Thread 24627356

comfy

tfw no murderer bf

>Drink tea
>Suck sugar cubes
>Lift poods
>Smuggle vodka in intestines
>Shoot the shit with murderers
Kino

>>24627356 (OP)
Criminally underrated book

Reading it now. The description of the unwashed hospital gowns made me feel a bit queasy.

>>24627356 (OP)
If 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.

tolstoy was such a faggot for saying its Dostoevsky’s best novel its fine

>community bath scene
imagine the smell

>>24628187
"Fine" is the best Dosto could do.

>>24628420
Dostoevsky's works aged perfectly.

>>24627356 (OP)
Is it as good as the video game?

>In January 1850 two new political prisoners were brought to our prison: Sergei Fyodorovich Durov and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Both had been sentenced to four years of hard labor, and then to being drafted into the army. Both were extraordinarily weak, nervous, and overmedicated with iodine and mercury.
[...]
>The other man, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, was the acclaimed novelist and author of Poor Folk [1845]. But we felt that this “ornament of the northern capital”(5) did not measure up to his fame. Certainly, he was talented. But it was not his talent but his personality that we encountered. How on earth could this man have ever entered any conspiracy? How could he have participated in any democratic movement? He was the vainest of the vain, and his vanity had to do with belonging to the privileged caste. How could he possibly desire freedom for the people if he accepted only one caste-the nobility, and regarded it as the only class that could lead the nation forward?

>“Nobility,” “nobleman,” “I am a nobleman,” “we noblemen” were constantly on his lips. Whenever he addressed us Poles and said “we noblemen,” I interrupted him: “Excuse me, but I think that here in prison there are no noblemen, but only people deprived of rights, prisoners in a hard labor camp.”

>He foamed with anger:

>“You are of course pleased that you are a prisoner in a labor camp,” he shouted with malice and irony.

>“I am glad that I am who I am,” I answered trying not to show my emotions.

>>24629128
>So how did Dostoevsky become a conspirator? Probably he allowed himself to be carried away by a momentary impulse, just as sometimes, and also on impulse, he showed his deep regret that the waves of conspiracy carried him to the prison in Omsk. He hated us Poles, perhaps because his features and name betrayed a Polish ancestry. He used to say that if he learned that in his veins there flowed even one drop of Polish blood, he would immediately order it to be let out. It was painful to hear this conspirator and sufferer for liberty and progress exclaim that he would be happy only when all countries surrender to the Russian tsar. He did not seem to understand that Ukraine, Volhynia, Podolia, Lithuania, and Poland were forcibly annexed by the Russian empire; on the contrary, he maintained that all these lands belonged to Russia from time immemorial, and God’s justice handed them to the Russian tsar because they could not possibly exist on their own, or rise from their backwardness, barbarism, and destitution without Russia’s help. According to Dostoevsky, the Baltic countries were also Russia, and so were Siberia and the Caucasus. While listening to these ravings we concluded that Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was mentally challenged concerning Russia’s properties. But he repeated his absurdities with great pleasure. He also maintained that Constantinople should belong to Russia, not to speak of the European part of Turkey which, in his opinion, would soon become a jewel of the Russian empire. On one occasion, he read to us his ode commemorating the eventual conquest of Constantinople by the Russian army! The ode was indeed beautiful, but none of us was in a hurry to congratulate the author. Instead, I asked him:

>“A na vozvratnyi put’ u vas ody net?” [Have you written an ode to commemorate the return of the Russian army back to Russia?]

>This made him mad. He sprang up and called me an ignoramus and a barbarian. He shouted so loudly that ordinary criminals began to murmur that “the politicals are fighting.” We all left the building and went to the courtyard to end this scandalous scene. Dostoevsky kept saying that there exists only one great nation in the world, namely, the Russian nation, and that it is destined for a great mission. According to him, the French were barely acceptable, while the English, Germans, Spaniards were simply human caricatures. By comparison to Russian literature, all world literatures were trivial.

>>24629130
>I remember I told him that in 1844 in Poland a subscription was issued for The Wandering Jew.(6) First he did not believe me, and then said that I was lying. Finally Durov interrupted him and confirmed my statement. Even then he did not quite believe me. He was always poised to belittle any nation, not just the Poles whom he hated with all his heart, but also everyone else but the Russians. He tried to deny that anyone produced anything beautiful, great, or noble, as if wishing to destroy, wipe out, cover up all human achievement in order to prove that Russians were superior to everybody in the world. The style of his disputations was hard to bear. He was conceited and brutal, and he finally made us avoid not only the disputes with him but also ordinary conversations. Thus we had to “conceal our joys and sorrows/And become impenetrable like an abyss.”(7)

>It is very likely that this inability to control his temper was a sign of mental illness; as mentioned above, both Durov and Dostoevsky were nervous and sickly types. So how was it possible that a graduate of the Russian military school became a Russian political prisoner? Judging by what he told us, he was an avid reader. It is possible that images of the French Revolution inflamed his imagination. Or perhaps he found lofty ideas in the works of the great thinkers, and these ideas overpowered his mind and heart and led him onto the road which he soon wished to exit at any price. When Dostoevsky and Durov came to Omsk to live in the same barrack with me, it seemed at first that they were two glittering lights on the dark northern sky. But it was a momentary impression that soon passed, and both I and my companions stopped conversing with Dostoevsky because of his temper.

>After serving his term, Dostoevsky was drafted to the battalion billeted on the town of Semipalyatinsk. While serving there as a private and on the occasion of the Crimean War, he wrote a poem about Tsar Nicholas I in which he presented the Tsar as residing above all the Olympian gods. He wanted to publish the poem, perhaps hoping that flattery would lead to the shortening of his sentence or maybe even to a monetary reward. On this basis and on the basis of our conversations with him, we concluded that Dostoevsky was a man of weak and unattractive character. One could forgive him his hatred of Poles-we bore greater hatreds and succeeded in forgiving them. But it appears that the reason he got to jail was not worthy of respect. I say that even though I was already in prison, in fact on my way to a hard labor camp (and thus outside the realm of the civilized world, where an informed opinion could have been acquired) at the time when [the Petrashevsky affair] was playing out in Petersburg.

>>24629132
>I know nothing about other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, but I do know this: among the few honest and educated Russians whom I met in Siberia, the Petrashevsky affair did not generate either sympathy or interest-quite unlike the Decembrist uprising.(8)
S. Tokarzewski, "Seven Years of Hard Labour"

RELOAD

>>24629125
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.