Dubliners (0 of 4), Anna Karenina (11 of 14) & The Brothers Karamazov
Sisters, pilgrims and vampires
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s Araby bazaar you will find:
The launch of our four-week read-along of Dubliners by James Joyce;
Details of our long-term read-along for 2026 – The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky;
Birthday wishes to both John Bunyan and William Blake, with a selection of Blake’s illustrations of Bunyan;
A round-up of new classics published yesterday, including Stainless, a postmodern Vampire chiller;
A preview of coming attractions;
And our eleventh monthly instalment of Anna Karenina – with a note about provincial geography.
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Dubliners (0 of 4)
‘There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke.’
Today we start reading James Joyce’s first major work, Dubliners, his collection of fifteen short stories about middle-class Dubliners that was originally published, after many years of wrangling, in 1914. All the details of our read-along can be found here.
Before we start reading, it’s worth saying that although Dubliners is a collection of short stories, Joyce always envisaged it as a book: he thought carefully about the stories’ arrangement. In May 1906 he wrote to his publisher Grant Richards:
I have tried to present [Dublin] to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order.
In the finished collection, this scheme works out thus:
Childhood: ‘The Sisters’, ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Araby’
Adolescence: ‘Eveline’, ‘After the Race’, ‘Two Gallants’ and ‘The Boarding House’
Maturity: ‘A Little Cloud,’ ‘Counterparts’, ‘Clay’ and ‘A Painful Case’
Public life: ‘A Day in the Committee Room’, ‘A Mother’ and ‘Grace’
‘The arrangement, of three, four, four, three, follows the chiastic (ABBA) pattern of expansion and contraction, of repetition by inversion, of which both Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait and Joyce were so fond,’ observes Jeri Johnson, in the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition.
The critic Florence L. Walzl also points out that Joyce allocates his protagonists according to ‘the Roman names and divisions of the life span’:
childhood (pueritia) extended to age seventeen; adolescence (adulescentia), from seventeen through the thirtieth year; young manhood (juventus), from thirty-one to forty-five; and old age (senectus), from forty-five on.
‘The last story of the volume, ‘The Dead’ [. . .] stands in many respects outside this schema while containing within it elements of each stage represented therein,’ continues Johnson. ‘‘The Dead’, that is, lies as both culmination and coda to the volume: it both completes the pattern and exists outside it, in excess to the already predetermined structure of the whole.’
Jeri Johnson is also very good on the significance of Joyce’s titles. Here she is on the titles of the stories we’ll be reading this week:
‘The Sisters’
We might well ask why the story has this name rather than, say, ‘The Dead’, which seems more applicable; just as ‘The Sisters’ might itslelf be applied to that last story [. . .] The interchangeability of the titles of the first and last stories has more than once been noted; at the very least it brings the two ends of the book together: ‘doublends jined’ (‘double ends [Dublin’s] joined’) as Joyce was to put it in Finnegans Wake.
‘An Encounter’
‘encounter’: ‘a meeting face to face; a meeting in conflict; hence, a battle, skirmish, duel’; ‘a coming upon, esp. undesignedly or casually’; ‘an amatory meeting’: all are relevant here.
‘Araby’
‘Araby’: poetic for Arabia; also the name of an actual charity bazaar held in Dublin, 14-19 May 1894, a ‘Grand Oriental Fete in aid of Jervis St[reet] Hospital’ (admission one shilling).
‘Eveline’
Eveline: the name means ‘little Eve’; other Evelines who may lie behind this one include the Victorian pornographic novel of the same name (which includes an incestuous relationship between Eveline and her father, ‘revised more than once and very popular for decades’); Evelina; or a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778) by English diarist and novelist Fanny Burney (1752-1840), and, most obviously, Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies, ‘Eveleen’s Bower’.
‘After the Race’
‘the Race’: the fourth Gordon-Bennett Cup Motor Race, 2 July 1903; 370 miles across the Irish countryside; twelve cars began (three each of French, German, British, and United States drivers); five finished. In Paris (April 1903) Joyce interviewed for the Irish Times one of the French drivers, Henri Fournier. The phrase also means, of course, ‘in the manner of the tribe or national people’, another concern of the story being the loyalties and characteristics instilled and the demands exacted by one’s ‘race’.
‘Two Gallants’
Gallant: as a noun (pronounced with the accent on either the first or second syllable): a ladies’ man, a lover or paramour; (archaic) a man of fashion, a fine gentleman; as an adjective (accent on the first): brave, chivalrous; (archaic) finely dressed; (accent on either): markedly attentive to women; concerned with sexual love, amatory; as a verb (accent on first): flirt with; escort; all are relevant even if only ironically.
I look forward to discussing the childhood stories, ‘The Sisters’, ‘An Encounter’ and ‘Araby’, and three of the adolescence stories, ‘Eveline’, ‘After the Race’ and ‘Two Gallants’, next Friday 5th December.
In particular we can discuss why Joyce considered ‘Two Gallants’ ‘one of the most important stories in the book’. He said he’d ‘rather sacrifice five of the other stories (which I could name) than this one’.
Here are links to our previous Dubliners posts:
The Schedule (7 November)
James Joyce (21 November)
These weekly read-along discussions of Dubliners will be available to paid subscribers only. More details here.
If you – or anyone you know – would like to join this or future read-alongs, but can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
2026 read-along – The Brothers Karamazov
Today I am also delighted to be announcing our long-term read-along for 2026. Please join me next year to read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
‘There is no writer who better demonstrates the contradictions and fluctuations of the creative mind than Dostoyevsky,’ says Joyce Carol Oates, ‘and nowhere more astonishingly than in The Brothers Karamazov.’
What is it?
When the cruel landowner Fyodor Karamazov is murdered, the lives of his four sons are changed irrevocably: the impassioned soldier Mitya is immediately suspected of the murder; the atheist intellectual Ivan has a nervous breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha takes it upon himself to keep the family together; and the servant Smerdyakov, their bastard half-brother, suffers from epileptic fits. Everybody is incriminated and the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, become increasingly blurred.
Why are we reading it?
The Brothers Karamazov is often cited as one of the greatest novels in literary history: Sigmund Freud thought it ‘the most magnificent novel ever written’. For anyone who has been reading Anna Karenina with me this year, it will make a fascinating comparison, because it was published in the same periodical, The Russian Messenger, just a few years after Anna Karenina, but they are very different novels.
The Brothers Karamazov was the book at Tolstoy’s bedside when he died.
Which edition should I read?
There are five English translations of The Brothers Karamazov easily available, by Constance Garnett (1912), Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and Michael R. Katz (2023). You can find more information about all of these in this post from a couple of weeks ago.
The edition I’ll be reading is the Oxford World’s Classics edition, translated by Ignat Avsey under the title The Karamazov Brothers. It strikes a good balance between readability and accuracy – and it’s easily available in both the UK and the US.
How will we read it?
The Brothers Karamazov is 965 pages long in the Oxford edition. It consists of twelve books (in four parts) and an epilogue.
I suggest we read the twelve books over twelve months – from January to December 2026.
The novel was originally published in intermittent instalments in The Russian Messenger, between January 1879 and November 1880. The twelve books correspond roughly to the original instalments, although four of them were split across two issues, so in those months we’ll also have two discussions.
Here is the full schedule:
We’ll start reading on Friday 2nd January 2026.
On Friday 23rd January we’ll discuss Book One: The Story of a Family.
On Friday 20th February we’ll discuss Book Two: An Unseemly Encounter.
On Friday 27th March we’ll discuss Book Three: Sensualists.
On Friday 24th April we’ll discuss Book Four: Crises.
On Friday 15th May we’ll discuss the first half of Book Five: Pros and Cons, Chapters 1-4.
On Friday 5th June we’ll discuss the second half of Book Five: Pros and Cons, Chapters 5-7.
On Friday 3rd July we’ll discuss Book Six: A Russian Monk.
On Friday 24th July we’ll discuss Book Seven: Alyosha.
On Friday 14th August we’ll discuss the first half of Book Eight: Mitya, Chapters 1-4.
On Friday 4th September we’ll discuss the second half of Book Eight: Mitya, Chapters 5-8.
On Friday 2nd October we’ll discuss Book Nine: Judicial Investigation.
On Friday 30th October we’ll discuss Book Ten: Schoolboys.
On Friday 13th November we’ll discuss the first half of Book Eleven: Ivan Fyodorovich, Chapters 1-5.
On Friday 27th November we’ll discuss the second half of Book Eleven: Ivan Fyodorovich, Chapters 6-10.
On Friday 11th December we’ll discuss the first half of Book Twelve: Judicial Mistake, Chapters 1-5.
On Friday 1st January 2027 we’ll discuss the second half of Book Twelve: Judicial Mistake, Chapters 6-14 and the Epilogue.
Our read-along of The Brothers Karamazov will be available to all subscribers.
If you buy a copy of The Brothers Karamazov through Bookshop.org (UK) or Bookshop.org (US), Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!
Happy Birthday Bunyan and Blake
In other news, today, 28 November, was the birthday of both John Bunyan and William Blake: Bunyan would have been 397 today; Blake would have been 268.
Bunyan was the son of an English tinker. After serving in the Parliamentary army during the Civil War he suffered a spiritual crisis and began publishing polemical pamphlets. He was imprisoned for heretical preaching and languished in Bedford Gaol for twelve years. On his release, he resumed preaching and today he is best remembered for The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), his allegorical novel about the everyman Christian and his symbolic journey from this world to ‘that which is to come’.
Blake trained as an engraver and taught himself to be a painter, a printmaker and a book designer. He also wrote extraordinary visionary poems, which he called ‘prophecies’. He never achieved financial success in his lifetime, but today he is revered as one of the greatest and most rebellious artistic talents that Britain has ever produced. He is said to have been singing as he died. He is perhaps best remembered for his Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794).
On the occasion of their joint birthday, I thought I’d share some of the remarkable illustrations Blake made for Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in the last few years of his life:
When Blake died in 1827, he was buried in Bunhill Fields, the Dissenters’ burial ground in London – the same burial ground where Bunyan had been buried 140 years earlier. You can still visit memorials to both writers in Bunhill Fields today.
What’s new this week?
Yesterday, Penguin Classics published six ‘delightful and collectible’ hardback editions of Jane Austen’s novels – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion – to Jane Austen’s 250th anniversary.
And next month Penguin will also be releasing a new box of postcards, celebrating ten decades of Austen editions – the perfect gift for the Janeites in your life:
Jane Austen at Penguin: 50 Postcards from 10 Decades
From the first Penguin edition of Pride and Prejudice in 1938, with its glorious woodcut illustrations, to a special wartime Northanger Abbey published to provide troops with comforting reading material; and from the Clothbound Classics covers designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith to a brand-new edition of Jane Austen’s juvenilia from 2025, here is a celebration of ten decades of publishing history and design heritage, and one of the world’s most beloved authors.
[UK] Penguin Classics | 50 postcards
Other than these new Austen editions, however, I could only spot one new classic reissue this week: a bloody, erotic, postmodern vampire novel from McNally Editions.
Stainless by Todd Grimson (1996)
Justine is a vampire. Keith just lives like one. An ex-junkie and ex-rock star, his hands mangled by his dead ex’s own jealous ex, he’s let go of his ambitions. He’s content to be Justine’s live-in Renfield, helping her pick up dinner when she needs a bite, keeping an eye on her lavish L.A. manor when the sun is out and she’s down for her beauty sleep. It’s true that Justine has been around for a few centuries and Keith barely three decades, but they’re good for each other: Justine is teaching Keith to take the long view; Keith is reminding her how it feels to be alive. Yet a cohort of criminals, desperate artists, dead-enders, hangers-on, and wanna-bes, undead and otherwise, threaten their curious union. Can love stay untainted in a world of monsters?
First published in 1996, Todd Grimson’s Stainless is a noir fantasia, a symphony of bloody horror, and a woozy, erotic tour of night-side L.A. Not only is it the greatest vampire novel of the twentieth century, it may be the last, best farewell to the mythic Los Angeles of Bette Davis, Dennis Hopper, and Less than Zero. In a league with the best of James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler—and closing the coffin for good on poor old Bram Stoker—Stainless is the final word on fangs, hangovers, and heartbreak.
[UK / US] McNally Editions | 256 pages
The book description above is taken from the publishers’ online blurb.
Coming Attractions
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, take a peak here.
Last week we finished reading The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima. If you would like to continue discussing it in person, please do book a ticket for our conversation at the Hatchards Classics Book Club next week on Thursday 4th December.
We meet downstairs at Hatchards (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.
And for the ideal Christmas present, may I recommend, once again, the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription? You (or a friend) will 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
Anna Karenina (11 of 14)
And finally, we’ve finished the eleventh instalment of Anna Karenina – I really enjoyed this one. Here are my thoughts:
I’d love to hear yours!
This instalment involves quite a lot of travel – between country estates, to Moscow and between Moscow and the provincial town of Kashin.
I thought you might be interested to read the extract below from Life is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800-1917 by Professor Anne Lounsbery of New York University. (You can find the whole book here.)
In this extract, Lounsbery discusses the way in which Tolstoy reinforces his views on the gentry and the peasantry through his presentation of travel and geography:
The anonymous provincial towns that serve as ground zero of provinciality in other authors’ work do not feature in Tolstoy’s most famous novels. When Tolstoy does depict provincial towns he gives us their names; their provintsial’nost’ [provinciality] is not emphasized—that is, they do not serve to showcase a monotonous, derivative, or second-rate culture. [. . .] When Anna Karenina’s Levin goes to Kashin for zemstvo elections, the town itself is left virtually undescribed; all the focus is on Levin and the other noble landowners who have converged there to vote, and who can in no sense be construed as provincials.
In place of the empty provinces trope, Tolstoy’s major works typically imagine a decentralized agricultural heartland organized around a number of gentry estates, with the estates serving as focal points toward which nearby surrounding areas direct their resources and attention. The word “surrounding” is important: we might imagine the geography implied by Tolstoy’s texts as a continuous and relatively homogeneous stretch of space punctuated by dots of concentrated significance and activity. Surrounding these dots are tracts of rural land that are organically connected to the estates. The estate-dots are not exactly “nodes” since they are not usually represented as connecting points in a network; instead of emphasizing how these places are linked to each other by roads or other lines of communication, Tolstoy tends to depict each estate as a more or less self-sufficient world in a more or less symbiotic relationship with the directly adjacent countryside.
Tolstoy’s gentry estates seem “real” in the sense that they are carefully drawn places capable of fostering genuine (organic, nonimitative) culture, but we feel little need to locate them on a map. [. . .] In other words, this is not regionalism.
Tolstoyan estates are often not especially lavish, but they are almost always the locus of an authentic and coherent culture; they are often inward-looking, but not exactly isolated and usually not sealed off from “the world outside.” His Rostovs and Bolkonskys and Levins move back and forth between estate and capital (something that Gogol’s provincial gentry, for instance, never do); both worlds are thoroughly real and accessible to Tolstoy’s characters, though they may prefer one or the other. Even his most modest and unsophisticated estates, the ones that are indeed isolated and insular, cannot be called provincial. The landed noblemen who inhabit them, whether rich or poor, feel themselves to be utterly at home in these places, and they are not comparing themselves to a distant standard (and as we have seen, anxious comparison is a prerequisite of provinciality). [. . .] Even when Tolstoy represents an estate falling into inauthenticity—as does Anna’s and Vronsky’s English-inflected “play farm” toward the end of Anna Karenina—it does not become provincial in the sense of being behind or culturally incoherent. Instead it becomes just self-consciously modern, too deracinated and flimsy to serve as a setting for what Tolstoy deems real life.
Both War and Peace and Anna Karenina imply a close accord between the peasantry and the traditional gentry, strongly suggesting that whatever essence the two classes supposedly have in common is the basis of an “organic” Russian culture—and what is organic is the opposite of what is provincial. In other words, Tolstoy finesses the relationship between peasant/rural culture and estate culture (or to put it differently, between pastoral and provinciality) in order to draw on peasant authenticity, and peasant permanence, for his own ends. In order to be at risk of being provincial, you must be striving to be modern; unlike someone who is adhering to a supposedly timeless code (as do peasants and genuine noblemen, in Tolstoy’s view), someone who tries to keep up with the times is bound to fail at least on occasion, at which point he or she has no “authenticity” to fall back on. [. . .] In Tolstoy’s view staying the same is a large part of what defines peasants, and ideally noblemen as well; there is nothing less appropriate to a supposedly timeless essence than following changing “fashions” or generally mixing it up in any way.
I hope you enjoy the next monthly instalment of Anna Karenina. We’ll be reading it over Christmas and then on 2nd January 2026 we will discuss Part Seven, Chapters 1-16.
These chapters formed the twelfth instalment of the novel, first published in the Russian Messenger in March 1877.
Here are links to our previous Anna Karenina posts:
The Schedule (18 December 2024)
Leo Tolstoy (3 January 2025)
0. Introductions (10 January)
1. Part One, Chapters 1-23 – and Nabokov on Time (31 January)
2. Part One, Chapters 24-34, Part Two, Chapters 1-11 – and John Sutherland on Anna’s English novel (28 February)
3. Part Two, Chapters 12-29 – and Sergei Eisenstein at the races (28 March)
4. Part Two, Chapters 30-35, Part Three, Chapters 1-12 – and the Mowing Scene (25 April)
5. Part Three, Chapters 13-32 – and the Mirror of the Revolution (30 May)
6. Part Four, Chapters 1-17 – and Nabokov’s double nightmare (27 June)
7. Part Four, Chapters 18-23, Part Five, Chapters 1-6 – and the Mystery of Crowning (25 July)
8. Part Five, Chapters 7-20 – and Aleksandr Voronsky on Art (29 August)
9. Part Six, Chapters 1-15 – and Patti (26 September)
10. Part Six, Chapters 16-32 – and Shklovsky on the Snipe Hunt (31 October)
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What an amazing year it's been, and reading this book with you and every one in this group has been an absolute delight. I'm tempted to rush to the end, but I've held out so far lol.
It's been surprisingly easy to read Anna Karenina. No wonder it's considered a classic, so many threads, woven together with flawless dexterity, so many characters yet each one reads like a unique individual. It's also ironical that we know Anna by the very name she's trying to get rid of, through most of the book, her husband's name Karenin.
Dolly's musings on her way to see Anna and her interaction with the woman who lost her child, is one of my absolute favourite parts of the book. For a man of his times, and also knowing of the misogynistic streak in him, it's phenomenal that Leo Tolstoy had the level of insight into a woman's mind, as displayed here. It's truly mind-boggling.
So far, Anna didn't have my sympathy, but now that we are near the end of the book, I'm finally beginning to feel for her. Can't wait to complete this marathon year-long project and begin The Brothers Karamazov!
So much happening in this section (as in the rest of the book) and I'm fascinated by how both the characters and, I suspect, some readers change their views of other people.
The section where Dolly visited reminded me of the second act of 'La Traviata'. It's a not dissimilar situation - a woman and her lover escaping to the country - and although they appear happy, you know it can't last. Although you'd like to think 'if only they could stay like this, everything would be OK', deep down you can see tragedy on the horizon.
I thought it was interesting when Dolly started to warm to Vronsky. It reminds us of the charm that Anna saw when she first met him, and how easily anybody can be thrown off guard. And his stinginess in small things set against his generosity for others is quite telling - although his generosity does seem quite performative.
The politics section had me hooked - even if I'm not sure I totally followed what was going on (a bit like Levin). It not only showed us Levin and Vronsky, but it also showed the latter having a good time away from Anna. You have to admit that doesn't bode well. I was also taken with how the men at the election talked about the land. Rather like Ranevskaya in 'The Cherry Orchard' there seems to be a stronger bond with the land - I remember somebody suggesting that we should see the serfs as belonging to the land rather than the landowners.
But the election wouldn't have been out of place in 'The Thick Of It'. (Apologies for so many external references this week.) It's all pomp and conspiracy - I mean, what's not to love? You really are left with the impression that the nobility shouldn't be expected to run a bath, let alone the country.
But then, when Vronsky goes back to Anna, we see all the fault lines opening up. Anna can see that what she is doing won't work, but she does it anyway. Vronsky seems to put up a bit of a shield. And then the plan to go to Moscow and get a divorce - it feels like putting the cart before the horse. Without the divorce, Anna and Vronsky are likely to have a poor time of it as a couple in Moscow and I can't imagine Anna taking that well.
I'm so glad that we're reading this over longer than a year - if we were finishing at the year end, we would have had a lousy Christmas.