E.Y. Zhao’s Reviews > The Brothers Karamazov > Status Update

OK so read some of Bakhtin’s book abt Dosto and it confirmed what I felt about the reader’s lack of “place” in the polyphony (re: Spivak). SCOUNDREL NOT A THIEF! Not enough space for Dmitry’s speech before he goes to jail but…look it up.

Big identification with Grushenka this time. Have I judged Dostoevsky too harshly for all his heroines being “noble prostitutes” when he’s just externalizing the structural place of Woman…why has this taken me so effing long to come around to…internalized Puritan misogyny? Prudery (see previous entry)?

One day after Father Zosima section, think I’m returning to vegetarianism.

After reading Spivak “The Burden of English”: finally sinking in that some strangeness in reading Dostoevsky derives from his (lack of) assumed reader. No legible racial or class assumption b/t us (either of connection or disconnect (w Tolstoy and Turgenev maybe I’m a cosmopolitan bourgeois “target audience”?))

Fathers and teachers, I am pondering: “What is hell?” I think: “Hell is the suffering of no longer being able to love.”

Reread —

Paying closer attention to how nuts the plotting and characterization is. And how that rattles my brain so hard it creates openings for Dostoevsky’s philosophy to permeate. And how every crazed action we take toward our deepest desires only obstructs us…

Wish Dosto were here to write about Luigi Mangione…

Within each of us there are 3-4 Karamazovs…