The Call of the Wild (2 of 2), The Brothers Karamazov (1 of 16) & Edith Wharton
Startsy, Stendhal syndrome and champagne baths
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s Orthodox monastery you will find:
Our discussion of Book One of The Brothers Karamazov;
Some background on Edith Wharton, before we start reading The Age of Innocence next month;
Happy Birthday wishes to Stendhal;
This week’s new classic – a ‘kaleidoscopic swirl of sex and exploitation’;
A preview of coming attractions;
And our final discussion of The Call of the Wild – with a note on fascism and a list of literary animals.
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The Brothers Karamazov (1 of 16)
This month we’ve read Book One of The Brothers Karamazov, ‘The Story of a Family’. Here are my thoughts in the video below. (Somehow I’ve managed to add an echo to the audio here – apologies that I sound like I’m speaking in a cathedral . . .)
Click on the button below to share your impressions.
In Book One we are introduced to Father Zosima, the ‘starets’ who will play an important role in the novel, not least in Book Two next month.
Dostoyevsky describes Father Zosima like this:
Starets Zosima was about sixty-five, came from a land-owning family, and in his far-off youth had been a soldier and served as an officer in the Caucasus. . . . Because he had received all who came to him to pour out their hearts, anxious for his advice and healing words, for so many years, because he had absorbed so many revelations and confessions, so much grief into his soul, he had acquired a sensitivity so finely tuned that, from one glance at a stranger’s face, he could tell why he had come, what his needs were, and even what kind of suffering tormented his soul . . .
Father Zosima is modelled closely on a real starets, whom Dostoyevsky met: the hieroschemamonk Ambrose of Optina.
In 1878, Ambrose was the principal starets at the Optina Monastery in Kozelsk, Kaluga, and had been for eighteen years. He would continue to be the principal starets for another thirteen, until his death in 1891.
In 1988, he was canonised as Saint Ambrose of Optina.
The fourteenth-century Optina Monastery lies outside the town of Kozelsk in Kaluga, a hundred miles southwest of Moscow.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky mentions in his potted history of the startsy (in Chapter 5) that the tradition ‘flourished especially in Optina Pustyn, the famous monastery of Kozelsk.’
In May 1878, Dostoyevsky’s youngest son Alyosha died tragically at the age of three.
Distraught, Dostoyevsky made a pilgrimage to see Father Ambrose at the Optina Monastery, with his friend, the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov.
In her Recollections (1925), Dostoyevsky’s wife Anna Grigoryevna recalled that:
Fyodor Mikhailovich returned from Optina Hermitage as if at peace and significantly calmed and told me a lot about the customs of Optina Monastery, where he spent two days and nights. He saw the famous elder, Father Ambrose, three times: once in a crowd of people and twice alone, and he came away from these talks with a deep and penetrating impression. When Fyodor Mikhailovich told the elder about our misfortune and about my grief, which manifested itself far too stormily, the elder asked him whether I am a believer. When Fyodor Mikhailovich answered in the affirmative, the elder asked him to send me his blessing, as well as those words that Elder Zosima would later say to the grieving mother in his novel. From Fyodor Mikhailovich’s stories it could be seen what a profound seer of hearts and clairvoyant was this elder, respected by all.
Dostoyevsky published the first instalment of The Brothers Karamazov seven months after visiting Optina.
It’s already apparent that this novel is partly a debate about how best to live one’s life and the startsy offer a radical but liberating solution to the problem of human existence, an almost Buddhist conception of freedom from the self. As Dostoyevsky writes:
A starets is one who subsumes your soul, your will, into his soul and into his will. When a starets accepts you, you renounce your own will and surrender to him in total obedience, total self-abnegation. He who submits himself to this discipline voluntarily accepts an awesome apprenticeship in the hope that, after a long ordeal, he will achieve self-mastery, subjugate the self to such an extent as to attain at last, through lifelong obedience, perfect freedom, that is, freedom from the self, and escape the fate of those who have lived their whole lives without finding their true selves.
I look forward to discussing Book Two: An Unseemly Encounter next Friday 20th February. Book Two was first published – along with Book One – in the January 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)
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! There’s still plenty of time to catch up. All our Brothers Karamazov posts will be gathered here – and here is the full reading schedule. As I say above, our next discussion will be on Friday 20 February.
All the Brothers Karamazov posts and group discussions are accessible to all subscribers for free, but if you would like to contribute to the conversation, 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.
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
We also read a shorter classic every month – and I am very much looking forward to reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence in February. We’ll start reading next week, on Friday 30th January. All the details are here.
