Today we are beginning our Dostoevsky reading club. This week we're reading parts I and II of The Brothers Karamazov. If you're having trouble reading that much this week because you have a lot of studying to do or whatever, be sure to let me know so I can adjust the pace.

There were some objections to started with this for a Dostoevsky reading club, and a lot people think it should come last, since they see it as at the culmination of Dostoevsky's ideas. My reason for starting with it, is I don't see it as the culmination of his ideas at all, but rather the core of them, reading it beforehand contextualizes the rest of his work. If you don't, you might not gain the theology of where he's coming from. Notes from Underground, for instance, clearly influenced Nietzsche, and if you've read it you'll know that it is fully of ideas that Nietzsche explored in same fashion. In fact, if you haven't read Dostoevsky's other work, and read that, he seems very much like the Russian Nietzsche, and that might even have played into the enormous admiration for Russia Nietzsche has in Beyond Good and Evil. But Dostoevsky and Nietzsche came to almost opposite conclusions. And so, in order to view Dostoevsky's works through the lens of Dostoevsky's own perspective, I began with The Brothers Karamazov rather than Notes from Underground.