Hope you read “The Brothers Karamazov” some day! Mikhail Zagoskin described a typical literary evening in Moscow or St. Petersburg: “a whole crowd of deep thinkers who, having arrived at the age of 20, had managed to experience everything, feel everything and bore everyone.”
I loved C&P!! I tried Bros K and The Idiot and was not ready for them at the time but I've worked my Russian lit muscles since then and now i can't wait to read more.
Btw this is from Vladimir Nabokov’s lecture on C&P when he taught at Cornell in the mid 1950s... “I must have been twelve when I read 'Crime and Punishment' for the first time and thought it a wonderfully powerful and exciting book. I read it again at nineteen, during the awful years of civil war in Russia, and thought it long-winded, terribly sentimental, and badly written. I read it at twenty-eight when discussing Dostoevsky in one of my own books. I read the thing again when preparing to speak about him in American universities. And only quite recently did I realize what is so wrong about the book. The flaw, the crack in it, which causes the whole edifice to crumble ethically and aesthetically may be found in Part 10, Chapter 4. It is the beginning of the redemption scene when Raskolnikov, the killer, discovers through the girl Sonya the New Testament. She has been reading to him about Jesus and the raising of Lazarus. So far so good. But then comes this singular sentence that for sheer stupidity has hardly the equal in world-famous literature: ‘The candle was flicking out, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room, the murderer and the harlot who had been reading together the eternal book.’ ‘The murder and the harlot’ and ‘the eternal book’ - what a triangle. This is a crucial phrase and a typical Dostoevskian rhetorical twist. Now what is so dreadfully wrong about it? Why is it so crude and so inartistic? I suggest that neither a true artist nor a true moralist - neither a good Christian nor a good philosopher - neither a poet nor a sociologist - should have placed side by side, in one breath, in one gust of false eloquence, a killer together with whom? - a poor streetwalker, bending their completely different heads over that holy book. The Christian God, as understood by those who believe in the Christian God, pardoned the harlot nineteen centuries ago. The killer, on the other hand, must be first of all examined medically. The two are on completely different levels. Raskolnikov's inhuman and idiotic crime cannot be even remotely compared to the plight of a girl who impairs human dignity by selling her body. The murderer and the harlot reading the eternal book - what nonsense. There is no rhetorical link between a murderer, and this unfortunate girl. There is only the conventional link of the Gothic novel and the sentimental novel. It is a shoddy literary trick, not a masterpiece of pathos and piety. Moreover, look at the absence of artistic balance. We have been shown Raskolnikov’s crime in all its’ sordid detail and we also have been given half a dozen different explanations for his exploit. But we have never been shown Sonya in the exercise of her trade. The situation is a glorified cliche. The harlot’s sin is taken for granted. Now I submit that the true artist is the person who never takes anything for granted.”
This lecturer has entirely missed the point. Maybe because he's trying to see it from a possible Christian perspective when he clearly knows very little about Christianity. The beauty of the scene described is in the very fact that the characters are totally different-- and yet the same. I don't believe the author is equating their sins, Sonia is shown throughout to be a much superior person to Raskolnikov, but both have sinned, and in this they are equal in finding hope of redemption through the eternal book. The thief and the liar and the selfish person are all equal on this level. This is so simple and beautiful, it's hard to see how he could have missed it. I guess his imagined intellect got in the way. Secondly, to decide that an entire novel, a great and deep novel, is bad based on a single line that he has decided to give a significance of his own making, is pure stupidity. Basically: This guy is full of crap.
@@RelishBooks Oh his intellect was considerable. And he was atheist. But Dostoevsky was his Bête noire. He regarded D as a sloppy, slipshod writer who should have been a playwright and not a novelist. When you read Nabokov’s fiction (“Lolita” for example) you can see how his aesthetic was just completely different. His orientation was too European.
