I Read The Brothers Karamazov 9-13-2014

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/12/2025] 

I finished all 936 pages of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov earlier this morning. No way I am going to comment on this one. I doubt I will have anything original to say. He plots like Dickens. He gets overwrought, like Dickens. But he has a bigger subject than Dickens - God and freedom and whither Russia. According to my reading list, War and Peace comes next, since Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon has gone missing from the prison's leisure library. I think I will finish off the collection of William Blake's poetry, and a copy of Granta, before moving onto Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies and William Golding's Lord of the Flies. I have had quite enough of the Russians. Although I give old Fyodor credit for taking me far from the Fort Dix FCI of 2014.

Dostoevsky gave me a clue, why are not Great American Novels like there are Great Russian Novels. It came to when during the epilogue, Dmitry talks about going to American. See, no America exists in the same sense Russia existed for Dostoevsky (or Tolstoy or Gogol or Turgenev). In a few hundred years more, there should be an America. Maybe by then we shall have cured ourselves of what Gore Vidal described as our American historical amnesia. Maybe it will come in time, as we evolve past a federal authority into a national identity. We have tried to impose a series of nationalistic agendas on a federal system - to the point we will destroy ourselves the moment we lack an external enemy. The Islamic State arrives as if on cue to save the federal government from exposure as a broken piece of equipment. I realize that as I wrote and thought on my "Only The Dead and The Dying" stories, this was an America unknown to the Easterners and the Southerners around; just as they were strange to me. So, I say since no unified America exists, there can be no representative American who can be the subject of a novel understandable by all citizens of the United States.

Just because I do not find myself fit to comment on The Brothers Karamazov, doesn't mean I will keep quiet.

While much is made of The Grand Inquisitor (Book V, Chapt. 5) with his banning, killing Christ, and for his speech that people wanted happiness not freedom. But I think equal time should be given to Father Zosima (Book VI) with his idea that happiness comes from restricted freedom. I had no problem with that idea - it seems like the distinction William Blackstone makes between license and ordered liberty. We have forgotten that distinction. Which explains the Libertarianism of the Ayn Rand variety works well in the college dorm and will wreck the country. Perhaps it is modern life generally that infantilizes us and not the just Bureau of Prison policies. Joel C disagreed with me about this idea of restricting liberty making us more free. As writers, we have our liberty restricted to the customary usage of grammar and syntax and the definitions of words. We can say what we like, but communication requires we say/write within the customary restrictions which make us intelligible.

I also found myself in this passage from Book XI ("Ivan"), Chapter 41 ("A Hymn and A Secret"):

"you're just a little boy, Aloysha, so here's a piece of advice for you: never ask a woman you love for forgiveness! Especially if you rally love her, however guilty you may be before her... I tell you, the moment you admit to a woman that you've wronged her and ask her to forgive you, she'll never stop showering you with reproaches....

I saw that behavior with my mother and her mother. I learned how they might forgive but never forget, and how more often they forgave or forgot. The same thing happened to me and TJ. Although, I gave her plenty to complain about - even if that bit was a pale shadow to her imaginings! I suspect the ex-wife will hate me till the day she dies.

I have one more bit of brilliance from Dostoevsky. Under the following proposition, I never qualified as a father.

"... Let us show the world at large that the progress of the past few years has reached us too, and that, today, the word `father' designates both the man who has begotten you and then deserved your love...."

Part Fourt, Book XII, Chapter 13

I am not so sure how to think of my own father in those terms. 

I spent 13 days reading The Brothers Karamazov. I also read an issue of Granta from 2013 or 14, devoted to Great Britain. I also read Robert B. Parker's Back Story from 2003. That took a day. I overloaded on Parker sometime around the days of Spenser for Hire. Now dead, he wrote more Spenser novels than Raymond Chandler did Philip Marlowe novels, and a whole lot more than novels than Dashiell Hammett. He may have written more than Ross MacDonald wrote Archer novels. And Parker deserves a lot of respect for revitalizing the hard-boiled detective story. What I did not notice till now was how Spenser operates as observer, commentator, and participant. The story had more to do with his own integrity, exploring that integrity, than punishing a wrongdoer or the Truth.

I want to talk about Sherry Weesner, but I need a break. I need to read a little, Besides, I did not bring the alumni magazine to the library. So I end here.

I am not sure what I make of Robert B. Parker now. How succinct, how sharply he plots compared with Dostoevsky. He plays with genre as much as the Russian. Why do I say this? Because The Brothers Karamazov is a religious novel, a family novel, a crime novel, and a legal thriller. I really hate these pauses in my own writing.

sch

[6/12/2025: I do not think I ever got around to writing Sherry Weesner, a woman who I knew from Ball State who died while I was gone. I have never found out what was the cause of her death. There are limits to Google. sch.]