I love dmitri too, I like that the other anons did alyosha and Ivan I like them both but dmitri I relate to most, honestly.
I don't read a lot. But I'm looking for something to get into, maybe.
This has nothing to do with the question in the OP, but I have heard good things about Dostoevky's characters. I like how deep and kind of romantic they are. It's interesting to read.
I wanted to ask if any of you could recommend me similar books or authors, ones that also have this sense of depth to their characters, perhaps explore their thoughts and romantic delusions or fantasies.
I'm not necessarily asking for something I can relate to, just an interesting character that feels human.
I don't read at all, so no matter how "popular" a book might be, please tell me about it. Only exceptions are Dostoevsky books, since I already know about them, obv.
;: Charles dickens seems good for that, though his prose style is very polarizing. David Copperfield is great though honestly a bit over saturated. The characters in it have real depth though atleast the main characters, some others are a bit one dimensional like Uriah heap. I mean the only other book I can really think of is war and peace by tolstoy, I’m bout halfway through that
https://i.imgur.com/e5GYeYx.jpg
It was once Alyosha, but upon realizing that I will never truly again be capable of Christian faith, it has become Ivan
Honestly I get it anon, even as a Christian. I’ve been an atheist most of my life but had an experience that I have faith in was some contact with God. Still sometimes I doubt my experiences and chock it up to brain states but I do try to believe. Still I totally get the atheist perspective and without my specific honestly gnostic experience, I’d still be hardline atheist and probably would’ve only liked Ivan
Thanks, anon. I already started Brothers Karamazov and I'm interested in checking out something by Charles Dickens next, as per your recommendation. I only know he was quite the eccentric and rather flamboyant.
A Christmas Carol is an excellent Dickens novel, it's short and powerful and gives you the flavor of his work in general. If you want something more serious try A Tale of Two Cities.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Great, I'll look into it. Thanks!
Rn, by the way the narrator speaks in Brothers Karamazov, it feels like he has adhd lmao.
It was once Alyosha, but upon realizing that I will never truly again be capable of Christian faith, it has become Ivan
), I appreciate you being so understanding. I genuinely admire the near-saintliness of Alyosha and I sometimes am grieved by my loss of faith, but faith is something I cannot artificially conjure up within myself: it's something that must come about from something like what you've experienced, a direct encounter with God.
I think my loss of faith was similar to the one that Tolstoy recalls in "A Confession":
> "S., a clever and truthful man, once told me the story of how he ceased to believe. On a hunting expedition, when he was already twenty-six, he once, at the place where they put up for the night, knelt down in the evening to pray - a habit retained from childhood. His elder brother, who was at the hunt with him, was lying on some hay and watching him. When S. had finished and was settling down for the night, his brother said to him: "So you still do that?" They said nothing more to one another. But from that day S. ceased to say his prayers or go to church. And now he has not prayed, received communion, or gone to church, for thirty years. And this not because he knows his brother's convictions and has joined him in them, nor because he has decided anything in his own soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own weight. The word only showed that where he thought there was faith, in reality there had long been an empty space, and that therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions. Becoming conscious of their senselessness he could not continue them."
I really, really did believe in God for some years of my life, from 16 when I converted to Christianity to 20 or even 21. But the past few months have honestly revealed to me that something precious has died inside my deepest recesses, and I have no knowledge of how to retrieve it.
I don't read a lot. But I'm looking for something to get into, maybe.
This has nothing to do with the question in the OP, but I have heard good things about Dostoevky's characters. I like how deep and kind of romantic they are. It's interesting to read.
I wanted to ask if any of you could recommend me similar books or authors, ones that also have this sense of depth to their characters, perhaps explore their thoughts and romantic delusions or fantasies.
I'm not necessarily asking for something I can relate to, just an interesting character that feels human.
I don't read at all, so no matter how "popular" a book might be, please tell me about it. Only exceptions are Dostoevsky books, since I already know about them, obv.
I love dmitri too, I like that the other anons did alyosha and Ivan I like them both but dmitri I relate to most, honestly.
[...];: Charles dickens seems good for that, though his prose style is very polarizing. David Copperfield is great though honestly a bit over saturated. The characters in it have real depth though atleast the main characters, some others are a bit one dimensional like Uriah heap. I mean the only other book I can really think of is war and peace by tolstoy, I’m bout halfway through that
[...]
