Brothers Karamazov, By F Dostoevsky: Characters with many layers like a Russian doll

Characters with many layers like a Russian doll

After three hundred pages you have an impression if the story is gaining momentum. Not quite so. You have to read another two hundred pages to find that things are now actually leading to the event which the author had in mind all the way. The big distraction is that a character is being called by four different pet names which are mercifully shorter than his real name.

The life described is stifled and stultified by the conditions around–till it suffocates. Landlords philander and drink recklessly and compete with their own sons to win a lover. The tyranny is so deep that the serfs are deeply scrutinized to see if they are rebelling against the state or the religion. They are engaged in an intellectual discussion only to make that inquiry. It is on top of the physical or sexual exploitation they are subjected to in the estate of a landlord, where they can live for many generations with their legal or illegal children. It was possibly a little better and a little worse than the slavery world witnessed due to colonialism at that time. For it was possibly not as penurious but emotionally was more exploitative.

But deep down the life was far more intellectual than in many other societies of the contemporary era.

The renowned poets and authors are frequently referred to. At times in a very discreet manner to remind a reader that the rebellion was never tolerated in the Russia of that era and any literary work with such undertones were silenced not too long after it surfaced.

One such instance is the reference to the banned poetry journal published by Pushkin twenty years before this novel was written. It is so discreet that one has to read the three-line paragraph many times to realize that the author wants to turn the table on the world around him all the way while writing such a lengthy novel. In a literate society revolt is crushed in a literature long before it grips the society.

Always aware of their class, the underclass characters in the book are conditioned enough to behave in a way which is politically correct to the core. Inviting ire of the power-that-be is something no one wants among them. So they witness but never interfere in the wasteful and indulgent lives of their higher class masters. But in their heart they harbour all kind of emotions including the idea of liquidation of a master.

This book the author wrote after the death of his beloved young infant son, one came to know, who was epileptic. There is a character who is epileptic in this book also it deals with the death of a young boy. Also there are other impressions of the life of writer in the characters of this novel.

The author lived only for a few months after his this last novel was published.

However, the Russian revolution completed only after thirty five years of his death. If one is looking for the conditions in the society which lead to violent revolutions like the Russian one, they are described in this book.

The apparently quaint and self-satisfied life of the rural Russia, where religion was used as a tool to perpetuate the system which is so unfair for the large majority, entailed what ensued.

It might not have been a surprise to this author, if he had lived longer, to witness the revolution unfolding and concluding.

The Translation by Mcduff is good enough for me. It effectively portrayed the ailing landlord too, among many other things, who sends a young man, one of the brothers Karamazov, seeking loan from him to a person who remained drunk for two days before he dismisses him with an utter disdain for his folly. This young man is planning to runaway with his young lover, who is almost a prostitute, who his father, another big landlord of the town, wants to marry as well. When he explains this matter to others to win the loan to finance his plans, no one seems interested and instead ridicules him behind him. The book is full of such characters and events which portray the life of the country then at a great length.

It took a long journey and waiting over the drunkard for two days for him to realize that the first landlord was only tricking him to ridicule him by sending him to some one who will simply scoff at his plans. But he does not mind it and is busy to find someone else who might lend him the money.

This book is described as the best ever novel by any writer in any language by some critics. One never came across any other one which under took a more comprehensive project while holding the attention of a reader as well.

Having been written such a long time ago, the book details everything. At times the furniture of a room during an important scene is dealt with–with a long description, which is very distracting. At times the author, speaking as a first person, warns that if he went into the full such detail of a person or a setting or a place, it might entail writing an entire book independently. So he is sparing those details–(and the reader as well, possibly). In modern times an author has no such authority over a reader to patronize him in such a manner.

However, lasting nearly a thousand pages, the book is full of characters being introduced as a sub plot often, who frequently make long discourses; mostly trying to make clear their position on religion or politics or other issues, before they do something which might actually give impetus to the story.

At times a character may speak for five pages without the paragraph being broken.

