Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

When trying to evaluate such a significant novel, one looks to its historical literary context and developments in style and language over the last 140 years in an attempt to explain its shortcomings. The truth is that when read with a modern eye The Karamazov Brothers ^ is an inconsistent novel, and not strikingly original. Rather, the opposite is apparent, as its devices have since become familiar influences for countless other works. For something that claims to be philosophical novel, so much of its word count is devoted simply to descriptions of characters and events, much of which are mundane and superfluous (so different to the succinct and incisive Notes from Underground!) If we are honest, most of the first 500 pages of the novel falls into this category. With some exceptions, the role of the first half of the novel is little more than to set up the conclusion, and there is just so much extraneous description and seeming lack of focus that reading it cannot be described as enjoyable. It is easy to see why this novel is so often abandoned. However if one can get through the first half of the novel, the remainder, or more specifically the last 300 or so pages rewards the effort. And because the first half of the novel renders the second half possible, and in fact brings it retroactively to life, I am inclined to regard the entire novel highly based on the merits of the later parts.

As to the content of the story itself and its explorations I won’t go into detail (there are plenty of reviews which cover this already), only to say there is a complexity, richness and nuance that exceeded my expectations. The characters (though often excessively flamboyant or dramatic, sometimes comically so) contain genuine human limitations and contradictions, which together encapsulate the broad possibilities of human experience and whose nature and actions are open to endless interpretation. There is a level of philosophising which is overt in the discourses of the novel, and a secondary level which is hidden in the actions of the characters and evident only under examination. There is so much here beneath the surface, I feel that one could never approach the limits of what this novel has to offer.

The Karamazov Brothers is by no means a perfect novel, but it undoubtedly deserves its reputation as one of the greatest.

* * * * *

^ (view spoiler)[ In case you were wondering, the translator of this edition explains the variation in the title:

“One need go no further than the title, the standard English rendering of which is The Brothers Karamazov. This follows the original word order, the only one possible in Russian in this context. Had past translators been expressing themselves freely in natural English, without being hamstrung by that original Russian word order, they would no more have dreamt of saying The Brothers Karamazov than they would The Brothers Warner or The Brothers Marx.�

This explanation is compelling enough to me, yet the more “correct� title still sounds odd at first, and loses some of the authority of the distinctive traditional title, with its word order which in English seems for some reason exclusively reserved for Karamazovs and Grimms. (hide spoiler)]