Picking up "The Brother's Karamazov" can be a fairly frightening experience. It is, after all, the best-known novel from the darkest and perhaps most complex writer of the Russian Romantics. Starting with this mindset, reading the book can turn out to be a pleasant surprise. The book is somewhat lighthearted and humurous, delving into darker phsychology only as a side note to the overall plot moving the story. It's fast paced; Dostoyevsky's narrator uses little description and mostly notes down action and dialogue so that the book reads more like a screen play than a novel.

However laughable the characters are at times, they are not without deeper thoughts and quite stunning commentary. It is perhaps this delicate balance that makes the book the cannonized classic it is. For instance, the chapter "The Grand Inquisitor" hypothesizes the invention and abuse of religion- not from the stand point of humanity, but from the stand point of Christ and God. Which, more than anything else, inspired me to write this review.

The previous review written of this book asserts that Dostoyevsky was a man of faith. However, this is a common misconception. Dostoyevsky's own journals and letters indicate that he often went back and forth on the issue during his life - especially during his exile. This book, if anything, points out his attempt to deal with the complexity of something such as faith. He, in my opinion, manages to justify faith outside of proving in God or Christ. So the narrator warns his reader in the introduction that "Alyosha" is not your typical hero, nor are his interpretations of the Bible typical.

If anything, this book encourages people to act justly according to what ever moral ground they can find. Because of this, Dostoyevsky is often considered the precursor to existentialist thought.

My recommendation in reading the book is to find the translation from Richard Pevear and Varrissa Volokonsky. They are recent award winners for tranlating Russian classics such as "Anna Karenina."

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Created Apr 01, 2005 at 6:33pm • Submit your own review...