Welcome to Week 8, my very own week-of-DM-shame, as the days have slipped past and now I’m suddenly a week behind. I blame the Cannonball Run references from a few weeks back, which inspired me to go on a 750-mile trek throwing my DM schedule into mad array! But don’t wait for me. March on! March on! I’ll aim to catch up with ya before the next bend. Next Wednesday: Let’s Gumball Rally our way to the end of Part III, Book Nine, Chapter 2, “after a long but, I believe, necessary explanation.” (which is to say: please use this Week 4 thread for comments on pages 0-456; aim to finish reading that section and shout out here by end o’ day Tuesday)
In our modern always-on world, it’s very easy to forget how dark everything can be without street lights and headlights and other light pollution practically illuminating every part of the larger metro areas and certainly much of the not so metro areas.
The imagery of the dark, of lighting with candles, of nearly running into people, of seeing a single light in the windows to know that everyone was still up, of references to how dark everything was a night, was far more vivid in this weeks readings than previous weeks.
That, and I couldn’t really stop at the end of this week’s quota. The march has become an easy jog.
I’ve never stopped reading anything in the middle of a paragraph till this book. 8 page paragraphs?! I’m enjoying D’s writing; I’m not enjoying the characters. I’m racing to get caught up but so far there’s no one I give a rats as about. I think I have some idea of what an important part the Orthodox church is playing for these characters and for D’s Russia. This was serialized? And, but, so the public was awaiting a new episdode each week/month? (what I won’t do for a fridge magnet)
Happy Holidays
Whodunit? At first I was thinking that today the crime lab would sort it all out with DNA tests of the blood on the pestle and the victims and suspects. But I’m not so sure, since brothers, half-brothers, & parents share DNA to some degree.
So far, I have failed to see any explanation why Grigory yelled “Parricide!” (p. 394) when he saw what turned out to be Dmitri running away from his father’s house. I haven’t seen any indication that Grigory knew for sure that Fyodor was dead at that point, much less saw who murdered him. So I assume that Dosty wants us to assume that old Grig was yelling “Parricide!” based solely on his fears and assumptions, without any specific eyewitness knowledge. Anybody noticed otherwise?
The other big question is the obvious one of explaining how Dmitri got hold of all the money if he wasn’t his father’s murderer. Meanwhile, half-brother Smerdy attracts the doc’s notice because “Such severe and protracted fits of the falling sickness, recurring uninterruptedly over two days, are rarely met with.”
As I said back at week 5: This Smerdyakov guy bears watching. A good murder mystery often involves a perp who you barely notice at first, and I think Smerdy fills the bill here.
Another note on one of my sub-themes whilst doing this march: noting how Jews are portrayed in & by 19th century Russians. I see on p. 415 that in addition to thinking of Jews regarding accumulating money, the folks in this time and place called on Jews when they wanted entertainment. Imagine that! Jews in the entertainment industry?
I know I’m swinging as wildly as one of the Karamazovs, but I loved this section! That Dostoevsky could portray an Alyosha and Dmitri in the same book, and make both seem sympathetic, is some serious amplitude.
Dmitri’s frenzied shopping spree, the bloody roubles in his hand, the improvised entertainment at the tavern, Grushenka’s sudden change of heart—I was there, all the way, for all of it. The details, from the concerned friend trying to protect Dmitri, to the canny innkeeper anxious for another windfall, to the frenzied gambling with the Poles, to the peasant girls dancing in bear costumes, to Dmitri’s concern for his troika driver, made this one of the novel’s most amazing set pieces for me, up there with monks’ jealousy when Zosima died, or with Fyodor Pavolvich’s outrageous behavior at the monastery.
(Fyodor Pavlovich earns some sympathy too, I thought, with that note and pink ribbon tied around his envelope for Grushenka. The slobbery old rogue was really in love!)
I’m with the Old Man in Kansas in thinking that Dostoevsky’s got a trick up his sleeve, and we may find the case against Dmitri only circumstantial. But the circumstances are pretty damning. Yet weirdly, Dostoevsky’s got me pulling for Dmitri like I haven’t for anyone else up till now. How is it he got me to see the childlike sweetness in a violent parricide?
I will be willfully falling behind this week as I try to finish “Absalom, Absalom” for my terrestrial book group. So-called “Gary,” you think Fyodor D. is bad? Faulkner piles up page upon page of endless paragraphs filled with impenetrable prose. Rarely have I so wanted to slap an author and scream “Get to the freakin’ point already!” Can’t wait to get back to the giddy fun of our Russian murder mystery.
Ah, at last, now I know where I am. As a lover of mystery novels, I just know that I am going to be very, very disappointed if the murderer does indeed turn out to Mitya.
Who then? Ivan? Smerdyakov? But who is the most unlikey? Alyosha? Madame Hohlakov? Lise Hohlakov? She’s been suspiciously quiet for awhile. The ghost of the stinking Zossima, in a spasm of divine wrath? Or, I guess if one follows “the butler did it” school, it could be Grigory, with his cries of “parricide”– trying to frame Mitya!
i just woke up in a daze running away and whopping my father’s servant on the bonce, so i can’t be sure i did the reading but i hope i did.
on the upside, i seem to have tons of cash on me.
in this stretch there’s a critical mass of concurrent threads and hysteria fueling the impression that these lives are being lived while we’re not watching.
for me, it began in the room where pyotr washes the blood off mitya’s hands, the basket of food and wine is ordered, the pistols returned. when mitya rushes off to find grushenka and perhaps to kill himself, pyotr wanders around town, increasingly cranky and suspicious until finally it all comes together for him and he must have answers from grushenka’s servant, and he’s knocking at that gate, “getting more and more enraged each time he knocked, and at the same time banging still louder on the gate” (409).
nearly forty pyotrless pages later–time we spend with mitya, the despicable polish boyfriend and his bodyguard, the singing local ladies, grushenka’s boredom (disappointment, drunkenness, fervent love), and then, suddenly, a bedroom full of cops–we find that pyotr, “whom we left knocking with all his might at the well-locked gates of the widow Morozov’s house, in the end, of course, was finally successful” (445), setting off other waves of action, of swat teams and chatty khokhlakov and a whole chorus whose minds are made up about mitya (when we KNOW he didn’t do it), that take us right back to mitya and grushenka in that bedroom full of cops.
helluva trick, i’m starting to think, the way FD lit discrete fires that took hold all over town, are beginning to converge, and will burn the whole place down.
It may have been just a dream but I think I did both-met up with Linsay Lohan AND killed Fyodor. When I woke up I counted 3,000. Now I am off to the store to buy three, no, four dozen bottles of champagne!
As someone wrote above, it will be very disappointing if Dmitri is in fact the father-slayer, but then again I’m sure he isn’t.
As the Old Man said, I too have my eyes on Smerdyakov. Sometimes I wonder about that boy.
Also, am I alone in finding Alexei irresistible?
I love the Rashomon aspect: Fenya has part of the story, Madame K has part, Pyotr Ilych has part, the men in the tavern have another small part. And for several dozen pages, there is no priest (nor even a Lt. Columbo) to resolve them all. It’s a delicious suspension, and short by the scale of the whole book.
For those craving action — we’ve had it this week! I find myself 10 pages beyond the assignment, but I’ll keep quiet. The excesses of emotion and language convinced me that translation was done by very low-level English speakers, BUT I read all the early blubs again and find this one described as the most faithful to the Russian. However, doubt I read another translation to compare. Shrieking is a common voice and Fyodor P is “thoroughly murdered” and it all seems very natural now. Has anyone noticed we’re well past half way through?
anti smer(dyakov) campaign
is the onion peeler seeking revenge for his mother’s rape?
weak in the knees for grushenka. she possesses a joystick for each man she encounters. oh please oh please mister dosto, more lurid details involving her love you, love you not’s — how round is your face sweet grushenka, and your feet of perfect minutiae…
lying poles, lock em in a room of off-cheese and deceit
Another vote for Smerdyakov as killer. I seem to remember him giving up the secret knock to Fyodor’s door a little too easily when Mitya asked him a few hundred pages ago. And wouldnt that validate Grigory’s cry of parricide! upon seeing Dmitri somehow managed to get in? Im not sure who done it, but I also hope it wasnt Dmitri.
I was also interested in the part where Andrei says to Dmitri, dont worry Dmitri, you are like a child and the Lord will forgive you. And Dmitri goes on to ask Andrei if Andrei will forgive Dmitri “for everyone.” This reminded me and contrasts with Ivan’s earlier rant about the innocence of children, and the inability of anyone, including the mothers, to forgive acts of violence against kids.
I’m in the midst of “Delirium” and it’s not a comfortable state for me. Polish, cards, too much champagne–I’m ready for a few quiet moments with Alyosha or–rest his putrid bones–Zosima.
