Decoding Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’

What books do you read?” a priest-formator asked me during one of our Spiritual Direction sessions. My first impulse was to say that I read the classics. Or I thought of enumerating the titles that I had read that month.

Instead I singled out Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.  I anticipated follow-up questions like what I liked about the book, how it affected me and all that. So I gave some answers even before a question was asked. I told the priest that I like Dostoyevsky because his books do me a lot of good.

Looking back, that conversation with my formator helped me decide to devote some of my reflections to The Brothers Karamazov. Other options were to write a review of Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ or Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. But, please, not again. I had already had enough of them. It was mere curiosity that made me spend hours in my dark room reading those controversial books.

Reading such cheap literature made me ashamed of myself. I was alarmed that I might get contaminated from such trash and was quick to cure this by reaching for the real thing.

This reminds me of an anecdote I heard when I was studying philosophy:

A seminarian went to confession. To play it safe, he chose a very old priest with a little hearing problem. He started pouring out his sins when the priest interrupted him. “Ah, you watched pornography?” the priest asked in rather too loud a voice that echoed inside the chapel. “Well, you need to balance it by reading the Bible,” the old priest advised almost in a whisper.

Not an accurate analogy, I know, yet the point is quite obvious.

Now allow me to talk a little about the author and his book. Literary experts have labeled Dostoyevsky a “psychologist,” which he denied. Others said he wanted to be called a “realist” who portrayed all the depths of the human soul.

The Brothers Karamazov is the result. It tells the story of the Karamazov family with its bestial father and four sons. Each member is separated from the others and lives an independent and isolated life. Fyodor is the insensitive head of the family who embodies an ancient disciple of Bacchus. Dmitri, the eldest, retains some qualities of his father but we can see him trying to escape from becoming like him. Ivan represents the intellectual atmosphere of the times, when almost everybody was asking questions about the meaning of life, the problem of evil, and the existence of God. The youngest Alyosa depicts the spiritual side of man. Though he is the main character of the story, he is more of an observer. We catch sight of the drama from his perspective as he experiences the unfolding of events. Finally, Smerdyakov is the illegitimate son of Fyodor who personifies the “insulted and injured, and the disinherited.”

Dostoyevsky credibly portrayed characters that are caught in a web of moral philosophy. God and the Devil battle for possession of their souls. The battlefield occurs in the heart of each character. It rages from the first page to the last, until it finally leads to the murder of the father, Fyodor Karamazov. The characters are all involved in the crime, and as the drama unfolds they reveal their emotions, conscious and unconscious, with gripping precision.

Dmitri’s rivalry with his father because of a woman makes him the primary suspect in the parricide. In fact, all the evidence discovered by authorities and supported by several witnesses points to him. In this part of the story a déjà vu feeling swept over me. If you have read Crime and Punishment by the same author, you will notice this parallelism — that things are far more complex and deeper than what they seem. Behind the visible evidence are devious designs lurking beneath. The almost-perfect crime is actually orchestrated by Smerdyakov, who gets inspired to commit the murder through his conversations and philosophizing with Ivan.

Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Smerdyakov executes the murder in cold blood and with chilling accuracy plants evidence that will implicate Dmitri. The final verdict finds Dmitri guilty of parricide, while Smerdyakov commits suicide.

The murder of Fyodor Karamazov is certainly not the central focus of the novel. This serves only as the catalyst of the real action. The Brothers Karamazov is a discussion of fundamental and universal issues pertaining to man. It shows us an in-depth analysis of man’s inner realities — his values as well as his beliefs. We observe the characters as they react to different situations and make moral judgments on them. As we move from one chapter to the next, we notice changes in the characters and share in their moments of spiritual metamorphosis.

Though the interior movement of the characters is slow and often perilous as their beliefs and counter-beliefs clash, we find them struggling to discover within themselves some meaning in life.

Now I do not want to end this reflection without talking about the most controversial chapter of the book. It bears the infamous title “The Grand Inquisitor.” It is a whole chapter detailing a discourse on freedom and man’s rebellion against the freedom-giver. As told by Ivan, we hear a story about Jesus Christ, who has conceived a desire to visit his people again, at least for an instant. He chooses to visit Seville, Spain during the period of the Inquisition. Christ appears in a street and a crowd gathers around him. He starts attending to the needy, heals the sick, raises the dead, but the Grand Inquisitor comes along. He observes the mob and has Christ arrested. That night he goes to pay the prisoner a visit in his dungeon and attempts to show him, in a long discourse, the folly of his “idea,” especially the answers he gave when he was being tempted by the devil in the desert.

The Grand Inquisitor points out that in the course of the temptations, the devil had revealed to Christ and placed at his disposal the three means that would have insured the stability, well-being, and happiness of humanity. First, the Grand Inquisitor asserts that Christ should have taken the bread and offered mankind the freedom from hunger instead of freedom of choice. Second, he says that Christ should have given people a miracle, for most people need to see the miraculous in order to be content with their faith. Third, he blames Christ for not taking power over all kingdoms of the world, leading to a situation where the Church has to take it in His name in order to convince men to give up their free will in favor of eternal security. Yet Christ rejected these opportunities. On the other hand, the world’s religious leaders accepted Christ’s choices and worked for the kingdom of God by accepting the limitations of human nature. Indeed, they work at it with zeal in the name of Christ, but in a spirit contrary to His. Throughout this discourse Christ listens silently, just as Alyosa keeps silent while Ivan tells him this story. However, as the Grand Inquisitor finishes his indictment of the prisoner, Christ walks up to him and kisses him gently. The astonished Grand Inquisitor sets Christ free and bids him not to return again. As Ivan finishes this story of The Grand Inquisitor, he worries that its meaning may disturb Alyosa. But Alyosa leans forward and also kisses his brother, saying: “Everything you say serves not to blame but to praise Christ.”

The Brothers Karamazov simply trumps all books I have read so far with the exception of St. Augustine’s Confessions, Thoreau’s Walden and JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. “But I don’t like to read books thicker than a phone directory!” I overheard my classmate saying while we were waiting for our professor in class. I agree. Thick books are daunting and discouraging to most readers. Only a few adventurous ones will read them. Yet we cannot ignore the fact that literary giants in the world, the likes of William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes,  St. Thomas Aquinas, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Ernest Hemingway, to name a few, are garrulous writers. They have so much to say. And what they are saying still makes a lot of sense to us. I once wondered why these authors couldn’t write shorter books. I’m still wondering — but differently now — why we have so few of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy’s colossal classics. I can never have enough of them. Life for mankind might have been a lot better if they had produced more.

People say that books choose you as much as you choose them. When my priest-formator asked what books I read, I singled out The Brothers Karamazov and added that I am a fan of the author and that his book does me a lot of good, to put it lightly. Reading the book is like journeying with and through the human soul as beautifully described by the author as it metamorphoses towards its objective end. This reminds me of St. Augustine’s Confessions, which I consider one of the best utterances of man. The Brothers Karamazov, like the Confessions, is a book that portrays a man who seeks the ultimate truths and is not afraid to tell God about his doubts. Nor is he afraid to exercise his God-given intellect by confronting God with difficult questions.

“Read only the best,” Anna C. Brackett writes. She says that there is no need to read other books because they “are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest.” She adds that “to read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.”

Few books demonstrate so effectively that provoking thought by Brackett. One simply has to read The Brothers Karamazov.