“No, gentlemen of the jury, they have their Hamlets, while we still have only our Karamazovs!” Arguments are under way in the state’s case against Dmitry Karamazov, on trial for the murder of his father, Fyodor Karamazov, and for the theft of three thousand rubles from the old man’s room. In a crowded courtroom, the prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich, is reminding his audience of the unpredictable, inconsistent nature of the Russian character. Dmitry has a reputation for generosity (he was known to treat peasants to champagne), but this does not make a man incapable of murder, least of all in Russia. “We possess broad natures, Karamazov natures,” the prosecutor declares. “We’re capable of combining all possible contradictions and simultaneously contemplating both abysses at the same time, the abyss above, that of lofty ideals, and the abyss below, that of the most vile and stinking degradation.”
The prosecutor’s speech is crammed with quotable lines for journalists who have flocked to the town of Skotoprigonevsk (derived from the Russian word for “cattle yard”) to attend Dmitry’s trial. “ ‘They have their Hamlets, while we still have only our Karamazovs!’ That was clever,” someone in the crowd remarks afterward. The trial is national news, the object of “feverish, irritating interest” across Russia. A star defense attorney has arrived from Moscow, and medical experts trained in the latest science, psychology, have been shipped in to determine whether Dmitry was overtaken by a newly discovered phenomenon: a fit of passion. “I read about this recently,” one of the townswomen offers. “Doctors confirm it: they confirm everything.”
By 1878, when Dostoyevsky sat down to write “The Brothers Karamazov,” Russia was in the throes of a true-crime craze and courtroom trials had become media events. A few years earlier, the reformist tsar Alexander II had opened the courts to public audiences and, separately, granted greater freedom to the press. The two developments created a Russian reading public that was rabid for shocking tales of murder and a liberated press that was happy to supply them. There were periodicals devoted to crime, such as Glasnyi Sud (“Open Court”), and “The Criminal Chronicle” became a standard feature of Russian newspapers. (Dostoyevsky found the germ for “Crime and Punishment” in a newspaper story about a young man who killed a chef and a washerwoman with an axe; the paper said he was an Old Believer, a Raskolnik.) Sensing an audience, both in the courtroom and beyond, prosecutors and defense attorneys alike began to argue and persuade in style, often invoking fictional killers whose stories might distract jurors from the real case in front of them. Raskolnikov, the impoverished axe murderer of “Crime and Punishment,” was a popular choice.
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Dostoyevsky was as addicted as anyone to the crime stories flooding the papers. He contributed to the frenzy, covering trials in his magazine, A Writer’s Diary, where his reporting sometimes slipped into personal testimony. Of a woman whose attacker was acquitted, he wrote, “She endured several minutes (far too many minutes) of mortal fear. Do you know what mortal fear is? . . . It’s almost the same as a death sentence being read to one tied to a stake for execution while they pull the hood over his head.” He was drawing from memory. In 1849, when he was twenty-seven, Dostoyevsky had been arrested for participating in a discussion group called the Petrashevsky Circle, whose members debated socialism and read banned literature. Along with other members of the circle, he was sentenced to death by firing squad. On December 22nd, just before he was to be executed, a messenger from the Tsar suddenly arrived with a last-minute reprieve. Dostoyevsky was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia, followed by six years of compulsory military service.
In the labor camp, Dostoyevsky experienced a political and spiritual conversion that led him to reject the French utopian socialism of his youth and embrace the idea of a benevolent autocracy guided by the Russian Orthodox faith. As a way of atoning for his earlier radicalism, he devoted much of his career to depicting wayward Russian youth confused and corrupted by Western ideas of progress. Years later, at a literary gathering, one such youth asked Dostoyevsky, “Who gave you the right to speak like this, on behalf of all Russian people?” The author lifted the hem of his pants, revealing scars left on his ankles from years of wearing shackles. “This is my right to speak like this,” he told the crowd.
