"Wonderful Christmastime" Appreciation Blog @garth-greensleeves - Tumblr Blog

trek-tracks

She just sat contented in the comfy chair as I built this up around her

I call this installation “The Cat of Amontillado.”

#for the love of god montresor!#cats #that face!

mf-dude

tel-aviva

hes trying to explode you with his mind

#cats #kittens

sovietpostcards

Tamara Yufa. Illustrations for Karelian Folk Tales (1976).

#art #karelia

frozen-fountain

#george #that face!#cats

collins-crypt

#lol #dark shadows #allegedly

frozen-fountain

#george #HIS FACE #cats

gazpachito95

One of the things that I love the most of Alyosha Karamazov as a character is how he single-handedly obliterates the myth of "morally good characters are boring". I love how he demonstrates that the problem was never that there is nothing interesting about a genuinely good person, but that many writers often confuse this with giving the "good" character a fully-fledged 21st century set of morals (when this doesn't make any sense within the story) or a miraculous moral-omniscience that allows them to make the most objectively correct and ethical choices at all times. Alyosha is deeply kind, deeply loving and deeply caring, but he is also quite flawed.

This aspect of him gets even more interesting when you realize that Alyosha is very fully aware (and tormented) about his flaws and weaknesses, but is completely misguided about what these are. Being a Karamazov, Alyosha is convinced that the major temptation that he must resist is the "voluptuosity" that has driven his brothers and his father astray (which is probably the reason why he decided to become a monk), while being completely oblivious to his blatant classism towards his brother Pavel. I've seen some posts lamenting that not even "the cherub" Alyosha could show some compassion for Pavel but, while I agree that this is indeed something extremely tragic about these characters, I also feel that that is exactly the point that Dostoevsky wanted to make. It doesn't matter how kind and empathetic you are. If you are born into a prejudiced society, you will not be able to shake these prejudices off unless you "go forth into the world" and listen and learn from people who are different from you, make mistakes and let others correct you. Alyosha's reaction to his own perceived flaws is instead something more akin to: "I am not as good and perfect as others think I am, so I must withdraw back into my shell (e.g. the convent) until I have managed to make myself as pure and flawless as they expect me to be"…which is honestly kind of a relatable reaction, but it is not how it really works.

While this is something that is not explicitly stated in the book, I also have the impression that Dostoevsky made Alyosha astoundingly oblivious to romance as a way to show how much he was repressing this aspect of himself. For example, at the start of the book Alyosha is like: "Of course Mitya loves her fiancee Katya and not Grushenka, and of course Ivan doesn't love Katya, that's his brother's betrothed! :)", and then you see Mitya/Grushenka/Ivan/Katya interact and you are like: "My brother in Christ, Alyosha, do you even have eyes in your face???". This could be interpreted as Alyosha wanting to believe his family above everything else, but there are other instances in the novel (which are not romance related) in which Alyosha demonstrates to be really emotionally intelligent and perceptive in terms of what his family is saying vs what they are actually thinking, so I don't think that this is the case. Another example of this is Alyosha's reaction to Lise's love confession. I think that he tells her that he will marry her not because of pity, but because he is not able to realize that he doesn't love Lise that way. This of course backfires horribly when Alyosha doesn't act towards Lise as an enamoured person would (he kinda forgets about her in favour of whoever seems more needy at the time), and this breaks Lise's heart even more than if he had rejected her in the first place. In a similar vein, I also love that the book explores how Alyosha's main virtues (or what he thinks his virtues are) can sometimes turn out to be detrimental depending on the circumstances. For example, everyone loves how Alyosha is so empathetic and understanding, and this is for sure a quality that he has made an effort to maintain/work on. However, when he urgently needed to find Mitya to keep him from doing something dumb and impulsive, his empathy gets him distracted with his brother Ivan, who seems to be having a (very non-urgent) religious crisis.

So yeah, I guess that what I wanted to say with this wall of text is that I reallyreally like Alyosha as a character ^^".

#the brothers karamazov #dostoyevsky