Dostoyevsky isn't difficult

Dostoyevsky isn't difficult(autodidacts.io)

59 points by surprisetalk 2 days ago | 51 comments

I thoroughly enjoyed Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and White Nights, but I'm finding myself slogging through Karamazov. I'm about 600 pages in and its picking up at least. Banking on it all being worth it in the end. Normally I subscribe to the quote "life's too short to read a bad book", but making an exception for Dostoyevsky.

jszymborski 37 minutes ago | |

I started with Karamazov, then C&P, then the Idiot.

I loved excerpts of Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor, Dimitry's troika ride, any passage with Grushenka) but I also found it rough to get through. I really don't think I was ultimately able to appreciate it as a whole.

C&P felt much smoother and finally I devoured The Idiot. Those novels felt like night and day compared to Karamazov.

With Karamazov, I feel like there is some subtext or context I'm missing and would have loved to have had a companion text or course to help me.

When I first Master and Margarita, it came with incredible footnotes, and rereading it again I found I sometimes recalled the footnotes more than the text. I recommended the book to a friend, but their edition didn't have the footnotes so they bounced right off it.

Anyway if anyone knows of an edition better than the Penguin Classic of BK I'm all ears.

reg_dunlop 21 minutes ago | | |

Ha. I love Karamazov. To me, it boils down to a love affair/triangle and case of mistaken identity and ultimate justice. But in true Russian lit fashion, you must pass through the absurd with a detour through morality and human nature.

edit: I read the Barnes and Noble translation. And I would encourage reading some passages aloud.

yalue 55 minutes ago | |

I had the same experience, lol. I started with Crime and Punishment expecting thinly veiled philosophy where each character is a mouthpiece for one of the author's thought processes. Granted there's some of that, but I wasn't expecting such an exciting murder drama. Went into Karamazov expecting an exciting murder drama, and got the type of Russian literature I initially expected Crime and Punishment to be! Really it's a question of expectations.

crypttales 59 minutes ago | |

Karamazov is amazing.

But if you're 600 pages in and it's a slog you might have lost the train of thought of the novel.

It is a lot to keep in your head!

still-learning 50 minutes ago | | |

Yeah I've picked it up and put it down multiple times over the past year, might have had some context loss. Theres been a few very lucid monologues I've enjoyed, but I haven't felt the same level of internal revelation as the previous novels.

wahnfrieden 38 minutes ago | |

Try the Ignat Avsey translation, it’s great

To give you one idea of the approach - the accurately translated title is The Karamazov Brothers. Every other translator chooses the usual way because it sounds grander or eccentric or just because that’s how others did it before them, even though it’s simply incorrect as a translation.

P&V - one of them edits without even knowing Russian, a polar opposite

Karamazov is basically YA fiction though. Find other works if you’re not into it as an older adult, it’s fine

HDThoreaun 47 minutes ago | |

Nabokov didnt like Dostoyevsky either, especially Karamazov https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/magazine/nabokov-on-dosto...

wahnfrieden 36 minutes ago | | |

He was a noted hater of many great authors and works so naming one target of his doesn’t carry much weight

stevenwoo 1 hour ago |

One thing is a lot of common television/movie tropes are instantly recognizable in one form or another in there, the murder in Crime and Punishment is a series of coincidences and lucky timing for him to initially get away with it that would not be out of place in modern thriller or comedy. I had the same issue with the names so I took notes and bookmarked the Wikipedia page for the books to refresh my memory of whom was whom until it stuck. Audiobooks (most of the russian classics are free from my local library)help a lot with the pronunciation if one is like the writer and pattern matches names - hearing them a few times initially is very helpful. Side note - not a sea person but only from audiobooks learned i didn’t know how to pronounce English words boatswain, gunwale and forecastle.

gaiagraphia 1 hour ago |

Lol, remember being in my early 20s on a train and trying to read Crime and Punishhment, and just kept skipping random 5 pages here and there, before going back to playing Durak with some random Tajiks (who got kicked off the train in some random place...). The huge pages of French didn't help.

Prefered Demons, personally. Probably becuase I read it when more mature.

david927 2 days ago |

I also stumbled onto Crime and Punishment at 18 and expected it to be difficult and was blown away with how Dostoyevsky wrote one of the greatest novels of all time, to be sure, but as the author here says, also how engaging he made it.

The scene where he commits the crime is an absolute stunner, edge-of-your-seat, thriller. Who does that? Who can pull that off? Dostoyevsky

ivlad 2 hours ago | |

Dostoyevsky was originally published in magazines chapter by chapter, so he would end the December’s on a cliffhanger so that the readers re-subscribed

dang 1 hour ago | | |

You've touched on my favorite Dostoevsky anecdote! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152240.

A lot of 19th century novels were published as serials. The TV of their time I suppose.

With the final installment arriving by ship, crowds in New York shouted from the pier "Is Little Nell dead?" - https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-old-curio...

NoMoreNicksLeft 2 hours ago | |

Dunno. I can't read Russian for shit (pre-kindergarten level, I'd guess), but it seems like cheating to read it in English.

SamBam 1 hour ago | | |

I can't imagine how much amazing and important literature you'd miss if you were snobby enough to think that you could only read things in their original language.

I'm so glad I get to read the Russians and Kafka and Calvino and Murakami and Camus and Marquez and Homer and Plato and, heck, the Bible.

