withdraw with honor; connections

Some kibbitzers and readers have complained about The Brothers Karamazov, have admitted to feelings of boredom and frustration.

Hear ye, hear ye: Unless you are a student and need a good grade on your Karamazov midterm, unless you are a lover trying to woo a professor of Russian Literature, there is no good reason to slog through this novel.

When you reach the end of Book Three/Part I (pg 160), pause for a moment and reflect. You've given the Brothers a fair shot and have read a representative sample; the sophistry will rarely get cleverer than "Disputation" (1.3.7); the soap opera will never be cattier than "The Two Together" (1.3.10); the psychology will never penetrate deeper than Dmitri's "Confessions" (1.3.3-5); and you've seen your share of violence (1.3.9), and taken your share of spiritual punishment (too many passages to cite).

If you've reached this point and are not engaged, close the book and never open it again--no one will fault you for it. The Brothers Karamazov is not for everyone; the wonder is that anyone could find it appealing.

And yet I do find it appealing, despite all I wrote in my last post, which you must have guessed was largely a posture, which was, in fact, a weak attempt at a pastiche. For me one of the book's strengths lies here, in Dostoevsky's habit of championing arguments he does not believe, and giving them to his favorite characters; and of perverting ideas he does believe in, and giving them to his villains.

Balaam's Ass just gave us two wonderful examples of this: first, Papa Karamazov's delirious rant on the hooks and iron and forges of hell; and second, Smerdykov's absurd syllogism on the power of faith. In both cases, Dostoevsky raises legitimate questions about the tension between religious belief and modern logic, questions central both to his thinking in general and to this novel in particular; but in both cases, he raises them through fools and deviants--the characters you would least expect to voice them.

What is the purpose of this technique; or, perhaps safer to ask, what is the effect?

In part it is what separates The Brothers Karamazov from a philosophical treatise, what makes it a novel--albeit an unusual one, albeit one nearly unique in the canon: the technique humanizes the philosophy, it connects the aspirations of the intellect and the soul, with the dirt and the stink of this wretched earth. And such connections are what this book aims to demonstrate and even, in its own small way, helps to create: they are the links between 1879 and 2008--between czarist Russia and the democratic United States, between dead Dostoevsky and the living reader; and they are the links between you and me, and perhaps also between the two of us and Something Great and Beyond.