I love Dostoevsky; for those interested in him, or in Russian literature, but who might find the "genre" hard to breach, I can't recommend Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground" enough. It's a very quick read, and what initially convinced me to continue exploring Russian writing.
Another great introduction is his short stories. I’ll add a link below to one of my favourites. A noble with a big, misguided heart and high, lofty head gets drunk with his aristocratic buddies and talks about humaneness and the people and blah blah, and on his drunken carriage ride home sees a wedding celebration at one of his subordinate’s home and invites himself in and ruins everything.
It’s such an amazing exposition of the gap separating our thoughts and ideals and reality, self grandeur and delusion, etc. It’s also very funny in The Office kind of way.
I love Dostojewski (german spelling) as well. I just finished "A gentle creature" and once again Dostojewski caught me off guard. He has such a talent in describing human behavior and motive - especially the morally ill traits. I believe there is a piece for everyone of us that we can profit of and understand ourselves better. This recent story opened my eyes for some inner happenings that I feel and know of but couldn't really work out. This really set me on a trip forwards. Thanks Fjodor!
PS: To put this a bit in perspective, I'm in my twenties and always felt like an alien around my peers, family, etc. . I haven't had anyone to relate with before I started reading more. Yes, Hesse also did it for me ;)
I want to second the Notes From Underground recommendation. I took a class focused on Dostoevsky as an elective in college and the professor had us start with reading Notes From Underground. It did a fantastic job of setting the tone and expectations for the course. One of the few things I read in college that I actually have held onto my copy of.
"Was he speaking from experience? Dostoevsky had been arrested in 1849 for his participation in an underground salon whose members read banned works and discussed French Utopian socialism. He had spent the next four years in prison, where he had undergone a political conversion, abandoning the radicalism of his youth to become, on many issues, a conservative. Yet, what incensed Dostoevsky above all about Chernyshevsky was his blind faith in scientific explanations for human behavior. Chernyshevsky became known for a theory he called rational egoism. Inspired by Jeremy Bentham and English Utilitarianism, Chernyshevsky claimed that human behavior was rational in that it was guided by self-interest. If poverty were to be eliminated, he conjectured, crime would all but cease to exist.
Dostoevsky had served side by side with murderers in prison, “sharing tables and latrines with them, hauling bricks with them, sipping water from the same ladles,” writes Birmingham, and could not abide this simplistic view of crime—and by extension of human nature. People were unpredictable, irrational, and often did things that worked against their own interests—this was ugly, but also beautiful, because it was the essence of freedom. Indeed, this is why Crime and Punishment became a crime novel in which the whodunit is answered straight away, leaving the rest of the novel for questions of motive or—more accurately in the case of Dostoevsky—the muddled mess that is human motivation in the first place."
Seems relevant to a lot of the discussions over LA rail thefts, increased crime, and progressive DAs relationship to these trends. There is nothing new under the sun.
Interesting passages, but why think the poverty-crime issue is a simple binary at all? There's ample evidence that imporverishment does lead to increased criminal activity. No reason to think solving poverty would eliminate crimes of theft either. Specifically on the LA rail thefts, as with the retail theft panic, there is likely far more to the story.
> However, one major development that may be directly correlated with the rise in theft has continuously been left out: In September of 2020, due to pandemic-related budget cuts, Union Pacific laid off an unspecified number of employees across the railroad system. Including members of its railroad-only police force.
> The Union Pacific Police department has jurisdiction over the 32,000 miles of track Union Pacific owns. Many of these “special agents” used to patrol this now infamous stretch of track. According to the source, the number of patrolling officers has been cut from 50 to 60 agents to eight, which the worker thinks has led to an increase in train robberies.
Can't help but think of Anders Breivik's current courtroom theatricals when I read about the narcissistic "revolutionaries" which inspired Dostoevsky's book.
Thanks for this, much appreciated. Always a pleasure to read essays that credibly bring to life times long gone, which in this case brings Dostoevsky to life too.
For example: "In the mid-1860s, Russia was in the throes of a true crime craze." and "Sections like “The Criminal Chronicle” became a regular feature of daily newspapers, introducing new social types like the charismatic defense attorney." and "By the end of the century, terrorism was referred to by those throughout the world—including Karl Marx—simply as “the Russian method.”
It creates a better understanding of the surviving literature, moored in the social and political context where it belongs. We can probably never escape the fact that we view everything from our own social and political context - but a good dose of historical knowledge broadens our perspective at least.
It’s such an amazing exposition of the gap separating our thoughts and ideals and reality, self grandeur and delusion, etc. It’s also very funny in The Office kind of way.
https://onemorelibrary.com/index.php/en/?option=com_djclassi...
PS: To put this a bit in perspective, I'm in my twenties and always felt like an alien around my peers, family, etc. . I haven't had anyone to relate with before I started reading more. Yes, Hesse also did it for me ;)
Dostoevsky had served side by side with murderers in prison, “sharing tables and latrines with them, hauling bricks with them, sipping water from the same ladles,” writes Birmingham, and could not abide this simplistic view of crime—and by extension of human nature. People were unpredictable, irrational, and often did things that worked against their own interests—this was ugly, but also beautiful, because it was the essence of freedom. Indeed, this is why Crime and Punishment became a crime novel in which the whodunit is answered straight away, leaving the rest of the novel for questions of motive or—more accurately in the case of Dostoevsky—the muddled mess that is human motivation in the first place."
Seems relevant to a lot of the discussions over LA rail thefts, increased crime, and progressive DAs relationship to these trends. There is nothing new under the sun.
> However, one major development that may be directly correlated with the rise in theft has continuously been left out: In September of 2020, due to pandemic-related budget cuts, Union Pacific laid off an unspecified number of employees across the railroad system. Including members of its railroad-only police force.
> The Union Pacific Police department has jurisdiction over the 32,000 miles of track Union Pacific owns. Many of these “special agents” used to patrol this now infamous stretch of track. According to the source, the number of patrolling officers has been cut from 50 to 60 agents to eight, which the worker thinks has led to an increase in train robberies.
https://www.lataco.com/union-pacific-theft-police-laid-off/
I'd rather just leave any commentary on the incident (mine or yours) out of the discussion of this article, though.
For example: "In the mid-1860s, Russia was in the throes of a true crime craze." and "Sections like “The Criminal Chronicle” became a regular feature of daily newspapers, introducing new social types like the charismatic defense attorney." and "By the end of the century, terrorism was referred to by those throughout the world—including Karl Marx—simply as “the Russian method.”
It creates a better understanding of the surviving literature, moored in the social and political context where it belongs. We can probably never escape the fact that we view everything from our own social and political context - but a good dose of historical knowledge broadens our perspective at least.