Should I read Demons or The Idiot?
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Should I read Demons or The Idiot?
Should I read Demons or The Idiot?
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Depends. How good is your command of the French language?
demons is better. read the idiot.
Let us know what you decide on and I’ll read it too. I haven’t read a big book this year yet and dosto sounds like a nice choice.
I'm reading Demons right now. It is EXTREMELY slow. The start just drags on for 300 pages introducing tons of irrelevant side characters. It feels like being a small child at the dinner table and having to sit there listening to your parents conversation about people you don't know.
Before this I read C & P and blew through it in less than 2 weeks.
BK is like this, too, if not even slower. If you don't find the act of reading Dosto enjoyable in its own right then I'm convinced reading his books is pointless.
>if not even slower
Holy shit.
No, because I really enjoyed C&P, and it is not necessarily the slowness that I find frustrating. It's more so the huge list of characters being introduced page after page and have to keep track of. Since there is not really anything happening in the first half of the book, you also don't relate to any of the characters in a meaningful way and they just become interchangeable. As opposed to C & P, which I read before this, where we just get a handful of very well developed characters.
I'm only halfway though now, so my opinion might change as I understand everything happens in the second half of the book.
>Thank you, I thought I was the only one who was bored to death with Demons. Things pick up toward the end, but damn if it isn’t slow until then. Not my favorite by him.
I find it very tough to get through, and then I see people on this board say it is their favorite Dosto novel... Did I just get filtered?
>then I see people on this board say it is their favorite Dosto novel
The only people who believe Demons are the best Dosto novel are the ones who read Dosto for /misc/ reasons.
I enjoy Demons a lot and I don't think its meandering really. To me all this slow buildup is necessary for the whole clusterfrick of the second half. It's easily his most satirical work from what I've read and those lengthy passages where nothing truly "happens" is important to turn into ridicule most of the characters, especially the older liberals.
Might also note though that
is not completely wrong. Due to the censorship of the At Tikhon's chapter, Dostoyevsky had to completely reimagine what came next in the novel, I like the current ending nonetheless but you can tell it wasnt really supposed to end like this.
TBK is several orders of magnitude better than Demons.
Thank you, I thought I was the only one who was bored to death with Demons. Things pick up toward the end, but damn if it isn’t slow until then. Not my favorite by him.
Yeah, but The Brothers Karamazov is full of interesting philosophical takes and meaningful character development from the beginning, whereas Demons was just bland and meandering until the end. Then it feels like he just shits on all the characters by giving everyone a crappy fate in the span of a couple pages to wrap things up.
Is Demons the same book as The Possessed or no way?
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.
Everyone is always so focused on Karamazov and Punishment. Those books are great! Just like everything Dostoy wrote. But the thing is to me everyone gets so incredibly hung up on the inquisitor in Karamazov and the message of Ivan's atheism which isn't much more than a punch at the preconcieved lack of morals held by atheists (which was much more relevant back then in Russia). And Punishment is somewhat the same and also kinda tackles Tolstoy's great man theory and especially utilitarianism and thats swell too. But to me the prelavent message in all the Dostoy books I've read is the absurdity of common human life as in that people regularily commits actions against their best intentions (which is the whole thing with Underground Man). And that you can't reason with human emotion. We can logically build dams, railroads, palaces, prisons and fortresses. These things can be thought up, planned, prepared for and implemented by and after the book with no real creative need (aside from everpresent mismanagment and necessity being the mother of invention). But we can't logically decide where the railroads go, why the dam needs to be there, why should only a select few can live in the palace and who shall fill the prisons and fortresses? So much of our modern day is the result of history which has itself been the result of it's history. And history has consisted of emotional, short-lived and short-tempered humans with no regard of logical idealism or should's and must's. Honestly I felt a load slip of my back when I first read Dostoy as a young adult because I had come to the conclusion that everything is society is logically built and propagated by primarily thinking and logical people with mine along with everyone elses best interests. Naive sure but Dostoy explained to me that what we humans create as a collective, while impressive and astounding as is, can't be and shouldn't be mastered and commanded by some god-philosopher king. Humans are far to impulsive, stubborn and illogical for that. Demons in-particular illustrates this and shows that beneath all our political posturing we're all just humans wanting to get by and finding purpose in life, for some that is politics at the expense of others. The Idiot shows that it would be logical for everyone to be like The Prince as it would create a paradise on earth, but despite everyone liking him and having no proper reason to rebuff him they treat him contemptously and badly, simply because that's how humans do.
>Tolstoy's great man theory
What
Well yeah, that's the point - Tolstoy never had a great man theory, he just criticized it.
tolstoys theory about the great man theory then. forgive me.