Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
snrynkee's review against another edition
5.0
This is an excellent book of insights on how Dostoevsky thought. I am currently reading Crime and Punishment, and this book will help me finish it with a new perspective of its author.
hayesstw's review against another edition
4.0
I bought this book nearly 50 years ago, and started reading it several times, but never got further than the first couple of chapters, perhaps because I thought I should be more familiar with Dostoevsky's own works before reading this one, but perhaps it should be read concurrently.
I've made a few other attempts since then, but not until now have I managed to read it all the way through. It's a mixture of literary criticism, theology and philosophy, and Berdyaev makes a point of comparing Dostoevsky with Tolstoy, usually to the detriment of the latter.
The first part makes the point that Dostoevsky writes from a Christian point of view, with a strong stress on human freedom. There is no hint of predestination here, and Dostoevsky's theodicy is that evil is found in the world because man has freedom to choose it, and the way to combat evil is through redemptive suffering. Calvinists probably won't find much to agree with here.
The prime expression of this is in the legend of The Grand Inquisitor as told in [b:The Brothers Karamazov|4934|The Brothers Karamazov|Fyodor Dostoyevsky|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1427728126s/4934.jpg|3393910] The Grand Inquisitor (who in Berdyaev's description sounds very like Mustapha Mond in [b:Brave New World|5479|Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited|Aldous Huxley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1331315450s/5479.jpg|39947767]) maintains that men are unhappy when free, and it is much better to organise their lives for them. Freedom, of a sort, might be for a small elite.
So far it seems to make a lot of sense, and makes sense of Dostoevsky's novels -- the ones I have read, anyway. There is even a kind of defence of the current slogan #alllivesmatter, which some Americans regard as very politically incorrect.
But there are things that I have more doubts about. Berdyaev regards socialism as necessarily atheistic and anti-Christian, which seems to conflict with what he has written elsewhere, and it is only right at the end that he brings in the qualification that he is referring to socialism as a religion, and not as a social or economic system. It might have helped if the had made that clear from the beginning.
Nowadays we hear quite a bit about American Exceptionalism, and at times in the book Berdyaev seems to be preaching a kind of Russian exceptionalism. He goes off into long strings of abstractions, wittering on about the "Russian mind" and the "Russian soul". One gathers that the Russian mind is apocalyptic, but it's never quite clear in what way, though at times the language seems to be over-hyped: "the spiritual warp of Dostoievsky's disciples was different. Their eyes were turned to an unknown but threatening future, apocalyptic waves broke over them, they were dashed from one extremity to its opposite; above all they were to experience that inner division that the men of the 'forties did not undergo..."
That sort of prose puts me in mind of videos of tsunamis in Japan and Indonesia.
And then there are such generalisations as this:
Several different interpretations of this have occurred to me, and I've already forgotten some of them. So if anyone is still reading this, I'll leave you to come up with your own.
I've made a few other attempts since then, but not until now have I managed to read it all the way through. It's a mixture of literary criticism, theology and philosophy, and Berdyaev makes a point of comparing Dostoevsky with Tolstoy, usually to the detriment of the latter.
The first part makes the point that Dostoevsky writes from a Christian point of view, with a strong stress on human freedom. There is no hint of predestination here, and Dostoevsky's theodicy is that evil is found in the world because man has freedom to choose it, and the way to combat evil is through redemptive suffering. Calvinists probably won't find much to agree with here.
The prime expression of this is in the legend of The Grand Inquisitor as told in [b:The Brothers Karamazov|4934|The Brothers Karamazov|Fyodor Dostoyevsky|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1427728126s/4934.jpg|3393910] The Grand Inquisitor (who in Berdyaev's description sounds very like Mustapha Mond in [b:Brave New World|5479|Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited|Aldous Huxley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1331315450s/5479.jpg|39947767]) maintains that men are unhappy when free, and it is much better to organise their lives for them. Freedom, of a sort, might be for a small elite.
So far it seems to make a lot of sense, and makes sense of Dostoevsky's novels -- the ones I have read, anyway. There is even a kind of defence of the current slogan #alllivesmatter, which some Americans regard as very politically incorrect.
But there are things that I have more doubts about. Berdyaev regards socialism as necessarily atheistic and anti-Christian, which seems to conflict with what he has written elsewhere, and it is only right at the end that he brings in the qualification that he is referring to socialism as a religion, and not as a social or economic system. It might have helped if the had made that clear from the beginning.
Nowadays we hear quite a bit about American Exceptionalism, and at times in the book Berdyaev seems to be preaching a kind of Russian exceptionalism. He goes off into long strings of abstractions, wittering on about the "Russian mind" and the "Russian soul". One gathers that the Russian mind is apocalyptic, but it's never quite clear in what way, though at times the language seems to be over-hyped: "the spiritual warp of Dostoievsky's disciples was different. Their eyes were turned to an unknown but threatening future, apocalyptic waves broke over them, they were dashed from one extremity to its opposite; above all they were to experience that inner division that the men of the 'forties did not undergo..."
That sort of prose puts me in mind of videos of tsunamis in Japan and Indonesia.
And then there are such generalisations as this:
The Russian gladly rids himself of all cultural trappings in the hope that in the "state of nature" true being may be revealed to him; of course it is not, because culture is in fact the way that leads to the reality of being: divine life itself is the highest culture of the spirit.
Several different interpretations of this have occurred to me, and I've already forgotten some of them. So if anyone is still reading this, I'll leave you to come up with your own.