The Age of Innocence (3 of 4) & The Brothers Karamazov (2 of 16)
Archimandrites, Russian journalists and quahog chips
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s private dining-room you will find:
Our discussion of Book Two of The Brothers Karamazov – with a note on Mikhail Rakitin;
Birthday wishes to Georges Bernanos;
The week’s new classics – including the journalism of Anna Politkovskaya;
A preview of coming attractions;
And our third discussion of The Age of Innocence – with a tour of nineteenth-century Boston.
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The Brothers Karamazov (2 of 16)
This month we’ve read Book Two of The Brothers Karamazov – ‘An Unseemly Encounter’. Here are my thoughts:
Please do share yours in the comments!
In Chapter 7 – ‘The careerist seminarian’ – we were introduced properly to the self-centred Mikhail Osipovich Rakitin.
At one point, talking to Alyosha, Rakitin rails against Ivan, who has apparently been ‘running him down’:
‘He went so far as to suggest that if I didn’t settle for a career as an archimandrite and didn’t decide to become a monk soon, then without a doubt I would go to St Petersburg and join the staff of an intellectual journal, where I would almost certainly work for the literary section, write for about ten years, and finally run the journal myself. I’d continue to publish it, certainly with a liberal and atheist tendency, with a hint of socialism, just a tinge of socialism, but all the time keeping my ear close to the ground and being all things to all men, and leading fools by the nose. The high point of my career, according to your brother, would be reached when, in spite of my socialist tendencies, I’d start diverting the subscription money into my current account, letting it work for me profitably on the investment market under the management of some little Jew, till I was able to afford to build a grand house in St Petersburg to which I’d transfer the editorial office and cram the remaining floors with lodgers.’
This seems like an oddly specific and detailed jibe – and indeed it seems to have been Dostoyevsky’s oblique way of running down two contemporary writers: the journalists Grigory Blagosvetlov and Grigory Eliseev.
Grigory Blagosvetlov was the editor of the literary magazine Russkoye Slovo (Russian Word), one of the two most radical Russian journals of the 1860s.
In A Writer’s Diary, Dostoyevsky wrote:
‘Man does not live by bread alone. That is, a person, if truly human, will not be satisfied even when fed; but feed a cow, and it will be content, just like Mr. Blagosvetlov and other liberals who have finally bought their own house with their liberalism. . . . This sated cow, content like Mr. Blagosvetlov, who has grown fat from his deeds and achieved his own house.’
The other radical journal of the 1860s was Sovremennik (The Contemporary). Sovremennik had been founded in 1836 by Pushkin and Gogol as literary review, but in the 1850s it became increasingly radical with the nihilist Nikolai Chernyshevsky as its principal critic. When Chernyshevsky was arrested in 1862, the magazine’s leading contributor became Grigory Eliseev.
Like Rakitin, Eliseev was a seminarian as a young man, but he broke with religion, moved to St Petersburg and began working as a literary journalist, first for the socialist magazine Iskra (The Spark) and later for Sovremennik, where he ran the influential ‘Domestic Affairs Review’ section under the pseudonym ‘Grytsko’.
Between 1863 and 1866, Sovremennik published What Is to Be Done?, the socialist novel that NikolaiChernyshevsky wrote while imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and which would later be an inspiration for Vladimir Lenin.
Both Russkoye Slovo and Sovremennik were closed down in 1866, following the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II.
On a different note, in the video above I mentioned the significance of the number three in The Brothers Karamazov.
In his 1978 book La création littéraire chez Dostoïevski (Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation), the French academic Jacques Catteau describes the number three as the ‘golden number’ in The Brothers Karamazov:
The movement of the novel is an almost perfect spiral, with three as its golden number. . . . Five days pass before the epilogue [which] happens in one day. . . . The acceleration of time is exemplary: three days, then two, then one. . . .
The repetitive, mainly ternary, structure accentuat[es] the impression of a dizzying whirlwind, or rather of a rising Piranesian spiral. Not only are their three Karamazov brothers . . . but the recurrence of situations, actions, confessions and dreams sketches the loops of time.
Let’s look out for pattern of three – and repetitions in threes – as we read.
