News

The Brothers Karamazov is one of the supreme examples of the novel. One reason is that it stretches the form to its limits. With the notable exception of the Gothic novel of the late 18th century, the form is in modern times associated with the more or less commonplace incidents of ordinary social life.

But such works rarely touch on the intense moral-spiritual conflicts depicted in great works of tragic drama — conflicts that probe the ultimate meaning of human life. This is why, in attempting to characterize Brothers Karamazov interpreters so often refer to Greek tragedy or King Lear.

The Brothers Karamazov was written by Dostoevsky at the very end of his life (1821-1881). It thus focuses the issue that had increasingly come to preoccupy him ever since he discovered, during his four-year imprisonment with peasant-convicts, the mental-emotional gap between the religious peasant world and the educated upper class. This class had assimilated a Western culture which, if not totally irreligious, had been at least touched by the conflict with the dogmas of Christianity. The disintegrating effect of this on Russians is illustrated most graphically in Dostoevsky's prison memoirs The House of the Dead, in which the most despicable character in a world filled with peasant criminals, all of whom pray devoutly at Easter, is the educated Aristov. For Dostoevsky, nothing was more important than for the upper class to learn to respect the religious values of the peasantry, which he believed preserved them from the moral monstrosities of an Aristov and made them immune to calls for revolution among the disenfranchised proletariat of Europe.

The novel is Dostoevsky's magnificent attempt to present this theme to an educated public that would be inclined to regard the Russian monastery portrayed here as a haunt of obscurantism and reaction. The contrast between the moral sublimity of Father Zosima and the superstitiously ascetic Father Ferapont is intended to counter such resistance.

This theme may be defined as the opposition between reason and true faith, a faith that depends on no external evidence. Faith implies the acceptance of a realm that transcends the limits of what the human mind can rationally comprehend, and summons all the emotive powers of the human personality to overcome such a barrier. All the characters are tested in terms of their capacity to transcend this limitation.

The three Karamazov brothers, Alyosha, Dimitri and Ivan, all undergo a religious crisis. Alyosha has become a novice in the monastery, a disciple of Father Zosima. His crisis occurs when the corpse of the holy father, whose sanctified life had led to the expectation that his body would be spared earthly decay, begins to emit an unpleasant odour. The crisis is resolved in the beautiful dream-sequence in which Alyosha hears a reading from the Gospel of St. John of the miracle of the transformation of water into wine during the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee.

Ivan is the most intellectual of the brothers, the one most influenced by the undermining of religious faith, but he cannot suppress his need for something in which to believe. His inspired tirade against the injustice of a world in which innocent children are doomed to suffer makes for some of the most powerful pages ever written against the acceptance of God's world. So does the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, in which Christ is accused of endowing mankind with a freedom of moral choice that it is too weak to sustain. But Ivan's acceptance of a murder he did not commit reveals the intense inner struggle of his amoral reason with his sense of guilt, which leads to the mental breakdown in which he is still trapped as the novel ends.

The main action revolves around Dimitri, first seen as an explosive regimental brawler quite capable of killing his father, but whose conscience prevents it. Dimitri's moral transformation is the most spectacular, and his trial and conviction exemplify the novel's main theme. This is the incapacity of abstract reason to cope with the complexities of a human situation determined not only by egocentric and sensual drives, but also by the ineradicable moral conscience which finally triumphs in all three brothers.

The richness and variety of the novel's characters and situations, the profundity of its themes and Dostoevsky's tendency to give the strongest versions of views he was combatting, has led to endlessly competing speculations about his own point of view. But this can be said with certainty: Once read, The Brothers Karamazov will not be forgotten.

Joseph Frank is professor emeritus of Slavic and comparative literature at Stanford University. His most recent book is Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (2002).