The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky (Fyodor), Magarshack (David)
This Page provides (where held) the Abstract of the above Book and those of all the Papers contained in it.
Text Colour-ConventionsDisclaimerPapers in this BookBooks / Papers Citing this BookNotes Citing this Book


Notes

  1. I intend to add notes an this book now that – at long last – I’ve read it. I’ve added a few to the Translator’s Introduction to the copy I possess.
  2. I’ve repeated the Back Cover Blurb and publishers’ blurbs from the various editions available on Amazon.
  3. Wikipedia: The Brothers Karamazov gives useful plot summaries and background.
  4. The book is referenced in a number of Books and Papers in my collection, including:-
    → "Fowler (Charlotte) - Evil and Suffering: Protest Atheism"
    → "Hick (John) - An Irenaean Theodicy"
    → "Plantinga (Alvin) - God, Freedom and Evil: Introduction"
    → "Plantinga (Alvin) - Warranted Christian Belief: Preface"
    → "Wiles (Maurice) - Whence Comes Evil?"
    → "Williams (Rowan) - Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction"
  5. The Grand Inquisitor was covered as part of the Heythrop MA course I part-took: see Grand Inquisitor1.

Back Cover Blurb
  • The Brothers Karamazov, the culmination of Dostoyevsky’s work, was completed in 1880, shortly before his death.
  • A portrait of his contemporary Russian society in the turbulent 1870s, the novel introduces Fyodor Karamazov, a mean and disreputable landowner, and his three legitimate sons: Dmitry, a profligate army officer; Ivan, a writer with revolutionary ideas; and Alexey, a religious novice. In the presence of the monk Zossima, they meet to resolve a family dispute.
  • A tense and magnificent story unfolds through these characters, a drama of parricide and fraternal jealousy which profoundly involves the questions of anarchism, atheism and the existence of God. As an artist and as a great and fearless thinker, Dostoyevsky triumphantly fulfils his aim, as recorded in his diary, ‘to find the man in man'.

Amazon Book Description
  • As Fyodor Karamazov awaits an amorous encounter, he is violently done to death. The three sons of the old debauchee are forced to confront their own guilt or complicity. Who will own to parricide? The reckless and passionate Dmitri? The corrosive intellectual Ivan? Surely not the chaste novice monk Alyosha? The search reveals the divisions which rack the brothers, yet paradoxically unite them. Around the writhings of this one dysfunctional family Dostoevsky weaves a dense network of social, psychological and philosophical relationships.
  • At the same time he shows - from the opening 'scandal' scene in the monastery to a personal appearance by an eccentric Devil - that his dramatic skills have lost nothing of their edge. The Brothers Karamazov, completed a few months before Dostoevsky's death in 1881, remains for many the high point of his genius as novelist and chronicler of the modern malaise.
  • It cast a long shadow over D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, and other giants of twentieth-century European literature.

Amazon Book Description
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s final novel, considered to be the culmination of his life’s work, “The Brothers Karamazov” is the story of the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, whose four sons are all to some degree complicit in the crime.
  • Fyodor is a contemptible man who during his two marriages has three sons, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei. A fourth, Pavel, whom he employs as his servant, is suspected to be the illegitimate product of a union with “Reeking Lizaveta,” a mute woman of the street who died in childbirth. Fyodor takes little interest in the raising of his children and as a result finds himself in a contentious relationship with them.
  • Within the context of this crime story evolves a brilliant philosophical debate of religion, reason, liberty, and the nature of guilt in a modernizing society.
  • Considered by Sigmund Freud as “The most magnificent novel ever written,” Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” remains to this day to be regarded as one of the finest accomplishments of literature in any language. Through the lives and loves of the Karamazovs, Dostoyevsky presents a compelling examination of Russian life in the 19th century.
  • This edition follows the translation of Constance Garnett.

Amazon Book Description
  • Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha - are all at some level involved.
  • Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disastrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the authors most cherished causes and beliefs are presented with a note of irreverence, so that orthodoxy, and radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrong are no longer mutually exclusive.
  • Rebecca West considered it "the allegory for the world's maturity", but with children to the fore.
  • This new translation does full justice to Doestoevsky's genius, particularly in the use of the spoken word, which ranges over every mode of human expression.

Amazon Book Description
  • Dostoevsky’s final, greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, paints a complex and richly detailed portrait of a family tormented by its extraordinarily cruel patriarch, Fyodor Pavlovich, whose callous decisions slowly decimate the lives of his sons ― the eponymous brothers Karamazov ― and lead to his violent murder. In the aftermath of the killing, the brothers contend with dilemmas of honour, faith and reason as the community closes in on the murderer in their midst.
  • Acclaimed translator Michael R. Katz renders this masterpiece’s nuanced and evocative storytelling in a vibrant, signature prose style that captures all the power of Dostoevsky’s original―the clever humour, the rich emotion, the passion and the turmoil ― and that will captivate and unsettle a new generation of readers.
  • A monumental new translation ― the first in more than twenty years ― of Russia’s greatest family drama, rendered with all the passion, humour and soul of the original
Book Comment


"Dostoyevsky (Fyodor), Magarshack (David) - The Brothers Karamazov"