I do know the feeling. I struggled through the start of My Brilliant Friend because I ought to read it in Italian, because I speak it pretty well. So then I didn't read it for years. Finally I just read it in English and enjoyed myself.

olvy0 2 days ago |

Funny, I'm just reading War and Peace myself (the Anthony Briggs translation) and having the same reaction, gushing occasionally to people I know how approachable it is, and how darkly funny and modern it feels. Well, at least after passing through the first ~200 pages which are a slog. I didn't find even Tolstoy's historical musings boring, although he tends to repeat himself. And I usually suck at names, but the main characters are done so well I find them easy to remember. There aren't that many important ones despite how it seems at the start. It also serves as a fascinating peek into the daily lives of Russians of all stripes in the early 1800s.

I also had the same reaction to Crime and Punishment as the OP did.

user3939382 1 hour ago | |

Read those first 200 pages 10x could never get past it. 300 characters with names that I’ll never remember, some woman and her son, a general or something. A guy that keeps saying “Capital!”, standing around at parties.

I’m sure it’s good but I don’t think I have it in me to try again.

stevenwoo 1 hour ago | | |

I swear it took me six retries to make it past the start. But if you have six hours the BBC adaptation is pretty good IMHO and captures many of the essentials of the book if not all the details. The show made me cry and the book did not have the same effect but maybe that was because it focused on certain aspects. I particularly remember the combat scenes in the book would have been difficult to match - the prose capturing the chaos and randomness of brutality in the neighborhood of D Day landing in Saving Private Ryan but with horse cavalry charges and cannon fire.

CalChris 55 minutes ago |

I liked The Possessed by Elif Batuman. I had read The Idiot in high school, a death march for a term paper. But I liked Batuman's reading of it better than mine (but not enough to re-read it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_Batuman

blast 39 minutes ago | |

> The Possessed (2010), The Idiot (2017), and Either/Or (2022)

That's like publishing Hamlet (2010), King Lear (2017), and Thus Spake Zarathustra (2022). I wonder what her thought process is in choosing these titles? And what will her next work be?

archonis 2 hours ago |

Sometime in the 90s we started getting really good Dostoyevsky translations, and they make a huge difference.

waynecochran 1 hour ago |

I have never read a book I hated more than The Brothers Karamazov. I never read a book that depressed me more than Crime and Punishment. No more Dostoevsky for me.

dang 1 hour ago | |

You and Nabokov.

Edit: except for The Double.

enthdegree 1 hour ago |

From the circles I am exposed to Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations are not seen as the most natural ones (although they are the only ones I have read because of the cool abstract paperback covers). I have heard they miss anecdotes and humor in favor of word accuracy. Characters are always "twisting their mouth" and similar. I'm looking forward to re-reading Demons in some other translation. He might have been well served by Garnett.

slackfan 14 minutes ago |

The Pevear and Volohonsky "translations" are an affront to english prose, russian literature, and the craft of translation in general. A heavily quantized LLM with an aneurism would provide the reader with a better translation than that trash.

(I used to be a professional translator for the relevant languages, so I have opinions™)

sharts 2 hours ago |

IMO The Russians were always more of a joy to read than English and Americans

_doctor_love 2 hours ago | |

A read I enjoyed in college was Ada, or Ardor by Nabokov.

rayiner 1 hour ago | |

No, too much emotion.

cyberax 20 minutes ago |

If you liked "The Idiot", there's a wonderfully bizzare adaptation: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0255958/

Looks like there are English subtitles that are quite decent.

mikrl 1 hour ago |

The death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy is bleak, humane and fairly short. I enjoyed it like a good Charles Dickens

ks2048 2 hours ago |

This rings a bell, because I decided to tackle Don Quixote (English translation). At 200 pages in (of around 1000, I think), it’s funny and entertaining and feels fresh.

stevenwoo 1 hour ago | |

Many of the subplots have been reused for entire romance movies, and lots of the mini adventures would not be out of place in something like Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as odd as that sounds.

Barrin92 1 hour ago |

He isn't difficult but I always thought Nabokov (in his fairly incendiary reviews http://wmjas.wikidot.com/nabokov-s-recommendations) was on point that he was sentimental, preachy and mediocre as an artist.

I found Dostoyevsky a slog to get through and it might have been made worse because he was sold to me as this 'great psychologist' when psychological realism is often missing from his stories and characters become page-long megaphones for some version of Orthodox Russian nationalism or Christianity.

HDThoreaun 44 minutes ago | |

I think Nabokov definitely has a point with brothers. Ivan's portrayal and brain fever always struck me as a cop out because Dostoyevsky couldnt actually articulate what was wrong with his ideology. Of course thats kind of the point, but still it always felt cheap and clumsy to me

functionmouse 58 minutes ago |

Shoutout to The Gambler

blueblazin 2 hours ago |

Not difficult, just boring.

dang 54 minutes ago |

As I've said at least once before: come back, pvg!

If ever we needed you...

_doctor_love 2 hours ago |

"I never got into the Russians, they take too long getting to the feckin' point!"

"Oh? Not even Dostoyevsky?"

"Oh come on now, he was the main offender."

- The Guard

carabiner 2 hours ago |

LMAO he's saying russian lit is readable when using the most bastardized, westernized translations available, Garnet. That was the point of her work and what P&V sought to rectify when they put out their vastly more faithful renditions.

sno129 31 minutes ago | |

Don't really know what point you're trying to make here. Maybe Garnett is more westernized, but that doesn't make it more readable. IMO Garnett's not great (at least for Anna Karenina, which is all I've read by her); from what I've read P&V is more readable than Garnett.

tyjen 1 hour ago |

War and Peace is one of those books I've reread every decade since I was a teenager. It's one of my favorite novels because, as I've matured and moved through different stages of life, the parts that resonate with me change significantly. Each rereading feels like encountering a different book, not because the words have changed, but because my own life experiences have shaped what draws my attention.

I'm sure many books offer this experience, but War and Peace explores the human condition across a lifetime in a way few novels do.