Se me presentaba con claridad la idea de que la vida y el mundo parecían ahora depender de mí. Incluso podría decir que el mundo, en aquel momento, estaba hecho sólo para mí: si me suicidaba, el mundo desaparecería, al menos para mí. Por no hablar de que en realidad era probable que ya nada existiera tras mi desaparición, y que cuando se apagara mi conciencia, se apagaría y desaparecería al instante todo el mundo, como si fuera una aparición de mi conciencia, pues tal vez todo ese mundo, y toda esa gente, no eran únicamente más que yo.
hello hello love your blog aa! wondering about fav dostoyevsky books and characters and WHYY do you you like them!! thank you <3
Aaaaegdhrg This message threw me down into a rabbit hole of thoughts... Anyway thank you 🙈🙈 I’m glad u enjoy this… assortment of…. Posts… And thanks for the question
This is such a difficult question because you put it in the plural. I can easily say my favorite book of his, singular, is The Brothers Karamazov, just because it’s the one I’ve reread the most, the one I think about the most, the scenes are both more memorable and more touching to me. The other novels I think I like equally? (Though IDK if I’ll ever find myself wanting to reread the Demons)
This is how I can best explain my personal feelings about how these novels compare to each other:
I haven’t read either the Demons or Crime&P in a while, though, so I’m relying entirely on memory here! But also with the addendum that none of these works are really dry, structured or un-gutsy: I have only read the Demons once, but I occasionally reread the looooong scene with Maria Ignatievna giving birth because I think it’s so genuinely touching?? I even made my wife read it completely out of context lmao 😬 So, number one favorite thing about Dosto in general is that I think there’s a lot of guts in it, a lot of the author letting the characters take the story, and that’s why we get pages and pages of monologue, because all of these characters are to the point of bursting. We meet them when they’re so ripe that just poking a little too hard breaks the skin. I had a friend who told me once she was annoyed by how hysterical Dosto’s female characters were in The Brothers Karamazov: that struck me as odd, because I think all his characters of all genders are hysterical at all times. Those are never books about sane people doing sane things in a sane way. Which ofc I love :)
I don’t have the vocabulary to talk about this in English, but I’m constantly thinking about what is the ideal amount of control an artist ought to have over their own work. I love this topic and I can talk about it for days; it’s the thing that comes trickling through the craft that I think is fascinating and that makes an artwork truly brilliant; it’s something about the momentary ego death that being very invested in the crafting of a work brings sometimes, and how that creates a work that is able to reproduce that momentary ego death on the perceiver as well… I have said this before, but I much much much rather prefer works that are messy or have execution problems, but where you can see the artist truly let themselves go, let the characters and story develop as if alive. That’s what I mean when I say the work has “guts”. I hate moral tales lol.
In that sense, I think my ‘spectrum’ illustration makes sense to me because the Idiot truly was, according to the man himself, an experimental work where he did not plan the ending beforehand and just gave the characters free reign to go bonkers, and that’s why the last chapter is literally nightmare fuel… the Demons, by contrast, has a more organized structure and you can see the author knew exactly where he wanted to arrive (and it also ends with nightmare fuel…). But even when he’s planning and designing, he’s too good to break his own story, shove his hand inside the narrative and artificially relocate the pieces in order to better suit his conscience, so it always stays in the realm of allegory and never decays into metaphor :D I also like how he sets a scene, and I don’t think it’s by accident that when I talk about these books, I immediately recall it in terms of scenes more than in terms of themes or characters. That’s not necessarily how I function with novels in general, so that’s also something I appreciate in his works.
One thing I really like and that I feel a little shy to talk about, due to not having the vocabulary to do it very well, is how many relationships he depicts where one part (normally the man) adores the other (normally the woman) to the point of self-degradation; a love that creates a worshipful distance that, ultimately, is exactly what destroys the relationship… in the Idiot, for example, Nastasya doesn’t want a master and doesn’t want a slave, but the men she loves and who love her can’t really offer anything else. Same with Dmitri and Grushenka and Katya and Ivan, same with Alyosha and whatever is it he has with Lise, in that he puts himself too differently human from her to be properly loved; in fact I think the reason the main couple of Crime and Punishment work is because they wrestle with this a bit, but Rodka believes in redemption, and his story with Sofia is a story of becoming, together… sorry wait this makes me really emotional 🤧
For the novellas and shorter books… I haven’t read most of them but I did have more fun with the bleaker ones… Notes from the Underground is simply too good, I remember calling my friend to read him entire passages out loud while I was reading it; A Gambler is SUCH A DOWNER but the part where the protag tells Polina that “the mere sound of the rustle of her skirts on the stairs makes him want to hurl himself to the ground and bite his hands” or something along these lines altered my brain chemistry forever, and the Eternal Husband is like... Really a book without a single likeable character, and yet I enjoyed myself immensely while reading it lmao.
Fave characters, ULTRA HARD question bc I tend to like more their interactions than them themselves as concepts, but:
Crime and punishment: Dunia, Rodka, Sofia, Katerina the widow
The brothers karamazov: The three brothers (sorry Smerdiakov), Katya, Grusha, Lise
