan wanted him to...at least that's what he claims.
The first half of the book, for the most part, was very exciting. I didn't really care about the chapters taken up by the elder monk Zosima's life story. This book definitely has a religious message...maybe about how, at a time of change in Russia, many people were renouncing religion and this was a bad thing. Alexei, who almost becomes a monk but is advised by his dying mentor Zosima to be a righteous layman, is the only religious one in the family. He is respected by pretty much everybody (except Rakitin, a hypocritical douche anyway), and he's the only one of his brothers at the end with a decent future ahead of him. So yeah, Dostoyevsky definitely felt like mother Russia needed "our father in heaven."
Anyway, the first half of the book, with the explanations of the feud between Dmitri and his father, kept my interest. But things started to go downhill around the time that Dmitri was falsely arrested for his father's murder. It was just too obvious that it was Smerdyakov, so there was no tension or suspense here. The trial was the worst part. Dostoyevsky narrates like it's a local person, unnamed but acquainted with the Karamazovs, telling the story. He "forgets" certain details of the trial, yet can recall word by painful word the closing arguments made by the prosecution and the defense...each of which took me over an hour to read. The defense attorney made some interesting points, but it just so long. It got very boring, to the point where I was frustrated.
There's a side story about a young boy named Kolya, who is hilariously precocious. If I met him, he would have made me laugh...but he respects Alexei for taking him seriously, though he's not quite 14. Kolya had once been a friend, then an enemy, of a poor kid named Ilyusha. Ilyusha had been humiliated when his father had been dragged around town by the beard by a drunk and hostile Dmitri, and the other boys ganged up on him. Alexei takes an interest in the boy's family, and when Ilyusha becomes deathly ill, he helps all of the boys to make amends, and they offer support to the dying boy and his unfortunate family. Ilyusha dies, but the boys all respect Alexei for helping them to do the right thing. Alexei ought to be a teacher, I think.
I haven't said much about the principle female characters, Grushenka the whorish and Katya the bitter, but I don't have much to say about them. Dostoyevsky, like Tolstoy, doesn't seem to like women much. There are no redeemable female characters in this book. Then again, most of the male characters are fucked up, too.
As I've said, I'd never read an abridged text or translation. However, I can't help but wonder if an abridged translation of this book wouldn't be more enjoyable. I'll end with this: it'll take me a long while to work myself up to reading Crime and Punishment. I think I've fulfilled my Russian quota for awhile...
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