Book 22: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I should have started this one on Monday, but I'm a little behind.  This time around I'm reading some World Literature, which is what I'm calling literature in any language but English.  I learned Russian specifically to read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Pushkin in the original and I'm glad I did.  I always felt that something was missing in Russian literature in translation and I find that the works are far richer in their native language.

Clocking in at 735 pages, I should be able to finish in a week at 105 pages per day.

REVIEW: The Brothers Karamazov was a very interesting novel.  I usually feel a bit of dread going into Russian Literature and Dostoevsky in particular because it can get rather depressing.  Dostoevsky is very fond of delving into the depths of desperation, madness and tragedy.  This novel had a bit of that but was well rounded in other ways that had me pleasantly surprised.

It begins as a standard 19^th century family drama.  The story revolves around the Karamazov patriarch, his sons, their servants and their love interests.  The father is a bit of a scoundrel but wealthy.  The eldest son is also a scoundrel, but is more of a playboy.  The middle son is an atheist and a Socialist, practical and serious.  The youngest son is a pious, truthful novice monk and is the main point of view character.

As the novel changes gears the role of the youngest son, Alexei, becomes more important as Dostoevsky explores the role of religion in about 100 pages of pretty dense philosophy.  It’s here that the book bogged down a bit for me.  He has a lot of good things to say, but it’s pretty dense and scholarly.

The novel picks up again, however, as the eldest son, Dmitri, begins to take over as the main character.  Dostoevsky loves to write about manic characters behaving irrationally and this is Dmitri to a tee.  Not to spoil things but the book changes into a bit of a crime/mystery novel at this point as the reader tries to figure out the details of one fateful night.

Then the book changes gears again at the end of the novel and becomes a courtroom drama.  The last 200 pages or so deal with a trial and evidence given on both sides.  What was most interesting about this to me was that the author was able to effectively show how the available evidence was able to be interpreted, realistically, it two very different ways, neither of which was entirely the true series of events.

Overall, this was a very rich reading experience.  I’m not a big fan of Crime and Punishment because it was very far into the psyche of a madman but this book really showed Dostoevsky’s range as an author.  It was very engaging for most of it’s 750-ish page length and I have to put it pretty high on my list of best novels.  It did bog down in a couple of places and I don’t really like some of the characteristic traits that Dostoevsky characters tend to have (overly anxious women, manic, passionate men) but it was a very good read.  9 out of 10.