It still makes me sad that Lada Niva is such a missed opportunity, basically world's first SUV with 4wd, unibody and coil spring independent suspension. The 2-door version looks good even.
Could have been a huge success if not for the quality and compromises in the engine/transmission.
> This book is also notable for me in that I fundamentally disagree with one of the author’s main idea - that humans need religion as a source of morality.
I think in Dostoyevsky's world it's not just religion that is necessary but specifically God: "If there is no God, everything is permitted". Which is a different question, e.g. I agree with you on the part where one can get by without God, but I also think that religion is necessary in a sense that any set of beliefs complex enough to guide you through life is indistinguishable from one.
> Lastly, if anyone can explain to me - why do they call Agrafena Alexandrovna Grushenka? Is this a standard nickname for Agrafena, like Alyosha is for Alexei? I feel like everyone in the novel just took the name for granted, like it was normal to call someone a little pear.
Apparently so, it's hard to tell for sure because the name had completely fallen out of fashion. I was about to write you that I never met anyone who come by that name, however I started reading about it and was quite surprised to learn that Grunya is another short name for Agrafena and one of my great-grandmothers had that name. Never heard anyone call her Grushenka though.
I see where Dostoevsky was coming from. God and religion helped him process the grief of losing his little boy. I cannot possibly speak about how I’d process grief like that.
I feel like I have a set of principles that boils down to “treat people how you would want to be treated”. But those principles don’t cover situations like the one Dostoevsky or his characters found themselves in.
This is a fundamentally gentler world than the one he lived in. Maybe in this world we can rely on the State preventing situations where “Everything is permitted”, as Ivan was worried about. Maybe people aren’t as desperate as the people were in Tsarist Russia. They’re not exposed to as much violence, and so don’t feel compelled to commit that themselves.
I don't think that the State can somehow solve or sidestep the morality problem. The laws of the state are the consequence of beliefs and culture of the citizens (or the elites), not the other way round. Everyone needs to be able tell good from evil in their daily lives, this process can be partly codified in laws but then neither the laws cover it all nor do they work if people don't believe in law.
In that sense very little had changed since Dostoyevsky's time. Or since Homer's time for that matter.
I see where you’re coming from - the state is just the will of the people.
From my perspective, the State’s capacity to enforce the will of the people has improved dramatically. People both then and now would have wanted no indentured servitude, no starvation, better healthcare, safety from violence and so on.
But governments can actually deliver on most of those to a reasonable degree now. In that sense “everything is permitted” is limited by what the state will allow you to get away with. Is murder permitted? Yeah, but you’re probably getting caught. Is littering permitted? Same. We don’t need a belief in God to prevent people from committing crimes against their fellows. Less violence, less starvation, fewer children dying.
People haven’t become better, but the world has become gentler. Whether a person believes “everything is permitted” or not, there’s a lot less permitted now than back then. A simple morality of “I’ll follow the laws of society”, which you have to do anyway, is probably good enough to make a stable society.
On some level, this makes the Brothers Karamazov feel a bit less timeless. It feels like those difficult questions Ivan was grappling with aren’t eternal, just a problem of the circumstances he was living in. If he lived in 2025 he’d probably just be an atheist and he wouldn’t lose his mind over it. It doesn’t matter to me thought, the book is still a masterpiece.
Thank you for discussing this with me. This book is a bit niche so I can’t remember the last time I got to discuss it with someone.
The edition of Crime and Punishment that I read had an appendix with a detailed character listing mapping characters to their nicknames (and giving an overview of their relationships also I think): I was so grateful for that.
I am bad at tracking things like character's surnames already when books call people by different names, I probably wouldn't have been able to enjoy the book as much as I did without this help.
I tend to agree with bayareapsycho that Dostoyevsky doesn't feel genuinely christian. In his books God is derived out of ultimate necessity, it's the only sane way to survive. If you follow that line of thought you can come to a conclusion that if God didn't exist people would have to invent him. And if that's the case then maybe they DID invent him after all. It's just that it doesn't matter.
Dostoyevsky himself never goes that far in his books but I feel that the direction is set pretty clearly. It could be that I'm reading my thoughts into his works though.
So what counts as a genuine Christian in your view?
I can agree with that his books often suggest that God is the only sane way to survive, but I don‘t agree that this reduces him to only a useful necessity.
Ironically the conclusion you are making aligns very closely with what the Grand Inquisitor is preaching to Christ. And as the Grand Inquisitor is Ivan’s story, and not a plot in the book, I feel like Dostoyevsky is tackling that exact topic very prominently in the book on multiple levels. Especially through the response of the kiss.
> So what counts as a genuine Christian in your view?
I assumed that among other things it requires just accepting that God exists whether we need him or not. The practicality of having God around seems off to me, but in the end I'm not a genuine Christian myself so it's hard to judge.
I like Dostoyevsky and enjoyed many of his books but the Brothers in my opinion is just badly written: long and self-repetitive. It has moments of clarity and beauty like the The Grand Inquisitor novel or the discussion in the monastery, and ideas in the book are compelling but boy it's an ordeal to get to them. So my advice: if you want try Dostoyevsky please don't start with "the masterpiece", pick any other book of his. Crime and Punishment, the Idiot or short novels like The Gambler are a good start. You can get to the Brothers later if you chose to.
Another thought I had been having when reading the book was that Dostoyevsky uses insanity and especially insanity caused by stress way too often, it's a major plot device in his books while it's so rare in real life. However now I observe many of my friends (especially single ones) slowly going insane in various ways and I don't anymore think that it's rare. I guess mental health becomes scarce as you get older just like the physical health, just didn't expect this to manifest itself around the age of 35.
I left the Brothers to the last, after loving Dostoyevsky especially as a young person - his shorter books really speaks to the youth sense of rebellion while questioning that - and eventually I tried the Brothers several times, the last being this year on a very long car trip as an audio book. I just couldn't.. It's obtuse and the storytelling gets in the way. I stopped listening and succumbed instead to reading various reviews and summaries to get the gist of it. So thanks for your comment, and everyone else's here - I now understand a bit better the parts I skipped.
The article seems to assume that containers appeared to solve the software distribution problem and then somehow got repurposed into virtualization, isolation and management of production services. I think this view is very far from truth.
The virtualization/isolation aspect came first, the SWSoft Virtuozzo was doing that quite well in early 2000s. They even had [some] IO isolation which I think took around a decade to support elsewhere. Then gradually pieces of Virtuozzo/OpenVZ reached the mainline in a form of cgroups/LXC and the whole thing slowly brewed for a while until the Docker added the two missing pieces: the fast image rebuilds and the out-of-the-box user experience.
Docker of course was the revolution, but by then sufficiently advanced companies have been already using containers for isolation for a full decade.
I remember hearing about all the support from Intel for "0-cost" virtualization at the hardware level way before I heard about containers. From what I remember it was mostly to speed up virtual machines (VMWare stuff). It was a massive market differentiator for Intel in the server space.
I vaguely remember having to turn on some features in VirtualBox at the time to speed up my VMs, it was a massive uplift in performance if you had a CPU that supported it.
Could have been a huge success if not for the quality and compromises in the engine/transmission.