Pun Salad

Every so often I get the feeling that I'm overindulging on literary junk food, that I really should eat some bookish vegetables. I was inspired by this post, where Steven Landsburg details his impressive 2011 summer reading. Among his conquests was The Brothers Karamazov, which he deems "Arguably the greatest novel ever." Landsburg was merely echoed Freud, who opined that TBK was "the most magnificent novel ever written". OK, fine, I can try that. I checked out the Peavar/Volokhonsky translation, deemed to be pretty good, from The University Near Here's Dimond Library. Their translation had a somewhat Biblical cadence; I almost felt like it should have book/chapter/verse numbering.

It was tough going, although I finished in time to get the book back to the library without incurring an overdue fine.

It's the epic tale of the Karamazov family, headed by the father, Fyodor, who is, by all accounts, a very bad guy. Abusive toward his (two) wives, neglectful toward his (three) sons, and just kind of an all-around jerk. He's probably also fathered an illegitimate child via a disabled girl who died in childbirth.

The legitimate brothers are Alexei, Ivan, and Dmitri. Dmitri, the oldest, is a hothead and a wastrel, perpetually enraged in the (accurate) belief that Fyodor is withholding the inheritance he's due from his long-dead mother. The middle kid, Ivan, is (seemingly) the smooth intellectual; he's written a famous essay advocating for a theocratic Russia, while he himself rejects God. Astonishingly, Alexei seems to be a genuinely good person; at the start of the book, he's doing a monkly thing at the local monastery.

There are also a host of other characters, many of which you need to keep track of. What doesn't help you do that is the Russian habit of calling people by different names, seemingly at whim. Thanks to Wikipedia, for example, I can tell you that Alexei is also referred to as " Alyosha, Alyoshka, Alyoshenka, Alyoshechka, Alexeichik, Lyosha, and Lyoshenka." Repeat for the other major characters. Fortunately, the version I read had a small cast-of-characters entry at the beginning that you can consult when you're confused. Which I was, a lot.

Squirreled away in these many pages is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, social commentary, philosophical and religious disquisitions, and sordid soap opera. But mostly talk. All the characters talk to each other, all the time; and they're usually rambling incoherently or lying, either to others, or to themselves. No wonder Freud liked it.

Again via Wikipedia: Dostoyevsky intended the story of the Karamozovs to continue in future works, and it shows: at the end, I found myself saying: "Yes, and then what?" But he died shortly after publication, so we'll never know.

I also couldn't help but reflect that the book was written a few decades before Russia was to slip into a nasty totalitarianism. In the US, on the other hand, Mark Twain was writing stuff about Tom and Huck. And (in contrast to Russia) we kept muddling along with bourgeois democracy. Cause and effect? Over to you, literature majors.