CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
and
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
In early 2015, before even starting my website, Michelle and I had stopped at our favorite store, Barnes&Noble. I enjoy having my collection of their leather bound books, and almost all of them are to this day, but something struck me that day a little different. I grabbed, as you see in the above image, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, and I remember quite well that Michelle said to me, with an awkward look on her face “You want to read that!?” Umm, “yes” I go to her, “what can it hurt, it’s here, and it’s famous, is it not?” ‘well yes okay, if you want it’. I brought it up to the counter and even the lady there had looked quite awkward as well. After purchasing it I said to myself “What is it with this book that makes people so afraid of it?, what’s the big deal?, is it because the book is quite long, longer than most. I had no idea of who Fyodor Dostoevsky was, nor when or where it was written and why.
I hadn’t read it for a short while because I was getting bored out of my mind from Dickens, Twain and others and superbly annoyed by Alexandre Dumas’s books, manly and mostly his Count Of Monte Cristo. Thanks to those irritating boring as all hell authors, I grabbed off of my shelf a paperback of Crime And Punishment, Michelle looks at me and goes, “you going to read that!, wow, okay, if you want”. And that day changed the way I read and wrote my own information, I was able to write and type better myself from his teachings, simply by picking up a book!
When I introduced myself to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, it was of sheer amazement to me and most of how superb he was. His talent, his writings, and his superb knowledge was back in Russia in the mid 1800’s and would have been the same today. I did not know of his background yet or of his problems either, which were epilepsy, but as I read along from the very first word, mind you, to his very last, I felt something in his writing that of which only another epileptic could pick-up on. Nevertheless, he was epileptic from birth which came as no surprise to me, but even so, aside from the books of the Bible, he is the greatest genius of our time. As you read along all his life-long masterpieces, you can feel the troubles he went through, the problems in our own epileptic lives: causing trouble but not knowing the reason, trying to do good for others when things start to fall apart on you, and, as any epileptic who has or the ones who watch, run away from their incidents, hopefully before things get worse as the way he wrote about Rodion Romanovitch Roskolnikov, a confused college student who is diseased, though he doesn't know of what, nor does anyone else, and causes trouble that punishes his life, but he thinks that he is doing things for the better, trying to help others. Always wakes up felling better, like most epileptics do, and yet, more confused. The book has many twists and turns in trying to find out who the bad people really are, and poor Roskolnikov, which he is a well wearing rags for clothes, sometimes remembers what he did, but nobody will listen or believe his story. Mainly because of his illness, his friends try to help him all the more. Very interesting and exciting book, keeps the pages turning from start to finish with the epilogue being the most crazy part of the whole book. Dostoevsky’s mind blows your own away!
Background
Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on November 11th, 1821 and spent most of his life in St Petersburg. Placed his children, who died at birth, as some of his main characters; his daughter Sonya and his son Alexey, along with all of his Novels, as he puts it, Petersburg. Death of his mother in 1837 and the assumed murder of his father by serfs, just two years later. In 1864, the death of wife and brother Mikhail and along with his severe financial difficulties, but concurred them with the continuation of his masterpieces. In 1880, he completes The Brothers Karamazov, was given a speech at Pushkin celebrations in Moscow, and died of a lung hemorrhage on February 9th the very next year at 59yrs of age caused by emphysema and epileptic seizures. He is buried at Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg.
In 1849 he was arrested and sentenced to death for participating in the ‘Petrashevsky circle’ where he was reprieved at the last moment, but sentenced to penal servitude, and until 1854 he lived in a convict prison in Siberia. In the decade following his return from exile he wrote his stories and novels that drew heavy on his experiences in prison, which goes to show you how his writings as in The House Of The Dead, Notes From Underground, Crime And Punishment and Demons, a.k.a The Possessed, are more true than not. Although not fact, but fiction, reflects back on his own life more fact than fiction!
So when you think of how sad your life is or of others, just imagine how others lives were, and still are today, in poverty, out on the streets in the freezing winters and boiling summers.
You wouldn’t believe it, even as I am telling you now, but others, I guess some other geniuses you may of heard of or recall learning about, though more difficult to fathom like Albert Einstein who declared “that he had learnt more from Dostoevsky than any other thinker.”
His novels are all astonishing, how he can grab you, lock you into his stories and never let go. Fyodor Dostoevsy’s books are more like traps, per say, because they are all so well written and translated that you can never open another book, nor put his down. In his last masterpiece Dostoevsky revealed the components of his own split personality, depicted in four main characters; a humble monk Alyosha, a compulsive gambler Dmitri, a rebellious intellectual Ivan, and their cynical father Fyodor Karamazov. He writes as if he even has a double split personality, a triple even with all other characters of his, younger, older, men and woman; if that even exists. But I do believe that it did in this epileptic.
Everything else after will just sound, to make it short, Stupid! His books in the past were translated mostly at first, by Constance Garnett, but most recently and better by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, a married couple who live today in France. It is written on the back cover, one, from the San Francisco Chronicle as “This fresh, new translation…provides a more exact, idiomatic, and contemporary rendition of the novel that brings Fyodor Dostoevsky’s tale achingly alive…it succeeds beautifully.” And another from the Chicago Tribune which states “Reaches as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as is possible in English…The original’s force and frightening immediacy is captured…The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard English version.” Along with others.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the Washington Post Book World states that “Dostoevsky is at once the most literary and compulsively readable of novelists we continue to regard as great…THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV stands as the culmination of his art - his last, longest, richest, and most capacious book. This scrupulous rendition can only be welcomed. It returns to a work we thought we knew, subtly altered and so made new again.” As well as the The Times(London) “A miracle…Every page of the new KARAMAZOV is a permanent standard, and an inspiration”. With many more!