I’m still behind but no further behind — just a week behind. I get a little irritated at the “modernist” (?) style of having to trace every thought or idea in a character’s mind, but I still enjoy watching Alyosha’s unfolding, his interest in Grushenka, and how much he is, at heart or in his genes, a Karamazov.
Sorry–I’m late posting–I’m sure it’s end of day Tuesday somewhere still! I found the whole Polish World Series of Baccarat most fascinating. The interplay–the hiding of the cards in the couch–the bluffing–the flushed faces! Didn’t anybody hear of Kenny Rogers? (sorry, wrong century). Ya gotta know how to hold ’em; ya gotta know how to fold ’em. Apparently, these people are not good bluffers, especially Mitya himself. And rollicking dancing girls? This is Sodom indeed (page 430). Can’t wait for what comes next.
Squeezing in my comment for the week to say: I’m almost caught up and can attribute my progress to the lack of theorizing about morality in this last installment. Also, have a totally inexplicable impulse to picture Rachel Weisz as Grushenka, which I wish I’d stop doing.
yikes! I almost forgot to post! And I even finished early this week!
I may be missing something, but it seems completely clear to me that Dmitri didn’t do it, right? It seems like D. is going out of his way to establish how he is soong going to look circumstantially guilty to others. We’ve basically followed him the whole time, too–there’s no unaccounted for time period in which Dmitri could have done it.
Anyway, fun segment this time. D can write a pretty good drunk scene. However, after all this debauchery and blood and hysterics, I’m definitely ready for Alyosha to return. I guess I love him, too, like everyone in the book!
I actually did finish the section on time but am just now doing the writeup.
I am surprised how much emphasis is placed on the money for some time and continuing. It seems that there is no real accounting of it. It is being thrown around.
The spending spree reminds me of the spending spree of the two murderers in the Book In Cold Blood. The two left a trail spending that helped with their capture as I remember it from many years ago.
The narrator seems very sympathetic to Dmitry – I dont get it – did he not just kill his father?
Fascinating to read the posts and hear suspicions that the killer might not be Dmitri. Hmmm.
The ‘spree’ was enjoyable reading… Grushenka is getting more and more interesting as we learn more about her. Poor girl had a broken heart for 5 years and then her love turns out to be hardly worth bothering over… I’m ready to keep going, the pace is picking up and things are getting more interesting!
Welcome to Week 8, my very own week-of-DM-shame, as the days have slipped past and now I’m suddenly a week behind. I blame the Cannonball Run references from a few weeks back, which inspired me to go on a 750-mile trek throwing my DM schedule into mad array! But don’t wait for me. March on! March on! I’ll aim to catch up with ya before the next bend.
In our modern always-on world, it’s very easy to forget how dark everything can be without street lights and headlights and other light pollution practically illuminating every part of the larger metro areas and certainly much of the not so metro areas.
The imagery of the dark, of lighting with candles, of nearly running into people, of seeing a single light in the windows to know that everyone was still up, of references to how dark everything was a night, was far more vivid in this weeks readings than previous weeks.
That, and I couldn’t really stop at the end of this week’s quota. The march has become an easy jog.
I’ve never stopped reading anything in the middle of a paragraph till this book. 8 page paragraphs?! I’m enjoying D’s writing; I’m not enjoying the characters. I’m racing to get caught up but so far there’s no one I give a rats as about. I think I have some idea of what an important part the Orthodox church is playing for these characters and for D’s Russia. This was serialized? And, but, so the public was awaiting a new episdode each week/month? (what I won’t do for a fridge magnet)
Happy Holidays
Whodunit? At first I was thinking that today the crime lab would sort it all out with DNA tests of the blood on the pestle and the victims and suspects. But I’m not so sure, since brothers, half-brothers, & parents share DNA to some degree.
So far, I have failed to see any explanation why Grigory yelled “Parricide!” (p. 394) when he saw what turned out to be Dmitri running away from his father’s house. I haven’t seen any indication that Grigory knew for sure that Fyodor was dead at that point, much less saw who murdered him. So I assume that Dosty wants us to assume that old Grig was yelling “Parricide!” based solely on his fears and assumptions, without any specific eyewitness knowledge. Anybody noticed otherwise?
The other big question is the obvious one of explaining how Dmitri got hold of all the money if he wasn’t his father’s murderer. Meanwhile, half-brother Smerdy attracts the doc’s notice because “Such severe and protracted fits of the falling sickness, recurring uninterruptedly over two days, are rarely met with.”
