Dear classics reader,
In this week’s burning lake in Hell you will find:
Our discussion of The Brothers Karamazov Book Seven – with a note on spring onions;
Some background on Zora Neale Hurston before we start reading Their Eyes Were Watching God next week;
Birthday wishes to Alexandre Dumas;
A preview of coming attractions and other notices;
And for paid subscribers:
The week’s new classics – including some newly translated Osamu Dazai short stories.
This newsletter may be too long for your email inbox. If so, please click ‘View entire message’ at the bottom – or visit Substack.
The Brothers Karamazov (8 of 16)
This month we’ve read Book Seven of The Brothers Karamazov – ‘Alyosha’. Here are my thoughts:
I’d love to hear yours in the comments!
One of the most memorable sections of Book Seven is Grushenka’s fable of the spring onion.
Grushenka says she heard it when she was ‘still a child from Matrena, who now works for [her] as a cook.’
On 16 September 1879, Dostoyevsky wrote to his publisher Nikolai Lyubimov:
‘Please make sure you edit the legend of the spring onion properly. It’s a gem; I wrote it down from the words of a peasant woman, surely for the first time ever. I at least have never heard it before until now.’
As Ignat Avsey points out in the Oxford World’s Classics edition, Dostoyevsky was evidently unfamiliar with Alexander Afanasyev’s Russian National Folk Legends, published in Moscow in 1859, which contains a similar story: ‘The Brother of Christ’.
Here is the full folk tale, in the English translation made by Leonard Magnus in 1916. The segment that corresponds to Grushenka’s fable is the last six paragraphs.
THE BROTHER OF CHRIST
An old man was dying, and he was enjoining on his son not to forget the poor.
So on Easter Day he went into the church, and he took some fine eggs with him with which to greet his poor brothers, although his mother was very angry with him for so doing—for she was an evil-minded woman and merciless to the poor.
When he reached the church there was only one egg left, and there was one dirty old man. And the lad took him home to break his fast with him.
When the mother saw the poor man, she was very wroth. ‘It would be better,’ she said, ‘to break your fast with a dog than with such a filthy old beggar.’ And she would not break the fast.
So the son and the old man broke their fast together, and went out for a walk. Then the son looked and saw that the dress of the old man was very shabby, but the cross on him burnt like fire.
‘Come,’ said the old man, ‘we will change crosses; you become my brother by the cross.’
‘No, brother,’ the lad replied, ‘however much I may wish it; for I should get such a fine cross as you are carrying, and can give you nothing in return.’
But the old man overbore the youth, and they exchanged. And he asked him to come as his guest on Tuesday in Easter week. ‘And if you want to find your way,’ he said, ‘follow the path yonder. You need only say, “The Lord bless me!” and you will find me.’
That very Tuesday the youth set out on the footpath, and said: ‘The Lord bless me!’ and set out on his way journeying forth. He went a little way, and he heard children crying: ‘Brother of Christ, speak of us to Christ, whether we must be long in pain?’ And he went on a few steps farther; and he saw maidens ladling water out of one well into another. ‘Brother of Christ!’ they said to him, ‘speak of us to Christ, how long we must remain in torture?’ And he went on still farther, and saw a hedge, and beneath that hedge there became visible old men, and they were all covered with slime. And they said to him: ‘Brother of Christ, speak of us to Christ, how long shall we remain in pain?’
And so he went on and on. Then he saw the very old man with whom he had broken his fast. And the old man asked him: ‘What did you see on the way?’
And the youth recounted all that he had met.
‘Well, do you recognise me?’ said the old man. And it was only at this moment that the peasant boy understood that he was speaking to Jesus Christ Himself.
‘Why, O Lord, are the children tortured?’
‘Their mother cursed them in the womb, and they can never enter Paradise.’
‘And the maidens?’
‘They traded in milk, and they mixed water with their milk; and now for all eternity they must ladle out water.’
‘And the old men?’
‘They lived in the white world, and they used to say: “How pleasant it really might be to live in this world! But, as it is, there is nothing worth caring about!” So they must bear up against the mire.’
Then Christ led the boy into Paradise, and told him his place was ready for him there, and you may be sure the boy was none too anxious to leave it on that day. And afterwards He led him into Hell, and there the peasant’s mother was sitting.
So the peasant boy began to beseech Christ to have mercy on her. ‘Have mercy on her, Lord!’
And Christ bade the lad plait a rope of brome-grass. The peasant plaited the rope of brome-grass, and the Lord must have supervised.
And he brought it to Christ, Who said: ‘Now you have been weaving this rope for thirty years and have laboured sufficiently for your mother, rescue her out of Hell.’
And the son dangled the rope down to the mother who was sitting in the boiling pitch. And the rope never burned nor singed: so did God provide. And the son tried and tried to drag his mother up, and caught hold of her head, and she cried out to him: ‘You savage dog! Why, you are almost choking me!’ Then the rope broke off, and the guilty soul once more flew down into the burning pitch.
‘She had not desired to escape,’ said Christ, ‘and all of her heart is down there, and she must stay there for all eternity.’
Apart from the brome-grass / spring onion fable, the story has several other interesting points of connection to Book Seven: the Easter setting recalls Father Païsy reading of the ‘Wedding at Cana’, there is the relationship between a young man and an older mentor, a spiritual transformation and a reference to children suffering.
Perhaps – like Grushenka – Dostoyevsky heard this story as a child, internalised the experience, and later it subconsciously influenced Book Seven, ‘Alyosha’.
I look forward to discussing Chapters 1-4 of Book Eight – ‘Mitya’ – on Friday 14th August. These chapters were first published in the October 1879 issue of The Russian Messenger.
Here are links to our previous Brothers Karamazov posts:
Different translations (14 November)
The Reading Schedule (28 November)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (12 December)
0. The Family Tree (2 January)
1. Book One: The Story of a Family – and Father Zosima (23 January)
2. Book Two: An Unseemly Encounter – and Mikhail Rakitin (20 February)
3. Book Three: Sensualists – and Pavel Smerdyakov (27 March)
5. Book Five: Pros and Cons, Chapters 1-4 – and non-Euclidean geometry (15 May)
6. Book Five: Pros and Cons, Chapters 5-7 – and Bakhtin on dialogue (5 June)
7. Book Six: A Russian Monk – and Murav on holy fools (3 July)
All the Brothers Karamazov posts are accessible to all subscribers for free, but if you would like to view or contribute to the discussion in the comments section, you will need a paid subscription.
As ever, if you – or anyone you know – can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
I’m very much looking forward to reading Zora Neale Hurston’s beautiful Their Eyes Were Watching God with you next month. We’re going to read it over three weeks, starting next Friday 30th July. All the details are here.
Beforehand, here is a little about Hurston’s life.
Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth of eight children. All four of her grandparents were born into slavery. In 1894, at the age of three, she moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black town in America.
She worked odd jobs until, at the age of twenty-six, she got herself a high school education in Baltimore. In order to qualify for free education, she claimed to be sixteen, ten years younger than she was, a fiction she maintained for the rest of her life.
She went on to Howard University, where she started writing, and won a scholarship to Barnard College in New York, where she studied anthropology and became a leading member of the Harlem Renaissance.
She swiftly became the pre-eminent African-American woman writer in the USA. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays and she wrote four novels, an autobiography, essays, stories and plays.
By the late 1950s, however, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in January 1960 at the St Lucie Country Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Florida. She died penniless but friends paid for her funeral. She was buried in an unmarked grave.
Her greatest acclaim arrived posthumously, especially following Alice Walker’s 1975 article ‘In Search of Zora Neale Hurston’ (later titled ‘Looking for Zora’), in which she describes seeking the site of Hurston’s grave in 1973 and placing a marker that reads ‘A Genius of the South’ (a line taken from Jean Toomer’s poem ‘Georgia Dusk’).
Hurston is now recognised as one of the most influential African-American writers of the twentieth century.
I look forward to reading Their Eyes Were Watching God with you, starting next Friday.
Happy Birthday Dumas
In other news, today was the Alexandre Dumas’s birthday. He was born on this day in 1802.
Dumas’s father, the mixed-race, illegitimate son of a French marquis, was a general in the revolutionary army. He died when Alexandre was four years old and the young Dumas joined the household of the future king, Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, where he read voraciously and wrote plays and essays. In 1839, he began writing the historical novels for which he is best remembered today. He is sometimes known as ‘père’ to distinguish him from his son Alexandre Dumas fils.
In 2002, his ashes were reinterred in the Panthéon, escorted by four mounted Republican Guards dressed as Musketeers. President Chirac said: ‘With you, we have been d’Artagnan, Monte Cristo, or Balsamo, riding along the highways of France, roaming fields of battle, exploring palaces and castles [. . .] With you, we have dreamed. With you, we dream once more’.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1844-5)
Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to use the treasure to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas’ epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 1,312 pages | translated by Robin Buss
Coming Attractions and Other Notices
Future monthly read-alongs
For a preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, take a peak here.
Bonjour Tristesse – in-person book club
We finished discussing Bonjour Tristesse last week.
If you would like to continue the conversation in person, please book a ticket for our Bonjour Tristesse discussion at the Hatchards Classics Book Club in two weeks’ time on Thursday 6th August.
We meet at Hatchards bookshop (187 Piccadilly, London) on the first Thursday of every month at 6.30pm – tickets cost £5 with a free Hatchards Reward Card and include a glass (or two) of wine. These book club events are not live-streamed, but I post a report of our discussion afterwards here on Substack.
Big Think – Summer 2026
I’m very glad to have a piece in Big Think’s quarterly print magazine. The theme of their summer issue is ‘The Opt-Out Nation’: I’ve written about Bartleby the Scrivener and other forms of opting out in literature. You can read my piece here.
Here is some more information about the issue. Big Think is here on Substack. Become a member to get your copy of the print edition.
Annual book subscription
If you’re enjoying our read-alongs, why not treat yourself to the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription?
You (or a friend) can receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can choose to read along with us, if you wish.
To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
