When Tolstoy fled his home in 1910 and died at a railway station, The Brothers Karamazov was reportedly the book he had been reading again at the end. Tolstoy, whom Chekhov believed did the work for every writer of his time. Having finished it myself now, I can see why.
I’ll say it plainly: this is the best book I have ever read. And it may have ruined everything else for me.
On the surface it is a family drama spilling with blood and intrigue. It has a godless, dissolute father, three sons, a woman, 3,000 roubles and a murder. Then it becomes a psychological thriller, a police investigation, and finally a trial. But running underneath all of it are the only questions that matter, which philosophers have argued over for centuries: freedom, good and evil, God, and why we do what we do.
The characters are tormented, contradictory and enormous. Every Karamazov contains multitudes, and so, Dostoevsky insists, do we.
A few chapters stood out for me. In “Rebellion”, Ivan rejects a world whose harmony is bought with the tears of a single tortured child. He respectfully returns his ticket and wants nothing to do with such an order. Le Guin would later turn the same thought into “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. (Must read!)
Then “The Grand Inquisitor”. The drama, the intensity, the moral weight of it. Would you rather have freedom or bread? Can faith survive without miracles and a top-down system? Has the religion, in correcting Christ, ended up working for the other side? I have not read anything more passionate about power and conscience, ever, and I doubt I ever will.
The book is also funny, which nobody warns you about. There is the buffoon father, the hanger-on Maximov insisting he is a character out of Gogol, and a devil suffering from a cold he caught flying through space in evening dress, who cures it with quack remedies from the newspapers.
That devil’s chapter is a masterpiece of its own. The devil is within us, a shabby, smiling version of our cleverest thoughts. What’s more, the devil himself makes a compelling case for goodness without God, for science without morality, and for the conclusion that if there is no God, everything is permitted. Two years later Nietzsche announced the death of God. Chesterton’s warning, or the line attributed to him, followed: when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
(Spoiler alert)
Nothing is beyond reproach here, and everything is fair game. Dostoevsky picks apart the human soul atom by atom. He shows causation that is unseen as well as seen. A schoolboy kills a goose without touching it, and a man commits murder by putting an idea into another man’s head, or doesn’t.
Every reader is left with Zosima’s most unsettling idea: each of us is guilty before all, for all.
The writing is stunning, but what I marvel at most is the capaciousness of the mind behind it. Dostoevsky pre-empts every objection and answers it, often more powerfully against himself than for himself. He seems to know each of us intimately. I read War and Peace earlier this year, and if Tolstoy is the great sociologist, Dostoevsky is the master psychologist. Tolstoy makes you understand yourself and society across decades. Dostoevsky makes you confront yourself in the moment and, more often than not, shudder and recoil.
And what a life produced it. He was arrested for belonging to a circle that read banned books, and led out to be shot. He was reprieved at the last moment and sent to a Siberian prison camp, then to forced service as a soldier. His first marriage was unhappy. While planning this novel he lost his three-year-old son to epilepsy, the illness he suffered from himself, which keeps making an appearance in the book too.
Crime and Punishment, which I also read, asks whether a man may kill. Karamazov asks whether, without God, anything at all forbids it. Once he has laid out every argument, giving each side its best case, the devil’s included, he conducts an autopsy on them.
Read it. Then read it again. It’s a book I refuse to rate out of five at all, out of sheer respect for it and its author.
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