Review: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)

When I said this blog was going to review the books I read, I meant almost all of those books. Limiting myself to fantasy would limit fantasy, saying that it can't stand on the same shelf as other great literature.

But enough griping. I present: The Brothers Karamazov.

Set in post-feudal, pre-Communist Russia, this book follows the trials of the dysfunctional Karamazov family, the father of which is Fyodor Pavlovich, an old man known for his buffoonery and sexual promiscuity. Fyodor's eldest son, Dmitri Fyodorovich (you get the hang of the naming rules after a while), is a hotheaded man who often gets into trouble with love and money. The middle son, Ivan, is cold and critical, but tragically passionate. And the youngest, Alexey, is an overzealous monk whose dying elder knows that Alexey belongs out in the world for a longer time. Reuniting after living apart for many years, the family must find a way to keep from destroying each other over matters of money, women, and ethics.

You guessed it: this book is very different from anything I've already reviewed on this blog, both in time and space. I'm a big fan of Dostoevsky's philosophic beliefs, and so I must recognize from the beginning that these may tip the enjoyment of the book depending on where you stand. Because, as it turns out, philosophy and moral speculation are the backbone of this book. Its biggest problem is that the plot is secondary until the dramatic twist.

I'll tackle things chronologically. Dostoevsky's characters are amazingly complex and come with lots of baggage. I don't know whether this is more a 19th century trope or a Russian one, but that baggage is described in massive detail, including an entire chapter of back-story whenever a significant minor character is introduced. It's important to note that the book was originally released in chapter-long installments in a magazine. Dostoevsky was enormously popular by then, and readers were hooked; they looked forward to this month's exposition of the disgraced army captain's woes. But put into a continuous narrative, translated into English, and picked up by a young man in the attention span-fearing 21st century, the technical details slow the story nearly to a standstill. If it were written in the U.S. today, The Brothers Karamazov would need to be a third of its current size for a publisher to touch it with a ten-foot copyright. As it is, the first task is to sort out all the characters and their histories, making the book difficult to dive straight into.

Once it picks up, the book fluctuates between solid and brilliant. The long characterization pays off: everyone is understandable as a real person, and their actions make them more understandable rather than too complicated. For me, all the real points of gold come to or from the character Alexey, who is the only character without any concealed intentions. His bravery and honesty do not make him simple-minded or even all that naïve, as is the tendency. He is faced with the problem that too few books try to tackle, perhaps because nobody knows the answer: what to do when you have succeeded in becoming humble and good-hearted, but the world keeps on turning up new problems.

The other characters are explored just as well. I didn't understand or like Ivan until the very end, mostly because he felt like a crabby "stock atheist" who should have been more complex. Here's a spoiler: he is. The women in the book are brilliant, which is more remarkable considering the time (I don't know about the place, never having read a Russian, non-Dostoevsky book). 19th century authors, even those I wouldn't consider sexist, didn't tend to know quite how complex women act. I'm not an expert, but at least I try to give my women characters layered personality traits and actual motivations. Dostoevsky's women are at least as complex as his men–they're as realistic as people. None of his characters is limited to a desire for love, sex, money, power, purpose, or any other mold into which a sociologist might try to cram one of us. Just like anybody, they're not always sure what they want. This is something I try to give my characters, so I can say from experience that it's the hardest character trait to write, because the whole character goes bonkers if he's not written naturally. And Dostoevsky does it masterfully.

The political and religious debates were interesting. Not knowing enough about Russian history, I didn't have enough context to judge the attitudes with which his characters discuss socialism, which was already a common–if not popular–concept there. I was able to get down and dirty with the religion, and I found myself morbidly fascinated by Ivan's story "The Grand Inquisitor," in which a bishop explains his dystopian vision of the Catholic Church to his prisoner, a heretic who is actually Christ. Dostoevsky does well to include his characters' personalities in their religious views, keeping them real and at least semi-rational. After all, it's people who believe that humans and faith can be separated who have the dimmest sense of what constitute belief, apart from those who take it for granted. This, I digress, is the reason stories are useful for exploring philosophy.

What lost my interest was the turn of the story after its climax, which I won't spoil here. It involves a crime, an investigation, and a trial, none of which interested me very much. Caught up in rhetoric, the book loses some opportunities for its characters to develop smoothly, although they get there in the end. It's certainly not a thriller.

Although I hold this book in high regard, it's not the first one I'd recommend off the shelf. Read it if you're looking for some solid insight on Christianity, ethics, psychology, Dostoevsky, or Russia. Don't read it if you're looking for some insight on legal proceedings, or if you're looking for thrills and spills. Better find those elsewhere.