The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880, translated by by David McDuff in Penguin Classics series, 1993/2003, 1013 pages.
These are my personal reflections on re-reading the novel. There are no spoilers and no attempt at a plot summary.
A symphony
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is a Mahler Symphony of a novel: it is huge, with an overarching sense of brooding inevitability which grows and grows with relentless tension, and yet each scene is an exquisite piece of chamber music. Seen up close, the mosaic of little dramas are each a study in manners – or lack of them – and finely-drawn psychology. Experienced as a whole, it is a careering cacophony of voices, of reckless and desperate actions, and of seething complex motivations. With good reason did Sigmund Freud describe The Brothers Karamazov as “The most magnificent novel ever written”.
It is a story about three very different brothers and one appalling father. On the surface it is something of a whodunnit, or perhaps a whydunnit? For there is a death, there is a mystery and there are possible culprits and motives amongst a tangle of tightly woven interrelationships. There are numerous detailed clues and red herrings, and in an unforgettable trial scene, the final verdict is delivered on the penultimate page. And yet this novel is far far from a “murder mystery”.
Who’s who?
There are many characters inhabiting this book. Some are central to the story and some peripheral, of course. Yet in Dostoevsky’s writing, each is a fully rounded, believable person. Few if any are just “plot devices”. With aristocrats and servants, highly educated scholars and ignorant peasants, otherworldly clerics and all-too-worldly prostitutes in the cast of hundreds, you would anticipate that some get short shrift from the narrator, but no: as a new character steps into the story they are given weight, a backstory, at least a sketch of their psychology, motives, relationships and feelings. Dostoevsky doesn’t intend for you to rush. And you never know when a “minor” character holds the key to understanding the story.
Culture shock
One initial obstacle to following and forming the characters is Russian naming conventions. It is not unusual for Dostoevsky to refer to the same character in 3 or 4 different ways in the same scene. Aleksey Karamazov may be called by his first or his surname or patronymic “Fyodorovich” or by his pet name “Alyosha”. It depends who is talking, or with what degree of formality or familiarity. Not only other speakers in the scene, but even the narrator, may switch names as the conversation progress within a chapter. Until the galaxy of names becomes familiar, continuity can be a challenge.
But the names are a surface feature of a whole raft of cultural differences, for a non-Russian reader, which mean that we may lose significance of the action and the nuance of speech. I made every use of the numbered endnotes to discover when a phrase was alluding to a contemporary event which would have been well-known to the original readers, but obscure to us. I picked up most of the biblical quotes that certain characters threw in, but would have remained in the dark about most references to Russian poetry and literature. Because something is translated into fluent English, we should beware that this 5″ x 8″ x 2″ collation of words on paper is really a time machine that transports us far in time and place and into a culture that is often baffling.
Re-reading
I cannot remember whether I first read Karamazov in my early or late twenties. But it was certainly before I had done enough growing up to fully appreciate it. In my teens I had read acres of science fiction, along with some Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad in school. The SF included “big” dramas like Asimov’s Foundation series, while Hardy’s Tess opened my eyes to “realism” and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to darker psychologies and insightful narrators breaking the fourth wall. But nothing prepared me for encountering Russian literature. First came Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and Gulag Archipelago, soon followed by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. For me it was a “loss of innocence” moment. It was a sudden confrontation with depths of human emotion and behaviour that had somehow passed me by.
Yet even when I first embarked on Karamazov, I was not really ready. I had not experienced enough of life to fully comprehend what was going on. I was swept along in the story, in the emotions and passions and wild behaviours of this dysfunctional and morally abject family. But as much as these Russian voices shook me out of some immaturity, I was still naïve, still ignorant of too many things. The main impression I was left with my first reading of Karamazov was an identification with the mystically religious (and somewhat naïve) brother Alyosha. But then I was entering many years of a convinced but troubled religious journey – one that I have since stepped away from. Therefore re-reading a great novel like this is certainly an instance of “you cannot step into the same river twice”. It was not only the water that had swept long downstream, but now there was a different person wading into the stream.
A bereavement
I am sure it common to feel a sense of loss when finishing a good book. Couldn’t it have continued? Do I want to know more about what happened to the characters after the last chapter? One thig that was the same with my re-reading of Karamazov was felling “bereft” at its conclusion. But It had also exhausted me – please, no more! And most of the absorbing and complex characters were, frankly, awful people whom I am very happy not know more about. (I even found the short Epilogue unsatisfying.) I was gripped right up to the last word, but am happy now to step back out of the time machine.
This is a book about men and women and children, about psychologies and morals and society and how each can break down. It is set in a time and place of big ideas and huge social changes. And in the minutiae of conversations and arguments and actions, there is also a tale that purports to represent the Soul of Russia. There is a deeply-held religious life challenged; a breaking down of the distances between the historic aristocracy and the recently emancipated serfs; a revelation of the insights from modern psychology and an undercurrent of never-manifested revolution in the air. After all, if a man may murder his unworthy father, perhaps the father of the nation is not secure any more?
Is it the “most magnificent novel ever written”? How can anyone know? But as I close the back cover of Karamazov for a second time, I am sure that it is one of the most unforgettable.
Elsewhere on the Shelf
There are not many works of fiction that I return to. But here are a few that stand out and that I have re-read over the years:
- The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel) by Hermann Hesse, also published as Magister Ludi, 1943. Set in an unspecified future, it concerns the extraordinary life of Knecht, a novice scholar who is destined to become the Master of the Game, a competitive and ritual activity which is never explicitly explained, but is a synthesis of arts and science. It bears reading over and again.
- Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. His masterpiece of 1904. Re-reading it gets better each time.
- Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, 1988. Another towering work of satirical genius, full of complexity and dark imaginings, as well as playful humour. I re-read this because I got stuck on my first attempt, partly because I reacted badly to some of the arcane and occult scenes, when I was younger. Returning to it, I found the cleverest and most entertaining plot about a vanity publishing heist with a literally fantastic twist, as the raving conspiracy theories of duped authors seem to come to life in an explosion of magic realism. I love it.