“Dostoevsky is at once the most literary and the most obsessively read novelist among those we consider great throughout time. The Brothers Karamazov represents the pinnacle of his art – his last, greatest, richest, and most expansive book.”
DMITRI, IVAN, AND ALEXEI KARAMAZOV, three brothers who seemingly live in different worlds, share a father and, with him, an indescribable shame: shame over their origin, over their very birth. Shame for their very existence, which drives Dmitri into alcoholism and the excesses of his father, and condemns Ivan to irrevocable resignation. Then there is the illegitimate son, Smerdyakov, a cynical libertine who lives as a servant in his father’s house. One of them will commit patricide.
As the spread of atheism plunges the Russian people into existential questioning, Fyodor Pavlovich, the father of the three brothers, embodies the chaos caused by a wounded devotion to the object of worship. Condemned to a second-class life, he becomes a parody of himself. The disappearance of God has not erased sorrow or guilt, but has left an insatiable thirst for forgiveness: in the absence of redemption, Fyodor lives like a pitiful jester and reaps the hatred of his sons. Only the youngest, Alexei, confidently opens the way to a life worth living, countering the prevailing domination of shame with the fervor of a good man.
Expressing the ineffable fears that drive us, Dostoevsky finds complete solace in the feverish exchange of words and the dangerous intoxication of whispered confessions. Family drama, drama of human consciousness, questions about the meaning of human existence, a panorama of misery, pride and innocence, Russia after the reforms of the 1860s, orgies, miracles: the richness of this Dostoevsky novel will never be exhausted. It is his last book and is considered his masterpiece.
Dostoevsky’s genius is so multifaceted that Nabokov even dared to write the following: “Let us not forget that Dostoevsky is first and foremost a writer of detective novels… a master of suspense.”
