The new season of The Cosmic Library is on the way, and this time we’re talking about—and listening to—Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Conversations go everywhere: we’re thinking about the nature of time, music, and the self, and we’re figuring out how focusing on self might take us way beyond ourselves.

Each episode will include a reading from In Search of Lost Time. This miniseries, then, works as an unconventional audiobook adaptation of Proust’s novel—full of digressions, conversations about the book, commentary, and riffs, but always looping back into readings from the novel itself.

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; and Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust.

The first episode will be out on February 18, and new episodes will come out weekly into March. Find it at Lit Hub or wherever you go for podcasts!

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By now, it's clear that The Brothers Karamazov sits comfortably on the shelf of books of infinity, books that can never be completed. It is, for one thing, only the first part of a plan Dostoevsky had for much more. But this novel also emphasizes incompleteness, drives toward potential rather than anything that might be perfectly established on the page.

In episode four, we talked about incompleteness theorems, finding a mathematical dimension to some of our literary notions. And in The Brothers Karamazov, no system of thought is complete on its own. Characters also change each other continually, as if in a sort of infinite chain reaction. A sense of intensified possibility pervades, and the brothers move toward that sense especially in their connection to childhood.

Throughout The Brothers Karamazov—and throughout this season—there are prompts to reflect on earlier states of potential, to recall what came before. Garth Risk Hallberg in this episode describes how the novel prompts reflection on itself, gets the reader to look back on what’s been read or experienced: Dostoevsky, Hallberg says, “likes to inset these little mirrors into the text that reflect back on it and force you to reconsider what you’re reading.” In this sense, the ending of the book—and this miniseries—can send you back to all kinds of beginnings, including this season’s first episode, where you can hear the Brothers Karamazov radio play that started things.

Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library:

Garth Risk Hallberg, author of the novel City on Fire

Andrew Martin, author of the story collection Cool for America

Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU

Paulina Rowińska, author of Mapmatics

Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University and author of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel

Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian literature at the University of British Columbia and author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic

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In this season of The Cosmic Library, you’ve heard us discuss how Fyodor Dostoevsky's Karamazov brothers converge, even as they're on seemingly distinct tracks. And the novel directs attention to convergences in surprising ways: at one point, for example, Ivan Karamazov alludes to non-Euclidean geometry in which parallel lines meet—in which otherwise separate things join.

It doesn't just happen mathematically, or philosophically: dreams, too, can bring the novel’s characters toward convergence. Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky scholar, says here: “Dreams that characters have are as important to them, in the long run, and as illuminating to them in the long run, as any philosophical ideas that they might embrace.” Math and dreams both offer means by which alternative ways of thinking can be accessed, and by which separations might get resolved or reconsidered.

Mathematician and science journalist Paulina Rowińska says in this episode, “Math is much richer than what we learn in school. And the key point, that’s also relevant to Dostoevsky, is that math is also relative, as with Euclidean/non-Euclidean.” Different geometries, different philosophies, and different states of consciousness all offer ways for characters to think differently, and change, and collide in The Brothers Karamazov. No single system seems victorious here, but the process that moves through system after system—or character after character—works with irresistibly vital, dramatic force.

Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library:

Garth Risk Hallberg, author of the novel City on Fire

Andrew Martin, author of the story collection Cool for America

Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU

Paulina Rowińska, author of Mapmatics

Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University and author of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel

Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian literature at the University of British Columbia and author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.