If you do not read The Brothers Karamazov, you will never understand the heights that literature is capable of. It's really the best book that exists.
>>24838668I read it and I don't think it even gets close to the top 10
>>24838677You didn't read it deeply. You didn't read it with a sympathetic ear. You didn't read it with love and hatred and passion in your heart. You read it with closed eyes and closed fists. You saw nothing in the light when there was darkness visible.
>>24838679least corny dostonigga
Smerdyakov is my waifu
if you didn't read it in russian, you're a pseud
>>24838749*pseudo
>>24838668If you would consult the /lit/ top 100 you would notice that that title goes to Moby Dick, don’t ever try and have an independent thought again
>>24838757>anglo literaturebottom tier
>>24838757>Moby DickIt's Moby-dick
>>24838760>she doesn't know that the original is by Władysław Herman MajewskiTsk tsk tsk
>>24838769i didn't know
>>24838769what up, majewski
>>24838782When I told my associates at Wordsworth’s that I was planning a new, revised, English translation of Władysław Herman Majewski’s Moby-Fiut: Lub, Wieloryb, they all looked at me as if I had gone slightly mad. After all, not only is Wieloryb an exceedingly difficult text in and of itself, it would be doubly difficult to translate, and worse still—I knew not a word of Polish, and very little English! My associates asked me why I wouldn‘t write a Tamil translation, the only language I am fluent in. Nevertheless, my mind was made up, and so I rolled up my sleeves, stuck a pencil behind my ear, and got to work. The weighty tome that you hold in your hands is the end result of years of toil, and sweat, and anguish; it is safe to say that it is my life’s work, a fact which makes me perfectly content, for I can also safely say that it is the definitive translation of Władysław Herman Majewski’s masterpiece.When undertaking this project, I set out to preserve as much of Majewski’s unique sentence structure and vocabulary as possible; puns, double meanings, and the like have been translated literally in some cases, and have been altered in others, depending on which method of translation would best preserve Majewski’s literary conundrums. For example, the title has been changed from Moby-Fiut to Moby-Dick, pre-serving Majewski’s original intent while maintaining the rather humor-ous nature of the book’s title. Sadly, not all of these double meanings survived translation; Polish has a great wealth of descriptive words, while English has a great dearth of them, so that certain metaphors and word-plays were irretrievably lost, no matter how hard I attempted to preserve them. Thankfully, I only encountered a handful of such examples; the novel’s thematic depth and vision has been, for the most part, preserved. In some instances, it was necessary for me to translate a sentence into Tamil, and then from Tamil to Hindi, from Hindi to German, and then from German to English. Because of this, much of the regional dialogue that Majewski is famous for in Poland has been covered up[1].[1] Though Majewski’s usage of regional dialects is noteworthy, it is marred by two factors. The first is that Majewski never left his native Poland, so that many of the regional dialects belong not to Nantucket or the Americas, but instead belong to the backwards farming communities of Slansk, the Lubelszczyzna, and the Opolszczyzna. The second is that he likely stole many of these dialects from The Peasants, a novel by Wladyslaw Reymont—Wladyslaw Reymost is now, of course, most famous for being the most prolific pederast in Poland. Modern literary circles will not mention him, and his work has been out of print for decades, and untranslated into any civilised language (i.e., English). This all conspires to cover up Majewski’s thievery, and as long as contemporary squeamishness prevails, his sleight-of-hand will remain hidden.
I'm a native Russian speaker and I never read it.
I love dostojewskii.
>>24838808read it
>>24838808what about dovlatov, kharms, and saltykov-schedrin?
>>24838668If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.
