Dostoevsky Loved People Enough To Draw Them Very Carefully: His Themes Are Relevant Today

Short Essay On Brothers Karamazov By Vladimir Golstein, Professor of Russian Literature

“To say that Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov is an ambitious novel is to say very little.

“The book features Christ, and devil, and life and death, and all sorts of philosophical questions concerning evil, guilt, love and so on.

“Yet, at the bottom of it, it is the story of the legal failure. The guy is wrongly accused for killing his father and then send to Siberia for it.

“From that perspective, the novel is incredibly relevant. Throughout the novel, we read about Dmitry Karamazov, his failures, triumphs, goals, ideals. We know how complex and contradictory his life is. Yet, when he ends up being tried for the murder that he didn't commit, we end up with simplistic and wrong headed denouement.

“Liberal defense lawyer does not care whether Dmitry is guilty or not. He delivers his liberal speeches about corrupt Russia, and its bad authorities, claiming that whacking one such authority figure -- Dmitry's father --is not really a crime.

“Conservative prosecutor argues to another extreme: everyone who even says something bad about an authority figure should go to jail.

“The jurors -- mostly peasants -- are totally dumbfounded by these arguments. They lose the vision of the concrete person, Dmitry, and instead participate in the political debate between a conservative and the liberal. Being conservative by nature, the jurors take the prosecutor side. End of story. Innocent man goes to jail.

“Isn't today's political situation in the west similar? You bet it is.

“We have elections, during which left and right exchange their political cliches blaming each other in all sort of imaginary crimes.

“We have the actual countries -- which similar to Dmitry -- are being misread, misunderstood, and condemned.

“And we have the public -- the jurors -- who being confused by the stupid political rhetoric, keeps on voting, that is, making the same judgment mistakes, agreeing with this or that political argument, while condemning their innocent countries to further destruction.

“Do you really think that US, England, France, Germany or Italy -- benefiting from idiotic accusations that the conservatives and progressives, right and left hurl at each other?

“And each time, as Dostoevsky puts it -- "peasants stood for themselves." Confused by arguments, the population makes uninformed choices based on their natural inclinations or prejudices. French leaning toward the left, Brits and Americans toward the right. But the truth -- the actual state of the affairs in their countries -- continues to be ignored. Even worse, continues to be sentenced to destruction. While the politicians continue to practice their pseudo profound rhetoric--bowing to the public which applauds them for their successfully delivered barbs.

“(Below is Repin's portrait of the liberal lawyer, Spasovich -- the darling of Russian intelligentsia, mocked by Dostoevsky in his portrayal of demagogic defense lawyer, whose rhetorical abuses ostracized the jury, costing Dmitry his freedom).”

—-Vladimir Golstein

(Originally published as a FB post. Golstein, who is Russian, teaches Russian Literature at Brown University, and has given his permission for TTB to re-publish this.)