Word: smerdyakov
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...family stories like O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night, for example, or Terry Zwigoff’s documentary about Robert Crumb and his family, all the characters became blurred and sometimes it’s hard to remember if Smerdyakov really is my brother...
...gown. Samuel Johnson daily pampered his spoiled companion Hodge with meals of fresh oysters. Victor Hugo cherished Gavroche. Cardinal Richelieu left a generous legacy for the 14 he owned. Napoleon is said to have broken into a cold sweat at the sight of one. In his childhood, Smerdyakov, in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, was fond of hanging them. Thomas Hardy and Thomas Gray wrote poems to them; Hemingway shared dinner with his. Physician and Scholar Albert Schweitzer favored two ways to take refuge from human misery: playing the organ and delighting in the play of his cats...
...principle that ultimately made all of his successor's crimes possible: "Our morality is completely subordinated to the class struggle." Here is the 20th century extension of Ivan Karamazov's doctrine that "if there is no God, everything is permitted." Indeed, Stalin was to Lenin what Smerdyakov was to Ivan, the murderer who made his half brother's deadly aphorism come true...
Unfortunately, other transitions are not so effective. The characters of Pyotr Petrovitch Luhzin and Arkady Ivanovitch Svidrigailov, who ranks with Smerdyakov of The Brother's Karamazov as Dostoevsky's most frightening embodiments of evil, are merged into one person, Antoine Monestier, played by Bernard Blier. Blier handles the job fairly well, but fails to capture Svidrigailov's essense, largely because of the necessary omission of the dream sequences which are so important in the novel...
...could have composed the masterful "Grand Inquisitor" or struggled with the devil himself near the close of the novel. The precariously saintly Alexey Karamazov is transformed into a sort of religious straight man, whose feeble pietisms and meaningful stares represent the religious instruction of the movie, and the idiot Smerdyakov becomes a shrewd, calculating, vengeful spirit who falls just a trifle short of being the film's dominant figure...