In brief
A dissolute provincial landowner, Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, is found with his skull broken and three thousand roubles gone. He has three legitimate sons who hardly know him and a servant who is probably his fourth. The eldest, Mitya, has threatened to kill him in front of witnesses and wants the same woman, so a jury convicts him. He did not do it. Dostoevsky’s last novel is a detective story with an answer, but the answer is the least of what it asks: who wanted that death, who made it thinkable, and whether wanting counts.
It is a long book that keeps stopping to talk. Monks argue about church courts, a schoolboy announces his socialism, a prosecutor holds forth for four chapters. I think that is why it lasts. Other novels have characters who hold ideas; here ideas behave like relatives, turning up in the wrong house and doing damage.
The argument
Two sentences pull against each other through the book. One belongs to Ivan, the second son, and reaches us second-hand, as such things do in a small town: “if there’s no immortality of the soul, then there’s no virtue, and everything is lawful” (Book II, ch. 7). The other comes from a dying boy, the brother of the elder Zossima: “every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything” (Book VI, ch. 1). The first frees each person from everybody. The second binds each person to everybody. Both sound absurd, and the plot is built to test them.
The test is cruel. Ivan’s sentence reaches Smerdyakov, the servant who admires him, and Smerdyakov acts on it. In their last interview he tells Ivan: “You murdered him; you are the real murderer, I was only your instrument” (Book XI, ch. 8). Ivan has lifted no hand. He has only talked, and then taken a convenient journey at the moment his father most needed a witness in the house. If he is guilty, Zossima’s absurd sentence is simply true, and it is proved by the man who most despised it. His outburst in court accuses the whole audience: “Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?” (Book XII, ch. 5).
Mitya goes the other way. Innocent of the blow, guilty of the wish, he dreams during his interrogation of a burnt-out village and a crying child, and wakes asking: “Why is the babe poor?” (Book IX, ch. 8). He decides to accept punishment on behalf of a guilt he cannot quite locate.
The novel’s boldest stroke concerns miracles. Believers expect the saintly Zossima’s body to stay sweet after death; instead it begins to stink, early and publicly, and part of the monastery enjoys it (Book VII, ch. 1). Alyosha, the youngest brother, is shattered and walks out. It is the same refusal of proof that Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor holds against Christ two books earlier. Dostoevsky, who wanted to defend faith, takes away its evidence before he lets his hero keep it.
The shape of the book
Twelve books in four parts, with an epilogue. The first three parts cover only a few days. The fourth jumps to November and the trial. Each brother gets a night: Alyosha’s on the ground outside the monastery after the reading of the marriage at Cana, when “He had fallen on the earth a weak boy, but he rose up a resolute champion” (Book VII, ch. 4); Mitya’s at Mokroe, drunk and happy, as the police arrive (Book VIII, ch. 8); Ivan’s with the devil on his sofa (Book XI, ch. 9).
The murder itself is a hole in the text. Mitya stands under his father’s window with a brass pestle in his hand, and the narrator breaks off at the instant of decision: “God was watching over me then,” Mitya said afterwards (Book VIII, ch. 4). The next thing we know, an old servant is down with his head bleeding and Mitya is running. Dostoevsky then lets the reader share the town’s certainty until Book XI, so that by the time the truth comes out we have half convicted Mitya too.
The trial is the ironic climax. The prosecutor’s reading of Mitya’s character is shrewd and his conclusion false. The defence counsel’s conclusion is true, and he reaches it by a dazzling performance. “Profound as psychology is, it’s a knife that cuts both ways,” he says (Book XII, ch. 10), and the novel agrees: all that clever inference, and the peasants on the jury convict the wrong man.
What looks like a digression turns out to be the destination. A boy named Ilusha, whose father Mitya dragged out of a tavern by the beard, throws stones at Alyosha and bites him (Book IV, ch. 3). Book X returns to the boy’s dying. The last chapter leaves the family quarrel behind for a child’s funeral, where Alyosha tells a dozen schoolboys that there is nothing better for the future “than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home” (Epilogue, ch. 3).
