This may very well be the most manipulative and dishonest book I've ever read, and I've read Atlas Shrugged.
>>24840637>make inflammatory comment>don't elaborate>leavewho do you think you are? Pepe the Frog?
>>24840640Fine, I'll elaborate.>grand inquisitor passage shows that the writer has at least some understanding of the criticism leveled against his philosophy>the character who wrote that passage degenerates into insanity and madness while being visited by the literal devil (psychological (not really))>smerdyakov is a nihilistic atheist>up and decides to commit a murder for no reason>alyosha is the most pious character in the book>constantly charming people by how good of a good boy he is>everyone loves him and believes him and thinks he's the most handsome person in the worldMiss me with chr*stcuck bullshit
>>24840637I felt the same way with Anna Karenina. Part 8 Levin was just as bad as that 100 page monologue in Atlas Shrugged.
>>24840637>>24840640>>24840782Welcome to Dostoevsky. He's incapable of artistically illustrating or defending his worldview without resorting to strawmen and caricatures. Mainly because his worldview is retarded, but also because he just isn't a very good writer.
>>24840648you object to smerdyakov's portrayal, but by what measure are you judging that his portrayal is in error? if there's no good or bad, then smerdyakov simply did what he willed to do, all things happened necessarily in the novel with no ultimate arbiter of goodness or badness of the acts, and nobody is in the right or wrong.
>>24840648>for no reason
>>24840648>>24841992likewise, you object that alyosha is portrayed too favorably, but what standard is this favor measured against? you could say that no such pious and good-willed people exist, but how would you know the inner motivation of all people? you could say that it's unfair that alyosha is treated well, but by what measure could you judge that people should treat the genuinely pious with scorn and dismissal? again, with no good or bad, all things happen necessarily and with no right or wrong, alyosha is treated well by the other characters necessarily and smerdyakov gets away with murder and dies sick necessarily, and there's no goodness or badness in what happens, because there's only the story and what happens in it, and if there's no good or bad then nothing in the story is ultimately judged good or bad. "amor fati" and all that.
>>24842053NTA and I like TBK overall but I somewhat agree with anon's reaction to Alyosha. The issue is not that "such pious and good-willed people don't exist", it's that it seems like Fyodor Mikhailovich himself did not believe that such people exist, and that in encountering such individuals everyone else would act like they just personally met Jesus. Everyone just gets shocked out of their wits by the idea of a genuine young man who is not out to make money and fuck bitches, and expresses himself earnestly. Dosto had the same theme in The Idiot. It genuinely feels to me like he straight up never met such people, and so could not imagine others simply not caring much about their holiness.
Reading Dosto past age 18 is pretty embarrassing. Still, not as bad as Camus
>>24841992Dosto makes the very common chr*stian mistake of confounding atheism with nihilism - most specifically moral nihilism. I can buy Smerdyakov being a psychopath. What I can't buy is every atheist being either a total moral nihilist (Smerdyakov), or a closeted atheist who's mad at god (Ivan), while all the theists are pious, virtuous, and faultless. I object to the story being shoehorned in specific directions to force a narrative, especially after I've already read 75% of the story. It's insulting to my intelligence.>>24842053I don't care about good and pious people existing, that's not the part that I object to. I object to the world folding to Alyosha's will because he's the goodest of good bois. And I object to the endless preaching eventually "winning" over everyone in the end, while the atheists are corrupt nihilists who suffer horrible ends. Dmitry gets redeemed because he sees the grace of God, Grushenka the whore decides that she actually loves Dmitry after all because Alyosha makes such an impression of her and shows her love once, Rakitin is a bitter and miserable guy who's out to make everyone else bitter and miserable, solely because he hates god. The characters are extreme caricatures and the events are nonsensical. This felt like reading Atlas Shrugged if it had been written by a pastor instead of a capitalist.
>>24840637If 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.
>>24842759It's incredible how on point he was with this criticism The fact that Dosto still to this day is placed on the same level as the true literary greats of Russia like Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, etc. is bewildering.
>>24842771Totally agree, and, in fact, Nabokov stated the case almost exactly as you have here:It is, as in all Dostoyevsky's novels, a rush and tumble of words with endless repetitions, mutterings aside, a verbal overflow which shocks the reader after, say, Lermontov's transparent and beautifully poised prose. Dostoyevsky as we know is a great seeker after truth, a genius of spiritual morbidity, but as we also know he is not a great writer in the sense Tolstoy, Pushkin and Chekhov are. And, I repeat, not because the world he creates is unreal -all the worlds of writers are unreal - but because it is created too hastily without any sense of that harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is bound to comply with (in order to be a masterpiece). Indeed, in a sense Dostoyevsky is much too rational in his crude methods, and though his facts are but spiritual facts and his characters mere ideas in the likeness of people, their interplay and development are actuated by the mechanical methods of the earthbound and conventional novels of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
>>24841992Claiming "good or bad" has to come from religion (which is just a set of claims made by humans) is the height of intellectual dishonesty. Good and bad must terminate in reference to human experience, that an individual considers themselves better off as a positive thing with reference to their manifest experience. Next is to assess what set of principles reliably and sustainably bring about the greatest and widest possible positive among mankind, from which we derive rights and morals and responsibilities. Any other justification is just unthinking deference to untethered religious dogma.
