Scan barcode
mspaperback's review
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
autogeek's review against another edition
1.0
Before you read this review, keep in mind that:
- All reviews are subjective. This review is about how I felt about this book and why. Not about how you will/should/have or should have felt about it.
- If you have read this book already and liked it, you probably shouldn't continue reading this review. It is really more of a rant.
============================================
So now for the review. Oh dear!
In short: absolutely terrible. It was over a 1000 pages of slow paced, winding, rambling storyline filled with branches and forks that don't contribute to the plot and some of the most inane characters that I have ever had the misfortune of reading!
The plot itself isn't all that special. There is a rich, womanising idiot who has three kids, a bad relationship with the kids, the kids have their own love triangles, dad gets murdered, one of the kids is suspected, arrested, convicted and goes to jail. The end. If this story had been written by a contemporary author, I honestly believe it could have been reduced to less than a third of its size or even less, without loss in quality. Most probably, there would have been an increase in quality. But then, this book isn't about the story, not really.
I had read some reviews of the book before I started and everyone seemed to love it. The reviewers loved the fact that the characters spoke "like gods" and that the author dedicated "pages upon pages" for their dialogue and to explain their reasoning. They loved that the characters had so much "internal conflict". It is supposedly about man's "internal struggle" and his "wretched nature". And it is not really about murder, but is a "work on philosophy", it is about the "reaction to the murder". Each reviewer had a different idea of what the book was about. And now that I have read it, I kinda get what they all mean. While I agree with all the reviewers factually, it was those very things that made me hate the book.
Firstly, the characters. My god, they're terrible. I don't mean that they aren't well developed or that they are evil. Quite the contrary, they are extremely well developed and there are a wide range of characters, varying from the holy-naive-good to the sadistically-evil. But they are just so annoying and extreme that it makes my head hurt. And many a times, these extremes are found within the same character and within the space of a single paragraph of speech. They come off as extremely fickle, bipolar idiots. Then there are the conversations. Well, they are more like a series of monologues. No one ever just answers anything to the point. They always beat around the bush, ramble on about their motivations, how good they are and then how wretched they are and by the end of their little speech you don't even know what they are going on about. It appears none of them understood the concept of brevity. Nor were they introduced to the novel idea of just thinking things through before they started talking. And this applies to the author to a large extent as well. There are so many instances where different parts of the story are repeated from different viewpoints and are explained in dreary detail only to find out subsequently that it plays no role in the rest of the story at all. Aarrgghh!!
And as for the idea that the book is about the human condition and psychology, sure, I buy that. But I can't help but think that if that was the task, it could have been done so much better. To start with, the novel is set in 19th century Russia. While that makes it difficult for me, I can't really blame the author for that. You know, given that he was a Russian. Who lived in the 19th century. But when the prose is so dry and the characters so obtuse that it makes me gnash my teeth in fury, there is little room for any other thought process in my brain. So I slogged through the novel, constantly frustrated by the different characters and never felt the urge to analyse them or their motives. Because, when you have characters so extreme and they come off as immature morons, you don't spend time trying to understand their motivations, you just put their actions down to stupidity.
With any book I read, I want to be so absorbed by the language or the plot or the idea that it makes me want to keep reading it for longer and longer. With this book though, it was a constant struggle to read every paragraph, sentence. With a good book, I want to be transported to the new world described in the book, get lost in it. But this didn't happen with this book. I really wanted to though, if only so I could get the satisfaction of imagining myself punching the different characters in the face until they got to the damn point. But alas, life is full of disappointments.
So in summary, if you (like me) value well written, well paced novels with a good story line that stays on point, has good characters, then you most likely won't like this book. This is the worst book I have ever read.
- All reviews are subjective. This review is about how I felt about this book and why. Not about how you will/should/have or should have felt about it.
- If you have read this book already and liked it, you probably shouldn't continue reading this review. It is really more of a rant.
============================================
So now for the review. Oh dear!
In short: absolutely terrible. It was over a 1000 pages of slow paced, winding, rambling storyline filled with branches and forks that don't contribute to the plot and some of the most inane characters that I have ever had the misfortune of reading!
