The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov
Spoilers all over the place.

Yeah I just finished it and I don't feel like I have any actual complaints.

The part about Dmitri doing everything bad in a haze of excitement. I have a hard part telling right, wrong, real, false apart.
-Well just a way to tell the story.

The judicial system is pretty much a cruel joke on humanity, not right but not wrong.

Because of the author being "in" on the story I accept the missing of hyper realism I got from crime and punishment ( translations into Swedish by Staffan Dahl ) that I missed from this one.

Basically I don't really have any complaints that don't come down to god or my preference in writing literature.

In the end I feel like I have read an awesome piece of literature and just want to share it with the world.

>MFW the funeral speech.

The whole "ending" was just not what I was expecting.

The whole ending is strange, I even dreamed about about. In my version Ivan dies, Dḿitri is left by her and lives a life in misery and never returns to tr Russian. This is all under the assumption that he escaped.

Lise is also pretty much left to live a life in misery in the idea of "purification through pain"

>tfw you find every reference to premature death is based on Dostoevsky's own son's early demise.
>tfw you find out his name was Alyosha.

Is this what Veeky Forums has become?

It is an ending. BK is not an unfinished book, that's a myth

I did not know that and it doesn't make reality any better.

Sure it is an ending, just not the one I wanted or expected.

What you thought about Father Zossima?

I thought he was a very good character and the passage from his childhood to his adulthood really explains his personality.

I found Zosima's backstory to the be very interesting, especially the hitting his servant and duel. But in reality most characters from Dostoyevsky like Zosima, Myshkin(The idiot), and Alekséy all seem a bit preternatural to me, there is just something of about them.

Yes yes they are supposed to be characters larger than life, representations of Christ.
But since I'm an atheist that might be what's stopping me.

I might also mention that I met some people from Belarus and we talked about symbols ( Dragons, six fingers and so on ). But also just how society was in Russian in 1850's. How much freedom do the servant's actually have, how close to slaves are they in reality. It was all very interesting.

Thr work is a fragment. A prologue to another work that blew up into a whole novel, and so major themes and plots are left unconcluded. It is important in Dostoevsky's corpus primarily for its religious characters, Zosima and Aloysha: they are the only positive main characters in all Dostoevsky's work who both deeply believe and practice Orthodox Christianity. In all other cases, Christians either believe and don't practice, practice and don't believe, or do both but are portrayed as cruel or zealots (and following Saint Isaac the Syrian's mystical homies, which Dostoevsky was an avid fan of, "zeal" is negative). Therefore in all Dostoevsky's other work, Christianity, as a theme, is only treated obliquely. Here the veil is torn, and we finally see Dostoevsky showing pious (in a positive sense), practicing, Orthodox Christianity, confronting Her foe, the world. We actually see Christianity discussed at length...not in a purely nostalgic sense, or for questions of culture, or mere social implications (although that last is a running theme consummated finally in this work) but as a real, intense, beautiful but difficult hope personified by two faithful saints who defy the world. Here Truth, Beauty and Goodness are One and complete, without dilution; prior to this, they were only glipsed

Well I buy most of you conclusion.

But what makes it Orthodox as you say?
Not protestant, catholic, restorationist ?

I ask as someone who can't really tell them apart.

>Spoilers all over the place.
Whoa man. Have you also heard that Lelouch, Kamina and Anna Karenina all die?

No and no thank you.
Please be a better person in the future, you are not making anyones life any better at the moment.

you make the world an uglier place :(

using this thread to ask: is it ok to start with BK? I've never read any of his books.

I finished it recently as well. I found it an unbearably boring melodrama with half assed societal commentary thrown in.

Depends on what you want I guess,

I would start with Crime and Punishment, it gives you a good start and tell you about the author. The brothers Karamazov is masterpiece and I saved it for a really rainy day and I'm glad that I did. I had already read several books by Dostoyevsky and I'm glad that I saved it for later.

Have you read any other books by Dostoyevsky?
Because yeah most of his books are long and maybe not for everyone.

Just curious.

I read and liked notes from the underground. I read crime and punishment and thought it was ok but not much to it

Hm...
I read Crime and punishment and it was in the beginning of starting to read classic literature. The idiot was close to follow on that list, pretty good. After that I tried evil spirits which I didn't like.

So in the end I would call myself a fan of Dostoyevsky.
I haven't read "Notes from the underground", mainly because I really like long books over short ones.

But if you didn't like crime and punishment I would ask one more question before telling you to read the brothers Karamazov. Are you Christian and find it important in what you read? I don't and I'm not a Christian but I like Dostoyevsky way of telling stories.

But if not I can't really advice you to read him if you didn't like crime and punishment. And I this is based on my experience and Christian friends to me who mainly like the books for religions reasons.

So if you don't like his other books you probably won't like this one if you don't have strong religious feelings.

Zosima's farewell is drawn from the Orthodox tradition and directly references ideas about, for instance, hell, which are unique to Orthodoxy. The question of the Church as political ruler also discussed in the monastery and the Grand Inquisitor in way that overtly contrasts Orthodoxy with Rome. The fool for Christ is a running theme, and that is unique to Orthodoxy. Dmitri's ordeal, in the chapter titles, is explicitly an analogy for Ariel Toll Houses. Ivan's encounter with the devil (?) clearly draws on descriptions of such by Orthodox saints. The institution of a "starets" is entirely Orthodox

There's quite a bit more as well.

I appreciate your answer very much and it does bring some new things and I shall look into some references. Some I already knew but all in all I thank you.

>missing of hyper realism I got from crime and punishment
BK was published 14 years later than CaP. During his career, Dostoevsky had a change of views about the world - first he was agnostic (Dimitri),then atheist (Ivan) and in the end religious (Alyosha).