Talking of which, I look forward to discussing Book Three – ‘Sensualists’ – next month, on Friday 27th March. Book Three was first published in the February 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)
And in case you’re new to Read the Classics, we are reading The Brothers Karamazov over the course of 2026: twelve volumes in twelve months, January to December.
Join us! All our Brothers Karamazov posts are gathered here – and here is the full reading schedule. As I say above, our next discussion will be on Friday 27 March.
All the Brothers Karamazov posts are accessible to all subscribers for free, but if you would like to view or contribute to the discussion, 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.
Happy Birthday Bernanos
In other news, today was also Georges Bernanos’s birthday.
Bernanos was born in Paris and studied law and literature. He fought in the battles of the Somme and Verdun in the First World War. His notable works, including Under the Sun of Satan, Joy and Monsieur Ouine, deal with the ironies of good and evil.
Disillusioned with the state of Europe in 1938, he went into self-imposed exile in Brazil with his wife and six children. He died after returning to France in 1948.
Diary of a Country Priest is considered to be his masterpiece. It was adapted for film by Robert Bresson in 1951.
Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos (1936)
A young, shy, sickly priest is assigned to his first parish, a sleepy village in northern France. Though his faith is devout, he finds nothing but indifference and mockery. The children laugh at his teachings, his parishioners are consumed by boredom, rumours are spread about him and he is tormented by stomach pains. Even his attempts to clarify his thoughts in a diary fail to deliver him from worldly concerns. Yet somehow, despite his suffering, he tries to find love for his fellow humans, and even a state of grace.
[UK] Penguin Classics | 256 pages | translated by Howard Curtis
[US] Grand Central Publishing | 308 pages | translated by Pamela Morris | introduced by Rémy Rougeau
What’s new this week?
This was a relatively quiet week: there were two notable additions to the classics shelves.
The Essential Anna Politkovskaya (1999-2006)
Anna Politkovskaya was one of the great, heroic investigative journalists of the modern era. Shining a light on Russian state corruption, human rights abuses, and the brutal conflict in Chechnya she was renowned for her unwavering commitment to exposing the harsh realities of life in Russia under Vladimir Putin’s regime. That was until her violent murder in 2006. In this collection, published ahead of the twentieth anniversary of her death, the raw, unflinching prose that defined Politkovskaya’s career is brought together to provide an unparalleled look at the complexities of modern Russia and the enduring fight for human rights within it. Through vivid storytelling and courageous reporting, Politkovskaya delves into themes of political oppression, the struggle for justice, and the resilience of the human spirit.
[UK] Vintage Classics | 384 pages | translated by John Crowfoot & Arch Tait | foreword by Helena Kennedy | afterword by Svetlana Alexievich
Voices by Frederic Prokosch (1982)
Voices is a memoir framed by evocations of Prokosch’s childhood in Middle America and his old age in the South of France but mostly composed of short chapters in which he ventriloquizes the myriad famous figures he met. If he did not in fact meet all of these figures, he manages to convince us that he listened to their cadences more closely than most. Whether he is playing a tennis match with Ezra Pound or retrieving Marc Chagall’s wallet from the Grand Canal, sharing a beer with Bertolt Brecht or a steam bath with W. H. Auden, Prokosch hypnotizes the reader with his humour and melancholy, creating a masterpiece of imaginative memoir, long out of print and long overlooked.
[UK / US] NYRB Classics | 360 pages | introduced by Kathryn Davies
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
Coming Attractions
Future monthly read-alongs
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, you can take a peak here.
March – The Catcher in the Rye
Next month we will be reading J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye over three weeks, to mark the cult novel’s 75th anniversary. Join us! Here are the details.
“Wuthering Heights”
In case you missed it, do listen to the “Wuthering Heights” episode of the Penguin Podcast. The brilliant Rhianna Dhillon interviews the director Emerald Fennell and then talks to Harriet Evans and me about the novel and the film adaptation.
Annual book subscription
And 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
The Age of Innocence (3 of 4)
Finally, this week we’ve read the first half of Book Two of The Age of Innocence. Here are my thoughts:
