"The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

An orthodox monastery (though in Romania, not Russia)

This is a huge and complex book and it seems impossible to summarise it in a review. These are my preliminary impressions.

The size of the book
On first impressions, it is dauntingly big. Dostoevsky liked words and never used one when a dozen were available. It could have been shorter. And we must bear in mind what E M Forster, in Appendix A of Aspects of the Novel, says: “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” But, on the other hand, The Brothers Karamazov is often thought to be Dostoevsky’s masterpiece and is generally regarded as a classic of Russian literature. I suspect that is because it endeavours to do so many things.

A murder mystery?
The plot revolves around the murder of a rich old man, Fyodor Karamazov and the subsequent arrest and trial of one of his sons, Dmitry. It was said to have been inspired by a real case involving a man Dostoevsky knew when he was in exile in Siberia; this man was wrongfully convicted and subsequently exonerated of parricide.

It’s not a murder mystery in the conventional sense in that there are only two suspects, Dmitry and the villainous Smerdyakov, and the reader is pretty certain whodunnit. But it follows other tropes almost perfectly. Before the crime, Smerdyakov explains to Ivan, the middle brother, how it can be committed. When Dmitry is in the garden of his father’s house at night, clutching a weapon, there is a pause in the action ... and then he is fleeing the scene and being accused of parricide by an old servant whom he strikes. After the crime, there is a police investigation and the evidence is thoroughly dissected. The novel ends in a courtroom drama. This is classic stuff.

A retelling of the myth of Oedipus?
In some ways Dostoevsky’s story is a retelling of the Oedipus myth. Dmitry was abandoned by his father when he was very young and brought up initially by a servant and then a rich relative far away, as Oedipus was abandoned by Laertes, and taken in by poor folk and subsequently a foreign king. (At Dimitry’s trial the Defence Counsel makes much of this, suggesting that fatherhood is a two-way thing and therefore that this murder can’t be called parricide.) Oedipus accidentally marries his mother; Dmitry is in love with Grushenska, a woman also wooed by his father. So there are links. And Ivan the middle brother also harbours murderous thoughts towards his father, exclaiming (at Dmitry’s trial): “Who does not desire the death of his father?” (12.5) And the alternative suspect for the murder is allegedly the illegitimate son of Fyodor (a bit of a nineteenth-century cliche: always blame the bastard). So TBK has plenty for Freud to get his teeth into.

A romantic farce?
Not only are Dmitry and his father wooing the same woman, Grushenska, but Dmitry is already engaged to Katerina who, in turn, loves and is loved by Dmitry’s brother Ivan (sibling rivalry?). Grushenka is a notorious woman, having an old merchant ‘protector’ and having been ‘dishonoured’ when she was young by a Polish officer after whom she still secretly hankers. Ratikin is courting (for her money) Mrs Khakhlakov but she fancies Perkhotin.

A theological debate
If there is a hero, it is Alyosha, the third and youngest legitimate brother. At the start of the book, he is a monk in the local monastery but he spends an awful lot of his time visiting various different people around the town and therefore acting as a sort of thread binding the story together (although the principal narrator is an anonymous monk living in the monastery).

One of the major subplots involves Alyosha’s mentor at the monastery, the Elder Zosima, a sort of wise guru whose sayings and prophecies are suitable gnomic but whose reputation as a holy man takes a severe knock after he dies and his body goes putrid and smells (the body of a saint is supposedly incorruptible). Another subplot involves Alyosha effecting a reconciliation between warring schoolboys.

His elder brother, Ivan, is an academic and an atheist who has recently published an infamous article which suggests that if there is no God, then everything is lawful. His atheism isn’t absolute. He entertains the possibility of there being a God, but he finds it difficult to believe that this world is that created by God. The root of his disbelief stems from the fact that children suffer and this cannot be reconciled with the idea that compassion is at the heart of Christianity. Ivan is the focus of the theological debates in the book. He is the one who makes up the tale of the Grand Inquisitor which is perhaps the most famous part of the book: Jesus appears in fifteenth century Spain and is arrested and interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor who explains why giving mankind free will was a mistake. Ivan also hallucinates a conversation with the devil.

