Dostoevsky
 

I am almost done read Crime & Punishment, and it is a great fucking book.

What book should I get by him next?

i'm going to yield the floor to atari on this one-- he's our dostoievski expert no doubt

Yes Atari is the Dostoyevsky (in all our different spellings) expert.

What I would reccomend reading next is Notes from the Underground and then The Brother's Karamazov.
I have The Idiot and Demons (The Possesed) but haven't got around to reading them yet.

i think i read The Brothers Karmazov (Garnett) after I read Crime & Punishment (Coulson) too...it's so cool to read about all these people reading Dostoyevsky.

TheDom, the next one you read really depends on what aspect of Dostoyevsky's dialectical polemic you want to further explore. If you want to get an idea of the tribulatory conditions that Raskolnikov lived through in Siberia (which is omitted at the end from Crime & Punishment...instead D. just cuts straight to the Epilogue) then you might want to check out Memoirs from the House of the Dead which is semi-autobiographical. In the book, Alexander Petrovich is the author of the memoirs & serves a narrator; he has been imprisoned (complete with fetters) for murdering his wife. Fyodor was sent to Siberia for having a printing press & as you probably know, narrowly escaped death by firing squad.
If you want to go into the dark recesses of Raskolnikov's feverish madness & nihilism further, you might want to read Dostoyevsky's most disturbing work, The Possessed. Go to a good used book store if you can & find a Modern Library Constance Garnett translation; all you can find in new book stores is a Penguin David Magarshack at best & as others have commented on, this is the Dostoyevsky (i always use the Garnett spelling) title that has the most variations of translations & is also known as The Devils & also as Demons. Or read the short Notes from the Underground about "the Underground Man" who is "a basement dweller" & an older, more bitter, burned-out version of the nihilist.
If you want to go in the opposite direction & read about self-sacrifice you can read "The Idiot" about Prince Myshkin who in many ways is an expanded earlier character study of Alyosha Karamazov.

If you want a little of everything, then Constance Garnett's translation of The Brothers Karamazov will do well.

Hey, thanks for the long post atari.

Judging by that, I think I'm going to go with The Possessed or Note From The Underground. Do I have to get those certain translations though? Will it take away from the book at all if I get another translation? I'm just asking just in case I can't find the right ones.

It does matter to some & I have read these three translations. The Devils is the David Margarshack version & it's put out by Penguin which is a good publisher (they publish Jack Kerouac, for example). It's not too bad. The Constance Garnett version is usually the best with any Dostoyevsky & that is the case with The Possessed. I actually do like Jesse Coulson's somewhat newer translation of Crime & Punishment better than the Garnett translation though, & it's also my favorite novel, so ultimately it's gonna depend on the reader. Demons is the newest translation of the lot & is published by Vintage Press (they do some good authors too...D.H. Lawrence, for example) & is translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. It's still good, but it just loses something to me. I love the Howard & Edna Hong translations of Kierkegaard, but usually these "team-up" translations never work out all that well. Demons reads kinda more like Turgenev than Dostoyevsky. Ivan Turgenev is a good writer too though & I also highly recommend Fathers & Sons. The themes are very similar to those explored in The Possessed.

Atari pretty much put it perfectly.

The Brothers Karamazov is my favorite of the ones I have read.

Hey, thanks guys for the replies.

I'll be heading out to a couple of book stores in the next day or two to see if I can find a Garnett translation.

I might have to check for certain translations from now on...
It never really occured to me how much the translation can affect a work.

I've heard there are people that don't like the Garnett translations, such as Nabokov, but then again Nabokov didn't really like Dostoevsky.

Oh, yes "Notes From Underground" is amazing, if you can find it get a book that has that as well as "The Double", and his other novellas "White Nights", "The Meek One" and "Dream of a Ridiculous Man", Barnes and Noble have a book that has all his novellas in one book.

yeah, Nabakov wrote this in his autobiography Speak, Memory:

"Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: That not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of these Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a clap-trap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment - by this reader anyway."

I was a little too rough before on the David Madgarshack translation; it's actually pretty good. You may be able to find that one (The Devils) in a regular bookstore, although it does seem I see Demons a lot in bookstores too. Also, by the way all three translations make note that they feature the "lost" chapter "At Tihon's. Stavrogin's Confession" or as "Stavrogin's Confession." This chapter has been included for quite some time in all the editions.

Damn, I just read the wiki entry for Constance Garnett & she gets lauded, then slammed for being "too British" & not accurate enough (for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina especially is the specific charge.) The entry for the book also starts this way with a rather dumb criticism.

The Devils, also translated as Demons or The Possessed, is a 1872novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Possessed is an earlier translation, made famous by Constance Garnett's version, but is somewhat inaccurate; the original Russian title refers to the demoniac possessors rather than the possessed.

actually, that's something to look into also, TheDom. There are a few different compilations of short stories out there too.

Do not read the Brothers Karamazov after Crime & Punishment. Go through his entire short works, then read it, or perhaps read the Idiot first.

Maybe you should get a book by an Author you didn't hear about from Family Guy.

I couldn't resist. You KNOW you heard about him from Family Guy

Just because you heard about Dostoevsky for the first time VIA Family Guy doesn't mean everyone else did. Crime and Punishment is an assignment that many schoolteachers give their students, and the Brothers Karamazov is a popular college read.

I didn't hear about him for the first time Via Family guy. I just have a strong belief that you did, because unfortunately LOTS of people did. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just felt like being disruptive.

I don't watch Family Guy....

I couldn't find the other translations, so I just got Notes From The Underground + The Double as one book. Haven't cracked it open just yet though.

Thanks again for the help.

At the time of this thread, I had only read The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot.

I just read House of the Dead, Notes From The Underground. Both are wonderful. Also of his short stories, Dream of a Ridiculous Man is great.

All I have left on my bookshelf is the Possessed, which I began to read a long time ago, but then never finished it because I went into a dark period of my life from about 2005-2008. I need to get back to that soon, but I'm going to read a few other things first:

Lewis Carroll- Through the Looking Glass
Gabriel Garcia Marquez- 100 Years of Solitude
Dostoyevsky- White Nights (in the same book as Notes and Dream)
Joseph Conrad- Heart of Darkness

it's sad that people believe in the cultural hegemony of SHIT like fg enough to assume noone would read or explore literature on their own if it wasn't referenced by seth mcfarlane.

yeah, no kidding. Maybe an obscure author or something but who the fuck hasn't heard of dosto at least a few times

I personally got into Dostoyevsky because I was assigned to read Crime and Punishment in high school, and I really loved it so I picked up a few of his other novels.

I don't really think anyone saw Family Guy read Dostoyevsky because he was mentioned. That's just silly. And if someone wanted to, why not? Why decide not to read him because you heard about him first on Family Guy? You'd be completely cutting yourself off from a great novelist for a rather silly reason.

Family Guy is sort of a sickening reflection of our culture, in which we all sort of become nothing more but a shoddily put together collection of references, allusions, and memes. (At the end of Notes from the Underground, I think the Underground Man hints at this himself- saying that men engrossed in literature can't be real men, but just literary characters.)

he's one of my favourite writers! i have read a few of his books and crime and punishment is still my favourite, next i would go to notes from the underground.

i agree with you,i think the point i was trying to stress but obviously failed at was that i hate how because of family guys layers of "references/allusions/memes" it appears to the unwitting viewer to have attained some level of pomo detachment that renders it superior in a way that the sum total of its references suggest but crucially does not achieve. so the viewer thinks "i don't need to read crime and punishment, i don't need to pay attention to anything, just compile references and i can sail thru life on my fat stupid ass smugly above anyone who tries to do anything. im not saying that that doesn't apply to me either - i sadly remember a time when it was very difficult to even read or pay attention to anything for fear that i would be caught taking it seriously when everyone else was already in the comfort zone of cynicism about it and mocking those who aren't in the know. this kind of self concioussness makes you

but i just don't buy the idea that anyone is going to "get into" something because of a pop culture reference. it's the same logic that says "you don't have to do anything, just enlighten people who don't already know and then somehow collective action will take place" - when in actuality the collective is just a bunch of individuals counting on the other to do something. this logic is used as justification for people to make shitty art that serves as nothing but enemy propaganda because it's got no substance just endless references. oh look family guy's on our side it's anti war! it's on the side of all the other anti war people who are against the war but won't do anything about it except punish their individuality because the collective will doesn't. to my horror and naievity, when iraq happened i really did expect people to feel the same way as me and actually do something about it. but noone wants to give up the comfort of the endless referencing. everyone wants to,and feels that they should, believe in the moral justice of collective social action yet they all want to do it from the standpoint of selfish individualism. they want to protest and then go watch their family guy dvds when they don't feel like protesting. they think that all they have to do is act like they've seen it all before and they can get what they want. what is seth mcflarlane really saying except for "just get into a position were you can reference in comfort with noone calling you out on it, it all ends up in a mush of entertainment anyway". of course what im saying is from the standpoint of my own tortured guilt and relationship to trash culture so i can't pretend to know how everyone else interprets it. the dream is that the virtual aspect of trash culture, the fake aspect and the moral platform it contains, will somehow merge with reality and take its place/patch it up. this is all our dreams because we can't make the distinction between virtuality and reality anymore. i get pissed off when i see jello biafra wearing a cowboy outfit ironically now obama has won for the same reason i'm pissed off at family guys anti bush jokes that come after he's out of office. they both suggest a false resistance and a false position that is used to try to rid the guilt of someone who'se so right wing they feel guilt that they don't stop the war and become the perfect democratic god/jesus combo because if that's not what we should act is possible then hell our very notion of self must be a sham and thus my own subjectivity will disintegrate and it'sall just chaos after all.

what i don't like is how, family guy itself, as you say "makes it silly" to read dostoevsky because you heard about him from fg. it has the affect of neutering the very culture it uses to legitimise itself. it makes you think that you can somehow gain the insight instantly without thinking about it. not that dostoevsky is exactly the most important author in the world that is necessarily going to have more value and a greater affect on some reader than other authors, but still, shit imagine turning off family guy and reading. its good for the mind. shit imagine turning off the whole inescapable ENTERTAINMENT sludge itself and not wanting to seek enjoyment anymore.

i don't think fg is a "sickening reflection of our culture". i don't buy the reflection or moral mirror we hold up to guilt trip ourselves due to the necessity of our culture idea. i think fg IS the culture and the culture just plays at offering a reflection of a false reality. i don't accept the alibi of "i'm just providing a reflection of what's already there".