Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
$265
It is not an exaggeration to say The Brothers Karamazov is one of the most influential novels ever written. It is a novel that has a history of dividing opinions, regularly hitting banned book lists: Written in the mid-late 19th century, contemporary Christians believed the novel was atheistic, and contemporary atheists believed the novel is too Christian. Regardless of which it is, the novel is certainly an attempt to tear down established norms and create a blueprint for a new societal order in Russia. Dostoyevsky himself spent time in a labor camp earlier in his life, accused of various crimes including fears from the Ministry of Internal Affairs that he was a member of a revolutionary literary group.
If Tolstoy’s War and Peace, written a decade earlier, was an attempt to capture the totality of political and interpersonal life, then The Brothers Karamazov is an attempt to capture the totality of internal life. It is a project with no less of a goal than creating a new society and new religion through the demonstration of the tripartite souls of the titular brothers: Aloysha, the exuberant, youthful monk-in-training; Ivan, the depressed, ruminating academic, and Dimitri, the eldest, sensualist, and self-destructive soldier. Each character represents a period of life and a way of looking at the world; though archetypes, they also feel like people you may have known. When their miserable and cruel estranged father is murdered, all three have to face his self-destructive aspects in themselves: Why are modern humans miserable when we know we could be happy, and why can’t we seem to get out of our own way? And who among Fyodor Zaramazov’s orbit killed him, and why?
We will be reading the Peaver and Volokhonsky translation, itself a major turning point in the novel’s popularity in English, shedding some of the stuffy, plodding, confusing language of earlier translations in favor a readable and populist style. The Brothers Karamazov is a big novel full of big ideas, and there is no better way to experience it than in a group.
Required Texts: The Brothers Karamazov, Bicentennial Edition, trans. Peaver and Volokhonsky
Reading schedule:
Week 1: 1-173 (Part I)
Week 2: 173-300 (Part II, Books 4-5)
Week 3: 300-472 (Part II, Book 6 – Part III, Books 7-8)
Week 4: 472- 545 (Part III, Book 9)
Week 5: 545- 696 (Part IV, Books 10-11)
Week 6: 696-825 (Part IV Book 12 & Epilogue)
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Andrew Maxwell
Andrew Maxwell is a writer and educator based in Portland, Oregon who has been teaching in classrooms the better part of a decade. He holds masters degrees in Secondary Education and Liberal Arts from Lewis and Clark College and St. John’s College respectively and a bachelors in English Literature with a minor in Classical Greek with a focus on ancient comparative literature. His short fiction and nonfiction can be found in literary magazines like 4’33 and Jenny Magazine.
