Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a great thinker, a manipulator if you will, of deep

philosophical questions concerning the existence of man and/or God. Some

would argue that his preoccupation with finding answers to the unanswerable

bordered on the neurotic. Yet with all of the looming doubts and agonizing

theses that constitute the bulk of his writing there is one underlying question

that Dostoyevsky could never seem to eradicate from his ever racing quest to

define the essence of man. “What is he wearing?” It seems that the narrator

(yes, it has been established that Fyodor himself was indeed not the narrator,

but let’s face it, he is the author, creator and ultimately what he says goes) fixates

on the fashions of the day, and makes it a point to interject his own

whimsical opinions as to what is “in” and more importantly, what is “out.”

The Brothers Karamazov, though primarily a novel of dialogue, is also richly

embellished with commentary from the ever omniscient narrator as to

descriptions of characters, their surroundings, whether up to date with style

of furnishings, or God forbid “in the fashion of the twenties.” How necessary

is it that the reader know that Trifon’s daughters, “on feast days or when going

visiting, would put on light blue or green dresses of fashionable cut, tight fitting

behind and with three feet of train” (p. 413), while Trifon himself, “went

about dressed in the Russian style, in a peasant blouse and a long, full skirted

coat” (p. 413)? We barely meet this Trifon, and the daughters are about as significant

as Smerdyakov’s twitching left eye. Although the optical twitch could

be constituted as merely a rumor or a neuroti...

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...aged theologian,

not a boy of fourteen.

There are other peculiar idiosyncrasies employed by Dostoyevsky throughout

this work, such as his need to focus dinner conversations on physically

torturing both children and heretics, the bringing together of various conflicting

personalities for the sake of posing religious and moral questions that

have little to do with the logical reasoning for bringing said people together,

and his preoccupation with noses. These are just a few of the Dostoyevskian

quirks that hook the reader instantaneously, and then leave the reader wondering

why.

Works Cited

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov, New York: Vintage Classics

1991, Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Inspiration taken from, And Quiet Flows the Vodka, by Alicia Chudo,

Northwestern University Press, 2000.