More than just The Brothers Karamazov

Every once in a while, we come across a piece of art that is cherished as if it were our own creation. But it is not. I have felt this way only a very few times in my life, but I can confidently project these feelings onto Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Over the course of six months i.e. the latter part of 2022, I came to understand and love each of the characters as they were fleshed out beautifully in the novel. Every person’s aspirations, thoughts, deeds, and ultimately actions were inseperable from their individual and connected psychologies and there’s no better feeling that to realize these faces were all carved by just one person, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

There’s perhaps little I can say right now on the book except to give a hearty recommendation to read it. Bear in mind, its a big book, literally and figuratively speaking. Time and mental resources are guzzled quickly during the process and often times I found myself reading barely two or three pages before closing the novel and just taking in the ideas presented over a span of a couple lines. Yes, it is that book. For now, I will let the Goodreads review do the talking while I think about presenting all I wanted to say about this book, in better detail.

Goodreads Review

It surprises me how quickly can a man’s head be filled with a story that absolutely moves him. And one would expect such an event to occur perhaps once or twice throughout the course of any well-written book. But what if each character you meet in a book seems to have such a story? At that point you realise that it’s not people but the author of these deeply fleshed out characters that is to blame. I do not say the characters are uninteresting. On the contrary, we have a case of selection bias/chosen-one scenario over here. Normal, routine lives are barely given a mention in this story. But, it is within these same lives we find our stories.

There’s no high stakes political drama nor is there a cataclysmic event to engage the reader. It’s just sinply beautiful exposition after exposition from Dostoevsky’s colorful pantheon of ordinary humans. Humans that say what they think, but do not think what they say. Humans that are at the whim of their psychologies out for the others to understand and perhaps even exploit. There’s a hidden psychologist in each of us and The Brothers Karamazov demarcates between those that are subtle in their art and those who have a more mercurial approach to thinking around others.

As a computer programmer, there’s often a soft limit on how much can one nest information. But with Dostoevsky, there seems to be none. It is a marvelous piece to work getting sucked in to stories within stories within stories. And then to see the detail at work further on within the book is pure awesomeness.

This is a book I can wholeheartedly recommend to any reader of engaging fiction. There’s much storytelling to be experienced here and the layer of psych 101 is just the cherry on top. This book may help you to think better, to feel better, and above all, to experience life better.

March 2023