>>24842780Oh damn, I've read this critique before so I was probably unconsciously plagiarizing him with my post lol. Still, I stand by it.
>>24840637Provide an argument or shut up cretin.
>>24842665>Dosto makes the very common chr*stian mistake of confounding atheism with nihilismThere isn't a mistake when you pay attention to what atheists actually believe.
>>24842759>>24842780based Nabokov tearing down Hackoevsky
>>24842784good or bad must come from reality, and humans are a product of the reality from which they emerged from and are embedded in.
>>24840637>>24840648You might just genuinely be retarded. You clearly have zero understanding of what Dostoevsky's worldview even is and have somehow missed the entire psychological aspects of his work that make him so influential to figures such as Nietzsche, Freud etcetera. Also keep in mind, this book is also the first part of a duology in which Alyosha would go on to become a political radical and try to assassinate the Tsar lmao.
>>24842814Read the thread, dweeb.>>24842953Atheists are not monolithic, retard. Nor is atheism an organized belief system. Atheism does not prescribe any beliefs whatsoever; quite the opposite. Atheism is the lack of a belief in God, as evidenced by the etymology of the name. Look up what a strawman is. Protip: it isn't a character from Wizard of Oz.
>>24843105>"his overt religious manipulation is okay because he layers it with a veneer of psychology!"I could also just read Tolstoy and read a psychological novel that evolves naturally, with characters that aren't extreme caricatures with no basis in reality.
>>24843105>consider this second part of the book that doesn't exist the absolute state of dostocels
>total moral nihilistSmerdyakov wasn't even that, once he got the money he was unable to use itBut it's true that TBK has a rather rigid moral system where it's not just being nihilistic is bad but also being a rationalist is bad as well
>>24842814Those four years of penal servitude Dostoyevsky spent in Siberia he spent in the company of murderers and thieves, no segregation having been yet introduced between ordinary and political criminals. He described them in his ''Memoirs from the House of Death'' (1862). They do not make a pleasant reading. All the humiliations and hardships he endured are described in detail, as also the criminals among whom he lived. Not to go completely mad in those surroundings, Dostoyevsky had to find some sort of escape. This he found in a neurotic Christianism which he developed during these years. His emotional life up to that time had been unhappy. In Siberia he had married, but this first marriage proved unsatisfactory. In 1862-63 he had an affair with a woman writer and in her company visited England, France and Germany. This woman, whom he later characterized as ''infernal,'' seems to have been an evil character. Later she married Rozanov, an extraordinary writer combining moments of exceptional genius with manifestations of astounding naivete. (I knew Rozanov, but he had married another woman by that time.) This woman seems to have had a rather unfortunate influence on Dostoyevsky, further upsetting his unstable spirit. It was during this first trip abroad to Germany that the first manifestation of his passion for gambling appeared which during the rest of his life was the plague of his family and an insurmountable obstacle to any kind of material ease or peace to himself. Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret no ear for Dostoyevsky the Prophet. The very best thing he ever wrote seems to me to be ''The Double.'' It is the story - told very elaborately, in great, almost Joycean detail (as the critic Mirsky notes), and in a style intensely saturated with phonetic and rhythmical expressiveness - of a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. It is a perfect work of art, that story, but it hardly exists for the followers of Dostoyevsky the Prophet, because it was written in the 1840's, long before his so-called great novels; and moreover its imitation of Gogol is so striking as to seem at times almost a parody. Dostoyevsky characterizes his people through situation, through ethical matters, their psychological reactions, their inside ripples. After describing the looks of a character, he uses the old-fashioned device of not referring to his specific physical appearance anymore in the scenes with him. This is not the way of an artist - say Tolstoy - who sees his character in his mind all the time and knows exactly the specific gesture he will employ at this or that moment.
>>24843154When it comes to being a psychological observer, Dostoevsky has a keener eye than Tolstoy. Remember that Dostoevsky spent time among the revolutionaries before getting arrested, then 5 years on katorga, then 7 years with his first, horrible wife, all the while drinking and gambling with social misfits. His psychological and sociological insight captures the revolutionary nature of Russia in the 70s and 80s better, and it flows more naturally to the bolshevik revolution.
>>24843522I view this as a disadvantage. His perspective was massively tainted by bitterness and resentment. This is why in his fiction, the characters who represent opposing viewpoints are always done dirty by him, often sinking to the point of a strawman like Ivan who is driven insane by "values he doesn't think actually exist" (there is some line Ivan says to himself almost verbatim to something like this). Materialists can and do subscribe to morals and solidarity, but not in the view of the radical anti-radical Dostoevsky. To him, there is only one set of values, Russian Christian Orthodox values, and everyone who denies them secretly knows they are the one true set of morals but are just lying to themselves. It's horrendously disingenuous and poisons all of Dosto's major works.
He attempts to criticise atheism and nihilism by putting his own fantasy of atheism and nihilism into the mouth of a murderous cretin who everybody hates, then with a completely straight face he names that murderous cretin "Smelly Son".
>Alyosha overhears Smerdyakov talking about how much he hates his own life so he'd rather not be born at all early in the story>sees him dead and reads his suicide note>0 reactionI get that killing doggerinos and caterinos and being arrogant is bad but this just makes Alyosha appear a little hypocritical when he's giving his grand uplifting speech in the epilogue
