I'm a history major and a history buff, so I would like to make my own contribution to this discussion by offering for everyone here in the Athenaeum Book Club audience, these titles to learn more about Russian history:
* The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes
* Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes
* The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore
* A Kingdom and a Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow by Simon Morrison
* Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921 by Antony Beevor
* Russia and the Russians: A History, Second Edition by Geoffrey Hosking
* Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie
* Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie
* Stalin: The Court of the Red Star by Simon Sebag Montefiore
* A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes
* When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler by David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House
* Khruschev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman
* Gorbachev: His Life and Times by William Taubman
* Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman by Susan Schattenberg
* Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia by Benjamin Nathans
Thank you! Excellent list! Its also can be more difficult to understand or compute Russian literature without a deeper understanding of Russian spirituality, specifically Orthodox Christianity. A deeper dive there will help inform any reading of Russian literature.
I have been waiting anxiously for this podcast episode to come out! I was not previously aware of the Athenaeum Book Club, but he did an excellent job of conducting this interview and have become a free subscriber. His style of interviewing is conversational, seamless and flows smoothly. I am a fairly longtime subscriber and fan of Liza and Pens and Poison's. She is a brilliant writer, poet, thinker, intellectual, and scholar! She perfectly explains in a simple, straightforward way anyone could understand what Crime and Punishment is about. She distills this very complex work of literature down to its very essence. I knew literally nothing about Russian literature before listening to this interview. What little I have heard about it comes from Liza. I literally read no Russian literature at all in school whether it be K-12 or college. Nor do I know how to speak any other languages, so those nuances Liza spoke of found in other languages are something I was completely oblivious to. I now understand perfectly after listening to this interview why Crime and Punishment is considered such a profound work of literature and is a classic that has stood the test of time. Fyodor Dostoevsky was a genius at mining the human psyche to teach readers around the world for generation after generation about the big questions facing humanity. After doing some research about his life, I now understand why he focused so much on existential questions about human existence and had this inner darkness and depression to him. He lived such a hard life! He saw the very worst of humanity and experienced great personal hardship and tragedy! He was arrested in 1849 for reading banned books that were critical of Tsarist Russia. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian hard labor camp followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile.
Dostoevsky as a result of developing a gambling addiction, suffered severe financial hardship during his lifetime at one point, he was forced to beg for money on the street. He lost his baby daughter Sofya to pneumonia at just three months old. Towards the end of his life, he suffered from all kinds of aliments before dying from a final of three pulmonary hemorrhages at the age of just 59 in 1881. But despite how incredible hard and filled with tragedy his life was, he still gave so many great works of literature that will live on forever like Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Demons, The Adolescent, Notes from the Underground, The House of the Dead, A Writer's Diary, and Twilight of the Idols. Rodion Raskolnikov is spiritually dead, his life lacks any sort of deeper meaning. He longs for some sort of spiritual meaning, but he can't quite identify exactly what that is supposed to be. He believes he has found this spiritual purpose he longs for in being like the great men of history like Napoleon Bonaparte and Sir Isaac Newton. A giant who towers above all others. So, he starts to kill other people not because he is poor or to support his family, but because he sees as a means to obtaining the transcendence in life he has been seeking for so long now by through committing murder, proving he is one of those great men who stand out from others if not above them. He doesn't believe in a God, so therefore he fancies himself a God in other words. As Liza explains, if human beings don't have a God to look to for transcendence, they will seek to obtain by playing God themselves. Let's just say whenever this has happened in history it has no ended well be it National Socialism, Fascism, Communism, Socialism, or Islamism. All ideologies that in a perverse way sought to their own form Utilitarianism as they defined it, to create a prefect world that in their mind would be just, free and wonderful. This is dangerous! Only God should be in charge of making such decisions as we have learned from the hundreds of millions of deaths and billions of shattered lives left in the wake of these evil totalitarian ideologies. Raskolnikov finally finds the meaning he seeks by becoming a Christian and finding redemption from God. He does so through the love of his life Dunya who believes in second chances. But first he has to go through that crisis of meaning and the guilt he feels for committing his wicked deeds. For is only through suffering that we can discover what good truly is. This interview came out at an opportune in my life because only recently, I was in a situation in my life where I came to understand this. As always, I learn from Liza.
You seem almost animated talking about the firing squad that Dostoevsky faced, even seemingly smiling about it, almost laughing. This is just not right.
To me, it would have shaped his life immensely afterward, adding deeply to his profound sense of justice and the tenuous nature of life, he being the proto-Raskolnikov as it were.
This is great! Lisa brings the novel, and Dostoevsky, alive with her scholarship and passion. He is obscure to the modern mind, which is so different from a mid-1800s Russian mind, and has little patience. He is also a formidable mix of morality, philosophy and personal drama. But Lisa weaves it together beautifully. I loved this. Have her do more!
I took my eldest son and his friend to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and saw demonstrated a juxtaposition of the modern relativism with Shakespeare’s moral clarity. The players creatively sang as a side additive a song suggesting no one can tell right from wrong and then Shakespeare’s play proceeded to present overwhelming examples of right and wrong, clearly discernible to the audience, except those mired in sophistry
The humanly created world is an immensely powerful incomprehensible pattern patterning. Nobody is or ever has been in charge. On the contrary everyone is in some sense in charge. Everyone transmits their mental-emotional state in all directions. Everyone is thus affecting everyone else and being simultaneously affected by everyone else, and the unstoppable momentum of the pattern patterning.
Reading the classics, however seemingly insightful or prophetic will not and cannot make the slightest difference.
Liza has a gift for clarifying the classics with enthusiasm and high intelligence.Kudos
I'm a history major and a history buff, so I would like to make my own contribution to this discussion by offering for everyone here in the Athenaeum Book Club audience, these titles to learn more about Russian history:
* The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes
* Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes
* The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore
* A Kingdom and a Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow by Simon Morrison
* Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921 by Antony Beevor
* Russia and the Russians: A History, Second Edition by Geoffrey Hosking
* Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie
* Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie
* Stalin: The Court of the Red Star by Simon Sebag Montefiore
* A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes
* When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler by David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House
* Khruschev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman
* Gorbachev: His Life and Times by William Taubman
* Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman by Susan Schattenberg
* Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia by Benjamin Nathans
Thank you! Excellent list! Its also can be more difficult to understand or compute Russian literature without a deeper understanding of Russian spirituality, specifically Orthodox Christianity. A deeper dive there will help inform any reading of Russian literature.
I have been waiting anxiously for this podcast episode to come out! I was not previously aware of the Athenaeum Book Club, but he did an excellent job of conducting this interview and have become a free subscriber. His style of interviewing is conversational, seamless and flows smoothly. I am a fairly longtime subscriber and fan of Liza and Pens and Poison's. She is a brilliant writer, poet, thinker, intellectual, and scholar! She perfectly explains in a simple, straightforward way anyone could understand what Crime and Punishment is about. She distills this very complex work of literature down to its very essence. I knew literally nothing about Russian literature before listening to this interview. What little I have heard about it comes from Liza. I literally read no Russian literature at all in school whether it be K-12 or college. Nor do I know how to speak any other languages, so those nuances Liza spoke of found in other languages are something I was completely oblivious to. I now understand perfectly after listening to this interview why Crime and Punishment is considered such a profound work of literature and is a classic that has stood the test of time. Fyodor Dostoevsky was a genius at mining the human psyche to teach readers around the world for generation after generation about the big questions facing humanity. After doing some research about his life, I now understand why he focused so much on existential questions about human existence and had this inner darkness and depression to him. He lived such a hard life! He saw the very worst of humanity and experienced great personal hardship and tragedy! He was arrested in 1849 for reading banned books that were critical of Tsarist Russia. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian hard labor camp followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile.
Dostoevsky as a result of developing a gambling addiction, suffered severe financial hardship during his lifetime at one point, he was forced to beg for money on the street. He lost his baby daughter Sofya to pneumonia at just three months old. Towards the end of his life, he suffered from all kinds of aliments before dying from a final of three pulmonary hemorrhages at the age of just 59 in 1881. But despite how incredible hard and filled with tragedy his life was, he still gave so many great works of literature that will live on forever like Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Demons, The Adolescent, Notes from the Underground, The House of the Dead, A Writer's Diary, and Twilight of the Idols. Rodion Raskolnikov is spiritually dead, his life lacks any sort of deeper meaning. He longs for some sort of spiritual meaning, but he can't quite identify exactly what that is supposed to be. He believes he has found this spiritual purpose he longs for in being like the great men of history like Napoleon Bonaparte and Sir Isaac Newton. A giant who towers above all others. So, he starts to kill other people not because he is poor or to support his family, but because he sees as a means to obtaining the transcendence in life he has been seeking for so long now by through committing murder, proving he is one of those great men who stand out from others if not above them. He doesn't believe in a God, so therefore he fancies himself a God in other words. As Liza explains, if human beings don't have a God to look to for transcendence, they will seek to obtain by playing God themselves. Let's just say whenever this has happened in history it has no ended well be it National Socialism, Fascism, Communism, Socialism, or Islamism. All ideologies that in a perverse way sought to their own form Utilitarianism as they defined it, to create a prefect world that in their mind would be just, free and wonderful. This is dangerous! Only God should be in charge of making such decisions as we have learned from the hundreds of millions of deaths and billions of shattered lives left in the wake of these evil totalitarian ideologies. Raskolnikov finally finds the meaning he seeks by becoming a Christian and finding redemption from God. He does so through the love of his life Dunya who believes in second chances. But first he has to go through that crisis of meaning and the guilt he feels for committing his wicked deeds. For is only through suffering that we can discover what good truly is. This interview came out at an opportune in my life because only recently, I was in a situation in my life where I came to understand this. As always, I learn from Liza.
Awesome interview! Fabulous insights both into Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky as a person, as well as contrasts to modern day literature. Thank you!
Great talk. Really enjoyed the nuances mentioned of the Russian words.
You seem almost animated talking about the firing squad that Dostoevsky faced, even seemingly smiling about it, almost laughing. This is just not right.
To me, it would have shaped his life immensely afterward, adding deeply to his profound sense of justice and the tenuous nature of life, he being the proto-Raskolnikov as it were.
This is great! Lisa brings the novel, and Dostoevsky, alive with her scholarship and passion. He is obscure to the modern mind, which is so different from a mid-1800s Russian mind, and has little patience. He is also a formidable mix of morality, philosophy and personal drama. But Lisa weaves it together beautifully. I loved this. Have her do more!
I took my eldest son and his friend to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and saw demonstrated a juxtaposition of the modern relativism with Shakespeare’s moral clarity. The players creatively sang as a side additive a song suggesting no one can tell right from wrong and then Shakespeare’s play proceeded to present overwhelming examples of right and wrong, clearly discernible to the audience, except those mired in sophistry
Very interesting - but so what!
Especially if you check out this very sobering website which describes the state of the humanly created collective psychosis.
http://reeswilliame.substack.com
The humanly created world is an immensely powerful incomprehensible pattern patterning. Nobody is or ever has been in charge. On the contrary everyone is in some sense in charge. Everyone transmits their mental-emotional state in all directions. Everyone is thus affecting everyone else and being simultaneously affected by everyone else, and the unstoppable momentum of the pattern patterning.
Reading the classics, however seemingly insightful or prophetic will not and cannot make the slightest difference.