Hi,
I`m thinking about reading some Dostoevskij novels. It would be nice if some people could share their personal ranking of the Dostoevskij novels or could give some reasons why to read a specific novel. :)
Greetings, Benjy
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Hi,
I`m thinking about reading some Dostoevskij novels. It would be nice if some people could share their personal ranking of the Dostoevskij novels or could give some reasons why to read a specific novel. :)
Greetings, Benjy
Just to begin:
My favorite novels are:
The Brothers Karamazov
The Idiot
Crime and Punishment
I also love some of his short stories very much. My favorite ones:
"The white nights"
"A Gentle Creature" and "Bobok"
Thank you very much, Danik 2016! It would be nice if you (or someone else) could also post something on what you like about one or the other of these works, especially about Crime and Punishment, The Adolescent, The Gambler or the short stories. (I already read quite some passages from "Brothers Karamazov" and "The Idiot")
There are several Dostojevski threads on this forum:
http://www.online-literature.com/for...oevsky-Fyodor&
Thanks!
I agree with the sloth that the books to read are The Bros K (if you read none other, read that one), The Idiot (just avoid Gladys for a time :) ) and C&P (the original Friday the 13th). Some folks like to start with Notes From the Underground, which is shorter. If you go that route, be sure to read the others, which are ultimately greater novels. Good luck and enjoy! Dostoyevsky is an amazing thinker.
Thanks!
(Who's Gladys? An ultimate Non-Idiot?
And the connection with Friday the 13th? Because everything goes wrong for Rodion? - I'm not a native Speaker in English)
Gladys is the Fairy Godmother of The Idiot--well, more of an avenging Seraph, really. She's a nice lady and fiercely intelligent. But if we say her name one more time, she's going to materialize. I'll distract her and you run for it. :) :) :) (Just kidding Gladys. You're the best).Quote:
Originally Posted by Benjy
Oh sorry, I didn't see you were German. Friday the 13th was a really bad American horror movie about a psychopath who murders teenagers with an ax. A bunch of even worse sequels were made (Saturday the 14th, Sunday the 15th, Monday the 16th--no, no, I'm just kidding again).Quote:
Originally Posted by Benjy
Is there a materializing function on this forum? (How does it feel)
Well, those two murders were committed, as I understand, in quite an amateurish way, that's true. Yet I've read it was something like a perfect crime - except that Rodion had that longing to betray himself...
By the way - I was born on a Sunday the 8th (really) ... that goes with the row.
It all depends on whether you agree with her. Believe me, it can get uncomfortable. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Benjy
There's a professional way? I'm getting a little scared of you, Benjy. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Benjy
I came upon this video yesterday and thought about you. It addresses Raskolnikov's motives--rather too briefly, but I thought you might be interested. As to your point, I don't see him as looking to get caught. That would take more self-awareness than he can muster until the novel's final pages. Let me know what you think.Quote:
Originally Posted by Benjy
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vEfyCVD7BgI
Added: Just found this one, too. Same guy, but better because more detail. Enjoy!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dlj2fuJsGLI
Thanks a lot for the links! Unfortunately I haven't had time so far to watch it because I have to concentrate a lot while listening to an English lecture.
I would like to give you a link, too, on Crime & Punishment (Schuld und Sühne). You probably can't understand the German, but you can use the automatically generated English Subtitle which is, in my opinion, not too bad, to get the idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llyJMT6OIME
Do you have something like that in English language, too? Or other interesting material on Dostoevskij or Tolstoy?
Thanks. :lol: I couldn't find an English translation, but it was hilarious in German. (I liked Raskolnikov's stubble beard and little grin especially). The professor in the link I left suggests that Dostoyevsky's works are so compelling because he does not argue his positions against a straw man version of an opposing view, but by what he (the professor) calls an iron man argument. That is, Dostoyevsky makes the argument for the position he rejects in its strongest possible form, and then shows where it leads and why it is flawed. In the case of Crime and Punishment, he opposes Raskolnikov's atheist-materialist/nihilist position that morality is the mask of cowardice and that a free and healthy mind must be able to overcome it. He does this by giving Raskolnikov every reason (even an ethical one) for carrying out his crime. But the act itself is counterproductive and (he says) afterwards it changes who Raskolnikov is in a fundamental way. I can see his (Peterson's) view to some extent. I'm not sure Raskolnikov is a new person entirely (though he is by the end of the epilogue), but his "heroic" endeavor is an utter failure. All he manages to do is (SPOILER ALERT) to murder the innocent Lizaveta with the repugnant pawnbroaker and to steal money he never wished to touch again. In my view it is Raskolnikov's subsequent self-loathing (as opposed to his conscience, which is the standard interpretation) that puts him in Siberia. But I do not think he botched the job because he always wanted to fail. He was too arrogant and self impressed before the crime. He hated himself afterwards only because he saw himself as a failure. And he was cured of this by the self-awareness his love for Sonya brought him in the novel's final pages--in my view the most powerful part of the novel.
Well, that's my opinion--the best resource I know how to give you. Ask me another day and I'll tell you about War and Peace. As usual my ideas are not the standard ones.
Yes, it's really interesting how Peterson presents it:
- Raskolnikow could, through the murder, save his sister from a loveless marriage
- the pawnbroker is cruel, deceitful, resentful, terrible in the eyes of the other people as well
- R. could "free the slave", the abused pawnbroker's niece
- he is half-starved, delirious, possessed with all those new, nihilist ideas
- with the money he could become a lawyer and do good for the world/the poor
...
When you listen to this, for a short moment you really think Raskolnikow could defend his murder. Very interesting, this iron man concept.What do I have to agree on? By the way, some weeks ago I personally wrote an e-mail to this Youtuber and asked him about "The Idiot". He replied he would probably have done it by Octobre or November this year. Around Octobre 1st there will also be an election by Youtube users with the winning 25 novels being guaranteed to be played during the next half year; the Idiot being one of the favourites, perhaps.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
Of course, I haven't read C&P so far, so this (subconscious) looking to get caught is just something I picked up somewhere.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
Lol. It is better to watch this kind of presentation after having read the actual novel. Else one might get the idea that it is a sort of black comedy.
OK, what about War and Peace?Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
(Thanks for the Peterson lectures! Really interesting; it reminded me of 1 or 2 Irwin Weil lectures on Dostoevskij that I had watched some weeks ago)
Well, War and Peace seems to me to be about fate; and also history, which is a highly related topic (for Tolstoy, they are more or less the same thing). He is anxious to be done with the Carlyle's Great Man Theory. The supposedly great men of history just aren't all that important in War and Peace. Napoleon thinks he's a military genius, but his orders aren't really even reaching his own men. The French and Russian troops are just doing what they have to do based on what's happening in their little part of the battlefield. And Kutuzov isn't really pursuing some kind of grand strategy. He's just doing what he has to do every time the French beat him, which is mostly just running away. There is this rather moving scene in which Kutuzov, who's not the most emotional man in the world and not the smartest, learns that Napoleon has (quite foolishly) withdrawn from Moscow. He turns to an icon at the back of the room and silently weeps because he FINALLY sees how he can (maybe) defeat him. The implication is that he didn't really have a plan before that, and the one he eventually adopted (the one that won the war) was handed to him by fate.
Previously, many Europeans had thought of fate in Augustinian terms. It was like a boulder crashing down a mountainside, partly carried by the force of its own trajectory (in effect, the consequences of one's prior choices) and partly being directed by or reacting against landscape features (events, ideas, people, crises). This is still a common way to look at things. I just reviewed a book called Pachinko in the Write a Book Review forum. The writer put an East Asian spin on things, but much of it was just a rehash of Augustine's ideas about fate.
But for Tolstoy, fate involves microscopic interactions between an interconnected humanity. It is like a universal web. When a constituent part (an individual) acts it affects others, and their actions affect others and others and others in vast radiations. Although he doesn't use the metaphor, it is like a Ouija board. You know how several people can place their fingers on Ouija board planchette and, although none is aware of it, each is interacting with or against the tiny movements of the others so that the planchette sails off on a course independent of all of them. That is how Tolstoy (at least at that time in his life) saw fate and history. It was (and remains) a challenge to the Homeric ideal that became central to western thought.
