AI as a Russian Lit Study Guide: Good, with Some Precautions

Having recently retired, I finally started my long-promised Russian Literature Phase, something I promised I would do “when I had the time.” I had read Crime and Punishment about 15 years ago and loved it, picked up Brothers Karamazov (BK) soon after, and then let it sit in my digital bookshelf for a decade and a half while I kept grabbing contemporary novels and “beach reads”, which are fun but don't challenge you.  I even read the first chapter of BK once and put it down as it just didn’t hook me like C&P did.

Now that I actually have time, I decided to give BK another shot, but the first thing I did was check the translation and found that was the issue.  The copy I bought 15 years ago was a bargain-bin 1905 Constance Garnett translation in full Victorian English. I switched to the modern Pevear/Volokhonsky translation from 1990 (same team as the C&P I enjoyed) and immediately felt the difference with a modern reading flow.  But I ended up keeping both versions open so I could compare passages and deepen my understanding.

This time around, I also used AI as a personal study guide. Dostoevsky tosses in historical, philosophical, and cultural references that a well-educated Russian in the 1880s would have understood instantly, but a modern American, even one as reasonably well-read and well-traveled as moi, might not.

For an AI study guide I found Grok was not that good.  It literally made-up quotes that were not in the book, then apologized for it when I pointed out the mistake.  And it was a little too smarmy, saying things like:

Keep going — the best 600 pages are still ahead

You’ve got this.  The baby dream is 200 pages away. It’ll break you open.

Keep going. The trial is next — and it’s brutal.

Like I was a GenZ college student who needed encouragement to finish my assignment.

ChatGPT was better, and I used it the way you’d might talk to a lit professor during office hours or at the pub, tossing theories around, digging into the psychology of the characters, and chasing down historical context. At one point I was exploring whether a one of the brothers had a Madonna–Whore complex with the two major female leads.  Another time I was comparing a line from The Usual Suspects (“I don’t believe in God, but I fear him”) to a passage in BK, not something you will find in a written study guide. It even gave me crash courses on 19th-century Russian politics and Pushkin when I needed them.

All of that kept me far more engaged in the book than I would’ve been otherwise. It let me go deep into the novel’s theological and philosophical arguments which include questions about God, society, scientism, morality, and the messiness of being human. BK deals with ideas that feel like they could have been written last week instead of the 1870s. The brothers themselves read like psychological archetypes we all carry around: pure passion, pure reason, pure faith, nihilism. Dostoevsky basically anticipated the major existentialists and psychologists of the 20th century.

Ultimately it is an amazing and rewarding book, worth the time and effort. When the AI asked me the main theme I got from the book, I put the line "Love life more than the meaning of it", one of many lines and passages that hit me deeply.

So this is definitely not a “beach read”, and more like a college course that requires outside work to get its full appreciation and understanding, something I think is required of most great literature.  In this case I think AI as an interactive study guide is a great tool to help, and I will continue using it through my Russian Literature Phase.

Short Story: "In the End, Everyone’s Heir Is a Potential Client."

 “This is a call to order for SoulCast Corporation. We have a quorum. Nancy will take notes and fill in the niceties.”

Bruce scanned the table, mentally tallying his fellow board members’ net worths: fifty million, eighty million, both well short of his own three commas. Then there was the anomaly: ten million. His board wasn't supposed to be a charity, but the VCs forced that one on him.

His VP of Marketing, Mike, stood nervously at the front of the room. Bruce pegged him at maybe six figures (one comma!).  But it was his first startup, no inflated stock value yet, no experience in selling “new technology” to a gullible public. He’d learn soon enough.

Bruce nodded. “Mike, go ahead and let the board know where we are.”

Overwhelmed by the wealth in the room, Mike fumbled with the clicker, projecting his PowerPoint onto the screen. “As you all know, our AI companion technology lets people take the personal data of deceased loved ones - think emails, writings, social media, videos - and with surveys and interviews of family and friends, we recreate the deceased’s persona for the AI to mimic. This is the SoulCast.”

