Dubliners (4 of 4), The Brothers Karamazov (0 of 16), Anna Karenina (12 of 14) & Jack London
Patronymics, oyster pirates and psychohistorians
Wishing you a very Happy New Year, dear classics reader!
In this Twelfth Night feast you will find:
The launch of our 2026 read-along of The Brothers Karamazov;
Some background on Jack London, before we start reading The Call of the Wild next week;
Birthday wishes to Isaac Asimov;
A new classic reissue, introduced by Martin Scorsese;
A preview of coming attractions;
Our twelfth discussion of Anna Karenina – including a tour of Moscow’s English Club;
And our final discussion of Dubliners – with a note on the Feast of the Epiphany.
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The Brothers Karamazov (0 of 16)
‘Aleksei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner of our district, extremely well known in his time (and to this day still remembered in these parts) on account of his violent and mysterious death exactly thirteen years ago, the circumstances of which I shall relate in due course.’
Today we start reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov. Welcome! – especially to anyone who is joining us for the first time.
All the details of our year-long read-along can be found here.
This month we’ll read Book One: The Story of a Family.
This section was first published – along with the note ‘From the Author’ and Book Two: An Unseemly Encounter – in the periodical The Russian Messenger in January 1879.
We will be discussing Book One in three weeks’ time on Friday 23rd January.
Before we begin, we should discuss Russian names, as we did last year.
In Russia people have a first name, a surname and a middle ‘patronymic’ ending either ‘-ovich’ or ‘-evich’, meaning ‘son of’, or ‘-ovna’ or ‘-evna’, meaning ‘daughter of’, and first names and patronymics can also be shortened to one or more familiar diminutives.
Characters can therefore be addressed in more or less formal ways. From most formal to least, these forms of address are:
full name (first name, patronymic and surname);
first name and patronymic;
first name and diminutive patronymic;
surname;
first name;
diminutive first name.
In Book One of The Brothers Karamazov, we are introduced to Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, his two wives and three sons.
Here they are with the various versions of their names – and their most common monikers are in bold:
Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov
Fyodor Pavlovich
a landowner – a ‘nasty little clown’
Adelaida Ivanovna Karamazov
Adelaida Ivanovna
Fyodor Pavlovich’s first wife, née Miusova – ‘a young girl possessed of a dowry, and a beauty into the bargain, as well as being quick-witted and clever’
Dmitry Fyodorovich Karamazov
Dmitry Fyodorovich
Dmitry
Mitya, Mitenka, Mitka or Mitry
their son – ‘who grew up in the conviction that he would one day inherit an estate’
Sofya Ivanovna Karamazov
Sofya Ivanovna
Fyodor Pavlovich’s second wife – ‘Those innocent eyes of hers slashed me like a razor’
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov
Ivan Fyodorovich
Ivan
Vanya or Vanechka
their elder son – ‘a rather morose and introverted young man’ with ‘an extraordinary and brilliant aptitude for learning’
Aleksei Fyodorovich Karamazov
Aleksei Fyodorovich
Aleksei
Alyosha, Alyoshenka, Alyoshka, Alyoshechka or Lyosechka
their younger son – the ‘hero’ of the novel according to Dostoyevsky’s narrator, ‘a youthful philanthropist . . . everybody loved this young man’
Here is their family tree:
We won’t be meeting Lizaveta – or her son, Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov – this month, but they will enter the narrative before long . . .
Enjoy reading! And I look forward to discussing Book One: The Story of a Family on Friday 23rd January.
Here are links to our previous Brothers Karamazov posts:
Translations (14 November)
The Schedule (28 November)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (12 December)
And a reminder that our posts about The Brothers Karamazov will be available to all subscribers, but if you would like to join our discussion in the comments section, you will need a paid subscription.
If you – or anyone you know – can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
Jack London (1876-1916)
I’m also very much looking forward to reading Jack London’s The Call of the Wild this month. We’ll start reading next week, on Friday 9th January. All the details are here.
First, though, here is a little about Jack London’s remarkable life.
Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney in 1876. He grew up on the San Francisco waterfront, the son of a spiritualist and an astrologer. Before he was born, his father disowned him and his mother attempted to shoot herself.
London left school at fourteen and worked in a cannery, as an oyster pirate, as a member of the California Fish Patrol and on a seal-hunting ship, which took him as far as Japan.
On his return to the United States, he joined the gold rush to the Klondike in 1897. He took with him Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Milton’s Paradise Lost and he returned with less than $5 of gold dust and scurvy, which dogged him for the rest of his life.
‘It was in the Yukon that I found myself,’ he later wrote. ‘There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. You get your true perspective.’
His first literary success came in 1903 with the publication of The Call of the Wild, inspired by his adventures in the far north.
