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Ask me what book has now transformed my thought about what literature can do and I will name this book. Ask me about a book whose characters I will reference for years—not because they were so relatable or lovable but because they were replacements of philosophical thought—and I will name Alyosha, Ivan, and Mitya. Ask me about an author whose works I won’t mind reading and rereading, and I will name Fyodor Dostoevsky.

To think, before reading this, I didn’t even know how to properly pronounce the author’s name. First thing I did was look up the proper pronunciation. Now it slides off my tongue: duh-stuh-yef-skyee.

When I started my personal challenge to read more Russian literature, I had no idea that I would discover the language and nuance that I have. I had no idea that I would even like a Dostoevsky piece. But thanks to my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends who started the Fyodor Dostoevsky Group, I’ve become acclimated to the wordy intricacy of the Dostoevsky novel. I can earnestly say that after a couple months of courtship, where I had to get familiar with the storytelling structure and the interchangeable names of characters (by the way I learned that the middle names are patronymics, derived from the first names of the father, like Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov), I can now say that I am in love and on a nickname basis.

Three brothers, The Brothers Karamazov, each standing in for the profoundness that is the human condition: one representing the reckless way of living and thinking; another, selfishness and intellectual arrogance; and the third, timidity and religious belief. At the novel’s core is a contemptuous father, the absence of motherhood, and brothers who travel different courses in life, only to reunite as adults. There is love, betrayal, poverty, riches, death, murder, shame, good, bad, evil—you name it, the things we seek in novels because we come across them in life.

Yet narrowing things down a bit in this multi-layered novel, I would say that it is about belief and loyalty: after harsh childhoods, do these brothers believe in themselves; do they believe each other; do they believe in something greater than themselves?

Fragments of thoughts floated through his soul, flashed like stars and went out again at once, to be succeeded by others. But yet there was reigning in his soul a sense of the wholeness of things—something steadfast and comforting.

There is one other book which has philosophically penetrated me like this one has: The Bible. When I was a little girl I lived in a wartime shelter and foster home of a church in Liberia, separated from my parents. I loved reading but there were not a lot of books because they were either burned or left behind as people ran for their lives. But there were Bibles everywhere. So I turned to the great storytelling of the Bible: Jacob and Esau, the brothers at war with each other; the story of Joseph and the striped cloak and how he was sold into slavery by his own brothers, and more. To date, I still think The Bible has the most beautiful stories and poetry (i.e.: The Book of Psalms). Reading The Brothers Karamazov, I was again reminded of those stories of brotherhood and betrayal and their underlying themes and lessons.

It is hard to believe that Dostoevsky was said to have been an atheist at some point, having endured some personal struggle with belief and nonbelief, especially since there are moments in his novel when he adds the type of posturing ( “Deep calls to deep� and “If I forget thee Jerusalem �)� whose true meanings are only gathered from knowledge of biblical text. Yet his characters deal with this same struggle with moral and religious belief and this makes for an alluring read.

But just like the psychoanalysis of Greek tragedy (think Oedipus Rex) this is not a novel about someone or some belief being triumphant over the other, for it is about the passionate struggle that each character endures and their individual transformations in the end.

You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom. It’s only that I don’t know how to destroy you and I see I must suffer for a time. You are my hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself, but only of one side of me…of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them.