What kind of light is there in The Brothers Karamazov?
These are voices. The Brothers Karamazov is a novel of voices. Men, women, young, old, rich, poor, foolish, wise: all allowed to be heard in their own way, all to speak in their own voice. And in each individual voice there are echoes of other voices, modern or past, written or oral, political or philosophical, from the Bible or newspaper articles, city rumors, memories of a long-dead person. Everyone in the novel speaks from their own special and unique place, some of them completely unforgettable in their magnificent individuality, but they do it in the same language. And although some of the characters in The Brothers Karamazov are on a par with Shakespeare's works, it is not a work dominated by one main character, like Hamlet is a play by Hamlet, and Othello is a play by Othello. On the contrary: “The Brothers Karamazov” is a collective novel – it is about the merging of voices, about how they intertwine and, although they themselves do not see it, how they form one whole, one connection, one chorus.
This overarching stylistic feature finds a clear echo in the voices of two voices – Elder Zosima and Alyosha, whose shared belief that we are all responsible for everyone and that we are all to blame before everyone sounds like a mantra throughout the novel. This is the hope of the novel, the utopia of the novel, but not its reality. “Mom, don’t cry,” says Zosima’s dying younger brother, “life is heaven, and we are all in heaven, but we don’t want to know it, and if we wanted to know it, tomorrow there would be heaven in the world.” In another place, the killer says to Zosima: “As for the fact that every person is guilty before everyone and for everything except his own sins, your reasoning about this is quite correct, and it is surprising that you were suddenly able to grasp this thought so fully. And indeed, when people understand this thought, the Kingdom of Heaven will come to them not in a dream, but in reality.”
In other words, the Kingdom of Heaven is nothing more than an unrealized possibility: we are just a realization away from Heaven.
So why don't we take this step? What's stopping us?
This is what The Brothers Karamazov is about. The novel plucks all its ideas from the sky of abstractions and drives them into the human realm, based on the understanding that they exist only there, in people consisting of flesh and blood. As Dostoevsky once wrote: “Man is a mystery… If you spend your whole life trying to solve it, then don’t say that you wasted your time. I am engaged in this mystery because I want to be a man.” In his novel universe, people are controlled by emotions, driven by desire, they are unpredictable, imperfect, fallible, but at the same time they have enormous power. In The Brothers Karamazov, he brought together in one house four completely different young people, with very different qualities. This is a house filled with hate. The father, Fyodor Karamazov, is a greedy, depraved, deceitful and unscrupulous widower. He always neglected his sons; he never cared about them except when there was something to be gained from it. He's a father from hell. Each son is associated with some social institution: the eldest, Dmitry, extremely proud and hot-tempered, is the army; for the average, Ivan, rational, cold and analytical, this is the university; and for the youngest, Alyosha, warm, attentive, always accepting, this is church. In addition, there is Smerdyakov's servant, supposedly the illegitimate child of Fyodor and the mentally retarded Lizaveta, nicknamed Smelly Lizaveta.