Source: Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov


Contents
  1. Part I
    1. Book I. The History Of A Family
      1. Chapter I. Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov
      2. Chapter II. He Gets Rid Of His Eldest Son
      3. Chapter III. The Second Marriage And The Second Family
      4. Chapter IV. The Third Son, Alyosha
      5. Chapter V. Elders
    2. Book II. An Unfortunate Gathering
      1. Chapter I. They Arrive At The Monastery
      2. Chapter II. The Old Buffoon
      3. Chapter III. Peasant Women Who Have Faith
      4. Chapter IV. A Lady Of Little Faith
      5. Chapter V. So Be It! So Be It!
      6. Chapter VI. Why Is Such A Man Alive?
      7. Chapter VII. A Young Man Bent On A Career
      8. Chapter VIII. The Scandalous Scene
    3. Book III. The Sensualists
      1. Chapter I. In The Servants’ Quarters
      2. Chapter II. Lizaveta
      3. Chapter III. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—In Verse
      4. Chapter IV. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—In Anecdote
      5. Chapter V. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—“Heels Up”
      6. Chapter VI. Smerdyakov
      7. Chapter VII. The Controversy
      8. Chapter VIII. Over The Brandy
      9. Chapter IX. The Sensualists
      10. Chapter X. Both Together
      11. Chapter XI. Another Reputation Ruined
  2. Part II
    1. Book IV. Lacerations
      1. Chapter I. Father Ferapont
      2. Chapter II. At His Father’s
      3. Chapter III. A Meeting With The Schoolboys
      4. Chapter IV. At The Hohlakovs’
      5. Chapter V. A Laceration In The Drawing‐Room
      6. Chapter VI. A Laceration In The Cottage
      7. Chapter VII. And In The Open Air
    2. Book V. Pro And Contra
      1. Chapter I. The Engagement
      2. Chapter II. Smerdyakov With A Guitar
      3. Chapter III. The Brothers Make Friends
      4. Chapter IV. Rebellion
      5. Chapter V. The Grand Inquisitor
      6. Chapter VI. For Awhile A Very Obscure One
      7. Chapter VII. “It’s Always Worth While Speaking To A Clever Man”
    3. Book VI. The Russian Monk
      1. Chapter I. Father Zossima And His Visitors
      2. Chapter II. The Duel
      3. Chapter III. Conversations And Exhortations Of Father Zossima
  3. Part III
    1. Book VII. Alyosha
      1. Chapter I. The Breath Of Corruption
      2. Chapter II. A Critical Moment
      3. Chapter III. An Onion
      4. Chapter IV. Cana Of Galilee
    2. Book VIII. Mitya
      1. Chapter I. Kuzma Samsonov
      2. Chapter II. Lyagavy
      3. Chapter III. Gold‐Mines
      4. Chapter IV. In The Dark
      5. Chapter V. A Sudden Resolution
      6. Chapter VI. “I Am Coming, Too!”
      7. Chapter VII. The First And Rightful Lover
      8. Chapter VIII. Delirium
    3. Book IX. The Preliminary Investigation
      1. Chapter I. The Beginning Of Perhotin’s Official Career
      2. Chapter II. The Alarm
      3. Chapter III. The Sufferings Of A Soul, The First Ordeal
      4. Chapter IV. The Second Ordeal
      5. Chapter V. The Third Ordeal
      6. Chapter VI. The Prosecutor Catches Mitya
      7. Chapter VII. Mitya’s Great Secret. Received With Hisses
      8. Chapter VIII. The Evidence Of The Witnesses. The Babe
      9. Chapter IX. They Carry Mitya Away
  4. Part IV
    1. Book X. The Boys
      1. Chapter I. Kolya Krassotkin
      2. Chapter II. Children
      3. Chapter III. The Schoolboy
      4. Chapter IV. The Lost Dog
      5. Chapter V. By Ilusha’s Bedside
      6. Chapter VI. Precocity
      7. Chapter VII. Ilusha
    2. Book XI. Ivan
      1. Chapter I. At Grushenka’s
      2. Chapter II. The Injured Foot
      3. Chapter III. A Little Demon
      4. Chapter IV. A Hymn And A Secret
      5. Chapter V. Not You, Not You!
      6. Chapter VI. The First Interview With Smerdyakov
      7. Chapter VII. The Second Visit To Smerdyakov
      8. Chapter VIII. The Third And Last Interview With Smerdyakov
      9. Chapter IX. The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare
      10. Chapter X. “It Was He Who Said That”
    3. Book XII. A Judicial Error
      1. Chapter I. The Fatal Day
      2. Chapter II. Dangerous Witnesses
      3. Chapter III. The Medical Experts And A Pound Of Nuts
      4. Chapter IV. Fortune Smiles On Mitya
      5. Chapter V. A Sudden Catastrophe
      6. Chapter VI. The Prosecutor’s Speech. Sketches Of Character
      7. Chapter VII. An Historical Survey
      8. Chapter VIII. A Treatise On Smerdyakov
      9. Chapter IX. The Galloping Troika. The End Of The Prosecutor’s Speech.
      10. Chapter X. The Speech For The Defense. An Argument That Cuts Both Ways
      11. Chapter XI. There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery
      12. Chapter XII. And There Was No Murder Either
      13. Chapter XIII. A Corrupter Of Thought
      14. Chapter XIV. The Peasants Stand Firm
  5. Epilogue
    1. Plans For Mitya’s Escape
    2. For A Moment The Lie Becomes Truth
    3. Ilusha’s Funeral. The Speech At The Stone


