Ok, so I don’t have a lot of experience with Dostoyevsky aside from reading Crime and Punishment a few years ago (gotta re-read by the way, I was still too young to fully understand it). The Brothers Karamázov has been on my TBR for a while and I picked it up on a whim on my last visit to the library.
It’s a doorstopper of a book and, based on Crime and Punishment, I was expecting a heavy, more “brainy” read; but I definitely did not think it would be so damn entertaining. I’m on page 250 and, up until now, it’s basically a soap opera and I’m so loving it. I mean, this thing has a love triangle, fights for inheritance, a murder plot _and even_ a mysterious pregnancy! It’s all the 1880’s Russian melodrama I didn’t know I needed. The characters are so entertaining too; maybe that’s just a cultural difference, but they seem so much more… expressive than I would expect, I guess? It kind of feels like watching a theater play; everything is more grandious, more excessive and exaggerated to really make a point to the audience/reader. The whole scene between Catierina and Gruchenka, for example, or the way everyone (especially Dmitri) sounds so desperate and sincere in their confessions to Aliocha.
One thing I’m enjoying about Dostoyevsky’s writing style is that you can tell it was written to be accessible to the normal readers of his time. Nowadays we think of books like his as “hard”, I would guess mostly due to them just being older or part of the ever unreachable “classics”; but it’s not very hard at all, writing-weise. He has good vocabulary and is definitely an awesome writer, but still uses common lexicon and doesn’t overcomplicate descriptions. I’ve seen modern books with waaaay more purple prose; he is smart, but is not a show off.
Also, it’s very, very much a late 1800’s Russian book. This will vary depending on the version, but I don’t think I had ever seen this many translation notes; this guy was immersed in his time and place to the last hairstrand.
by Leticia_the_bookworm
1 Comment
Thank you for bringing up this aspect of his writing – Dostoevsky, like many other writers of the time period that we look back on, famously Dickens, wrote in a serial format for a broader audience. I think there’s a pretty strong argument to be made that serial writing of the 19th century *was* the soap opera of its day.
(and I’m curious, which translation did you read?)