I this book because...
I had read most of Dostoyevsky’s other novels twenty-five years ago. I decided then to save up this book for a rainy day.
The Brothers Karamazov is on a vaster scale than Dostoyevsky’s other novels, less concentrated along one line of supreme intensity. And yet, all the power still bursts forth, in moments where the innards of the characters seem to explode outward, penetrating the reader’s soul. It is hard not to be conscious of the fact that Dostoyevsky wrote this novel following the death of his own three-year-old son. The novel seems to constitute a re-piecing-together of the author’s mind, and, as this was his last book, a final statement on life and death, love and loss.
The
book holds a colossal power, quantum neutron-star-like depths wrestling crazily
on the page, but underlying that, the restraint still of a great and
overwhelming sense of order in the things of this world, a faith in that
underlying web that holds everything in place as we live among its strands, and
not always trapped either in the role of fly or spider, but capable perhaps, in
Dostoyevsky’s eyes, of more.
4 authors picked The Brothers Karamazov as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Winner of the Pen/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize
The award-winning translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel of psychological realism.
The Brothers Karamasov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons―the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, is social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in…