Brothers Karamazov

Our class read the book Brothers Karamazov in high school, senior year. Its an ambitious book to thrust upon 17 year olds, but we indeed did read it. The class was  six kids. Today,  I can't imagine having  focused, at age 17, on a book so portentious. But indeed I did. Even if I didn't really read the whole thing--I suspect that there was a lot of skimming or day dreamy reading--I do remember parts. Also, I remember the moral our teacher, John Gardner, who had a PhD and had gone to Princeton was trying to impart. That is, the character Alyosha was good and representative of a balanced person, the brother Dmitri a tragedy who easily became overwhelmed with emotion, and  brother Ivan a lost intellectual--the three sons parables of the modern mind, and how lost we had become.  The book, we all knew, was considered great.

This sort of philosophical stuff was drilled into us at Waldorf School, where we got  Emerson,  Dostoevsky and transcendental writers like Melville and Hawthorne. Heavy on the literature, for sure, or as my brother once called it, "Culture High." Gardner was a sort of charismatic figure in that school--an anthroposophist who seemed a bit crackpot, a bit genius.  he was  tall, looked like a mean John Kennedy, and ran the Waldorf School. I could never understand what he was saying. Much philosophizing, but people at that Waldorf School, on Long Island, took him very seriously. He published pamphlets with metaphorical and deep thoughts.  I guess I was very lucky to have him as a teacher. My mother was enamored of  him. My father  looked very skeptical--as if not wanting to criticize unduly. Gardner had us read Moby Dick, too, though we were allowed to skip the long passages on whales not essential to plot.


I  recently noticed BK on my shelf- the very same book from high school with doodles on the pages. I decided to reread it to see if it made more sense to me decades later. So far I am about 30 pages in. It is still not interesting. Granted, it seems almost a completely different book. But even this seemingly different book is unexciting, unfunny, and moralizing , or to do with issues that have long been irrelevant.

I am up to the part where the Karamazov

pere and filles and some other people meet with the holy elder Zossima.Maybe the book will improve.

 Dostoevsky lived a miserable life to produce this massive work of genius only to have it indifferently reviewed more than a hundred years later here on this blog. One more unfairness, posthumously.