Honestly I get it anon, even as a Christian. I’ve been an atheist most of my life but had an experience that I have faith in was some contact with God. Still sometimes I doubt my experiences and chock it up to brain states but I do try to believe. Still I totally get the atheist perspective and without my specific honestly gnostic experience, I’d still be hardline atheist and probably would’ve only liked Ivan
I've never understood why people like Ivan. He's basically a strawman of an atheist, he carries all the false assumptions that Dosto himself carried, that values cannot come from anywhere other than God (a manifest falsehood) and Ivan himself ends up hallucinating the devil and then sinking into madness. This is the kind of atheist that delusional theists love to imagine but which has no bearing on reality. Values are discovered by interacting with the material universe, not with the divine.
it's funny to watch dosto's atheist be tortured by a life without faith when i live without faith every day and don't find it all that difficult. that said, i don't think ivan can be called a strawman. he's the sharpest character in the book and his madness makes perfect sense if you can view the world through dosto's eyes. there really are atheists like him out there that see religion as a necessary falsehood that lesser minds than themselves need to navigate the world. ivan is not a strawman but dostoyevsky attempting to paint atheism in the best possible light within the world as he sees it.
Not anon you're responding to but this sounds like you're just making the point that his portrayal is not intentionally a strawman, but could objectively still be one just due to the fact that dosto can't really step outside his worldview. Like a witness who describes what he saw from his perspective, it's not the objective truth and fair representation of reality but it's also not wrong from his limited perspective. I feel like this strikes on a point that constantly happens in atheist/christian debates, where people with different perspectives argue hypotheticals that are impossible to imagine because they imply a complete change in perspective. For example the old question of "Would you rape and murder if you suddenly stopped believing in God?". If a Christian answers "Yes." that answer actually makes sense and is not contradictory to the fact that Christians who lose faith don't suddenly start raping and murdering, but only because it implies that the answer that they gave is from a Christian perspective. And after losing faith, they now find a secular perspective and find that there is a secular moral sense that is at least strong enough to keep you from murdering/raping. It's like a bachelor is someone who isn't married, but many bachelors actually get married, and that's not a contradiction for obvious reasons.
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.
Is your criticism that he takes sinning too lightly or allows too much of it? Isn't the whole point of Christianity that no man should judge another man, and that only God can judge? And even without religious context this is basically true. If an impressionable young girl whose family is dying of hunger gets persuaded to sell her body for some money so she and her family can survive, what can anyone be judgemental about? And that's just an obvious example, it is true for even the most seemingly voluntary and unnecessary sins, a rich man with the perfect life and family who cheats on his wife may seem irredeemable but again, you don't know every detail that lead to that. Not even he can judge himself because humans are fundamentally limited and biased in self reflection. I understand that lifting this behavior up is also not a virtue obviously and people should stride towards the best and condemn the worst, but I think that's the role of the church, not of novels. That whole genre came into existence to portray the miserable life of commoners instead of aristocratic epics.
And wasn't the entire point of the new testament and Jesus that he welcomed sinners and ate with them, a radical inclusivity compared to any other religion that came before it? As it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.
Dosto is essentially sadomasochistic, he loves dwelling on characters who revel in how depraved they are, but who also prostrate themselves in the just punishment or humiliation of their depravity. Again, sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes imply the exact situation he adored, all the violence and sexual intrigue he desired so much, but with the approval of his super ego since they ritualistically degrade themselves in a kind of spiritual fetishistic pleasure in confessing, being punished, and then being "redeemed". It's lurid and partakes of a sick kind of gratification in self flagellation.
Dosto essentially perpetuates a kind of Samsara, a constant cycle of animal impulse outbursts followed by shame, guilt, and regret, but since these mechanisms are woefully insufficient to actually affect a better way of expressing these impulses, it simply fuels a further cycle.
How does Dosto purport to redeem these aspects of humanity? Is it to integrate them? To accept that they are rightful parts of the human experience and to work with them to self actualize; to transcend and include? No. His worldview firmly states that they must be brought before a higher power, judged as sinful, and repressed forever. As I said before, this enterprise is utterly futile, since its objective is to destroy what is human, to snuff out the very spark that is humanity. Thus the cycle of indulgence (the inescapable humanity) and self flagellation (the divine judgement that such things are sinful and abhorrent). There is nothing profound, nothing transcendent here, just shallow fetishistic pleasure taking of the lowest tier followed by the harshest condemnation and repentance. Both sides of this coin forever restrict the other to its worst form, forever traps the victim of this ideology to a lifetime of misery and self hatred. It's vile in the extreme.
Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov.
He's the only one who went through with the job and didn't ramble for pages.
He committed suicide only because Dostoevsky wanted to teach a moral lesson.
Father was rather baste, if I might say.
Oh and yeah fyodor pavlovitch is hilarious. The unfortunate gathering scene in book 2 is one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever read
Without a doubt, Dimitri.
I love dmitri too, I like that the other anons did alyosha and Ivan I like them both but dmitri I relate to most, honestly.
;: Charles dickens seems good for that, though his prose style is very polarizing. David Copperfield is great though honestly a bit over saturated. The characters in it have real depth though atleast the main characters, some others are a bit one dimensional like Uriah heap. I mean the only other book I can really think of is war and peace by tolstoy, I’m bout halfway through that
Honestly I get it anon, even as a Christian. I’ve been an atheist most of my life but had an experience that I have faith in was some contact with God. Still sometimes I doubt my experiences and chock it up to brain states but I do try to believe. Still I totally get the atheist perspective and without my specific honestly gnostic experience, I’d still be hardline atheist and probably would’ve only liked Ivan
Thanks, anon. I already started Brothers Karamazov and I'm interested in checking out something by Charles Dickens next, as per your recommendation. I only know he was quite the eccentric and rather flamboyant.
A Christmas Carol is an excellent Dickens novel, it's short and powerful and gives you the flavor of his work in general. If you want something more serious try A Tale of Two Cities.
Great, I'll look into it. Thanks!
Rn, by the way the narrator speaks in Brothers Karamazov, it feels like he has adhd lmao.
I'm Ivangay anon from last night (
), I appreciate you being so understanding. I genuinely admire the near-saintliness of Alyosha and I sometimes am grieved by my loss of faith, but faith is something I cannot artificially conjure up within myself: it's something that must come about from something like what you've experienced, a direct encounter with God.
I think my loss of faith was similar to the one that Tolstoy recalls in "A Confession":
> "S., a clever and truthful man, once told me the story of how he ceased to believe. On a hunting expedition, when he was already twenty-six, he once, at the place where they put up for the night, knelt down in the evening to pray - a habit retained from childhood. His elder brother, who was at the hunt with him, was lying on some hay and watching him. When S. had finished and was settling down for the night, his brother said to him: "So you still do that?" They said nothing more to one another. But from that day S. ceased to say his prayers or go to church. And now he has not prayed, received communion, or gone to church, for thirty years. And this not because he knows his brother's convictions and has joined him in them, nor because he has decided anything in his own soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own weight. The word only showed that where he thought there was faith, in reality there had long been an empty space, and that therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions. Becoming conscious of their senselessness he could not continue them."
I really, really did believe in God for some years of my life, from 16 when I converted to Christianity to 20 or even 21. But the past few months have honestly revealed to me that something precious has died inside my deepest recesses, and I have no knowledge of how to retrieve it.
Alyosha is LITERALLY me.
I don't read a lot. But I'm looking for something to get into, maybe.
This has nothing to do with the question in the OP, but I have heard good things about Dostoevky's characters. I like how deep and kind of romantic they are. It's interesting to read.
I wanted to ask if any of you could recommend me similar books or authors, ones that also have this sense of depth to their characters, perhaps explore their thoughts and romantic delusions or fantasies.
I'm not necessarily asking for something I can relate to, just an interesting character that feels human.
I don't read at all, so no matter how "popular" a book might be, please tell me about it. Only exceptions are Dostoevsky books, since I already know about them, obv.
Dunno. I’m reading the Bible first
It was once Alyosha, but upon realizing that I will never truly again be capable of Christian faith, it has become Ivan
Completely reversed for me
I've never understood why people like Ivan. He's basically a strawman of an atheist, he carries all the false assumptions that Dosto himself carried, that values cannot come from anywhere other than God (a manifest falsehood) and Ivan himself ends up hallucinating the devil and then sinking into madness. This is the kind of atheist that delusional theists love to imagine but which has no bearing on reality. Values are discovered by interacting with the material universe, not with the divine.
