Let’s start by getting this out of the way: The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky is a Great Book (you also knew that).
Not only is it Great, it is perhaps the Greatest Novel Ever Written. I think its only competitors for that status are Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch. Maybe War and Peace.
After reading it 4 or 5 times, I still find it brilliant from beginning to end, gripping, thoughtful, and amazingly fun to read. Everything you could possibly want in a novel. If you have never read it, do so. You won’t regret it. Get the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. (Unless you can read Russian, in which case get the original.)
So, what does one write about the Greatest Novel Ever Written? The problem here is not a paucity of things to say, but a surfeit of topics. Pick a page and start your mind wandering—it will go interesting places.
So, let’s take the very end:
“Well, and now let’s end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don’t be disturbed that we will be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient, eternal thing, and there is good in that, too,” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let’s go! And we go like this now, hand in hand.”
“And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya cried once more ecstatically, and once more all the boys joined in his exclamation.
Eating pancakes. At the end of a novel exploring the deepest philosophical matters which have occupied the mind of man, the eternal, ancient questions, they head off to eat pancakes at a memorial dinner. Pancakes. Simple, basic pancakes.
I was thinking about those pancakes when I read an essay by C.S. Lewis: “Christianity and Literature” (reprinted in The Seeing Eye). The essay itself is a bit of a mess—Lewis is trying to figure out how Christianity and Literature connect, and his answers are tentative and terribly unsatisfying. But he made the following observation toward the end which startled me with its relationship to those pancakes I had been pondering.
The Christian will take literature a little less seriously than the cultured Pagan: he will feel less uneasy with a purely hedonistic standard for at least many kinds of works.
Lewis’ reasoning leading to this conclusion is a bit wobbly. (“The unbeliever is always apt to make a kind of religion of his aesthetic experience” while the Christian knows his aesthetic experiences are not as important as the salvation of mankind, so things like literature are smaller and thus easier to simply enjoy. Like I said, wobbly.)
But, set Lewis’ reasoning aside and just think about the premise: how seriously should we take literature?
An aside before getting back to Dostoevsky. I teach courses using Great Books at Mount Holyoke whenever I can figure out a way to sneak one into the curriculum. To say these courses are not popular with my colleagues in the Humanities would be an understatement. Their (my colleagues) principal complaint: here is an economist (insert tone of disgust) talking about…Literature or History or Philosophy. What could I possibly know about…Literature? Surely I don’t know enough Theory (said in hushed reverent tones) to be competent in discussing Literature.
To which complaints, I invariably laugh and point out that Shakespeare was Great long before Derrida showed up to tell us how to take apart Shakespeare and find a nothing but a mirror for the obsession of the day of the 21stcentury academic. Surely, we can all just read Shakespeare and, you know, enjoy him. Surely enjoyment is part of the point of Great Books. My colleagues in the Humanities find me utterly incomprehensible when I say things like this.
Lewis again: “It thus may come about that Christian views on literature will strike the world as shallow and flippant.” There is no doubt that “shallow and flippant” is exactly how my colleagues in the Humanities see my views on teaching Great Books.
The serendipitous shock I had on reading Lewis’ essay: this was exactly why I thought that pancake passage is so fascinating.
Fyodor! You just wrote The Greatest Novel Ever and you end by having your hero wander off to have pancakes with some kids?? After all the talk of Life and God and Meaning, you end your novel with pancakes?
Which is, of course, exactly how I read Great Books—they are Great, Amazing, Worth Reading, Deep, Profound, Insightful, Etc., Etc., Etc.—but after setting them down, I go on with my life. I don’t read Great Books Seriously; I read them for pleasure, including the pleasure of thinking thoughts I have never before thought and ruminating on unanswerable questions and learning new things. And all that Learning is Important, Very Important, not because it is Serious, but because it is Joyful.
That is exactly what I try to teach whenever I am teaching a course or giving a lecture (or, come to think of it, writing a blog post): this book is Awesome because reading it will bring you Joy.
It is a message far too few teachers seem to understand. I cannot think of anything more dreary that taking a positively amazing novel like The Brothers Karamazov and dissecting it according to the Dictates of Theory. Give me the genuine human reaction to a book every time, give me the sense of rapturous joy or utter disgust with the argument, the parts that make you weep or cry, the shocks and twists, the parts that caused you to stop and just stare into space for half an hour—tell me about these things.
And as we talk about those things we will learn something worth learning. And then we will go eat pancakes and enjoy a pleasant conversation over a meal. An ancient and eternal practice there. To remember the dead, the past, and simultaneously take joy in the present.
Hurrah for Karamazov! If this book has ever been taught and the students did not scream that at the end, then the teacher should be immediately removed from the classroom as a positive danger to mankind. Hurrah for Karamazov! Read The Brothers Karamazov and eat pancakes. That is about as good a recipe for the Good Life, the Life Worth Living, as I can imagine. Hurrah for Karamazov!
Beautifully said. And as someone who once prided herself on the seriousness with which she took Literature (🧐), this rings especially true. I think part of what makes this book so remarkable is its ability to be both infinitely deep and complex, and resoundingly un-self-important. That is such a rare combo, but Dost nails it. There’s no ego, here. Just richly constructed ideas, built upon the frailty and majesty of human nature and the human soul. Why dissect something with pretense that was constructed without it? I can see Dost rolling his eyes (compassionately) from some supernatural plane: “Bah, they don’t get it! They missed the pancakes!”
It’s a Great Book, for sure — and as you said, perhaps THE Great Book from a literary standpoint, and I can’t help but think it’s for that reason. The writer gets out of the way; so, the least we can do is return the favor.
Great insight, Jim!! Loved reading it!
I too once thought that Great Books had to be read *seriously*. The ironic part–one I stopped reading them seriously, I learned vastly more from reading them.
Jacques Barzun nicely summarized the problem of listening to and imitating people who think that the only way to read Great Books is to focus exclusively on the deepest parts: “Let them remind themselves that their colleagues’ profundity would strike the great author as either surface scratching or pedantry…”