The Brothers Karamazov [Audiobook] (Naxos)

The Brothers Karamazov is often referred to as Dostoyevsky’s greatest novel. On a superficial level the story is an intriguing ‘who-done-it’, with a dramatic trial scene as its finale. But Dostoyevsky, like Shakespeare, was able to address more than one audience at a time – in this case not just the groundlings in the pit or the aristocrats in the boxes, but the different audiences which we, his readers, have within us. As one part of us is enjoying The Brothers Karamazov at the level of an exciting crime thriller, our deeper selves are engaged in the consideration of such primal and universal themes as the existence of God, sexual passion, jealousy, sibling rivalry, patricide, cruelty, evil, poverty and shame.

The characters of the three brothers themselves may be seen as embodying different aspects of human personality; Dmitri, passionate and uncontrolled, Ivan, proud and self-deluding, and Alexey, pure and compassionate. And woven through the thread of the narrative, the idea which would later be developed by Freud as the Oedipal theory, the wish of the son to overthrow and kill his father.

Reasons for these particular sons to murder this particular father are heavily weighted by the author – Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov is the most negligent of fathers and a thoroughly repulsive character. Dmitri considers he has cheated him out of his inheritance and is wildly jealous because he is attempting to steal the woman he loves. Ivan’s intellectual atheism results in the stifling of his conscience, especially where it concerns getting rid of his father, and leads to his eventual mental breakdown. Only Alexey’s unswerving belief in God and the essential goodness of man prevents him from wishing to take revenge for his father’s cruel treatment of his mentally fragile mother.

If we examine Dostoyevsky’s own history, it is clear that many of the themes, situations and characters in the book are drawn from experience. His father was a cruel and merciless master to his serfs, by whom he was eventually murdered. Dostoyevsky draws on his personal experience of epilepsy in order to describe Smerdyakov’s medical condition. The story of the death of Grigory and Marfa’s infant child echoes the tragic early deaths of two of his own children. Ivan’s resistance to belief in God reflects Dostoyevsky’s tormented struggle with his religious doubts, whilst Alexey’s unshakeable faith represents the calm assurance he wished to achieve.

But in the end, attempts to draw analogies with Dostoyevsky’s own experience are of limited value because, as with every great artist, the author’s achievement is to have used the raw material of life to create an enduring work of art. The Brothers Karamazov is such a work, one which transcends the limitations of skilful storytelling to become a universal representation of the human struggle, a compassionate study of man’s battle with his baser instincts, and his courageous attempts, frequently doomed to failure, to grow upwards, out of the darkness and into the light.