In the "Weltliteratur to go series" the episode on War and Peace is especially funny in German; the Russians brilliantly running away being sort of a running gag. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
Tolstoy, as you portray his view on fate, really makes a good point there. But I also think there really are some outstanding men in history like Alexander the Great with his leadership and motivational skill that with their actions sort of overshadow many of these microscopic interactions and change the political/cultural landscape on earth.
In the last two weeks I've read the first 15 chapters of his novel "Resurrection" (and some other selected chapters) and I'm really surprised how well Tolstoy could observe and describe people in their psychological reactions, and also how satirical he writes, e.g. on the system of justice in Russia at that time, the Orthodox Church or several political movements.
Tolstoy's notion is that Napoleon is subject to the "Laws of History", which are determined by millions of individual decisions and personal choices. One of the (many) great things about War and Peace is that,whatever one's opinion on "Great Men's" effect on history upon sober reflection, when immersed in the novel it's impossible to deny Tolstoy's argument. His fiction supports his philosophy that skillfully.
Yes, of course, if you condense the plot of a Classic, with a lot of death/murder etc. going on, into 10 minutes, it's hard to present it as something else than either a black tragedy or a black comedy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Danik 2016
Of course, you can get a wrong picture of the content and mood of the book - the youtuber later admitted he had "terribly massacred the religious and philosophical dimension" of the novel -, but I personally like to know something of the plot in advance.
I had a look at War and Peace and I laughed a lot. Specially the "aua " part of it is funny. But then I know the original story. It´s not only that the story has been shortened. The spirit of the presentation is different. In fact it works as a kind of satire on the original . So I wouldn´t recomend it for a classroom introduction for students, for example.Quote:
Originally Posted by Benjy
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
True, but of course "Laws of History" in this case are the Tolstoyan laws. They differ, for example, in comparison with the inexorable laws of Marxist materialist history or the cyclical history of Thucydides or even Toynbee. I'm a Tolstoyan where history is concerned, but I remain a little troubled about some of his theory's implications for individual responsibility. Everyone causes history, but (supposedly) "great men" like Hitler and Stalin and Mao are still responsible for their murders.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Benjy
Oh, post the link for the video, Benjy! I'd love to see it! :)
It's very hard in the western historical and literary tradition (or even psychiatric, if you're a Jungian) to do without the idea of the hero. Even Alexander seems to have consciously modeled himself after Achilles. Russia always straddled that middle ground between Europe and Asia, so perhaps that had something to do with Tolstoy's radicalism, I don't really know. Rather than becoming dogmatic about one historiography or another, it is better to be aware of the various approaches and to take what one can from them. Some kind of dialectic is usually the rule.
Unlike Marx, Tolstoy didn't think he had discovered the laws of history. He thought they existed in the abstract. Also, I don't think he thought that Napoleon was absolved of individual responsibility -- although he shared it with the soldiers who signed up for his armies and supported his campaigns. War and Peace shows how two families (the Rostovs and Bolkonskis) were both influenced by the great events of the time, and influenced those events in their turn. Every soldier (and every citizen of Russia or France) had a personal story, personal motives, and personal ambitions -- just like Napoleon. That's what makes Tolstoy's (potential) laws of history so difficult to get at -- there is no single driving force (like economic infrastructure) that the historian can identify as causal. Tolstoy did think that the king (or general) was "history's slave".
Here's the end of Book 9, chapter one:
We use "cause" to refer to a handle which we (puny) humans can manipulate, or the willful act of a fellow human. The murderer "causes" his victim's death by plotting the murder with malice aforethought. Nonetheless, "in an historical sense" there are infinite "causes" (i.e. conditions that were necessary and sufficient for the murder to take place). That doesn't abrogate the legal and moral responsibility of the murderer.Quote:
When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?
Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.
Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
The "laws of history" (by the way) don't determine what happens; they describe it. Similarly, the laws of physics don't determine the motion of the universe; they describe it. The "laws" are human inventions, the motion of history, like that of the planets, continues without regard to the laws. The notion that the laws are "discoveries" instead of "inventions" suggests a theistic world view in which the laws predated the universe.
Here you are: :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCYvQ7xOfC8Without having read the novel I'm sure I can say you're right. This series is a about satire big time. I fear I have to tell you that, as I understand, many teachers in Germany now use these presentations in class. IF the students then read the novel afterwards, I think it's no big problem and can be helpful and motivating (unless the specific presentation is too much disrespectful). But if they don't read it anyways they get, as you say, a wrong notion of the spirit of the work.Quote:
Originally Posted by Danik 2016
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
Yes, everyone thinks that about his own ideas. :) I mean, Tolstoy's historiography describes a recognizable reality to you and me. But if we were members of Mohammad's army at Medina we might have understood historic processes differently. 19-century historians may have wanted scientific laws akin to those of physics, but history didn't give it to them. Tolstoy brought light to history's processes. So did Nietzsche (for example), though their ideas were very different. My rather simple approach is try to learn what I can from both.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
I wasn't troubled so much about how Tolstoy saw Napoleon as the way some of his ideas could be (mis)used to incriminate the innocent and exonerate the guilty. A concentration camp survivor once told me that she held every adult German alive during the Holocaust responsible for it. But she wasn't being racist, she assured me-- German children and subsequent generations were innocent. I understood her reasoning to some extent (there were a lot more Germans than Gestapo) but I strongly reject such notions of collective guilt. History is more complicated and human experience more intricate than that. Another such abuse has led some to say, hey, Hitler didn't happen in a vacuum. Why focus him when the whole society was to blame? Or to take a more modern (and more personal) example, I oppose abortion. But my generation of Americans has not managed to turn it back. Am I complicit? Of course not, but one could misuse Tolstoy's ideas to argue that I was. To get a bit science fiction-ish, I can imagine some future Fundamentalist dystopia alleging such a thing. It is better to approach supposed certainties about history with a healthy degree of caution.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Benjy
Thanks, Benjy. It's great! :)
The series is quite extensive. I´m very curious about the treatment he inflicted on Faust and Homo Faber.Quote:
Originally Posted by Benjy
Yes, he has imposed on himself to post at least one performance per week. I've just watched the one on Max Frisch's Homo Faber (Faust is too spooky for me :)). It's apparently only the 4th performance he has ever done and perhaps that's why it is done more slowly and extensively.Quote:
Originally Posted by Danik 2016
1:34 "Once she was a communist, now she is merely an intellectual..."
3:29 "he's an artist indeed but cool anyway..."
3:43 "he really looks similar to his brother..." (macabre scene)
I'll have to watch it before I answer you:D .
This has little to do with Tolstoy, and even less to do with Dostoevsky, but I think most of us are complicit in the immoral acts of our leaders or our nations. Germans who protested the Holocaust to the extent that they were imprisoned or killed may escape blame, of course, but most of us could work harder than we do to prevent evil. However much you may have worked to prevent abortions, it seems unlikely that you could not have done more. I think Donald Trump is an embarrassment to our country, and dangerous for the world, and I didn't vote for him. In fact, I spent two long evenings making phone calls in support of his opponent (who I thought was a (less) terrible candidate). Nonetheless, I could have donated more money, spent more time campaigning, and worked more diligently than I did to prevent Trumps's election. The point is that the blame should be commensurate with the activity. Of course someone who voted for Clinton (or opposes abortion) has less "blame" for the current situation than those who support abortion rights or voted for Trump. But that doesn't mean that they are completely blameless. Same with Germans and the Holocaust.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
Actually, I think your position does have something to do with Tolstoy, if only because his ideas influenced the kind of political liberalism that countenanced notions of collective guilt. I just reject it. In it's extreme form it has proved murderous (a la Stalin: Kulaks were oppressors as a class so we killed them all). Certain other political versions are merely obnoxious (You owe me money because people who had the same color skin as yours enslaved people who had the same color skin as mine). Dream on (such folks can). So we disagree on this, Ecurb. Not the first time it's happened, and we needn't let it come between us as men.
Here is the English link of the series of Michael Sommer:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCba...lh06P1QMhrf44A
Thanks, Danik. Appreciate that.
You´re welcome!
Thanks a lot! I didn't know there were English presentations, too.
There are some nice moments in "Crime and Punishment".
1:54 "...until Raskolnikow takes him home at some point in return for which he is dissed by Marmeladowa..."
7:38 "...and Porfiry does his Inspector Colombo routine again..."
By the way, the names Marmeladow and Luschin are very funny in German (marmelade=jam; Lusche=loser), perhaps intended by Dostoevskij who spent several years in Germany (and deeply despited the Germans which is very funny to read in his "A writer's diary").
