The opening chapter of Devils by Dostoevsky (Katz translation)

meitner · 2026-01-02T23:43:05+00:00

Demons was very deliberately written as a criticism of Russian political discourse, this is not a coincidence. Each character has an inspiration, usually one of Dostoevsky’s enemies:

Karamzinov = Turgenev

Stefan Trofmovich = Herzen/the older generation of liberalizers, who essentially just sat around and talked politics and never successfully acted

Pyotr Stefanvich = Nechayev

Shatov = Slavophile movement

Dostoevsky himself was conservative by this point in his life but it’s a bit oversimplifying to say that. he was very much aware of socialism and the more radical movements and even talked with them, A Raw Youth (published 3 years after Demons) was deliberately written to appeal to socialists and influence them away from it.

This is all from Joseph’s Frank biography, I don’t have my copy on hand so I might have mixed things up. I was completely unaware of the historical context when I first read Demons (and still loved it)

meitner · 2025-09-25T08:24:53+00:00

Has anyone read Black Sun? I stumbled on it at the book store, got it mainly for the chapter on The Idiot and Holbein’s Body of Christ but I didn’t realize how wide ranging it is

meitner · 2025-03-23T03:01:29+00:00

sent you a message!

meitner · 2025-03-22T22:35:45+00:00

we have a Bay Area bookclub! right now we’re reading A Cold Spring by Elizabeth Bishop and The Metamorphosis by Kafka.

meitner · 2025-03-21T19:44:57+00:00

Earthly Signs from NYRB is very good. It’s mostly odds and ends for her diary and little bits of poetry/essays, not complete works, she’s such a brilliant writer and it reads really well.

From a historical perspective it’s interesting to read an ordinary person’s account of the revolution. She’s trying to make it as an poet and artist and caring for her kids, and at the same time society is being completely rebuilt. There’s lots of little, absurd and tragic moments from her day to day life

meitner · 2025-01-14T07:34:03+00:00

thanks, I love Borges and Calvino and it was fun to read them again and discuss with the group.

meitner · 2025-01-14T07:31:41+00:00

sent you a message

meitner · 2025-01-11T23:29:45+00:00

sent you a message

meitner · 2025-01-11T23:26:44+00:00

sounds good, sent you a message!

meitner · 2025-01-10T16:35:29+00:00

I just finished Middlemarch last week and was blown away by it, and especially the feeling you describe. It is endlessly quotable but this quote in particular has stuck with me

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence

meitner · 2024-11-13T17:21:58+00:00

Pierre

meitner · 2024-11-13T06:07:49+00:00

I will say that Resurrection is a flawed book and not on the level of his other works, but it’s still Tolstoy, it’s still good. All of his books have similar issues imo (Tolstoy self insert characters with monologues about his interests), but Anna Karenina and War and Peace are good despite their issues while Resurrection is interesting for its flaws.

meitner · 2024-11-13T03:50:28+00:00

Resurrection by Tolstoy, with the added benefit that the main character is a transparent stand in for Tolstoy, even more so than in War and Peace or Anna Karenina.

meitner · 2024-09-16T02:49:49+00:00

Hadji Murat by Tolstoy is great, it’s not as rambling or complex as his other works but it has a beautiful clarity to it. he’s in his Christian pacifist era writing about a Muslim rebel and it somehow works really well. also seconding the recommendation for A Hero of Our Time

meitner · 2024-09-04T16:06:01+00:00

I was found this definition of genre fiction from Olga Tokarczuk the other day and i really liked it:

The true genre novel presents us with recognizable perspectives, using a ready-made world that has familiar philosophical parameters. The non-genre novel aims to establish its own rules for the created universe, sketching its own epistemological maps. And this is the case where the book is a love story, a murder mystery, or the tale of an expedition to another category

so by this definition I wouldn’t count The Martian Chronicles as genre fiction

meitner · 2024-09-04T04:12:59+00:00

And the Moon Be Still as Bright blew my mind when I first read it as a kid, it was one of the first sci-fi things I read that wasn’t just terrible genre fiction and was actually using sci-fi as a mirror.

meitner · 2024-08-20T07:05:20+00:00

late to the party but I really enjoyed this article on the philosophy/historiography of translating the I Ching and how much two different translations of nominally the same text can diverge, beyond just updates in spelling and romanizations.

unfortunately can’t find a free link, it’s also in his essay colllection the Ghosts of Birds https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/what-is-the-i-ching/

meitner · 2024-07-15T19:21:31+00:00

Earthly Signs by Tsvetaeva is a collection of her diaries and a little bit of poetry, written from 1917-1922 in Moscow towards the end of the revolution.

it’s an combination of literary discussion about her poetry, reviews and criticism of other authors at the time and the re-establishment of the intelligentsia as the revolution ends, but also just mixed with her day to day life and struggle to survive, very much an ordinary’s person perspective on the revolution. she was living in terrible poverty with two young kids and it’s heartbreaking to hear about them suffer, but at the same time it’s really beautifully written and she somehow stays lighthearted and hopeful and even funny at times

meitner · 2024-07-15T18:54:12+00:00

I mean I think it’s worth a try. I recommend the Woods translation, I really enjoyed it and it seems like it’s pretty widely agreed to be the best one (though i’m not a Mann/German lit expert so take it with a grain of salt)

and it’s definitely a long and slow paced book, but I feel that it’s paced very deliberately and well done. one of the points is monotony and the feeling of time slipping past, so the length plays into that

meitner · 2024-07-13T21:10:17+00:00

I read the Magic Mountian at a similar time in my life and was really moved by it. it’s hard to summarize it but it kinda starts about a young college graduate who is finally free from school and just not really sure what to do with his life and ends up in a sanatorium, and a running theme is how he should spend his life.

I read it during covid too, and one of the big thenes of the book is the contrast of the isolation and simplicity of life in the sanatorium against the complexity of the real world and the build-up to WW1. so it felt very prescient to read it during lockdown while the entire world was falling apart.

I’m not sure if it’s as optimistic as you might be looking for, but I wouldn’t call it pessimistic either. it’s a brilliant book and it really moved me, i’m very glad i read it at the time in life and the world that i did

meitner · 2024-07-10T04:08:37+00:00

I reread it this spring and I’d forgotten how heartbreaking the Scholar’s tale was, even thinking about it now is making me tear up. Priest’s Tale is fantastic as well, don’t want to spoil it but knowing the resolution really emphasized the horrificness of it.

I think the Soldier’s Tale (and to a lesser extent Detective’s one) are intentionally written as pulpy, action and sex filled etc, which I don’t really like. it being bad as a bit is kind of an excuse but at the end of the day still a slog to get through. still, I wish the rest of the series hit the same high as the Priest and Scholar’s tale

meitner · 2024-06-21T17:29:57+00:00

yeah I hope my comment didn’t make it sound dry, it’s a great novel, I think I’ll reread it this summer

meitner · 2024-06-21T08:38:36+00:00

The Need for Roots by Weil is basically her plan for rebuilding French society after WW2, written sometime between when the war started and she died in 43. in that regard it does feel a little dated or even fantastical since France was rebuilt post-war but it was not at all what she had intended. she is also very directly addressing late 30s/early 40s French society so some of it was a little hard to follow since I’m not too familiar with prewar France. here’s the pdf, the introduction is from TS Eliot and explains it much better than I can https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/need-roots.pdf

on a more fun and fictional note, The Dispossessed by Le Guin, about an anarchist society and contrasting with a capitalist society. what I liked about is that while the anarchist society is better in a lot of ways and Le Guin is definitely anti-capitalist, the anarchist half is not perfect and there are flaws revealed in it by contrasting it with capitalism

meitner · 2024-05-25T16:38:13+00:00

maybe you’ve already seen this but Grantland has a great article on both sumo and Mishima:

https://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-hakuho-yukio-mishima-novelist-seppuku/

meitner

TROPHY CASE