This painting doesn’t represent the brothers to my mind…
I’m reading Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov for the third time, but in many respects every reading is for the first time. I’m sure that when I first read Great Literature as a young person who hated school I approached ‘The Greats’ with an appropriate sense of awe, assuming them to be the real masters to learn from, masters who wouldn’t give me homework to do, or belittle me in front of my peers etc etc. If they wrote odd or confronting things, who was I, a mere novice, to contradict them?
Decades later, it’s a different story (and if not, something’s gone very wrong!), and proof, to me at least, that rereading such texts is more than useful, if you can be bothered.
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the novel:
Set in 19th-century Russia, The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that discusses questions of God, free will, and morality.
These days I have little interest in gods except from a historical-psychological perspective, but free will, or the lack thereof, and associated ethical issues interest me greatly. So here’s a passage from early in Dostoyevsky’s novel that may or may not be worth analysing:
I fancy that Alyosha was more of a realist than any one. Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling‐block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, “I do not believe till I see.”
The Brothers Karamazov, from Part 1, Book 1 – the history of a family. Section V ‘Elders’
The ‘I’ that opens this passage is Dostoyevsky’s more or less reliable narrator. In this passage he’s more than simply unreliable, he’s pretty much nonsensical. What could he possibly mean, that ‘miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist’? Could the translator, Constance Garnett, be at fault here? Highly unlikely. Is it some kind of irony? Possibly this is intended. He describes unbelievers as a sub-category of ‘genuine realists’, though today all realists would be, by definition, unbelievers, or non-religious. Realists in this sense aren’t confronted by miracles as ‘irrefutable facts’, though they may be confronted by miraculous claims, which they would treat with skepticism. All this can be cleared up if we assume that the narrator firmly believes in miracles, which is a bit of a let-down but alerts us to how he will treat Alyosha’s credulity and pious passivity throughout the novel. The idea of a ‘miracle as an irrefutable fact’ makes me think of a brilliantly managed magician’s trick. You have no idea how she did it, you see the subject disappear before your eyes, but your realism tells you it’s very clever conjuring, not a miracle or an upending of the laws of nature. A magician who can’t make her audience gasp over the seemingly counter-to-reality quality of her tricks is unlikely to make a living thereby. But if you believe her tricks are truly miracles, you’re not a realist, though you may not want your pleasure spoiled by knowing her secrets.
Needless to say, the religious elements of this novel will grate on me more than they did in previous readings – I’m becoming less tolerant of that sort of stuff in my old age. Then again, I recall years ago, when I was doing Honours French at Adelaide University (later abandoned), and had decided to do my thesis on the writings of Stendhal, I read an essay in the form of a dialogue between two literary critics, comparing Stendhal’s novels to those of Tolstoy. Both critics chose to agree that Tolstoy was the greater writer because Stendhal’s work lacked a ‘religious dimension’, or words to that effect. It really really pissed me off. And I should add that, in referring to religion they were surely referring only to Christianity, which, apart from its violently rejected father, Judaism, is the only religion treated with literary credence in the WEIRD world.
As to standing up to the test of time, that’s probably an unfair test. Novels may hold up a mirror to their own time and culture, they can’t be expected to transcend them.
There will doubtless be more on this novel, from time to time, as I read on.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1881