call/response

1. I am reading The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Somebodyovich Dostoevsky. I read The Idiot and Crime & Punishment last year, so the Brothers shall complete the trifecta of Russian depressing.

The thing I could never understand about Dostoevsky is why I like him. There are SO many reasons to find him distasteful. For one thing, he is kitschy as fuck. For another he is extremely Christian. A third: his characters could be described as lightly personified philosophical points of view who exist only to a) argue, b) kill each other, and c) provide cautionary fables of a conspicuously moral nature. Four: every book has the same characters with different names and the basically same plot. Reason E: he is MAUDLIN, which seems like it should fall under the heading of "kitsch" but it is somehow a distinct property of his work, separate from the kitsch, and also throbbing.

I could go on. In conversations this week, I've gotten this list as high as seventeen distinct reasons to dislike Dostoevsky. The fact remains that I like him still. A lot. I finally realized that this so for the following reason: He is a great observer of human beings, a diligent recorder of our ways and means.

We really are as mean and petty and unredeemable as he makes us seem. We really do have something incandescent in us which we don't know how to handle, which usually drives us to try to kill it. We really do hate each other that much. We are that absurd. Our lives are that dumb. That Dostoevsky wrote a handful of variations on the same book stems from the fact that he could never get his head around a system of theology so generous as to offer redemption to nearly everyone. He came to his religion later in life, after having been to prison, after having faced a firing squad. The idea of Christ quite simply blew his mind, and he spent the rest of his life and career trying to simultaneously understand it and help others experience it the way he had. He's not the only writer who, having become intimate with human misery to the point of believing it to be inevitable and everlasting, had his mind blown by the concept of Grace. T.S. Eliot was another.

There's also the fact that Dostoevsky isn't the least bit afraid to say something. Even if I find what he actually says a little silly about half the time, its such a nice change from all our breathing novelists, those great masters of the perhaps, the maybe, the it seems to me. Fyodor just says, "It IS!" and its like rain after a long string of hot and muggy days.

2. My favorite line from literature? How can you even ask somebody that type of question? That is simply cruel. Its like what God did to Job, or Abraham with that whole, "Kill me a son," routine. But fine. Here it is.

Hamlet. Act 2, Scene 2. Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius are sitting around, discussing the possible cause of Hamlet's madness. Polonius is convinced its that Ophelia has begun to parry his affections. The King and Queen are dubious. Especially the King. Polonius suggests that, since Hamlet often spends four hours a day walking in the lobby, they can place Ophelia in his path, hide behind a curtain and eavesdrop on them, and all will be revealed. As they are mulling this over, enter Hamlet, with a book in his hand. The Queen sees him and says:

"But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading."

3. I don't know about Sandra's book, having not read it. If someone will kindly mail it to me I would be glad to read and then give my answer. And I concur with Steve, her Khlebnikov translation is amazing.

- Brandon Holmquest