欧宝娱乐

鈥淗urrah for Karamazov!鈥�

Those are the concluding words of this bombastic brick of a book. I am more than willing to chime in, to cheer for the brothers Karamazov who finally, finally made me give in to the genius of Dostoevsky fully, without anger, without resentment and fight, after a year of grappling with his earlier novels.

This is doubtless his magnum opus, the shining lead star in a brilliant cosmos. There are many similarities to his earlier novels, and his characters fight with the same inner demons as the predecessors. And yet, there is something milder, more soothing in the Brothers Karamazov, there is mature perfection in this novel.

Yes, Smerdyakov is an underprivileged, hateful sufferer, but he is not lost to compassion and care in the same way as the nihilistic man writing his Notes from Underground.

And Dimitri is rash and bold and full of contradictions, but he is not as confused as Raskolnikov, he does not impose the dogma of suffering in the sense of Crime and Punishment on his family and community. He has a plan for living, not for suffering.

Ivan is a brooding intellectual, but he is not stone-cold like Stavrogin in Devils. His conflicted heart and intellect are connected to the world.

Alyosha, thank goodness, is a sweet and innocent character, but nothing like the awful Christlike idiot Myshkin from The Idiot. He knows how to live and interact, and he is willing to step away from rigid prejudices and principles to comfort the ones he loves.

What about the women? Grushenka is not destroyed by the love of several men like Nastasya, and even Katerina Ivanovna is given a complex, divided soul, not just a shallow platform for men to use at their convenience and throw away when they have made their point. She has her own points to make.

Why do the Brothers Karamazov work so well?

I believe Dostoyevsky made the decision to paint a family just like it is, with all the contradictory emotions and actions, and all the mood swings and difficult situations. He had already established his religious and political ideas in earlier works, and he could afford to let the characters be what they naturally were, without judging them from the standpoint of history and society. Thus he could be the storyteller he naturally was, without any agenda but love for the story he told.

The plot is both simple and complex: Be careful what you wish for, it might come true!

As the three (or four) brothers and the women they love in different ways and fashions face the murder of the old patriarchal buffoon, all of them have to come to terms with the painful reality of loving and hating at the same time.

A bad parent is still a parent, and a dead parent still has power over the lives of his offspring. The 鈥淜aramazov character鈥�, much cited throughout the novel, becomes a synonym for any human being in his or her dealings with that complicated microcosm called family:

鈥淎nd why? Because he was of the broad Karamazov character - that鈥檚 just what I am leading up to - capable of combining the most incongruous contradictions, and capable of the greatest heights and of the greatest depths.鈥�

Because Dostoyevsky dares to let go of his mission to prove that Russian nationalism and Christian orthodoxie are at the centre of the meaning of life, he actually makes a case for both in a much more convincing way than he ever could with his more concept- and idea-driven earlier works. The humour in the unforgettable scenes with the 鈥渦nspeakable conduct鈥� of the stinking Father Zossima are so much better than the pseudo-Christian rants of Myshkin, and the intellectual understanding of the dangers of community worship in the story of the Grand Inquisitor is as true now as it was back then, showing the way to the core of both religious and political extremism:

鈥淭his craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they鈥檝e slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another: Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods.鈥� And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same.鈥�

So what is the redeeming feature of the Karamazovs then? Why do I feel like shouting, over and over:

鈥淗urrah for Karamazov!鈥�

They love each other. They really do, in a crooked, angry way, in a distorted, strange way. But they do. They love each other despite being completely different in their approach to life, and they support each other鈥檚 right to life, love and happiness. In the end, they help each other make the best of a muddle (and that is the best any family can do: help each other deal with the blows that families tend to inflict on themselves!).

Exile in a place worse than Siberia (Oh, America, what a delightful irony Dimitri鈥檚 words are!) is manageable if you make peace with your loved ones. And the final pages leave me bowing to the beauty of the insight that man and woman can love each other in so many different ways, and that love is not exclusive, but inclusive.

Dostoyevsky! You wrote the perfect novel. Hurrah!