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2009/02/03

more of the Dostoi_ Karamazov

Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostoyevski, Portrait by Vasily Perov (1872)






Ivan and the Devil _ or his double self other. take your pick. deliriums are like this. one never knows the line between imagined and real. real imagined deliriums whether "real" in the the to touch sense, are meaningful in every other way.
I've read and reread Karamazov many times since my early 20's.

___the dialogue between them _- Ivan and Satan __is one of the most perplexing and unnerving  which I have ever read... we don't know who he is addressing ? himself or the devil....the spooky theme of the double.... it occurs to me they may have influenced Beckett's fast paced quick back banter dialogues... but that is just a thought.
i've no idea whether the Irishman read the Russian. Joyce remarked  to his son Giorgio 't
hat he saw neither crime nor punishment' in the book of the same name. No matter. It is one the most intensive of novels, and this scene and nearly every other in it is non stop expressive push of the highest order. ive never watched a complete film version of the Brothers Karamazov. But I like these Russian snippets.




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I think of Russia in the era of the camps and how this book had to smuggled around to be read. theUSSR did not like Dostoevsky. they preferred Tolstoy. i cant remember why but that old revolutionary Trotsky wrote some essay that was supposed to have explained it all...

__ Siberia 1998 was not the same as Siberia. after war. and armies and trains. Siberia was not Leningrad nor St.Petersburg. and the deaths that came.

Moscow 1996 was not Moscow of 8 4 ~


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and this video documentary account of how the russian writer ended up in Siberia and penal servitude.


in letters to his brother Dostoevski talks about he never once spent a day alone in five years.
------------- One More minute to live....

_____'my life is not finished '____________________
indeed.
alone.
years.
prison
servitude.

---------------------------------Dostoevsky's notes for chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov




images via wikimedia

the year I took the seminar of his works was the most beautiful year . of learning, and ghostly presences. there were three a week. a large one for the whole college _ consisting of a hundred students, and the smaller group ones which met twice a week. Sister Prudence, the presiding nun and principle of the school, gave a dimension of spirituality and presence to the whole event. at times, all of us, felt god's presence, whatever it might. be. it was also the year of the attempted putsch against the 'democratic' government of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. everyone felt it was real. the Books, the characters, and the implications of the questions they raised and posed.



all is true. nothing is permitted. the Russian soul is special, and spiritual . as is the poetry. of this great nation. in its follies, loves and extremes. its sheer honesty is razor sharp, and its dangerous volatility is also so.

Russians are dangerous. and beautiful. there is much alcoholism and gambling in all the books. i suspect Joyce's comment referred to above had to do with a secret love and identification with the russian writer. and their peoples' not dissimilar dilemmas . envy as joyce pointed out, was the Irish sin, the vice, perhaps of covetousness, and perhaps the Russian soul has like flaws.
 
 
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