Happy Week 5! I’m about 8 pages behind, but trucking along. Did I fall asleep today in a public place with the book on my lap? And did they almost take an embarrassing picture of me, but then I woke up just in time? Counsel has advised me to neither confirm nor deny.
This one has been feeling to me a little more like a “Cannonball Run” or a “Gumball Rally” than a “Deathmarch” for some reason. Not that it’s easy or even zany. Just something about the rhythm — the book is racing along. And then I get stopped by the cops and Sammy Davis Junior has to dress up like a monk. Something like that. It’s not a bad thing though — “The Brothers Karamazov Gumball Rally” has a pleasant ring to it.
I’ve been especially enjoying the conversations characters keep having with themselves while other people watch, letting their thoughts tumble out like grapefruits from a busted shopping bag: “I don’t want an ice cream cone. Oh, you can see I want an ice cream cone, can’t you? It’s written on my face! Yes! I do want an ice cream cone! But I won’t have one. Unless you give me one. Will you give me an ice cream cone? I’m such a lowly creature! And yet, an ice cream would be fantastic right about now!” he said.
I’m guessing this may in part be because people interrupted each other a lot less back in 19th century Russia. Also, they were mostly insane.
This coming week let’s go for a slightly more slenderized serving, to give those marchers-just-a-wee-bit-behind a chance to catch up, so we can march toward page 300 with a mighty trailwind at our backs.
Next Wednesday: I’ll see ya at the optimistic juncture at the end of Book V, where “never had his heart bathed in sweeter hopes…”
(which is to say: please use this Week 4 thread for comments on pages 0-282; aim to finish reading that section and shout out here by end o’ day Tuesday)
"…something like the supervisor of an entire team of political agents…"
Cecil,
Your comment this week, and the thought of Raptor Mage in La Traviata, give me strength to go on. Keep being your bad sleeping-in-the-boys-room gumball rallyin’ self!
Thank you, brother. If I can be your strength, I serve my purpose. Here, have some more strength: http://tinyurl.com/d88tww (Yes, it’s me in stage makeup. The opera opens with a lavish formal party…)
Yikes, I think I missed last week? Time is rushing past me. I am amazed at the way they all talk, too, and wished I knew Russian so I could read it in the original language.
So, if I missed, I missed the magnet or the triumph of saying I posted every week?
I will continue on. I am behind, but hope to catch up this weekend. OOH! Then I can post again on Monday. Does twice in one week count for anything?
>>>
Hi Mary Lee — no problem. I’m pretty sure I’ll forget about your missing Week 4 comment by the time we wrap. đ
What’s so embarrassing about falling asleep in a public place with a book on your lap? Were you wearing pants?
When I woke up they were all laughing at me and saying “he’s 8 pages behind!” It was horrible! he said.
Er, I’m not sure what happened but I seemed to have slipped out of consciousness for a week. I didn’t realize I was so behind. I’m gonna have to get more cannonball and less deathmarchy to catch up.
Forgive me if someone else already posted this, but in the Feb Harper’s is the following in an article on Tolstoy: “Tolstoy fled to his study and tried to distract himself by reading The Brothers Karamazov: ‘Which of the two families, Karamazov or Tolstoy was the more horrible?’ In Tolstoy’s view, The Brothers Karamazov was ‘anti-artistic, superficial, attitudinizing, irrelevant to the great problems.'”
I do love all of Alyosha’s illuminations. They’re endearing and you realize that’s what’s missing from the other characters: there’s no sense of self-reflection or life discovery, which, I find makes Alyosha the artist of the story. To go to Tolstoy’s anti-artistic comment, is that fair? Maybe Dostoevsky is making a comment about the artist in the big, bad world through Alyosha’s journey?
Oddly enough, I found this 30 or so pages a lot harder to get through than when I sprinting through the first 200+ to catch up last week. Perhaps it was because such a large part of it was Ivan’s long “prose poem” attacking, it appears, organized religion. Ho hum. It’s been done.
I guess I’m a “glutton for punishment,” but it so happens that I’m also currently re-reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged with even more pages than the Brothers. (I had reserved it at the library some months ago, and just this week it became available.)
I mention this because I’m finding the books very similar in form. I suspect the writers had similar aims, even though one is set in the US, written about 50 years ago, and the other a century before that in Russia. I think both writers had certain ideas about political philosophy and how society is organized that they wanted to explicate, but understood that just offering a treatise on these ideas would probably get very little attention. But wrap those ideas in an interesting story, and put the discussion in the mouths of characters in the story, and now you’ve got something that can reach a mass audience, possibly circulate for decades and even be adapted for Hollywood.
