An entry in a new series that covers these covenantal categories…
Today, The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
AUTHOR: Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821. He published The Brothers Karamazov in 1880, the year before his death.
HIERARCHY: Dostoevsky was the son of a middle-class doctor who studied to be an engineer. His father was killed by serfs, and Dostoevsky’s literary reputation was connected early on to his insight into Russia’s social problems. Following his arrest, imprisonment, and service in Siberia, Dostoevsky’s social views changed considerably. While his novels gained prominence, he remained an outside, the product of his gambling addiction and poor health.
The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky’s final novel and represents the culmination of one of his great themes: faith vs. reason. In its subject matter and scope, the novel is the fitting culmination of a great literary career.
CONFESSION OF FAITH: Dostoevsky converted to Christianity while in prison. He only had access to the New Testament there and left with a profound sense of faith’s necessity in a world of scientific rationalism. This verse from Matthew begins his novel and adorns his tombstone: “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.” Dostoevsky’s basic conviction that suffering (the straight and narrow) led to redemption.
The Brothers Karamazov illustrates what that suffering looks like. The father is murdered and the eldest son (who, incidentally, is innocent) gets convicted of the crime. The middle son knows the truth but has a mental collapse so that his testimony is not believed. The youngest son, a devoted monk, nearly loses his faith when his beloved elder’s body decomposes immediately after death.
Yet the novel affirms faith in the face of skepticism and good in the face of evil.
CONSEQUENCES: Dostoevsky read his own radicalism as the source of his suffering in the early 1850s. He remained a morally conflicted man; he gambled recklessly and had affairs. He also experienced great heartache. His youngest son Alyosha died in the years just before Brothers K was published. He suffered epileptic seizures for most of his life and died before he was 60. Dostoevsky did suffer, in ways that were both attributable to moral failings and in ways that were incommensurate with any personal sin.
The novel gives a particularly striking argument against Christianity by illustrating the suffering of children. The skeptic of the family, Ivan, adds to this intolerable suffering the fact that the church is hopelessly corrupt.
Yet the novel finds ways of supporting belief in God and ends with a new generation gathered in hope around the youngest and most spiritual Karamazov, Alyosha (named for Dostoevsky’s son). Unaided reason can offer a calculation that seems convincing and excludes God. But the truth can never be captured by reason alone, and the terror of unaided reason is a worse hell than any the skeptics blame Christians for creating.
LEGACY: The book is considered one of the greatest novels ever written. The list of luminaries who admire it is odd: Einstein on the one hand and Joseph Stalin on the other. It is a great book that reads you as much as you read it. As a Christian, I see the immensity of its faith and how Dostoevsky testifies about Christ and the hope his resurrection provides. I can also see why, taken on its own, something like the famous “Grand Inquisitor” sequence could be read as the greatest of fictional anti-church screeds.
Experiments in Criticism 