>>24838853Dostoevsky is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence. I know that some people think he was fantastic, mad even, but the motives he employed in his work, violence and desire, are the very breath of literature. Much as we know has been made of his sentence to execution, which was commuted as he was waiting for his turn to be shot, and of his subsequent four years' imprisonment in Siberia. But those events did not form his temperament though they may have intensified it, for he was always enamoured of violence, which makes him so modern. Also it made him distasteful to many of his contemporaries, Turgeniev for instance, who hated violence. Tolstoy admired him but he thought that he had little artistic accomplishment or mind. Yet, as he said, 'he admired his heart', a criticism which contains a great deal of truth, for though his characters do act extravagantly, madly, almost, still their basis is firm enough underneath... The Brothers Karamazov... made a deep impression on me... he created some unforgettable scenes... Madness you may call it, but therein may be the secret of his genius... I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness, perhaps. In fact all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness; the reasonable man achieves nothing.
>>24838869>created modern prose>this proves my point that he's goodLMAO
>>24838808Comrade.....
>>24838668I plan on reading it this winter, but I recently started The Possessed, so, yah
>read crime and punishment>struck me deeply, changed how I view myself >just finished brothers Karamazov >sense a lot of it went over my head It's a tough life being retarded, took me about 35 hours to read it tooGuess it wasn't a good choice as I'm just only getting into reading literature in general
>>24839247Its like that sometimes. I have no doubt that you will reread it in 5-10 years and get a lot out of it. And remember, literature takes practice.
>>24839247A 1000 pages in 35 hours? That's a decent pace, 30 pages an hour. I read anywhere from 15 (Ulysses, GR) to 60 pages (genre fiction) an hour depending on the density of the text and font size, with 30 being the average for literary fiction.As the other anon said, try rereading books. I went from hating Heart of Darkness (16 yo) to loving it (26 yo).
>>24838814You can be an ardent anti-semite and they'll still call you a jew
>>24838668I listened to the audiobook. Some interesting sections, but some parts seemed glacial. I get that the details of Dimitri's big party night are important because of the later murder investigation, but that was a drag. Aloysha is very likeable, and my favourite moments involved him. The Grand Inquisitor, mentoring the kids who killed the dog with the needled bread, kissing his brother when he can't refute his arguments. I don't want to read it or listen to it again.
>>24838869It is questionable whether one can really discuss the aspects of ''realism'' or of ''human experience'' when considering an author whose gallery of characters consists almost exclusively of neurotics and lunatics. Besides all this, Dostoyevsky's characters have yet another remarkable feature: Throughout the book they do not develop as personalities. We get them all complete at the beginning of the tale, and so they remain without any considerable changes, although their surroundings may alter and the most extraordinary things may happen to them. In the case of Raskolnikov in ''Crime and Punishment,'' for instance, we see a man go from premeditated murder to the promise of an achievement of some kind of harmony with the outer world, but all this happens somehow from without: Innerly even Raskolnikov does not go through any true development of personality, and the other heroes of Dostoyevsky do even less so. The only thing that develops, vacillates, takes unexpected sharp turns, deviates completely to include new people and circumstances, is the plot. Let us always remember that basically Dostoyevsky is a writer of mystery stories where every character, once introduced to us, remains the same to the bitter end, complete with his special features and personal habits, and that they all are treated throughout the book they happen to be in like chessmen in a complicated chess problem. Being an intricate plotter, Dostoyevsky succeeds in holding the reader's attention; he builds up his climaxes and keeps up his suspenses with consummate mastery. But if you reread a book of his you have already read once so that you are familiar with the surprises and complications of the plot, you will at once realize that the suspense you experienced during the first reading is simply not there anymore. The misadventures of human dignity which form Dostoyevsky's favorite theme are as much allied to the farce as to the drama. In indulging his farcical side and being at the same time deprived of any real sense of humor, Dostoyevsky is sometimes dangerously near to sinking into garrulous and vulgar nonsense. (The relationship between a strong-willed hysterical old woman and a weak hysterical old man, the story of which occupies the first hundred pages of ''The Possessed,'' is tedious, being unreal.) The farcical intrigue which is mixed with tragedy is obviously a foreign importation; there is something second-rate French in the structure of his plots.
>>24838679>you need to be a chr*stcuck to enjoy this bookFuck you and your religious babble
>>24838878Hello newfriend