A book about redemption?
Dmitry realises that the only way he will reform is by spending twenty years in the Siberian mines and therefore he seems to believe that he possesses a nugget of redeemable character. Is this Dostoevsky suggesting that purgatory is the place where souls are redeemed on their way to paradise?

A prematurely postmodern psychological novel
Dostoevsky seems to me to be way ahead of his time in his understanding that people are inconsistent. To take a trivial example: a young girl called Lise (later called Liza) writes a love letter to Alyosha which she then repudiates, telling him it was a silly joke and then repudiates the repudiation, saying she loves him after all.

Dmitry is a more important example. He is a libertine and by his own (frequent) admission a scoundrel but he has a fine sense of honour and he insists he is not a thief. When he has money he splurges it and yet he keeps 1,500 roubles sewn into a bag around his neck. He gets drunk and enjoys women and yet at the same time he is desperately in love with Grushenska. The straight and narrow road is not for him: “I always liked side‐paths, little dark back‐alleys behind the main road—there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt. I am speaking figuratively, brother. In the town I was in, there were no such back‐alleys in the literal sense, but morally there were. If you were like me, you’d know what that means. I loved vice, I loved the ignominy of vice.” (3.4)

Perhaps the most fascinatingly complex character is Kolya. He’s a clever schoolboy and he knows it. He’s vain but sufficiently self-aware to know when he is being boastful. He has rudimentary ideas of socialism and likes talking to the people but he is very patronising when he does. His school fellows admire him as a daredevil because of some of his pranks but he finds it a strain keeping this reputation up. He has a tender heart and is very fond of some young children whom he occasionally babysits. He hates his own name (Nikolay). He talks to Alyosha on equal terms (he calls him ‘Karamazov’) but he knows that Alyosha somehow sees Kolya’s naked soul.

Not all the characters are multi-dimensional. Fyodor Karamzov, the father, enjoys being a sensualist, he boasts about it. He explains to Alyosha why he needs his money: “As I get older, you know, I shan’t be a pretty object. The wenches won’t come to me of their own accord, so I shall want my money. So I am saving up more and more, simply for myself .... For I mean to go on in my sins to the end, let me tell you. For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly. And so all the other sinners fall upon me for being so open. And your paradise, Alexey Fyodorovitch, is not to my taste, let me tell you that; and it’s not the proper place for a gentleman.” (4.2) At the start of the book Dostoevsky suggests that Fyodor accumulated his wealth by sponging, so that everyone always underestimated how rich he was, he also indulges in sharp practices (marrying for money and effectively cheating Dmitry out of his mother’s inheritance); by the time of the action of the novel, however, Fyodor has a reputation for being a rich voluptuary. Is this an inconsistency in the story or is Dostoevsky showing that even when a character is consistent, their reputation can be multi-faceted.

At the end of the book, at the trial, both Prosecutor and Defence Counsel interpret the actions of Dmitry in different ways: as the Defence says “psychology, gentlemen, though it is a deep thing, none the less resembles a stick with two ends” (12.10). It is pointed out that the lawyers are constructing competing stories. It is as if Dostoevsky is saying that there is no absolute truth but that all versions of reality are unreliable narrations, a very postmodern idea.

The unreliable narrator is also a trope of modernist fiction, so perhaps TBK is an early example of that. The ending of the book, which is only partially resolved, is another characteristic of modernism. 

Characters
In the end, the joy of TBK lies in some of the characters. Although I found Alyosha rather empty and bland and Smerdyakov is a purely pantomime villain, other characters are fascinating. My favourites were Mrs Khokhlakov, a wonderfully empty-headed widow, and the brilliant but vain but compassionate Kolya. At the other end of the age spectrum, who doesn't love an unredeeemed rake who takes joy in his wickedness, such as Fyodor Karamzov?

