Rex’s Reviews > Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel > Status Update

How Memory occupies such a pivotal theme in Dostoevsky’s works, is something that always fascinates me.

Form and content become inseparable. Dostoevsky’s idea here, is that a precious memory of love can exert a unique, sustaining, and unexpected power over people.

If parents fail to turn the family into a school of love, sacrifice, and patient endeavor, the family becomes the place of judgements, violence, and crime.

— Vladimir Golstein

"Most novelists reproduce all the external appearances—tricks of manner, landscape, dress….—but very rarely, and only for an instant, penetrate to the tumult of thought which rages within his own mind. But the whole fabric of a book by Dostoevsky is made out of such material….We have to get rid of the old tune….to realize how little of our humanity is expressed in that old tune." — Virginia Woolf

The characters in this novel have attained the status of myth. Moreover, Dostoevsky, in this, as in all his other novels, indirectly has encouraged his readers to duplicate in the act of reading the dilemmas of the characters. Dostoevsky’s reader is an implicated reader.