Dostoyevsky’s experience colored his views on the new court system. His commentary could be conflicted, as if he were cross-examining his own soul. He had seen for himself what hard labor could do to a man, and, noting Russia’s large number of acquittals, he praised his countrymen for applying the law “from a Christian point of view.” (In 1889, Russian juries acquitted violent offenders at a rate—thirty-six per cent—that far exceeded those in Western Europe, an indication of pervasive mistrust of the state.) But he also feared that verdicts of not guilty were being confused with spiritual absolution. Acquittals left no room for remorse.
“The Brothers Karamazov” is the last in Dostoyevsky’s tetralogy of so-called murder novels, following “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” and “The Possessed.” In it, Dostoyevsky satirizes the theatrical nature of Russia’s court system and treats what he sees as its limitations with deadly seriousness. Though no longer a socialist, Dostoyevsky could never shake his faith in the collective. He was wary of any system that held individuals responsible for the failures of society. In a country, as in a family, guilt was a collective inheritance.
In “The Brothers Karamazov,” now available in a lively, fast-flowing new translation by Michael Katz (Liveright), Dostoyevsky blended the family novel with the whodunnit, revealing the capaciousness of the novel as a form and the power of blood as a metaphor. The Karamazovs fit what Dostoyevsky described in A Writer’s Diary as “an accidental family,” sons merely by birth, brothers in name only. In this, they resembled Russia, which he saw as a family at war with itself. There are three Karamazov brothers. Dmitry is Fyodor’s eldest son. Alyosha, the youngest, has been living in a local monastery. Ivan, the middle brother, has been working in Moscow as a book critic. (There is also a possible fourth brother, Fyodor’s servant Smerdyakov, who is thought to be his illegitimate son.) Neither Alyosha nor Ivan is a suspect in their father’s murder, but the novel tries them for spiritual culpability. Did they do enough to prevent the murder, or did they look away? In “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky puts Russia itself on trial, forcing all its children to fess up to their bad behavior.
Though Dmitry swears he is innocent, the case against him is, from a legal standpoint, open and shut. Dmitry had a motive: he believed his father had stolen his inheritance, which he needed to run off with his girlfriend, a sweet temptress with a name to match, Grushenka (Russian for “little pear”), whom Fyodor was trying to woo himself. Dmitry also had the means: he was one of two people—the other being Smerdyakov—who knew the secret knock, signalling that the “little pear” had arrived in the night, that would make Fyodor open his door at once. Then, there is the fact that after the murder Dmitry appeared in town covered in blood and waving a wad of cash around.
The only wrinkle in the prosecutor’s case is the victim. No one liked Fyodor Karamazov. He was a landlord and a lecher, a proud “sensualist” who likened himself to “an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period.” He held drunken orgies in front of his children. The town doctor testifies that as a little boy Dmitry was left to wander by himself on the estate with just one button holding his trousers together. Ivan and Alyosha, Fyodor’s sons by his late second wife, were left unwashed and underfed. Smerdyakov, the son of a mentally ill woman named Lizaveta, whom Fyodor was rumored to have raped, suffered from epilepsy, possibly induced by beatings. Ippolit Kirillovich gets all this out of the way at the start of the trial, anticipating the defense. “There were no paternal, spiritual obligations,” he tells the jury, of Fyodor: “he raised his little ones in the backyard, and was glad when they were taken away from him. He even forgot about them completely.” In short, the prosecutor concludes, quoting another cold, uncaring patriarch, the French monarch Louis XV, “the old man’s only moral principle was après moi, le déluge.”
The subject of regicide hangs over the courtroom. What responsibilities does a father—of a family, of a nation—have to his children? And what recourse do these children have when their basic needs are not met? These questions had political echoes that had already determined the fate of nations all over Europe. During the trial, it becomes obvious that the journalists are less concerned with who killed Fyodor Karamazov than with the nature of the crime: in a country ruled by one man, patricide was inevitably a symbolic act. The novel is set in 1866, a “transitional progressive epoch,” the narrator, the town gossip, tells us. It has been five years since Alexander II abolished serfdom, and yet Fyodor’s serf Grigory has stayed behind to serve his master, to the protestations of his wife, Marfa. “Do you understand what duty is?” he chides her. “I do understand what duty is, Grigory Vasilievich, but what sort of duty do we have to remain here?” she implores. “That I don’t understand at all.” When Grigory sees Dmitry in the garden at night, he screams—even without knowing that Fyodor is dead—“Patricide!” The talk about masters no longer being masters, about the order of things being rearranged, has him on edge.
