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Братья Карамазовы

1880

  • literature - classics / criticism
  • russian
  • literature: classics
  • classics
  • literary
  • 19th century fiction
  • russian novel
  • crime and criminals
  • russian literature
  • fiction

The story

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide and family rivalry that embodies the moral and spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime and Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, and profligacy. Significantly, the book was on Tolstoy’s bedside table when he died. Readers in every language have since accepted Dostoevsky’s own evaluation of this work and have gone further by proclaiming it one of the few great novels of all ages and countries. ([source][1])

What it’s like

Long, heavy paragraphs of feverish talk and sudden interior confession, with the narrator dipping in and out of characters' heads: a reader settles into this book the way one settles into a crowded provincial room in late afternoon, with stale heat, candle smoke, vodka, and voices rising and falling over one another. The sensory world is thick and specific (muddy town streets, a monastery's cell and courtyard, a hushed courtroom packed with onlookers) and rendered with more psychological than visual detail. The mood is anguished and darkly comic by turns, with long stretches of argument about God, guilt and freedom punctuated by bursts of melodrama. Pacing is slow to build and then accelerates in its final third, and the emotional register is raw and intense. Its people are unstable and self-divided, and their arcs turn on confession, rivalry and slow, painful reckoning. Intensity: the father's murder is central but happens offstage, and violence is mostly recounted, not shown; there is drunkenness, sexual humiliation and strong emotional cruelty, but no graphic gore. For readers who want a demanding, immersive novel for long winter evenings, and who don't mind dense dialogue and philosophical digression.

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