When the book reaches the denouement, the murder around which the story is built almost loses its importance and a character starts arguing at length with his alter self, trying to make several things clear with himself. He possibly has a psychiatric issue or too much time for intrigue; however, in the earlier part of the story, he is too clever to be a madman and seeks his interests with a great focus. But he is not alone in that. Most of the characters had many layers of thinking which they reveal one by one as the book progresses: Just like the layers of a Russian doll emerging one by one.

Yet another remarkable character is a fatherless, thirteen-year old boy Kolya, who reads widely from the books left behind by his father and tries to surprise the established intellectuals of the town and his friends with his knowledge. He at times pretends to know what he actually does not, in doing so; but he never fails to deal with an adult on equal terms and his peers as his underlings. In his younger days, he once slept on a railway track, on the prompting of his friends, and let a train pass over him. It was to prove that he is desperate character and it made him famous in the town.

So, most of the important characters are well-literate in this story, including a servant of the father Karamazov, who actually is suspected by all of being an illicit son of him. Father Karamazov is later murdered and his two sons and his servant are the main suspect.

Even the women looking for a financially profitable relationship with a high official or a landlord discuss a column published in a journal or newspaper published in St. Petersburg, which speculate about the people and society of their town. At times a character casually passes a serious literary judgement like if Lev Tolstoy can not actually write.

If it was not for the lockdown and isolation Covid19 imposed, one might have never had the chance to go back to a book long back abandoned after reading a few pages. The complicated names, slow pace and the formidable size of the book are not an appetizer really.

All very well but one feels that it could have been avoided and the book shortened to keep focus on the main story of the novel. It is the last book of the author which he wrote while he was in a fragile stage so possibly he wanted to say everything he had to, or having been co-opted into the system at this stage, he wants to make every character politically correct mostly, to save his position in the system. But he has less control over them and they surprise a reader often.

Because, a trained engineer Dostoevsky, after launching his literary career, suffered greatly in the earlier part of his life. By a General, who was an uncle of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, the literary group he was a member of, which did the crime of reading a banned literature, was sent to the notorious Siberian prison where they were to be executed by a firing squad.

While a few have been killed possibly, and he was the third in the line to be fired at, a missive from the Czar himself arrives and the remaining members including Dostoevsky were saved from being executed and were subjected to live for many years in sub human conditions in the jail. It all was before he wrote any literature seriously. So it had an impact on most of his writing.

The book has characters who are often corrupt to the core. A landlord and his sons have affairs with common women. The women know it all but vie with each other to win a common lover. His sons and the servants at his home want to eliminate him. All the characters mostly know each other and create intrigues against one another. It defines their whole life, as they seldom are involved in some other business or intellectual pursuit.

If it was not a murder mystery, about which even the author is not much bothered towards the end, then too the book is readable for the way it explains the social situation of the country.

The court scene in the end does not conclude the story by saying clearly who committed the murder, though it lasts more than one hundred fifty pages. One of the brothers Karamazov, who is convicted by the court, who is very sick after the verdict has been given, always maintains that he is not guilty; the other brother of him, who claims in the court to have committed the murder, is so sick with brain fever that the court and people think if he is having hallucination due to his condition. The third suspect, the servant and a suspected illicit son of father Karamazov, who is very sick during the trial and commits suicide on the eve of the verdict day, does so without saying clearly if he was guilty or not in his suicide note.

Another character dies who is a sickly child, who always is tormented by the insulting way people treat his father for being a drunkard and underclass and a former low-ranking soldier.

Possibly the author himself was very sick at this stage and dies a few months after this book was published. He writes so many things in such a great detail but finally himself loses focus from the story.

He often makes the dubious kind of characters in this book look like the people who are cynical and rebellious. But the upper class people too are very conservative. The Father Karamazov is an erstwhile under class who becomes rich due to his chance marriage to a wealthy women and once she dies he indulges in all kinds of excesses.

The system is so corrupt that the convicted Karamazov is already planning an escape to America while on his journey to the jail somewhere in Siberia–by bribing the guards.

It is a relief to have finally completed the books after dropping it so many times.