By the time Dostoyevsky wrote “The Brothers Karamazov,” Grigory’s worries had become those of a nation, and anxiety had given way to terror. Bazarov, the charismatic nihilist of Ivan Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons,” which was published in 1862, was smoking in parlors and seducing society women with talk of science and reason. Fifteen years later, the country’s radical youth had traded their cigarettes for dynamite, and the women in their midst were being handed lists of targets to assassinate. In 1878, Vera Zasulich—a clerk who had come under the influence of a student revolutionary named Sergey Nechayev—shot the governor of St. Petersburg in his office. In a decision that shocked Europe, she was acquitted by a Russian jury. Zasulich became an international celebrity and settled in Switzerland, spreading the gospel of violent revolution; Oscar Wilde’s first play, “Vera; or, the Nihilists,” first performed in 1883, was inspired by her.
In 1880, the year “The Brothers Karamazov” was published, there were attempts on the lives of Alexander II and the minister of the interior. The head of the secret police had been assassinated two years earlier by an anarchist named Sergey Kravchinsky, known as Stepniak, who then fled to London, where he eventually encouraged Constance Garnett, Dostoyevsky’s early English-language translator, to learn Russian. Across Europe, terrorism was referred to as “the Russian method.” Kirillovich warns the jury in Dmitry’s trial that all of Europe is watching to see what they decide, that foreign powers might intervene if Russia cannot keep its house in order. “Don’t tempt them,” he cautions, “don’t accumulate their constantly growing hatred by a verdict that justifies a son’s murder of his own father!”
For much of the nineteenth century, Russian literature lived, in the minds of most Western Europeans, behind, well, a curtain. The curtain was ornately embroidered with images of bears, onion domes, and noble savages untainted by logic. Russians, D. H. Lawrence wrote, “have only been inoculated with the virus of European culture and ethic. The virus works in them like a disease. And the inflammation and irritation comes forth as literature.” The most inflamed Russian writer was said to be a man called Dostoyevsky. His hatred of Western Europeans only added to his mystique.
When, in 1912, Garnett translated “The Brothers Karamazov” into English, its review in the Times Literary Supplement covered almost the entire front page. “We are told that through him alone can we hope to understand the Russian soul, divined and interpreted in his novels as nowhere else,” it announced. “Here comes the Scythian, the true Scythian, who is going to revolutionize all our intellectual habits,” another critic exclaimed, invoking the nomadic people who once roamed the Russian steppes.
The English were left perplexed, as if they had survived the book rather than read it. “Amazing in places, of course; but my God!—what incoherence and what verbiage, and what starting of monsters out of holes to make you shudder,” the novelist John Galsworthy wrote. Joseph Conrad echoed this ambivalence, calling the novel “an impossible lump of valuable matter.” Everyone could sense that something important had happened. But what?
The answer lies in the texture of Dostoyevsky’s language. The novel has a spoken quality that is meant to communicate the unreliability of memory and the fact that people tend to misunderstand one another far more often than they do the opposite. Katz is particularly attentive to this feature of Dostoyevsky’s prose. His is, by my estimation, the voiciest translation of the novel thus far. He writes at the fever pitch of speech, unleashing the speed and the chaos of the original. All anyone knows of the events that led to Fyodor’s murder comes through an inconsistent narrator who is often relaying rumors spread by unreliable sources. The witnesses who take the stand are nervous, stammering. They melt down in jealous rages and burst out in tears while remembering events that took place twenty years earlier. The nonplussed detectives who interview Dmitry about the night of the murder seem to have wandered in from a different novel, one in which personalities are coherent, cause leads to effect, and clues build toward an answer. When the detectives question Dmitry about the three thousand rubles he was seen with after the murder, Dmitry claims it was money he had saved and stuffed in an amulet he sewed and kept on his chest. Where is the amulet? they ask:
Just when you think, Dmitry knows how to sew?, the detective questioning him asks, “You know how to sew?” The detectives are from the land of realism. In “The Brothers Karamazov,” narrative unfurls at the mad and authentic pace of human emotion.