"Magarshack (David) - The Brothers Karamazov: Translator's Introduction"

Source: Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov


Full Text
  • Dostoyevsky began uniting The Brothers Karamazov, his last and his greatest novel, in June 1878, and finished it in October 1880, about three months before his death.
  • ’You can’t imagine,' he wrote to the Slavophil poet and critic Ivan Aksakov on 21 September 1880, 'how busy I am at present. I am working hard day and night. Yes, I am finishing the Karamazovs and reviewing in my mind the work which I, at any rate, think highly of, for there is a great deal of my own in it. I am, as a rule, highly strung when working - my work gives me a great deal of pain and worry. When working hard, I am even physically ill. Now I am striking a balance of what I have been revolving in my mind for three years, drafting it and writing it down. It has to be done well, that is to say, at least as best as I can.... The time has come when it has to be finished and finished without any further delay.... In spite of the fact that I have been writing it for three years, I keep re-writing some chapters again and again. I write and reject.... Only the inspired passages come off at once, the rest requires a great deal of hard work. ...
  • As a matter of fact, Dostoyevsky had been revolving the subject of his last novel in his mind for much longer than three years. All his four masterpieces are essentially murder stories, but each of them deals with a different aspect of murder.
    1. Crime and Punishment1 revolves round the idea whether the murder of the evil old woman, an unscrupulous moneylender, can be justified if it helps to provide the means for a brilliant career of an impecunious student;
    2. The Idiot2 deals with murder as a result of carnal passion set against the Christian ideal of forgiveness;
    3. In The Devils3 the motive for murder is political, while
    4. In The Brothers Karamazov it is the most heinous form of murder that comes under close scrutiny - parricide, a subject that seems to have exercised a powerful fascination over Dostoyevsky since early childhood.
    ‘As a boy of ten’ Dostoyevsky wrote to a correspondent on 18 August 1880, from Staraya Russa, where he usually spent the summer months, ‘I saw a performance of Schiller's Robbers, and I assure you, the powerful impression it made on me then had a very fructifying influence on my spiritual development.’ Dostoyevsky's wife Anna records in her diary that while engaged in writing The Brothers Karamazov her husband again re-read The Robbers, and on one occasion read it aloud to his family. Schiller's play deals with the subject of parricide and the rivalry between two brothers.
  • This theme Dostoyevsky introduces at the very beginning of his novel by a direct reference to Schiller's play. 'This,’ Fyodor Karamazov tells Father Zossima, pointing to his second son Ivan, 'is my most respectful Karl Moor, while this son of mine, Dmitry, who has just come in and against whom I am seeking justice from you, is my most disrespectful Franz Moor, both from Schiller's Robbers4, which, I suppose, makes me the Regierender Graf von Moor.’ The old man, though, made a mistake: it was Ivan and not Dmitry5 who, like Franz Moor, had been plotting his father's death and was in love with his elder brother's fiancée.
  • The genesis of The Brothers Karamazov, however, shows an even closer link with Dostoyevsky's past. For it was during his imprisonment in Siberia that he met a man serving a twenty years' sentence for parricide, who was to supply him with the central idea of the plot of his last novel. He relates this meeting in The House of the Dead, the first great work he wrote after his return from Siberia. The condemned parricide was, like Dmitry Karamazov, a retired lieutenant of a line regiment, by the name of Ilyinsky. (In the first drafts of The Brothers Karamazov the name of Ilyinsky occurs side by side with that of Karamazov.) In the first chapter of The House of the Dead, which appeared in 1861 in Time, the monthly periodical Dostoyevsky published with his elder brother Mikhail, he gives the following account of his meeting with Ilyinsky:
  • 'There is one parricide in particular I cannot forget. He was of noble birth and was regarded by his sixty-year-old father as a kind of prodigal son. He led a riotous life and got himself heavily into debt. His father tried his best to restrain him and persuade him to change his mode of life. But his father owned an estate and was reputed to have money, and so his son murdered him in order to inherit his fortune. The crime was only discovered after a month. The murderer himself had informed the police that his father had disappeared and that his whereabouts were unknown. He spent the whole of that month in a most dissolute fashion. At last the police discovered the body in his absence. There was an open sewer, covered by planks, running across the whole length of the yard. The body lay in that sewer. It was dressed and carefully laid out, the grey head was cut off and placed beside the trunk, and the murderer had put a pillow under it. He did not confess; he was deprived of his rank and sentenced to twenty years' hard labour in Siberia. All the time I spoke with him he was in a most cheerful frame of mind. He was a muddle-headed, thoughtless, and extremely irrational fellow, but not by any means a fool. I never noticed any special streak of cruelty in him. The convicts despised him not because of his crime, to which they never referred, but because of his folly, because he did not know how to behave himself. In his conversations with me he sometimes spoke of his father. One day, talking to me of the healthy constitution which was characteristic of all the members of his family, he added: “My father, you know, never complained of his health to the very day of his death." Such brutal insensibility is, of course, uncommon; it is a phenomenon, a sort of flaw in a man’s make-up, a physical and moral deformity still unknown to science, and not just a crime. I did not actually believe in this crime. But people of his town who ought to have known all the particulars about him told me everything about the case. The facts were so clear that it was impossible not to believe.
  • ‘The convicts,’ Dostoyevsky concludes his account, ‘overheard him shouting6 in his sleep one night: “Hold him! Hold him! Cut off his head, his head!"’
