Hacker News Reader

Comment by Storiesofsome1 | Hacker News Reader

This was an incredible read! This is my first introduction to Dostoyesvky and I’m engrossed.

So from these excerpts, his profound writing reminds me of another great writer I admire the most; Poe. Poe’s writing has had a profound effect on me and so has this story by Dostoyesvky.

I see the similarity in the sense that both of these writers seem to distill such great truths about life and translate them into poetical and lyrical writing.

The conventional plot is barebones in their stories but their focus lies on the inner turmoil, revolving intensely around a lonesome nihilistic character musing about the existence, human desires and the consequent suffering that results thereafter.

I’m a fan now and will definitely be reading more of Dostoyesvky.

View on HN

I really really really believe everyone should read Dostoyevsky. I think a very fundamental part of human experience is understanding yourself with respect to your true self and with respect to the society. You know when they compare psychadelic substances people sometimes say LSD is extraspective and shrooms is introspective. Dostoyevsky is very much about finding a peace between introspection and extraspection. It is about the fundamental trade-off between "maximal personal freedom" vs "a moral society where nothing 'bad' happens". Being both hardcore religious and conservative and anarchist Dostoyevsky hosts two inconsistent (?) ideas that "one should always do the moral thing" and "morality is a social construct and 200 years from now nothing we deem im/moral today will be relevant and thus one should only do what they think is the right regardless of 'morality'". I think this is a very familiar discussion every person has with themselves.

It’s wordy and all over the place, but I loved the Brothers Karamazov in my early twenties.

I think a lot of the parts in that book that seemed to be all over the place would have later come together into something more cohesive by the end of the second book.

It was supposed to be the first part of two books but he died before he wrote the second. Which is why I think there was much more to the plot and there may have been some more twists beside what was already revealed in the first.

if you enjoyed this you might also find “A confession”[1] by L. Tolstoy interesting. I did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confession

I strongly recommend Crime and Punishment.

I suggest House of the Dead. His life transformed immensely during the course of that book, to put it simply.

Can you point out what great truths Dostoevsky distills?

I would say that it's less about some kind of absolute truths about existence, which are often things that we have long heard about (be kind to your neighbor, etc) but rather more about the characters and the experiences that they go through in order to arrive at these truths. He strikes me as a person who actually lived through the things that he writes about and he bases his characters and their experiences on them.

Some writers may have some truth that they want to convey in their book and so they create characters that are simply vehicles for these ideas and not much more (ie Ayn Rand). Dostoyevsky's characters are not simply posterboys for some moral agenda but are more like personality archetypes that you would actually come across, that's what makes his writing so relatable and believable, and the interactions between these characters so lifelike.

Some of it does get lost in translation, there's something about Russian dialogue that it translates very awkwardly to English.

PS: Another example where his insight was pretty accurate was his book The Possessed. It was published over 40 years before the communist revolution in Russia but it definitely offered some very on-point commentary about the nature of the people who lead these kinds of movements. It was prescient in many ways, really. It's a lesser known book but I highly recommend it, in many ways I think it's relevant to what's (still) happening in politics today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com