Lit in the Time of War: Dostoyevsky

Hello! I hope you are well and are enjoying the September weather. I’ve read a big book this week and have reviewed it below so you can read it too. I’ve also included a list of organizations you could donate to in order to support Ukrainians in need. Please do so if you are able.

The Adolescent, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Translated by Dora O’Brien

(Note: second quote mentions suicide.)

“’What I like about you, Kraft, is that you’re such a courteous person,’ I said all of a sudden. ‘Yes?’ ‘It’s because I seldom manage to be courteous, though I would like to be… Still, it might be better when people insult you: at least it saves you from the misfortune of loving them.’ ‘What time of day do you like best?’ he asked, obviously not listening to me. ‘What time? I don’t know. I don’t like sunset.’ ‘Really?’ He said this with particular interest, but then instantly withdrew once more.”

“And as I’m fully convinced to this day that in gambling it’s impossible not to overcome the brutality of blind luck and not to win, given complete composure and a subtlety of mind and calculation—I must naturally have felt more and more frustrated seeing that I was constantly unable to show strength of character and got carried away like a complete brat. ‘I’ve been able to withstand hunger, but not this foolishness!’ That’s what plagued me. Added to this was the awareness that there was in me, however foolish or abject I might appear, a wealth of strength which would one day force everyone to change their opinion of me; this awareness—very nearly going back to my humiliating childhood—was then my only real source of life, my light and my dignity, my weapon and my comfort, or I might have killed myself while still a child.”

This book is about an illegitimate youth named Arkady Makarovich who tries to win his birth-father’s love, subtly falls in love with a girl, unsubtly shouts at anyone who insults her, gambles, shouts at his father, gets embroiled in a conspiracy, shouts at anyone who frustrates him, and tries to pursue his “idea” of detaching from the world and becoming a millionaire.

I remember walking past this book dozens of times in the school library occasionally picking it up and reading a random page and thinking it sounded good but assuming it would probably be boring. I know in the past I’ve mentioned Dostoyevsky’s books lacking dramatic effect/pacing. Interestingly, I found that this usually happened in his third-person works but not in his first-person ones. The Adolescent was in first-person. So I finally decided to try it.

I’m so glad I did. It was unexpectedly terrific. It had the most dramatic power out of any of Dostoyevsky’s works I’d read (AKA Notes From the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and his short stories). Best of all, unlike in most of Dostoyevsky’s books, the philosophy in The Adolescent was well-paced and didn’t get in the way of the action! That alone helped the story a lot. Add to that actually-dramatic and non-melodramatic scenes (subtly-menacing encounters, outright brawls, and reconciliations), and you could see how the story worked very well.

Yes, there were parts of it where Arkady just started shouting at people for no real reason, and there was a ridiculously convoluted scamming-plot going on during the last third of the book, but I was able to forgive these weaknesses due to the book’s dramatic effect. I actually found them funny instead of annoying or off-putting.

Aside from its dramatic impact, The Adolescent also had terrific characters. Since Dostoyevsky was writing in the first-person, he got to show the specific psychological nuances motivating Arkady’s actions (unlike in The Brothers Karamazov where the characters mostly seemed to rush around unfathomably). Arkady’s subconscious motives were also fascinating to pick apart, especially since Dostoyevsky had him explain his actions with motives that were different from what his true ones seemed to be (repressing his affection for that girl but clearly being driven by it, for instance).

Finally, I have to say that this book had great minor characters. There’s Tatyana Pavlovna who starts out as a grumpy woman who insults Arkady but who eventually proves to be a staunch ally. Her characterization is done with just the right amount of subtlety—she embodies a type (like a Dickens character would) but unlike some Dickens characters, she’s never quite fully reduced to that type, so you never dismiss her as one. There’s also Trishatov, a kid who aligns himself with bad people only to unexpectedly help the protagonist (which reminded me of a character from Chingiz Aitmatov’s The Place of the Skull). These characters were very well-written, and made the story much more compelling than it would have been had Dostoyevsky not depicted them so much care.

