The Brothers Karamazov

I finished the book about a week ago. It was a good read… all the way until the end, when I was somewhat surprised. Alyosha’s speech seemed to be on such a note of happy idealism that was a tad too dramatic and idealistic for me, in some ways I felt that the ending could have been better. I was expecting something dead realistic. ‘That’s how the world is, live with it, but live on christ-like’. Alyosha’s speech was more along the lines of ‘Whatever happens, let us live on with Hope and Love!’ You can argue that the content is by and large the same, but the tone was totally different.

I gave it some thought and eventually realised, upon a second reading of the ending, that it’s not altogether so incongruent with the rest of the novel. After all, is not a central theme in Dostoevsky’s novelistic outlook about Amazing Grace? That no matter what happens, how debauched Dmitry might be, he can be assured of Grace, most aptly portrayed in the form of his brother, the ‘cherub’ Alyosha? No matter how filthy and downtrodden human nature may be, there is always a sparkle of that noble aspiration to goodness, as Dmitry’s Confessions in prose and verse, show? (I must admit, I liked that section of the whole near-1000 page novel – it left an impressionable mark on me). What better way to end the novel than to introduce that little sparkle of hope in the otherwise dreary ending to the novel, where Dmitry was convicted of a crime he did not commit and sent to Siberia, and Ivan with not much hope of living?

Although I like the book for its explorations of such themes as human nature and guilt, and redemption and forgiveness, I cannot help but admit that certain places left me feeling rather letdown. For one, Dostoevsky seems to paint stock characters. His characters are larger than life, improbable, and he does not seem to care much about what happens to them as a character per se (we never see Alyosha marry although his starets, who has this prophetic quality about him, has predicted it, and in spite of the fact that his lifelong friend, Lise, had confessed earlier on in the novel about her ardent feelings for him and we see him reciprocating. And what will come out of Ivan in the end? Will he live? And barring that, what will happen of his tortured soul, between atheism and his desire to believe?), as long as he is able to use them to flesh out his main themes. His dramatic, sometimes gripping, pace of narration holds the reader in breathless suspense until the end, which was disappointing since I was already caught up in the whole chase-the-narrative mode until I squared with Alyosha’s somewhat anticlimax ending.

As regards the point I am going to make, this is probably personal, but I feel as though Dostoevsky had not really elucidated his themes really well. For a novel this size, I left off feeling like all I got were memorable snippets, such as Dmitry’s Confessions, The Grand Inquisitor, The Onion, The Devil visits Ivan etc. Towards the end, during the long trial, when Dostoevsky begins to dig into earlier parts of the novel which you would not have suspected to be part of the evidence against Dmitry’s committing the murder, I had already forgotten most of them and only had a faint inkling that I’d seen those before… It’s not surprising, I suppose, that when I finally put the novel down and was trying to analyse it in terms of themes and message, that I found the task insurmountable. I resolved to consult a critic’s works instead of go solo.

That said, however, I loved those scenes, they are really inspiring in terms of portraying the eternal struggle between rationalistic Ivan and his desire to believe, his conscience and his statement that ‘everything is permissible’, the strumpet Grushenka (for that really seems to be the main essence of her character, although I own that when she loves she loves steadfast – if only for a moment) and her sudden admission of granting an onion (an altruistic act counter to her base nature) and owning that she is like that old woman who granted an onion in that fairy tale… who will save Grushenka? In those memorable snippets I think I find the best this novel has to offer. It is touching, in a way completely Dostoevsky-an, the way these seemingly irredeemable characters can, in their most debased hour, suddenly turn in a frenzy and confess to nobler sentiments, and all in a way that actually moves people, instead of appear farcical. In a sense it is at these moments when I think I see a sneak-peek into the human condition: whatever the basest of characters may be, there be moments of introspection when they, in like frenzy, confess to better aspirations, if only… True to life, Dostoevsky’s characters return to the dirt and grime their impassioned states seem to be inevitably drawn to. Realistic and poignant, it is this that draws the reader to Dostoevsky.