Nov 29 2008
Brothers Karamazov…what was it about again?
This is another Book (or two books, actually) Without ISBN, and this set was another of the ones given to me by my aunt, from her own university days. It’s interesting to look at some of these books and realize what she must have been studying. It says a lot about her, and tells me how very much alike we’ve always been.
The funny thing about these books is that I had them long before I really got going on my interest in Russia and Russian language. Or rather, I’d had a bit of interest from that hockey series in 1972, if you remember. But it wasn’t until I was in university in 1982, and chose to take first-year Russian as an elective, that the interest was really aroused. And there was The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, just sitting there, waiting for me.
So I read it in my first year of university, while I was beginning to study the language.
It was a slog!
I’d really had no idea, until I started this book, just how heavy the Russian novelists were. All the multitude of characters to keep track of! (With their names and patronymics — that is, they were called by the names of their fathers as well as their own names. So Dmitri son of Andrey would be referred to as Dmitri Andreyevich, and Olga daughter of Andrey would be Olga Andreyevna. That sort of thing.) And the convoluted plot!
And then there was the tendency of every single character to act a little wildly and impulsively, and engage in a great deal of emotional breast-beating and agonizing, extended introspection about it.
My gosh, I loved it. It was such a different style and tone and atmosphere from any other novel I’d ever read. Coming from my North American background, I’d still find it hard to deal with on a daily basis, but I loved reading this book just for the novelty of it, and also because it required some work and concentration. It was stretching.
I barely remember the plot now, meaning of course that it’s time I read it again. I do remember that the Great Inquisitor appears in here, discussed by depressed and introspective Ivan, one of the brothers. I remember that Dmitri was the oldest one, but was the one most prone to fly off the handle and do something rash. And I remember that the youngest, Alyosha, was the sweetest. But I barely remember what happened to them.
So yes, time to read the book again. After I fortify myself, and brace myself for another slog.
The nice thing was, as I progressed through university, that as I majored in Russian for a couple of years, I got a lot more used to the Russian novelists. I read a lot of them, for courses such as “The Russian Novel in Translation.” So I dabbled in Tolstoy and Pushkin, read some Lermontov and Gogol, read Turgenev and, yes, more Dostoevsky. (I liked Crime and Punishment rather less than The Brothers Karamazov.) I got quite fond of my Russians.
And what I’d noticed in the Brothers was largely true of most of the characters in the novels I studied: that overdramatic temperament, that tendency to act emotionally and on impulse, that tendency to Feel! Everything! So! Intensely! I was keenly interested in the Soviet Union while I was studying these books, and I marvelled that anyone we saw from that society, out here in the West, always seemed so stolid and controlled. I started to think that what we saw on the surface and what was boiling around underneath, in the so-called “Russian temperament” were two very different things. I loved the mystery of it all.
I probably would have read this book eventually anyway, considering my field of study for those two years. But it’s rather nice that I got a head start with this one, from my aunt’s collection. I’ve never lost my love of the Russian novelists I’ve read, and this is another treasure in my library.
