The Brothers Karamazov review Archives

As I have noted before in this space, one of the amazing things about The Brothers Karamazov is that it contains within it a zillion different themes.

I recently read it with one of my reading groups.

I was talking with one of the students a few days before we were going to meet and asked her which of the endless possibilities she thought would be an interesting discussion. Her reply, to put it mildly, surprised me.

She really wanted to talk about Perezvon.

If you haven’t read the book, the name means nothing to you. If you have read the book, the name also means nothing to you. You are wondering “One of the monks? People in town? Lawyers? Kids?”

Don’t feel bad that you do not remember Perezvon.

Perezvon is the dog. And, you may not even remember there was a dog in the novel. In a 750 page novel, he gets a couple dozen pages of screen time.

I expressed my skepticism that the dog could merit much discussion. To which I got this reply:

It can’t be hard to talk about Perezvon. You get this book full of insane rants about everything from free will to murder to loyalty to moral guilt, and yet the thing that makes the saddest character happy is finding his dog. I mean, Ilyusha is this insanely troubled and problematic kid, he’s literally dying, but he’s thrilled when he sees Perezvon again. It sort of makes me want to give up school and reading and history and just live on a ranch. Plus, then you have the whole thing where Kolya keeps his dog from him, prolonging the suffering in an attempt to make the dog even better and whatnot. It’s tragically beautiful.
(Izzy Baird, e-mail to author, February 1, 2020)

As I thought about her comment, I realized that the episode with Perezvon is even more interesting than I thought when I first read Izzy’s comments.

We need to revisit the story. Perezvon was not Ilyusha’s dog. He was a stray dog. Ilyusha, a young kid was induced to throw a piece of meat to the stray dog which contained a pin inside it. The idea was to enjoy the amusement after the dog gobbles up the meat and is tortured by having a pin in its stomach. (People can be cruel.) Ilyusha tosses the meat, the dog gobbles it up, and runs off in great pain presumably to die of internal bleeding. Ilyusha is devastated at what he has done.

Shortly thereafter, Ilyusha is on his own deathbed when one of the other kids, Kolya, shows up with Perezvon. Kolya found the dog shortly after Ilyusha’s act; the dog had not actually swallowed the pin. Then in order to surprise Ilyusha, Kolya spent weeks training the dog to do all sorts of fun tricks. One day, Kolya brings Perezvon to Ilyusha’s bedside. Ilyusha is incredibly happy.

It is, indeed, tragically beautiful.

Here is what is particularly fascinating. The story of Perezvon is a retelling of a rather more famous story. The stray mangy dog is wounded and presumed dead. Then one day the dog comes back transformed into a newer, more vibrant and whole self. It is a story of the death of the old dog and the rebirth as a new dog and the new dog is so much more glorious than the old dog. Ilyusha goes from the grief of knowing he killed to the old dog to the joy of realizing that the dog has been reborn in a new glorious state.

Sin and cruelty lead to death. But death is not the end. The end is glory.

Oh, Dostoevsky is a clever writer. The Perezvon story is a microcosm of the entire Brothers Karamazov. The themes of death and rebirth are everywhere in the novel, including in what seems like an interesting little aside to the larger tale. Noticing that, you suddenly realize that the story of Perezvon is embedded in a longer story of Ilyusha’s death, which is part of a larger story of Alexei bringing redemption and life to the Ilyusha, Kolya, and their friends. That story is thrust right in between the arrest and the trial of Dmitri, who will have his own experience of dying to his old self and being reborn after his vision of the Wee One.

Stories within stories within stories all pointing the same direction. Yeah, this really is the greatest novel of all time.

Bibliography
Baird, Izzy. E-mail to author. February 1, 2020.

[Izzy told me I had to provide a proper citation and a bibliography when I told her I was going to quote her. She also insisted that I use Chicago-style citation methods. Izzy is a historian and thus does not know that APA is the vastly superior citation method. APA does not include personal communications in the bibliography; Chicago does. So, yes this bibliographic entry is completely redundant and useless, but I know I would be roundly chastised by Izzy if I did not include it, and truth be told, I already get chastised by Izzy for enough things.]

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 21^stcentury 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!

Tag: The Brothers Karamazov review

More Surprises in The Brothers Karamazov

Finding Joy in Great Books