Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Part One - The Narrative

One of the oldest paperbacks in my library.  I bought this in the early 1980's and read it twice over a couple of years.  It was highly entertaining and rewarding to reread it again after 40-some years.  I realized how I've changed in many ways.

Note:  This is part one of a series of planned essays covering various aspects of this great Russian novel.

I read The Brothers Karamazov twice before I went to India in the 1980's.  One of my New Year's Resolutions was to read it again, for the first time in about 40 years.  I was surprised by the impression it made on me this time through.  For one thing, there is a great deal of humor in the novel that I completely missed back in my twenties.  I was reading it from the perspective of a “serious philosophical novel”, which it is, of course.  But, this time I was drawn more to the story itself and the masterful way it is told.

I started it about mid-December but didn't get serious about reading it until January, finishing it in about six weeks, while reading other things.  The novel is more entertaining than I remembered it, not just for the sprinkling of humor but for the plot.  A despicable father (Fyodor, named after the author) and his oldest son (Dimitry) are in a passionate relationship with the same naughty woman, who appeals to their sensuous natures.  This ultimately becomes a murder mystery with the wrong man sentenced for the crime.  That's the plot in teaser mode.

Of course, that is only a minuscule portion of the actual story.  This was the last novel Fyodor Dostoevsky would write.  He labored over it for three years.  It was the culmination of his life's work, a summation and representation of everything he came to examine and believe.   It was partly inspired by the death of Dostoevsky's 3-year-old son and the author personally coming to terms with a world where little children everywhere suffer and die.

The suffering of children lies at the heart of the novel, among other things.  Dostoevsky gave his son's name to the novel's youngest Karamazov, Alyosha.  Importantly, its only through Alyosha, the spiritual seeker, that we see the children.  The other two brothers would never encounter children.  The value of children would not occur to them, as it never did to their father.  Fyodor practically abandoned his boys to the care of his servants.  

The middle brother is Ivan, the intellectual.  The most famous chapter of the novel, “The Grand Inquisitor”, is a philosophical thought-experiment by Ivan which he tells as a story ("poem") to Alyosha.  As if the romantic entanglements were not already complicated enough, Ivan loves the woman Dmitry is engaged to (Katerina), who is not the same woman Dimitry passionately desires along with his father (Grushinka).  There are some really juicy, gossipy aspects to the novel.  It is very entertaining and is written at times in a sensual, psychological, almost erotic style (within the mores of the nineteenth century).

For a time, the father kept “a regular harem in the house” and hosted “orgies.”  The reader is treated to witnessing Dimitry and Grushinka (the unabashed flirtatious slut) at a drunken party that goes on in extended detail at one point in the novel.  Meanwhile, Ivan, who secretly loves Katerina, has a psychological breakdown before our eyes.  Along the narrative, Alyosha finds a moment of sheer spiritual rapture that is breathtakingly refreshing in this often gloomy novel.

So there is plenty of sex and sizzle to read.  Of course, Dostoevsky's main purpose is to explore larger ideas.  Is there a God?  What does it mean if there is no God?  The existential nature and weight of guilt and responsibility.  The strange ordinariness of irrational behavior.  The use and misuse of the passions.  The use and misuse of belief.  Here, I just want to keep the main focus of the basic narrative and primary characters stripped of the author's musings.  

Fyodor is the murder victim.  One of the most astonishing things about this is that no one cares.  The reader has no reason to care that the hedonistic, narcissistic old man is murdered.  He is abrasive to everyone he encounters (except Grushinka and, to some degree, Alyosha).  He basically abandoned all his off-spring so that he could freely live his hedonistic lifestyle.  Dostoevsky does not kill someone you care about.  He kills someone no one actually cares about, something he first established in Crime and Punishment.

This was more pronounced in rereading it after 40 years.  Dimitry has every reason to kill his father, who treats him brutally, withholds his inheritance, and is intimate with the same woman as he. Interestingly, Dostoevsky makes the actual moment of the murder ambiguous.  Dimitry is there, he sees his father, he even thinks about killing him, but the novel does not describe him actually doing it, only as he is about to do it.

This is cleared up later when the real murderer confesses privately to Ivan.  This is a surprising plot twist to a first-time reader, who has no reason to suspect anyone other than Dimitry.  The murderer accuses Ivan of being his accomplice because he, too, wanted his father dead.  Ivan is crushed under the weight of this truthful revelation.  Bit-by-bit, the reader experiences him falling apart mentally and emotionally.

