Phew.
I finished Dostoevsky's masterwork The Brother's Karamazov on Sunday, 11/6/11, at 6:54 AM. And while I do indeed feel more culturally enriched by the experience, I mostly feel relief.
I'm not saying it was a bad book by any means, but it was a really tough read. It was like watching a tightly wound, tense soccer match between two excellent teams: a tough slog with occasional flashes of sublime brilliance. Some days I could barely put it down, but then there were times were I could only read 6 pages a week.
For those of you who haven't read it, I'll set the scene: This is a book basically about a double love triangle between Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and two of his four sons: Ivan and Dimitri (aka Mitya), where Dimitiri is sort of the hinge. On the one hand, Fyodor (a moderately wealthy landowner) and Mitya are competing for the favors of the vivacious, cunning, and reputedly rather wicked Grushenka. On the other hand, Dimitri is already engaged to a wealthy young woman, Katya Ivanovna, who Ivan secretly loves. It's a mess.
Karamazov has two other sons. One is Alyosha, who is a very spiritual and religious young man who when the novel opens is about to enter an Orthodox monastery. The other is the "lackey" Smerdyakov, who is reputedly the offspring of Fyodor and a wandering, homeless mystic, Stinking Lizaveta, who Fyodor essentially rapes on a bet between him and other wealthy gentlemen. Smerdyakov serves as a cook to Fyodor, after being raised by his two servants.
As you can tell, Fyodor is not really a stand-up guy. He is little more than a buffoon, given to drunkenness, debauchery, depravity. He is good at making money, but that is not exactly commendable. As to the others, Dimitri is a sensualist, a hedonist who knows no restraint, who nonetheless possesses a keen and absurd sense of honor. Ivan is a rationalist, an atheist, and though we don't know it at the start of the novel also possess a Karamazovian lack of restraint for his passions as witnessed by his love for the engaged Katya.
As we discover the love triangles, the plot unfolds. At the beginning of the book all the brothers are in their hometown, and we witness the simmering tension between Dimitri and his father Fyodor which is only kept from boiling over by the presence of Ivan. Alyosha is on the scene, but his family is a secondary concern (and perhaps to an extent an embarrassment) compared to his religious pursuits, especially as his mentor's health is ailing.
The mentor Zosima does finally die (after a really, really, really long speech) and Alyosha suffers a crisis of faith when the corpse of Zosima, lying in state, is corrupted (i.e. it starts to stink. I guess when a holy man dies he does not stink). He goes with a friend to Grushenka, who has reportedly promised to whip his cassock off of him and, I can only assume (though its not explicitly said in the book...it was 1880, after all), fuck the bejeezus out of him. But when he arrives she doesn't seem that interested, she and Alyosha have a conversation of a spiritual nature that I can't really remember, and he goes off, his faith intact but changed. He no longer fears the world, he has mastered his Karamazovian appetites. He leaves the monastery and goes out into the world, as his mentor instructed him to do.
At the same time, Ivan resolves to leave for Moscow in spite of the ongoing strife. The next day, Fyodor is killed and three thousand roubles, which he had been using to entice Grushenka but Mitya always claimed was rightfully his, is stolen.
Dimitri is the prime suspect, of course, and indeed he is captured the next morning in the next town over while having a drunken spree with Grushenka, funded with a sudden and suspicious influx of cash.
The rest of the book concerns the investigation and trial, and its really interesting, but I don't want to discuss it too much because that is when the book really picks up. It's a shame that Fyodor isn't killed until over halfway through the 726 page book.
There are two things that make this book hard to read. First, its kind of like Moby Dick in that the plot is quite interesting, but there are many asides and long speeches that are really more philosophical in nature. Some of them are very interesting (notably the Grand Inquisitor, which I think I will examine in a different post later), but some of them are less so.
But the other thing that makes this book so hard to read is that people say its one of the great books, and that its about everything, and so you examine every sentence for meaning, looking for it in places where maybe it just isn't. There are many things in the book that are probably more about Russia in the late 1800s than anything else, and not knowing much about that time they just don't seem to matter much one way or the other.
But naturally, in a book with this kind of density and this kind of length, there is still a lot to take away, even if we set aside the Grand Inquisitor. As I have already written so much, I will leave you only with a comment on Alyosha and his faith.
At the beginning of the book, the narrator (who is sort of an omniscient citizen of the town in which all the action is set) states that Alyosha is the hero of the story, or at least that is certainly the sense that you get as we are introduced to him. But at first blush Alyosha seems very unheroic. While Ivan is desperately trying to keep his brother from killing his father Alyosha is at the monastery, and he really does nothing to help Ivan. he is a nervous young man who is afraid of his passions, that they might overtake him, and he does his best to seclude himself from temptation and his family. While his faith is admirable, he is something of a coward.
After his mentor dies he does realize that his faith has overcome his lustful, Karamazovian nature, and given him the power to live freely in the dangerous world, outside the monastery. So he is no longer a coward, but rather now a very brave man, going out into the world that he once so feared.
But even then, as things unfold, he doesn't really act the hero. He can't set anything to rights. All his belief in God and all of his prayers cannot keep the lives around him from unraveling. And his family, while a grave matter, still seems like a secondary concern to other things. Even after the murders, when his brother Ivan is ill and his brother Mitya is in jail, he seems to be more interested in saving the life of a young peasant boy who is obviously (in a heart wrenching Tiny Tim sort of way) beyond help. Sure, he visits his brother in jail and touches base with those who need to speak with him, but he really puts much more effort into comforting this little boy, his family, and a small platoon of the little boy's friends (who once teased him).
So Alyosha is not a hero in that he can keep bad things from happening. But I think there is something heroic about how he lives his life. Everyone else has all these hang ups, have drunken deeply of the times in which they live. Mitya embodies the sort of seedy underside of the 19th century and a belief in a ludicrous sense of honor that still hadn't faded from European life. His appetites and sense of deep offense pave the way to his destruction. Ivan embodies a sort of out of control rationalism in which anything can be justified through thought, even war and the non-existence of God. It has a hand in leading him to madness. There is one minor character that spouts nothing but what the liberal Russian press was writing at the time the book was written (or so it says in some of my edition's footnotes), and another minor character flits around from one idea to the next, from faith to atheism, from pastoralism to modernism.
But Alyosha? As everyone else spins around him like a drunken top, as people are killed and sent to jail and go mad, as the town becomes a sensational scene for a sort of celebrity trial of the day, as lives are ruined, only Alyosha can maintain his course. Only he is really....not calm, but steady...in the midst of all that goes around him. He's not necessarily happy. In no passage does he suddenly whip out a guitar and sing "I Can Only Imagine", but at the same time his faith allows him to move through a difficult time in a difficult and changing place without he himself being destroyed. He loves others. He alone has the ability to act positively, thoughtfully, and gracefully to the dark and troubling world he finds himself in.
And if his prayers are wasted on the adults, the little boy's friends he has met through helping little Tiny Tim (I can't remember his name...Illyusha? Something like that) seem to have undergone a positive change. One of the more bombastic seems humbled. One of the more shy ones seems more confident. Alyosha has given them an onion that one day they might grasp onto in their own struggle for salvation; a bittersweet memory of a good and worthy deed, of providing comfort to one who so desperately needed it, that one day may save them all.
What does that stuff about the onion mean? Well, my dear friends, you'll simply have to read the book.
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