Half of The Brothers Karamazov

It’s hard to know what to write about this most profound of novels. What could I possibly say that could add anything to what Dostoevsky has said? If you don’t read the book, anything I try to tell you wouldn’t matter. If you do read it, you don’t need me to point out to you that Ivan’s question about children’s suffering is devastating or that Alyosha’s summary life of his mentor in the monastery is inspirational. You’d notice without any help from me! So I’ll just say a couple of brief things about my reading experience.

I had difficulty deciding on a translation, but I decided to go with Constance Garnett, partly because her translation is cheap on Kindle, but also because I had read that she keeps Russian turns of phrase more than others. The book is strange enough to read with its Russian customs and Russian outlook; adding Russian conversational cadences only makes it weirder. But part of the reason for reading the book is to appreciate the perspective of the author in his time and place, so I prefer this experience to one in which the dialog has been translated so all the nineteenth-century Russians sound like twenty-first-century Americans. I know one way or another I’m reading Russian characters speaking English. But in my head, I want them to speak English with a Russian accent.

Mortimer Adler divided up The Brothers Karamazov over two years in the original reading plan included with the Britannica Great Works set. So that’s the way I read it the first time. I had never done such a thing before, but I was amazed at how well I picked up the characters when taking up the book again after several months. I started thinking about Star Wars stories appearing in installments, about Dickens books originally coming out in serial form over the course of twenty months, and about Cervantes publishing the conclusion to Don Quixote only after a hiatus of ten-years, and it occurred to me that splitting up the reading of a book over years isn’t as odd as it seems at first. Maybe I’m just jealous of my wife, who can sit down and read a whole book in a day. Anyway, I’ve split Karamazov up again. I just read half of it this month and then put it aside for the next book on this year’s list. I’ll finish it sometime early-ish next year.

Speaking of Being Expected to Know History . . .

In my last post, I noted that Winston Churchill expects readers of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples already to know the outline of the history he recounts so that he can spend most of his effort putting his own spin on it. I opened my next book only to find this dynamic even more applicable: Charles Williams clearly expects his readers to know the history of Christendom and of Europe before taking on his The Descent of the Dove.

The passage that most clearly shows this assumption comes near the end, where Williams introduces one important personage, without naming him, simply as "the most famous man in all Europe," a man who cried "Ecrasez l'Infame." Now, I recognized Voltaire in the description. But I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t read about Voltaire and this motto only last year in the Durants' history. Did any of my readers recognize the man by the description?

Williams is hard to read in other ways as well. He had a peculiar view of the Church and of the world and described them constantly in terms of “coinherence and exchange.” And he wrote as if we all knew what he meant by those terms. (Blogspot’s editor doesn’t know the word “coinherence”!) And he has a fondness for identifying biblical personages (including the Persons of the Trinity) by foreign forms of their names. Page 1 of The Descent of the Dove includes this intriguing passage: “The beginning of Christendom is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metaphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the ascent of Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the descent of the Paraclete.” I like it, but after reading two-hundred pages of this kind of writing, I can’t say I truly understood more than about 75% of it.

What I did understand, though, I found inspirational – the last point especially. Belief is not exactly knowledge, and the Church flirts with pride and hatred when she treats people who don’t believe in Christ as if they don’t know as much as she does. (And every denomination within the Church runs the same dangers with regard to their attitudes towards Christians who don’t believe exactly the same.) What Christendom needs in order to be again “close to the Descent of the Dove,” he says, is to “feel intensely within itself the three strange energies which we call contrition and humility and doctrine.” I am called to be humble and contrite, as are all other Christians; what makes me think that we are not called corporately to feel, express, and act on communal humility and contrition?

By the way, why don’t Americans know about the most famous man in eighteenth-century Europe and his crusade? Is it that we – No, let me correct that. Is it that the historians of our grandparents’ time decided that the most important fact about eighteenth-century Europe is that this country made a break from it, so that we Americans wouldn’t have to worry about the need for Voltaire’s crusade? Or do we think that we don’t need to learn about Europe’s past problems because we have found the proper solution to all Europe’s problems in our missiles and aircraft carriers?

*sigh* We will be close to the Descent of the Dove only when we feel contrition and humility.