The plot itself isn't all that special. There is a rich, womanising idiot who has three kids, a bad relationship with the kids, the kids have their own love triangles, dad gets murdered, one of the kids is suspected, arrested, convicted and goes to jail. The end. If this story had been written by a contemporary author, I honestly believe it could have been reduced to less than a third of its size or even less, without loss in quality. Most probably, there would have been an increase in quality. But then, this book isn't about the story, not really.
I had read some reviews of the book before I started and everyone seemed to love it. The reviewers loved the fact that the characters spoke "like gods" and that the author dedicated "pages upon pages" for their dialogue and to explain their reasoning. They loved that the characters had so much "internal conflict". It is supposedly about man's "internal struggle" and his "wretched nature". And it is not really about murder, but is a "work on philosophy", it is about the "reaction to the murder". Each reviewer had a different idea of what the book was about. And now that I have read it, I kinda get what they all mean. While I agree with all the reviewers factually, it was those very things that made me hate the book.
Firstly, the characters. My god, they're terrible. I don't mean that they aren't well developed or that they are evil. Quite the contrary, they are extremely well developed and there are a wide range of characters, varying from the holy-naive-good to the sadistically-evil. But they are just so annoying and extreme that it makes my head hurt. And many a times, these extremes are found within the same character and within the space of a single paragraph of speech. They come off as extremely fickle, bipolar idiots. Then there are the conversations. Well, they are more like a series of monologues. No one ever just answers anything to the point. They always beat around the bush, ramble on about their motivations, how good they are and then how wretched they are and by the end of their little speech you don't even know what they are going on about. It appears none of them understood the concept of brevity. Nor were they introduced to the novel idea of just thinking things through before they started talking. And this applies to the author to a large extent as well. There are so many instances where different parts of the story are repeated from different viewpoints and are explained in dreary detail only to find out subsequently that it plays no role in the rest of the story at all. Aarrgghh!!
And as for the idea that the book is about the human condition and psychology, sure, I buy that. But I can't help but think that if that was the task, it could have been done so much better. To start with, the novel is set in 19th century Russia. While that makes it difficult for me, I can't really blame the author for that. You know, given that he was a Russian. Who lived in the 19th century. But when the prose is so dry and the characters so obtuse that it makes me gnash my teeth in fury, there is little room for any other thought process in my brain. So I slogged through the novel, constantly frustrated by the different characters and never felt the urge to analyse them or their motives. Because, when you have characters so extreme and they come off as immature morons, you don't spend time trying to understand their motivations, you just put their actions down to stupidity.
With any book I read, I want to be so absorbed by the language or the plot or the idea that it makes me want to keep reading it for longer and longer. With this book though, it was a constant struggle to read every paragraph, sentence. With a good book, I want to be transported to the new world described in the book, get lost in it. But this didn't happen with this book. I really wanted to though, if only so I could get the satisfaction of imagining myself punching the different characters in the face until they got to the damn point. But alas, life is full of disappointments.
So in summary, if you (like me) value well written, well paced novels with a good story line that stays on point, has good characters, then you most likely won't like this book. This is the worst book I have ever read.
gabudell's review against another edition
4.0
Dostoevsky’s lyrically and inspiring imagery that is created in tandem with the thought-provoking commentaries on love, politics, social normalities, religion and family made this book, overall, a great read.
At times, especially in the middle of the novel, I felt the plot deviated too often and I believe the entirety of the memoirs of Father Zossima’s youth (nearly 70 pages) could have been removed from the novel and it wouldn’t have made any difference. At times I did feel like the dialogue became too extensive if Dostoevsky was going for realism but I feel that it was likely that he was following a trend of melodramatic monologues that was common for writers at that time - at least they are good monologues.
I’ll end this by saying that the one thing that did keep me going, when questioning why I decided to embark on another 900 page epic novel, was the relationship between the three Karamazov brothers and how they all changed throughout the novel in their respective ways.
