Russian Eastenders
May. 16th, 2011 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselNov 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.
I have written about Dostoevsky's view that human irrationality undercuts rational constructs before, but here it is less usefully deployed. The examination of the causes of criminality in Crime and Punishment is of interest to everyone. But in this book the battle is between atheism, represented by the intellectual but arrogant Ivan, and spirituality, epitomised in the warm and kind Zosima and his acolyte Alyosha, and is so one-sided that it is not very interesting. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is a viewpoint character who stands up for his intellectual ideas and argues them out, but Ivan is a secondary character who has no true friends and is isolated from his family (even Alyosha doesn't really get on with him). Atheism is seen as a spiritual illness, so much so that its manifestation becomes literal. It is also dangerous, being capable of infecting others and causing them to do evil things. Dostoevsky is pre-figuring Freud in suggesting that suppression of our irrational selves is a bad thing and will ultimately fail (and raising an interesting link between the ideas of psychoanalysis and religious belief).
Almost everyone else in the novel behaves in a melodramatic manner that would have given even Dickens pause for thought, careering from place to place and engaging in actions and conversations with the emotional intensity set permanently to 11. Katya and Gruschenka are particularly irritating, weathercocking wildly between their various suitors in an apparently permanent state of semi-hysteria. The two religious characters, Zosima and Alyosha, are the exception to all this madness, the implication being that the serenity of religious belief is the only thing that can slow the whirligig of our irrational, emotional selves. Unfortunately, the long, long chapters about Zosima's personal history and teachings that illustrate this point are incredibly dull if you have no interest in Russian spirituality. You end up longing for Dmitry to come crashing back into the story. He may be deeply annoying in his selfishness, but he is never boring.
Later in the novel there is an interesting depiction of the relationship between justice and social gossip which prefigures modern concerns about the effects of media comment on judicial proceedings. There is also a sub-plot about a dying child, the thematic relevance of which escaped me. But overall, the book felt more like a long slow soap opera-cum-religious tract than a tautly argued novel of ideas, and I can't say that I enjoyed it.
Side note: This translation does the novel no favours. I presume that the very, very long paragraphs (in one case 10 pages of solid text) follow the original Russian. But they also make the book extremely difficult to read.
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.
I have written about Dostoevsky's view that human irrationality undercuts rational constructs before, but here it is less usefully deployed. The examination of the causes of criminality in Crime and Punishment is of interest to everyone. But in this book the battle is between atheism, represented by the intellectual but arrogant Ivan, and spirituality, epitomised in the warm and kind Zosima and his acolyte Alyosha, and is so one-sided that it is not very interesting. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is a viewpoint character who stands up for his intellectual ideas and argues them out, but Ivan is a secondary character who has no true friends and is isolated from his family (even Alyosha doesn't really get on with him). Atheism is seen as a spiritual illness, so much so that its manifestation becomes literal. It is also dangerous, being capable of infecting others and causing them to do evil things. Dostoevsky is pre-figuring Freud in suggesting that suppression of our irrational selves is a bad thing and will ultimately fail (and raising an interesting link between the ideas of psychoanalysis and religious belief).
Almost everyone else in the novel behaves in a melodramatic manner that would have given even Dickens pause for thought, careering from place to place and engaging in actions and conversations with the emotional intensity set permanently to 11. Katya and Gruschenka are particularly irritating, weathercocking wildly between their various suitors in an apparently permanent state of semi-hysteria. The two religious characters, Zosima and Alyosha, are the exception to all this madness, the implication being that the serenity of religious belief is the only thing that can slow the whirligig of our irrational, emotional selves. Unfortunately, the long, long chapters about Zosima's personal history and teachings that illustrate this point are incredibly dull if you have no interest in Russian spirituality. You end up longing for Dmitry to come crashing back into the story. He may be deeply annoying in his selfishness, but he is never boring.
Later in the novel there is an interesting depiction of the relationship between justice and social gossip which prefigures modern concerns about the effects of media comment on judicial proceedings. There is also a sub-plot about a dying child, the thematic relevance of which escaped me. But overall, the book felt more like a long slow soap opera-cum-religious tract than a tautly argued novel of ideas, and I can't say that I enjoyed it.
Side note: This translation does the novel no favours. I presume that the very, very long paragraphs (in one case 10 pages of solid text) follow the original Russian. But they also make the book extremely difficult to read.
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Date: 2011-05-17 07:58 am (UTC)