In general, I agree with you and think Tolstoy may have agreed with you. Sin (the Christian position surely is, correct me if I'm wrong) a personal and individual failing, not a collective one. However, it's a complicated issue. Your Kulaks example is not telling. Stalin should not have killed the Kulaks because they belonged to a particular class, nor should he have killed those who held an anti-communist position, opposed collective farming, and tried to keep their personal wealth. It's not the notion of “colllective guilt” that makes Stalin's persecution of the Kulaks horrible: had those individuals who were guilty of obstructing Communist principles been the only ones executed, that would still have been horrible,. Reparations for slavery don't cut it either, for reasons we probably agree about.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
However, here's a hypothetical: suppose a man is wrongly convicted of a crime. He rots in prison for 20 years. The truth comes out: not only is the man not guilty, but he was railroaded by the now-deceased prosecutor. He is released (he was a medical student, about do become a physician when convicted), and the state decides to award him restitution of $300k, to give him a new start on life. Of course, this suggests “collective guilt”; all of us citizens constitute “the State”. Do you think the restitution unreasonable, and if not does this suggest that you DO accept the notion (in limited instances, at least) of “collective guilt”?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
Yes to restitution (in that case) but no to collective guilt. A member of the demos may have a responsibility to contribute to the common good by helping a fellow in such circumstances (which could, God forbid, be his or hers some day). But that is different from culpability in the original problem. Some of my federal tax dollar will no doubt be sent to Hawaii to help repair the damage done by the recent volcanic eruption. Not guilty! :)
Aiding victims of natural disasters constitutes neither "reparation" nor "restitution".
Individuals are often mandated by courts to pay reparations, and so, occasionally, is the State. The felon who gets out of prison after serving a JUST sentence of 20 years needs the money just as much as the man who was railroaded; we pay the man unjustly convicted because we admit our guilt in convicting him. Of course it is still reasonable to think that "guilt" can only be an individual failing: the unethical and ambitious prosecutor is most culpable;the elected D.A. who assigned the case should have known better; the voters who elected the DA could have made better choices; those voters who voted for the D.A.'s opponent could have campaigned more diligently. Nonetheless,the reparations are paid by the collective (which seems fair to me,although some members of the collective are more guilty than others).
Another example from our legal system would be a law suit against a corporation. A corporation is clearly a "collective". When sued, a corporation may pay "punitive damages" as well as "actual damages" (or whatever the term for that is). Any punitive damages paid are a penalty for "collective guilt". It's reasonable to think that the actual (moral) guilt is individual, although the financial and legal practicalities make "collective guilt" an appropriate fiction. Nonetheless, collective guilt is a legal reality.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
No, but it is (potentially) the responsibility of a participant in our republic to the contribute to common good (and this is an example of the common good because all are potentially subject to miscarriages of justice). But responsibility to our country is not the same as culpability for a crime. Why should it be?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
Speak for yourself, Ecurb. I didn't do it.
As far as corporate responsibility goes, you have a good point. Those who join corporations on the level of collective liability take their chances. But that hardly makes a retired kindergarten teacher in Des Moines (for example) culpable of someone else's prosecutorial misconduct. Not in a society that at least aspires to justice and morality.
Neither did the kindergarten teacher in Des Moines. But (assuming the court is in Des Moines) the teacher voted (or failed to vote) in the elections in which the responsible parties were elected. Doesn't that constitute at least a minor "responsibility"? Aren't all citizens responsible for their elected government (albeit only in a very minor way)? I suppose citizenship conferred at birth is involuntary, and a person could refuse responsibility. Except for that, however, it doesn't seem so different from owning stock in a corporation (the kindergarten teacher whose pension fund owns stock could plead lack of responsibility as well).Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
It seems to me that in a society that aspires to justice and morality each person takes at least some minor responsibility for the activities of his or her government. And, yes, I do speak for myself when I say this responsibility is (in my opinion) not only mine, but yours.
edited to ad: I'll agree with you that although I think we are responsible (to a minor degree) for the actions of our government, our "guilt" in failing in our responsibilities does not reach the level of being criminal (in most cases). So if "guilt" means "culpability for a crime" then we probably agree.