Kevin Kreutz

General

The David McDuff translation

"Dostoyevsky already presupposes that the reader will not read the story, the roman, in literal terms, but rather in the Dantesque, Gogolian tradition of a tale concerning the ‘contiguity with other worlds’.

  1. "In the world of late nineteenth-century Russia Fyodorov perceived one of the principal social sicknesses to be the hatred with which the educated youth viewed the concepts of ‘father’ and ‘son’, rejecting these with contempt in their frenzied aspiration towards social ‘progress’ and revolution."

Quotes

"You know, master, a weak man cannot control himself on his own."
  1. ‘Love human beings in their sins. Love even their sins.’
  2. "‘I punish myself for the whole of my life, the whole of my life I punish!’ – indicates his overwhelming sense of guilt at being alive at all, at having received life from his father, and also his desire to punish his father for having given it to him."
  3. "Indeed, the world of the public procurator and the state investigator, with its ‘soirees’ and ‘legal experts’, its games of cards and glasses of tea, is every bit as dubious from a moral point of view as the world of the monks and the monastery."

Language Quotes and Notes

  1. "The Russian word, zhizneopisanie, is an alternative, though rather more workaday, to the word biografiya, ‘biography’"
  2. "zhitiya, or ‘Lives’ of the saints."
  3. "Neither the ‘little family’ (the narrator purposely uses the deprecatory form semeyka)"
  4. "Hieroschemonachs (a Slavonic version of the Greek schemahieromonachos, or priests who wear the robes of monks)"
  5. "Fetyukovich (whose very name inspires a Gogolian shiver of revulsion, with its initial ‘F or Theta’ suggesting an obscenity)"
  6. "Skotoprigonyevsk - which roughly translates as ‘Brutesville’."
  7. "Thus, for example, the title of an early chapter in Book II, ‘The Old Buffoon’, where ‘buffoon’ translates the Russian word shut, could also be conceived as meaning ‘The Old Devil’, for shut also carries that meaning in colloquial Russian – thus Fyodor Pavlovich emerges early on in a ‘Satanic’ light, appropriately enough, in the circumstances."
  8. "belaya goryachka (literally ‘white fever’), is traditionally used to referto the alcohol-related hallucinatory disorder known to medicine as delirium tremens, and this definition is given even in nineteenth-century Russian dictionaries and encyclopaedias, such as those of Dal’ and Brockhaus-Efron."

Quotes for further reading

  1. In his article ‘About Universal Love’ (1880), Leontiev criticizes Dostoyevsky’s doctrine of universal brotherly love as it is put into the mouth of Father Zosima, considering it to be a distortion of true Christian love, a modified and altered form of socialist humanitarianism.
  2. Zola (in La Faute de l’abbe´ Mouret)