Dostoevsky

This year I am devoting to the challenge of reading the entire cannon of Dostoevsky. I am blogging about this as I go, and keeping a discussion log in the Club Read 2009 group.

http://www.thelectern.blogspot.com/

http://www.librarything.com/topic/55158

This is not a shameless plug for my blog or thread, but a search to widen and deepen the conversation about this great writer. If you are interested, please drop in and join the conversation. Everyone is welcome.

I tried reading Demons this year and was quite underwhelmed. It seemed to evolve into a romantic Tolstoy-ish kind of thing, which is not how I remember Dostoevsky. If anyone can confirm this, please do. I ended up just putting it down rather than continuing. (This is for the Pevear translation).

I finished The Possessed but I didn't like it that much either. Of the five major novels I still need to read A Raw Youth but so far The Possessed is my least favorite.

The Possessed is the most topical of Dostoevsky's novels. it needs a thorough understanding of the revolutionary groups and thinking that was current at the time to get the most out of it.

i realy love him. i'm trying to read all his books

Me too!

I have posted about Crime and Punishment:

http://languagehat.com/crime-and-punishment/

And about The Gambler:

http://languagehat.com/the-gambler/

I keep recommending to all of the people around me that they read Dostoyevsky.
About 35 years ago, I read The Brothers Karamazov, The Possessed, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, A Raw Youth and Netochka Nezvanova.
My Mom, my 2 brothers and my sister, but not my Dad, all were reading several of these novels back at that time.
Later on, because I wanted to practice French, I read The Brothers Karamazov in French.

But after that I bought some lesson books from the book store at University of Alberta and have been struggling through ever since to get some reading knowledge of Russian.
I went on a buying spree this past winter and bought the first four of the above titles in Russian, and now I have even stronger motivation to get past Lesson 7 in my Russian for Everybody textbook by Robert L. Baker.

I am still going to give it a shot to try to read them all in Russian. (In Russian I also bought War and Peace and Dead Souls.)

Library hermit I wish you all the luck in your endeavors.

I do too -- Dostoyevsky loses far more in translation than, say, Turgenev!

Thank you for your encouragement, bjbookman and lanugagehat.

35 years ago I heard somewhere about a work by Dostoyevsky called Diary of a Writer but I couldn't find it with all the other Penguin editions of Dostoyevsky that our bookstores carried at that time. But eventually I tracked one down published in 1973 by Octagon Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2 volumes, $50.00 CDN plus GST at The Bookseller. http://thebookseller.ca/app/ Happy day! So I discovered that Dostoyevsky was a journalist as well as a novelist.

I have posted about The Idiot, which I had mixed feelings about:
http://languagehat.com/the-idiot/

On the other hand, I liked The Eternal Husband a lot more than I expected to:

http://languagehat.com/the-eternal-husband/

I've posted on The Possessed (The Devils):
http://languagehat.com/dostoevskys-devils/

Thank you! This is I think the last of Dostoevsky’s big books I have left to read and I’m still wondering about which translation (I have at least two). And interesting link to your Magarshack post - I’ve read a lot of his translations over the years, in fact he was probably my introduction to Dostoevsky!

A Dostoevskii Companion text and contexts has been published by Academic Studies Press. “Rather then offering a single definitive view of the author, the book contains a collection of documents from Dostoevsky own time, excerpts from letters his journalism and what his contemporaries wrote about him”

I didn't care for The Adolescent (A Raw Youth) at all:

http://languagehat.com/dostoevskys-adolescent/

I'm loving the Brothers K:

http://languagehat.com/karamazov-suddenly-halfway/

Ah, it’s fab! Popping over to look at your post! 😁

More on the Brothers:

http://languagehat.com/karamazov-preliminary-investigation-art-life/

And my final thoughts:

http://languagehat.com/the-brothers-karamazov-the-summing-up/

A bit late to the party, but an article by Slavoj Žižek in yesterday's Guardian includes a little grit for fans of Dostoevsky's oyster*:

"Anatoly Chubais, the father of Russian oligarchs (he orchestrated Russia’s rapid privatization in 1992), said in 2004: "I've reread all of Dostoevsky over the past three months. And I feel nothing but almost physical hatred for the man. He is certainly a genius, but his idea of Russians as special, holy people, his cult of suffering and the false choices he presents make me want to tear him to pieces." As much as I dislike Chubais for his politics, I think he is right about Dostoevsky, who provided the "deepest" expression of the opposition between Europe and Russia: individualism versus collective spirit, materialist hedonism versus the spirit of sacrifice."

We must stop letting Russia define the terms of the Ukraine crisis (Guardian, 2022-05-23).

*Or possibly oeuvre.

>24 Cynfelyn:

Physical hatred of Dostoevsky that makes Chubais want to tear him to pieces? That's a little overboard, isn't it?

Of course it is, and Slavoj Žižek is always worth ignoring. The grit involved with Dostoevsky is that he was a nasty anti-Semite, but that is (alas) no rarer among Russian authors than among Russians in general, and once you start going down the "I won't read any authors who aren't morally perfect" path you wind up with nobody left to read.

I mostly find Zizek interesting but that is a terrible article for dozens of reasons. Perhaps it is best NOT to mix "metaphysics" and politics.

Antisemitism is a European ailment. The West contributed to it at least as much as the Russians.

That's a pretty sentiment, but I'm afraid while "Antisemitism is a European ailment" is perfectly true (and you could replace "European" with "worldwide" -- I encountered it in Taiwan), it is far worse in Eastern Europe than elsewhere. I can give you a truckload of citations, but if you don't have detailed knowledge of the region and its history, I suggest you just take my word for it.

Wow. Yeah, well, it's not the Taiwanese that invented it, and maybe less condescension and bad faith arguing is in order. As it happens, I do have a detailed enough knowledge of some Eastern European countries that I would never talk about Eastern Europe as a "region". And yes, I too could give you a truckload +++ of citations demonstrating that when it comes to antisemitism, Western Europeans LEAD, not follow. I won't quarrel, though. The times are depressing enough, the subject is awful, and I don't won't to contribute to the devolution of this thread. Believe what you want; you won't be "suggesting" anything to me again, that much is easy enough to ensure.