Greetings, intrepid readers! By now you should be at least through Book 1 of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, but if not, you’re still welcome to join in the conversation below (and if you’re much further along, please hold off on discussing material yet-to-come for the benefit of new readers). We’ll adjust the pace of reading as we go, but Book 1 seems like a manageable chunk to open our first conversations about the novel, the characters, and the world Dostoevsky is creating for us. So without further ado…
Notes and Comments:
This week I’m just going to offer a few stray observations about history and context that might be relevant to how we read Book 1, or to highlight certain details that may or may not be covered in the editions we’re using.
- In a very early discussion on planning this novel, D. pointedly calls it his own Fathers and Children (a reference to his lifelong friend/enemy Ivan Turgenev’s famous novel of the same name). One of the major conflicts in T.’s masterpiece comes from the breakdown of communication between an older generation and their already adult children due to everything from political ideals to family dynamics, but there remains a core humanness that allows us to retain our sympathy for all the characters and, more importantly, for the characters to retain sympathy for each other. Dostoevsky, however, wanted to shift the focus to “present-day Russian children”, watching them grow up from earliest childhood under the shadow of “their present-day fathers, in their present-day, mutual interrelation” (Mochulsky, 537). The plans went through many changes before the novel we now have, but that core problem is still recognizable throughout the book.
- One of the major events in Dostoevsky’s life that occurred during the early stages of writing this novel was the death of his young son, Alyosha. There are a ton of biographical details encoded in this novel, but this is the one most notable for the book’s introduction, which positions Alyosha Karamazov as its hero. In his brief introduction to the novel, D. uses the word “жизнеописание” to refer to the genre: in English this translates to capital-L Lives in secular genres, like Plutarch’s or Visari’s Lives of famous people (versus житие for lives of saints or other holy folk). In other words, D. sets out TBK as part one of a planned “Life of Aleksei Karamazov”. Here McDuff has “life-chronicle” and PV “biography”; Garnett omits the introduction outright.
- Speaking of Turgenev, we hear a vestigial echo in the character of Miusov, “a Liberal of the forties and fifties,” which represents the “fathers” generation in T.’s novel (and to a great extent, T. himself). As per the stereotype, Russia’s “men of the 40s” were well-read, somewhat moderate liberals who believed in constitutional government; they were replaced by a younger generation of radicals who believed in overthrowing the system outright. A large part of TBK’s background deals with social malaise after the Great Reforms of the 1860s (more on this later), so in the context of this novel, Miusov seems like even more of a vestige from a long-gone era.
- Even defenders of Dostoevsky concede that his antisemitism is impossible to ignore, and we get an early taste of that in Book 1, Chapter 4. It’s no use trying to interpret the derogatory comments as merely Fyodor’s buffoonery, since D. himself makes similar comments in his nonfiction (see, or rather don’t see, his regular newspaper column Diary of a Writer.) (D.’s most thorough biographer in English, Joseph Frank, has the frustrating tendency to acknowledge it with a halo of apologia, as in this review.) D. would hardly be the first writer to be a better artist than person, but as we discuss some of the book’s Big Ideas, it’s worth remembering their limits.
- Book 1 also gives us our first use of a key word in the novel sometimes translated as “holy fool” (юродивый), an important Russian concept that fuses together the social and literary functions of jesters (think the Fool in Lear) and a somewhat more performative idea of mental illness than in similar fool-in-Christ traditions elsewhere. In a tradition that stretches far back into the Middle Ages, holy fools were considered “untouchable”, which allows them to function as “speakers of unspeakable truths.” In Book 1, the word is applied to Alyosha by a mildly condescending public who tut-tuts his naive generosity. Garnett has “religious enthusiast”; PV “holy fool”. Note that this is emphatically not the same concept as “buffoonery,” the word the novel applies to his father Fyodor, though it may be worth exploring the contrast.
Questions for Discussion:
Compared to the rest of the novel, Book 1 is a straightforward “prehistory”, a big chunk of exposition that lays the groundwork for what’s to follow. In his thorough critical biography of Dostoevsky, Konstantin Mochulsky devotes only a single sentence to Book 1 as such: “In the first book, necessary information is given about the landowner Karamazov and his three sons.”
- Jumping off from that observation, what information do you think is most necessary here? If you haven’t read the novel yet, has anything stuck out to you in particular? If you have (or if you’ve read further), what details from Book 1 seem to have the most resonance later on? (n.b.: please clearly mark spoilers, if you’re going to give anything away)
- Importantly, we see three children raised under very different circumstances coming to lead very different lives. How do you interpret Dostoevsky’s nature/nurture portrayal of their childhood → adulthood? D. is clearly setting them up as “types,” so how do you read them so far?
- Last week Radiowalla expressed some disappointment with the patriarch Fyodor:
The character of the father overpowers everything at first, but he failed to truly engage me because of his complete self-absorption and downright meanness. He has given me no reason to care about him, no matter how amusing and outrageous his antics.
Since he is, in a very important sense, the central figure of Book 1, what are your thoughts on Fyodor Karamazov so far?
For Next Week:
I think we can easily knock out Book 2 by next Monday, but let’s put this up to a vote. Book 2 is twice as long as Book 1, but there is some compensation for the length: in lieu of exposition dumps, it has long stretches of dialogue, so the pacing is much faster, more exciting, and easier to read. That being said, there are a couple of paragraphs that get into meaty philosophical questions, so there’s also a case for taking it slower.
What say you, readers?