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| Father Fyodor, Brothers Dmitri, Alyosha, and Ivan |
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| Scratch paper proves Dostoevsky put some thought into this |
A: I vacillate between loving this book and hating it. I adore all three of the brothers but the bad choices that everyone made and the trial outcome drive me nuts. Not to mention Ivan going crazy; that made me so sad. I bet reading books like this is what made Ayn Rand create Objectivism. How did you feel about it? Do you think the lessons in this book are applicable to modern life?
C: The book was sad. It was well written up until the resolution; the narrator is sassy and self-deprecating and felt as real a character to me as anyone else in the story. The movie became a fanart of the original, which was a good move, because we needed to see justice done and the brothers happy. I would've liked Katya and Ivan to get on, and of course we can daydream about them all getting along happily in the American West, but for what little the movie did it went a long way to curing my dissatisfaction with the book. I wonder what Dostoevsky was thinking, leaving us hanging with Dmitri's fate like that. He kept such good track of the story up until that point!
I did not adore the brothers in the book. I think the only character I grew to love was Grushenka. She was hateful at first of course, and she was the cause of the entire mess (except for Smerdyakov), but she was bitter and cynical and became loving and willing to bind her life to a drowning man's... I could never do that, but I admire her for it, and her transformation gives me hope for myself.
Plus, look at her! Who can't love that face?
A: We're not just going to dream about their new life; we're going to write it. American Moors II, after we finish rewriting Jane Eyre! How could you not love sweet Alyosha who tied all the pieces together and was a good listener and believed in his brother no matter what, and who led the boys around Illyusha's bedside and helped them through such sad times? And Dmitri, who is never able to get a handle on money and who loves well but not wisely? (Thanks Shakespeare!) I may also love him because he and I are both fans of Last of the Mohicans. Awesome that Dostoevsky references that right?
I suppose my love of Ivan is a little more radical. I thought the Grand Inquisitor poem was smashing - I believe humans too often want to follow things greater than them and do what they are told to do, and don't want to choose freely. And his ideas about how Jesus would fare in the Inquisition - amazing! I'd never thought about it before. Ivan's thoughts made him one of my favorite characters early on -- like during the part of the book where Dmitri is doing some psycho-stalking that makes me dislike him.
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| Exhibit A: hiding in bushes |
The point is - Ivan was so smart and so troubled, and I wanted to comfort him. The murder was not his fault; he'd have to stop it every time and Smerdyakov would only have to succeed once. I thought Dostoevsky was taking the trial in a direction where Ivan--the smart one voicing many of Dostoevsky's own ideas--would figure out how to solve everything and exonerate Dmitri. Instead Dostoevsky makes Ivan descend into madness. Why why WHY?
I loved Grushenka too! I want to watch Maria Schell in other things - she was excellent in the movie. But Katya, she was terrible! I thought she was worse than Anna Karenina - did you?
C: It's cruel of me to say it, but Alyosha's the kind of person I can't understand or relate to at all. He's very compassionate, which is great, but the amount of faith the guy has is a total turn-off. I don't mean sexually, I mean in any respect. He's not real. Reality does not allow people like that to prevail. Unfortunately that archetype -- the one who allows God to guide his every thought and action, and who therefore comes to no harm -- is rather common in classic lit. It just annoys the hell out of me. Where are my saintly scientists?? Ivan I thought at first might be my man, but he turns to God in the end, and he always believed he was seeing the Devil, which sucks and isn't his fault but precludes him from being the hero I'm looking for. And for Dmitri, God is a nonentity. He spends no time wondering about Him, or asking the big questions -- he thinks with his heart and his libido. So again, kind of a turn-off.
To answer your question about Dostoevsky's motives toward Ivan's character: I think Ivan's transformation from cold atheist to believer could be something Dostoevsky himself experienced. The madness thing might be explained by his motive to write this story at all, which I think was not to describe morals or do any of the things you look for in stories. I think he started with a question: "Can the legal system logically make the wrong choice?/Is there a situation in which all the evidence points towards guilt when the man is truly innocent?" And he demonstrates that it can. Which might be an argument against man's justice system in favor of God's?
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| "Did y'all f*** it up again? Don't make me come down there." |
But though I liked the three leads I can't say I liked the plot. Parricide isn't new. Botched court cases aren't new. (Perhaps they were new when this was written.) There was no satisfying triumph, and I hate stories whose specific point is to tell you that things are bad without offering suggestions for how to fix them. Plus this story hinged on some disappointing turns of events, i.e., Katya betraying Dmitri (plausible, yes, but appropriate for what is supposedly one of the greatest books of all time?) and Ivan going crazy.
That's one reason I liked the movie, it smoothed over all those rough edges while making the characters even more interesting.
If you couldn't relate to the main characters and they weren't the heroes you were looking for. What made you love it so much?
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| You'd be amazed how much fanart is out there about this book. This is a surprisingly accurate summary! From left to right: Grushenka, Fyodor, Dmitri, Katya, Ivan, Smerdyakov, Alyosha, Krasotkin, Zhuchka. ((C)spoonybards) |
C: The greatest books of all time don't have to show us at our best; many of them are classics because they are the firsts to tell it like it is. Classic lit is just historical real talk.
I appreciate stories that tell it like it is, even if the characters aren't heroes and the resolution sucks. They give me a sense of history in a fun way, unlike what reading news articles or essays from the time would do. I think the "greats" become such by virtue of their generally perceived accuracy. Lots of people read them at the time or soon after because they could see the connections to their own lives. I'm not a small-town Russian in 1870, nor am I trapped in a marriage I am dissatisfied with, nor do I have two lovers, nor do I enjoy debauchery... My life is just so different from these books that it's tough to connect on anything other than a scholarly level.
A: Interesting. Many classics are valued for their ability to capture an era for sure, but I tend to think of the best classics as the ones that transcend the time period and speak to some human element that most can relate to no matter where we are or when we read it. That's why I got bored during the discussions about peasant revolutions and whether or not the Russian church should embrace elders, but I loved the dynamics between the brothers. It's also why I was disappointed that nothing really seemed applicable to life now. Or perhaps I'm just not in the mood to receive the message that we should keep faith in the face of injustice and the absence of miracles.
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| 27-year-old William Shatner could sell me on it though, especially with that firm jawline. |
