I thoroughly enjoyed Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and White Nights, but I'm finding myself slogging through Karamazov. I'm about 600 pages in and its picking up at least. Banking on it all being worth it in the end. Normally I subscribe to the quote "life's too short to read a bad book", but making an exception for Dostoyevsky.
I started with Karamazov, then C&P, then the Idiot.
I loved excerpts of Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor, Dimitry's troika ride, any passage with Grushenka) but I also found it rough to get through. I really don't think I was ultimately able to appreciate it as a whole.
C&P felt much smoother and finally I devoured The Idiot. Those novels felt like night and day compared to Karamazov.
With Karamazov, I feel like there is some subtext or context I'm missing and would have loved to have had a companion text or course to help me.
When I first Master and Margarita, it came with incredible footnotes, and rereading it again I found I sometimes recalled the footnotes more than the text. I recommended the book to a friend, but their edition didn't have the footnotes so they bounced right off it.
Anyway if anyone knows of an edition better than the Penguin Classic of BK I'm all ears.
Ha. I love Karamazov. To me, it boils down to a love affair/triangle and case of mistaken identity and ultimate justice. But in true Russian lit fashion, you must pass through the absurd with a detour through morality and human nature.
edit: I read the Barnes and Noble translation. And I would encourage reading some passages aloud.
I had the same experience, lol. I started with Crime and Punishment expecting thinly veiled philosophy where each character is a mouthpiece for one of the author's thought processes. Granted there's some of that, but I wasn't expecting such an exciting murder drama. Went into Karamazov expecting an exciting murder drama, and got the type of Russian literature I initially expected Crime and Punishment to be! Really it's a question of expectations.
Yeah I've picked it up and put it down multiple times over the past year, might have had some context loss. Theres been a few very lucid monologues I've enjoyed, but I haven't felt the same level of internal revelation as the previous novels.
To give you one idea of the approach - the accurately translated title is The Karamazov Brothers. Every other translator chooses the usual way because it sounds grander or eccentric or just because that’s how others did it before them, even though it’s simply incorrect as a translation.
P&V - one of them edits without even knowing Russian, a polar opposite
Karamazov is basically YA fiction though. Find other works if you’re not into it as an older adult, it’s fine
One thing is a lot of common television/movie tropes are instantly recognizable in one form or another in there, the murder in Crime and Punishment is a series of coincidences and lucky timing for him to initially get away with it that would not be out of place in modern thriller or comedy. I had the same issue with the names so I took notes and bookmarked the Wikipedia page for the books to refresh my memory of whom was whom until it stuck. Audiobooks (most of the russian classics are free from my local library)help a lot with the pronunciation if one is like the writer and pattern matches names - hearing them a few times initially is very helpful. Side note - not a sea person but only from audiobooks learned i didn’t know how to pronounce English words boatswain, gunwale and forecastle.
What disginguishes Dostoevsky is his attention to detail and this unusual ability to describe someone inside and out with a voice that finds some sort of intrinsic fascination with the person no matter how dark, dingy, flawed, or just plain strange they are. It's like he withholds judgement without being clinical. His writing is peppered with these sketches, filled with insight, and it's not just a still-life - he manages to weave in these character studies with action and interaction. Most of us look out and see a lawn, boring and inert. He looks out and sees a lawn comprised of individual blades of grass, growing in soil of a specific kind, some weeds, cut some time ago, insects striving and fighting and dying and reproducing, the effects of weather and sun and shade making microclimates from which whole communities of life escape from or to....if there is anything to learn from him it is his gorgeous attention to details that we know are there but have long since ceased bothering to note.
Awareness. He learned it when he was (as he thought) about to be executed.
As he wrote to his brother the same day:
"When I look back into the past and think how much time has been wasted, how much of it wasted in delusions, mistakes, idleness, in the inability to live; how little I cherished it, how many times I sinned against my heart and my soul — my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could have been a century of happiness. Si jeunesse savait!"
One of my professors, so long ago that I can't remember which*, said it was not a who-dun-it but a why-dun-it.
The murder scene itself is so vivid that it's easy to forget that the long middle of the novel is the cat-and-mouse game between him and the detective whose name I forget.
Lol, remember being in my early 20s on a train and trying to read Crime and Punishhment, and just kept skipping random 5 pages here and there, before going back to playing Durak with some random Tajiks (who got kicked off the train in some random place...). The huge pages of French didn't help.
Prefered Demons, personally. Probably becuase I read it when more mature.