Nevertheless, the novel is filled with a specific form of humor.  Dostoevsky has a talent for the ridiculous, the dead pan, and the smart aleck.  Early in the novel, Father Zosima, an important figure in Alyosha's life, stunningly prostrates himself before Dimitry, placing his forehead on the floor.  Afterwards, Alyosha is talking to a minor atheistic character who witnessed the moment.  The atheist says Father Zosima “banged his forehead on the floor.”  Which is a humorous, somewhat insulting, way to put it.  At first, Alyosha does not even know what he is talking about.

Much later, Ivan has a hallucination of coming face to face with the devil, dressed as a somewhat bedraggled gentleman.  He frantically denies that the devil even exists.  But the devil is a smartass.  He criticizes Ivan for expecting a more grandiose devil.  Having taken human form, this devil complains about catching a cold while wearing formal coat and tails as he travels through the subfreezing cold of “outer space” to corrupt those attending a high-class reception.  He is defensive, stating that he was wearing only tails and had nothing to keep him warm.  

He also suffers from rheumatism which he complains physicians have done a poor job in treating him thus far.  He complains that he is working his evil into the world “under protest” to higher authority and that earthly science has really confused everyone “over there” where he comes from.  He is laughably mundane and matter-of-fact about everything.    

The devil humorously runs intellectual circles around Ivan, keeping him off-balance as the brother continues his psychological breakdown.  It is a strange juxtaposition indeed where one of the funniest parts of the novel is also the moment one of the main characters suffers a psychotic break.  Overall, the book has a lot of funny little moments which made it more entertaining than I remembered.

There are almost no descriptions of nature throughout the novel.  Dostoevsky is exploring human psychological interiors here and the natural world does not really exist at this level.  There are, however, several residence rooms and spaces described with exquisite detail.  The reader knows the domestic conditions and décor of where every major moment of the plot occurs.  The novel is picturesque in a strange way, psychologically so.   I would love to study it well enough to write a post on nothing but all the rooms Dostoevsky so wonderfully describes.

The only bit of nature that gets several sentences devoted to it is a large three-acre garden area adjoining Fyodor's home.  This becomes an important location later in the novel so it is a necessary set-up early on.  Basically, it is a clinical description of all the various kinds of trees which outline the garden space, how much hay could be cut off the open grass each season, and various berries that grow here and there.  In other words, it is not a natural description that one can enjoy so much as a material accounting of the space.

The novel begins with a number of pages devoted Fyodor Karamazov, the necessary biographical information.  Dmitry was bore to him by his first wife, who afterward “eloped”, humorously enough, “with a half-starved tutor, a former divinity student.”  His second wife bore him Ivan and Alyosha, but she was unwell, suffering from “hysteria” and was known as a “shrieker.”  She died when Alyosha was three, leaving the old man free to build his harem and have orgies.   

The brothers were initially brought up by the old man's servants, chiefly Gregory and his wife Maria.  But a local lady of dignified society showed up one day and “without a word” slapped Fyodor “with two mighty, resounding smacks on his face” for the condition of his children.  She slapped Gregory too before taking them away under her care.  She soon died and an “honorable man” stepped in to take care of their education.  

One of a multitude of splendid moments described by Dostoevsky throughout the novel is a memory Alyosha holds of his mother from his infancy.  I'll quote it as an example of his writing.  “He remembered a certain evening – a quiet summer evening, an open window, the slanting rays of the setting sun (the slanting rays were the clearest part of his recollection), an icon with a lighted lamp in the corner of the room, and, kneeling before the icon, his mother, sobbing hysterically, screaming and shrieking, clutching him with both hands so tightly that it hurt, praying to the Mother of God for him, then holding him away from her toward the icon, as if putting him under the protection of the Mother of God...” (page 21)

After these few pages of introduction to the father and his sons, the novel proceeds for the next 350 pages to take place in one day.  As it happens, it is the last day in the life of the elder monk Father Zosima, who is a sort of guru for Alyosha as the youngest brother considers joining the monastery.  Zosima is an crucial figure during this stage of the novel for the profound spiritual wisdom he possesses and expresses with others.

For all his importance, however, Zosima is a facilitating character.  The story is more about what happens to the brothers that day while introducing us to the two primary female characters and to Smerdyakov, Fyodor's other principle servant.  The reader mainly follows Alyosha around as he encounters the other characters.  

The novel is divided into four parts with an epilogue.  Each part contains anywhere between 5 to 14 chapters.  Most chapters are brief, though some like “The Grand Inquisitor” are over 20 pages.  This makes the novel easy for the reader to tackle, in smaller chucks similarly to Tolstoy's War and Peace - a long book with mostly short chapters.  I usually read through it at a pace of one or two chapters a day, though there are some moments when Dostoevsky leaves the reader hanging, enticing you to read on to see what happens next.  I kept reading straight-through with interest in those cases.

The narrative perspective constantly shifts from the omniscient third-person to the intimate experiences of each brother.  Meanwhile, Dostoevsky himself, as narrator, constantly interrupts things to interject his own opinions and to fill the reader in on important facts.  There are several whimsical moments when the author basically says, “I have to pause for a moment and tell you about something necessary for the novel to make sense.”  He also occasionally puts his own opinions into the work, though these are usually regarding minor details of someone's personality or something.

An excellent example of this occurs when Dostoevsky places his narrator in the audience during the trial near the end of the book.  When Grushenka appears as a witness in the trial she is respectfully referred to as Miss Svetlov, to which Dostoevsky humorously writes in parenthesis: “It was at the trial, by the way, that I heard Grushenka's last name for the first time – I had not been aware of it until just then.”   So the narrator breaks the wall between himself and the reader, merely to acknowledge a minor detail as if the reader and the narrator are in dialog – which they kind of are in this great classic.  The reader has already known her last time for quite some time which is an interesting juxtaposition - the reader knows some details that the narrator does not.

Though Alyosha is the primary brother followed in the text, there are lengthy sections relating to the perspectives of Dimitry and Ivan as well.  We follow the oldest brother around move-for-move at the time of his father's murder and witness his delirious escapades afterwards that culminate with a wild party with Grushenka which ends with his arrest for the murder.  During Ivan's hallucinatory encounter with the devil Dostoevsky has the tongue-in-cheek devil mention another famous Russian author.

The devil absurdly takes a moment to explain to Ivan that he is hallucinating: “Listen, in dreams and particularly in nightmares, caused perhaps by indigestion or whatever, a man may think up such artistic creations, such complex and realistic visions, events or even a whole world of events woven into a plot of such astounding details that Leo Tolstoi could not invent them.” (page 769)  

That's a funny tip-of-the-hat to Tolstoy.  Yet, it is simultaneously a genuine insight into how human beings can invent all sorts of things when interpreting their dreams.  The Brothers Karamazov is an intense novel.  It is intensely entertaining in dramatic, mystery, sensual, and psychological ways, which makes the book rewarding on multiple levels. 

The brothers are intensely interesting characters, reflecting various aspects of human life.  All three brothers are intensely passionate, like their father. Dimitry is the sensualist, who ultimately accepts his wrongful sentence because he knows that he wanted his father dead.  He feels responsible for that desire to the point of believing he was an accomplice of sorts even though he is completely innocent of the actual crime.  He views his resulting suffering as just though he never wavers from declaring himself innocent of that specific crime.

Ivan is the intellectual.  He refers to himself as a “realist.”  He doubts God's existence and entertains philosophic musings about the death of God.  He, too, feels himself an accomplice for the way he hated his father.  But, unlike Dimitry, he cannot cope with the weight of that accountability.  He suffers a complete breakdown which Dostoevsky uses to examine deeper existential and religious questions.

Alyosha is the spiritual brother.  At the beginning of the novel he considers becoming a monk.  But Father Zosima, just before his death, tells Alyosha to remain a part of society.  That he will serve God more by getting married and applying the teachings of the monastery to his ordinary life.  

Most importantly, it is Alyosha, the youngest and most childlike brother, that takes time to interact with the children of the novel.  It is through Zosima's wisdom as practiced by Alyosha that the reader meets all the children.  When one remembers that Alyosha was the name of Dostoevsky's boy who so recently died, one understands that this is the author's son playing with the other children.  

Which makes the children, seemingly unnecessary characters that contribute little to the actual plot, perhaps the cornerstone of the novel.  Undoubtedly, they offered some catharsis for Dostoevsky himself, which is probably one reason he repeatedly writes himself into the narrative.  He is in the novel.  With Alyosha.

YouTube offers a lot of content pertaining to The Brothers Karamazov.  There are plenty of “greatest novels of all time” videos that mention it.  Clearly, it is a mighty tome in world literature.  Several videos examine the plot and themes of the novel.  The best of these is a generous series of chapter-by-chapter talks by Jessica Hooten Wilson.  Though she offers a very Christian perspective on the novel, her insights are rich and she definitely understands the intricacies of Dostoevsky, who was a perpetually struggling Christian himself.  An excellent guide.