  • But in a subsequent issue of Time Dostoyevsky published the following correction in a note before Chapter VII of The House of the Dead: ‘In the first chapter of The House of the Dead I said a few wards about a parricide of noble birth. The other day the editor of Time received news from Siberia that the criminal had been right all along and had served ten years of imprisonment for nothing; his innocence had been officially established. The real criminals had been found and had confessed and the unhappy man had been released from prison. The editor has no reason to doubt the authenticity of his information. . .. There is nothing more to be said. There is no need to dilate on the tragic significance of this fact and on the dreadful fate of the young man whose life had been ruined by that terrible accusation. The fact needs no comment: it speaks for itself.'
  • Ilyinsky was the victim of a miscarriage of justice, which forms the main subject of Dostoyevsky's last novel.
  • The parricide theme, however, occurred to Dostoyevsky long after he had conceived the idea of uniting ‘a huge novel’ dealing with another great theme of The Brothers Karamazov, the theme of atheism7 and the existence of God. This idea of his proposed novel Dostoyevsky first discussed in a letter to the poet Apollon Maykov from Florence on 23 December 1868, ten years before he began writing The Brothers Karamazov.
  • ’I have now in mind,' Dostoyevsky wrote, ‘a huge novel under the title of Atheism (for God's sake this is strictly between ourselves), but before I can sit down to it I must read almost a whole library of books written by atheists, Catholics, and Greek Orthodox writers. Even if I get an offer for this work, it will be finished no sooner than in two years' time. I have the chief character. A Russian who belongs to our social set, an elderly man, not very well educated, but not entirely uneducated, either, a man of some rank, who suddenly in his old age loses his faith in God. All his life he was only interested in his job in the Civil Service, never left the rut, and had done nothing in particular up to the age of 45. (A psychological explanation, a serious man, a Russian.) His loss of faith in God makes a tremendous impression on him (the background and the action of the novel are conceived on a large scale). He gets mixed up with the younger generation, the atheists, Slavophils, and Europeans, Russian religious fanatics, monks, and priests; gets deeply involved, among others, with a Jesuit propagandist, a Pole; sinks as low as the sect of the flagellants and in the end – regains his faith in Christ as well as in Russia, the Russian God, and the Russian Christ, (for God's sake don't tell anyone about it: so far as I am concerned, I am going to write this last novel even if it kills me. I am going to speak my mind no matter what).’
  • Fifteen months later, however, he changed the title and to a certain extent the contents of his proposed novel.
  • 'This will be my last novel,' he declared, as it turned out prophetically, in a letter to Maykov from Dresden on 6 April 1870. 'It will he as large as War and Peace and, I am sure, you would approve of the idea of it, at least that is what I have gathered from the talks I have had with you. This novel will consist of five long stories (about fifteen folio pages each; during the last two years the whole plan has matured in my head). The stories will be quite independent of each other, so that they could even be sold separately. The action of the first story lakes place in the forties. (The general title of the novel is The Life of a Great Sinner, but each story will have a different title.) The main question that will be discussed in all the parts is one that has worried me, consciously or unconsciously, all my life - the existence of God. During his life my hero is at times an atheist, at times a believer, a fanatic, a dissenter and, again, an atheist. The second story will take place in a monastery. I put all my hopes on this second story. Perhaps people will at last say that not everything I have written is a lot of nonsense. (I am telling this to you alone: I want to make Tikhon Zadonsky8 the chief character of the second story, under another name, of course, but he too will be a bishop living in retirement in a monastery.) A thirteen-year-old boy, who took part in a criminal act, precocious and dissipated (I know the type), the future hero of my novel, is put into a monastery by his parents (our own set, cultured), where he is to be educated. A wolf-cub, a nihilist, the boy makes friends with Tikhon (you know Tikhon’s character and personality, don't you?)..., It is true’, he concludes, ‘I shall not create anything but only show the real Tikhon whom I have taken to my heart long ago. ... The first story will deal with my hero's childhood.... ‘ (Dostoyevsky had made an attempt to introduce Tikhon in The Devils, and in June 1879 he paid a visit to the bishop at the Optina monastery, together with the young philosopher-poet Vladimir Solovyov. They spent a week at the monastery, and Dostoyevsky incorporated his impressions of his visit in the descriptions of the monastery in The Brothers Karamazov. Father Zossima, too, was modelled on Tikhon.)
  • Dostoyevsky wrote in almost identical terms to the critic Strakhov, concluding his letter by the assertion that he had decided to make ‘this idea of mine into the culmination of my career, for I can’t expect to live and write for more than another six or seven years.’
  • In the meantime however, the political events in Russia, where he had returned on 20 July 1871, and, particularly, the growing revolutionary terrorist movement there, made him postpone his plan of writing his 'huge novel' and write The Devils instead. He also resumed his journalistic work by editing the conservative periodical The Citizen, in which he began publishing his extreme reactionary views in his Diary of a Writer, which he subsequently published independently, the last two issues appearing shortly before his death. 'During these years,' a close friend of his records, 'he never regained the composure which is natural to people who carry on quietly with their work. His inner tension hardly ever left him. He was in a constant state of nervousness and irritability, especially during the last years of his life.' By the time he began writing The Brothers Karamazov he had become, according to the same authority, extraordinarily emaciated and the slightest effort exhausted him. He suffered from emphysema, and it was a burst blood vessel in his lungs, complicated by an attack of epilepsy9, that finally killed him: he died on 9 February 1881.
  • Dostoyevsky jotted down the first draft of The Brothers Karamazov in the autumn of 1874, about four years before he actually sat down to write the novel. This draft follows closely the Ilyinsky episode, and contains most of the elements of Mitya's story.