He spent the rest of his short life writing books and sailing around the world. He travelled to London and wrote about the slum conditions in the East End, he made voyages to the Caribbean and the South Seas, he sailed to Australia on a yacht called the Snark and he was a war correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War.
As George Orwell said, ‘he was an adventurer and a man of action as few writers have ever been.’
London picked up various tropical diseases on his travels; he was also an alcoholic. In 1916 he died on his Californian property, Beauty Ranch, at the age of only 40.
He was in the process of building a mansion at the ranch called Wolf House, which he never saw completed. You can visit the ruins today.
‘The greatest story he ever wrote,’ said the critic Alfred Kazin, ‘was the story he lived.’
In 1943 his life was produced as a Hollywood film, starring Michael O’Shea as Jack London. You can watch the full film here.
I look forward to reading The Call of the Wild with you, starting next Friday.
Happy Birthday Isaac Asimov
In other news, today was Isaac Asimov’s birthday.
Isaac Asimov was born in Russia near Smolensk in 1920 and brought to the USA by his parents three years later. He grew up in Brooklyn, graduating from high school before he was sixteen and going on to study chemistry at Columbia University. His first science fiction story was published in 1939 in Amazing Stories.
He went on to write more than 500 books, winning the Hugo Award four times and the Nebula Award once. He is best remembered for his I, Robot stories and the Foundation series, the first instalment of which was published 75 years ago in 1951.
Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951)
The Galactic Empire has prospered for twelve thousand years. Nobody suspects that the heart of the thriving Empire is rotten, until psychohistorian Hari Seldon uses his new science to foresee its terrible fate. Exiled to the desolate planet Terminus, Seldon establishes a colony of the greatest minds in the Empire, a Foundation which holds the key to changing the fate of the galaxy. However, the death throes of the Empire breed hostile new enemies, and the young Foundation’s fate will be threatened first.
[UK] Harper Voyager | 240 pages
[US] Spectra | 272 pages
What’s new this week?
Yesterday – New Year’s Day – saw the Pushkin Press Classics reissue of Shusaku Endo’s masterpiece, Silence, with a new introduction by Martin Scorsese, who adapted it for the screen in 2016.
Silence by Shusako Endo (1966)
Jesuit priest Sebastian Rodrigues sets sail for Japan in 1640, full of idealistic fire. But the cold land he arrives in has no place for missionaries: the Tokugawa shogunate has banned Christianity, and believers face torture and execution. Living in hiding, leading worship in secret, Rodrigues begins to question the true meaning of compassion – and the limits of his own belief.
[UK] Pushkin Press Classics | 304 pages | translated by William Johnston | introduced by Martin Scorsese
[US] Picador Modern Classics | 256 pages | translated by William Johnston | introduced by Martin Scorsese
The book description above is taken from the publisher’s online blurb.
Coming Attractions
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs this year, you can take a peak here.
And if you’re looking for the ideal way to kick-start the new year, 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
Anna Karenina (12 of 14)
In December we read the twelfth instalment of Anna Karenina. Here are my (rather emotional) thoughts:
Things are really escalating! Please let me know your impressions in the comments.
Tolstoy based the memorable gentlemen’s club scene in this month’s instalment on the actual Angliyskiy Klub or ‘English Club’ in Moscow.
The club was founded in the late 18th century, during the reign of Catherine the Great, modelled on the aristocratic gentlemen’s clubs of London. From 1831 it took up residence in the mansion building on Tverskaya Street above, which still stands today.
Inside was a dining room, a drawing room, a fireplace room, a reading room, a newspaper room, a portrait room, a billiard room and a fruit room. There was an extensive library with newspapers in four languages and the food was famous: one could enjoy breakfast and dinner every day and lunch on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
For the first half of the 19th century, the membership was predominantly aristocratic and limited to just 300 men. Later the membership expanded to 600 and the social composition changed to include merchants, financiers and industrialists.
It was always a haunt of writers, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol and Tolstoy, all of whom were members.
The club began to encounter problems in the early 20th century. In 1909 the admission fees increased and the number of dinners was reduced.
A ‘black board’ was installed in the room known as the lifostroton, ‘the courtroom’, with lists of those who had been expelled for non-payment.
During the First World War, the building was used as a military hospital and the club was finally abandoned following the October Revolution of 1917.
Today the building houses the State Central Museum of Contemporary Russian History.
I look forward to talking about the penultimate instalment of Anna Karenina at the end of January. On Friday 30 January we will discuss Part Seven, Chapters 17-32.
These chapters formed the thirteenth instalment of the novel, first published in the Russian Messenger in April 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)
11. Part Seven, Chapters 1-16 – and provincial geography (28 November)
Dubliners (4 of 4)
And finally, over Christmas we read the last and greatest story in James Joyce’s Dubliners – ‘The Dead’. Here are my impressions:
