This might still be the single greatest novel of all time. I'm open to suggestions but I don't know what can top it for philsophical suggestiveness, moral rigor, influence, entertainment value, poetry, drama....

Freud took the ideas of the id, ego, and super-ego from the sons of the sinister, leeringly sensual, masochistic patriarch Fyodor Karamazov.

The sad fact is, Dostevsky himself wanted to write a whole new (no doubt as lengthy) treatment of Alyosha, the saintly humble son as his effort to understand and honor a pure, simple soul of goodness.

He died before he could. This, then, I suppose, is his legacy.

Dedicate some serious time to this, iffin' you wanna read it. It's worth it. I really like this translation by David McDuff. I havent tried to tackle the Pevear/Volk translation yet, but I might try one of these days. This one will do fine- for now.

O, and you can't idly pass by the painting on the cover. It's called "The Rejected Confession" by Ilya Repin and its perfect. Give it a good stare.


*

Now I'm rereading it to see if it still resonates- both with me and the world at large. Um...yeah. In all the uncomfortably true ways...as well as the comfortable ones...

*

and now I've finished rereading the sucker to prepare for Grad School, checking on some of the ghosts of the past before my lesiure reading goes up in smoke.

It's still a strong piece of writing, certainly a masterpiece, but----I'm dropping a star. At too many points in the story I found myself rolling my eyes, groaning a bit, and started to pick at my collar, which was beginning to wilt in the hothouse soap opera this thing began to resemble. I'm not usually that practical a person- trust me, I'm not the one call soap opera on big dark fervent emotions- nor am I the one who insists that everybody just pull themselves together and get on with it. Nope. I don't comb my hair.

Some of the plot reversals hit me in a more muffled way than they did when I was younger. Not too big a deal, but there it is nonetheless. Though the settings of the scene are so much more effectively drawn.

But, if we take something into consideration, Tolstoy v. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy wants to create worlds which are sunlight, interactive, social, immediate, 'progressive'....Dostoevsky wants to pull you into the irrational, the nocturnal, the solitary, the hypothetical, the 'regressive' and to be honest, at this point I want to learn more about how to live in the world...the irrational and unconscious and I have been doing a loud tango a bit too long. I'd be more interested in life as it's lived (or at least among living people)- the Karamazovs are, often and ruefully, reminded of their own Karamazov blood, which is to say their humanity, which is to say the world. True enough. But- and this is not insignificant- the name is just a name. It's not the real sum and substance of a feeling anymore than a color is a piece of light. What I'm saying is, the brothers to a man (and that includes the bastard son) are as it were orbiting around their own humanity in their various ways, through their various means (the spirit, the intellect, the heart, etc) and are no closer to being human for that. it's a shame. this is the standard for at least half (the Dostevskian half) of the world at large- I would be more interested, these days, in other people. Someday soon, I'll reread Tolstoy.

As for now, I must in some way wave goodbye to my fellow Karamazovs, which I suppose is a form of what I'd been doing in that diner here in Boston, stranded accidentally, sitting in a booth under a streetlight sipping routine cokes and peering at the final two hundred pages or so under the moon and streetlights...

The ending, though, has always got me to the edge of tears.....

(there's also something rather touching and grand about this book, at least for me, much like my feelings for Moby-Dick. I carried it around with me, took it outside for smoke breaks even when I didn't look at it, I handled it nevertheless. Whitman said 'whoever touches this book touches a man' and I have always loved that quote for a particular reason. The brick thickness and the momumental perspicacity is nothing to sneeze at. There's a real sense that these kinds of novels (The Magic Mountain also comes to mind, The Castle perhaps) are really the SUMMA of their repsective authors' life and thought and experience and so forth. Dostoevsky died shortly after finishing TBK, Melville had a bit more to go but, it seemed, was never the same. I like this tremendously. Everyone ought to have their magnum opus)