  • '13th Sept.1874,' Dostoyevsky wrote. 'Drama. In Tobolsk, twenty years ago, something like the Ilyinsky episode. Two brothers, an old father, one of the brothers has a fiancée with whom the second brother is secretly and enviously in love. But she loves the elder one. The elder brother, a young lieutenant, leads a riotous and foolish life. He quarrels with his father. The father disappears. Nothing is heard of him for several days. The brothers discuss their inheritance and suddenly the police arrive: they dig up the father's body from the cellar. The evidence points to the elder brother (the younger brother does not live with them). The elder brother is tried and sentenced to hard labour in Siberia. (N.B. He quarrelled with his father, boasted about his mother's inheritance, and other foolish things.) When he entered the room even his fiancée recoiled from him. He was drunk and said: "Do you, too, believe I did it?" (The evidence has been cleverly fabricated by the younger brother.) The public is not sure who the murderer is.
  • 'The scene in Siberia. The convicts want to kill him. The prison authorities. He does not betray them. The prison governor reproves him for having killed his father.’
  • 'Twelve years later. His brother comes to see him. A scene in which they understand each other without uttering a word. Seven years pass after that meeting. The younger brother is a person of high rank and occupies an important post in the Civil Service. But he is greatly worried, a hypochondriac. Tells his wife that it was he who killed his father. "Why did you tell me that?” He goes to see his brother. His wife, too, arrives. The wife implores the convict on her knees not to tell and to save her husband. The convict says: "I'm used to it." They make it up. "You're punished as it is" says the elder brother.
  • 'The younger brother's birthday party. The guests assemble. He comes in. "I am the murderer." They think it's a stroke.
  • 'The end: the elder brother is released, the younger brother sent to Siberia. The younger brother asks the elder one to be the father of his children. "He has entered upon the right path"’.
  • At the time these notes were written Dostoyevsky was working at his novel The Adolescent, and it was during that period that he jotted down a great number of notes which he afterwards made use of in his plot of The Brothers Karamazov. In one of these notes he already outlines the life-histories of the three Karamazov brothers.
  • ’Preparations for the marriage of the second brother Fyodor,’ he wrote. ‘The younger one goes out and meets Lambert. Tells him about his family. “Is there a devil?" the third brother asks the elder one. Meanwhile the rebellion of the children. And so one brother is an atheist and in despair. The other one is a fanatic. The third – the coming generation, a living force, new men. (And the newest generation - children.)’
  • The children theme is first elaborated in notes for a separate novel: ‘A novel about children, only about children and the child-hero. N.B. (save a suffering child, stratagems, etc.). We found a child left on our doorstep. Fyodor Petrovich (a lover of children and wet nurses). Fyodor Petr., addressing the children after he had carried out their commissions, says: “Children, I’ve done what you told me and I’m going to give you a full account of it now' Or, “Children, I’ve read this or that book," and then he tells them about politics, etc. N.B. (he is a grown-up child himself and is full of the deepest and liveliest feeling of love for children). The children plot to organize their own children’s empire. Children’s arguments about a republic or a monarchy. The children get in touch with the delinquent children in prison. The children - fire-raisers and wreckers of trains. The children convert the devil. Children - debauchees and atheists. Lambert. Andrieux. Children - parricides (Moscow News No. 89. 12 April). A civil servant, his marriage, a foundling [illegible], home for delinquent children, he accepts a bribe, resigns.’
  • The maltreatment of children is touched upon in the draft of yet another novel: ‘A fantastic poem-novel: the future society, the Paris revolution and Commune, victory. 200 million heads, terrible sores, dissipation, destruction of the arts, libraries, a tortured child. Quarrels, lawlessness. Death.
  • "Children. Mother marries a second time. A group of orphans. Half brothers and half sisters. The champion of truth. Death of the worn-out mother. The children’s protest. Run away? They go out into the street. The champion alone. Wanderings, etc.’
  • In his notes for the year 1877 there are also indications that Dostoyevsky was contemplating writing novels under the titles of 'The Russian Candide’, ’A Book on Christ’, and ‘The Forties’. The last-named novel contains a number of notes that bear a direct relationship to some of the themes in The Brothers Karamazov: "The Forties. Book of Wanderings. Ordeals (1, 2, 3, 4. 5. 6, etc.). Satan: We were all deceived. [young man]: What maddens me most of all is that you have been appointed to look after me.... Why, you even accept God as something that has been cast off.'
  • Another brief note contains the following chapter heading that must have been intended definitely for The Brothers Karamazov: 'The Devil. Ivan Fyodorovich's Nightmare.’ A further note, later elaborated in the chapter of Ivan and the devil, reads: 'The man who shot himself and the devil, something like Faust. Can be joined to the poem-novel.'
  • The first mention of Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya occurs in Dostoyevsky’s notes as early as in 1874-5: 'Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya. Send me, the stinking one, not to thee into paradise, but into hell, so that out of the torment and the fire I may cry to thee: thou art holy, holy, and I have no other love... ‘
  • At first Dostoyevsky intended to deal with one of the main themes of The Brothers Karamazov, the disintegration of the Russian family and the Russian State, in a separate novel under the title of 'Disorder'. The note referring to it is dated 26 August 1875: ‘The title of the novel is “Disorder”. The whole idea of the novel is to show that universal disorder now reigns everywhere in society, in its affairs, in its leading ideas (which for that reason do not exist), in its convictions (which do not exist, either), in the disintegration of family life. If passionate convictions do exist, they are only destructive ones (socialism). There are no moral ideas left, not a single one remains, and the main thing is that he talks as if they never existed. “But you are religious, aren't you?" "You did not expect me not to be, did you?"’