The “giveaway” as to the authors’ intentions is a story form that includes long sections where characters just talk about ideas and concepts. This is not intended as a criticism of either book. The Grand Inquisitor (p. 246-264) is much more than about “religion.” It’s a masterful analysis of how dictators justify themselves with the elitist claim of a special wisdom or call to duty, and how dictatorships can be rationalized because the masses really fear having to control their own destinies.
I think I get why Dost’y uses the Roman Catholic Church and the Jesuits, rather than his own culture’s Russian Orthodoxy when he needs a “straw man” to pick apart. The Russian Church in his world was a “department” of the ruling bureaucracy, sort of like the Dept. of Health & Human Services in our system. To offer direct criticism of the Russian Church, even in the mouths of characters, would sound sort of treasonous, at least anti-Russian, and make it harder for the book to gain popular acceptance. So he puts the evils to be discussed off on foreigners, the non-Russian Romanists.
Getting back to the story, keep an eye on that Smerdyakov guy. He’s up to something. Since he’s a half-brother, I think he thinks he’s entitled to a piece of the old man’s fortune and is scheming to get it.
Finally, p. 263 twice mentions “sticky little leaves” in the context of something to be loved and enjoyed. Marijuana?
really enjoyed the direct – logical attack on faith in organized religion with the examples of the children, and then the follow-up attack on the institution via poetic prose. The image of religion (in the form of the inquisitor) actively rejecting the foundation of the system in favor of power is compelling. Also then loved the pure humanity as Ivan leaves this highly intellectualized seen and is just annoyed by Smerdyakov.
Sacred as profane and profane as life….
Learned a new word from page 232: “fanfaronade.” At first I thought this was a combination of fanfare and lemonade, but it turns out to mean “bragging; bravado; bluster.” It’s going to take some doing to work this into a conversation, but I think it can do it if I try. Maybe something involving the NCAA tournament?
Why, oh, Why, can’t I catch up! I had the endurance during Against the Day, which had as many interlocking weird characters, for sure! But, I passed page 200 and treated myself to a Skinny Cow Ice Cream Sandwich just for endurance so I could pass the finish line by this week’s deadline. I’m not there yet. But I am seeing some Mel Brooks-Blazing Saddle-ish-potential here. What with Grushenka popping out behind curtains saying ha, ha, ha…(or whatever)–I’m seeing Bernadette Peters playing Grushenka. And the whole rock-throwing incident with the bad boys…I WILL reach the page count requirement. I WILL.
I found this week’s reading to be slow going. Maybe I’m even starting to understand what Tolstoy meant by “unartistic:” it feels to me like the way Dostoevsky uses the characters as a mouthpiece for his own thoughts, questions, concerns about morality, society and God makes the book feel too linear and un-novel-like at times.
Some big ideas in this section, I thought: Ivan – Its possible to love ones neighbor abstractly, but never up close. Beggars should not seek alms in public, but should seek alms thru the newspapers where they will not have to be seen.
“What of the children?” Not even the mothers have the right to forgive on behalf of the victimized children.
The whole bit about people wanting to be told what to do, fearing their freedom, needing to believe in something, needing for everyone to believe in the same thing, following those who provide stability and bread. Man needing miracles, and inventing his own if need be, willing to bow down before the miracles of quacks and magic.
In the cause of universal worship, they have destroyed each other.
The church striving to be caeser.
“In every man a demon lies hidden. Or at least in So called Bill.”
Still feebly marching along, way behind the pack. SAG wagon please?
Finally caught up after stumbling last week; I’m still in this race-don’t retire my number! I’m trying to figure out if Mr. D knew people like the characters in the book, or if he idealized and expanded the personalities he wrote in order to get his point/theology across. It’s hard to believe that 19th century Russians lived so large.
I keep looking at my bookmark, with all those inches left to go, then clicking to the picture of RaptorMage in the opera. Bookmark, RaptorMage. Bookmark, RaptorMage. I canât go on Iâll go on.
âThe Grand Inquisitorâsâ a showstopper, fodder for a thousand anthologies yet a something Iâve never read. To follow Cecilâs âHappy Daysâ analogy, it was like the Fonz took Richie C. aside to one of the booths at Alâs and told him he couldnât really turn the jukebox on with his fist, he just pretended to do it so Mrs. C. would stop hitting the family donkey in the eyes with a knout, and Mr. C. wouldnât rub excrement on Joanieâs face and lock her in the outhouse anymore. Or something.
Anyway, about as dazzling a dissection of modernity Iâve seen. âYou want the freedom? You canât handle the freedom!â Again too, Dostoevskyâs (to my mind very modern) insistence that freedom that doesnât work for everyone isnât really freedom. You canât save a tiny elite, it has to be the whole damn peeps. Right down to the Smerdyakovs. It made me wonder how well our own modern miraclesâdemocracy, capitalism, medical science, etc.âmeasure up on that yardstick.
Iâm with the Old Man in KS in appreciating the way Dostoevsky uses fictional characters to express these ideasâit means, for me anyway, that the juryâs still out on how much of Ivanâs monologue weâre really being asked to believe. The mystery thickens when D. follows up Ivanâs poem-that-never-really-becomes-a-poem with that encounter with Smerdyakov. All Ivanâs theories about how low and ignorant the masses are destined to be, and why some fearless leader needs to give them bread and circus, and up pops epileptic half-brother S., with his intelligent smile to challenge Ivanâs notions of whoâs low and whoâs strong enough to be free.
RaptorMage, tell me you sang too and Iâm good for another 100 pages. đ
Bah! I actually saw Mr. Magoo, and I totally forgot to thrash him. Must be getting old.
There’s something in Ivan that reminds me of the main character in Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood,” who denies Jesus as loudly and as often as he can but can’t escape that figure, and I’m paraphrasing from faulty memory here, “leaping from tree to tree in the back of his mind.” I think that in his heart Ivan may be more religious than Alyosha–his is a faith that has been tested, that has to account for some truly horrible things, but that can’t quite be extinguished.
Thank you rodney k for the Happy Days reference. It made me laugh out loud. Which is not something I’ve done this week when reading all of Ivan’s little stories that he ‘collects’.
I am about 30 pages behind. I am right in the middle of “The Grand Inquisitor”.
I am with those who have mentioned perhaps Ivan is more religious than Alyosha. Or perhaps they are equally religious.
I kind of get the feeling if you put them both on jury duty Alyosha would go with his gut feeling and not listen to any evidence while Ivan would almost go insane battling it out in his mind how probable or not the crime was….I’m not sure which one I’d want if it was me being judged.
Yup, I sang. Chorus, not a lead or solo, but definitely sang. The demons-into-depths at the end of Don Juan was more fun musically, but La Traviata has the chorus on stage for most of the show.
I can’t believe I’m caught up. The world really is topsy-turvy.
i had to stop reading when Ivan is retelling his children stories to Al, so i’m behind yet again… so far, my favorite character is I, but A is a close second–then again, there’s D, and F, well F i don’t like at all, but i like that. his demon is not so hidden, or IS it?
Reading the conversation between Alyosha and Ivan, I had the thought that it was like someone thinking to themselves weighing two points of view. Then I thought, could the three brothers represent three different world views fighting it out in Dostoevsky’s Brain?
Ivan’s tirade about children was hard for Alyosha to hear and an attack on religion. on page 44 “… Just art thou, O Lord, for thy ways are revealed! …. When the mother and the torturer whose hounds tore her son to pieces embrace each other, … everything will be explained…”
“If the tormenters are in hell, what can hell set right here, if these ones have already been tormented?”
“It is not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, … I just most respectfully return him the ticket”
On page 263 – this struck my funny bone. In Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor poem the Old man is cut to the quick by a simple kiss from the prisoner. Then after the poem ends, after the brothers have a disagreement, Ivan says to Alyosha “… I see that in your heart there is no room for me …” Alyosha gently kisses Ivan. Ivan says “Literary theft”. I loved that part. Alyosha becomes more real in this scene.
Ivan completely bored the socks off me. I hope I don’t have to endure another ‘poem’ by him. ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ felt monumentally terse, in my humble opinion.
I liked the bit, “Don’t hold any grudges!” on p.279. There seemed to be a lot of strong hints of things to come in the final section this week.
suddenly, the pages become more ominous than ever with the correspondence at the lunch table with ivan and alyosha in ârebellionâ â iâm at least engaged with ivanâs trying to clinch an argument or point over alyosha (with the children), if not kind of freaked out by ivan. then comes âthe grand inquisitorâ chapter and ivan folds into the high drama, still creepy, but with all this play-act preaching âis he being ironic? is he laughing?â iâm just all over the place, and not very engaged, thinking, hm, weâre actually probably getting to the meat of this book now, and not really happy about that thought. iâd pretty much prefer meaningless meanderings, i think, altho this does seem to have a fair amount of those, itâs just that the meanderings are so heavy-handed. ah the curse of the upper crust, oh, ignorance is bliss, and blah blah blah (though i am folding a bit into the religion/philosophy logic, but how can you not with page after page of this (at least without going crazy or skipping pages, which i never allow myself to do, for better or worse). ah, but it starts to pcik up again toward the end of our section for this week. i think.
Remind me someone, please, next time I am asked that age-old question about the dream-guests at a dinner party to reply, with deadpan intonation and no trace of a smile, “Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov”. In fact, why not push the boat out and get them all together. If I do that, though, will someone remind me to get soup-making lessons and ensure the chicken isn’t overcooked.
Call me perverse, but I enjoyed The Grand Inquisitor. I appreciated and am perplexed by the well-tilled difficulty that Ivan’s “poem” calls “this need for communality of worship is the chief torment of each man individually, and of mankind as a whole, from the beginning of the ages”.
From somewhere I suddenly feel this urge to beat up Smerdyakov. No not really, I like him actually. But the thing I don’t quite understand that is spewing up from my soul without me being able to prevent it is two words: human condition. Human condition.
I liked the ending of Ivan’s poem, and the funny way he chides Alyosha for nicking his ideas even though he “never wrote two lines of verse”… I like it that this discussion is framed as something like a poem, poetic: ‘the muddled poem’.
How does our narrator have such access to the hidden depths of the characters’ souls? I feel weird asking that (as if it’s the first time i’ve read a book) but I think it came up because of the funny way the book is narrated: “nor is it time yet to enter his soul- this soul will have its turn”.
Oh and one more thing to remind me, if you don’t mind. Next time I am defending my ideas to my supervisor nudge me so that I can answer: “However, the way I am defending my thought makes me seem like an author who did not stand up to your criticism. Enough of that.”
ivan’s torture stories made me sick; too much like our tabloid times perhaps. admired his argument, though.
Yay! Shorter section this time! Thanks for the lighter week on the Deathmarch.
Sadly, I am going to have to bow out of the Deathmarch. I can’t keep up with all my work and the reading. I’ve been falling farther and farther behind. I’ll keep reading, but I’ll have to watch the rest of you slowly disappear into the distance.
I’m still here. Plugging along, dazed and amazed by the madness, brought into balance by your comments.
I’m a little behind this week but I have only about twenty pages before I’m with you, so I should make it up by tomorrow. Right now, Ivan needs to shut up.
When I can dismiss logic and reason from my brain and just read…I can bear it, but when I can’t, become agitated with the monologues, especially Ivan’s ‘poem’. His analysis of the role of the Catholic church enslaving mankind because they could not tolerate Christ’s gift of freedom of choice was interesting. Is all this fictional theology expressed through the book’s characters autobiographical? The introduction described D as living with a ‘coexistence of faith and disbelief’, which we’ve seen several times, is perhaps the clearest in these ‘week 5’ pages. He’s certainly not an atheist, but maybe–just maybe he’s an agnostic. This “read” is kinda fun.
i don’t want to drop out, but i’m behind again and haven’t felt like this since high school.
better than any gospels ive read
dosto bought all the sententious products from ‘ethereal costco.’
thank you ivan
i will now stand up when i pee AND NOT EVEN put the seat down!
everything is pissable!
I’m with TOMinKS about Smerdyakov. Even his name is slimy and creepy.
Very ominous forebodings at the end of this section. I’m ready for the next action, but see we get to spend some time with the elder again, which is always a pleasing respite for me.
The human cruelties documented by Ivan in his essay on the failure of God’s redemption are now deeply etched in my psyche, and I can’t help but link them to the horrors described by the daily news. I enjoyed his essay on “higher harmony” and how he deconstructs the the concept of good-and-evil as one of the ways people have created “God.” God has made man in his image, and we have made God in our image. Alyosha’s worldview is taking a real hit.
But now, can I get the image of that little girl out of my mind? I don’t think so.
I loved this week’s passage. I stumbled at first during Grand Inquisitor–somewhere during a seven-page paragraph (to which my high school daughter said, “I thought that wasn’t allowed?”), but then the sheer relentless force of Ivan’s assault got to me, and the fact that he is so obviously at war within himself over wishing he could just buy into this thing he finds himself rebelling against. I too am surprised by the modernity of some of the arguments in this book, but that’s probably just because of the bias that every generation has on thinking it thought of stuff “first.” In addition, I’m going to argue against Tolstoy and others who think that the book is too unwieldy to be “art”. I think it’s the boiling-over cascade of words and ideas that gives the book such force. I wouldn’t want to see a more reigned-in, mannered version of this book, or one with more of an artifice. I’m loving it’s almost-out-of-control structure. All this plus a bona-fide cliffhanger this week! Woo hoo!
Still sadly behind but at least I’ve met Grushenka. Wow.
I found this week to be a real slog for the first time in the march. Ivan’s religious rant/diatribe was hard for me to get through. The initial talk about how tragedy befalling children makes him basically want to flip God the bird was working for me, but after that… I really found it hard to focus. Also, it’s starting to kind of grate that Alyosha and everyone else just flits from place to place reacting to what they’re hearing from other characters. There is a notable absence of adult influence in these people’s lives. The only adults act just like the adolescents – excluding the holy fool, who acts like a holy fool. I hope things coalesce soon. I’m not giving up! Just feeling tired. I cheated on this book all week with two other books, I confess.