Beforehand, here is a little about Edith Wharton’s life.
Edith Newbold Jones liked to turn the pages of books as an infant, making up stories. She attempted to write her first novel at the age of eleven.
She was raised in Gilded Age New York, in the ostentatiously wealthy Jones family, said to have inspired the phrase ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. Her childhood was spent between New York and Newport on Rhode Island.
Despite her early interest in writing, however, Edith’s controlling mother forbade her to read novels before she was married, which she duly was, in 1885, to Teddy Wharton from Boston. He suffered from depression and their marriage swiftly became unstable.
Wharton travelled frequently to Europe and spoke several European languages, crossing the Atlantic sixty times in the course of her life. She moved permanently to France in 1910, divorcing her husband three years later.
She published her first novel, The Valley of Decision, in 1902, at the age of 40, and followed it with The House of Mirth (1905), which made her name. She went on to write dozens of novels and volumes of stories, poems, essays and memoirs. She was a close friend of Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau and André Gide.
During the First World War, she fed French and Belgian refugees in Paris, visited the front line and sheltered 600 Belgian orphans. In 1916 she was awarded the Légion d’honneur.
In 1921 she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, the first woman to do so. In 1926, she was elected to the American National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Wharton died in France in 1937 at the age of 75 and she is buried in Versailles.
I look forward to reading The Age of Innocence with you, starting next Friday.
Happy Birthday Stendhal
Today was also Stendhal’s birthday.
‘Stendhal’ was the pen name of Henri Marie Beyle, who received a commission in Napoleon’s army at the age of seventeen and took part in campaigns in Italy, Germany and Russia, where he witnessed the burning of Moscow.
After Napoleon’s fall in 1815, Beyle returned to Italy, where he settled in Milan and wrote books on Italian art under the pseudonym ‘M. de Stendhal’. He chose his pen name in memory of the German town of Stendal, which was both the birthplace of the respected art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the home of a beautiful blonde called Wilhelmine.
In 1821, he reluctantly returned to Paris because his health was declining. There he wrote the novels for which he is best remembered, such as The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839).
In his final years, he treated his chronic syphilis with potassium and quicksilver, which resulted in swollen armpits, shrunken testicles, and terrible tremors that prevented him holding a pen.
The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830)
In this vigorous and fast-moving novel of post-Napoleonic France, Julien Sorel’s plans to reach the higher echelons of society through the priesthood are deflected by his realisation that the attainment of happiness is of greater consequence than the pursuit of ambition. Subtitled ‘A Chronicle of 1830’, Stendhal’s depiction of a nation of smug hypocrites scandalised contemporary readers, who recognised themselves or their peers and felt uncomfortable with the energy, imagination, and sincerity of a hero so patently inspired by their lately deposed Emperor.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 592 pages | translated by Catherine Slater | introduced by Roger Pearson
Incidentally, Stendhal lends his name to ‘Stendhal syndrome’, a psychosomatic disorder brought on by exposure to great works of art.
While visiting the church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1817 and looking at Giotto’s frescoes, Stendhal suddenly found himself in ‘a sort of ecstasy [. . .] I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call “nerves”. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.’
What’s new this week?
This was a quiet week for classics publishing, but yesterday Virago published a paperback edition of the ‘lost classic’ Fish Tales – a ‘kaleidoscopic swirl of sex and exploitation, selfhood and self-destruction’ by Nettie Jones
Fish Tales was originally acquired by Toni Morrison and published by Random House in 1984. Nettie Jones’s second novel, Mischief Makers, was published in 1989. Her essays and short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.
Fish Tales by Nettie Jones (1983)
Lewis Jones is a party girl on the edge. Bankrolled by her husband Woody and accompanied by her fellow hedonist Kitty Kat, a hustler who knows all the best spots, Lewis bounces between the demimonde of 70s New York and affluent Black Detroit in a fractured haze of lovers, cocaine parties and champagne baths. But her wild pursuit of freedom is upended when she meets the handsome, erudite, cruel Brook – the only man who won't allow her to take control. ‘Nettie Jones’s voice is astonishing,’ said the New York Times Book Review. ‘It leaps off the page like a panther.’
[UK] Virago Modern Classics | 272 pages
[US] Picador | 272 pages
The book description above is taken from the publisher’s online blurb.
Coming Attractions
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, you can take a peak here.
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 Call of the Wild (2 of 2)
And finally, this week we’ve finished reading The Call of the Wild by Jack London. Here are my thoughts:
