The Brothers Karamazov

This book holds a special place in my heart. I first read it in college, in a Russian Literature course where we analyzed the book’s characters and major themes. This experience trained me as both a writer and a reader.

This is a book concerned with Big Ideas: How can we reconcile the suffering of innocents with a benevolent God? How do we keep from falling into nihilism? These are the questions I come to literature for—questions that perhaps have no answers but whose contemplation is nevertheless worthwhile and transformative.  

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… show more.

It feels like a bit of a shame to include such a ubiquitously known philosophical novel when I have the chance to recommend others, but I feel compelled to include this novel because of the profound effect it had on me. There are endless things that can be said about the various philosophical, existentialist, and theological themes of this novel, so I will limit myself to praising one which was affecting to me. No other novel I have read so profoundly and deeply explores the notion of forgiveness. The reader is asked to consider forgiveness, its limits, its demands, its… show more.

This classic of 19th-century Russian literature offers a disturbing parable about God and religion. In the middle of a sprawling novel about a dissipated family squabbling over money, one of the three Karamazov brothers – Ivan, a strident atheist – composes a “story within a story” about a medieval Grand Inquisitor who imprisons a resurrected Jesus and threatens to execute him a second time. The Inquisitor reveals to Jesus that the Church has opted to follow Satan rather than God, because God’s teachings are simply impractical for the human race. But Jesus’s unexpected and mysterious response suggests that… show more.

Reading Dostoevsky is not easy, but there’s a reason he was Sigmund Freud’s favorite Russian writer: he wrote unblinkingly about guilt and rage and shame, regardless of how hard it is to contemplate these ugly facets of the self. He is a heroic writer, standing on a precipice, refusing to back down from the cold and snow and biting wind. And in recording the most difficult truths, he warms me up like a winter fire lasting as long into the night as this 1000-page behemoth of classic literature on a patricide trial.