Ivan isn't an atheist.
it's funny to watch dosto's atheist be tortured by a life without faith when i live without faith every day and don't find it all that difficult. that said, i don't think ivan can be called a strawman. he's the sharpest character in the book and his madness makes perfect sense if you can view the world through dosto's eyes. there really are atheists like him out there that see religion as a necessary falsehood that lesser minds than themselves need to navigate the world. ivan is not a strawman but dostoyevsky attempting to paint atheism in the best possible light within the world as he sees it.
Not anon you're responding to but this sounds like you're just making the point that his portrayal is not intentionally a strawman, but could objectively still be one just due to the fact that dosto can't really step outside his worldview. Like a witness who describes what he saw from his perspective, it's not the objective truth and fair representation of reality but it's also not wrong from his limited perspective. I feel like this strikes on a point that constantly happens in atheist/christian debates, where people with different perspectives argue hypotheticals that are impossible to imagine because they imply a complete change in perspective. For example the old question of "Would you rape and murder if you suddenly stopped believing in God?". If a Christian answers "Yes." that answer actually makes sense and is not contradictory to the fact that Christians who lose faith don't suddenly start raping and murdering, but only because it implies that the answer that they gave is from a Christian perspective. And after losing faith, they now find a secular perspective and find that there is a secular moral sense that is at least strong enough to keep you from murdering/raping. It's like a bachelor is someone who isn't married, but many bachelors actually get married, and that's not a contradiction for obvious reasons.
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.
Is your criticism that he takes sinning too lightly or allows too much of it? Isn't the whole point of Christianity that no man should judge another man, and that only God can judge? And even without religious context this is basically true. If an impressionable young girl whose family is dying of hunger gets persuaded to sell her body for some money so she and her family can survive, what can anyone be judgemental about? And that's just an obvious example, it is true for even the most seemingly voluntary and unnecessary sins, a rich man with the perfect life and family who cheats on his wife may seem irredeemable but again, you don't know every detail that lead to that. Not even he can judge himself because humans are fundamentally limited and biased in self reflection. I understand that lifting this behavior up is also not a virtue obviously and people should stride towards the best and condemn the worst, but I think that's the role of the church, not of novels. That whole genre came into existence to portray the miserable life of commoners instead of aristocratic epics.
And wasn't the entire point of the new testament and Jesus that he welcomed sinners and ate with them, a radical inclusivity compared to any other religion that came before it? As it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.
Dosto is essentially sadomasochistic, he loves dwelling on characters who revel in how depraved they are, but who also prostrate themselves in the just punishment or humiliation of their depravity. Again, sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes imply the exact situation he adored, all the violence and sexual intrigue he desired so much, but with the approval of his super ego since they ritualistically degrade themselves in a kind of spiritual fetishistic pleasure in confessing, being punished, and then being "redeemed". It's lurid and partakes of a sick kind of gratification in self flagellation.
Dosto essentially perpetuates a kind of Samsara, a constant cycle of animal impulse outbursts followed by shame, guilt, and regret, but since these mechanisms are woefully insufficient to actually affect a better way of expressing these impulses, it simply fuels a further cycle.
How does Dosto purport to redeem these aspects of humanity? Is it to integrate them? To accept that they are rightful parts of the human experience and to work with them to self actualize; to transcend and include? No. His worldview firmly states that they must be brought before a higher power, judged as sinful, and repressed forever. As I said before, this enterprise is utterly futile, since its objective is to destroy what is human, to snuff out the very spark that is humanity. Thus the cycle of indulgence (the inescapable humanity) and self flagellation (the divine judgement that such things are sinful and abhorrent). There is nothing profound, nothing transcendent here, just shallow fetishistic pleasure taking of the lowest tier followed by the harshest condemnation and repentance. Both sides of this coin forever restrict the other to its worst form, forever traps the victim of this ideology to a lifetime of misery and self hatred. It's vile in the extreme.
I like Ivan and Alyosha more or less equally.
Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov.
He's the only one who went through with the job and didn't ramble for pages.
He committed suicide only because Dostoevsky wanted to teach a moral lesson.
Pyotr Steponavitch
>bicentennial edition
Now, I know I'm an ESL, but doesn't that mean 200 years?
I love Alyosha!
Love him less as a socialist terrorist