Hey guys, it's Jane!
I'm back today,
it's nearly the end of the month
and I figure if I'm ever going to do
a video about
'The Brothers Karamazov'
it had better be soon, so
we're going to have a stab at it today.
I'm not going to
be calling this a review because
although my hubris quotient
is high, I don't think
[laughs] I don't think
it is sufficiently high enough
for me to consider that I could review
one of the great novels of all
literature. [laughs]
But I'm going to have
a stab at
talking about it in a meaningful 
way, and some of my reflections
on it. Trying really hard
not to drop spoilers,
especially for the second half, because the second half
is basically a murder mystery,
y'know there is actually
possible full-on spoilers!
I found a really interesting essay
written by David Foster Wallace.
A lot of what he's talking
about really speaks to me, so I thought I'd just
read an excerpt of this now:
"It's
true that there are features
of Dostoyevsky's books that are alien
and off putting.
Russian is notoriously hard to
translate into English, and when you add to this
difficulty the
archaisms of 19th century literary
language, Dostoyevsky's
prose/dialogue can often
come off mannered and silly.
Plus, there's the
stiltedness of the culture Dostoyevsky's
characters inhabit.
When people are ticked off for instance, they do things
like 'shake their fists'
or call each other 'scoundrels', or
'fly at' each other.
Speakers use exclamation points
in quantities now seen only in comic
strips, 
social etiquette seems stiff to the point of
absurdity, people are always 'calling
on' each other, and being 'received',
or 'not being received'
and obeying rococo conventions
of politeness, even when they are 
enraged.
Everybody's got a long, hard to pronounce
last name, and a Christian name,
plus a patronymic, plus sometimes
a diminutive, so you almost have to keep a chart
of character's names.
Obscure military
ranks and bureaucratic hierarchies abound,
plus there are rigid and totally
weird class distinctions that are hard
to keep straight and understand the implications of.
The point is that it's not just 
the 'death by canonization' thing,
there is real and alienating
stuff that stands in the way of our
appreciating Dostoyevsky, and
has to be dealt with.
But the larger point, which,
yes, may be kind of obvious,
is that some art is worth
the extra work of getting past all the impediments
to the appreciation, and
Dostoyevsky's books are definitely worth
the work. And this is not just because
of his bestriding the Western canon,
if anything it's despite that.
For one thing
that canonization and course assignments
obscure is that Dostoyevsky isn't just
great, he's also fun.
His novels almost always
have ripping good plots,
lurid and intricate and thoroughly
dramatic. There are murders and
attempted murders, and police and
dysfunctional family feuding, and
spys and tough guys and
beautiful fallen women,
and unctuous con-men, and wasting
illnesses, and sudden inheritances, and
silky villains, and scheming,
and whores."
OK, that was an
excerpt of David Foster Wallace on
Dostoyevsky. Now, clearly
David Foster Wallace has thought a bit about
Dostoyevsky, in fact
I read one
reviewer that claims the Incandenza
family out of
'Infinite Jest' is based
on the Karamazov
family from 'The Brothers
Karamazov'.
And he makes a number of
points there, that there are
real difficulties in getting to grips
with these books, and
yet, they are in fact
incredibly readable if
you can push through
some of the difficulties.
The Brothers
Karamazov in particular
has
a number of
amazing elements
and I read another article
which called the Brothers Karamazov
the first ever police procedural.
And in fact, the whole second half
of the book almost
reads like a script out of Law and Order.
You have police
you have crime, you have
all these different characters in the court
room, yeah.
It's, yeah, it's...
CHUNG CHUNG
That's what the second half of the book
feels like. The first
half of the book
felt less like a TV
drama to me and
more like a play.
You have lots of people coming
on stage, and
being given set piece speeches
that describe themselves
or their point of view about
the world.
The episodic nature of
the book I've also read is based
on Dostoyevsky's real
love and passion for Charles 
Dickens. Charles Dickens was one of Dostoyevsky's
favourite authors, and in lots of 
ways he 
was trying to write Dickensian
fiction.
Whether or not that's achieved
I'll leave to somebody else to judge.