Overall, if you’re looking for an unexpectedly entertaining, insightful, and well-paced story, I’d recommend The Adolescent (especially the Dora O’Brien translation). In spite of its sometimes-convoluted plot and random fits of shouting, I’d say it’s my favorite Dostoyevsky novel so far.

Have you read it? What were your thoughts? Let me know in the comments below!

As promised, here’s a list of organizations you can donate to in order to support Ukrainians in need:

Plan USA: Gives resources and psychological support to girls and women in Ukraine. Donate here: https://www.planusa.org/

The American Jewish Distribution Committee: Supports those in Ukraine, those fleeing Ukraine, and Ukrainians residing in Hungary, Poland, Moldova, and Romania. Donate here: https://www.jdc.org/

Stand Up For Ukraine—Provides food, shelter, education, and healthcare to those displaced by the crisis in Ukraine. Donate here: https://www.globalgiving.org/global-citizen-ukraine/

CARE: Works to get food, water, and other urgent supplies to Ukrainian civilians. Donate here: https://www.care.org/

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Lit in the Time of War: Kertész, Konstantin, and Dostoyevsky

Hello. I hope you are all healthy and safe and that you are enjoying whatever books you are reading. I’ve read three books this week and have reviewed them below in case you wanted any inspiration for your summer reading. I’ve also included a list of organizations to donate to in order to support Ukrainians in need. Please do so if you are able.

Fatelessness, by Imre Kertész, Translated by Tim Wilkinson

“’Would you care to give an account of your experiences, young fellow?’ I was somewhat dumbfounded, and replied that there was not a whole lot I could tell to him that would be of much interest. He smiled a little and said, ‘Not me—the whole world.’ Even more amazed, I asked, ‘But what about?’ ‘The hell of the camps,’ he replied, to which I remarked that I had nothing at all to say about that as I was not acquainted with hell and couldn’t even imagine what that was like. He assured me, however, that it was just a matter of speaking: ‘Can we imagine the concentration camp as anything but a hell?’ he asked, and I replied, as I scratched a few circles with my heel in the dust under my feet, that everyone could think what they liked about it, but as far as I was concerned I could only imagine a concentration camp, since I was somewhat acquainted with what that was, but not hell.”

This is a book about fourteen year-old Georg who is taken to Auschwitz. Georg goes on to recount his experiences of starvation, torture and sickness with a kind of intellectualized detachment. His attempts to rationalize his experiences made for fascinating and horrifying reading.

I don’t know what else to say about this book other than that you have to read it yourself to understand what I mean. I would recommend.

A Red Boyhood: Growing Up Under Stalin,
by Anatole Konstantin

”As I discovered many years later, there actually was no need for us to go hungry. The desert was literally crawling with food: desert turtles and snakes were there just for the taking. The fact that people starved to death rather than eat them is another proof that materialism, dialectical or of any other kind, does not prevail in real life and that ideas and taboos are more powerful than even the instinct to survive.”

This is a memoir written by the Ukrainian Anatole Konstantin about his boyhood in the USSR. It begins with the arrest of his father, describes his life as a son of an enemy of the people, goes on to tell about his family’s experience during World War II (where they had to go work on a collective farm in Kazakhstan), described their return home, their journey through Poland, and ultimately, their emigration to America.

It was fascinating to read, especially since in my experience, history is usually depicted in somewhat-separated sections: Stalin’s purges are depicted as being separate from World War II, which is then shown as being separate from the Cold War. This is the way I learned about history in school at any rate. While dividing history into chapters/units may help students learn, this division destroys the sense of continuity that actually existed in reality. A Red Boyhood put all these sections of history together into one coherent whole, which enabled me to better see the causes and effects of various events.