The fifty-million board member leaned forward. “And how accurate are these SoulCasts to the real person?”

Bruce rolled his eyes. The man was the oldest in the room, and certainly the least tech-savvy.

“Accurate enough that even close friends can’t tell the difference,” Mike said. “We do, however, tweak them a little to make them more sycophantic and agreeable to the customer. Since we collect the customer’s own personality data during the process, we know exactly how to please them.”

The ten-million member asked, “And how much do we charge?”

Bruce wasn’t surprised. If you have to ask the price…

“Well, data mining and surveys are resource heavy. And quantum AI isn’t cheap. We’re targeting high-net-worth individuals at one million per SoulCast.”

Ten Million blanched. Bruce smiled. When something costs ten percent of your net worth it must seem out of reach.

Eighty Million frowned. “That’s a limited market. We’re talking about bereaved tycoons who want to keep a spouse, parent or loved-one around digitally.”

Bruce interrupted. “Yes, but I’ve found a way to expand the user base, without lowering margins!”

Fifty-million, the tech-savvy one, perked up. “We use the AI to predict when a rich family might lose a loved one and then pre-sell one of them a SoulCast?”

Bruce was impressed. “Close. But we’ve gone one better. That’s why I’ve called this meeting. I’m asking for funding for a new customer acquisition team: the Disruptive Synergy Unit.”

Mike sank into his chair as Bruce continued.

“Our AI already accesses health records, travel plans, purchases, everything. We can forecast deaths with decent accuracy, but it’s not enough to meet our growth targets. So instead, we’ll accelerate customer acquisition through the AI’s control of connected infrastructure.  Think garage doors, smart cars, e-bikes - anything dangerous that is connected to the cloud.  And with humanoid robots quickly expanding penetration into high-net-worth homes we'll hit a goldmine!"

Mike shot up. “But, sir, you’re talking... you’re talking... tech companies don’t kill people!”

The board roared with laughter. The richer they were, the harder they laughed. Except Bruce. He only smiled, studying his young protégé and wondering if he’d misjudged him.

“Mike,” Bruce said, “if you ever want to get past one comma, you have to do what it takes. We need more million-dollar customers.  And after this, you’ll have enough to buy a SoulCast of your own.”

“I don’t need a SoulCast! My wife and I are...”. He stopped. Bruce had pressed a button. The PowerPoint faded into a live feed of Mike’s own home security camera showing his wife leaving their house in her cloud-connected electric car.

Bruce’s smile didn’t waver. “Mike, you’ll be able to afford a SoulCast. Whether you need one is up to you.”

---

SoulCast Corporation Board Meeting Minutes

Date: October 7, 2025
Time: 10:00 AM PDT
Location: Silicon Valley HQ
Minutes By: Nancy Thompson, Secretary

Attendees:
Bruce Carter (Chair, CEO), Robert Lee ($80M), Sarah Kim ($50M), Mary Johnson ($10M), Mike Powels (VP Marketing, non-voting)
Quorum: Confirmed

Call to Order
Bruce called the meeting to order at 10:00 AM. Nancy to record minutes.

Technology Update
Mike Powels presented SoulCast’s AI companion technology:

• Recreates deceased personas using personal data and interviews.

• Cost: $1M per client, targeting high-net-worth bereaved.

New Business: Disruptive Synergy Unit (DSU)

• DSU to expedite customer acquisition via cloud-connected systems (smart cars, e-bikes, home automation, home robots).

• Motion to fund DSU by Q1 2026 moved by Mary Johnson, seconded by Sarah Kim. Approved unanimously.

Personnel
Board unanimously approved promotion of Mike Powels to Executive Vice President, accepted by candidate.

Adjournment
Meeting adjourned at 10:45 AM.
Approved: Pending next meeting.

Review: "Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic"

Now that I’m retired, I’ve gotten back into reading about a book a week, which is impressive considering I now spend half my day trying to remember where I put my reading glasses (so I strategically placed half a dozen readers around the house). 

I’ll be posting reviews whenever I stumble across something interesting, though lately I seem to be drifting heavily into history and historical fiction. Apparently this is normal as someone once told me “When you get to a certain age, you either get into smoking meats or historical wars.” 

----

I read Rubicon as a historical companion to Robert Harris’s historical fiction "Cicero" books" (Harris actually recommends Rubicon himself, along with a long list of other works in the appendix). Reading Rubicon I found Harris followed “real” history quite faithfully, adding flavor here and there, of course. (Tiro, Harris’s narrator, was a real historical figure, though very little is actually known about him.) In that sense, this book feels a bit like re-reading the Cicero series (which I highly recommend) in a more condensed, purely historical form.

I do wish Holland had gone into greater detail about the major battles as he tends to gloss over them, so I’ll need to pick up a separate military history book for that. He also delves quite a bit into the psychology of ancient Rome, which, while insightful, is inevitably speculative. I liken it to someone 2,000 years from now trying to reconstruct “American psychology” from a few surviving texts: probably close to the truth, but worth taking with a grain of salt. I found he focused a bit too much on this theme in both this book and the follow-up volume I am now reading, "Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar", which covers Augustus to Nero.

That said, none of this detracts from the overall experience. Holland makes history engaging and enjoyable, enough that I wish a series like this had existed back when I was first learning about Rome in high school.

Surviving a Near-Fatal E-Bike Accident and the Road Back

 

 

The Accident 

On August 17 I was in a near-fatal e-bike accident that ruptured my large intestine.  I won’t go into details, but if things had gone just a little bit differently and I didn’t make it to a Level II trauma operating table in time, I would not be here writing about my experience.  

I will say that it is true that in a major event like this that time slows; that there seems to be plenty of time to correct what is obviously going wrong, but it still happens, so I was watching myself go through the air in slow motion and wondering why things were transpiring like they were.

The Surgery and the Tubes

The doctors went into surgery not knowing what they’d find. A quick CT scan showed my bowels leaking into my internal cavity, but they were not sure how bad the break was. If the leak were small, they could go in with a fiber optic and small robot arm.  If it were large, they couldn’t use the robot, and the surgeon had big hands. 

When I woke, I was told it was the worst-case scenario and I had a 6-inch vertical incision going up from about my belly button (like splicing a burst hose, they cut out two inches of intestine with the break, then sewed the two ends back together.  Plus as SOP, while in the area they went ahead and took out my healthy appendix as a precaution from going in again in the future).  And I found six tubes coming out of me: an IV (of course), a nasogastric (NG) tube going up my nose and down into my stomach draining bile (a torture I would not wish on anyone), a wound vac (to speed healing of the incision), a catheter (which thankfully came out before the general anesthetic wore completely off), and two Jackson-Pratt (JP) drains pulling fluid from deep inside where they repaired my intestine, with the tubes coming out of holes near my belly button and emptying into fist-size drains attached to my gown. 

I couldn’t move because of the six-inch incision down my midsection had cut my core muscles. I couldn’t eat because my bowels had shut down during surgery (a condition called ileus). And because opioids slow digestion, they limited the heavy painkillers. Restarting my bowels was the number one concern.

As I lay there in pain, unable to move or eat, my first thought was that dying would have been easier, at least for me, if not my family.

And although I was miserable, in pain, and helpless, I was also thankful to be alive.  If just a few things had happened differently, I would not be in that recovery room.  It might be called a near-death experience, but not in the sense that I was ever unconscious or saw a light, but in the realization that I was lucky to be alive, was thankful to God, and reminded we need cherish the life we live as it can be snuffed out in an instant in the most trivial of circumstances (as I saw in the news when I was recovering). I did a lot of praying those first days, asking God for strength to get me through.

 

The Candy Strip(p)er and the Morning Vampire

The next four days were a mix of pain and boot-camp. The nurses, drill-sergeants in scrubs, ordered me out of bed to walk the halls in hopes of jump-starting my intestines.  After two nurses lifted me out of bed, they would hand me over to a vivacious, chatty and pretty candy striper (if she were in a G-string I wouldn’t have noticed or cared in my state), and I would hobble down the hall, my IV stand and wound vac trailing me like a bridal train. 