My own wife has asked me many times if I would choose to read this or that, and since then, the past year, I have given the same answer, “Did Fyodor write it? If not, then no”. She said to me many times, my mother even, that if you love this author as much as you do, his books, then write a blog about him. Tell someone who may be as interested as you obviously are, and share with them his knowledge. I was not afraid of doing so, I’m just not sure that anyone will care to learn or just to enjoy his novels as I do, but someone else in my case or such other being home bound, will need to learn of his excellence and expertise as I have to myself. His books are mostly much longer than others, but teenagers and young adults wouldn’t mind reading a sentence without falling asleep! Every adult in my family turned away from me laughing even when I would hold up a book because they ask me why I want to read something so long, I can only guess that since there twice my own age, so then don't, nobody is asking or telling you to. But when you have so much more time on your hands then you know what to do with, it doesn't hurt to try.
And it’s as simple as that. Most of the time I’m reading a daily Missal or I have one of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s books in my hand. Every word on every page keeps you excited and into his storytelling, dramatic or funny, or both usually, you will never read a page from any other author with more words on it without stopping, comma by comma. When the sentences stop or the book ends you wish for two things: That he wouldn't have stopped and Second, how much he could have done with his life if he had the chance to fight off the epilepsy and of lived longer. In The Brothers Karamazov, there's an entry, towards the end, that he has a story for his next project, but knowing that he hadn't survived, will make you teary eyed, just as I am writing it to you today. It's sad to say even though, but if he wasn't epileptic himself and had lived his life the way it had come, that many others as well do believe that the genius of his world would not have been on paper the way it was. Therefore, the name Dostoevsky would not exist the way that it does today.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV have now become my favorite books ever written from my favorite author to have ever lived. I now own 6 CRIME AND PUNISHMENTS, 2 others digital, and 4 BROTHERS KARAMAZOV’s, along with every one of his other writings I was able to get my hands on. From his very first when he was 22yrs old, POOR FOLK, where he writes a letter to his brother Mikhail, a long letter in the introduction, that “I am seriously pleased with my novel, to make it short, if my project does not succeed, I may hang myself.” Amazing and surprising to himself, thank God, that he was smarter than even he thought at the time. The people that Mikhail told him to see and speak to knew that there was something special about Fyodor from page one. He brought his manuscript with him wherever he went, and from that year in 1846, published, was a great success and from that we have our genius. From then on, he was able to publish 14 novels and short stories in total before his death, and for which I myself own almost all of them. Some older illustrated ones from the 1960’s, leather bound with 22Karat gold paper edges. Like the one in the picture above from the Easton Press Collectors Editions. There is one thing though that I must note to you about his book called Demons or The Possessed: it is not a book about demons, it’s a book about people with seizures who suffer during their lives the way most of us do, the way he did! His very first entry is from Gospel according to Luke:
Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him to let them enter these. So he gave them leave. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.
When the herdsman saw what had happened, they fled, and told it in the city and in the country. The people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. And those who had seen it told them how he who had been possessed with demons was healed.
Luke 8:32-36
In Russian literature from his time, and maybe today, since I am not Russian or in Russia, he was a religious man too, a Christian in Moscow, so he never says anything bad about God or Christ, but there's something he says that makes it quite funny. It may be said today in Russia, but have never heard it here in America or anywhere else for that matter, but it's somethings that he has that is very catchy! Somethings that basically means that a person may say to another, or themselves, which could be about something or someone else. And I use it myself here even nowadays with my wife Who laughs at it, wondering where it came from, because she doesn't read Dostoevsky either, works a lot, but still uses it herself in our text messages sometimes, which is:
“Pah….Spit on it!” and or “Devil take it!”
The names of the characters in all his novels, in the Authors Notes, he describes to make the storyline easier for the reader, are the people that he didn't appreciate, as evil neighbors or teachers from his past. The names in Russian are not too hard for a reader to understand and translate to in European or English, besides the one and only I was having trouble with, his own. Fyodor, Fyodor, Fyodor? This troubled me for quite a while, my family as well when I asked them if they had ever heard of the name before. And none of my friends are Russian, which would have helped, until I finally gave in to grab my cell and find the translation. Fyodor is actually a beautiful name, I said to myself and my mother who was with me at the time “Oh, what a nice name, a lot nicer then Bruno”. Something I say more then ten times a day! I couldn't find myself to drop the first two letters of his name, nor could anyone else. Mom I go again “we have had many famous Fyodor’s here in America” she goes “Roosevelt”, ‘Yes him, also quite special.’ And then I texted my wife on her way home what the name Fyodor was in translation. Again she had no clue, probably sick of me asking her as well, so I gave her a pretty simple, yet funny hint, “one that sang with his two older brothers,” but stopped there for a few seconds because who would she know, and said that “one was Alvin”. A millisecond after returned with
THEODORE!!