I also stumbled onto Crime and Punishment at 18 and expected it to be difficult and was blown away with how Dostoyevsky wrote one of the greatest novels of all time, to be sure, but as the author here says, also how engaging he made it.
The scene where he commits the crime is an absolute stunner, edge-of-your-seat, thriller. Who does that? Who can pull that off? Dostoyevsky
Dostoyevsky was originally published in magazines chapter by chapter, so he would end the December’s on a cliffhanger so that the readers re-subscribed
If you can read more than one language, try reading translations into two or three different ones. It'll give you a different view of a book you enjoy: the translations will all have a different feel, in my experience.
I can't imagine how much amazing and important literature you'd miss if you were snobby enough to think that you could only read things in their original language.
I'm so glad I get to read the Russians and Kafka and Calvino and Murakami and Camus and Marquez and Homer and Plato and, heck, the Bible.
I do know the feeling. I struggled through the start of My Brilliant Friend because I ought to read it in Italian, because I speak it pretty well. So then I didn't read it for years. Finally I just read it in English and enjoyed myself.
A translation is by necessity a work of both the author and the translator. There have been some amazing pairings such as Kafka translated by Edwin and Willa Muir. I don't think a translation necessarily diminishes the original work or the reader.
I know the feeling. Reading Don Quixote in English would be cheating.
Then again, so would reading Shakespeare in Spanish - even though I'm more comfortable reading in eng, I'm better in Spanish than i am 500 year old English
Funny, I'm just reading War and Peace myself (the Anthony Briggs translation) and having the same reaction, gushing occasionally to people I know how approachable it is, and how darkly funny and modern it feels. Well, at least after passing through the first ~200 pages which are a slog. I didn't find even Tolstoy's historical musings boring, although he tends to repeat himself. And I usually suck at names, but the main characters are done so well I find them easy to remember. There aren't that many important ones despite how it seems at the start. It also serves as a fascinating peek into the daily lives of Russians of all stripes in the early 1800s.
I also had the same reaction to Crime and Punishment as the OP did.
Read those first 200 pages 10x could never get past it. 300 characters with names that I’ll never remember, some woman and her son, a general or something. A guy that keeps saying “Capital!”, standing around at parties.
I’m sure it’s good but I don’t think I have it in me to try again.
I swear it took me six retries to make it past the start. But if you have six hours the BBC adaptation is pretty good IMHO and captures many of the essentials of the book if not all the details. The show made me cry and the book did not have the same effect but maybe that was because it focused on certain aspects. I particularly remember the combat scenes in the book would have been difficult to match - the prose capturing the chaos and randomness of brutality in the neighborhood of D Day landing in Saving Private Ryan but with horse cavalry charges and cannon fire.
I liked The Possessed by Elif Batuman. I had read The Idiot in high school, a death march for a term paper. But I liked Batuman's reading of it better than mine (but not enough to re-read it).
> The Possessed (2010), The Idiot (2017), and Either/Or (2022)
That's like publishing Hamlet (2010), King Lear (2017), and Thus Spake Zarathustra (2022). I wonder what her thought process is in choosing these titles? And what will her next work be?
I have never read a book I hated more than The Brothers Karamazov. I never read a book that depressed me more than Crime and Punishment. No more Dostoevsky for me.
From the circles I am exposed to Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations are not seen as the most natural ones (although they are the only ones I have read because of the cool abstract paperback covers). I have heard they miss anecdotes and humor in favor of word accuracy. Characters are always "twisting their mouth" and similar. I'm looking forward to re-reading Demons in some other translation. He might have been well served by Garnett.
The Pevear and Volohonsky "translations" are an affront to english prose, russian literature, and the craft of translation in general. A heavily quantized LLM with an aneurism would provide the reader with a better translation than that trash.
(I used to be a professional translator for the relevant languages, so I have opinions™)
This rings a bell, because I decided to tackle Don Quixote (English translation). At 200 pages in (of around 1000, I think), it’s funny and entertaining and feels fresh.
Many of the subplots have been reused for entire romance movies, and lots of the mini adventures would not be out of place in something like Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as odd as that sounds.
He isn't difficult but I always thought Nabokov (in his fairly incendiary reviews http://wmjas.wikidot.com/nabokov-s-recommendations) was on point that he was sentimental, preachy and mediocre as an artist.
I found Dostoyevsky a slog to get through and it might have been made worse because he was sold to me as this 'great psychologist' when psychological realism is often missing from his stories and characters become page-long megaphones for some version of Orthodox Russian nationalism or Christianity.
