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The Brothers Karamazov
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The Brothers Karamazov 2024 - Background Information
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Although written in the 19th century, The Brothers Karamazov displays a number of modern elements. Dostoevsky composed the book with a variety of literary techniques. Though privy to many of the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists, the narrator is a self-proclaimed writer; he discusses his own mannerisms and personal perceptions so often in the novel that he becomes a character. Through his descriptions, the narrator's voice merges imperceptibly into the tone of the people he is describing, often extending into the characters' most personal thoughts. There is no voice of authority in the story. In addition to the principal narrator, there are several sections narrated by other characters entirely, such as the story of The Grand Inquisitor and Zosima's confessions.
Dostoevsky uses individual styles of speech to express the inner personality of each person. For example, the attorney Fetyukovich (based on Vladimir Spasovich) is characterized by malapropisms (e.g. 'robbed' for 'stolen', and at one point declares possible suspects in the murder 'irresponsible' rather than innocent). Several plot digressions provide insight into other apparently minor characters. For example, the narrative in Book Six is almost entirely devoted to Zosima's biography, which contains a confession from a man whom he met many years before. Dostoevsky does not rely on a single source or a group of major characters to convey the themes of this book but uses a variety of viewpoints, narratives, and characters throughout.
Reception and Influence
The Brothers Karamazov has had a deep influence on many public figures over the years for widely varying reasons. Admirers include scientists such as Albert Einstein, philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, as well as writers such as Virginia Woolf, Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, and Frederick Buechner.
British writer C.P. Snow writes of Einstein's admiration for the novel: "The Brothers Karamazov—that for him in 1919 was the supreme summit of all literature. It remained so when I talked to him in 1937, and probably until the end of his life."
Franz Kafka felt indebted to Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov, calling himself and Dostoevsky "blood relatives" and was immensely interested in the hatred the brothers demonstrated toward their father in the novel. He probably found parallels with his own strained father-son relationship and drew on this theme to some extent in his works, especially the short story "The Judgment".
James Joyce wrote: [Leo] Tolstoy admired him but he thought that he had little artistic accomplishment or mind. Yet, as he said, 'he admired his heart', a criticism which contains a great deal of truth, for though his characters do act extravagantly, madly, almost, still their basis is firm enough underneath.... The Brothers Karamazov ... made a deep impression on me ... he created some unforgettable scenes.... Madness you may call it, but therein may be the secret of his genius.... I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness, perhaps. In fact, all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness; the reasonable man achieves nothing
Not all reception to the book was positive. Some were critical of it, such as Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, D. H. Lawrence, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky, for instance, once said of the novel in a letter that "Dostoyevsky is a writer of genius, but an antipathetic one."
As for Leo Tolstoy himself, the work appears to have proved both challenging and provocative. Entries from his journal indicate that, like others, he considered Dostoevsky's idiosyncratic style to be an obstacle, yet the book was one of several that he requested accompany him on his deathbed.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is said to have read The Brothers Karamazov "so often he knew whole passages of it by heart." A copy of the novel was one of the few possessions Wittgenstein brought with him to the front during World War I.
Martin Heidegger identified Dostoevsky's thought as one of the most important sources for his early and best-known book, Being and Time. Of the two portraits Heidegger kept on the wall of his office, one was of Dostoevsky.
According to philosopher Charles B. Guignon, the novel's most fascinating character, Ivan Karamazov, had by the middle of the twentieth century become the icon of existentialist rebellion in the writings of existentialist philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus centered on a discussion of Ivan Karamazov's revolt in his 1951 book Rebel. Ivan's poem "The Grand Inquisitor" is arguably one of the best-known passages in modern literature due to its ideas about human nature, freedom, power, authority, and religion, as well as for its fundamental ambiguity. A reference to the poem can be found in English novelist Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited and American writer David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest.
Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner reread the book regularly, claiming it as his greatest literary inspiration next to Shakespeare's works and the Bible. He once wrote that American literature had yet to produce anything great enough to compare with Dostoyevsky's novel.
In an essay on The Brothers Karamazov, written after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse described Dostoevsky as not a "poet" but a "prophet". British writer W. Somerset Maugham included the book in his list of ten greatest novels in the world.
Contemporary Turkish Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk said during a lecture in St. Petersburg that the first time he read The Brothers Karamazov, his life was changed. He felt Dostoyevsky, through his storytelling, revealed completely unique insight into life and human nature.
American philosophical novelist Walker Percy said in an interview: "I suppose my model is nearly always Dostoevsky, who was a man of very strong convictions, but his characters illustrated and incarnated the most powerful themes and issues and trends of his day. I think maybe the greatest novel of all time is The Brothers Karamazov which...almost prophesies and prefigures everything—all the bloody mess and the issues of the 20th century.
Pope Benedict XVI cited the book in the 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had read Dostoevsky since his youth and considered the author as a great psychologist. His copy of The Brothers Karamazov reveals extensive highlights and notes in the margins that he made while reading the work, which have been studied and analyzed by multiple researchers.
According to Serbian state news agency Tanjug, Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić described Dostoevsky as his best-loved novelist, saying: "The Brothers Karamazov may be the best work of world literature." American First Lady Laura Bush has said she is an admirer of the novel.
