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Meet the Karamazovs · John’s Newsletter

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody,
0:02
SPEAKER_00: and welcome back to the Dead Realist Society,
0:04
SPEAKER_00: where we revive classic literature and attempt to draw modern real-world links.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: Please do forgive us for our extra week off as we are officially kicking off
0:15
SPEAKER_00: The Brothers Karamazov.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: As you can see, quite a large book.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: We needed the additional week off.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: To get ready I hope that you did up with all of our other Substack content though
0:26
SPEAKER_00: that we do produce weekly including the foreign affairs 15
0:30
SPEAKER_00: and whatever is just going through john's mind throughout the week really podcast.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: But we're really excited to dive into, for now, our last installment of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: We started with Notes from Underground.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: We just finished Crime and Punishment.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: Please do go back and listen to those if you haven't had an opportunity to.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: Because I feel like these books really set each other up in a very good way.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: You kind of see the evolution.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: Of our author um as you read through the three and we'll probably revisit some
1:00
SPEAKER_00: of his works later on but for the time being this will be the book
1:04
SPEAKER_00: that we will pause russian literature for the time being
1:07
SPEAKER_00: and we'll start moving out west for some different literature uh but
1:11
SPEAKER_00: The way we're going to do this podcast is rather than breaking up into three parts
1:16
SPEAKER_00: in terms of the way it's segmented into the book,
1:19
SPEAKER_00: we're going to start by this part one discussing the characters,
1:24
SPEAKER_00: part two next week discussing the plot.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: And then we'll finish things off with part three and discuss the general themes of the book.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: As we've mentioned in the past,
1:33
SPEAKER_00: Dostoevsky characters are not so much your stereotypical character as much
1:38
SPEAKER_00: as they represent an idea.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: And that could not be more true for than this book, The Brothers Karamazov.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: John, go ahead and kick us off.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you, John.
1:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah, this is in many ways, and we will be back to Dostoevsky.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's an embarrassment of riches.
1:55
SPEAKER_01: We could do another part three and then another three-parter easily.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: I'm eager to do the devils,
2:00
SPEAKER_01: frankly,
2:01
SPEAKER_01: also called the possessed because it's about revolutionary utopian thinking,
2:05
SPEAKER_01: which is kind of up our alley, John.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: And that would be very easy to draw the modern real world links to.
2:12
SPEAKER_01: Boy, yeah, watch out, Robert Kagan, Victoria, Newland, wherever you are, and Applebaum.
2:16
SPEAKER_01: But The Brothers Karamazov, it's the 16th and final novel that Dostoevsky wrote.
2:21
SPEAKER_01: It came out in 1880.
2:24
SPEAKER_01: It took about two years to write, which is, you know, a long time.
2:27
SPEAKER_01: He wrote very quickly.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: He had to because of the gambling addiction.
2:29
SPEAKER_01: He had to make money.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: It was published serially in The Russian Messenger in January 1879 to November 1880.
2:39
SPEAKER_01: And I love that the Russian messenger,
2:40
SPEAKER_01: imagine you're just some average Russian guy paying your couple Kopecks to get
2:44
SPEAKER_01: a serialized thing.
2:46
SPEAKER_01: You're middle class trying to be a slightly high brow.
2:48
SPEAKER_01: At this point,
2:49
SPEAKER_01: you had the brothers Karamazov in a thing along with either War and Peace
2:53
SPEAKER_01: or Anna Karenina.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: I don't remember which, but...
2:56
SPEAKER_01: Peak Tolstoy, peak Dostoevsky for like one kopek, like 30 cents.
3:01
SPEAKER_01: So it was an embarrassment there.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: But he did it between January 1879, November 1880.
3:07
SPEAKER_01: He dies just after its publication, a few months just after this.
3:12
SPEAKER_01: Everybody loves this novel.
3:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Freud said is the greatest novel ever written.
3:16
SPEAKER_01: We'll get back to Freud in a minute.
3:18
SPEAKER_01: Jordan Peterson,
3:19
SPEAKER_01: a modern author,
3:20
SPEAKER_01: said to be a serious adult,
3:22
SPEAKER_01: you have to read it,
3:23
SPEAKER_01: which I think is a great Great thing to say and absolutely right.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: It's a passionate philosophical novel.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: It deals with his favorites, God, free will, and morality, faith, doubt, and reason.
3:37
SPEAKER_01: And of course, it's also a cracking detective story.
3:40
SPEAKER_01: It revolves around a murder.
3:42
SPEAKER_01: And he liked crime and punishment,
3:45
SPEAKER_01: but I think even better, the suspense of this is quite extraordinary.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: If it were just a really good murder story, we'd still...
3:51
SPEAKER_01: Read it.
3:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: And to kind of add to the background of this that I think is really important, too,
3:56
SPEAKER_00: is before deciding to write the brothers,
3:59
SPEAKER_00: Dostoevsky was going to write a book about children.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: He says, I've been studying children for quite some time.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: And at the time, he had a young son.
4:07
SPEAKER_00: A two-year-old who dies of, I believe, pneumonia, if I remember correctly.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: And this weight's so heavy on Dostoevsky's heart, he didn't really know what direction to go in.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: And I think in some ways it's so sad the way, I mean,
4:20
SPEAKER_00: we've already discussed the way Dostoevsky,
4:22
SPEAKER_00: he writes himself into the books, but to,
4:25
SPEAKER_00: after losing his child,
4:27
SPEAKER_00: he names the father in this book,
4:29
SPEAKER_00: who is brutally murdered and is kind of a deadbeat father
4:32
SPEAKER_00: who doesn't raise his sons properly, names him Theodore.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: His name, of course.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: Sorry for that interruption, John, but I thought that was an important ad.
4:44
SPEAKER_01: The Alexei, the name of the beloved character, the saintly brother that everyone loves.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: Of course, Alexei is Alyosha.
4:53
SPEAKER_01: Is the Russian, which is what he called his little boy.
4:55
SPEAKER_01: His boy who passed away.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: This is personal, yes.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is a love letter to his son.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: And Alyosha just lights the book up.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, absolutely.
5:07
SPEAKER_01: This is why we do these.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is what makes this really, really interesting.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: And it's astounding insights in this into human nature.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it is the ultimate...
5:16
SPEAKER_01: Remember, psychology hasn't really started yet.
5:19
SPEAKER_01: Freud is just getting onto the scene.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: This predates all of this.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: And the genius thing that he did was he predates Freud and that each of
5:27
SPEAKER_01: the main brothers,
5:29
SPEAKER_01: Fedor is the deadbeat father,
5:31
SPEAKER_01: Dimitri is the oldest brother, and then Ivan and then Alexei.
5:35
SPEAKER_01: And Dimitri, Ivan and Alexei are Freudian psychology in its entirety.
5:40
SPEAKER_01: Dimitri is the id.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: He's sensual.
5:43
SPEAKER_01: He's about the body.
5:44
SPEAKER_01: He's not a bad guy, but he lives on his impulses.
5:49
SPEAKER_01: That girl is beautiful.
5:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to sleep with her.
5:52
SPEAKER_01: I don't care if I'm engaged to another woman who I admire a great deal.
5:55
SPEAKER_01: I have to do what I have to do.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: The id.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: Ivan, the middle brother, is the ego.
6:01
SPEAKER_01: He's the mind.
6:02
SPEAKER_01: He's, well, you can't do that.
6:04
SPEAKER_01: He has no moral sense at all.
6:06
SPEAKER_01: In fact, he says in the novel, because God doesn't exist, everything is permitted.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: Hauntingly similar to Christ.
6:13
SPEAKER_01: He's trying to be the Superman again.
6:16
SPEAKER_01: He's the nihilistic socialist that Dostoevsky is always trying to reach.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: But in this, he's the ego for Freud.
6:22
SPEAKER_01: He's the mind.
6:23
SPEAKER_01: The only reason he wouldn't kill someone is he might get caught.
6:26
SPEAKER_01: He has no moral sense.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: But he's not living on impulse.
6:29
SPEAKER_01: He's trying to live through reason.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: So he's the ego.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: And then Alexei's the ultimate superego.
6:35
SPEAKER_01: He lives almost only for what is right and what is wrong.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: And so when you put them all together,
6:41
SPEAKER_01: there's a great line in the first part of the book where someone says,
6:44
SPEAKER_01: one of the novices who's where, when they go in to see Alexei's A monastery.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: And one of the guys serving the food says, you Karamazovs are all the same.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: He unites them and says, you're all saintly fools and grasping sensualists.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: And Dostoevsky is saying, this is what we are.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: This is what we all are.
7:03
SPEAKER_01: We're all a mix of the id, the ego, and the superego.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: We're all grasping all the time with trying these passions and these impulses
7:11
SPEAKER_01: and trying to make them work together.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: On their own, none of the brothers, even Alexei, can survive on his own.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: They need...
7:18
SPEAKER_01: We need qualities of the other to work.
7:21
SPEAKER_01: And somehow Dostoevsky way ahead of modern psychology 100 years ahead gets this point.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: And so he sets them loose about this first in the monastery, then in the home of Theodore.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: Just to lay out who they are, John, and then I want you to chip in.
7:38
SPEAKER_01: Theodore was a 55-year-old scoundrel and liar, or in my notes.
7:43
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he's the father of the three sons through two marriages.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: He also has an illegitimate son that we're going to get back to later who's really important.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: The radical, yes.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to leave him out until the plot bit.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: Feel free to have at him.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: But he's a really important character as his servant.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: And he's not been close to them.
8:05
SPEAKER_01: They've not been brought up together.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: And that's what makes their collision of different points of view so interesting.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: They broadly like each other.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: They're the brothers.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: They're broadly trying to work together, but they don't really know each other.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: And his relation with each of his sons drives the novel.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: On the surface,
8:20
SPEAKER_01: he hates Dimitri,
8:21
SPEAKER_01: but he says he's more afraid of Ivan than Dimitri, which is an interesting line.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: And he loves Alexei.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: Pretty much everybody loves Alexei.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: And that drives it.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: Dimitri, on the other hand, he's a 28 year old, he's the eldest son.
8:35
SPEAKER_01: He likes to drink, womanize the usual thing.
8:41
SPEAKER_01: He is engaged to Katarina, who is this perfectly good woman.
8:45
SPEAKER_01: But he's in love with Grushenka,
8:47
SPEAKER_01: this kind of sensual woman who's had to sell herself to survive.
8:51
SPEAKER_01: And again, it's so Russian.
8:53
SPEAKER_01: He's going between, you know, it's the Madonna and the horror syndrome.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: He's going back and forth between them.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: And as much as he likes Katerina, he thinks he would do better with Grushenka.
9:03
SPEAKER_01: He has this incredibly volatile relationship with his father.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: They physically fight all the time.
9:10
SPEAKER_01: But it's really and he's very close to the youngest brother.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: Again, he likes Alexei a lot.
9:15
SPEAKER_01: They rely on each other.
9:17
SPEAKER_01: But he's inspired by a convict that Dostoevsky actually knew in Siberia.
9:22
SPEAKER_01: He said,
9:22
SPEAKER_01: I knew guys like Dmitry all the time,
9:25
SPEAKER_01: who in a brawl, in a brawling would kill someone and then they had to go to Siberia.
9:29
SPEAKER_01: They're not bad guys, but they're driven by the impulse or what we would call the id.
9:33
SPEAKER_01: So that's that.
9:34
SPEAKER_01: Yvonne.
9:36
SPEAKER_01: Who the father, Fyodor, is right to say he's even more scared of.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: He's the ego or the mind.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: He's 24.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: He's the middle son.
9:43
SPEAKER_01: He's reserved and aloof, but quite brilliant.
9:46
SPEAKER_01: He grows closer to Alexei as the story goes on.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: He's required and needed by both the father and Dimitri to kind of keep themselves
9:55
SPEAKER_01: from killing each other, but also keep their passions under wraps.
9:59
SPEAKER_01: He falls in love, of course, with Katerina, the noble one.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: She's ambivalent to him.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: And so this becomes a problem.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: He talks,
10:09
SPEAKER_01: by the way,
10:09
SPEAKER_01: and we'll mention this about theme about the Grand Inquisitor,
10:12
SPEAKER_01: which is one of the great metaphors politically ever done.
10:15
SPEAKER_01: And we're leaving that for the theme.
10:18
SPEAKER_01: But it is there.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: You can I remember going to St.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: Andrews, and we read a separate little book just on the Grand Inquisitor.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yes.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: If you're not going to read the full 1000 pages of the book, just read the Grand Inquisitor.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: And you'll know, you'll I know a lot about politics.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: It was philosophy class.
10:36
SPEAKER_01: He's rational.
10:37
SPEAKER_01: He says God doesn't exist.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: And if God doesn't exist, everything is lawful.
10:42
SPEAKER_01: So we're back to Raskolnikov.
10:44
SPEAKER_01: We're back to Nietzsche.
10:46
SPEAKER_01: He's reaching out again.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: And he says his children are suffering.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: And again, this is the autobiography of Dostoevsky.
10:52
SPEAKER_01: Children are suffering so there can't be a God.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: Why would God allow children to suffer?
10:56
SPEAKER_01: This is obviously something that's been weighing on the mind of
10:59
SPEAKER_01: the deeply religious Dostoevsky with the death of his son.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: I mean, again, it's very moving.
11:06
SPEAKER_01: Dostoevsky is part of all of them, as he said.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: I'm not just Eliosha.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm all of it, as we all are.
11:11
SPEAKER_01: But that's Yvonne.
11:12
SPEAKER_01: And then Alexei, he's 20.
11:13
SPEAKER_01: He's the youngest.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: He's the super ego.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: He's the hero of the novel.
11:17
SPEAKER_01: And they say that three or four times in the beginning.