I think Nabokov definitely has a point with brothers. Ivan's portrayal and brain fever always struck me as a cop out because Dostoyevsky couldnt actually articulate what was wrong with his ideology. Of course thats kind of the point, but still it always felt cheap and clumsy to me
LMAO he's saying russian lit is readable when using the most bastardized, westernized translations available, Garnet. That was the point of her work and what P&V sought to rectify when they put out their vastly more faithful renditions.
Don't really know what point you're trying to make here. Maybe Garnett is more westernized, but that doesn't make it more readable. IMO Garnett's not great (at least for Anna Karenina, which is all I've read by her); from what I've read P&V is more readable than Garnett.
War and Peace is one of those books I've reread every decade since I was a teenager. It's one of my favorite novels because, as I've matured and moved through different stages of life, the parts that resonate with me change significantly. Each rereading feels like encountering a different book, not because the words have changed, but because my own life experiences have shaped what draws my attention.
I'm sure many books offer this experience, but War and Peace explores the human condition across a lifetime in a way few novels do.
I loved excerpts of Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor, Dimitry's troika ride, any passage with Grushenka) but I also found it rough to get through. I really don't think I was ultimately able to appreciate it as a whole.
C&P felt much smoother and finally I devoured The Idiot. Those novels felt like night and day compared to Karamazov.
With Karamazov, I feel like there is some subtext or context I'm missing and would have loved to have had a companion text or course to help me.
When I first Master and Margarita, it came with incredible footnotes, and rereading it again I found I sometimes recalled the footnotes more than the text. I recommended the book to a friend, but their edition didn't have the footnotes so they bounced right off it.
Anyway if anyone knows of an edition better than the Penguin Classic of BK I'm all ears.
edit: I read the Barnes and Noble translation. And I would encourage reading some passages aloud.
But if you're 600 pages in and it's a slog you might have lost the train of thought of the novel.
It is a lot to keep in your head!
To give you one idea of the approach - the accurately translated title is The Karamazov Brothers. Every other translator chooses the usual way because it sounds grander or eccentric or just because that’s how others did it before them, even though it’s simply incorrect as a translation.
P&V - one of them edits without even knowing Russian, a polar opposite
Karamazov is basically YA fiction though. Find other works if you’re not into it as an older adult, it’s fine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8OwyqvSh2g#t=438
As he wrote to his brother the same day:
"When I look back into the past and think how much time has been wasted, how much of it wasted in delusions, mistakes, idleness, in the inability to live; how little I cherished it, how many times I sinned against my heart and my soul — my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could have been a century of happiness. Si jeunesse savait!"
The murder scene itself is so vivid that it's easy to forget that the long middle of the novel is the cat-and-mouse game between him and the detective whose name I forget.
* I think I remembered. Thank you Roman! https://www.dignitymemorial.com/en-ca/obituaries/calgary-ab/...
Prefered Demons, personally. Probably becuase I read it when more mature.
The scene where he commits the crime is an absolute stunner, edge-of-your-seat, thriller. Who does that? Who can pull that off? Dostoyevsky
A lot of 19th century novels were published as serials. The TV of their time I suppose.
With the final installment arriving by ship, crowds in New York shouted from the pier "Is Little Nell dead?" - https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-old-curio...
I'm so glad I get to read the Russians and Kafka and Calvino and Murakami and Camus and Marquez and Homer and Plato and, heck, the Bible.
I do know the feeling. I struggled through the start of My Brilliant Friend because I ought to read it in Italian, because I speak it pretty well. So then I didn't read it for years. Finally I just read it in English and enjoyed myself.
Then again, so would reading Shakespeare in Spanish - even though I'm more comfortable reading in eng, I'm better in Spanish than i am 500 year old English
I also had the same reaction to Crime and Punishment as the OP did.
I’m sure it’s good but I don’t think I have it in me to try again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_Batuman
That's like publishing Hamlet (2010), King Lear (2017), and Thus Spake Zarathustra (2022). I wonder what her thought process is in choosing these titles? And what will her next work be?
Edit: except for The Double.
(I used to be a professional translator for the relevant languages, so I have opinions™)
Looks like there are English subtitles that are quite decent.
I found Dostoyevsky a slog to get through and it might have been made worse because he was sold to me as this 'great psychologist' when psychological realism is often missing from his stories and characters become page-long megaphones for some version of Orthodox Russian nationalism or Christianity.
If ever we needed you...
"Oh? Not even Dostoyevsky?"
"Oh come on now, he was the main offender."
- The Guard
I'm sure many books offer this experience, but War and Peace explores the human condition across a lifetime in a way few novels do.