The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

Abstract

Dostoevsky’s last novel is also his greatest, and among the greatest of all novels. Its moral passion has a sublime grandeur, its story a sensational, stark beauty. A passionate simplicity marks its delineation of character, while its themes — religious faith and doubt, love and rebellion, disintegration and renewal, and, above all, the terrible mysteries of good and evil — are intricately ‘worked’. It is a novel about the murder of a father by his own child (parricide), and a massive false trail leads the reader to believe, against his will, that Mitya must have perpetrated this act. We read, therefore, for suspense at the level of story, as well as for metaphysical suspense at the level of idea-play. The centre of this idea-play (atheism) and the subject of the story (parricide), moreover, echo each other: each concerns the overthrow of the father, earthly or heavenly, the rejection of authority, human and divine. In Siberia Dostoevsky had been much struck by Ilyinsky, a convict falsely convicted for parricide. His own father’s death may have left him with an unquiet conscience: his father’s estate contained the village of Chermashnya, which figures on the Karamazov estate and is associated by both Ivan and Mitya with their guilt.¹⁵