The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external.

to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, ever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter—this is what life is, herein lies its task. I have come to recognize this. This idea has entered into my flesh and blood.

That head which created, lived by the highest life of art, which acknowledged and had come to know the highest demands of the spirit, tha...

On voit le soleil!

I will tell you regarding myself that I am a child of the age, a child of nonbelief and doubt up till now and even (I know it) until my coffin closes.

Structurally this is the most symmetrical of Dostoevsky’s novels.

Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution”);

himself triple alliterations

richness of spoken language, its playfulness, its happy mistakes, its revealing quirks and peculiarities.

“Life is full of the comic and is only majestic in its inner sense,”

Words addressed, received, remembered, forgotten, carry an enormous weight in the novel and have an incalculable effect. Words form an element between matter and spirit in which people live and move each other.

Words spoken at one point are repeated later by other speakers, as recollections or unconscious echoes.

“each of us is guilty before all and for all.”

much emphasis is placed on what a person is given to remember.

He is not much of a speaker, but he is a hearer of words, and he is almost the only one in the novel who can hear. That is his great gift: the word can come to life in him.

To me he is noteworthy, but I decidedly doubt that I shall succeed in proving it to the reader.

Though it would be strange to demand clarity from people in a time like ours.

But strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any claim to attention, especially when everyone is striving to unite particulars and find at least some general sense in the general senselessness.

it sometimes happens that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.

Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.

precisely the type of man who is not only worthless and depraved but muddleheaded as well—one of those muddleheaded people who still handle their own little business deals quite skillfully, if nothing else.

Fyodor Pavlovich, for instance, started with next to nothing, he was a very small landowner, he ran around having dinner at other men’s tables, he tried to foist himself off as a sponger, and yet at his death he was discovered to have as much as a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash.

Difficult to understand

despite his dignity as a sponger, was still one of the boldest and most sarcastic spirits of that transitional epoch—transitional to everything better—whereas he was simply an evil buffoon and nothing more.

The thing was that he seemed to enjoy and even feel flattered by playing the ludicrous role of the offended husband, embroidering on and embellishing the details of the offense.

“Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”

In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.

simply because he totally forgot about him.

Fyodor Pavlovich saw at once (and this must be remembered) that Mitya had a false and inflated idea of his property.

had become a most insufferable crank from sheer idleness.

she bore Fyodor Pavlovich two sons, Ivan and Alexei,

they were found by that old crank, the general’s widow, their mother’s mistress and benefactress.

The old woman’s principal heir, however, turned out to be an honest man, the provincial marshal of nobility of that province,1 Yefim Petrovich Polenov.

If there was anyone to whom the brothers were indebted for their upbringing and education for the rest of their lives, it was to this Yefim Petrovich, a most honorable and humane man, of a kind rarely found.

an ideal way out for his soul struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness towards the light of love.

suddenly a nurse rushes in and snatches him from her in fear.

SOME OF my readers will think that my young man was a sickly, ecstatic, poorly developed person, a pale dreamer, a meager, emaciated little fellow.

my opinion miracles will never confound a realist.

I will simply repeat what I have already said above: he set out upon this path only because at the time it alone struck him and presented him all at once with the whole ideal way out for his soul struggling from darkness to light.

Although, unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish—such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them.

“If you would be perfect, give away all that you have and follow me.”

they had already counted a succession of three elders, the latest being the elder Zosima. But he himself was now dying from weakness and disease, and they did not even know whom to replace him with.

it had no relics of saints, no wonder-working icons, not even any glorious legends connected with its history, nor did it have to its credit any historical deeds or services to the fatherland.

An elder is one who takes your soul, your will into his soul and into his will. Having chosen an elder, you renounce your will and give it to him under total obedience and with total self-renunciation.

attain to perfect freedom—that is, freedom from himself—

Ecumenical bishop replied that not only was he, the Ecumenical Patriarch, unable to release him but there neither was nor could be any power on earth that could release him from his obedience, once it had been imposed by the elder, except the power of the very elder who had imposed it.

It is also true, perhaps, that this tested and already thousand-year-old instrument for the moral regeneration of man from slavery to freedom and to moral perfection may turn into a double-edged weapon, which may lead a person not to humility and ultimate self-control but, on the contrary, to the most satanic pride—that is, to fetters and not to freedom.

No doubt he struck Alyosha by some special quality of his soul.

Alyosha lived in the cell of the elder, who loved him very much and allowed him to stay by him.

It may be that Alyosha’s youthful imagination was deeply affected by the power and fame that constantly surrounded his elder.