Call Sign: Karamazov

If I ever become an elite fighter pilot (like those thrill-seeking wild boys in the movie Topgun) my call sign will be “Karamazov”.

Yes…my obsession with the, when-too-many-words-are-barely-enough, novel “The Brothers Karamazov”, by the hypergraphic Fyodor Dostoyevsky, continues. I’m thinking about trying to read it again. I thought I’d extracted it from my consciousness with the cathartic Incomprehensibles list, but I was wrong. Foolishly, I decided to look up The Brothers Karamazov on the internet and my obsession has been rekindled. I admit that doing an internet search on the novel is probably something I could have done some time ago, but unfortunately, ‘some time ago’ I viewed the internet only as a tool which provided me with cheats and walkthroughs for my playstation addiction (go Tomb Raider). It’s only recently that I’ve discovered its other uses.

But getting back to Karamazov – 3 things:

• Apparently, The Brothers Karamazov is held in high esteem by many people and is considered, by some, to be the greatest novel ever written. I’m not fond of the expression: “The greatest…novel/song/movie/device…ever…written/sung/made/invented”. I think it’s limiting and parabolic…no…inflection point…no…hyperbolic…over-the-top. And we, the semi-literate masses, need many authors writing great novels, novels that speak of the myriad themes of various lives. Although, there are some who think Dostoyevsky covered everything in Karamazov. I don’t think it’s wise to get my entire myriad themes of life from one person (unless it’s from me).
• Apparently, Fyodor Dostoyevsky suffered from bouts of hypergraphia (an obsessive need to write and write and write down every synapse-crossing electrical impulse traversing his brain), possibly brought on by his epilepsy.
• Apparently, there are a number of english translations of The Brothers Karamazov and it’s important to read the best one. Wikipedia recommends sampling different translations before deciding on which text to read. And this would be fine if I was going to live to be 250. I think the best thing to do is to read it in its original language – so I will have to learn Russian.

For the time being, however, I’ll have to be content with the edition I have (translated by David McDuff, first published in 1993). So far I've managed to re-read the opening paragraph, which I commend for its use of the expression “muddle-headed”, an expression for which I am keen to discover the Russian translation. Here is a heavily abridged excerpt of the opening paragraph:
“Aleksey Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner in our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, so noted in his time for his tragic and fishy death…he was a strange type…the type of man who is not only empty and depraved but muddle-headed – belonging, though, to the class of muddle-headed men who are perfectly well able to handle their little property affairs…he had persisted all his life in being one of the most muddle-headed madcaps in the whole of our district…the bulk of these madcaps are really quite sharp and clever – but plain muddle-headedness, and, moreover, of a peculiar, national variety.” (pg 3)

If I read one page per day (which is about all I can handle), I’ll have the book finished in 893 days or 2.45 years – I think that’s do-able.