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Russian Eastenders
May. 16th, 2011 11:33 pmNov 2010
The Karamazov Brothers - Fyodor Dostoevsky tr. Ignat Avesy - Oxford World's Classics, 2008
* *
Okay, so here's the set-up. In a small neighbourhood where everybody knows everybody else, a rich, dissolute man has three sons. The eldest, a hot-blooded good-for-nothing who hates his father for stealing his inheritance (as he sees it), was engaged to an heiress but has broken it off because he has fallen in love with a beautiful young woman. Which is a problem because his father also fancies her. The middle son, a cold-blooded intellectual, is attracted to the eldest son's ex. Who, it appears, still has feelings for the eldest son. Meanwhile, the beautiful young woman cannot decide between the financial and social security that the father would give her and the rather more exciting charms of the son.
It could almost be an episode of Eastenders, couldn’t it? Admittedly, the youngest son, Alyosha, introduces a religious element that you wouldn't normally find in that particular show, being a trainee priest who is in thrall to an elderly mystic called Zosima. And the father, eldest son, middle son, heiress and young woman are called respectively Fyodor, Dmitry, Ivan, Katya and Grushenka, so we are definitely in Russia. Still, the small-town setting, dramatic situations and sheer emotionalism of the characters are purest soap opera, and I suspect that my dislike of the irrational romanticism that is that genre's modus operandi explains why I didn't get on with this book.
( Read more... )
The Karamazov Brothers - Fyodor Dostoevsky tr. Ignat Avesy - Oxford World's Classics, 2008
* *
Okay, so here's the set-up. In a small neighbourhood where everybody knows everybody else, a rich, dissolute man has three sons. The eldest, a hot-blooded good-for-nothing who hates his father for stealing his inheritance (as he sees it), was engaged to an heiress but has broken it off because he has fallen in love with a beautiful young woman. Which is a problem because his father also fancies her. The middle son, a cold-blooded intellectual, is attracted to the eldest son's ex. Who, it appears, still has feelings for the eldest son. Meanwhile, the beautiful young woman cannot decide between the financial and social security that the father would give her and the rather more exciting charms of the son.
It could almost be an episode of Eastenders, couldn’t it? Admittedly, the youngest son, Alyosha, introduces a religious element that you wouldn't normally find in that particular show, being a trainee priest who is in thrall to an elderly mystic called Zosima. And the father, eldest son, middle son, heiress and young woman are called respectively Fyodor, Dmitry, Ivan, Katya and Grushenka, so we are definitely in Russia. Still, the small-town setting, dramatic situations and sheer emotionalism of the characters are purest soap opera, and I suspect that my dislike of the irrational romanticism that is that genre's modus operandi explains why I didn't get on with this book.
( Read more... )