The Catcher in the Rye (3 of 3), The Brothers Karamazov (3 of 16) & Arthur Schnitzler
Smerdyakov, Silence and Suetonius
Dear classics reader,
On this week’s wood-carved carousel you will find:
Our discussion of The Brothers Karamazov Book Three – with a few thoughts about Smerdyakov;
Some background on Arthur Schnitzler before we start reading Dream Story next week;
Birthday wishes to Shusaku Endo;
A preview of coming attractions and other notices;
And for paid subscribers:
The week’s new classics – including a new translation of Japan’s first professional female author;
And our final discussion of The Catcher in the Rye – with notes on the Biltmore Clock and the Central Park Carousel.
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The Brothers Karamazov (3 of 16)
This month we’ve read Book Three of The Brothers Karamazov – ‘Sensualists’ – which also means we’ve finished Part One. Here are my thoughts:
I’d love to hear yours in the comments!
In Book Three we are introduced to Pavel Smerdyakov.
He is rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Fyodor Pavlovich, in other words a fourth Karamazov Brother, and immediately there is something strange and even sinister about him
‘He was thoroughly surly and unsociable. . . . A wild, unsociable youth who regarded the world as if trapped in a corner. As a child he had loved to string up cats and then bury them with full ceremony.’
His mother was the ‘idiot girl’ Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya – or ‘Stinking Lizaveta’ (the Russian word for ‘stinking’ is smerdiaschaia) – and Smerdyakov’s surname reflects the same malodorous associations.
He trained as a cook in Moscow, spends all his wages on ‘clothes, pomade, perfume and the like’ and rarely speaks.
‘He would sometimes stop dead in the house or the courtyard or the street,’ the narrator tells us, ‘and stand there, as if lost in thought, for ten minutes at a time.’
The narrator then provides an unexpected, revealing, ekphrastic description of a contemporary painting.
‘There is a remarkable picture by the painter Kramskoy entitled Contemplative: it depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, on a track, stands the lone, diminutive figure of a peasant dressed in a ragged kaftan and bast sandals.
‘Standing there in utter solitude, he seems lost in thought, but in reality he is not thinking at all but merely ‘contemplating’. If you were to nudge him, he would start and look at you as if he had just woken up, oblivious of his surroundings. . . . He would probably remember nothing, although that would not stop him from locking away, deep inside him, a memory of the sensations that he had experienced during his contemplation. Those sensations are dear to him, and he probably stores them away instinctively and without conscious thought – why and for what purpose, of course, he does not know: perhaps, after many years of hoarding them, he might unexpectedly throw up everything and go off to Jerusalem as a wandering pilgrim, or perhaps he might suddenly set fire to his native village, or perhaps both. There are any number of contemplatives among the peasantry. Very likely Smerdyakov was one such, and he too, no doubt, was avidly accumulating his impressions, scarcely knowing what for.’
It’s an ominous conclusion to Chapter 6 – and suggests that Smerdyakov is yet another of the ‘sensualists’ in the book, although he is suppressing, bottling and fermenting his sensations and impressions until the day when they will explode . . .
I look forward to discussing Book Four – ‘Crises’ – next month, on Friday 24th April. Book Four was first published in the April 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)
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.
Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931)
I’m looking forward to reading Arthur Schnitzler’s haunting novella Dream Story, which was first published 100 years ago this month. We’re going to read it over two weeks, starting next Friday 3rd April. All the details are here.
Beforehand, here is a little about Schnitzler’s life.
Schnitzler was bon in Leopoldstadt, Vienna, in 1862, the son of a celebrated Hungarian-Jewish throat doctor.
In 1879 he began training as a doctor himself. He worked at the Vienna General Hospital, where he took an interest in psychiatry and hypnosis at the same time as Freud. Freud later described Schnitzler as his ‘alter ego’. ‘You have learned through intuition,’ said Freud, ‘[ . . . ] everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work.’
From 1890, Schnitzler began publishing stories, plays and novellas. He became a regular at the Café Griensteidl on Michaelerplatz, where a circle of young writers gathered and came to be known as ‘Jung Wien’ (‘Young Vienna’). In the autumn of 1896, the publishing house S. Fischer gave him a general contract to publish everything he wrote.
In 1897 he wrote Reigen (‘Round Dance’), the scandalous play for which he is best known: each scene is a conversation between two lovers, just before or just after sex, and each features one character from the previous scene, so they form a sexual circle. It caused a moral scandal when it was first performed in 1920. Max Ophüls adapted it for the screen as La Ronde in 1950 and David Hare translated it as The Blue Room in 1998, with Nicole Kidman and Iain Glen playing all the roles.
Schnitzler’s works challenged the morality of fin-de-siècle Vienna and, like Freud’s psychoanalysis, unearthed the subconscious drives of human sexuality. When asked why most of his works treated similar subjects, Schnitzler replied ‘I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?’ He himself was, as the novelist Frederic Raphael put it, ‘a keen, not to say addictive, pursuer of sexual quarry’.
He wrote Dream Story in 1925 and it began serialisation in December that year. Schnitzler died of a brain haemorrhage in October 1931, at the age of sixty-nine, and is buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Vienna.
I look forward to reading Dream Story with you, starting next Friday.
Happy Birthday Shusaku Endo
In other news, the novelist Shusaku Endo was born on this day in 1923.
Endo was received into the Catholic Church at the age of eleven and his faith is the defining feature of his writing. His most famous novel is Silence, about Catholic missionary priests in early 17th-century Japan. He won several major prizes and edited the literary journal Mita Bungaku (Mita Literature).
‘Endo to my mind is one of the finest living novelists,’ wrote Graham Greene.
Silence by Shusaku 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
Coming Attractions and Other Notices
Future monthly read-alongs
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, take a peak here.
Patient Griselda
I was delighted to write this article about literary resilience for the excellent Big Think Books magazine. It was published last week.
Keats in Hampstead
Last week I spent a lovely sunny morning walking around Hampstead with a group of sixth form students discussing John Keats. We visited the Vale of Health where Leigh Hunt crowned Keats with laurels, Well Walk where Keats nursed his brother Tom, and Wentworth Place (now Keats House) where he fell in love with Fanny Brawne.
I did a similar walk in 2021 with the poet and Keats biographer Andrew Motion, for the Penguin Classics podcast. You can listen to our episode here.
Catalogue
To mark the 80th anniversary of the Penguin Classics series this year, Penguin are publishing a complete catalogue of every Penguin Classic title currently available in the UK. It’s beautifully produced — and I’m proud to say that I helped to assemble the text inside.
This 400-page Catalogue will be available to purchase next month, from April 16th. Here is Penguin’s description:
From Achebe and Austen to Zola and Zweig, and from the Epic of Gilgamesh to twenty-first century dystopias and autofiction, here is the complete list of every Penguin Classic in print. Published in a beautiful clothbound format, the list is arranged alphabetically by author and also includes key bibliographic information such as sub-series, genre and ISBN. Comprising 3,500 entries, this is the essential reference guide to the world’s largest and best-loved classics list.
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