But perhaps the most interesting character is Ratikin. At the start he is almost unnoticeable, the seminarian in the background. But little by little he worms his way into the plot until he is a cross between a secret policeman and an agent provocateur. He is a spy for Mrs K. He takes money from Grushenska to bring Alyosha to her. He pops up everywhere! “It turned out that Ratikin knew everything, knew an extraordinary amount, had been to visit everyone, seen everything, spoken to everyone, and possessed a most detailed knowledge.” (12.2) Is he Dostoevsky's cynical self-portrait, like Velasquez in his Las Meninas? He writes slanderous articles (betraying Mrs K) for the Moscow press when the scandal of the murder breaks. Dmitry even says “He wants to write about me ... and thus inaugurate his role in literature.” (11.4) 

What I didn’t like
As with so many Russian novels, each character has three names: the first name, the patronymic and the surname. They are referred to either by first name and patronymic (eg Fyodor Pavolich) or by surname (eg Karamazov) or, most frequently, by a version of their first name (eg Alyosha, Mitya, Katya, etc). Some characters have more than one such nickname (often different people call them different things and this is a highlight of the book). In some cases we don’t learn the full name of a character until very late on in the book. This caused me considerable confusion at the start, not realising, for example, that Grushenska was also called Agrafena Alexandrovna. I really needed a cast list at the start of the book which listed all possible versions of their name.

The edition I had came with notes which often explained things that I wasn’t very interested in, such as the fact that a certain line was derived from a parody of Pushkin. What I absolutely needed was a translation of the many times that French or Latin was used. In the worst example, the devil tells a joke in French. There is an end-note ... which gives the full joke, still in French, and fails to translate it! Why do editors do this? I’m reading a translation ... but they can’t be bothered to translate anything that’s not Russian. Is it because they don’t know? Or is it because they do know and they expect me to know? Or is it because they do know and they know I don’t know and it is a way of asserting their superiority?

The implication that Smerdyakov was a rotter principally because he illegitimate. All of Fyodor Karamazov's sons get a rough start in life but poor old Smerdy is bullied and looked down on by everyone. The whole Russian economy depends on the peasants but, despite Dostoevsky's reputation as a revolutionary social reformer, his books are basically about the upper-classes, who are presumed, even when they are ill-educated and poverty-stricken, to be intrinsically nobler and worthier and better than the muzhiks. 

All those exclamation marks! There's only so much intensity that one can take. Dmitry lives his life in the fast lane, always seemingly on the edge of catastrophe, and Ivan seems perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Alyosha spends his time running from one crisis to another. It's like watching Macbeth when everyone shouts every line, or a ballet when the dancers never pause. Exhausting! The occasional funny bits, such as when Mrs K tries to interest Dmitri in gold mines, are a welcome relief. 

The narrative was somewhat lumpy. Two whole books (6 and 10) were almost extraneous additions. Book 6 tells of the life and works of the Elder Zosima and is almost completely irrelevant to the plot. Book 10 introduces a new character and acts as an interlude between Dmitry's arrest and his trial.

And, while I appreciate that every character needs a back story, does every character need that back-story told? I suppose these sometimes provided welcome breaks from the intensity of the action but I really didn't need to know, for example, why Zosima became a monk.

Evaluation

Yes it is much too long. There were passages of intricate theological and legal argument when I was numb with weariness. But even an inadequate review like the one above must give some idea of the wealth that is in this book. A classic? Undoubtedly.