Adaptations
Film
There have been several film adaptations of The Brothers Karamazov, including:
The Brothers Karamazov (1915 silent film, lost, directed by Victor Tourjansky)
Die Brüder Karamasoff (1921, directed by Carl Froelich, in German)
Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff (1931, directed by Erich Engels & Fyodor Otsep, in German)
I fratelli Karamazoff (1947, directed by Giacomo Gentilomo, in Italian)
The Brothers Karamazov (1958, directed by Richard Brooks)
The Brothers Karamazov (1969, directed by Kirill Lavrov, Ivan Pyryev and Mikhail Ulyanov)
The Brothers Karamazov (1969, directed by Marcel Bluwal)
Television
A Russian 12-episode series was produced in 2009 and is considered to be as close to the book as possible. It aired on Channel One.
The 2013 Japanese TV drama Karamazov no Kyōdai is an adaptation of the book set in modern-day Japan.
The Open University produced a version of "The Grand Inquisitor" in 1975 starring John Gielgud.
"The Grand Inquisitor" was adapted for British television as a one-hour drama titled Inquisition. Starring Derek Jacobi as the inquisitor, it was first broadcast on Channel 5 on 22 December 2002.
A 30-episode drama series named Oulad El Moukhtar ("Mokhtar's Sons") was produced by Nabil Ayouch for Al Aoula in 2020. The adaptation of the book is set in Morocco, with some aspects changed to resemble the local Moroccan culture.
Unfinished Sequel
A sequel to The Brothers Karamazov that would detail the life of Alexey Karamazov beyond the ending of what was supposed to be the first novel had been planned out by Dostoevsky, but was left unfinished due to the author's death in 1881.
Background Information
Availability:
Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28054
This is a Constance Garrett translation
Background
The Brothers Karamazov is the last novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. Dostoevsky died less than four months after its publication. It has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.
Set in 19th-century Russia, The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that discusses questions of God, free will, and morality. Dostoevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, which inspired the main setting.
Although Dostoevsky began his first notes for The Brothers Karamazov in April 1878, the novel incorporated elements and themes from an earlier unfinished project he had begun in 1869 entitled The Life of a Great Sinner. Another unfinished project, Drama in Tobolsk, is considered to be the first draft of the first chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. The similarly unfinished Sorokoviny, dated August 1, 1875, is reflected in Book IX, chapters 3–5 and Book XI, chapter nine.
In the October 1877 Writer's Diary article "To the Reader", Dostoevsky mentions a "literary work that has imperceptibly and involuntarily been taking shape within me over these two years of publishing the Diary." The Diary covered a multitude of themes and issues, some of which would be explored in greater depth in The Brothers Karamazov.
The writing of The Brothers Karamazov was altered by a personal tragedy: in May 1878, Dostoevsky's 3-year-old son Alyosha died of epilepsy, a condition inherited from his father. The novelist's grief is apparent throughout the book. Dostoevsky named the hero Alyosha, as well as imbuing him with qualities that he sought and most admired. His loss is also reflected in the story of Captain Snegiryov and his young son Ilyusha.
The death of his son brought Dostoevsky to the Optina Monastery later that year. There he found inspiration for several aspects of The Brothers Karamazov, though at the time he intended to write a novel about childhood instead. Parts of the biographical section of Zosima's life are based on "The Life of the Elder Leonid", a text he found at Optina.
Optina Monastery served as a spiritual center for Russia in the 19th century and inspired many aspects of The Brothers Karamazov.
Themes
Faith and Atheism
One of the novel's central themes is the counterposition of the true spiritual meaning of the Orthodox Christian faith, particularly insofar as it is posited as the heart of Russian national identity and history, with the ideas and values emanating from the new doctrines of atheism, rationalism, socialism, and nihilism. Not only were these ideas and values alien to Russia's spiritual heritage, they were, in Dostoevsky's opinion, actively working to destroy it, and moreover were becoming increasingly popular and influential, especially among Russia's youth. The theme had already been vividly depicted in all the earlier major novels, particularly Demons, but in The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky artistically represents and counterposes the two antithetical worldviews in archetypal forms — the character of Ivan Fyodorovich and his legend of The Grand Inquisitor, and the characters of Alyosha and the Elder Zosima in their expression and embodiment of a lived Christian faith.
The character of Ivan Fyodorovich, though he outwardly plays the role of devil's advocate, is inwardly far from being resolved in his atheism. A constantly reappearing motif in the novel is his proposition that without faith in immortality, there is no such thing as virtue and that if there is no God, everything is permitted. When Zosima encounters the idea in the meeting at the monastery, he doesn't dispute it but suggests to Ivan that since in all probability he doesn't believe in the immortality of his own soul, his thoughts must be a source of torment to him: "But the martyr likes sometimes to divert himself with his despair, as it were driven to it by despair itself. Meanwhile ... you divert yourself with magazine articles, and discussions in society, though you don't believe your own arguments, and with an aching heart mock at them inwardly.... That question you have not answered, and it is your great grief, for it clamors for an answer." In his relations with Ivan, Alyosha consciously personifies the loving voice of faith that he knows lives in his brother's soul, in opposition to the mocking voice of doubt that ultimately becomes personified in the nightmare of the Devil. Alyosha says of Ivan "His mind is a prisoner of his soul. There is a great and unresolved thought in him. He is one of those who don't need millions, they just need to get a thought straight."