Another simile
that I've heard that really
rang true with me is that
reading these books is a lot like
watching a Woody Allen movie,
that you have incredibly wordy characters,
that almost everybody
is ridden with angst,
and you have these deeply
neurotic women. [laughs]
And as a side
note, I think I could probably make
an entire video just
about the women in the Brothers Karamazov.
There are no, like, super main
characters who are female, but
there are three really important
female characters.
Katerina, who is Dimitri's
fiancee, and the love of Ivan's
life, Grushenka
who is 
the love of Dimitri's
life, and also the person
that their father Fyodor
is lusting after, and
Lise.
Lise!
Who is kind of the romantic
interest for
Alexei, the youngest brother,
and who is whole mystery
in and of herself.
The episodic
nature of the book
also leads to the fact that
there are a number of sections
that are actually often drawn out
and dealt with separately,
as separate works. The most
significant of these Ivan
tells to Alexei, I think it's
supposed to be a poem that
he, Ivan has
written, and he shares
this with Alexei.
It's called 'The Grand Inquisitor'.
It's a really quite disturbing
thought experiment
in theodicy
which is a Christian discipline
which is about asking
the question of how
do you square a good
and powerful God with
the pain and evil in
the world. The Grand Inquisitor
is just one of
the most disturbing
examples of
an attempt at a theodicy that
I have ever read, and
in some ways it's an anti-
theodicy, because of course 
Ivan's relationship
with faith 
is one of the really interesting questions
that arises in the book.
This is of course
another whole kettle of fish in this book.
One of the many things that I'd heard
about this book before I read it was that it was one of 
the great Christian novels,
that Dostoyevsky
had written a book largely
about questions of faith.
And,
I've got to say yes and
no to this. It is certainly
a book that addresses
questions of faith, but
the flavour
of the sort of
faith
world-view
whatever, that you're getting
from this is
very close to, and deeply
informed by Christianity,
but it's certainly
is 
a version, rather than
straight down the line
orthodox Christian
thinking and teaching.
Which is interesting,
and
certainly legitimate,
he is not
anti-Christian in any way, in fact
I really appreciated
the way that he drew... especially
the characters at the 
monastry, which is a major
scene for action
in the first half of the book.
The monastery is just full
of crazy
things,
fruitcake people
and really warped
people, and a number of quite
corrupt careerist people,
but that is not all.
It has all those things
but it is still a place where
there is genuine love and piety
and devotion.
So those things ...
Dostoyevsky's drawn this world where
those those things live together,
rather than cancelling one another
out, and I thought that was,
that was something that was so 
sophisticated about the way that he was looking at
faith. He certainly wasn't,
it's not a book where
the Christians, or the church
people are all the good guys, by
any means, and yet
by the end of the
book, almost every remaining
character has had some sort of crisis
of faith, and become some
sort of believer.
So
yes, it is
a book that
deals with spiritual issues but
there's much more than that going on
as well.
One of the other really
commonly worked over themes
is about Russianness
and what it is
to be Russian. Usually
in contradistinction to
'European'.
Being European is not really
a great thing as far as Dostoyevsky
is concerned, and especially
French. The French get a bit of a drubbing
in this.
Anybody with connections with France
is obviously
suspect. There is a German character
who's seen
as a bit of a buffoon, but who's not
evil, so maybe being
German is a little bit better than being
French, I'm not sure, but certainly
being Russian is
clearly the most important thing
you can be, but everybody is running around
with competing ideas about
what being Russian actually means,
and 
yeah, this is clearly
something that
given the historical context
that the book was written in
was a really live issue
and it's something that's wrestled with, but I
don't know that there's ever a final answer
arrived at in the book.
The other
probably the biggest theme
in the book is about family.
The Karamazov family
almost any way that you could think of
that a family could be dysfunctional, this family
is dysfunctional. But there are
other family groups
that are shown throughout the story
that are kind of held up as counter
examples. The way the book
finishes it seems to be making
a statement that the
major overriding theme of the book
is about families, and about
how families *should* work,
[laughs]
despite the fact
that the book is constantly
constantly being dragged
down into the mud with this family that is clearly
not working.
So that's
some of the stuff that the book
is talking about, but
for me the
thing
that has stayed with me the most
is the characters
and especially
the brothers, the family
the Karamazovs.
So, probably not so
much the father, because he is
almost a cartoon
villain, who is
sort of there to kind of create the
problem that the rest of the book is about.
He is a buffoon,
he is sometimes
he is almost demonic,
and
yeah, he's
he's not like
any real person that you could meet.
I don't think. I would
really hope not. But
then there's the three and a half
brothers
who are the real heart of the
story. So there is
Dimitri,
Ivan and Alexei,
the three legitimate brothers,
and then there's Smerdyakov
who works as a servant
to the
Karamazov family, but
is widely rumoured,
and he kind of
believes, is actually
the illegitimate son of
Fyodor, so that's why I've been talking about three and a half
Karamazov brothers.
So,
these characters
are incredibly finely
drawn and well rounded
and living, but they are also
allegory. A number of
times in the court case
different people draw them like
they are a parable, and
you can see that that was
put there intentionally. So
Dimitri the oldest brother
to my mind
he is the stomach.
[laughs]
He runs
on appetite.
He's into wenching
and gambling and drinking
He's always after money,
he went into the army
he's an officer in the army,
and he spends his days
trying to look grand and
make himself, y'know,
esteemed in
his society.
So he is sort of
an epitomization of the appetite.
Then you have
Ivan, who is the brain.
And Ivan
is the scholar,
and he is very careful
about all of his dealings
He has
reached a certain level of
fame for an
article that he wrote that
was published, 
he aspires to be
respected, but not
as a manly
man, but as a
intellect, somebody
to be reckoned with.
Dimitri and Ivan's relationships with women
are controlled by
these paradigms as well. Ivan
is in love with Katerina
Dimitri's 
fiancee, but not only can
he not really tell her about it,
he can hardly even recognise it in
himself.
And then we have Alexei,
who we
are told throughout the whole thing is the hero
of the piece, and he,
he,
I guess he's the heart.
Alexei
in a way is less realistic
I guess than the other two,
because Alexei almost always does the
right thing, I mean sometimes he gets tired
and he can't achieve
everything that he wants to on a particular
day, but you never see Alexei
doing something mean.
And a lot of his role in the
book is just listening
to other people, but
constantly we are
pointed to Alexei as a good example,
as somebody who is
redeeming the situation
they're put in, as distinct from the other
two brothers, who in their
own ways 
have just been foolish,
and who's lives are no
longer working as a result.
Smerdyakov, the
half brother
what can you say about
Smerdyakov? He is quite possibly
one of the most
creepy characters that I have ever read.
This didn't occur to me while I was reading the book,
but I read an article which
posed the question of whether Smerdyakov was actually
supposed to be 'the devil'
in this book, and in a way that
makes sense to me. The other
thing about Smerdyakov which I learned
after
finishing the book
one of the things about Smerdyakov is he's
epileptic, and in fact
Dostoyevsky himself suffered
from epilepsy, and
I just think it's so
interesting.
He was clearly writing
Smerdyakov in some way
as a facet of himself,
and to put himself into the story
as the devil
is just such...
I just, I
don't even really know what to do with that.
So,
there you go.
Why might you want to read
this book? [laughs]
It's a lot of work.
It really is a lot of work
but I am
really glad that I finally finished
it, and
I don't think that is entirely
because that's now a relief
that I can knock that off the bucket list.
Quite clearly there's an element of that,
but 
it's such a rich book with so much going
on and I'm sure there are elements of
this that I'm going to return to and chew
over
for years to come.
I don't have any way to
conclude this video.
I don't have any sort of
perfect
snappy encapsulation to put at the
end. What I
would say is that I would
so be interested
to 
discuss with anybody else who's
read this book.
Really anything
to do with it. It's the kind of
book that once I finished it...
well once I immediately finished it
I just wanted to not think about it for
a couple of days, and just bask
in the afterglow of having finished it, but since
then I've been struggling
because I really wanted to talk to somebody
about it.
That's part of the reason why I've been looking up
looking up articles and searching
seeing what other people have written about it,
because it feels like something I just
need to process
by talking to somebody else, so I would really
appreciate it. If you've read this
book, to
comment down below, and maybe we can get
into some sort of
Dostoyevsky-
off. That would be great.
Any way,
I hope you're all well,
and I'll talk to you later, Bye!
