intertext

Book I
Book II
Book III
Book IV
Book V
Book VI
Book VII
Book VIII
Book IX

Book X: In which very little happens. We spend time with a group of little boys, including one who is dying, and a dog. The main plot is not advanced at all. No one seems particularly bothered.

In a word: AAAAAARRRGH!!!!

Okay, well, I guess we learn more about what a nice guy Alyosha is. We meet a precocious, lively, wild but obviously with a heart-of-gold boy that Alyosha takes quite a shine to (Alyosha/Kolya slash, anyone??). We meet yet more of the mosaic of fascinating characters that make up the web of connections between people that FD seems fascinated by. There's a bunch more philosophy. There's a scene in the market which is no doubt planted to make us notice what lousy witnesses people are. Yes, Fyodor, we got that...

And there's some stuff about feeding a dog bread dough with a pin in it that's supposed to be "oh, naughty boy, what a chuckle" that had me gnashing my teeth. And srsly wtf about the dog? Kolya has been hiding the dying kid's dog all this time, brings it to him for a tearful reunion, and then takes it home again??

And the dying kid doesn't even have the grace to die in the end of this section. Just when you thought something was actually going to happen...

grrrr.

Book I
Book II
Book III
Book IV
Book V
Book VI

Book VII: A nasty smell and an onion.

In which Alyosha has his faith both shaken and stirred, and the narrator is more intrusive than ever.

So, Father Zosima has finally died, and the strangest thing happens. His body starts to smell! The very next day!!! (which, if you think about it - we're not talking about a tropical country here - is a bit strange) The thing is though, he's supposed to be a saint, and saints' bodies are supposed to smell like violets (ask Malory - he was careful to tell us that Lancelot's body gave off a sweet odour when he died, despite all his sins). The narrator advises us, however, that he wouldn't have bothered telling us about this except that it has an noteworthy effect on his hero, whom he's reluctant to call a hero yet, mind you, but will be a hero sometime soon, we hope.

As I'm writing this, I am reminded of how effective the narrative is, because we move forward in time, encompassing the days after Zosima's death and some time afterwards, where we see the way the townspeople are immediately upset by this occurence, then settle down again and return to normal some time later. In the same way, on that single day, Alyosha is very upset, seems to turn briefly into doubting Ivan, and even into debauched Dmitri, when he goes for a drink with Rakitin and Grushenka, but then has his faith restored and made stronger than ever.

Storytelling is once more foregrounded. The whole affair of the smelly body becomes in itself a little parable. Then, Grushenka tells Alyosha a little story about one onion: An old lady who had been mean and nasty all her life is burning in hell and whinging about it. An angel asks her if she ever did anything good, and she remembers having given someone an onion once. So the angel says, okay, I'll hold out an onion to you and pull you up with it and if it doesn't break, you get out of hell. Well, it's working, and then a bunch of other people see her and grab her legs, hoping to get pulled out as well. She kicks them, and tells them to let go because it's her onion, and of course the onion breaks.

Please note that of course the implication is that if she had not kicked them and told them to get lost, probably they all would have been saved. Another example, then, of how we are all responsible for everyone else and all interconnected.

There's a whole lot of business with Grushenka being hysterical, that I will pass over, but the upshot is that Grushenka decides to leave town to be with the man who seduced her (thus forgiving him) and Alyosha finds himself feeling a lot better.

The section ends with a rather effective dream sequence, where Alyosha, back at the monastery, falls asleep while those keeping a vigil over Zosima's grave are reading out the story of Cana of Galilee (which is the one where Jesus turns water into wine - his first miracle). He dreams that he's at a party, where everyone is drinking this wine, and Zosima is there and talks to him, and he gets this sense of the infiniteness of God's love and life the universe and everything and ends the book in a state of rapture.

All this is maybe just a wee bit heavy-handed. Like, Fyodor, dude - we get it, okay? But it's also interesting the way the structure of the book works to keep giving us theme and variations and turning back in on itself. We move in an out from the individual to the society and back again, backwards and forwards in time. There's a lot of _very_ intrusive narration, as if to highlight the theatricality of all this, self-consciously presenting a message.
I'm also thinking about the whole doubt and faith thing - the three things that Christ rejects in Ivan's story (miracle, mystery and authority) are both undermined yet reinforced in this section. Zosima ought to be demonstrating his sainthood by smelling sweet, by giving everyone some visible sign of his ascension to heaven and doesn't, but... in the end, we see him in Alyosha's dream, freed from death, partaking of a miracle in which water is turned into wine, in a room where God demonstrates his infinite dominion. It's as if we can't expect God to keep _advertising_ how powerful he is, but that doesn't mean he isn't powerful... I think. It all turns my head inside-out.

Book I was blogged by intertext (me!)
Book II by marri

and now, Book III, by lidocafe

Watch for Book IV, here, on Sunday...

lidocafe, marri and I have decided to embark on a summer project to read and blog our reading of The Brothers Karamazov. We are dividing it up by "Books" - each of us will blog one book in turn, and the others will comment. I'll link to the blogs in turn, in case any of you on my flist are interested in following along (or commenting!). I am first.

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner in our district who became a celebrity (and is remembered to this day) because of the tragic and mysterious end he met exactly thirteen years ago, which will be described in its proper place.

I will do what I'm always telling my students to do when reading a novel, and that is to spend a little time thinking about the title, the first line, and any preface or other "paratextual" material. So what do we learn from the title and the first line? Well, it's about brothers (well, duh). But let's not dismiss the obvious. It's about brothers, yes. And about their relationship to their father, and to each other. This relationship (or perhaps the various complexities of the different relationshipS, as each of the young men is different and each may have a different relationship to the father and to other brothers) will be important, if not central, to what we are going to read. We also learn that the father dies, under tragic and mysterious circumstances, and that is going to be crucial to the story, too. We learn from his placement at the beginning and also from the author's preface that Alexei is going to be the hero of this work. He is a third son (do I dare apply folkloric principles and think that as the third son he is bound to be the most successful or likeable of the brothers?)

The preface is an interesting document. The author tells us something about his hero, but is self-deprecating and plants in our minds the notion that Alexei is not a typical hero, that he is eccentric in some way. We are also told that the novel will be in two parts - the first about an episode thirteen years ago and the second to be about Alexei "today." A translator's note points out that part two was never written. Was it ever intended to be? If not, then why mention it?

Book I is called "A Peculiar Family History." Without knowing Russian, it is difficult to tell whether the ambiguity of the modifier is intentional. Is this a history of a peculiar family, or a peculiar history of a family? Or both? ETA: or is it peculiar in the sense of unique? It could be...

Effectively, the chapters of book 1 introduce us to the main players - Fyodor, the father, and the brothers K: Dmitry, Ivan and Alexei. Dmitry is a son by Fyodor's first wife, the other two by the second. So Ivan and Alexei are full brothers; Dmitry is a half brother to the other two. Dmitry is passionate, wild, spends too much money, and thinks his father has cheated him out of his inheritance. Ivan is somewhat mysterious, sullen and secretive but obviously intelligent. Alexei is charming, good-looking, likeable, extremely squeamish about "rude things" about women, and, at this point in the novel, destined for a monastery. Fyodor Karamazov is a thorough-going scoundrel: debauched, neglectful of his sons, "wretched and depraved" but also "muddle-headed" (again, I wish I knew Russian) in the sense of being amoral but not also ineffectual. The section ends with news of what is to be a momentous gathering of all members of the family.

The two mothers, by the way, have only small roles but are described remarkably vividly. Dmitry's mum is passionate and fierce - it is rumoured that she beats Fyodor - and runs off with another man. The second wife was young, in a miserable home situation, and seems to have run off with Fyodor in preference to suicide.

There is another striking character in this work: the narrator. He (doubtless it is a he) appears to be a member of the community in which the Karamazovs live. He is garrulous and judgemental, and his comments on the brothers seem designed to influence our opinions of the brothers and to place us in a similar position of witness and judge.

Have I left anything out?