As I said back at week 5: This Smerdyakov guy bears watching. A good murder mystery often involves a perp who you barely notice at first, and I think Smerdy fills the bill here.
Another note on one of my sub-themes whilst doing this march: noting how Jews are portrayed in & by 19th century Russians. I see on p. 415 that in addition to thinking of Jews regarding accumulating money, the folks in this time and place called on Jews when they wanted entertainment. Imagine that! Jews in the entertainment industry?
I know I’m swinging as wildly as one of the Karamazovs, but I loved this section! That Dostoevsky could portray an Alyosha and Dmitri in the same book, and make both seem sympathetic, is some serious amplitude.
Dmitri’s frenzied shopping spree, the bloody roubles in his hand, the improvised entertainment at the tavern, Grushenka’s sudden change of heart—I was there, all the way, for all of it. The details, from the concerned friend trying to protect Dmitri, to the canny innkeeper anxious for another windfall, to the frenzied gambling with the Poles, to the peasant girls dancing in bear costumes, to Dmitri’s concern for his troika driver, made this one of the novel’s most amazing set pieces for me, up there with monks’ jealousy when Zosima died, or with Fyodor Pavolvich’s outrageous behavior at the monastery.
(Fyodor Pavlovich earns some sympathy too, I thought, with that note and pink ribbon tied around his envelope for Grushenka. The slobbery old rogue was really in love!)
I’m with the Old Man in Kansas in thinking that Dostoevsky’s got a trick up his sleeve, and we may find the case against Dmitri only circumstantial. But the circumstances are pretty damning. Yet weirdly, Dostoevsky’s got me pulling for Dmitri like I haven’t for anyone else up till now. How is it he got me to see the childlike sweetness in a violent parricide?
I will be willfully falling behind this week as I try to finish “Absalom, Absalom” for my terrestrial book group. So-called “Gary,” you think Fyodor D. is bad? Faulkner piles up page upon page of endless paragraphs filled with impenetrable prose. Rarely have I so wanted to slap an author and scream “Get to the freakin’ point already!” Can’t wait to get back to the giddy fun of our Russian murder mystery.
Ah, at last, now I know where I am. As a lover of mystery novels, I just know that I am going to be very, very disappointed if the murderer does indeed turn out to Mitya.
Who then? Ivan? Smerdyakov? But who is the most unlikey? Alyosha? Madame Hohlakov? Lise Hohlakov? She’s been suspiciously quiet for awhile. The ghost of the stinking Zossima, in a spasm of divine wrath? Or, I guess if one follows “the butler did it” school, it could be Grigory, with his cries of “parricide”– trying to frame Mitya!
it’s so hard for me to keep up because lindsay lohan is looking for love online.
i just woke up in a daze running away and whopping my father’s servant on the bonce, so i can’t be sure i did the reading but i hope i did.
on the upside, i seem to have tons of cash on me.
in this stretch there’s a critical mass of concurrent threads and hysteria fueling the impression that these lives are being lived while we’re not watching.
for me, it began in the room where pyotr washes the blood off mitya’s hands, the basket of food and wine is ordered, the pistols returned. when mitya rushes off to find grushenka and perhaps to kill himself, pyotr wanders around town, increasingly cranky and suspicious until finally it all comes together for him and he must have answers from grushenka’s servant, and he’s knocking at that gate, “getting more and more enraged each time he knocked, and at the same time banging still louder on the gate” (409).
nearly forty pyotrless pages later–time we spend with mitya, the despicable polish boyfriend and his bodyguard, the singing local ladies, grushenka’s boredom (disappointment, drunkenness, fervent love), and then, suddenly, a bedroom full of cops–we find that pyotr, “whom we left knocking with all his might at the well-locked gates of the widow Morozov’s house, in the end, of course, was finally successful” (445), setting off other waves of action, of swat teams and chatty khokhlakov and a whole chorus whose minds are made up about mitya (when we KNOW he didn’t do it), that take us right back to mitya and grushenka in that bedroom full of cops.
helluva trick, i’m starting to think, the way FD lit discrete fires that took hold all over town, are beginning to converge, and will burn the whole place down.
It may have been just a dream but I think I did both-met up with Linsay Lohan AND killed Fyodor. When I woke up I counted 3,000. Now I am off to the store to buy three, no, four dozen bottles of champagne!
As someone wrote above, it will be very disappointing if Dmitri is in fact the father-slayer, but then again I’m sure he isn’t.
As the Old Man said, I too have my eyes on Smerdyakov. Sometimes I wonder about that boy.
Also, am I alone in finding Alexei irresistible?
