Brothers Karamazov: Book 1
Notes for reading and questions to consider
Meeting the Karamazovs: Book 1
Alice Neel, Untitled, 1938 (the Karamazov family and Grigory). Published in The Paris Review, February 2015.
Book 1 in a nutshell:
We learn two important pieces of information: first, this is the first time all three brothers and their father have been in the same place at the same time, and second, this is the story of Fyodor Pavlovich’s tragic death.
Nothing happens—the whole book gives you background on each of the Karamazovs as individuals and in relation to one another.
Make a character list for yourself to keep in your copy of the novel. Focus primarily on the father and three brothers.
“From the Author”
This note should be considered part of the novel, not an external note from Dostoevsky to us.
There is no evidence that Dostoevsky planned to write a second installment of this novel, so why would this note tell us to read this as a prequel to some other novel?
He is proposing that this is the story of Alyosha as a hero while also telling us not to expect much in the way of heroic action from Alyosha in this novel, which is focused on his formation through struggle and conflict. At this point, he is a tentative young man who wants to do the right thing and live a good life while feeling deeply confused about how to do that.
These comments begin to make visible Dostoevsky’s unique take on novels as records of human personalities and actions:
Human actions make sense within a larger trajectory of growth and change across a lifetime because
Human beings are not static and cannot be reduced to a single gesture, characteristic, or idea, which means
Human beings possess incredible freedom and must choose to embrace that freedom on a daily basis, so
Stories are the ideal form to capture human life because they are a medium that depends on change, where human choices are cast against a backdrop of causality, other people’s choices, and chance.
This note almost taunts readers and dares them to not read the novel, which is a peculiar way to address readers. This address suggests that we as readers are not invisible to the novel. The novel is aware of us and challenges us to participate in the act of seeking meaning.
In Dostoevsky’s literary universe, readers have freedom. There is no godlike author prodding us along, foreshadowing a secure future, helping us to arrive at conclusions. The novel is deeply invested in how individual human beings think as a moral, ethical activity. We see this investment in the novel’s depictions of characters as thinking beings and in its way of engaging us as readers.
Ideally, we will leave this novel as better readers than we are right now.
The Brothers Karamazov pretends to be a normal novel, briefly
First, a note about the Karamazov brothers that might offer a helpful mnemonic as we are getting to know them.
If we were to put on our English major hats, we might notice there are three brothers and think about the cultural and literary significance of the number 3. 3 might be the favorite number of stories: three little pigs, three wishes, Goldilocks and the three bears. 3 might be seen as a divine number associated with the Holy Trinity.
Many readers have treated the brothers as a trinity of sorts, with each one representing some part of humanity, as follows:
DMITRI represents the BODY and the SENSES, sensuality.
IVAN represents the human MIND and INTELLECT.
Alyosha represents the human SOUL.
Go ahead and read them this way if it helps to distinguish them at first. It is true enough at the start of the novel as a paradigm.
Warning: the novel will blow up the paradigm faster than we think possible. Many readers don’t notice that. But, we will.
Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his sons
It is easy to assume that most people want basically the same things: we want to be happy, we want security, peace, respect, autonomy, and purpose. This theory of human nature seems pretty unshakeable until we open social media, attend a meeting, or get ready to share a holiday meal with extended family during an election season.
Dostoevsky’s works show us the insufficiency of simple assumptions about the human mind. In the Author’s Note, he suggests that perhaps the strangest, most eccentric person “sometimes carries within himself the very heart of the whole situation.” In other words, if we want to understand something about human nature, we might avoid trying to treat human beings like a set where we could determine the mean or the average. We would be better off doing a deep dive investigation of a single eccentric mind.
Fyodor Pavlovich is one of Dostoevsky’s fascinating case studies of contradictory, paradoxical, maddening human beings in action. The first sentence of the novel lets us know that this story is about his demise. By the time we get to the end of Book 1, we can easily imagine someone wanting to murder him.
Fyodor Pavlovich is incredibly self-serving, yet he seems to relish public humiliation. He is a sensualist, committed to drinking, debauchery, and women. He is cruel yet entertaining. He’s a sponger who died with a fortune. He is happy to accommodate his wives’ desire to marry as a statement of protest or a grand gesture—it is all the same to him.
His first wife, Adelaida Ivanovna Miusova, married Fyodor Pavlovich to make a statement of some kind. To prepare us to understand this marriage, the narrator tells us about a young woman who committed suicide because she was determined to imitate Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Hamlet’s lover who famously went mad. Ophelia’s suicide was described in disturbingly beautiful, poetic terms by Hamlet’s mother. There is a tradition in the visual arts of rendering Ophelia’s dead body as beautiful and poetic.
