Brothers Karamazov

At long last, I finished The Brothers Karamazov last night. It's been a looooong read, with a lot of ups and downs. It's a sprawling novel, with lots of characters, and covering something like 30 years, if you include the opening chapters about the birth and early lives of the brothers.

So, in any book of this scope, there's going to be some less-effective parts, and I think they're very different for different people. For instance, I looked at the SparkNotes when I was done, and they look at the court scene as a long anti-climax, with the real climax coming in the chapter before, where we find that Smerdyakov is the criminal. But I found that the most infelicitous part of the book -- it's obvious from long before that Dmitri is innocent, which really leaves Smerdyakov as the criminal. More importantly, Smerdyakov's dialogue with Ivan is just painful to read.

Smerdyakov accuses Ivan of engineering his father's death by encouraging Smerdyakov to kill him. And Ivan sees this as a blow to his self-image. Thematically, of course, this is important -- Ivan has to feel somewhat responsible for his father's death. But, as a realistic character study, it makes no sense at all -- more likely that Ivan would just say, "Smerdyakov, you're a madman, I see no reason to blame myself for anything you might choose to do."

Whereas I find the courtroom drama fascinating. Fetukovich, the defense lawyer, mounts a decent defense of Dmitri, until all of a sudden he ends up endorsing parricide if the father was as evil as Pavlov Karamazov. Fetukovich is correct about so much of what happens, and yet he's morally off-course -- Dostoevsky puts the reader in a tough position to try to sort out which side to take.

And what do we make of the two primary female characters in the novel? Both contain extremes of nobility and baseness -- both have a great capacity for forgiveness in the right circumstance, but in both it quickly turns into a thirst for vengeance. And, yet, don't we see the same in Dmitri Karamazov? Do the two women appear more contradictory because we don't see them directly, we don't follow them through their thoughts the way we get to see Dmitri.

I definitely plan to re-read this novel; it's just too big to get a handle on in one reading. But it's always going to be hard to set aside the kind of time it takes to read it.