The Brothers Karamazov

What struck me most in re-reading this fabulous novel (having first read it as an undergraduate English major in the mid 1980's) – or more accurately, what I'm more capable of putting into words – is that it is a veritable handbook for psychiatrists and psychotherapists on the subject of inappropriate emotional response. Literary conventions vary by era and culture, of course, but I have to think that even a contemporaneous Russian reader would have felt as exhausted by the wildly erratic mood swings of these characters as I was. I wonder, in reading some of the other reviews here, if this is why it is so difficult to get through for so many readers.

The novel falls squarely into the realm of melodrama, and you can hear the machinery creaking as you read along. The plot is deceptively simple: a father and his son compete for the love of a manipulative, deceptive prostitute, and drag everyone around them into the fight causing various degrees of collateral damage. When the father gets his head cracked, we are plunged into an episode of Law and Order and see both the (surprisingly modern) police investigation and the (surprisingly contemporary) trial. The brothers K, all types, represent various philosophical perspectives on what to do about the decaying and decadent Old Russia as represented by Fyodor Pavlovich, their father. So as a work of fiction it's not overly complicated or difficult. Money and wealth (Katerina), sexual mores (Grushenka), morality (Fr. Zosima) and social hierarchy (Snegirov) are the problems that New Russia must tackle. What is the way forward? Traditional Orthodox Christian monarchy? Socialist, atheist revolution?

What makes this novel so compelling (and so long) is the psychological portrait Dostoevsky paints of each character. Types though they are, he takes great pains to show us the history and motivations of each character in a way few modern novelists do anymore. Whether or not we like them is one thing; whether we understand them is another, and I think that is what was most important to Dostoevsky, and what makes this novel more than the sum of its parts.

The omniscient first-person narrator with the front-row seats to all the action, very subtly influences our perceptions. Fyodor Pavlovich, depicted as a drunken and depraved old man (well, in his 50's which, in 19th century Russia was old) gains a backstory at the hands of the prosecutor that, while not rehabilitative, depicts him as a rather pathetic figure. We can almost feel sorry for him, and whatever his sins, we can say he certainly didn't deserve to be murdered in cold blood for the sake of a man's twisted beliefs about morality. And then we can't fully condemn the murderer either because we know the deprived and horrific upbringing he endured. Every character receives this kind of detailed portrait. As a result, no one, with the possible exception of Alexei (Alyosha), emerges from this novel looking good, but they don't emerge looking fully bad either. What they are is human - broken, flawed, contradictory, confused, and even at times lost, but they are human. Dostoevsky's achievement, again, is not in the structure and style of the novel, but in his deep and moving insights into people. No matter how many times you read this book, read it again.