city of mirrors.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. 1880.

There is not a more complete book in the world that I have come across. You not only have to, but want to read every page twice over to make sure you’re not missing anything. 

The chapter entitled “The Grand Inquisitor” might be the most thrilling, provocative, and thought-provoking thing I’ve ever encountered in literature. To think that Dostoyevsky was publicly introducing these ideas at that time and place in utterly amazing. To suggest that the second coming had already occurred during the Spanish Inquisition and that the Church captured the incarnate Christ to be put to death for intruding upon their worldwide authority conjures a whirlwind of emotion in today’s readers- imagine 130 years ago in Russia- and yet this is only a small discourse in the novel’s grand, grand scope.

The version I own, pictured above, offers and introduction that includes information about Dostoyevsky’s life and involvement in illegal intellectual societies 30 years before the publication of Karamazov, his last and greatest novel. Around 1850, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death by firing squad for these activities, and the introduction includes a letter from Dostoyevsky to his brother describing the events. In short, he was pardoned at his last hour, but the practice was to tie the prisoners to the posts in front of the squad anyway and continue with the count until the last second, bringing the prisoner to the brink of death before lowering the weapons. Dostoyevsky powerfully describes what it was like to walk down the street to the square to be shot, be that close to death, and then walk back up the street seeing everything anew in his next shot at life, forgiven. Absolutely unbelievable. 

Karamazov explores existentialism, humanism, religion, faith, sinning, jealousy, murder, sensualism, redemption, family values, love, hate, anger, sickness, hope, life, death, you name it. Complete as it gets, and darkly funny and addictive. Plus, the pages turn like Harry Potter.

Sigmund Freud called it “the most magnificent novel ever written.” 

James Joyce described Dostoyevsky’s unmatched detail and the mad genius in his writing “exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness, perhaps. In fact all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness; the reasonable man achieves nothing.”

Perhaps most simply put by Eliot Rosewater to Billy Pilgrim at the mental institution in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, “Everything there is to know about life is in The Brothers Karamazov… but that isn’t enough any more.”