The Brothers Karamazov

Overview

Eight hundred pages, twelve books and an epilogue, serialised over two years and finished four months before Dostoevsky died. It is a murder mystery whose solution is announced well before the trial, which tells you the mystery is not the point.

Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is a buffoon and a sensualist who abandoned his three sons and is now, at fifty-five, competing with the eldest for the same woman. Dmitri is all appetite and honour, a soldier in debt. Ivan is an intellectual who has published on church courts and does not believe in God. Alyosha, the youngest, is a novice at the local monastery under the elder Zosima. Smerdyakov, the epileptic cook, is probably Fyodor’s son by a mute vagrant woman he raped.

Dostoevsky called it a novel about “the contemporary question” of faith and doubt, and planned a sequel with Alyosha at the centre that he did not live to write.

What happens

The family gathers at the monastery to settle Dmitri’s claim on his mother’s money, and the meeting collapses into Fyodor’s clowning. Zosima kneels to Dmitri, which nobody understands and which the rest of the book explains.

Dmitri needs three thousand roubles. He is engaged to Katerina Ivanovna, whose money he has spent, and in love with Grushenka, whom his father is also pursuing with an envelope of three thousand as bait. He tells anyone who will listen that he might kill the old man.

The centre of the book is a conversation in a tavern between Ivan and Alyosha. Ivan says he accepts God but not God’s world, and gives his evidence: a child torn apart by dogs in front of his mother, a five-year-old girl beaten and locked in a freezing outhouse by her parents. If eternal harmony requires that, he refuses his ticket. Then he tells Alyosha a poem he has composed. Christ returns to Seville during the Inquisition and is arrested. The Grand Inquisitor visits his cell and explains that the Church has corrected his work: men cannot bear freedom, they want miracle, mystery and authority, and the Church has taken the burden from them and made them happy. Christ says nothing and kisses him. The Inquisitor lets him out and tells him not to come back.

Book VI answers with the life and sayings of Zosima, recorded by Alyosha: a dying elder’s account of a brother’s deathbed, a duel refused, and a teaching that all are responsible for all. Then Zosima dies and his body stinks, which the town takes as proof he was no saint, and Alyosha’s faith is shaken by exactly the kind of cheap miracle he was never supposed to want.

Fyodor is murdered. The evidence points at Dmitri, who was there, was covered in blood, and had suddenly acquired money. He did not do it. Smerdyakov did, and tells Ivan so in the third of three interviews, explaining that he acted on Ivan’s philosophy and that Ivan had understood and gone to Moscow anyway. Then he hangs himself, leaving Ivan without a witness and with a brain fever in which the devil visits him as a shabby gentleman.

The trial takes the last book. Both lawyers are brilliant, both are wrong, Katerina produces a letter that damns Dmitri to save her pride, and he is convicted. The epilogue leaves an escape plan half-made and Alyosha with a group of schoolboys at a funeral, promising that one good memory from childhood may be enough to save a person.

How to read it

Keep a list of names. Every character has a first name, a patronymic, a surname and at least one diminutive, and Grushenka, Agrafena Alexandrovna and Grusha are the same woman. Fifteen minutes with the character list at the front will save you hours.

Read Book V, chapters 3 to 5, with full attention. Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor are the reason this book is assigned, and they work as self-contained essays. If your course is reading extracts, that is what it means.

Then read Book VI, which most readers skim. Dostoevsky told his editor it was his answer to Ivan, and he knew it was a weaker weapon: an old monk’s reminiscences against the best atheist argument ever written. Judge whether an answer of that kind can meet an attack of that kind; that is the question the novel is actually posing.

On the translation: Pevear and Volokhonsky keep the Russian’s roughness, the repetitions and the odd word order, which is closer to what Russian readers meet and can feel clumsy. Garnett smooths everything into Edwardian English and reads more easily. Avsey is the most fluent. Any of the three is fine. Do not read a free public-domain text you have not identified, because it will be Garnett with the errors uncorrected.

Watch for the fact that the murder is solved offstage. Dostoevsky is not withholding the answer, he is showing you a court that reaches the wrong verdict from correct evidence, which is a statement about the limits of legal reason.

Questions it raises

• Ivan accepts God and rejects the world. Is that a coherent position, and is it more or less serious than atheism?
• The Inquisitor says people do not want freedom. The novel gives us Smerdyakov, who takes Ivan’s freedom and murders with it. Does Dostoevsky agree with his own villain?
• Christ answers the Inquisitor with a kiss and no words. Is silence an answer, or an admission there is none?
• Zosima says all are responsible for all. Does that deepen moral responsibility or dissolve it?
• Dmitri is innocent of the murder and wanted it badly. Should he be punished, and for what?
• If one good memory from childhood can save a person, what happens to the children in Ivan’s catalogue, who had none?