Dostoevsky wrote to his editor that his intention with book V, "Pro and Contra", was to portray "the seed of the idea of destruction in our time in Russia among the young people uprooted from reality". This seed is depicted as: "the rejection not of God but of the meaning of His creation. Socialism has sprung from the denial of the meaning of historical reality and ended in a program of destruction and anarchism." In the chapter "Rebellion", the rationale behind Ivan's rejection of God's world is expounded in a long dialogue with Alyosha, in which he justifies his atheism on the grounds of the very principle—universal love and compassion—that is at the heart of the Christian faith. The unmitigated evil in the world, particularly as it relates to the suffering of children, is not something that can be accepted by a heart steeped in love, so Ivan feels bound in his conscience to "humbly return the ticket" to God. The idea of the refusal of love on the grounds of love is taken further in the subsequent "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor". In a long dialogue, in which the second participant (the returned Christ) remains silent for its entire duration, the Inquisitor rejects the freedom and spiritual beauty of Christ's teaching as being beyond the capability of earthly humanity and affirms instead the bread-and-chains materialism derived from the Devil's Temptations as being the only realistic and truly compassionate basis for the government of men. The Legend is Ivan's confession of the struggle of "pro and contra" taking place within his own soul in relation to the problem of faith. According to Mikhail Bakhtin (Russian philosopher and literary critic), "both the very form of its construction as The Grand Inquisitor's dialogue with Christ and at the same time with himself and the very unexpectedness and duality of its finale, indicate an internally dialogic disintegration at its ideological core."
With Book VI, "The Russian Monk", Dostoevsky sought to provide the refutation of Ivan's negation of God, through the teachings of the dying Elder, Zosima. The dark world of the Inquisitor's reasoning is juxtaposed with the radiant, idyllically stylized communications of the dying Elder and Alyosha's renderings of his life and teachings. Zosima, though suffering and near death, unreservedly communicates his love for those around him, and recounts the stories of the crucial moments in his progress along the spiritual path. Alyosha records these accounts for posterity, as well as the Elder's teachings and discourses on various subjects, including: the significance of the Russian Monk; spiritual brotherhood between masters and servants; the impossibility of judging one's fellow creatures; Faith, Prayer, Love, and Contiguity with Other Worlds; and the spiritual meaning of 'hell' as the suffering of being unable to Love. Dostoevsky based Zosima's teachings on those of the 18th-century Orthodox saint and spiritual writer Tikhon of Zadonsk, and constructed them around his own formulation of the essence of a true Christian faith: that all are responsible for all, and that "everyone is guilty before all and for everything, and therefore everyone is strong enough also to forgive everything for others". He was acutely aware of the difficulty of the artistic task he had set himself and of the incompatibility of the form and content of his "reply" with ordinary discourse and the everyday concerns of his contemporaries.
Freedom and Mechanistic Psychology
"Dostoevsky could hear dialogic relationships everywhere, in all manifestations of conscious and intelligent human life. Where consciousness began, there dialogue began also. Only purely mechanistic relationships are not dialogic, and Dostoevsky categorically denied their importance for understanding and interpreting life and the acts of man."
Throughout the novel, in the very nature of all the characters and their interactions, the freedom of the human personality is affirmed, in opposition to any form of deterministic reduction. The "physiologism" that is being attacked is identified in the repeated references to Claude Bernard, who becomes for Dmitri a despised symbol of the scientific reduction of the human soul to impersonal physiological processes. For Dmitri, the word 'Bernard' becomes the most contemptuous of insults. References to Bernard are in part a response to Zola's theories about heredity and environment, gleaned from Bernard's ideas, which functioned as the ideological background to the Les Rougon-Macquart series of novels.
Though the affirmation of freedom and rejection of mechanistic psychology is most openly and forcefully expressed through the character of Dmitri, as a theme it pervades the entire novel and virtually all of Dostoevsky's other writings. Bakhtin discusses it in terms of what he calls the unfinalizability of Dostoevsky's characters. In Dostoevsky, a fundamental refusal to be wholly defined by an external source (another person, a social interpretation, an ideology, a system of 'knowledge', or anything at all that places a finalizing limit on the primordial freedom of the living soul, including even death) is at the heart of the character. He sees this quality as essential to the human being, to being human, and in his most fiercely independent characters, such as Ivan and Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Nastasya Filippovna and Ippolit in The Idiot, or the Underground man in Notes From Underground, it is actively expressed in virtually all their words and deeds. According to Bakhtin, for Dostoevsky:
A man never coincides with himself. In Dostoevsky's artistic thinking, the genuine life of the personality takes place at the point of non-coincidence between a man and himself, at his point of departure beyond the limits of all that he is as a material being – a being that can be spied on, defined, predicted apart from its own will, "at second hand". The genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself.