Dostoevsky, interesting

It's interesting (to me, anyway) that when you write a list of Dostoevsky's major novels, novellas, and stories there aren't that many.

About a baker's dozen:

The Double
Notes from Underground
Crime and Punishment
The Gambler
The Idiot
The Eternal Husband
The Possessed
The Brothers Karamazov
White Nights
A Nasty Story (also trans. as 'A Disgraceful Affair')
Bobok
A Gentle Creature (also trans. as 'The Meek One')
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Dostoevsky is interesting because he portrays the psychology a person who has developed into being able to see and value the Work possesses. Experiences are similar. Alienation. Isolation. The insulted and humiliated. Embarrassment as a means and an end in development. One I love, the 'scandalous feast' or 'scandalous gathering' where the veil is lifted on the facade of societal unity and people are exposed and things get crazy. D. has these scenes in all his major novels. The love triangle (which doesn't need to involve consummated love). The figure of the 'dreamer.' The dreamer as idealist who wants to transform his squalid reality into something more noble, more lofty, more beautiful. It ends badly. Reality triumphs. Though the ideals are vindicated in various ways. Then, isolated consciousness has recognized its isolation. Love this quote from Notes from Underground: "...to tell long stories of how I defaulted on my life through moral corruption in a corner, through an insufficiency of milieu, through unaccustom to what is alive, and through vainglorious spite in the underground - is not interesting..." Another motif is the motif of the double, the lack of unity or oneness in a person. Obvious Work theme. Then, the General Law, depicted as the social nexus (the outer, collective world) that impinges upon the inner, personal world. These clash in the aforementioned 'scandalous feasts' or 'scandalous gatherings.'

In the above paragraph, in places, I have paraphrased Richard Pevear in his Intro to the Bantam Classics edition of The Eternal Husband.

I didn't mention one other theme because Pevear presented it as confused. The theme of separation from 'what is living' leads to violence towards what is living. What is confusing is Pevear doesn't say if 'what is living' is the isolated individual or the collective social milieu.

For us, Work types, we can see that there is an element of violence going on, and criminal behavior is always close. Perhaps a percentage of inmates of prisons are in very early stages of development (recurrence) and succumbed to violence. I always use to say: "Don't get yourself into a prison cell!" when talking about accumulating higher energy in early stages of development.