Ophelia, Sir John Everett Millais, 1851-2. Tate Museum, London.
This is a small detail that introduces a significant idea for The Brothers Karamazov: human beings often see themselves as characters in a story and are susceptible to making foolish, destructive choices to fulfill the dramatic role they imagine they are playing. Many people would rather live in a story than in the world.
This is one of many ways that we deceive ourselves. The Brothers Karamazov tells us that we are not living in a Shakespeare play or a novel. Philosophical concepts and literary types are far too simple to accommodate the messiness of a single human life inside of time passing. The Brothers Karamazov is a novel that is boldly trying to accommodate the mess and to tell its story.
Fyodor Pavlovich plays roles as well as anyone, although we can tell early on that he is hardly committed to any of them. His unique talent as a parent seems to be forgetting that he has children. This characteristic comes up more than once in the opening book for a reason: morality and memory are closely linked in Dostoevsky’s universe. As the novel suggests—and perhaps, as our experience of the world today might confirm—forgetting the needs of children for whom we are responsible is a form of evil that has lasting consequences.
One point to keep in mind here is that Dostoevsky is setting up a novel where everyday acts of forgetting are part of the machinery of evil. He is creating a complex novel without a single hero, where the actions and ideas of a parent have lasting consequences for their children and where no character is simply the sum of their own experiences.
We are getting to know his characters the way we might get to know other people in the world if we had the time. We are learning the origins of the brothers, their personalities, their activities, and their conflicts. Each brother will get an entire Book telling us more (Dmitri: Book 3, Ivan: Book 5, Alyosha: Book 7).
The structure of the novel invites us to become better readers of other people and of complex human situations. The first seven books of the novel offer us a kind of training in understanding human beings; the novel’s second half will offer a test of our capacity to navigate the ambiguity and uncertainty that are essential to being in a world with other people.
As you read, ask yourself:
how has Fyodor Pavlovich influenced each of his sons?
what dimensions of Fyodor Pavlovich’s personality feel recognizable to you in the twenty-first century? Do you know anyone like him?
How does the novel explain the radical differences in Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov, even though they have the same parents?
What do you notice about Dostoevsky’s approach to conveying character to us? What is your own process of getting to know these characters like?
Contexts/glosses:
Dostoevsky and Anti-Semitism: I recommend this article about Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism in the last decade of his life by Gary Saul Morson. It does not deny, as most Dostoevsky scholars did for many years, the very real antipathy toward Jews in this novel. It also does not dismiss his anti-Semitic language and statements by making claims about historical relativism pointing to anti-Semitism as a common position in the 1870s in Russia. He includes some of Dostoevsky’s most anti-Semitic positions published elsewhere in his last decade and reads them, among other things, in light of Dostoevsky’s increasingly apocalyptic thinking. He concludes by asking what we can learn from the example of Dostoevsky about racial bias and hatred.
p. 22: the ecclesiastical courts. The 1860s and 1870s were a period of major judicial reform in Russia—in 1864, a Westernized system of courts was established. This prompted debate over whether ecclesiastical courts, which oversaw matters within the Russian Orthodox Church, should be the one and only true judicial system in Russia, replacing human judgment with divine judgment.
The main point of Ivan’s article is not the debate—it is that he can write compellingly about a position he doesn't even believe and do it so well that everyone who reads it thinks it agrees with their positions.
p. 27: “holy fool.” A major motif in Russian literature, holy fools are characters who seemed to renounce worldly wisdom and were therefore closer to God. Different authors had their own perspectives on what constituted a holy fool—some appeared to be mentally ill, some seemed to function like jester-type figures. None of them conformed to social standards.
Dostoevsky pointing out that Alyosha was almost a type of holy fool may be a reference to Prince Myshkin, the holy fool who was the hero of his novel The Idiot. The Idiot might be seen as Dostoevsky’s failed attempt to imagine a Christ-type figure exert a powerful influence on those around him. Myshkin was simple-minded, devout, pure, and ended up being easily manipulated and overpowered by most of the other characters in the novel.
The Brothers Karamazov shows Dostoevsky’s evolving understanding of the place of holiness in the human heart and within a complex human existence. Alyosha toys with the idea of purity—he’d prefer to stay within the safety of the monastery, away from the conflicts and temptations of the world of other people.