I love the Rashomon aspect: Fenya has part of the story, Madame K has part, Pyotr Ilych has part, the men in the tavern have another small part. And for several dozen pages, there is no priest (nor even a Lt. Columbo) to resolve them all. It’s a delicious suspension, and short by the scale of the whole book.
For those craving action — we’ve had it this week! I find myself 10 pages beyond the assignment, but I’ll keep quiet. The excesses of emotion and language convinced me that translation was done by very low-level English speakers, BUT I read all the early blubs again and find this one described as the most faithful to the Russian. However, doubt I read another translation to compare. Shrieking is a common voice and Fyodor P is “thoroughly murdered” and it all seems very natural now. Has anyone noticed we’re well past half way through?
anti smer(dyakov) campaign
is the onion peeler seeking revenge for his mother’s rape?
weak in the knees for grushenka. she possesses a joystick for each man she encounters. oh please oh please mister dosto, more lurid details involving her love you, love you not’s — how round is your face sweet grushenka, and your feet of perfect minutiae…
lying poles, lock em in a room of off-cheese and deceit
Another vote for Smerdyakov as killer. I seem to remember him giving up the secret knock to Fyodor’s door a little too easily when Mitya asked him a few hundred pages ago. And wouldnt that validate Grigory’s cry of parricide! upon seeing Dmitri somehow managed to get in? Im not sure who done it, but I also hope it wasnt Dmitri.
I was also interested in the part where Andrei says to Dmitri, dont worry Dmitri, you are like a child and the Lord will forgive you. And Dmitri goes on to ask Andrei if Andrei will forgive Dmitri “for everyone.” This reminded me and contrasts with Ivan’s earlier rant about the innocence of children, and the inability of anyone, including the mothers, to forgive acts of violence against kids.
I’m in the midst of “Delirium” and it’s not a comfortable state for me. Polish, cards, too much champagne–I’m ready for a few quiet moments with Alyosha or–rest his putrid bones–Zosima.
late, and with nothing more to say than i’m caught up and still reading and i’m glad there is story and that we’re over the hump.
I’m still behind but no further behind — just a week behind. I get a little irritated at the “modernist” (?) style of having to trace every thought or idea in a character’s mind, but I still enjoy watching Alyosha’s unfolding, his interest in Grushenka, and how much he is, at heart or in his genes, a Karamazov.
Sorry–I’m late posting–I’m sure it’s end of day Tuesday somewhere still! I found the whole Polish World Series of Baccarat most fascinating. The interplay–the hiding of the cards in the couch–the bluffing–the flushed faces! Didn’t anybody hear of Kenny Rogers? (sorry, wrong century). Ya gotta know how to hold ’em; ya gotta know how to fold ’em. Apparently, these people are not good bluffers, especially Mitya himself. And rollicking dancing girls? This is Sodom indeed (page 430). Can’t wait for what comes next.
Squeezing in my comment for the week to say: I’m almost caught up and can attribute my progress to the lack of theorizing about morality in this last installment. Also, have a totally inexplicable impulse to picture Rachel Weisz as Grushenka, which I wish I’d stop doing.
I still tag along on this march, tho the way is marshy and I’ve lost a shoe.
yikes! I almost forgot to post! And I even finished early this week!
I may be missing something, but it seems completely clear to me that Dmitri didn’t do it, right? It seems like D. is going out of his way to establish how he is soong going to look circumstantially guilty to others. We’ve basically followed him the whole time, too–there’s no unaccounted for time period in which Dmitri could have done it.
Anyway, fun segment this time. D can write a pretty good drunk scene. However, after all this debauchery and blood and hysterics, I’m definitely ready for Alyosha to return. I guess I love him, too, like everyone in the book!
I actually did finish the section on time but am just now doing the writeup.
I am surprised how much emphasis is placed on the money for some time and continuing. It seems that there is no real accounting of it. It is being thrown around.
The spending spree reminds me of the spending spree of the two murderers in the Book In Cold Blood. The two left a trail spending that helped with their capture as I remember it from many years ago.
The narrator seems very sympathetic to Dmitry – I dont get it – did he not just kill his father?
Fascinating to read the posts and hear suspicions that the killer might not be Dmitri. Hmmm.
The ‘spree’ was enjoyable reading… Grushenka is getting more and more interesting as we learn more about her. Poor girl had a broken heart for 5 years and then her love turns out to be hardly worth bothering over… I’m ready to keep going, the pace is picking up and things are getting more interesting!