  • All these themes, roughly sketched in the notes quoted above, Dostoyevsky finally incorporated in his last novel. But even when he began writing it, his idea of its ultimate form was still very vague. In his foreword to the reader, he reduced the five novels of his first plan to two, the second of which was to be the main novel and was to deal with the life of Alyosha Karamazov 'in our time’, as he put it. But, as always with Dostoyevsky, his first intentions never worked out as he planned them. Alyosha, as he appears in the later books of the novel, plays quite an insignificant part in the development of the plot and becomes a very shadowy figure indeed when compared with the figures of his father, his two brothers Mitya and Ivan, and his half-brother Smerdyakov. It is obvious that Dostoyevsky himself lost interest in him10, and that the few pages he devotes to him in Book Seven was all he had to say about him.’
  • The idea that Dostoyevsky did not finish his novel11, based on his rather confused foreword to the reader, is entirely unsubstantiated. Dostoyevsky himself admitted it in his letter to Ivan Aksakov, quoted at the beginning of this introduction, and in another letter to one of his closest friends, written from Staraya Russa on 7 September 1880. 'In spite of the lovely weather’ he wrote, ‘I sit day and night over my work – I am finishing the Karamazovs. I shall finish it by the end of September and then return [to Petersburg].' On the other hand, he realized more than anyone else perhaps that the novel in its final form was far from perfect. ‘I know,' he wrote to a correspondent in April 1880, 'that, like many other writers, I have many faults, for I am the first to be dissatisfied with myself .., At the moment when I am trying to review my life's work, I often realize with pain that I have literally failed to express one-twentieth part of what I had wanted to, and perhaps could have expressed. The thing that comforts me is the constant hope that one day12 God will grant me so much inspiration that I shall be able to express myself more fully, that, in short, I shall express all that is locked in my heart and in my imagination.... I cannot help feeling that there is much more hidden in me than I have hitherto been able to express as a writer. And yet,' he concludes, 'speaking without false modesty, there is a great deal that is true and that came from my heart in what I have expressed already.’
  • The Brothers Karamazov, then, is, first of all, a picture of Russia as Dostoyevsky saw it in the turbulent years at the end of the seventies and at the beginning of the eighties of the last century. 'Combine all the four main characters [of the novel]’ Dostoyevsky wrote to Katkov, the reactionary editor of The Moscow Herald, in which the novel was being serialized, 'and you will get a picture, reduced perhaps to a thousandth degree, of our contemporary educated Russia: that is why I regard my task as so important.' And in further letters to Katkov, he defined Ivan Karamazov's rebellion as ’the synthesis of our modern Russian anarchism', or, in other words, the Russian revolutionary movement of his day. ‘The modern negationist,’ he wrote to Katkov, 'declares himself openly in favour of the devil's advice and maintains that it is more likely to result in man’s happiness than the teachings of Christ. To our foolish but terrible Russian socialism (for our youth is mixed up in it) it is a directive and, it seems, a very powerful one: the loaves of bread, the Tower of Babel {that is, the future reign of socialism) and the complete enslavement of the freedom of conscience - that is what the desperate negationist is striving to achieve. The difference is,' Dostoyevsky continues, 'that our socialists (and they are not only the hole-and-corner nihilists) are conscious Jesuits and liars who do not admit that their ideal is the ideal of the coercion of the human conscience and the reduction of mankind to the level of cattle. While my socialist (Ivan Karamazov) is a sincere man who frankly admits that he agrees with the views of the Grand Inquisitor and that Christianity seems to have raised man much higher than his actual position entitles him. The question I should like to put to them is, in a nutshell, this: "Do you despise or do you respect mankind, you - its future saviours?”’
  • In another letter Dostoyevsky quite openly declares that his main task in writing The Brothers Karamazov was the defeat of 'anarchism', which he considered to be his 'civic duty.’
  • Dostoyevsky's personal involvement in the social and political life of his country becomes even more evident in the last chapters of his novel in which he attacks the newly formed courts and trial by jury. Dostoyevsky shared the opinion of Pobedonostsev13, the reactionary Procurator of the Holy Synod, whom he is known to have consulted on the various aspects of his novel, about the newfangled trials by jury as 'the talking shop of lawyers as a result of which the most terrible crimes, indubitable murders, and other grave felonies remain unpunished14'. He was present at the famous trial in 1875 of Vera Zasulich15, the twenty-seven-year-old terrorist, who was acquitted by the jury of her attempt on the life of the Petersburg Governor-General. Her acquittal was followed by a concerted attack on trial by jury by the conservative press, an attack in which Dostoyevsky joined. In fact, he went so far as to reproduce many of the incidents of the trial of Vera Zasulich in the trial of Mitya Karamazov. Thus, Mitya's trial for murder, we are told, 'had become known all over Russia', and, in spite of the fact that it was quite an ordinary, sordid case of murder without any political implications whatsoever, it had caused such 'an immense shock' that all sorts of 'distinguished personages' with 'stars on their frock-coats' (as at the trial of Vera Zasulich) travelled from Petersburg to Skotoprigonyevsk, the remote provincial town, which Dostoyevsky had given such an unsavoury name {the English equivalent of it would be Pigsty). The presence of many fashionable ladies at the trial was another of the features Dostoyevsky copied from the trial of the terrorist girl. But more significant still are Dostoyevsky’s descriptions of the 'presiding judge, the public prosecutor, and the counsel for the defence, all of whom were recognizable copies of the judge, prosecutor, and defending counsel of Vera Zasulich. Dostoyevsky made his intention of satirizing the new trials by jury quite clear in a letter to Pobedonostsev in which he drew the Procurator's attention to the September issue of The Russian Herald. ‘In this September issue,' he wrote, 'will be a description of a trial, of our public prosecutors and lawyers - and all this will be shown up16 in a special light.’