I feel if it wasn’t for the brilliant writing and commentary then this would be a three-star read, so if you’re not a fan of that sort of thing in books then take that into account before reading it, but I feel for me personally - as I got a lot from the book in my reading of it - it’s a four-star read for me.
At times, especially in the middle of the novel, I felt the plot deviated too often and I believe the entirety of the memoirs of Father Zossima’s youth (nearly 70 pages) could have been removed from the novel and it wouldn’t have made any difference. At times I did feel like the dialogue became too extensive if Dostoevsky was going for realism but I feel that it was likely that he was following a trend of melodramatic monologues that was common for writers at that time - at least they are good monologues.
I’ll end this by saying that the one thing that did keep me going, when questioning why I decided to embark on another 900 page epic novel, was the relationship between the three Karamazov brothers and how they all changed throughout the novel in their respective ways.
I feel if it wasn’t for the brilliant writing and commentary then this would be a three-star read, so if you’re not a fan of that sort of thing in books then take that into account before reading it, but I feel for me personally - as I got a lot from the book in my reading of it - it’s a four-star read for me.
billy_pilgrim65's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.75
talvinovels's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
4.0
Extremely rambly and philosophical to an incomprehensible degree and I mean this in the best way. I wish I had something more profound to say but this was such a long journey idk where to start. The characters are total disasters and the conversations they have with each other are often completely baffling, which genuinely made this very fun for me. I can't say I totally understood what this book was trying to say, I'll need some time to process lmao. This was An Experience for sure!
cdhotwing's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
andresvk's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.
Vonnegut was probably right, but that doesn't mean that this book if pretty close to enough. A truly inexhaustible work.
morguebooks's review against another edition
challenging
dark
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
joshken1997's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
daja57's review
5.0
This is a huge and complex book and it seems impossible to summarise it in a review. These are my preliminary impressions.
The size of the book
On first impressions, it is dauntingly big. Dostoevsky liked words and never used one when a dozen were available. It could have been shorter. And we must bear in mind what E M Forster, in Appendix A of Aspects of the Novel, says: “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” But, on the other hand, The Brothers Karamazov is often thought to be Dostoevsky’s masterpiece and is generally regarded as a classic of Russian literature. I suspect that is because it endeavours to do so many things.
A murder mystery?
The plot revolves around the murder of a rich old man, Fyodor Karamazov and the subsequent arrest and trial of one of his sons, Dmitry. It was said to have been inspired by a real case involving a man Dostoevsky knew when he was in exile in Siberia; this man was wrongfully convicted and subsequently exonerated of parricide.
It’s not a murder mystery in the conventional sense in that there are only two suspects, Dmitry and the villainous Smerdyakov, and the reader is pretty certain whodunnit. But it follows other tropes almost perfectly. Before the crime, Smerdyakov explains to Ivan, the middle brother, how it can be committed. When Dmitry is in the garden of his father’s house at night, clutching a weapon, there is a pause in the action ... and then he is fleeing the scene and being accused of parricide by an old servant whom he strikes. After the crime, there is a police investigation and the evidence is thoroughly dissected. The novel ends in a courtroom drama. This is classic stuff.
A retelling of the myth of Oedipus?
In some ways Dostoevsky’s story is a retelling of the Oedipus myth. Dmitry was abandoned by his father when he was very young and brought up initially by a servant and then a rich relative far away, as Oedipus was abandoned by Laertes, and taken in by poor folk and subsequently a foreign king. (At Dimitry’s trial the Defence Counsel makes much of this, suggesting that fatherhood is a two-way thing and therefore that this murder can’t be called parricide.) Oedipus accidentally marries his mother; Dmitry is in love with Grushenska, a woman also wooed by his father. So there are links. And Ivan the middle brother also harbours murderous thoughts towards his father, exclaiming (at Dmitry’s trial): “Who does not desire the death of his father?” (12.5) And the alternative suspect for the murder is allegedly the illegitimate son of Fyodor (a bit of a nineteenth-century cliche: always blame the bastard). So TBK has plenty for Freud to get his teeth into.
A romantic farce?
Not only are Dmitry and his father wooing the same woman, Grushenska, but Dmitry is already engaged to Katerina who, in turn, loves and is loved by Dmitry’s brother Ivan (sibling rivalry?). Grushenka is a notorious woman, having an old merchant ‘protector’ and having been ‘dishonoured’ when she was young by a Polish officer after whom she still secretly hankers. Ratikin is courting (for her money) Mrs Khakhlakov but she fancies Perkhotin.
A theological debate
If there is a hero, it is Alyosha, the third and youngest legitimate brother. At the start of the book, he is a monk in the local monastery but he spends an awful lot of his time visiting various different people around the town and therefore acting as a sort of thread binding the story together (although the principal narrator is an anonymous monk living in the monastery).
One of the major subplots involves Alyosha’s mentor at the monastery, the Elder Zosima, a sort of wise guru whose sayings and prophecies are suitable gnomic but whose reputation as a holy man takes a severe knock after he dies and his body goes putrid and smells (the body of a saint is supposedly incorruptible). Another subplot involves Alyosha effecting a reconciliation between warring schoolboys.
His elder brother, Ivan, is an academic and an atheist who has recently published an infamous article which suggests that if there is no God, then everything is lawful. His atheism isn’t absolute. He entertains the possibility of there being a God, but he finds it difficult to believe that this world is that created by God. The root of his disbelief stems from the fact that children suffer and this cannot be reconciled with the idea that compassion is at the heart of Christianity. Ivan is the focus of the theological debates in the book. He is the one who makes up the tale of the Grand Inquisitor which is perhaps the most famous part of the book: Jesus appears in fifteenth century Spain and is arrested and interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor who explains why giving mankind free will was a mistake. Ivan also hallucinates a conversation with the devil.
A book about redemption?
Dmitry realises that the only way he will reform is by spending twenty years in the Siberian mines and therefore he seems to believe that he possesses a nugget of redeemable character. Is this Dostoevsky suggesting that purgatory is the place where souls are redeemed on their way to paradise?
A prematurely postmodern psychological novel
Dostoevsky seems to me to be way ahead of his time in his understanding that people are inconsistent. To take a trivial example: a young girl called Lise (later called Liza) writes a love letter to Alyosha which she then repudiates, telling him it was a silly joke and then repudiates the repudiation, saying she loves him after all.
Dmitry is a more important example. He is a libertine and by his own (frequent) admission a scoundrel but he has a fine sense of honour and he insists he is not a thief. When he has money he splurges it and yet he keeps 1,500 roubles sewn into a bag around his neck. He gets drunk and enjoys women and yet at the same time he is desperately in love with Grushenska. The straight and narrow road is not for him: “I always liked side‐paths, little dark back‐alleys behind the main road—there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt. I am speaking figuratively, brother. In the town I was in, there were no such back‐alleys in the literal sense, but morally there were. If you were like me, you’d know what that means. I loved vice, I loved the ignominy of vice.” (3.4)
Perhaps the most fascinatingly complex character is Kolya. He’s a clever schoolboy and he knows it. He’s vain but sufficiently self-aware to know when he is being boastful. He has rudimentary ideas of socialism and likes talking to the people but he is very patronising when he does. His school fellows admire him as a daredevil because of some of his pranks but he finds it a strain keeping this reputation up. He has a tender heart and is very fond of some young children whom he occasionally babysits. He hates his own name (Nikolay). He talks to Alyosha on equal terms (he calls him ‘Karamazov’) but he knows that Alyosha somehow sees Kolya’s naked soul.
Not all the characters are multi-dimensional. Fyodor Karamzov, the father, enjoys being a sensualist, he boasts about it. He explains to Alyosha why he needs his money: “As I get older, you know, I shan’t be a pretty object. The wenches won’t come to me of their own accord, so I shall want my money. So I am saving up more and more, simply for myself .... For I mean to go on in my sins to the end, let me tell you. For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly. And so all the other sinners fall upon me for being so open. And your paradise, Alexey Fyodorovitch, is not to my taste, let me tell you that; and it’s not the proper place for a gentleman.” (4.2) At the start of the book Dostoevsky suggests that Fyodor accumulated his wealth by sponging, so that everyone always underestimated how rich he was, he also indulges in sharp practices (marrying for money and effectively cheating Dmitry out of his mother’s inheritance); by the time of the action of the novel, however, Fyodor has a reputation for being a rich voluptuary. Is this an inconsistency in the story or is Dostoevsky showing that even when a character is consistent, their reputation can be multi-faceted.
At the end of the book, at the trial, both Prosecutor and Defence Counsel interpret the actions of Dmitry in different ways: as the Defence says “psychology, gentlemen, though it is a deep thing, none the less resembles a stick with two ends” (12.10). It is pointed out that the lawyers are constructing competing stories. It is as if Dostoevsky is saying that there is no absolute truth but that all versions of reality are unreliable narrations, a very postmodern idea.
The unreliable narrator is also a trope of modernist fiction, so perhaps TBK is an early example of that. The ending of the book, which is only partially resolved, is another characteristic of modernism.
Characters
In the end, the joy of TBK lies in some of the characters. Although I found Alyosha rather empty and bland and Smerdyakov is a purely pantomime villain, other characters are fascinating. My favourites were Mrs Khokhlakov, a wonderfully empty-headed widow, and the brilliant but vain but compassionate Kolya. At the other end of the age spectrum, who doesn't love an unredeeemed rake who takes joy in his wickedness, such as Fyodor Karamzov?
But perhaps the most interesting character is Ratikin. At the start he is almost unnoticeable, the seminarian in the background. But little by little he worms his way into the plot until he is a cross between a secret policeman and an agent provocateur. He is a spy for Mrs K. He takes money from Grushenska to bring Alyosha to her. He pops up everywhere! “It turned out that Ratikin knew everything, knew an extraordinary amount, had been to visit everyone, seen everything, spoken to everyone, and possessed a most detailed knowledge.” (12.2) Is he Dostoevsky's cynical self-portrait, like Velasquez in his Las Meninas? He writes slanderous articles (betraying Mrs K) for the Moscow press when the scandal of the murder breaks. Dmitry even says “He wants to write about me ... and thus inaugurate his role in literature.” (11.4)
What I didn’t like
As with so many Russian novels, each character has three names: the first name, the patronymic and the surname. They are referred to either by first name and patronymic (eg Fyodor Pavolich) or by surname (eg Karamazov) or, most frequently, by a version of their first name (eg Alyosha, Mitya, Katya, etc). Some characters have more than one such nickname (often different people call them different things and this is a highlight of the book). In some cases we don’t learn the full name of a character until very late on in the book. This caused me considerable confusion at the start, not realising, for example, that Grushenska was also called Agrafena Alexandrovna. I really needed a cast list at the start of the book which listed all possible versions of their name.
The edition I had came with notes which often explained things that I wasn’t very interested in, such as the fact that a certain line was derived from a parody of Pushkin. What I absolutely needed was a translation of the many times that French or Latin was used. In the worst example, the devil tells a joke in French. There is an end-note ... which gives the full joke, still in French, and fails to translate it! Why do editors do this? I’m reading a translation ... but they can’t be bothered to translate anything that’s not Russian. Is it because they don’t know? Or is it because they do know and they expect me to know? Or is it because they do know and they know I don’t know and it is a way of asserting their superiority?
The implication that Smerdyakov was a rotter principally because he illegitimate. All of Fyodor Karamazov's sons get a rough start in life but poor old Smerdy is bullied and looked down on by everyone. The whole Russian economy depends on the peasants but, despite Dostoevsky's reputation as a revolutionary social reformer, his books are basically about the upper-classes, who are presumed, even when they are ill-educated and poverty-stricken, to be intrinsically nobler and worthier and better than the muzhiks.
All those exclamation marks! There's only so much intensity that one can take. Dmitry lives his life in the fast lane, always seemingly on the edge of catastrophe, and Ivan seems perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Alyosha spends his time running from one crisis to another. It's like watching Macbeth when everyone shouts every line, or a ballet when the dancers never pause. Exhausting! The occasional funny bits, such as when Mrs K tries to interest Dmitri in gold mines, are a welcome relief.
The narrative was somewhat lumpy. Two whole books (6 and 10) were almost extraneous additions. Book 6 tells of the life and works of the Elder Zosima and is almost completely irrelevant to the plot. Book 10 introduces a new character and acts as an interlude between Dmitry's arrest and his trial.
And, while I appreciate that every character needs a back story, does every character need that back-story told? I suppose these sometimes provided welcome breaks from the intensity of the action but I really didn't need to know, for example, why Zosima became a monk.
Evaluation
Yes it is much too long. There were passages of intricate theological and legal argument when I was numb with weariness. But even an inadequate review like the one above must give some idea of the wealth that is in this book. A classic? Undoubtedly.
The size of the book
On first impressions, it is dauntingly big. Dostoevsky liked words and never used one when a dozen were available. It could have been shorter. And we must bear in mind what E M Forster, in Appendix A of Aspects of the Novel, says: “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” But, on the other hand, The Brothers Karamazov is often thought to be Dostoevsky’s masterpiece and is generally regarded as a classic of Russian literature. I suspect that is because it endeavours to do so many things.
A murder mystery?
The plot revolves around the murder of a rich old man, Fyodor Karamazov and the subsequent arrest and trial of one of his sons, Dmitry. It was said to have been inspired by a real case involving a man Dostoevsky knew when he was in exile in Siberia; this man was wrongfully convicted and subsequently exonerated of parricide.
It’s not a murder mystery in the conventional sense in that there are only two suspects, Dmitry and the villainous Smerdyakov, and the reader is pretty certain whodunnit. But it follows other tropes almost perfectly. Before the crime, Smerdyakov explains to Ivan, the middle brother, how it can be committed. When Dmitry is in the garden of his father’s house at night, clutching a weapon, there is a pause in the action ... and then he is fleeing the scene and being accused of parricide by an old servant whom he strikes. After the crime, there is a police investigation and the evidence is thoroughly dissected. The novel ends in a courtroom drama. This is classic stuff.
A retelling of the myth of Oedipus?
In some ways Dostoevsky’s story is a retelling of the Oedipus myth. Dmitry was abandoned by his father when he was very young and brought up initially by a servant and then a rich relative far away, as Oedipus was abandoned by Laertes, and taken in by poor folk and subsequently a foreign king. (At Dimitry’s trial the Defence Counsel makes much of this, suggesting that fatherhood is a two-way thing and therefore that this murder can’t be called parricide.) Oedipus accidentally marries his mother; Dmitry is in love with Grushenska, a woman also wooed by his father. So there are links. And Ivan the middle brother also harbours murderous thoughts towards his father, exclaiming (at Dmitry’s trial): “Who does not desire the death of his father?” (12.5) And the alternative suspect for the murder is allegedly the illegitimate son of Fyodor (a bit of a nineteenth-century cliche: always blame the bastard). So TBK has plenty for Freud to get his teeth into.
A romantic farce?
Not only are Dmitry and his father wooing the same woman, Grushenska, but Dmitry is already engaged to Katerina who, in turn, loves and is loved by Dmitry’s brother Ivan (sibling rivalry?). Grushenka is a notorious woman, having an old merchant ‘protector’ and having been ‘dishonoured’ when she was young by a Polish officer after whom she still secretly hankers. Ratikin is courting (for her money) Mrs Khakhlakov but she fancies Perkhotin.
A theological debate
If there is a hero, it is Alyosha, the third and youngest legitimate brother. At the start of the book, he is a monk in the local monastery but he spends an awful lot of his time visiting various different people around the town and therefore acting as a sort of thread binding the story together (although the principal narrator is an anonymous monk living in the monastery).
One of the major subplots involves Alyosha’s mentor at the monastery, the Elder Zosima, a sort of wise guru whose sayings and prophecies are suitable gnomic but whose reputation as a holy man takes a severe knock after he dies and his body goes putrid and smells (the body of a saint is supposedly incorruptible). Another subplot involves Alyosha effecting a reconciliation between warring schoolboys.
His elder brother, Ivan, is an academic and an atheist who has recently published an infamous article which suggests that if there is no God, then everything is lawful. His atheism isn’t absolute. He entertains the possibility of there being a God, but he finds it difficult to believe that this world is that created by God. The root of his disbelief stems from the fact that children suffer and this cannot be reconciled with the idea that compassion is at the heart of Christianity. Ivan is the focus of the theological debates in the book. He is the one who makes up the tale of the Grand Inquisitor which is perhaps the most famous part of the book: Jesus appears in fifteenth century Spain and is arrested and interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor who explains why giving mankind free will was a mistake. Ivan also hallucinates a conversation with the devil.
A book about redemption?
Dmitry realises that the only way he will reform is by spending twenty years in the Siberian mines and therefore he seems to believe that he possesses a nugget of redeemable character. Is this Dostoevsky suggesting that purgatory is the place where souls are redeemed on their way to paradise?
A prematurely postmodern psychological novel
Dostoevsky seems to me to be way ahead of his time in his understanding that people are inconsistent. To take a trivial example: a young girl called Lise (later called Liza) writes a love letter to Alyosha which she then repudiates, telling him it was a silly joke and then repudiates the repudiation, saying she loves him after all.
Dmitry is a more important example. He is a libertine and by his own (frequent) admission a scoundrel but he has a fine sense of honour and he insists he is not a thief. When he has money he splurges it and yet he keeps 1,500 roubles sewn into a bag around his neck. He gets drunk and enjoys women and yet at the same time he is desperately in love with Grushenska. The straight and narrow road is not for him: “I always liked side‐paths, little dark back‐alleys behind the main road—there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt. I am speaking figuratively, brother. In the town I was in, there were no such back‐alleys in the literal sense, but morally there were. If you were like me, you’d know what that means. I loved vice, I loved the ignominy of vice.” (3.4)
Perhaps the most fascinatingly complex character is Kolya. He’s a clever schoolboy and he knows it. He’s vain but sufficiently self-aware to know when he is being boastful. He has rudimentary ideas of socialism and likes talking to the people but he is very patronising when he does. His school fellows admire him as a daredevil because of some of his pranks but he finds it a strain keeping this reputation up. He has a tender heart and is very fond of some young children whom he occasionally babysits. He hates his own name (Nikolay). He talks to Alyosha on equal terms (he calls him ‘Karamazov’) but he knows that Alyosha somehow sees Kolya’s naked soul.
Not all the characters are multi-dimensional. Fyodor Karamzov, the father, enjoys being a sensualist, he boasts about it. He explains to Alyosha why he needs his money: “As I get older, you know, I shan’t be a pretty object. The wenches won’t come to me of their own accord, so I shall want my money. So I am saving up more and more, simply for myself .... For I mean to go on in my sins to the end, let me tell you. For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly. And so all the other sinners fall upon me for being so open. And your paradise, Alexey Fyodorovitch, is not to my taste, let me tell you that; and it’s not the proper place for a gentleman.” (4.2) At the start of the book Dostoevsky suggests that Fyodor accumulated his wealth by sponging, so that everyone always underestimated how rich he was, he also indulges in sharp practices (marrying for money and effectively cheating Dmitry out of his mother’s inheritance); by the time of the action of the novel, however, Fyodor has a reputation for being a rich voluptuary. Is this an inconsistency in the story or is Dostoevsky showing that even when a character is consistent, their reputation can be multi-faceted.
At the end of the book, at the trial, both Prosecutor and Defence Counsel interpret the actions of Dmitry in different ways: as the Defence says “psychology, gentlemen, though it is a deep thing, none the less resembles a stick with two ends” (12.10). It is pointed out that the lawyers are constructing competing stories. It is as if Dostoevsky is saying that there is no absolute truth but that all versions of reality are unreliable narrations, a very postmodern idea.
