fyodor dostoyevsky the brothers karamazov

For example, in between all the debate about religion, mainly between the son Alyosha (who chooses a life in a monastery and is one of the only truly good, albeit intensely naïve characters) and Ivan (the smooth talking, smart city slicker brother who may or may not be our murderer) I never could truly extrapolate which – if either side – Dostoevsky was backing and his basic end point. Did I really, truly ‘get’ it: a resounding no.

The fact that great minds such as Einstein called this a favorite book, an epic of literature and meaning, give you an idea about just how difficult the real subject matter is and how inaccessible to your average everyman, yours truly included.ĭid I enjoy the book: yes. What Dostoevsky is saying at any one time is a hard guess.

It’s more the intentions behind the words and the long scenes that hold the deeper meaning, which, frankly is a struggle for many of us to grasp. The writing might plop some big words here and there and indulge in some long sentences, yet it’s mostly plain, almost brutally so. The words are lush, but not in the usual Charles Dickens sense of the word – our expectation for all these glitzy old classics. Its meandering nature, contingent upon the reader’s mood, is both fun and intensely irritating. It’s both incredibly satisfying and a huge disappointment.

And so while the murder story is the bombshell, the details are in the smoking remains and our understanding as the author leads us away from the temptation of a who-dunnit into more spiritual, vague realms. In this aspect, each page, each sentence, is weighted with intrinsic meaning that is never explained itself but intended for extrapolation from the beleaguered reader. It’s a slow story and less about who the actual murderer is and more about the conceptions of morality vs necessity, forgiveness vs anger, God vs atheism, free will vs heredity, and the transition of mother Russia, both socially and politically. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s final novel, written as he himself came face to face with mortality and death, is the story of three brothers who are left to deal with the aftermath of their depraved father’s life and violent death as a murder investigation slowly implicates their complicit involvement. I chose one of the smaller Russian novels, The Brothers Karamazov (a mere 700 odd pages as opposed to Dostoevsky’s other famous opus, the 1,700 page plus Crime and Punishment). The classics kick continues with full immersion into the heady and essentially depressing existentialism of classic Russian novels. Rating: Introspection, Theology, and Mother Russia

Fyodor dostoyevsky the brothers karamazov