Many attempts to interpret the novel have centered on a prose poem within it titled “The Grand Inquisitor.” In the poem, which Ivan recounts to Alyosha, Christ returns to Earth during the Spanish Inquisition and is questioned about the forty days and nights he spent in the desert. Why, the Inquisitor asks, did he refuse the Devil’s temptation, to turn stone into bread? Did he not understand that this is what people want: bread and miracles?
The Inquisitor’s dictum that humanity needs a strongman who will provide material security and mass spectacle was read in the years following Garnett’s translation as a prophetic diagnosis of Russian political life. Man is “too weak, or vicious, or something to share bread,” Lawrence postulated in an essay on the poem. “He has to hand the common bread over to some absolute authority, Tsar or Lenin, to be shared out.” Yet Dostoyevsky did not see his compatriots as simply children seeking a father. He understood them to be brothers in search of one another. His novel “The Possessed” (1872) was based on the true story of a student revolutionary who was murdered by a socialist brother-in-arms. In “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky sought other, specifically Russian forms of brotherhood based in Christian love.
The murder does not take place until the middle of “The Brothers Karamazov,” but Dostoyevsky creates a steady air of foreboding before then—no small feat in a nine-hundred-page novel. Even before a drop of blood is shed, we feel the pinprick of calamity. Everyone hints at what is about to happen; a seminarian tells Alyosha that his father’s house “reeks” of crime and refers to Dmitry as “the murderer” while Fyodor is alive and well. “What murder?” Alyosha asks. “What are you talking about?” Not long before Fyodor dies, Alyosha kisses him goodbye. His father becomes frightened. “Why did you do that?” he asks nervously. “We’ll see each other again. Or do you think we won’t?”
It is almost as if the whole family were in on the crime together. And, in a sense, they are. In Russia, unlike in many parts of Western Europe, inheritance laws were based not on primogeniture but on an even distribution among children. All three legitimate Karamazov brothers stand to gain from their father’s murder, with Dmitry’s imprisonment leaving Alyosha and Ivan a greater share.
On the fateful day, Smerdyakov urges Ivan to go see about some business in a town called Chermashnya, before outlining how heated the conflict between Dmitry and his father had become—indeed, that it was likely to come to a head that night. “So why did you,” Ivan asks him, “after all this, advise me to go to Chermashnya? If I leave, see what happens here.” Smerdyakov answers cryptically: “Precisely so, sir.” Sensing a plot, Ivan has a spasm and breaks into a fit of laughter, a sound associated in the novel with the Devil. Still, he goes.
After the murder, Ivan is driven mad by guilt. That he benefitted from his father’s death tortures him; he questions whether he wanted it, anticipated it, even facilitated it. Like everyone in town, he knew that something bad was coming, and yet he did nothing to stop it. Earlier, when Alyosha tried to talk to him about the tension brewing between their father and Dmitry, Ivan had brushed him off. “What does it have to do with me?” he asked. “Am I my brother Dmitry’s keeper?”
Dostoyevsky’s response to this question comes in the form of a speech by Father Zosima, an elder at Alyosha’s monastery. Zosima preaches a sermon on brotherhood to his fellow-monks: “You should know, my dear ones, that every individual is undoubtedly responsible for everyone and everything on earth, not only with respect to general guilt, but also each individual is responsible for every single person and all mankind on earth.” Zosima urges the monks, as Dostoyevsky urged readers, to see ugliness as a trait shared by the entire human family. We are all our brother’s keepers. No one, not Dmitry or anyone else, should ever stand trial alone.
