“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.”

“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is the first book in a long time that I have given a reread. On a second read, it did not disappoint. I was tempted to give another translation a whirl, but who are we kidding? Pevear and Volokhonsky might not be as unanimously praised for their Tolstoy as their Dostoyevsky, but they are still the gold standard. At heart, this is a story of a society bound by conservatism, tradition, and honor. The plot also relates how the Russian aristocracy acts and reacts to those who do not know their place and push the bounds of polite company’s limits. “Vronsky’s life was especially fortunate in that he had a code of rules which unquestionably defined everything that ought and ought not to be done. The code embraced a very small circle of conditions, but the rules were unquestionable and, never going outside that circle, Vronsky never hesitated a moment in doing what ought to be done…. These rules might not all be very reasonable or very nice, but they were unquestionable.”

Tolstoy is also telling a love story, or, in fact, two love stories, two very different stories, though intimately intertwined. “As a bachelor, seeing the married life of others, their trifling cares, quarrels, jealousy, he used only to smile scornfully to himself. In his own future married life, he was convinced, there not only could be nothing like that, but even all its external forms, it seemed to him, were bound to be in every way completely unlike other people’s lives. And suddenly, instead of that, his life with his wife did not form itself in any special way, but was, on the contrary, formed entirely of those insignificant trifles he had scorned so much before, but which now, against his will, acquired an extraordinary and irrefutable significance. And Levin saw that to arrange all those trifles was by no means as easy as it had seemed to him before.”

Living up to society’s moral codes and hypocrisies was even harder for a noblewoman. “Abstractly, theoretically, she not only justified but even approved of what Anna had done. Weary of the monotony of a moral life, as irreproachably moral women in general often are, she not only excused criminal love from a distance but even envied it. Besides, she loved Anna from the heart. But in reality, seeing her among these people she found so alien, with their good tone that was so new to her, she felt awkward…. In general, abstractly, Dolly approved of what Anna had done, but to see the man for whose sake she had done it was unpleasant for her. Besides, she had never liked Vronsky.” Anna, speaking to Levin, shall get the last word herself, “Tell your wife that I love her as before, and if she cannot forgive me my situation, I wish her never to forgive me. In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God spare her that.”

“Dead Souls” by Nikolai Gogol (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

I will try to read almost any book translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky. This novel does not always flow, especially in Volume 2, which is hindered by gaps, large and small, in Gogol’s manuscript. The result is a plot that sometimes leaves the reader guessing to fill in the blanks. One is saved by the fact that not too much happens in this story anyway. For the most part, Gogol weaves a beautiful description of provincial life in a Russian town. Of a typical landowner the narrator wonders, “Were you born such a bear, or did you get bearified by the backwoods life, sowing grain, dealing with muzhiks, and turning through all that into what’s known as a pinchfist? But no, I think you’d be just the same even if you’d been raised according to fashion, got your start and lived in Petersburg, and not in this backwoods. The whole difference is now you tuck away half a rack of lamb with groats, followed by a cheesecake as big as a plate, and then you’d eat some sort of cutlets with truffles. Yes, and now you have muzhiks under your rule: you get along with them and, of course, wouldn’t mistreat them, because they're yours and it would be worse for you.” The muzhiks are, of course, serfs bound to the land and their master for life. The “dead souls” in Gogol’s title refer to serfs deemed still alive for the tax purposes of the infrequent Russian censuses, though very much dead in point of fact. “What was this riddle, indeed, what was this riddle of the dead souls? There was no logic whatsoever in dead souls. Why buy dead souls? Where would such a fool be found? What worn-out money would one pay for them? To what end, to what business, could these dead souls be tacked?” Chichikov, the novel’s protagonist, is a mysterious man, who seems to have a gift for buttering up provincial officials of title and repute. “Obscure and modest was our hero’s origin. His parents were of the nobility, but whether ancient or honorary—God knows.” His life’s path did not seem easy, but it was hard to tell just whose fault that was exactly. “Now it might be concluded that after such storms, trials, vicissitudes of fate, and sorrows of life, he would retire with his remaining ten thousand to the peaceful backwoods of some provincial town and there wither away forever in a chintz dressing gown at the window of a low house, on Sundays sorting out a fight between muzhiks that started up outside his windows, or refreshing himself by going to the chicken coop and personally inspecting the chicken destined for the soup, thus passing his none-too-noisy but in its own way also not quite useless life. But it did not happen so.” One longtime landowner summed up provincial life the best, “For us fashion is no order, and Petersburg is no church.”

“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.

“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Richard Pevear)

This novella is so different from Tolstoy’s previous works. For one, it is short. Secondly, while his longer novels do somewhat delve into his characters’ states of mind, this story focuses almost exclusively on the mental world of Ivan Ilyich as he slowly decays into death. By starting the tale off at Ilyich’s funeral and then flashing back to his early healthy life, then focusing on his illness, suffering, anguish, and death, the plot leaves little suspense, but the psychological effects are the more greater felt. By first showing how little the people in his life, his family, his friends, and his colleagues end up caring about him, Tolstoy only isolates Ilyich even more in his final suffering. The questions of a life well lived and purpose and meaning culminate in an excruciating finale.