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Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Dostoevsky’s Humor

[ Read prior posts on this novel. ] As I have said, my first three times through The Brothers Karamazov were in the MacAndrew translation (1970). A perfectly splendid work overall, though looking back I can see it cost me something in certain chapters. My first two readings were before I went to India forty years ago. This was serious literature and I read it that way. I saw no humor in it at all. There were spiritual nuggets to be found. MacAndrew does not bring the humor to life like the newer translations. Then in 2022 I got around to reading MacAndrew again. And I noticed a couple of humorous moments. These exploded in 2026 when I discovered Dostoevsky to be flat-out funny. That is in part due to newer translations. I stumbled across the Katz 2024 translation after reading PV and McDuff simultaneously. PV was funny-ish, McDuff was noticeably funnier but the humor becomes crystal clear in Katz. Large sections of the novel loosen, not the whole thing, but clearly there is some relie...
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Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Dostoevsky's Rooms

[ See previous essays on this novel. ] I mentioned in 2022 that I wanted to write an essay on this topic the next time I read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov . I finished it the end of January and am allowing it to sit in my mind. I have several ideas in mind for reviewing the great novel but this was the most obvious and easiest one to write. This time I actually read two English translations simultaneously. I now own a nice paperback edition of the novel in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation from 1990. To augment it I bought the Kindle edition of the 1993 translation by David McDuff. I found PV to be superior to McDuff in terms of general reading experience though McDuff was often better at articulating dialog. I also thumbed through my old Andrew MacAndrew (1970) translation, which still serves me just fine. Before that, I have Constance Garnett’s 1912 translation, which is still noteworthy if a bit flat compared with these others. I picked up the novel again the week after...
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Trump Has No Plan

There was an article in The Guardian during the Obama years built around a single uncomfortable observation: that everyone in positions of authority is essentially making it up as they go, projecting an image of calm proficiency while improvising in something closer to controlled panic. The phrase that stuck was simpler than that. Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time. When Obama was president this caused me no alarm really. He may have ordered more global assassinations than any previous president (he took out bin Laden ), but he was a reasonable man even if you didn’t agree with Obamacare or whatever. To know this improvisational aspect of authority felt like an insider secret, a knowing wink at the gap between institutional surfaces and the messy reality underneath. The improvisation was real, but it was buffered — by process, by decorum, by advisors, by a kind of professional restraint that kept the adjustments behind the curtain. You had to infer it. The system proj...
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Listening to Lutoslawski: Part One

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Witold Lutoslawski. For rather random reasons, I made a New Year's resolution to devote 2026 to Witold Lutoslawski, one of my favorite “modern” composers. I have posted about him before (see here , here and here ). So I am working through his catalog chronologically, and this is a progress report through what I call “the first leg” of the journey — the early pieces up through and including his Concerto for Orchestra (1954) . Lutoslawski was born in Warsaw in January 1913, the youngest of three brothers, into a family of Polish landed nobility. His father Józef was a political figure, active in the National Democratic Party, intimate with its founder. The family had estates. They had standing. Then the war came, and then the Revolution, and then the Bolsheviks arrested Józef and his brother in Moscow, where the family had relocated. Józef was executed by firing squad in September 1918. Witold was five. The family returned to newly independent Poland to find their estates ruined. ...
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Camus and Indifference

It was about this time last year I started writing what I thought would be one book entitled Harmogenics . That turned into three books with the last, Raucous Reckonings , completed in October. I was late in the “final” revision of the text when I came across Albert Camus and his remarkable affinity with what I have in mind by "cosmic indifference." Short version: don’t slit your wrists. I have known of Albert Camus's philosophy as long as I have known Jean-Paul Sartre. Decades. But while I read and studied Sartre at different times of my life, I never studied or read Camus. I just knew he originated, more or less, contemporary philosophy of the "absurd." Camus gets designated an "existentialist," which annoyed him while he was alive, and then reduced to a single slogan about Absurdity. That reduction misses the point in a very human way. Camus wasn't trying to depress anyone. He was trying to keep people honest without lying to themselves for c...
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