My Lenten Penance: 47 Days and 600,000 Words of Dostoevsky

April 10, 2026

Happy Easter Week

This Lenten/Easter season I completed the Lent Prayer Challenge – The Return- on the Hallow App along with 191million other Hallow app followers.

All these years of being Catholic I never connected the dots that Lent was longer than 40 days.  Sundays are not counted, so there is actually 47 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter, when the challenge was completed.

The book suggested for this project was The Brothers Karamozov, written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the book that has over 600,000 words which is equivalent to eight romance novels. This is the book I wrote about in my “Word” Blog back in March and is the same author who penned the novel War and Peace which has over 587,287 words, which I have never read and not looking to read anytime soon.

I did complete the book in the actual 47 days of Lent.  This is Russian Literature and they -don’t know who “they” are – say this is great literature.  But “they” also say you have to read the book 2-3 times to figure it out and to get its true meaning.  For this Lent challenge, it was supposed to parallel the story of the prodigal son.  Thankfully there were daily conversations on Hallow, that linked the story of the book to the story of the prodigal son and the life lessons of the story, which were many and brilliant.  I don’t feel that I have to reread this book again because of this process.  This feeling makes me very happy.

The book was very difficult to follow, I spent a lot of time rereading many chapters, not only to how this story relates to the prodigal son, but also to make sense with what was going on throughout the storyline. 

Of course, the characters all have Russian names and then the author throws in nicknames for them all without letting the reader know what nicknames belong to what characters.  You have to figure it out as you read along.  It took several chapters to discover what nicknames belong to what characters.  

Needless to say, this was a very painful read for me. But I was determined to get to the end. Even the narrators on Hallow were feeling the pain on some days.  But once I got the hang of the writing style, the nicknames of the characters - which finally happened about halfway through the book – it all started making sense.  Thank you Hallow narrators for your daily tutorials!

GREAT STORY! GREAT LIFE LESSONS throughout the entire novel. I felt this to be my penitence for this Lenten season, causing me to be determined to finish the book to its last page, for which I am very grateful.

Until next Week!

Kathy