A Stunning Meditation On The Human Experience This novel is simply the finest novel ever written. The themes are universal, to a degree that they not only hold up over a century later, even for an American reader like myself, but speak directly and prophetically to the chaos and conflict of modern times. Even the great works of Tolstoy - a superb novelist and contemporary of Dostoyevsky's - in spite of their magnificent scope and brilliant historical detail, seem at times dated, dogmatic, and naïve in contrast with the brilliant insight see in The Brothers Karamazov.
As a result of the vast social convulsions in the century since the book's publication, few great 19th century writers are able to reach out to address our current concerns, as well as the universal questions of human existence, in a way that approaches the unflinching honesty and authority of Dostoyevsky.
The father and four brothers in the novel are archetypes, yet so intimately drawn that they walk and breath on the page - and for better and worse, they are people of irrepressible passion - people who confront the moral and social calamity of their times with a remarkable courage and gusto. Even when that passion becomes confused and twisted, or passes into actual depravity, they are never beaten into apathy under the unrelenting bleakness of a collapsing social order and a failing imperial state.
Through what at first glace seems exaggeration, Dostoyevsky paints an engrossing and devastatingly realistic portrait of his times, and he has been accused of exaggeration. He has been accused of being an insufferable romantic - of creating characters that are fantastic - of writing a kind of surrealistic distortion of existence employed for lurid effect. But if one goes through the book line by line it turns out that the opposite is true. It is his unflinching refusal to embellish, or prettify the world his characters inhabit, that gives his work it's disorienting quality.
He forces us to take off our rose-colored glasses, and see his world as he see's it, and this fierce vision is not for everyone; but those able to enter that vision may take away from it an understanding of life's meaning that is unequaled in fiction. Because, in spite of the patricide, the unrelenting grimness, and the omnipresent cold and deprivation that permeate this novel (and much of his other work) Dostoyevsky is determined to leave us with an appreciation of the power and endurance of the human spirit, a renewed vision of the wonder of human life, and finally, a conviction that neither the three surviving brothers nor we ourselves have passed beyond redemption.
Brent Hightower
Copyright 2014 Brent Hightower
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