The library was deserted during the break. I entered with a keycard and took a novel by Dostoevsky down from the shelves. I placed the book on a table and opened it and then leaned down into the splayed pages, reading and breathing. We seemed to assimilate each other, the characters and I, and when … Continue reading The Dostoevsky Project – My Final Thoughts →

Everything in Dostoevsky’s novels tends toward dialogue, toward a dialogic opposition, as if tending toward its center.  All else is the means; dialogue is the end.  A single voice ends nothing and resolves nothing.  Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence (Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 252).  The problem I … Continue reading Dostoevsky Wrap-Up #3 (C) Bakhtin’s _Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics_ (from the bottom up) →

Dostoevsky from the Top Down or the Bottom Up? While reading all these books, I had the help of two significant secondary sources – all along the way, Joseph Frank’s five-volume Dostoevsky, and at the end, after having finished all the original Dostoevsky writing, Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.  These two works represent two … Continue reading Dostoevsky Wrap-Up #3 (B) – Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky (From the Top Down) →

(It turns out I'll make this final post multi-parted.  Just too much to say...) By my estimation, Dostoevsky’s published works run somewhere between 7500 and 8000 pages.  That means I’ve read more words written by him (at least published words) than by any other human being.  I might have come close with George Eliot when … Continue reading Dostoevsky Project Wrap-Up #3: Final Thoughts (part A) – The Experience of All This Reading →

Here's just a little snapshot of my reading.   Best Opening Line: Notes from Underground - “I AM A SICK MAN… I am a wicked man.  An unattractive man.  I think my liver hurts.”  D. seems not to have thought to much about the effect of opening lines (unlike, say, Tolstoy, Dickens, or Jane Austen).  Still, … Continue reading The Dostoevsky Project Wrap-Up #2: Superlatives →

I know this is spread out over more than two years, and you might not have read everything I wrote, or might not want to.  But just in case you do - below are links to everything I've written about Dostoevsky over this time, in chronological order.  It's 43 entries I think.  I have to … Continue reading The Dostoevsky Project Wrap-Up #1: Everything I Wrote →

At the start of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (to be written about later in this same space) the children listen to Benjamin Britten's "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" and the voiceover narrator describes the different instruments as they enter the piece.  At the end of the movie, the same voiceover describes all the … Continue reading The Brothers Karamazov – Book XII (“A Judicial Error”) and Epilogue →

I'm still without my computer so I'll keep it brief again.  If this novel were a Shakespeare play (and George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky argues that Shakespearean drama is a good analogue to most of D's works) , Book 10 starts after where the intermission would have fallen: it's Act 4.  Fyodor has been murdered, Dmitri … Continue reading Books 10-11 – Boys and Brother Ivan Karamazov →

I won't say too much because I'm currently computer-less and iPad typing is frustrating. This part of the book was great in terms of plot action... Dmitri goes on a manic and dreamlike search for 3000 rubles, comes quite close to, but does *not* murder his father (honestly, I missed that detail the first time … Continue reading The Brothers Karamazov – Books 8-9 -Mitya and The Preliminary Investigation →