“The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

In many ways this is a book of philosophy disguised as a novel. “The heart is the main thing, the rest is nonsense. Brains are also necessary, of course…. maybe brains are the main thing. Don’t smile, Aglaya, I’m not contradicting myself: a fool with a heart and no brains is as unhappy a fool as a fool with brains but no heart. An old truth. I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.” At the center of the story is a superficially simple-minded man, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, the Idiot. “All those flashes and glimpses of a higher self-sense and self-awareness, and therefore of the “highest being,” were nothing but an illness, a violation of the normal state, and if so, then this was not the highest being at all but, on the contrary, should be counted as the very lowest. And yet he finally arrived at an extremely paradoxical conclusion: “So what if it is an illness?” he finally decided. “Who cares that it’s an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?… Those moments were precisely only an extraordinary intensification of self-awareness…. “Yes, for this moment one could give one’s whole life!””

Prince Myshkin has returned to St. Petersburg after years in Switzerland, trying to cure his affliction. “You have suffered and have emerged pure from such a hell, and that is a lot.” What makes this story so much like life is that all the characters are actually quite complicated. “Well, see how you throw a man into a final flummox! For pity’s sake, Prince: first such a simple-heartedness, such innocence as even the golden age never heard of, then suddenly at the same time you pierce a man through like an arrow with this deepest psychology of observation.” There is no one who is easy to root for or wholeheartedly identify with. “Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of own’s own.” Prince Myshkin, upon returning to Russia, goes from knowing not a soul to, in quick succession, becoming acquainted with some distant, well-off relatives, getting pushed into the edges of polite society, and coming into his own sizable inheritance. His life becomes a whirlwind. He also almost immediately falls in love with a mysterious lady of dubious origins, even before he meets her in the flesh. “A man could even lose his faith from that painting!” The story is on the surface a love triangle, or perhaps, more aptly, a love polygon. “It made no difference to this ‘poor knight’ who this lady was or what she might do. It was enough for him that he had chosen her and believed in her ‘pure beauty,’ and only then did he bow down to her forever; and the merit of it is that she might have turned out later to be a thief, but still he had to believe in her and wield the sword for her pure beauty.” It is also a story about Russia, its personality, its people, its religion, and what makes it unique and great. “But I am not saying anything against liberalism. Liberalism is not a sin; it is a necessary part of the whole, which without it would fall apart or atrophy; liberalism has the same right to exist as the most well-mannered conservatism; what I am attacking is Russian liberalism, and I repeat again that I attack it essentially because a Russian liberal is not a Russian liberal, but is a non-Russian liberal. Give me a Russian liberal and I’ll kiss him at once right in front of you.”

“Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is a brutal novel centered around the brilliantly confused mind of a murderer. “His whole body was as if broken; his soul was dark and troubled. He leaned his elbows on his knees and rested his head in both hands. “God!” he exclaimed, “but can it be, can it be that I will really take an axe and hit her on the head and smash her skull … slip in the sticky, with blood … with the axe … Lord, can it be?” He was trembling as he said it. “But what’s wrong with me?”” Raskolnikov tries to justify his actions during brief moments of lucidity. “The old woman was a mistake perhaps, but she’s not the point! The old woman was merely a sickness … I was in a hurry to step over … it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle!” He is obviously not in his right mind. "“You’ve all been saying that I was mad,” Raskolnikov went on, twisting his mouth into a smile, “and just now I imagined that perhaps I really am mad and was only seeing a ghost!… And who knows! Maybe I really am mad, and everything that’s happened during these days, maybe everything is just in my imagination.”” There is more than a little of Nietzsche’s notion of the superman and the will to power in the sick mind of Raskolnikov. ““Then I realized, Sonya,” he went on ecstatically, “that power is given only to the one who dares to reach down and take it. Here there is one thing, one thing only: one has only to dare! And then a thought took shape in me, for the first time in my life, one that nobody had ever thought before me! Nobody! It suddenly came to me as bright as the sun: how is it that no man before now has dared or dares yet, while passing by all this absurdity, quite simply to take the whole thing by the tail and whisk it off to the devil! I … I wanted to dare, and I killed … I just wanted to dare, Sonya, that’s the whole reason!””

“The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is a novel that deals with life’s biggest themes- filial bonds, sibling relations, God and the Devil, the honor of gentlemen, duty, respect, the purpose of life, free will, sex, love, and passion. The tale is full of intrigue and suspense. The three brothers Karamazov are so different and yet they seem to have a mystical bond that unites them. Their father is a degenerate, yet true to himself. The novel is particularly Russian, yet its themes transcend time and place. The plot is almost incidental to each character’s development. Almost all the individuals are fully fleshed out, with flaws and beauty in each. Dostoevsky does a particularly wonderful job plumbing the depths of what makes each brother tick, their internal struggles, and their code of life. The psychology of what makes us all human, how we relate to each other, and how we find purpose and meaning in life, both in this earthly world and in relations to a higher heavenly power, all come through. There is a current of mysticism that runs alongside an intensely religious pulse. The lessons are not didactic and yet Dostoevsky is seeking to expound eternal truths as he writes.

“Demons” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is not one of Dostoevsky's better known novels, but I became intrigued by it because of its associations with the anarchist circles operating in Russia during the 19th century. In fact, Dostoevsky was inspired by a real political murder in Russia, which took place in 1869 and wrote this novel partly as a protest against what he saw as the over-materialistic sentiments of some communists and anarchists. Although total fiction, the plot references famous anarchists such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Herzen. The tale itself is at the same time horrid and laugh-out-loud funny, with grizzly violence mingling freely with strange anecdotes and insane circumstances. There are devious conspirators, haughty aristocrats, silly academics, bungling provincial administrators, newly liberated serfs, lowdown thieves and all sorts of other riffraff all thrown together in the strange brew of small town Russia. As the plot moves, it is unclear if there is a criminal mastermind or other unseen dark forces as the conspiracy and violence pushes itself along seemingly uncontrollably. The real “demons” turn out to be the new ideas circulating at the time throughout Russia- idealism, rationalism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, and, above all, atheism.