The Brothers Karamazov

At a deeper level, its characters and the dramatic events in which they participate continue to agitate the memory long after the book has been put down. Ivan, Dmitri or Alyosha Karamazov, what they say, their emotional torments, their clash of personalities, how they react to dramatic events, readily spring to mind in discussions of the modern condition. Dostoevsky’s characters are men and women under stress, victims of modern neuroses, in the grip of modern ideas. Their presentation, while eminently readable in realistic terms, has also provoked comparisons with modernist and postmodernist fiction. Indeed, not least of the novel’s claims to classic status is that it has continued, it seems, to stimulate and to find an echo in every significant intellectual development to have gripped the western mind since its appearance.

Yet it is not just that The Brothers Karamazov seems contemporary and relevant to every succeeding generation — like that famous portrait whose eyes seem to follow you round the room; it also echoes and develops some of the most ancient paradoxes and preoccupations of humanity and foresees intellectual, social and political developments of our own time. It was the French existentialist Albert Camus who said that Dostoevsky not Karl Marx was the great prophet of the twentieth century. No less interestingly, though more difficult to fathom, Albeit Einstein declared that he had learnt more from Dostoevsky than from any other thinker.

‘Does Dostoevsky then simply use the novel form as a vehicle for his philosophical and religious ideas, for prophecy and psychological experiment? The reactions of some critics, in his own day as much as in ours, might lead one to think so. There they are on the shelves: works on Dostoevsky and theology, psychology, philosophy and so forth. But the important point is that for Dostoevsky himself only imaginative fiction is capable of expressing what matters about the human condition. It does not always do so, especially in the work of the ‘realists’ of his day at whom he was always having a dig. Yet at its best, it is capable not simply of entertaining, telling a good story or providing a social chronicle, but also of plumbing and illuminating the depths of the human soul. In Dostoevsky, one might say following his own line of thought, the novel finds its true vocation.

The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoevsky’s last book, published in serial form in The Russian Herald from January 1879 to November 1880, and is generally held to represent the synthesis and culmination of his entire work. It appeared as a single volume almost immediately its serialization was complete, bearing the date 1881. The prefatory note called ‘From the author’ indicates that there was to be a sequel and it is widely assumed that we were denied this only by Dostoevsky’s untimely death on 28 January 1881. (All dates are given according to the pre-revolutionary calendar which was twelve days behind ours in the nineteenth century.) But Dostoevsky could easily have (hanged his mind. The surviving notebooks for his novels show how often he did this. What we have is a tent which, because it claims to be incomplete, stimulates the reader to imagine how it might have continued and that is much more important than any fragmentary evidence of what was in Dostoevsky’s mind: for whatever reason The Brothers Karamazov is a novel whose story has no definite end.