The author apparently wrote this book “without any literary pretensions,” and in some places he makes subtle grammar errors/awkward word-choices which shows that English was not his native language. These did not really detract from his memoir. In any case, he more than compensated with the amount of rich detail he provided about his experiences. I was in awe of his memory. It felt like he was able to give very detailed descriptions of small events throughout his life, people he met once or twice, and even rooms in which he stayed in for like a night. His memory reminded me of the richness of detail in Maxim Gorky’s memoirs.

Anatole also had an excellent way of observing people. There would be several times where he would tell his mom not to trust Mr. So-and-So, and his mom would ignore him, only for Mr. So-and-So to wind up trying to steal their grain. This was very interesting to read about, and these nuances of their family relationship really brought history to life in a way that history textbooks never do.

In school, I remember a teacher giving me a bunch of memoirs to read written by historical figures in order to bring the dry-seeming facts we were learning to life. It seems to me that history can’t be taught effectively without humanizing the people involved—even if we do learn the dry facts in our textbooks to try and prevent history from repeating, history may repeat itself anyway unless we care enough about those who suffered before us to want to stop it from repeating. A Red Boyhood did a terrific job of making me care.

I would definitely recommend.

The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Translated by David Magarshack

“And so when I got off the bunk and looked round, I suddenly felt I remember, that I could look at these unhappy creatures with quite different eyes, and that suddenly by some miracle all hatred and anger had vanished from my heart. I walked round the prison peering into the faces I came across. That rascal of a peasant with his shaven head and branded face, yelling his horse drunken song at the top of his voice—why, he, too, might be the same sort of peasant as [the kindly] Marey: I cannot possibly look into his heart, can I?”

This book contains stories by Dostoyevsky written in his youth and in his old age. It’s interesting to track his writerly development across them. It starts out with “White Nights,” and goes on to other stories including “Notes from the Underground” and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.”

In the beginning, it seemed to me that Dostoyevsky was drawing mostly from the books he had read as a kid, because in “White Nights” the protagonist really just seems to want to assume a role similar to those of the literary heroes he worships, to the point of deluding himself about a romantic encounter. Not much more nuance exists to the story other than that.

As the book continues, there is more and more nuance to the stories. A rich man becomes jealous of a peasant boy who seems to have caught the eye of a rich girl who he eventually wants to marry for himself. Later on in Dostoyevsky’s writings, another man wants to feel so much in control of his reputation that he drives his wife to suicide.

As these dynamics become more nuanced, so does his observations related to them. While in the earlier stories, you could pretty quickly understand where characters were coming from all along (the rich man just wants the rich girl’s money! That’s it!), later stories had more unexpected revelations. At the same time, it didn’t feel like Dostoyevsky was doing any psychological acrobatics or contriving anything, which was exciting to see.

Finally, it’s interesting to compare Dostoyevsky’s first-person writings to his third-person ones. This book is entirely made up of his first-person writings, which all seem to be very rich, intriguing, and entertaining. Also, his characters all made sense, even when they got seemingly hysterical or irrational.

Meanwhile, whenever I read his third-person works (The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, or The Idiot), there were still rich psychological nuances and really good moments, but it seemed to me that his stories were less interesting, more convoluted, and that some of his characters suddenly acted very strangely and unrealistically. Now, you could apply the inner thought process of the Underground Man to Dmitri Karamazov, for instance, and his hysterical outbursts would make perfect sense. However, just reading about them in third person made them somehow seem unrealistic.

In any case this was just an observation I had. I would be interested to know if you had any thoughts about it.

As promised, here’s a list of organizations to donate to in order to support Ukrainians in need:

Revived Soldiers Ukraine—Provides medical support to soldiers and civilians. Donate here: https://www.rsukraine.org/

United Help Ukraine—Provides medical supplies to soldiers, and ships goods to Ukrainian refugees. Donate here: https://unitedhelpukraine.org/

Doctors Without Borders—Ships emergency supplies to Ukrainian hospitals. Donate here: https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/secure/donate 

United Way Ukraine—Provides food, water, and other emergency support for Ukrainian refugees and their children. Donate here: https://www.unitedway.org/our-impact/work/no-nav/unitedforukraine