Dostoyevsky’s prescription of fraternal love was not as pure as the language he wrapped it in. The night of the murder, Dmitry throws a bacchanal at a nearby inn. He offers a toast to the other men in the room, ethnic Poles living in the Russian Empire.“To Poland, gentlemen,” he proposes. “I drink to your Poland, the Polish land!” Dmitry is paying, so they all drink up, bottle after bottle of champagne. Dmitry makes another toast: “Now to Russia, panowie, and let us be brothers!” His new comrades hold their glasses still. One of them suggests an amendment. “To Russia,” he toasts, “within its original borders in 1772!” This reference to the year the Russian empress Catherine the Great, with Prussia and Austria, annexed a third of Poland causes Dmitry to burst out in rage. “You’re little fools, panowie!” he shouts, now using the Polish word for “gentlemen” as an insult.
Here Dmitry is echoing the views of his creator. Dostoyevsky saw Russia’s colonization of neighboring Slavic lands as akin to a brother’s warm embrace and took the Polish fight for independence as a family betrayal. The Polish question was not the only “family matter” that concerned Dostoyevsky when he began work on “The Brothers Karamazov.” In 1876, the principalities of Serbia and Montenegro declared a war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. The following year, Russia joined the conflict, hoping to leverage the surge of Balkan nationalism in Turkey in order to recoup territory it had lost in the Crimean War. In A Writer’s Diary, Dostoyevsky framed Russia’s intervention as an act of fraternity, a “new crusade” to protect the country’s “Slavic brethren” from “Mohammedan barbarism.” Brotherhood became, in essence, a perfect container for Dostoyevsky’s ugliest ideas, providing, as his biographer Joseph Frank put it, “a morally attractive façade for Russian imperialism.” A similar justification, based on Slavic affinity, would be used by Vladimir Putin in regard to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In December of 2022, Putin stated, in a televised address to Russian military officials, that he considers Ukraine a “brotherly nation.”
There are large swaths of “The Brothers Karamazov” in which Dostoyevsky’s vices are on full display. His chauvinism and antisemitism (Fyodor’s avarice is attributed to his time in the Ukrainian city of Odesa, a Jewish enclave of the Russian Empire), dressed up in the language of Christian love, threaten to weigh the novel down with the flaws of its creator. But the structure of the book gives it a greatness that transcends the author’s smallness. The form of the detective story forces readers to look closely for clues, to pay attention to characters or objects we might be conditioned to ignore. You do not want to make the mistake that the Karamazovs made, of overlooking what was right under their noses—the forgotten son, the disregarded brother, Smerdyakov. Did he feel slighted, rejected by his father, to the point of murder? The prosecutor does not take him seriously as a suspect. “What was his motive? What did he hope to gain?” Kirillovich asks. After all, an illegitimate son cannot inherit. But Dostoyevsky himself attends to Smerdyakov, granting him, arguably, the central role in the family drama.
Dostoyevsky’s attention to minor, forgotten people—the poor, the sick, the orphaned—won him fans even among the radicals he spurned. “The Brothers Karamazov” demonstrates its author’s desire to push past the limits of who can be included—in a story, in a family. The novel is filled with what you might call “accidental chapters,” culled from court transcripts, hagiographies, love letters, toasts, songs, legal and spiritual confessions. At times, it feels like a scattered compilation of documents and source texts, a series of digressions vaguely related to the main plot, second cousins twice removed in a book that is supposed to be about brothers.
The miracle of “The Brothers Karamazov” is that somehow it all fits. This cacophonous novel, made up of wildly divergent arguments written by an author who refuses to let any point of view go by without cross-examination, coheres. Its elements are all made, by Dostoyevsky, to belong. Every digression becomes key to the case, every forgotten character is called to the stand. United by guilt, they all own up to the parts they played. Like good siblings, they learn to share. ♦