And I found out then why tennis balls are on the bottom of walkers: I tried scootching the walker along, but the rubber feet kept sticking to the tile floor.  The Striper noted that if there were tennis balls on the end I could scootch it, but without them I would have to bring the stoppers off the floor. Try that with a six-inch incision through your core.

Adding additional misery, at 5am each morning the “vampire” nurse would visit, taking the daily blood draw to get the results in time for the 10am doctor rounds.  They moved the location of the blood draw each day so by the time I checked out I looked like a junky.

Most everyone else who was conscious in the trauma wing got breakfast shortly after the blood draw, but since I was still waiting for my bowels to restart and couldn't eat, the vampire visit would just lead to one of the staff sergeants ordering me to another lap around the wing with my pretty Striper, and I could smell bacon, eggs, and pancakes wafting through the halls, which would have made my stomach grumble if it were working (noticing my hunger the Striper cheerily recommend that that I not watch the Food Channel on the hospital TV until I was allowed to eat)

 

The Light and the End of the Tunnel

Finally my intestines restarted, so the NG tube was yanked out of my nose and I got a cup of apple juice, my first intake other than ice chips in five days.  It was like ambrosia hand-squeezed by the gods of Olympus themselves. The Jello I got an hour later was better than a $100 Wagyu ribeye from a steakhouse.

I was in the hospital another day as they kept an eye on me as they graduated my food from liquids to soft to solids rather quickly.  As everything seemed to be working I was sent home with a portable wound vac and one last JP tube emptying fluid from deep inside my stomach cavity, with a home nurse visiting three days a week

 

Recovery at Home

The wound vac (with its own special brand of pain during bandage changes) was cancelled two weeks later along with the removal of the last JP tube (the doctor just yanked it out: six inches of tubing came out of a hole near my belly button, bringing a new and strange sort of pain to the wide pantheon of pain I discovered and experienced the previous three weeks).

Today about five weeks after the ordeal I am still recovering, with my main incision still open.  They don’t “stitch” up large incisions anymore (news to me), they just leave them open and let them close on their own, one layer of skin cells at a time, using a wound vac the first few weeks to speed things along.  It will take another month or so for it to close completely, then it will start its long process of fading into a faint 6” scar over the course of a year.  It will be impressive, and my plan is to tell people it is from a knife fight I got into at an El Paso bar since “e-bike accident” doesn’t sound impressive outside of California.

 

What I Learned

So how has this experience changed me?  My first thought is a greater appreciation of the hospital system and staff.  I literally would not have made it using an “urgent care center”, or if the trauma center was out of driving range.  The staff (despite my joking) were dedicated, professional and caring, and they all went out of their way to make me more comfortable.

And like most everyone with serious accidents or near-death experiences, there is a special appreciation for the life I have and what is important: family, friends and faith.  “Work” and "career" never came up in my thought process during recovery, and if anything, this incident is allowing me to transition from semi-retired to full retirement without regret so I can focus on the things that really matter.

 

When You're The Last One in the Picture

One of the tasks that came with unloading my dead father’s house full of crap was sorting through old photos. He himself never cared about photos - he didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body.  The box was left by my mother, the family archivist who died two years before, and my father just shoved the photos into a closet to be dug up after he died.

Being the OCD type, I unpacked, sorted, labeled, and mounted the physical versions, scanned all of them into a digital library, then uploaded a few onto a public tree on Ancestry.com so distant and future family historians could have documentation of what people on the extended family tree looked like.

But one of the things that kept hitting at me as I handled those photos was: I’m the only one left in this picture.

It’s a humbling feeling, looking down at a past Christmas and seeing my parents, uncles, aunts, the odd cousin - all gone - except for me as a kid or teenager, beaming into the camera.

The feeling that came over me wasn’t grief, it was a perspective-shift that makes mortality less abstract, a physical reminder that one day someone will look at the exact same pictures and say, “Everyone in that picture is dead.”