The voice
The narrator is a local man, unnamed, writing up events of “thirteen years ago” (Book I, ch. 1). He gossips, apologises, loses his thread, and only in Book XI lets slip where we are: Skotoprigonyevsk, roughly Cattle-Pen Town. “That, alas! was the name of our little town” (Book XI, ch. 2). Yet he also walks into Ivan’s head at night without explanation. A voice this modest can never be mistaken for final authority.
That absence is what Mikhail Bakhtin, writing in 1929, called polyphony. Dostoevsky’s novel gives, in his phrase, “a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices”, none of them overruled by the author. It does not quite hold for Book VI, whose slow, pious cadence Dostoevsky modelled on monastic writing and which he wished to win. Elsewhere the atheist has the best arguments and the old buffoon the best jokes: “Of a truth, I am a lie, and the father of lies,” Fyodor Pavlovitch tells the elder, then frets that he has got his texts mixed (Book II, ch. 2).
The book is much funnier than its reputation. Ivan’s devil is a shabby gentleman with rheumatism who quotes Terence at him, “Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto”, and the comedy is what makes the scene frightening: Ivan’s own hallucination knows things he doesn’t (Book XI, ch. 9). Lise, the crippled girl who flirts with Alyosha, imagines a child crucified and herself “eating pineapple compote” opposite (Book XI, ch. 3).
Rebellion and the Inquisitor
These two chapters are often printed alone, which distorts them. In a restaurant, a young man tries to explain himself to a brother he hardly knows. First comes “Rebellion” (Book V, ch. 4): a list of cruelties to children, which Dostoevsky took from real newspaper reports. Ivan does not deny God. He denies the deal. If a final harmony requires one tortured child, “the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer”. Would Alyosha agree to build human happiness on that child’s “unavenged tears”? Alyosha says he would not, and Ivan has him. “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”
Then the poem (Book V, ch. 5). Christ returns to sixteenth-century Spain, and the old Cardinal Inquisitor has him arrested and explains at length why he has come too late. People cannot bear freedom. They want bread and someone to worship; the Church has corrected Christ’s mistake by giving them “miracle, mystery and authority”. The prisoner says nothing and at the end kisses him. “The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.”
What readers who meet it in anthologies miss is the frame. Ivan immediately laughs it off: “Why, it’s all nonsense, Alyosha.” Alyosha answers exactly as the prisoner did, by kissing him, and Ivan, delighted, cries: “That’s plagiarism.” The most formidable argument against Christianity in the novel is met by a joke and a gesture. Dostoevsky meant the life of Zossima in Book VI as the refutation, and it is a story, not a proof. Whether it succeeds is the oldest dispute about this book. I think it succeeds only with the rest of the novel behind it: the rotting corpse, the onion, the stone.
The people
Fyodor Pavlovitch
A clown who knows it and keeps performing out of spite. He is disgusting and alive, and he forgets his own children so thoroughly that a servant raises them.
Mitya
The eldest, an ex-officer of huge appetites who recites Schiller in a summerhouse and declares “God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man” (Book III, ch. 3). The secret he finds hardest to confess is not violence but fifteen hundred roubles sewn in a rag round his neck (Book IX, ch. 7), because to him that is theft.
Ivan
The intellect of the family, twenty-four, loving “the sticky little leaves as they open in spring” in spite of his own logic (Book V, ch. 3). His mind and his conscience are both first-class and do not speak to each other until the devil introduces them.
Alyosha
The narrator’s declared hero and the hardest kind of character to write: a good young man who remains interesting. It helps that the book keeps testing him, and that Mitya insists the family insect “lives in you, too” (Book III, ch. 3).
Smerdyakov
Son of a mute vagrant known as “Stinking Lizaveta” (Book III, ch. 1), brought up as a cook, epileptic, contemptuous. He shams a fit in the cellar, kills the old man, and hangs himself on the eve of the trial. He alone takes philosophy strictly at its word.
Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna
The two women exchange kisses and an insult in one scene (Book III, ch. 10). Grushenka looks like the sensual threat and turns out capable of the book’s simplest grace, the fable of the wicked woman saved by one onion she once gave away (Book VII, ch. 3). Katerina Ivanovna looks like virtue and turns out to be living on injured pride; her testimony in Book XII, ch. 5 sinks the man she has insisted on saving.
Zossima
The elder, sixty-five, whom Dostoevsky drew partly from Tikhon of Zadonsk and the living Father Ambrose of Optina. He bows to the ground before Mitya at the first meeting because he sees the suffering ahead (Book II, ch. 6), and he teaches that love is not a feeling but a labour: “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams” (Book II, ch. 4).
How it was made
Dostoevsky had been sketching a Life of a Great Sinner since 1869, and in the prison at Omsk he had known a convict named Ilyinsky, sentenced for killing his father and maintaining his innocence; word later came that another man had confessed. He used the story in The House of the Dead and again for Mitya. His own father died in 1839, officially of a stroke; the story that his serfs killed him, built on by Freud, is now thought unreliable.
Notes began in April 1878. In May his three-year-old son Alyosha died of epilepsy, the illness the child had from him. In June he went with the young philosopher Vladimir Solovyov to Optina Monastery and spoke with the elder Ambrose. The grief is in the book, visibly: in Book II, ch. 3 a peasant woman comes to Zossima, unable to bear the death of her small boy. Asked his name, she answers: “Alexey, Father.”
He wrote it largely at Staraya Russa, which supplied the town’s geography, and it ran in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. He died less than four months later. In a short preface he had called this only the first of two novels about Alyosha; the second was never written, and what it might have held survives only in reports, one of which has Alyosha killing the Tsar. The preface is missing from the Project Gutenberg text used here.
Readers and critics
Its admirers make an unlikely party. Freud called it “the most magnificent novel ever written” and used it in his 1928 essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide” to diagnose the author. C. P. Snow reported that Einstein thought it “the supreme summit of all literature”. Wittgenstein carried it to the front in the First World War and is said to have known passages by heart.
Critical argument has mostly centred on Book VI: did Dostoevsky answer Ivan, or did he hand him the victory while intending the reverse? Bakhtin’s polyphony shifted the question by suggesting the form never required a winner.
Afterlives
Philosophy took the book at its word. Sartre’s 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism made a Dostoevsky line, if God does not exist everything is permitted, the starting point of existentialism, a compression of what several characters say. Camus gave Ivan a chapter of The Rebel (1951), “The Rejection of Salvation”.
In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Eliot Rosewater tells Billy Pilgrim that everything there is to know about life is in this novel, and that it is no longer enough. Richard Brooks’s 1958 Hollywood version starred Yul Brynner as Mitya and Lee J. Cobb, nominated for an Oscar, as the father, with William Shatner in his film debut as Alyosha. The Soviet film of 1969, directed by Ivan Pyryev, Kirill Lavrov and Mikhail Ulyanov, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
How to read it
- Choose your translation. Garnett’s 1912 version is free and has every chapter, but she smooths the voices and this text lacks the author’s preface. Pevear and Volokhonsky (1990) keep the awkward comedy of the narrator; David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and Michael Katz are the other strong modern options.
- Keep a list of names. Alexey is Alyosha, Dmitri is Mitya, Katerina is Katya; patronymics change with the speaker’s feeling, and the changes are meaningful.
- Read Books V and VI together. They are an argument and its reply. Then read Book VII, which asks whether the reply survives a smell.
Read next
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866). What it would be like if one man lived out Ivan’s formula from the inside.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (1862). The Siberian memoir-novel in which Ilyinsky first appears.
- The Book of Job. The original of the argument with God over undeserved suffering, and likewise answered by something other than an answer.
- Albert Camus, The Plague (1947). A doctor watches a child die and, like Ivan, declines the explanation, but stays to work.
- Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky (1976–2002). The biography, for what the novels were answering.