Dickens

Nearly all Dickens' characters are odious or stupid - or both.

Most of the rest are fatally flawed or more or less anonymous victims.

Ralph Nickleby is an even more villainous Scrooge.

Everything is shabby, everywhere people are cold and desperate.

But it is all petty bourgeois, like the desperate clerks and minor officials of Dostoevsky.

No millwrights, carpenters, coachmen, miners, peasants, or common laborers.

No more than the Russian.

Yes, there is humor in his satire, and not always bitter.

Reading Nicholas Nickleby.

This clinches it. Trump is Fyodor Karamazov.

Fine, you were never big on Russian Lit and Dostoevsky's books are too damn long.

So see the movie.

Lee J. Cobb is brilliant in the role.

Fyodor Karamazov is absolutely our president, and this stuff is not going to stop. 

This is who his voters chose for the White House.

I learn from Lawrence O'Donnell that Trump explained Hillary's nearly three million vote lead in the popular vote, perhaps in his CIA speech the other day, by claiming three to five million illegal aliens voted for her.

Brian Williams said later Trump made that claim in a meeting today with Congressional leaders of both parties.   

You have to wonder if anybody laughed, or told him he was full of, er, beans.    

Or maybe they just all froze, rigid for a moment, taken aback and speechless at such a ludicrous stink-bomb.    

A perfect Fyodor moment.    

And O says all the Trump voters he personally knows explain her lead in the same way.

Oh, my.

Tribe, who really should give it up and retire, was on arguing a flaky case that Trump's hotels and other interests in foreign parts are a violation of the emoluments clause.

Nah.

And Trump said twice to the CIA we "should have kept the oil," when we were in Iraq, and that we might get another chance.

O'Donnell showed clips of him publicly saying the same long before he even ran for president.

O pointed out that is a war crime and a violation of the Geneva Convention, and that Bush the Elder made war against Saddam Hussein because the Iraqi dictator had invaded Kuwait in order to "take the oil."

Are we all waiting for The Duce to publicly say, again, we ought to be torturing terrorists and "going after their families"?

Or will he publicly deny that he ever said it, and say it is a vicious liberal media lie to say he said it?

Or make Sean Spicer do it, thus adding to his amusement?

And remember all that talk with Billy Bush about grabbing pussies?

Perfect Fyodor.

Especially if he knew it was being recorded.

For the next four years, unless he is out before then, everyone will studiously pretend that the emperor is not only clothed but beautifully so.

They will do their utmost to do business as they would with a real president, pretending constantly that that is not Fyodor Karamazov in the White House.

What does it mean that Dostoevsky named this character after himself? 

Trump so far

Who is Trump?

Mussolini?

Mary Lincoln?

Maybe we should look at literature rather than history.

Fyodor Karamazov, as played by Lee J. Cobb?

I like it.

It fits pretty well.

Trump so far

Among other things, he withdrew from negotiations re TPP.

And he told the National Park Service not to tweet after it retweeted side-by-side images showing the crowd at former President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration and Trump's inauguration.

And he will renegotiate NAFTA.

When the rubber finally hits the road he will discover the senate has to OK any changes to existing treaty arrangements.

And tariffs will require congressional approval.

Has he even begun to discuss any of this with Congressional leaders?

The Republican Party leadership is pretty firmly wed to free trade.

This is what he promised to do on his first day.

The Grand Inquisitor

Why on Earth should D have presented this scornful attack on the RC Church as Ivan's?

Why, when Ivan is revealing his most intimate, personally crucial thoughts to his brother, Alyosha?

Karamazov, Dostoyevsky.

No, thank you.

Ivan rejects creation, refusing to pay with the tears of a single child for endless and infinite bliss for all others of mankind, even supposing it is not an unspeakable, mad, baseless cruelty that this price should be demanded.

Imagine what he would make of the Machiavellian principle.

Karamazov, Book 5, chapters 3 and 4.

The insulted and injured

Snegiryov and his entire family of hateful hysterics are ridiculous.

Dostoyevsky's poor are always overdone.

Another inch and they would be despicable.

Karamazov, Lacerations.

Dostoevsky's books are full of contemptible hysterics, by no means all women, but some of them.

Katerina, Dmitri's betrothed, for example.

Oxymoron

Karamazov, Signet Classic pb., p 194.

There was a bed against the wall on each side, right and left, covered with knitted quilts.

The translator or the author?

The former, I think.

Lost opportunities

What if Schopenhauer had also written novels?

Or poetry?

Thomas Hardy is close, but still.

Reading Karamazov.

It doesn't take him long to lay it out

In the interview with Zossima right at the beginning, Dostoyevsky lays it all out.

Karamazov.

"Her nostrils were too far apart."

Manuel Komroff in his forward to The Brothers Karamazov, Signet Classics, 1958, foreword copyright 1957.

Describing Anna, 18 years old when Dostoyevsky married her.

He was 45 and, according to Komroff, soon to become the world's greatest novelist.

That's what he says.

Crime and Punishment

Not his best.

Just read it, again.

Devils

Dostoevsky.

Everybody dies.

Excellent, fast read for 750 pages.

The talented crackpot

Dostoevsky, Devils.

The narrator, himself a character in the story, whenever he speaks of Jews calls them "Yids."

From a writer who calls the Pope "antichrist" and despises Catholicism this is hard to ignore.

Dostoevsky, drunkard and slavophile bigot.

Liberals and nihilists

Reading Devils.

Dostoevsky writes of nihilists plotting a revolution of sheer destruction as a species of liberals.

Proper taxonomy of the age and place or just the sort of conservative slander familiar in our time?

'Our group meets.'

Who read whom?

Dostoevsky or Bismarck, which read the other?

Kirillov tells Peter Stepanovich why he plans to kill himself and one reason he gives is fear of death.

Bismarck once rejected preventive war with the remark that it was like committing suicide out of fear of death.

Devils was published in 1871.

But when did Bismarck say that, if he really did?

Peter Stepanovich gets busy

Devils, Dostoevsky.

A hair past the middle of the book, this malevolent booby thinks he's actually going to make a revolution!

So he reveals after a brief visit to the novelist Karmazinov.

Dostoevsky, always good for a laugh

Reading Devils.

Night.

Stavrogin: Everyone deserves an umbrella.

Captain Lebyadkin: In one little phrase you've defined the minimum of human rights.

Lebyadkin a little later mumbles to himself about Stavrogin, "He lives to harm other people."

A little later Stavrogin tells Fedka, the convict, who has recently robbed a church and murdered his accomplice, "Go on killing, go on stealing."

Revolutionaries, indeed

Reading Devils, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Part Two, Night.

FD writes of a famous provincial writer seeking to ingratiate himself with a circle of  wholly insignificant soi-disant revolutionaries in the belief they might represent the future of the country.

As though one might seriously have thought in the 1960s that the future of America might belong to the likes of Bill Ayers.

Some delusional people think they speak for God and will create a Universal Caliphate.

Others think they represent, or even are, a generation.

And others think they are the future rulers of the country and will make a revolution.

The latter two delusions were common in America in the 1960s and 70s.

To this day their victims have never recovered.

Nor have their admirers, fellow travelers, or dupes, for the most part.

Reading Dostoevsky

Devils.

The first chapter would be cruel if it were not burlesque.

Downright funny characterization of radical chic.

Tom Wofle with a sense of humor.

Varvara Stavrogina seems to have bipolar disorder.

Think of Mary Todd Lincoln.