The unreliable narrator is also a trope of modernist fiction, so perhaps TBK is an early example of that. The ending of the book, which is only partially resolved, is another characteristic of modernism.
Characters
In the end, the joy of TBK lies in some of the characters. Although I found Alyosha rather empty and bland and Smerdyakov is a purely pantomime villain, other characters are fascinating. My favourites were Mrs Khokhlakov, a wonderfully empty-headed widow, and the brilliant but vain but compassionate Kolya. At the other end of the age spectrum, who doesn't love an unredeeemed rake who takes joy in his wickedness, such as Fyodor Karamzov?
But perhaps the most interesting character is Ratikin. At the start he is almost unnoticeable, the seminarian in the background. But little by little he worms his way into the plot until he is a cross between a secret policeman and an agent provocateur. He is a spy for Mrs K. He takes money from Grushenska to bring Alyosha to her. He pops up everywhere! “It turned out that Ratikin knew everything, knew an extraordinary amount, had been to visit everyone, seen everything, spoken to everyone, and possessed a most detailed knowledge.” (12.2) Is he Dostoevsky's cynical self-portrait, like Velasquez in his Las Meninas? He writes slanderous articles (betraying Mrs K) for the Moscow press when the scandal of the murder breaks. Dmitry even says “He wants to write about me ... and thus inaugurate his role in literature.” (11.4)
What I didn’t like
As with so many Russian novels, each character has three names: the first name, the patronymic and the surname. They are referred to either by first name and patronymic (eg Fyodor Pavolich) or by surname (eg Karamazov) or, most frequently, by a version of their first name (eg Alyosha, Mitya, Katya, etc). Some characters have more than one such nickname (often different people call them different things and this is a highlight of the book). In some cases we don’t learn the full name of a character until very late on in the book. This caused me considerable confusion at the start, not realising, for example, that Grushenska was also called Agrafena Alexandrovna. I really needed a cast list at the start of the book which listed all possible versions of their name.
The edition I had came with notes which often explained things that I wasn’t very interested in, such as the fact that a certain line was derived from a parody of Pushkin. What I absolutely needed was a translation of the many times that French or Latin was used. In the worst example, the devil tells a joke in French. There is an end-note ... which gives the full joke, still in French, and fails to translate it! Why do editors do this? I’m reading a translation ... but they can’t be bothered to translate anything that’s not Russian. Is it because they don’t know? Or is it because they do know and they expect me to know? Or is it because they do know and they know I don’t know and it is a way of asserting their superiority?
The implication that Smerdyakov was a rotter principally because he illegitimate. All of Fyodor Karamazov's sons get a rough start in life but poor old Smerdy is bullied and looked down on by everyone. The whole Russian economy depends on the peasants but, despite Dostoevsky's reputation as a revolutionary social reformer, his books are basically about the upper-classes, who are presumed, even when they are ill-educated and poverty-stricken, to be intrinsically nobler and worthier and better than the muzhiks.
All those exclamation marks! There's only so much intensity that one can take. Dmitry lives his life in the fast lane, always seemingly on the edge of catastrophe, and Ivan seems perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Alyosha spends his time running from one crisis to another. It's like watching Macbeth when everyone shouts every line, or a ballet when the dancers never pause. Exhausting! The occasional funny bits, such as when Mrs K tries to interest Dmitri in gold mines, are a welcome relief.
The narrative was somewhat lumpy. Two whole books (6 and 10) were almost extraneous additions. Book 6 tells of the life and works of the Elder Zosima and is almost completely irrelevant to the plot. Book 10 introduces a new character and acts as an interlude between Dmitry's arrest and his trial.
And, while I appreciate that every character needs a back story, does every character need that back-story told? I suppose these sometimes provided welcome breaks from the intensity of the action but I really didn't need to know, for example, why Zosima became a monk.
Evaluation
Yes it is much too long. There were passages of intricate theological and legal argument when I was numb with weariness. But even an inadequate review like the one above must give some idea of the wealth that is in this book. A classic? Undoubtedly.