The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A masterpiece indeed! And I doubt if anything written by me would do justice in terms of glorifying the author’s work. But there are some emotions I can’t suppress. So, I am calling upon them to fall congruously in line, so that I can make out a sense of what the reading of it rendered me to grasp.

A few questions that came outright were, “Doesn’t ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, separated in their thoughts and ideas but united in their grief, represent all of us?” Isn’t it like someone has put a mirror before us and all we can do is to look at it and identify our closest self portrayed in it? Why, but we can be anyone of the three brothers, if not wholly then in parts, a part of Dmitri, Ivan or that of Alyosha. Incessantly trying to see the world, through understanding and opinions, as we have developed for our apparently long stay here, isn’t it? But as I say that the three brothers, who possess extreme characters, seem to be living inside all of us in parts, then who are the people out there ready to judge and condemn, at the suspicion of an offense? And still, what lets anyone to a crime?

Is there a line which separates ‘all’ from ‘an individual’? Don’t we, at the suggestion of a crime or a wrongdoing, jump to form the other part of society, denouncing and reproving the offender with a vehemence which is discernible in the creatures of this earth? Hence by, widening the gap and encouraging sins?

In the epilogue, the speech by the stone by Alyosha, does instigate a hope that seems comforting, specially the lines — still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are.

Still as I read these, I felt haunted by the following lines a few pages back --

‘A great writer* of the last epoch, comparing Russia to a swift troika galloping to an unknown goal, exclaims, ‘Oh, troika, birdlike troika, who invented thee!’ and adds, in proud ecstasy, that all the peoples of the world stand aside respectfully to make way for the recklessly galloping troika to pass. That may be, they may stand aside, respectfully or no, but in my poor opinion the great writer ended his book in this way either in an excess of childish and naive optimism, or simply in fear of the censorship of the day. For if the troika were drawn by his heroes, Sobakevitch, Nozdryov, Tchitchikov, it could reach no rational goal, whoever might be driving it. And those were the heroes of an older generation, ours are worse specimens still...’

And I was left awestruck!




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