A couple months back, I read The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
I had actually gone into the endeavor rather excited. A family friend had noted that it was one of her sons’ favorite books, but had remarked that it was too dark for her, personally. Another person had clucked air through their teeth and said, ‘oh, that one’s deep.’ Amazon.com customer reviews had also raved, talking of such elements as drama, adventure and mystery.
I was going to post some reviews that adorn my copy’s jacket, but at this point, and to me anyway, they just sound ridiculous. You see, I didn’t really think all that much of the book. In fact, I’m still rather baffled as to why people see such brilliance emanating from it, and worse still, I found it to have an almost childlike shallowness to it.
The characters function as little more than cardboard cut-outs to drag along a narrative that grapples with spiritual meaning. When the characters aren’t pandering towards the obvious, they very obviously drift or break from character, and it’s handled in such noted manner, that it’s clearly intended to shock the reader as it qualifies these moments as real plot advancement.
That level of plotting is also where I take issue, because you see, three hundred pages into the book, I was still wondering when it was all going to start. Four hundred pages in I thought it might have started, but then was still debating for another hundred or two if that had really been the case. This book is slow. That isn’t to say that it’s not engaging, because there were elements that genuinely interested me, but the very deliberate (read as heavily staged) sequence of events was further hampered by long stretches of philosophical musings that would drag on for pages, sometimes even consisting of whole chapters, as was the case with brother Ivan’s recounting of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ and the journals of Zosima. In fact, during Ivan’s telling of Inquisitor to his brother, and fellow Karamazov, Alyosha, he even quotes Shakespeare; Hamlet of all things!
There’s also the fact that, try as I might, I’m still not sure exactly why this book is deemed important, and what exactly all the philosophy is really supposed to convey. I’m not daft. I swear to God that this book has the outright audacity to make it’s central focus asking, just, what is, after all, the meaning of life.
It riffs on themes of spiritual commitment as challenge, that spiritual bliss isn’t always pretty, and how doing the right thing isn’t always the easiest thing. That there is good and bad! Darkness in all of us! That even an act of plain murder can be upstaged by the more criminal break from another’s flee from the righteous. That even when things go wrong? You can absolve your sins and live in exiled peace and the contentment of poverty.
Is that treating the book lightly? Yes, it is, but these are the most basic themes that make college freshman scrunch up their noses in perplexity. Everything is obvious, and if there is to be a double of a meaning lodged anywhere, it’s also carefully framed and I have no doubt that this deliberate structuring, which so knowingly cuts into second guesses and which could fuel debate, is one of the chief reasons that the book is so highly regarded in the literary circle. In short? It’s accessible and knowing all at once. It lacks the smugness of Mark Twain, but it never departs from seriousness or the self-aware.
I also understand that much of what the Russian masters, Dostoevsky included, were dealing with often involved trying to reach new understandings of the world around them, at a time when others had seemingly ceased to question; that’s what the critics say. My own perspective from Karamazov is that it’s more akin to watching one go about reinventing the wheel. Anything story-wise seems to have already been beaten out by precedent, as this book doesn’t attempt to sway from anything contained in the Bible (perhaps an allegory! parallels!), the Myths or that of Shakespeare.
In fact, I’ll make a case that everything that this book hoped to achieve and explain had already been stated by Pierre Laclos’ novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and that work managed to be thrilling, provocative and groundbreaking; it also pre-dates Karamazov by roughly a century. I am biased, as Dangereuses is one of my favorite books, and I have a feeling that it fails to command the respect that it deserves because it has yet to be blessed with the stature of Dostoevsky in the eyes of professors and the intellectual ‘elite.’
Did I like anything about The Brothers Karamazov? Yes, a few things. The growth and maturity of Alyosha was nicely handled, and he has the makings to be a literary great in a pantheon of characters, and the writing sometimes had a personality and warmth that reads beautifully, but that’s pretty much where my list ends, and that this is a gloating work which envisions an epic opera, but has, rather, delusions of grandeur as it performs more as dry soap opera. I didn’t come away with anything more than bragging rights to say I’ve commanded it, and that it pales in comparison to far better, and more meaningful books that I’d previously read. Should I encounter anyone who considered their time with The Brothers Karamazov to be intellectual growth, I’ll quietly suppress a grin knowing them to be a full-on dunce.
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The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Everyman’s Library
Publication dated as 1879-80
