The Novelist’s Craft: Reflections on The Brothers Karamazov

“ . . . we may have a sigh of relief at the thought that it is nevertheless vouchsafed to a few to salvage without effort from the whirlpool of their emotions the deepest truths towards which the rest of us have to find our way through tormenting uncertainty and with restless groping.”

—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“Imaginative writers are valuable colleagues . . . In the knowledge of the human heart they are far ahead of us common folk because they draw on resources that we have not yet made accessible to science.”

—Sigmund Freud, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’

Introduction

The first Dostoevsky novel I ever read was Notes from Underground. I was fascinated by the power of Dostoevsky’s language, his imagery, and his penetrating insights into the life of his characters—some of which I took to be into his own inner life, as he spoke in the first person singular. By directly addressing the reader, he drew me inside his narrative. Through this experience Dostoevsky enticed me to read everything he wrote in chronological order.¹ Reading his literary output in sequence deepened my appreciation of his craft as a novelist.

There are a number of reasons that I have sustained my interest in Dostoevsky’s writings. In the first place, I became aware of the fact that in each of his short stories and novels his descriptions indicated a deepening understanding of the psychology of his characters. I was particularly interested in the fact that he, just as my patients, never changed the subject.² But although the core ideas and experiences he wished to portray remained the same throughout his literary career, each of his successive stories and novels portrayed his characters’ inner worlds ever more richly and added a deeper comprehension of their motives and actions. Concentrating on the psychological layers of his writings, my own interest focused on the inner world of the characters that peopled his novels and on the nature of their relationships. Later—with the help of his biographers, especially Joseph Frank’s five-volume study (1976–2002)—I became cognizant of the other, richly textured historical, socio-cultural, and political layers of his works.³ Dostoevsky—who was born in 1821 and died in 1881—always framed historical, cultural, and political currents in Tsarist Russia within individual or family stories, rather than report about them in a direct narrative form as historians do. He thereby included those currents within the psychological layer of his great novels and at the same time contextualized his expanding insights into his characters’ inner worlds. And in this fashion, too, he entered into a dialogue with other writers of the period.⁴ Dostoevsky’s contemporary readers could easily identify these multiple dimensions embedded in his novels and this kept them intensely engaged: his novels spoke to them about their own socio-cultural and political lives.

There is no question among literary critics and biographers that The Brothers Karamazov, completed in 1880, is the apotheosis of Dostoevsky’s accomplishments as a novelist. And no wonder. Internally, silently, he “worked” on his final novel throughout his literary career but especially during the writing of his major novels: Crime and Punishment, The Insulted and Injured, The Idiot, and The Possessed. These earlier novels can be considered not only as encompassing depictions of a changing historic, political, cultural, and literary epoch, but also as preparatory portrayals of the more fully developed human beings in The Brothers Karamazov. This—his last—novel most clearly and thoroughly articulated the central preoccupation of his adult life: the unresolved struggle between faith and doubt, between believing in God and immortality and not believing in them. The question of his belief or non-belief in God may well be connected with his own “father-son conflict”—from which he also suffered. Perhaps for that reason he had Ivan exclaim during the trial: “Who doesn’t wish for his father’s death?” (Dostoevsky, 1990/2002, p. 686)

Synopsis

I will present a highly abbreviated synopsis of the novel—a bare outline—portraying Dostoevsky’s creativity and...