The Brothers Karamazov

What It Is

His last novel, serialised through 1879 and 1880 and published complete a few months before his death in January 1881. He intended it as the first part of something larger. There is no second part.

It runs to some nine hundred pages and it holds an improbable number of books inside it: a family novel, a comedy of provincial manners, a theological argument conducted at the highest level anyone has managed in fiction, and a portrait of a Russian monastery drawn from life. Dostoevsky had visited the Optina Pustyn hermitage while writing it, not long after the death of his three-year-old son.

Somewhere in the middle sits a chapter that has been read on its own, extracted and printed by itself, by more people than have read the novel. You will know it when you reach it, and you should reach it the long way round.

Why It Matters

This is the book Western thought keeps returning to when it wants to argue about God, freedom and suffering, and the reason is not that Dostoevsky wins the argument. It is that he refuses to rig it. A devout Orthodox Christian wrote the case against his own beliefs without softening a word of it, and never once put his thumb on the scale.

Everything downstream shows it. Freud wrote an essay on him. Wittgenstein read this novel so many times he could recite passages. Camus took his rebellion from it, Vonnegut said everything there is to know about life was in it, and its most quoted sentence has been used by people on every side of an argument Dostoevsky himself found unbearable.

Underneath the philosophy is something plainer: the best novel ever written about fathers and sons, about what is inherited and whether it can be refused.

Before You Read

Thirty to thirty-five hours, four to six weeks at a comfortable pace. Read Crime and Punishment first if you have not; it is shorter, faster, and it teaches you how Dostoevsky works.

The difficulty is not the language, which is plain. It is the range. A page of farce sits next to a page of metaphysics and then a police procedural starts, and readers who expect one register throughout keep being thrown.

Book Six, which gives the life and teachings of a monastic elder, is where first-time readers most often slow down or skim. Don't. Dostoevsky put it there for a reason, and skipping it leaves you holding half of an argument you will not know you are missing.

And, again, the names. Three names each, plus diminutives. Keep the list.

Which Translation to Read

• Michael R. Katz (Liveright, 2023) — recommended. The first major new translation in thirty years and the best one to read. Katz writes at the speed of speech, which is how the book is built: it is nearly all people talking, at each other, too fast, too much. Above all he restores the comedy, and a Karamazov without the comedy is a monument rather than a novel. The New Yorker put it among the best books of its year, and it deserved that. The cost: the idiom is contemporary American, and readers who want the Russian to feel foreign will not get it. View on Amazon →
• Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage, 1990). The literal standard for a generation, and genuinely faithful to Dostoevsky's odd rhythms and repetitions. The cost: it can read as translated rather than written, and the humour dies on the page.
• Ignat Avsey (Oxford World's Classics, 1994), published as The Karamazov Brothers. Warm, colloquial, thoroughly at home in English, with excellent notes. The cost: he domesticates. He even reordered the title, and that instinct runs through the prose.

Take Katz. David McDuff's Penguin version is a solid alternative, and Constance Garnett's remains the one most twentieth-century readers grew up on.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the introduction afterwards. All of them discuss the novel entire, and this one has more to give away than most.

Read the long conversations in single sittings. Dostoevsky builds in enormous set-pieces where a dozen people are in one room talking past each other, and breaking one across three nights destroys the pressure that makes it work.

Notice the humour. It is a very funny book, and readers braced for Russian gloom miss half of it.

Do not go looking for Dostoevsky's own position. He is on the page as all of them and none, and the honesty of that is the reason the book has outlasted every argument it contains.