  • Equally characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s methods as a novelist is the great pains he took to check up on the sources of the different incidents in his novel. In one of his letters to Pobedonostsev he underlines the fact that in one of the most important 'books' of his novel, Pro and Contra17 ('blasphemy and the refutation of blasphemy'), 'I have not betrayed the principles of realism even in so abstract a subject.' He tells Katkov that he had sought the advice of two public prosecutors in Petersburg before he wrote the description of Mitya’s trial, and had checked up on 'the medical condition of Ivan with medical specialists and the details of Father Zossima's burial with members of the Holy Synod. Smerdyakov’s song in the chapter 'Smerdyakov with a Guitar', he wrote to Katkov, 'was not composed by me, but written down in Moscow. I heard it forty years ago. It was composed by some Moscow shop-assistants and passed on to the footmen. It had never been written down by our collectors of folk-songs and it appears in my novel for the first time.' The legend about the onion had also been written down by Dostoyevsky. ‘I ask you particularly,’ he wrote to Katkov, 'to go through the proofs of the legend very carefully. This gem was written down by me from the words of a peasant woman and quite certainly written down for the first time.’ The stories of the maltreatment of children, too, were taken from actual life. 'Everything my hero (Ivan) relates in the text I am sending you,' he wrote to Katkov, ‘is based on actual facts. All the incidents about the children actually happened and were published in the papers, and I can show you where - nothing has been invented by me. The general who hunted down the child with his hounds and the whole of that incident is an actual occurrence published last winter in the Archives, I believe, and republished in many newspapers.’
  • Dostoyevsky took particular care about the episode with the children, which he quite seriously intended to provide a solution to the political strife in Russia and which peters out so disastrously18 in the epilogue. 'In your letter,' he wrote to a correspondent on 2S March 1878, ‘I was particularly struck by the fact that you love children, that you spent a great deal of your time with them and that even now you are so often with them. And so I would like to ask you a great favour: I am soon to begin a new novel in which children are to take part, and particularly children between the ages of seven and fifteen. There will be many children. I am studying them and myself. But the observations of a man like you would be invaluable to me. And so please write to me everything you know about children. (Incidents, habits, replies, words, sayings, traits of character, attitude to their families, their faith, their misdeeds and innocence; nature and teacher. Latin, etc., etc., in short, everything you know.) You will help me very much and I shall be very grateful to you ...’ For his chapters about the children Dostoyevsky also studied the works of Pestalozzi and Froebel19, and read the articles on schools by Leo Tolstoy.
  • It was by these means that Dostoyevsky sought to deepen and widen the realistic features of his novel (realism, as can be gathered from Mitya’s use of this term, was one of the most popular literary slogans of that period). In the creation of his characters, however. Dostoyevsky departed from the cruder forms of realism by which he sought to give authenticity to the various incidents in his novel. His aim as a creative writer, he declared in his diary, was 'to find the man in man. I am called a psychologist.’ Dostoyevsky writes. ‘It is not true. I am only a realist in the highest sense of the word, that is to say, I depict all the depths of the human soul.’ There was a curious dichotomy in Dostoyevsky’s nature; in his journalistic works, and especially, in his Diary of .a Writer, he expressed views and opinions which for sheer crudity and lack of vision can hardly be paralleled in the case of any other great writer, whereas in his creative works, and especially in The Brothers Karamazov, he achieves a profundity of thought that surpasses anything written in his or, indeed, any other time. He needed what he himself called 'inspiration’ to overcome his petty resentment against his political enemies, his racial prejudices20, and more particularly his hatred of his more successful literary rivals. In the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, which Dostoyevsky himself characterized as 'the culminating point of my literary activity’, he launched an indirect attack on socialism by making Ivan accept what he considered to be the ultimate policies of the Catholic Church. ‘By the stones and the loaves of bread,’ Dostoyevsky himself commented, ‘I meant our present social problems. Present-day socialism in Europe and in our country as well sets Christ aside and is first of all concerned about bread. It appeals to science and maintains that the cause of all human misfortune is poverty, the struggle for existence and the wrong kind of environment.’ But actually the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor transcends the political divisions of mankind and presents the problem of the human predicament in its universal aspect. Again, however controversial Dostoyevsky's idea of expiation of sin through suffering may appear, it is fully justified when he puts it into the mouth of Dmitry Karamazov.
  • It is through the fullest possible integration of idea and character that Dostoyevsky achieves his greatest triumph not only as a creative artist, but also as a profound and fearless thinker. Indeed, the paradox of Dostoyevsky as a writer is that he puts the case against what he himself stands for much stronger than the case for his own ideas and convictions. Father Zossima’s pious platitudes21 are never as convincing as Ivans ‘blasphemies’. Even in Father Zossima’s case, his ideas of Christian morality catch fire22 only when Dostoyevsky gives them a fictional form, as in Father Zossima's account of his dying brother’s conversion, his duel, and the story of the mysterious visitor. In this lack of consistency between Dostoyevsky the creative writer and Dostoyevsky the man lies the great tragedy of his life, and it is this perhaps more than anything else that accounts for his irritable and suspicious temperament, which was such a trial even to his closest friends. After his triumphant speech at the unveiling of the memorial to Pushkin in Moscow in June 1880, he remarked sadly: 'The main thing about me they don’t understand. They extol me for not being satisfied with the present political condition of our-country, but they don't see that I am showing them the way to the church.'
  • In The Brothers Karamazov, too, Dostoyevsky saw the solution of Russian troubles in the Greek Orthodox23 Church, but that is not why his novel is recognized as the greatest achievement of his genius. It is in the universal human drama that its greatness lies, and not in Dostoyevsky's ill-contrived attempt to transform Russia into a huge monastery.
    → D. M.



