Recently the author Michael Cunningham (The Hours, A Wild Swan) said that he had come to think of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain as "a book I’d spend my entire life intending to read." It wants focus and isolation (rather like Hans Castorp's years in a sanatorium on the mountain), "enormous in every sense of the world."
The Magic Mountain also reveals how the relationship between writers and readers has changed since 1924, "a reminder of a kind of relationship to a book that’s difficult to maintain, now."
How many of us, in 2020, can devote two months to reading one book every single night, all the more so when it’s a book that can be transcendent and can be exasperating? I’ve been thinking, ever since, about how the relationship between writers and readers has changed since Thomas Mann came and went.
Cunningham hated it on same days, adored it on others, and threw it across the room twice. Apparently he finished it, nevertheless.
I had my own experience lately with The Karamazov Brothers, in the translation by the late Ignat Avsey. Is that properly The Brothers Karamazov? Well, no; that title (of Бра́тья Карама́зовы) was a modest affection by Constance Garnett's 1912 translation, the English edition most available to most people. (There were others, including a significant reworking of Garnett's version for the Norton Critical Edition, 1976.) Avsey wanted to make his translation both readable in natural English and more faithful to Dostoevsky's rough-edged Russian than Garnett's adaptation of the novel's numerous voices, and dense prose.
I had my own experience lately with The Karamazov Brothers, in the translation by the late Ignat Avsey. Is that properly The Brothers Karamazov? Well, no; that title (of Бра́тья Карама́зовы) was a modest affection by Constance Garnett's 1912 translation, the English edition most available to most people. (There were others, including a significant reworking of Garnett's version for the Norton Critical Edition, 1976.) Avsey wanted to make his translation both readable in natural English and more faithful to Dostoevsky's rough-edged Russian than Garnett's adaptation of the novel's numerous voices, and dense prose.
Kay Bross, as I began to think of it, like The Magic Mountain demands two months of sustained reading—ideal for a time of pandemic and social isolation. It renders an entire world of a Russian provincial town named "Skotoprigonievsk" ("animal coral" or pen, a Russian version of fictional Winesburg, Ohio). Dostoevsky wrote much of the novel in Staraya Russa, a provincial town with several features that appear in the novel, such as the adjoining Monastery of the Transfiguration (Spaso Preobrajensky mon).
Собор Спасо-Преображенский: улица Володарского, Тимура Фрунзе, Старая Русса, Новгородская область: Wikimedia CCA:SA 4.0
The world of the novel has many voices: Ivan's tale of the Grand Inquisitor, his encounter with "the Devil," the life and sayings of Starets Zosima (a holy man), the formal, authorial account of the trial of Dmitri Fyodorovitch Karamazov, among others. It represents an immersion in an intricate, class-based society animated by concepts of honor and holiness that clash with newer, bourgeois ideas of commercial value, transactional relationships, and the "science vs. faith" argument. Reading the novel demands a great deal of energy and attention, but pays off with its celebration of humanity, both good and bad, and the promise of grace and resurrection.
Certainly we shall be resurrected, certainly, we shall see one another again and we shall tell one another happily, joyfully, everything that has happened.
The Karamazov Brothers, Oxford World's Classics, p. 974
When Aloysha, the unforgettable, cherubic third Karamazov son says everything —in a novel of 900-odd pages—he means everything. Not a flower petal, not a spring onion, not a child nor a thief, will be left behind.
I first read Kay Bross forty years ago, for a class on Russian Orthodoxy at Princeton Theological Seminary, taught by the legendary Fr. Georges Florovsky. Father Flo (as he was known only behind his back) was himself a character from Dostoevsky: born in Odessa in 1893, the erudite son of an Orthodox priest, exiled in 1920, further educated in Prague, ordained 1932 in Paris, teaching at St. Serge Institute there, then St. Vladimir's Seminary in Crestwood, New York, then at Princeton University until his death in 1979. I knew him only in his very last years, when he was entirely deaf in one ear, reading and commenting from his collected works. He was then a living connection to a lost world, a fragile, black-robed octogenarian on Mercer Street, a local saint living on the social margin of Princeton in the William Bowen and James McCord years.
Now forty years later I sometimes feel like a living connection to a lost world of prosperous, middle-class industrial Michigan as the working class began to decline even before the neo-liberal disaster of the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama decades. The world of Kay Bross seems only a little more remote. Its vivid testimony to the power of grace in forgiveness, loyalty, and resurrection has touched me in new ways in a time of fear, uncertainty, and viral pandemic.
Kay Bross needs the reader to come to life, and all of the reader. It is both uncompromising in its demands and unstinting in its full humanity. Its run-on prolixity approximates the pace of human time: sometimes fleeting, sometimes hardly passing at all.
When Aloysha drenches the earth "with 'the tears of thy joy, and love thy tears' . . . threads from all God's countless worlds converged in his soul . . . He wished to forgive everyone for everything, and ask forgiveness—oh, not for himself, but for others!" (p. 456) In that moment, something firm and immutable as heaven entered his soul: God's grace to all, the Holy and Wholly Other. Certainly we shall be resurrected, surely the Divine shall draw us to God's self and transfigure our health, justice, and relationships. Hurrah for Karamazov!
