Tag: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Review 2493: Dostoevsky Read-a-Thon: Devils, or The Possessed

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I haven’t felt as if I had the time to fully participate in Russophile Reads’ Dostoevsky Read-a-Thon, but my original plan was to read some of the shorter works. (That’s boiling down to The Gambler.) I have already read all the long ones and reviewed a couple of them already, and I didn’t think I had time to read any more. Well, that was the plan.

I could not remember Devils at all. For some reason, I got it into my head that it was about the same length as Notes from Underground, a relatively short work. So, I put a hold on it at the library. It already had four holds on it, which is unusual for my local library, and surprising. After a while, when only one hold had been released, I realized I wasn’t going to get it in time to read it for the project, so I began looking for a copy of it. That was when I discovered that Devils was once known as The Possessed, which I had in my own library (which means I have actually read it. I don’t put books on the shelves until I’ve read them). The newer editions of this book are all called Devils or Demons, apparently a preferred version of Dostoevsky’s title. And I have a Modern Library edition of the old Constance Garnett translation, which was all that was available years ago for most of the classic Russian translations (now considered inferior). And, of course, it’s more than 700 pages long with very small type. But I plunged in.

So, finally I get to my review. Let me say first that my spelling of names might seem eccentric now (especially Nikolay instead of Nikolai, which is much closer to the correct pronunciation), but since I reread the Constance Garnett translation, I am using her spelling.

The Introduction to my Modern Library edition of The Possessed says that although Dostoevsky thought he was a progressive, he wrote the book out of fear of nihilism and revolution. Until some events toward the end of the book, though, it’s hard to take the activities of the radical characters seriously.

The novel starts with two respected members of a provincial town. Stepan Trofimovich Verhovensky is a highly regarded scholar. However, for 20 years he’s been living under the patronage of wealthy and forceful Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin, supposedly writing a book but accomplishing nothing. He’s not exactly a parasite but rather an impractical, unworldly intellectual who has never had to take care of himself. He does manage to spend a lot of her money, but lately she’s been drawing in the expenses.

The action gets started (sort of) by the not quite simultaneous arrival of these two characters’ respective sons, Nikolay Vsyevolodovich Stavrogin (usually referred to just as Stavrogin) and Pyotr Stepanovich Verhovensky. Stavrogin is a sulky, charismatic young man who left years ago as a student and may be involved with a group of nihilists in town. He is also quite the womanizer, for we learn that both of Varvara Petrovna’s young friends, Liziveta Nikolaevna and the more dependent Darya Pavlovna, were involved with him during a visit to Switzerland. Pyotr Stepanovich has been gone even longer, as his father took no interest in him when he was a child and sent him away to be raised. He doesn’t seem important at first but turns out to be the catalyst for most of the action. He seems frivolous but is madly lying to and manipulating people for his own ends.

Both Stavrogin and another character named Shatov have become disillusioned with the revolutionary group that a group of the characters belong to, but Shatov, who has been running an illegal printing press, has asked to quit. Pytor Stepanovich has as one his goals, aside from sowing general confusion, to convince his group of five cell members that Shatov means to betray them, because he wants them to kill him. Pyotr Stepanovich, we learn, is an informer himself but also wants to avenge an insult by Shatov, who spat in his face back in Switzerland. Stavrogin doesn’t seem any more devoted to the cause, but Pyotr Stepanovich has secret plans for him. (There’s another character Pyotr Stepanovich wants vengeance against, and that’s his foolish father, Stepan Trofimovich.)

For quite a while, Dostoevsky seems to be setting us a farce, Stepan Trofimovich’s behavior is so clueless and absurd, the social machinations and gossip in the town are so ridiculous, and the radicals’ attempts to sow confusion are so silly. But violence kicks off thanks to the activities of Pytor Stepanovich.

Frankly, although I believe that Dostoevsky had a radical youth, his depictions of their meetings and their statements of belief seemed absurd. But I am no expert on on 19th century radicalism.

Everyone is in a frenzy at usual with Dostoevsky, and frankly, I had a hard time tolerating the many long, rambling speeches, whether of a religious or nihilistic subject. (And the nihilists, as well as others, sure seem to spend a lot of time talking about God.) This book was so long that by the end, when Dostoevsky has knocked off half the main characters, I was just skimming. Not my favorite of his works.

However, I was lucky enough, while poking around on the web, to find a multi-part article by Elif Batuman (author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them) about attending a 12-hour-long production of The Possessed in Italian on Governor’s Island. The first part is called “My 12-Hour Blind Date, with Dostoevsky,” and if you want to read all the parts, there are links to them, published by The Paris Review. It’s hilarious.

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Review 2472: 2024 Dostoevsky Read-A-Thon: The Gambler

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The Gambler is known as Dostoevsky’s most autobiographical novel, written in 26 days to foil the claims of an unscrupulous publisher. For Dostoevsky himself was a gambling addict and made a fool of himself over a girl called Polina when he was much older than his fictional alter ego. I read The Gambler for the 2024 Dostoevsky Readathon hosted by Russophile Reads. You can read his much more thorough evaluation of The Gambler here.

Alexey is a tutor for a Russian family returning at the opening of the story from two weeks’ leave to a German spa and gambling town. He works for the General tutoring his young niece and nephew and he is madly in love with Polina, the General’s older niece.

The General is broke, although he is madly pretending not to be. In fact, during his leave, Alexey has been pawning things for Polina. The General is in love with a Frenchwoman named Blanche, who is clearly after the money he expects to get when his aunt dies. Also hanging around are a Frenchman named des Grieux, whom the General has been borrowing money from and who has his eyes on Polina, and a rich Englishman whom Alexey likes named Mr. Astley.

As usual with Dostoevsky’s main characters, Alexey is in a sort of frenzy, this one of love for Polina. In attempts to gain some kind of equality with the other characters, he instead repeatedly shows his immaturity.

I have read most of Dostoevsky’s novels but I didn’t realize he could be funny until this one. The General hears that his aunt is ill and may be dying, so he keeps sending telegrams asking if she is dead in his desperation to seal the deal with Blanche. Suddenly, his aunt, called Grandmother in the novel because she is Polina’s grandmother, appears in town. And does she appear. She takes over the novel until she departs, making Alexey her escort to the casino, where she at first wins a lot of money.

Then loses it, but has the sense to go home. In the meantime, she disinherits the General. She is the most truly Russian character in the novel, with the other Russians trying to pretend they are cosmopolitan.

Eventually, we learn from Alexey’s experience what it’s like to be a gambling addict. For Alexey goes to the casino to try to win enough money to help Polina.

This is a short, sometimes funny, sometimes sad but always lively story about Alexey’s inability to understand what is going on, and about greed in its various forms. Note that the story contains lots of stereotypes in depicting people from countries other than Russia.

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Review 1886: Dostoevsky in Love

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Up until now, it has seemed to me that biographies fall into two categories: more academic works that are full of notes and citations and are sometimes turgid or too detailed or works meant primarily for the public that often list no backup material whatsoever and are sometimes sensational or even untruthful. Dostoevsky in Love makes an interesting compromise between the two. It is short at a couple hundred pages, it does include notes, and it somehow distills a sense of the true person that pages and pages of detail may not. Dostoevsky lived an interesting life and Christofi relates the events and Dostoevsky’s ideas in an interesting way, including quotations from his work to illustrate his points.

Dostoevsky’s life was difficult. He was poor for most of it, yet one reason was his generosity. (Unfortunately, another was his addiction to gambling, which he finally conquered.) Most of his life was spent in ill health, including epilepsy, serious bladder infections, and finally emphysema. As a young author, his first work was acclaimed, his next reviled, and then he was arrested for his radical politics and spent four years in Siberia (after suffering through a fake execution), followed by a stint of extra compulsory military service (he had already completed his usual service) with years before he was allowed to go to either Moscow or St. Petersburg.

Finally, in the last few years of his life, he gained the recognition he deserved, but he was still so poor that his wife Anna had no money to bury him with.

I found this to be an absorbing book. I have always wondered why most of Dostoevsky’s characters seemed to be in a frenzy, and now I think it’s because he himself was often in a frenzy, beset as he was with cares.

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Review 1670: Classics Club Spin Result! The Brothers Karamazov

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I selected The Brothers Karamazov for my Classics club list because I read it many years ago for Russian Literature and found it fascinating. I was curious how I would regard it now.

The plot of the novel is seemingly straightforward, but it is complicated by the characters’ relationships and several subplots, some of which are only tangentially related. Fyodor Karamazov has three sons whom as children he left to be raised by the servants. The oldest, Dmitri (or Mitya), is an ex-soldier whom Fyodor has cheated of part of his inheritance from his mother. Now, although Dmitri is engaged to Katarina, a girl of high moral values, he has fallen madly in love with Grushenka, a girl with an unsavory past, and Fyodor is trying to compete for her. The second oldest, Ivan, is a cold intellectual atheist. The third son, Alexei or Alyosha, is studying to be a monk.

In my old Penguin Classics edition, the novel is split into two volumes. It is not until the second volume that the action takes place that is the centerpiece of the novel. Fyodor is murdered. Mitya has been working himself into a frenzy and making threats so is immediately the prime suspect. Did Mitya kill his father or was it someone else? If so, who?

We readers know what Mitya did that night, so we can answer the first part of that question but not the second part, at least not right away. Dostoevsky (I’m going to use the spelling of his name that I’m accustomed to, and that indeed is on my old Penguin copy rather than the one shown on the title page above) isn’t interested so much in that but in what happens next. And ultimately he is engaged in pitting atheism against belief in God.

In my student days, I found the long philosophical passages in this novel fascinating. These days, I don’t have as much patience with them and I actually skipped a couple of chapters once I got their drift. The amount of time spent on Father Zossima, for example, a relatively minor character who dies in Book One, is a little inexplicable to me now. I can’t help feeling he might have been based on a real person whom Dostoevsky revered, but his presence in the novel doesn’t seem important enough to warrant several chapters being devoted to his life and sayings.

This is not to say that I didn’t find the novel compelling. Although it is long and sometimes difficult, there was something about it that made me want to keep reading it.

The novel is written with an unusual approach to point of view. The narrator is an unidentified person from “our town.” But the narrator is privy to scenes he could not possibly have witnessed. Yet, the point of view is not omniscient. For example, we see what Mitya does on the night of the murder even though there is no actual witness to that, but we don’t see the murder.

As usual with Dostoevsky, most of his characters are in a frenzy. Were 19th century Russians really this excited? Well, they’re not in Tolstoy, but most of Tolstoy’s characters are upper class, while Dostoevsky’s are not. So, I don’t know whether this is a class difference or a difference in the author’s perceptions or what. And speaking of class, the attitude toward peasants here is not great, and there are also other politically incorrect comments on occasion. Just a warning.

The Brothers Karamazov is considered Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, so if you are interested in Russian literature, you should definitely read it. Dostoevsky’s preoccupations are not mine, however, and I think even less so as I get older. I couldn’t help parsing some of the arguments and thinking about an implicit slant to them. The best example is an assumption—a sort of cognitive leap—that is very important to the plot and is stated several times by different characters. The cognitive leap is that if God doesn’t exist, “everything is permitted.” Only one character questions this assumption—that there is nothing within humans besides religion to stop them from doing horrendous things. But his suggestion is brushed aside because Dostoevsky wants you to conclude that there is a God and his arguments don’t work as well if you believe in inner goodness or inherently moral or ethical behavior. I guess.

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