11:19
SPEAKER_01: The omniscient narrator says he's the hero.
11:22
SPEAKER_01: If there had been a second book, John,
11:24
SPEAKER_01: and I'll leave that for you to talk about,
11:25
SPEAKER_01: he would have been the sole hero of the second book.
11:28
SPEAKER_01: But unfortunately...
11:29
SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, no, no,
11:30
SPEAKER_00: that is so unfortunate that we were going to get the part two of the brothers
11:36
SPEAKER_00: and unlike George R. Martin,
11:38
SPEAKER_00: who doesn't finish his books intentionally because he doesn't know how
11:41
SPEAKER_00: to finish his books.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Dostoevsky was just not able to finish because he he wrote until the day he died.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, literally, I mean, literally, he drops over.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: He's a novice in the Russian Orthodox monastery.
11:55
SPEAKER_01: The faith is with him,
11:56
SPEAKER_01: which is what contributes, you know, you contrast his faith with Ivan's atheism.
12:02
SPEAKER_01: He's sent out into the world by Father Zosima, sends him out.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: He said,
12:05
SPEAKER_01: you know,
12:05
SPEAKER_01: you have to go out in the world, even get married, you have to live in the world.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: So he doesn't separate him, which is an interesting choice.
12:11
SPEAKER_01: He sends him out as Dostoevsky's soldier to combat socialism and atheism,
12:16
SPEAKER_01: to offer a positive role model,
12:18
SPEAKER_01: because the criticism of Dostoevsky was, yeah,
12:20
SPEAKER_01: you're great at criticizing the socialists,
12:22
SPEAKER_01: but hey, what about, what would you do then?
12:24
SPEAKER_01: What would a Christian idealist do?
12:28
SPEAKER_01: And that's what in the second book, what we would have had, it's the tragedy.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: But really, that's what he functions as here.
12:34
SPEAKER_01: He's a peacemaker.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: Everybody likes this.
12:39
SPEAKER_01: And Dostoevsky wants the Russian radical youth to live.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry,
12:42
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry,
12:43
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry,
12:43
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry,
12:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry,
12:45
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry,
12:45
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
12:59
SPEAKER_01: That Russia is Ivan, that Russia will be Ivan.
13:02
SPEAKER_01: It is Dmitry right now.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: It's drunken.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: It's blowing its money.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: It means well, but it screws up.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: He fears it's going to be Ivan,
13:10
SPEAKER_01: the socialist kind of Nietzschean man, but he wants it to be Ivan.
13:14
SPEAKER_01: He wants it to be Alexei.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: And so the trinity of the brothers, and that's not a mistake that there are three of them.
13:21
SPEAKER_01: The trinity of the brothers,
13:22
SPEAKER_01: I think,
13:23
SPEAKER_01: functions as just this incredible metaphorical device,
13:26
SPEAKER_01: one of the greatest structures ever written in any form of literature.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: And I think when you can kind of break this down into the analogy of this,
13:36
SPEAKER_00: this Karamazov house,
13:38
SPEAKER_00: basically signifying your own human body to your point
13:41
SPEAKER_00: of all these different characters and the ideologies they represent.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: They lived within every single human.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: They lived within Fyodor Dostoevsky.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: He just says, okay,
13:50
SPEAKER_00: what if I take those things that live inside me and I isolate them as one individual
13:56
SPEAKER_00: and make them, and I think the genius, let's make them related.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: That's the kicker for me because to not be too Taoist, but you don't have love without hate.
14:07
SPEAKER_00: You don't have beauty without ugliness.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: They're brothers of each other, love and hate.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: So just because they represent opposite worldviews doesn't mean
14:17
SPEAKER_00: that they don't interact,
14:18
SPEAKER_00: that they don't have conflict,
14:20
SPEAKER_00: that they maybe don't,
14:22
SPEAKER_00: maybe they come from the same exact place and maybe it's just one thing here,
14:26
SPEAKER_00: one thing there that causes a passionate feeling that could have become love,
14:30
SPEAKER_00: that passion then becomes hate,
14:33
SPEAKER_00: depending on the mentorship in your life,
14:35
SPEAKER_00: the people around you,
14:36
SPEAKER_00: the sociology,
14:37
SPEAKER_00: the things that build you But I think what's interesting is all three
14:41
SPEAKER_00: of these brothers,
14:43
SPEAKER_00: being brothers,
14:43
SPEAKER_00: being under the same roof,
14:45
SPEAKER_00: you don't necessarily get as big of an excuse for kind of the terrible brother,
14:50
SPEAKER_00: the Dimitri, that say, oh, well, because the way he was raised, it makes him...
14:57
SPEAKER_00: So much different than Alexi, right?
15:00
SPEAKER_00: That can't happen.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: They're raised in the same household, the same place.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: Something, frankly, the Nazis were very curious of, of how can you have these twins?
15:11
SPEAKER_00: And one end up so different than the other one become incredibly successful,
15:15
SPEAKER_00: the other become homeless, for example.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: So seeing these ideas interact,
15:20
SPEAKER_00: I think,
15:20
SPEAKER_00: is a great way of kind of trying to extract what's happening
15:24
SPEAKER_00: in Dostoevsky's human mind as if it was playing out in the real world,
15:30
SPEAKER_00: all while,
15:30
SPEAKER_00: of course,
15:31
SPEAKER_00: dealing with the tragedies that we discussed around losing his son and just
15:35
SPEAKER_00: the person and the reflecting of the person that he was.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: Dostoevsky was absolutely, at times, a Dimitri.
15:44
SPEAKER_01: He gambled away all his winnings, Demetri.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes, of course.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: Demetri would absolutely gamble away all of his winnings.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: He showed us in Notes of the Underground exactly what we think of the rationalist.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: Yes, I'm rational, but it's one part of 22 parts of who I am.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, the believer.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: And I think this is really who Dostoevsky wanted to be at the end of the day,
16:07
SPEAKER_00: the core of who he was as a human being and what he wanted to see in people.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: I believe it was him who said something along the lines of,
16:15
SPEAKER_00: the longer I live,
16:16
SPEAKER_00: the more I love humanity, but hate humans, or something along the lines of that.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: No, he wanted to be a believer,
16:25
SPEAKER_00: but I think he struggled with that so much because he would get paralyzed
16:30
SPEAKER_00: by his own consciousness,
16:31
SPEAKER_00: which you have to go back to Notes from Underground to understand that.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: So we really do get to kind of see and I mean,
16:39
SPEAKER_00: you already talked about our kind of crime and punishment character.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: And so we almost kind of get to see in the brothers,
16:47
SPEAKER_00: a crossover book of the of all Dostoevsky's different characters
16:53
SPEAKER_00: that maybe just represented one part in their entire book.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: Now we get to see these people in Iraq.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: That's the key thing,
17:00
SPEAKER_01: that this book, great as the others are, and they're incredibly ambitious.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: It's the Avengers of the ideas.
17:08
SPEAKER_01: The thing about the Russians and the Americans that are going to separate them from
17:11
SPEAKER_01: the British and the French,
17:12
SPEAKER_01: who, again, Jane Austen, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, but they are narrow.
17:16
SPEAKER_01: The Russians and the Americans write these deeply flawed novels,
17:19
SPEAKER_01: but they swing for the fences, to use a good baseball term.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: Every book is about all of human nature, all universality, God, every big thing.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: Whereas Jane Austen's about people living in a small town,
17:31
SPEAKER_01: you know, in incredible detail as to why that matters.
17:34
SPEAKER_01: And then outward, this starts big.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: Everything is big.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: But this book is the biggest of them all.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: All the characters, it's like a greatest hits for Dostoevsky, are here.
17:45
SPEAKER_01: The former Raskolnikov is Ivan, but he's just one character.
17:50
SPEAKER_01: Possessed.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: You know, that place it is.
17:53
SPEAKER_01: The devil, the Christlike character is Alexei.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: They're all in this one book.
17:57
SPEAKER_01: They're all related.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: And it's compact because of that.
18:00
SPEAKER_01: All of them are there in the same room, but it's also gigantically universal.
18:04
SPEAKER_01: And I can think of no other book that does little and big better than this book.
18:08
SPEAKER_01: And I can't think of a more ambitious book than this one, really.
18:12
SPEAKER_01: You know,
18:12
SPEAKER_01: some of the things they said that,
18:14
SPEAKER_01: you know,
18:14
SPEAKER_01: Dimitri says at one point,
18:16
SPEAKER_01: God and the devil are always fighting and the battlefield is the heart of men.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
18:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's beautiful.
18:22
SPEAKER_01: And that's it.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: And Zazima says, above all, don't lie to yourself.
18:26
SPEAKER_01: All the way through,
18:27
SPEAKER_01: the characters that break through are the ones that actually are telling the truth.
18:31
SPEAKER_01: They may be sexy.
18:33
SPEAKER_01: They can be embarrassed about sex.
18:35
SPEAKER_01: They can be embarrassed about women.
18:37
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter.
18:37
SPEAKER_01: But if you're true to yourself in a Socratic way, you do connect.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: It's very Aristotle back to the know thyself is above anything, you know, intellectual honesty.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: And if you lie to yourself, then how can you ever see reality in the world?
18:54
SPEAKER_00: How can you ever actually find truth?
18:56
SPEAKER_00: If you're so busy lying to yourself, you will never see truth.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: You can't, you'll let everything lie.
19:01
SPEAKER_01: Again, the Greeks, fruit from the poison tree.
19:03
SPEAKER_01: If the tree is poisoned, it doesn't matter how smart you are.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: Father Zosoma's point,
19:08
SPEAKER_01: and you said this,
19:08
SPEAKER_01: is the more I love humanity in general, the less I love men in particular.
19:12
SPEAKER_01: And there we go, yes.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: That's the realist, I mean, that's realism, you know.
19:17
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, yeah,
19:17
SPEAKER_01: in theory,
19:18
SPEAKER_01: but we've got to allow for these failings,
19:20
SPEAKER_01: these weaknesses, these strengths, these irrationalities, these rationalities.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: And you really psychologically see the characters drawn.
19:29
SPEAKER_01: The big ones, yes, but the women as well, Grushenka, Katerina, you see drawn really clearly.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: The servants who know what a loser Fyodor is, that he's this terrible man.
19:39
SPEAKER_01: But because of the Russian tradition,
19:40
SPEAKER_01: they try to defend him, even if Dmitry is about to kill him.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: And so there's love and hate.
19:47
SPEAKER_01: Constantly, we're contradictory creatures.
19:49
SPEAKER_01: And that's why I like studying us.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: And I have friends who do higher physics and things.
19:53
SPEAKER_01: My cousin does this stuff.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: We get together and try to explain each other to one another about once a year.
19:58
SPEAKER_01: And we fail miserably like the brothers Karamazov, because I say you're getting it wrong.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: You're looking for suit or certitude.
20:04
SPEAKER_01: What's great about human beings is when you're about to write us off,
20:07
SPEAKER_01: we'll do something incredibly brave and selfless for no reason.
20:11
SPEAKER_01: And when you're about to say we're noble,
20:12
SPEAKER_01: there'll be some mass murderer wandering around,
20:14
SPEAKER_01: you know,
20:16
SPEAKER_01: We're this very odd mix,
20:18
SPEAKER_01: wonderful and terrible in a Manichaean, Zoroastrian way even.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: And that Dostoevsky sees this,
20:24
SPEAKER_01: conveys this,
20:26
SPEAKER_01: and uses these people to explore the whole of human thinking,
20:29
SPEAKER_01: the whole of human nature in one family
20:33
SPEAKER_00: is extraordinary.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: Oh, no, absolutely.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: And I think when you write good psychology in the way that Dostoevsky did,
20:41
SPEAKER_00: it goes through the test of time.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: We all know people, including ourselves, that we can draw from this.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: You know,
20:49
SPEAKER_00: Dimitri,
20:50
SPEAKER_00: volatile but big-hearted,
20:52
SPEAKER_00: has loyalty,
20:54
SPEAKER_00: does a lot of stupid things and doesn't realize until he hits rock bottom
20:57
SPEAKER_00: that he needs a reckoning.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: That sounds like a lot of Jacksonians that I know.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: Passionate, loyal people.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: They might do some stupid things, but it doesn't mean that their heart is necessary.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: They don't have a malicious heart, but they continue to have these unintended consequences.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: Because they're never thinking four steps ahead, three steps ahead.
21:18
SPEAKER_00: They're not even thinking one step ahead.
21:20
SPEAKER_00: It's what do I do in this moment right now?
21:23
SPEAKER_00: And there's benefits to that sort of character as well.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: Someone that can truly live in the moment and enjoy the world.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: It's not paralyzed.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: That sounds like a lot of Jacksonians.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: Ivan, our rationalist,
21:40
SPEAKER_00: the person that wants to be smarter than everybody else in the room
21:43
SPEAKER_00: to write off his bad Yeah, exactly.
21:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Yvonne is the Brookings Institute.
21:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he really is.
21:52
SPEAKER_01: He's beneath all this rules-based order.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: He wants what he wants when he wants it, just like Dimitri does.
21:59
SPEAKER_01: I prefer Dimitri because at least he's honest about what he wants.
22:03
SPEAKER_01: Whereas Yvonne pretends he's doing Dmitry a favor.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: Yvonne says, oh, I'll take Katarina off your hands.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: I'll be your friend.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: He wants to marry her.
22:12
SPEAKER_01: He's madly in love with her.
22:13
SPEAKER_01: He wants Dmitry to go off with Grushenka because it gets him out of the way.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: Now, does he also care about his brother?
22:19
SPEAKER_01: It's not clear.
22:19
SPEAKER_01: And Dostoevsky allows for you to have more than one motivation
22:23
SPEAKER_01: to make you do things, which is right.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: But it's all rules-based order,
22:26
SPEAKER_01: which is another way of saying Constant Western domination in the case of Europe,
22:31
SPEAKER_01: constant Western domination without us paying for it.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: And that's Yvonne.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: I think Ivan too also shows this.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: I've been reflecting on this thought a lot lately with some of the people we have
22:46
SPEAKER_00: in office and just generally some of the people like you mentioned
22:49
SPEAKER_00: at places like Brookings,
22:50
SPEAKER_00: the difference between information holders and And people who are wise.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the difference of somebody like Ivan, who is it has tons of information.
23:00
SPEAKER_00: He knows how to use that information.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: He is a very smart person.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: But personally,
23:04
SPEAKER_00: I would not consider him a wise person because he does not use that knowledge
23:09
SPEAKER_00: that he has to still make decisions that are positive for the world around him.
23:15
SPEAKER_00: They're positive for himself.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: But I don't consider him a wise person as much as yeah, he's a smart person.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: He's not a wise person.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: But even,
23:22
SPEAKER_01: and he doesn't believe in anything,
23:23
SPEAKER_01: so who cares
23:24
SPEAKER_01: if he jumps it like a lot of Wilsonians.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things,
23:28
SPEAKER_01: he writes this article at the beginning that Father Zosom is people,
23:31
SPEAKER_01: though Father Zosom is very cool and doesn't care, but the guys around him care.
23:35
SPEAKER_01: And he says, basically, they're talking about the church and state thing.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's this really Russian thing.
23:40
SPEAKER_01: You're like, oh God, I got to read this.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: It's actually really interesting because it turns out Ivan writes this thing
23:46
SPEAKER_01: to scandalize the church that he doesn't believe in at all.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: He's a true utilitarian at the end of the day.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: He will use any sort of movement.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: He's the definition of a grifter.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: In modern day terms,
23:58
SPEAKER_00: we would call him a grifter because he'll attach himself
24:03
SPEAKER_00: onto any ideological movement if it's going to advance him and allow him to grift,
24:09
SPEAKER_00: allow him to make money,
24:10
SPEAKER_00: allow him to do whatever he wants to undermine things
24:13
SPEAKER_00: that he doesn't actually believe in.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: And man, there's a lot of that these days as well.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: There is.
24:19
SPEAKER_01: And in the end, it amounts to nothing.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: Again, I prefer the Jacksonian, Dimitri, who at least says, oh, screw it up.
24:25
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, I love you.
24:26
SPEAKER_01: I really do.
24:27
SPEAKER_01: And help me out.
24:29
SPEAKER_01: But neither of them are going to get there.
24:30
SPEAKER_01: But also, Alyosha, Alexei, needs the other ones to ground him.
24:35
SPEAKER_01: Father Zozma is wise to put him out in the world.
24:38
SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, he's just some ascetic sitting at some think tank, not connecting.
24:43
SPEAKER_01: And so they're very wise to force him in the novel to go out into the world
24:48
SPEAKER_01: where he can be of use, where he can do good things, where he can care about.
24:54
SPEAKER_01: Alyosha is the only one who cares about the family and
24:56
SPEAKER_01: in nationalist interest terms, the country, what we care about.
25:00
SPEAKER_01: He even cares about Feodor.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: He really does.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: And if Alexei doesn't go out into the world,
25:06
SPEAKER_00: Then Alexei just is a Wilsonian at the end of the day.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: It's the real world experiences that have to contrast with his naive views of
25:15
SPEAKER_00: the world that matters the most.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: That's what has to make him more of a realist figure because
25:21
SPEAKER_00: without this real world interaction, he would in fact just be a Wilsonian.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: And I meet plenty of people like this as well,
25:27
SPEAKER_00: people that I absolutely love that have just never left Albuquerque,
25:31
SPEAKER_00: New Mexico, a place I grew up.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: And they're very good people,
25:35
SPEAKER_00: but their viewpoint of the world and the way that they kind of think policy works
25:39
SPEAKER_00: or think foreign policy works or think relationships work.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: But they haven't dealt with reality enough.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: They don't know how to balance their worldview with reality.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: And that is the interesting story that I wish we would have got to see more of,
26:05
SPEAKER_00: of course, is how does Alexei balance his worldview with a grounded, gritty reality?
26:11
SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
26:12
SPEAKER_01: Because he holds on to it,
26:14
SPEAKER_01: but he accepts in a realist way,
26:16
SPEAKER_01: he has to organically deal with the world as he finds it,
26:19
SPEAKER_01: and then try to make it better.
26:21
SPEAKER_01: Very, very Burkean view.
26:23
SPEAKER_01: He does get that as he goes along.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: And like his father, he's not a fool.
26:27
SPEAKER_01: And I like that Dostoevsky is clear.
26:29
SPEAKER_01: He knows his father is no good that he's what did they say sentimental and vicious.
26:34
SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting choice of word.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: And he is vicious and like he attacks the clergy for no other reason that he doesn't like them.
26:40
SPEAKER_01: And he feels that they're morally superior to him and he hates
26:42
SPEAKER_01: that anyone's morally superior to him.
26:44
SPEAKER_01: So he embarrasses them.
26:46
SPEAKER_01: And he does that because he doesn't care if he's a buffoon if he embarrasses them.
26:49
SPEAKER_01: I know people who are that petulant, that nihilistic.
26:51
SPEAKER_01: We all do.
26:54
SPEAKER_01: Alexei sees this but doesn't stop loving and say,
26:57
SPEAKER_01: I care about the whole, all of the brothers for all their sins.
27:00
SPEAKER_01: He's open.
27:01
SPEAKER_01: And he's always open to Dimitri trying to help him along the road.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: And he's the one in the end,
27:08
SPEAKER_01: because he is open and honest,
27:11
SPEAKER_01: who puts it all together and actually begins to see what the truth might be.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: And may we hope realism does the same.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: But what a novel.
27:19
SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
27:21
SPEAKER_00: To wrap up Alexi's character,
27:23
SPEAKER_00: and I think we'll start wrapping up this part of the podcast as well.
27:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: Since MLB playoffs are starting today,
27:30
SPEAKER_00: I recently hosted an event where I got to meet MLB legend Joe Girardi,
27:38
SPEAKER_00: who did manage my Phillies for a little bit,
27:40
SPEAKER_00: did not end in a World Series ring that year,
27:44
SPEAKER_00: but he did win a World Series ring with the Yankees,
27:47
SPEAKER_00: but he kind of gave,
27:49
SPEAKER_00: his keynote speech was a little bit Alexi-inspired,
27:52
SPEAKER_00: if I would say so myself,
27:53
SPEAKER_00: because he was asked about How did you take that really crappy Marlins team in
27:58
SPEAKER_00: the early 2000s that was projected to lose 100 games?
28:01
SPEAKER_00: And they weren't great, but you outpaced all your projections.
28:05
SPEAKER_00: Still the only manager to win manager of the year with a losing record, which is interesting.
28:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
28:11
SPEAKER_00: He broke down this idea that if you replace the word leadership,
28:16
SPEAKER_00: and what makes a good leader with the word love,
28:19
SPEAKER_00: nothing fundamentally changes in what you're doing.
28:23
SPEAKER_00: That leadership is love.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: And I think that that's kind of what I get from Alexei's character,
28:28
SPEAKER_00: that the way he leads is through his heart.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: And I think that that is beautiful.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: I do too.
28:34
SPEAKER_01: And I love that again,
28:35
SPEAKER_01: that doesn't make him a moron or simple minded,
28:38
SPEAKER_01: but the heart is what leads him and the openness to confront the world
28:43
SPEAKER_01: as it is not always nice, but still love.
28:46
SPEAKER_01: To see your father for who he is and still love him.
28:49
SPEAKER_01: To see your brothers for their weaknesses as well as their strengths and still love them.
28:53
SPEAKER_01: That's why everyone is drawn to him in the novel.
28:56
SPEAKER_01: Everyone.
28:57
SPEAKER_01: Everyone else,
28:57
SPEAKER_01: as someone who dislikes them,
29:00
SPEAKER_01: everyone loves Alexei because he's trying,
29:03
SPEAKER_01: and I mean that with a capital T, I mean that in a stoical Greek way.
29:07
SPEAKER_01: And as you say, what an example.
29:09
SPEAKER_01: And I think the Girardi quote is perfect and a good place for us to stop.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: It's all about love.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, everyone, so much for listening.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: As always, please do like, restack this, send it to your friends, share it.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify,
29:26
SPEAKER_00: please thank you,
29:27
SPEAKER_00: number one, and please do share these out on those platforms as well.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: Leave a comment what you like,
29:34
SPEAKER_00: what you don't like,
29:35
SPEAKER_00: or just leave a comment if you just say thanks down below just to keep
29:39
SPEAKER_00: the algorithm growing.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: It's what helps us grow.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: It's what helps the algorithm go.
29:44
SPEAKER_00: But thank you all so much for listening.
29:46
SPEAKER_00: And we're very excited for these next couple weeks.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: As we finish off at least this portion of all of our Dostoevsky books and look
29:54
SPEAKER_00: at moving forward into the West.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: So thank you all so much.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: And we'll talk to you soon.
29:59
SPEAKER_01: Everybody take care.