Word: karamazovs
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...went to Jesus College, Oxford. Lawrence, in the end, turned out to be a masochist and changed his name from T.E. Lawrence to T.E. Shaw. Wilson's comeback as Prime Minister again. Maybe soon he'll be Harold Chekhov. We're going to be the Brothers Karamazov. This movie is particularly relevant today, showing as it does the problems of a state-owned railroad system facing constant interruption of service. Wilson might learn a lesson here...
They are all wrong. The novel has never been popular because it is long, repetitious and confusing. But it is a marvelous book, fully worthy of the master who had just finished The Possessed and was soon to write The Brothers Karamazov. It is true that it attempts to portray "an age of the golden mean and insensitivity, of a cult of ignorance and idleness ... and of a longing for the readymade." But its greatness lies not in its timeliness but in its transcendence over time...
...Dostoevsky with a special force, for he was endlessly haunted by the revelation, at age 17, that his feared and hated father had been murdered by a band of his own serfs, including several whose daughters the elder Dostoevsky had molested. Patricide ultimately became the core of The Brothers Karamazov. Before confronting that, however, Dostoevsky had to write "this first trial flight of my thoughts...
...remains that Lenin created the instrument of power that allowed Stalin to do as he did, and he formulated the principle that ultimately made all of his successor's crimes possible: "Our morality is completely subordinated to the class struggle." Here is the 20th century extension of Ivan Karamazov's doctrine that "if there is no God, everything is permitted." Indeed, Stalin was to Lenin what Smerdyakov was to Ivan, the murderer who made his half brother's deadly aphorism come true...
...might wish to recall the thought of Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, "People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel...