THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
F.M. Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokonsky
San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990
793 pp., $29.95
Fyodor Dostoevsky would appear on almost anyone's top-ten list of Russian authors, and his classic, the Brothers Karamazov, certainly belongs near the top of any list of Russian novels. Notable dissenters to this lofty view of Dostoevsky are Vladimir Nabokov and a host of twentieth-century civic-minded critics and Soviet literary ideologues who, under the rule of Stalin, managed a virtual ban on Dostoevsky's important fiction because it so consistently and powerfully challenged their core ideas. Nabokov, whose strong opinions are legendary, if not always defensible, found Dostoevsky wanting aesthetically, and purportedly dismissed him punningly as a "dusty gothic novelist." The civic-minded set and the Soviet ideologues were fundamentally put off by Dostoevsky's powerful opposition to the idea of man's perfectibility in a properly engineered society. Dostoevsky has very justifiably triumphed over those who would dismiss him - be it on aesthetic or civic grounds.
Though the immensely talented and sophisticated Nabokov was worlds removed from the values of Dostoevsky's civic detractors, the two sides end up as strange bedfellows when it comes to aesthetics. Dostoevsky did have a pronounced neogothic streak. His works often suggest the otherworldly and dwell on man's shadow side, his capacity for crime and perversion, his stubborn refusal to adhere to the laws of reason and common sense. What for Nabokov was an unacceptable bondage to the extravagances of a shopworn literary tradition was for the civic-minded a denial of man's faith in progress based on inherent goodness, fidelity to reason, and the primacy of "this world." The Brothers Karamazov, which features parricide, white-hot sexual rivalries - not just between siblings but between father and son - a cast of eccentric, high-strung characters, and a strong advocacy of man's need for belief in a divine power, is vintage Dostoevsky. Consequently, it well embodies the differences separating him from his detractors.
Terming The Brothers Karamazov vintage Dostoevsky would likely be an understatement to most Dostoevsky specialists. This mammoth novel, completed in 1880, was the last and lengthiest of Dostoevsky's five large novels, the first of which was Crime and Punishment (1866). All five were major achievements. They added their girth to his already prodigious output of short stories, novellas, novels, criticism, and letters, which have recently been published in their entirety in a "rehabilitating" thirty-volume Soviet edition of Dostoevsky's complete works. However, there is a broad consensus that The Brothers Karamazov is not just Dostoevsky's last novel but his crowning achievement, a work that subsumes his thought and artistry.
Dostoevsky's Early Life - Rebel And Convict
There was much to subsume. At seventeen, Dostoevsky, already a voracious reader and aspiring writer, was enrolled in engineering school by his extremely willful father. Dostoevsky graduated, but his father's death in 1839 spared him from having to pursue an unwanted profession. That death may well have been the work of the father's serfs, who had had good reason to become fed up with
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