In-Page Footnotes ("Magarshack (David) - The Brothers Karamazov: Translator's Introduction")

Footnote 1: Footnote 2: Footnote 3: Footnote 4: Footnote 5:
  • Is this the case?
Footnote 6:
  • How is this explained if Ilyinsky didn’t commit the murder?
  • Is there a parallel with Dmitry, who said he was going to kill his father, but didn’t?
Footnote 7:
  • Dostoyevsky uses long speeches by his protagonists – as well as interactive dialogues – to put forward his views on various religious, political and administrative matters.
  • However – as the Translator notes later in this Introduction – he is fair to views opposed to his own, and the case for these is often stronger that those for the views Dostoyevsky holds dear.
Footnote 8: Footnote 9:
  • So, Dostoyevsky knows what he’s talking about in connection with Smerdyakov from first hand.
Footnote 10:
  • Well, he continues to appear – as a facilitator, someone whose ‘blessing’ or advice is requested, and with the various episodes with ‘the boys’, including the speeches in the final Chapter.
  • However, he’s supposed – after Father Zossima’s death – to go out into the world, get married and the like … but he remains for all intents and purposes a monk.
Footnote 11:
  • I accept that he did finish it, though the fact that he died so soon afterwards may indicate that he finished it sooner than he would have liked.
  • It cries out for a sequel – so many things are left hanging. What happened to the three brothers? Did Ivan recover; did Mitya escape; what happened to Alyosha?
Footnote 12:
  • Given how close he was to his death, this hope wasn’t realised.
Footnote 13: Footnote 14:
  • What was the judicial system in Russia prior to trial by jury?
  • How does this view – that trial by jury leads to the acquittal of the guilty – apply to Mitya’s trial? It leads – presumably – to a miscarriage of justice. Whose side was Dostoyevsky on?
  • The Public Prosecutor’s arguments were the most cogent – other than describing Smerdyakov as an imbecile, when he was in fact a calculating and deceitful individual full of malice, as the Council for the Defence rightly portrayed him.
  • But the Defence’s arguments that parricide – while still murder – doesn’t have the overtones of extreme wickedness if the father made no attempt to fulfil his moral role with regards to his children – seems to have got lost on the jury.
  • But it was a ‘mitigating circumstance’ which should not affect the verdict but only the sentence. However, we never get to know what the sentence was.
  • The same goes for the two-pronged defence – he’s not guilty ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, but even if he is guilty, you should be lenient, was confusing, as the Prosecutor pointed out.
  • The jury needs direction from the judge – who has to be impartial.
Footnote 15: Footnote 16:
  • So, is this article written by Dostoyevsky?
Footnote 17: Footnote 18:
  • This evaluation could do with a bit of justification.
Footnote 19: Footnote 20:
  • There are several anti-Semitic comments scattered throughout the novel.
Footnote 21:
  • I didn’t find Father Zossima’s speeches to be ‘platitudinous’, but maybe I wasn’t being critical enough.
Footnote 22:
  • This is a good point. Even a ‘saintly’ man is a man for all that, and has to have a ‘history’ in order to be credible.
Footnote 23:
  • Is this right? Why ‘Greek’ when there’s a ‘Russian’ Orthodox church?
  • I think I’ve read that there were tensions in Ukraine between Greek and Russian Orthodox, but not in ‘Mother Russia’ itself?
  • As it happens, there’s a recent squabble between the two versions of Orthodoxy over Ukraine: Wikipedia: 2018 Moscow–Constantinople schism. This page gives some historical background.

Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
  1. Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2024
  2. Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)


© Theo Todman, June 2007 - Sept 2024. Please address any comments on this page to theo@theotodman.com. File output:
Website Maintenance Dashboard
Return to Top of this Page Return to Theo Todman's Philosophy Page Return to Theo Todman's Home Page