Selected quotes:

• “The more I love mankind in general, the less I love human beings in particular. ... In the space of a day and a night I am capable of coming to hate even the best of human beings: one because he takes too long over dinner, another because he has a cold and is perpetually blowing his nose.” (2.4)
• “All these deportations to forced labour, ... reform no one, and more importantly have no deterrent effect, either.” (2.5)
• “It had rats, but Fyodor Pavlovitch did not altogether dislike them. ‘They help to relieve the monotony when one’s alone in the evening,’ he used to say.” (3.1)
• “But I always liked side‐paths, little dark back‐alleys behind the main road—there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt. I am speaking figuratively, brother. In the town I was in, there were no such back‐alleys in the literal sense, but morally there were. If you were like me, you’d know what that means. I loved vice, I loved the ignominy of vice.” (3.4)
• “The ladder’s the same. I’m at the bottom step, and you’re above, somewhere about the thirteenth. That’s how I see it. But it’s all the same. Absolutely the same in kind. Anyone on the bottom step is bound to go up to the top one.” (3.4)
• “As I get older, you know, I shan’t be a pretty object. The wenches won’t come to me of their own accord, so I shall want my money. So I am saving up more and more, simply for myself,.... For I mean to go on in my sins to the end, let me tell you. For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly. And so all the other sinners fall upon me for being so open. And your paradise, Alexey Fyodorovitch, is not to my taste, let me tell you that; and it’s not the proper place for a gentleman.” (4.2)
• “Even in these days the law does not allow you to drag your old father about by the hair, to kick him in the face in his own house, and brag of murdering him.” (4.2)
• “In schools, children are a tribe without mercy: on their own they are heaven’s own angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.” (4.7)
• “The very kindest and best of men are those who are most drunk.” (4.7)
• "If I didn’t believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil‐ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusionment—still I should want to live and, having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty, though, I shall be sure to leave the cup, even if I’ve not emptied it, and turn away—where I don’t know. But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over everything—every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I’ve asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t, that is till I am thirty, and then I shall lose it of myself, I fancy. Some drivelling consumptive moralists—and poets especially—often call that thirst for life base. It’s a feature of the Karamazovs, it’s true, that thirst for life regardless of everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base? The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic.” (5.3)
• “And so Our Lady, shocked and weeping, falls before the throne of God and begs for mercy for all in hell—for all she has seen there, indiscriminately.” (5.5)
• “We had four servants, all serfs. I remember my mother selling one of the four, the cook Afimya, who was lame and elderly, for sixty paper roubles, and hiring a free servant to take her place.” (6.1)
• “Much knowledge soon makes one old.” (7.3)
• “He felt unbearably awkward. All were clothed, while he was naked, and strange to say, when he was undressed he felt somehow guilty in their presence, and was almost ready to believe himself that he was inferior to them, and that now they had a perfect right to despise him.” (9.6)
• “I have, as it were, torn my soul in half before you, and you have taken advantage of it and are rummaging with your fingers in both halves along the torn place.” (9.7)
• “I’ve sworn to amend, and every day I’ve done the same filthy things. I understand now that such men as I need a blow, a blow of destiny to catch them as with a noose, and bind them by a force from without. Never, never should I have risen of myself! But the thunderbolt has fallen. I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame, I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified. Perhaps I shall be purified, gentlemen?” (9.9)
• “The study of the classics, if you ask my opinion, is a police measure, that’s why it has been introduced into our schools. Latin and Greek were introduced because they are a bore and because they stupefy the intellect. It was dull before, so what could they do to make things duller? It was senseless enough before, so what could they do to make it more senseless? So they thought of Greek and Latin.” (10.5)
• “Everything will change , and finally, nothing, they will all be old men staring into their coffins.” (11.2)
• “Everyone says they hate immorality, yet secretly they all like it.” (11.3)
• “De thoughtibus non est disputandum.” (11.4) It’s a rewrite of the philosophical maxim: de gustibus non est disputandum which means ‘you can’t argue over matters of taste’ (that is, if I like something and you don’t, you can’t dispute it) Dostoevsky’s maxim, put into the mouth of Dmitri, is ‘you can’t argue over thoughts ie philosophies’
• “How is man to fare after that? Without God and without a life to come? After all, that would mean that now all things are lawful, that one may do anything one likes.” (11.4)
• “Just try admitting to a woman your guilt ... On no account will she forgive you in a simple, straightforward manner, no, she will degrade you to the level of the floor-cloth, she will find things that never even happened, will take everything, forget nothing, add things of her own, and only then forgive.” (11.4)
• “What would become of an axe in space? Quelle idée! If it were to fall to any distance, it would begin, I think, flying round the earth without knowing why, like a satellite.” (11.9)
• “Who does not desire the death of his father?” (12.5)

February 2024; 985 pages

Other books by Dostoevsky include:

• Crime and Punishment
• The Double
• The Idiot
• Notes From Underground

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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 The breakthrough novel by the winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, this book does what it says on the title: it records a single day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a political prisoner in a 'special' work camp in Siberia. It was first published in November 1962; Soviet leader Khruschev had to give permission for publication. 

Shukhov's day is controlled by the prison guards and by all the little tricks and trades that a prisoner must do to stay alive, such as cheating the cook into providing an extra bowl of skilly for breakfast, and hiding a discovered hacksaw blade (a turning point for the day, occurring at the 50% mark of the book), and buttering up his team leader so her gets an extra ration for lunch, and borrowing tobacco. Throughout his day he is in constant peril of being caught by the guards breaking a regulation and being sent to the cells. The main part of the day involves the prisoners being marched out to a building site and, in sub-zero temperatures, building a wall.

Every moment is described in meticulous detail, told entirely from Shukhov's point of view, unchaptered, and in the third person past tense. The reader is told his thoughts, rather than being left to infer them. This technique added a certain distance and made it more difficult to empathise with the character; I couldn't feel him from the inside but then, as he says on page 23: "How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?" But if I wasn't inside his skin, I was watching from a close distance and admiring and learning how a man with his attitude could survive even such a terrible environment. 

At the end of the day, when he reflects on all that has happened, he decides that it has been a good day. Some critics think this shows the that the human spirit can triumph over the most appalling circumstances. I don't agree. Triumph is the wrong word. The word I would use in its place would be 'endure'. 

But it is a miniature mesmerising masterpiece.

I suspect that a lot of the power of the book comes from the decisions that Solzhenitsyn made while planning it. The decision to write in the third person meant that he was unable to describe the feelings and emotions of his character from the inside, avoiding the possibility that the intensity of those emotions might almost inevitably spill over into melodrama. The decision to restrict the action into a single day, as it were conforming to the Aristotelian unity of time (and pretty much the the other Aristotelian unities , of place and action, as well), focused and concentrated the drama. The setting is bleak which both contrasts with and reflects the protagonist: on the one hand he is warm and human, retaining his individuality despite his surroundings, on the other his use of the third person and his limited opportunities are mirrored by the sterility of his environment. 

Fundamentally, what I believe that Solzhenitsyn was trying to do was to use the day in the prison camp as a microcosmic metaphor for the situation of an ordinary man within a wider society.

Some people are tempted to regard the book as a condemnation of a particular political philosophy but it should be pointed out that political prisoners and slave labour have existed over a wide range of societies. Apart from the environmental temperature, is Shukov's condition much different from that of a slave in the southern United States in the first part of the 1800s? Or a forced labourer in one of Albert Speer's Nazi work camps? And it should also be remembered that Siberian prison camps with forced labour were inherited by the Soviets from the previous Tsarist regimes. 

Selected quotes: (page references for the AD 2000 Penguin classics edition)

NB: 'zeks' are political prisoners

• "Pay short money and get short value." (p 39)
• "How time flew when you were working! ... The days rolled by in the camp - they were over before you could say 'knife'. But the years, they never rolled by: they never moved by a second." (p 56)
• "Moments like this ... were transforming him from an eager, confident naval officer with a ringing voice into an inert, though wary, zek. And only in that inertness lay the chance of surviving the twenty-five years of imprisonment he'd been sentenced to." (p 68)
• "This was according to the rule: one man works, one man watches." (p 84)
• "There are loafers who race one another of their own free will round a stadium. Those devils should be running after a full day's work, with aching back and wet mittens and worn-out valenki - and in the cold too." (p 92)
• "It's pretty steep being imprisoned here with Bendera's men ..." (p 101) The fictional Shukhov was imprisoned because, in WWII, he was captured by the Germans and then escaped and made his own way back to his lines, at which point he was suspected of treason, something that really happened to Russian soldiers. The real-life Stepan Bandera was a right wing Ukrainian nationalist who fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. Even Shukhov, a victim of the Soviet system, is anti-Bandera. This helps to explain the Russian PoV regarding the present war with the Ukraine. 
• "Nothing seems to make the authorities madder than zeks kipping quietly after breakfast." (p 112)
• "The belly is a rascal.It doesn't remember how well you treated it yesterday, it'll cry out for more tomorrow." (p 122)
• "Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em." (p 138)
• "There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. ... The three extra days were for leap years." (p 142; last lines)

November 2023; 162 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Double" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is a delightful short novel by Dostoevsky written in 13 (is this significant?) chapters. It is a classic of doppelganger fiction. 

As with much of D's work, it concerns a very ordinary man, an Everyman, full of the hesitancies and uncertainties that characterise most of us, in an extraordinary situation. D's dialogue really brings this home: the hero's first remark (talking to himself as he looks in the mirror) is: "what a thing it would be if I were not up to the mark today, if something were amiss, if some intrusive pimple had made its appearance, or anything else unpleasant had happened; so far, however, there's nothing wrong, so far everything's all right." Brilliantly ordinary. He is searching his face for spots like any teenager (although he is quite a lot older, we assume). But he is looking in the mirror.

This is just one of many breadcrumbs scattered around in the very first pages. He has already waken up and then laid in his bed "as though he were not yet certain whether he were awake or still asleep, whether all that was going on around him were real or actual."

He goes out, riding in a hired carriage, and is embarrassed to meet his boss. Then he does that thing we all do, he pretends not to notice him. Then he is not sure about this: should he "pretend that I am not myself, but somebody else strikingly like me," he says to himself.

He goes to his doctor although he pretends he is "quite himself, like everybody else" but he is behaving so strangely that the doctor is concerned. The problem, Mr Golyadkin reassures his doctor, is not himself but all the others who are ganging up on him. And he goes off to meet some aristocratic friends in their big house (although the servants have orders not to admit him). On the way he meets some clerks from his office who laugh at him. He is the sort of person, he tells them, who "only mask themselves at masquerades" and his rule is "if I fail I don't lose heart, if I succeed I persevere". But "who's the hunter and who's the bird in this case?"

Then, in the middle of a snowstorm, G meets a man he thinks he recognises but can't quite remember where from. "He would not for any treasure on earth have been willing to meet that man" and he runs away, followed by "a little lost dog, soaked and shivering". He does home to see the stranger sitting on his own bed; the stranger is his double.

And next day the double has started work in his own office.

Next night he welcomes G2 to his home and gives him a meal. But G2 writes a sinister little poem (it reminded me of Sting's stalking song, Every Breath You Take:

"If thou forget me

I shall not forget thee;

Though all things may be

Do not thou forget me"

Things get worse. G2 takes credit for the work G does. G2 eats pies at the restaurant and G has to pay for them. G tries to confront G2 but every time he makes a mess of it. But he knows (we don't) that everything will be all right in the end: "one day, the wolf will have to pay for the sheep's tears."

At last we come to the climactic scene at the end ...

"The door opened noisily, and in the doorway stood a man, the very sight of whom sent a chill to Mr Golyadkin's heart. He stood rooted to the spot. A cry of horror dies away in his choking throat. Yet Mr Golyadkin knew it all beforehand, and had had a presentiment of something of the sort for a long time ... With a crushed and desperate air our hero looked about him."

Classic. April 2016; 135 words.

Originally published in Russian in 1846 and revised in 1866

It was first translated into English by Constance Garnett in 1917

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

A selection of works by Dostoevsky include:

• Poor Folk (1846) 
• The Double (1846) 
• White Nights (1848)
• Notes from Underground (novella) (1864) 
• Crime and Punishment (1866) 
• The Idiot (1869) 
• The Brothers Karamazov (1880) 

"Smoke" by Ivan Turgenev

Waiting to meet his fiancée in Baden-Baden, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov encounters his first love, Irina, a woman who abandoned him because she was poor and she had a financially better offer. The two of them fall back in love. But this means that Litvinov must betray his fiancee. And after all, can he trust Irina this time after what she did last time?

An interesting short story which perhaps suffers from being extended even to this barely more than a novella length.

And it is difficult to read a book where almost every page has a foreign phrase or obscure reference which can only be understood by looking up the notes at the back. It certainly disrupts the flow!

Good but nothing to compare with Fathers and Sons. 

December 2014; 184 pages

"Fathers and Sons" by Ivan Turgenev

This delightful book starts with Arkady taking his hero, nihilist medical student Bazanov, home to meet his doting father who has a small estate where the serfs have recently been freed and are supposed to pay rent. Once home, Arkady discovers that he has a baby half-brother: his father has impregnated a servant girl who is scandalously living in the house but they are not yet married. Bazanov pursues his scientific hobbies, mostly dissecting frogs, and angers Arkady's elegant ex-roue uncle with his politics. After a while the pair go to visit friends and stay with widow Anna and her sister Katya. Bazanov falls in love with Anna who rejects him and they go off to Bazanov's equally doting father. Bazanov hates being back at home: he is embarrassed by his parents although his father is always telling his mother to cool her ardour for the boy. So they go back to Arkady's house.

This is a brilliant book. The characters come alive through their dialogue: I particularly loved Bazanov who spouts his nihilist rubbish and scarcely takes a breath. It is especially brilliant because no character is quite what it seems. The contradictions within Bazanov's philosophy are clear from the start, sometimes subtly inherent in what he says and sometimes pointed out by one of the other characters, especially the devoted disciple Arkady who ends up getting quite fed up with his friend. But other characters have quirks. Uncle Piotr is the ultimate bachelor, elegant and polite, but he once trailed round Europe with his lover. Arkady's rather wimpish Papa has a new child. Arkady's love affair with Katya is a matter of slow and gentle discovery; Arkady is at first in love with Anna and it is only gradually, without him being aware (though the reader is) that his easy friendship with Katya blossoms into something more. His hesitant proposal is a masterpiece.

This is a brilliant book and really short (for a Russian novel!) and easy to read. A fabulous master-class in the art of writing characters.

November 2014; 224 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Notes from Underground" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This slender Dostoevsky is a book of two halves. The first half is a philosophical tract written by a disillusioned embittered man who lives like a mouse under the floorboards hidden from the society that rejects him without even noticing him, plotting his revenge. But he is so full of introspection that he cannot act.

The second half is a fragment of a memoir about how he meets up with some old school friends whom he dislikes, how he acts the bitter rude boor, how he follows them to a brothel (but they give him the slip) and talks to a young fresh girl, how she subsequently comes to his flat whilst he is in a dispute with his servant, and how he (apparently) rapes her. Thus he spoils what his philosophical arguments tell him should not be spoiled. Thus he rejects any hand of friendship, compassion or love. And presumably thus he dooms himself to eternal punishment in his own private hell under the floorboards for the rest of his life.

The first half I found nearly unreadable; the second almost disappointingly short.

March 2012; 115 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God