I'm still trying to mull this over. This is obviously a "classic" and recognized as Dostoyevsky's culminating masterpiece, and it has sat on my bookshelf for, what, 40 years now, at least since I first read "The Grand Inquisitor" in LS 52 with Kay Bethune in 1970, if not before. But whereas Ivan comes off as the protagonist in telling his "poem" as he calls it, and hence, a heroic figure for me at the time, that is certainly not the direction of Dostoevsky's thinking at. In short, Brother K may be an important book but it just didn't turn out to be an enjoyable read.
The fact of the matter is that Fyodor Pavlovich and Dmitri Fyodorovich (Mitya) are buffoons--idiots, really--and I just didn't care for them at all. And it is the trial of Mitya for killing Fyodor that is the central plot structure of the book. Ivan and Alyosha are really the only major characters in the book (well, I should include Father Zosima, but he dies early on) worth caring for, and that includes the females Grushenka, Katarina and even Lise. Nobody seems to have a clue. The first half of the book with Fyodor and Mitya furiously quarreling with each other over Grushenka, while Mitya also dumps Katarina after spending large sums of her money, is really unpleasant, relieved only by "The Grand Inquisitor" and maybe by conversations between Zosima and Alyosha. Then so much of the rest of the book is taken up with Mitya's protestations of innocence "I am a scoundrel but not a thief or a murderer" that become so tiresome after a while. I guess my real reaction to his conviction in the trial, even though we know he is innocent, is "who cares." He and his father are so led around by their dicks--the sensualist Karamazov personality that is pointedly described again and again--that if Mitya didn't kill his father, he would have sooner or later killed someone else. And neither he nor Fyodor had a clue that Grushenka was playing them all along.
It sometimes takes a shovel to beat an idea into my head, and the cover of the Norton critical edition has the "troika" of the prosecutor's speech emerging from the heads of the bothers, implying that the story of the bothers is the story of Russia: the out-of-control sensualist Dmitri, the intellectual and skeptical Ivan, and the saint Alyosha. Many commentators claim that Ivan and Alyosha represent the fight for the Russian soul. Of course, it is Ivan who says that without God, all things are possible, and hence leads directly to the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich, and so Ivan is instantly discredited. Alyosha is almost goodness itself, if quite naive and simplistic in his thinking. And since the book ends with the exclamation "Hurrah for Karamazov" I guess that means he wins in the end, especially with the exhortation of love and remembrance to the boys at Ilyusha's funeral.
This leaves out the fourth brother, Smerdyakov, and it is he who is misled by Ivan's Enlightenment philosophy and actually kills Fyodor since all things are possible. But then he ends up killing himself while Ivan goes mad (of brain fever?) after his "interview with the devil." Evil really does permeate the book and makes any kind of optimistic view of human nature impossible without the saving power of the orthodox church.
I really need to ponder and read about Brothers K some more.
Author: Dostoevsky, Fyodor
Date Published: 1880
Length: 735 pp & 34 hr 50 min
print and audio
Narrator: Davidson, Frederick
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