The Brothers Karamazov

Among books specifically on this novel, Victor Terras’ Karamazov Companion is an invaluable guide to every student of Russian literature. It has a long introduction which examines virtually every aspect of the novel, thematic and stylistic. Robert Belknap’s latest book on the novel displays many remarkable critical insights and is the work of a distinguished and influential scholar who has devoted many years to his subject.

New Essays on Dostoevsky, edited by myself and Garth Terry, contains an excellent psychological study of Ivan Karamazov by K. F. Seeley and an exceptionally knowledgeable and well-presented analysis of Zosima’s discourse by Sergei Hackel.

This brings me to the philosophical and religious dimensions of the novel. Sandoz’s magnificent book on the ‘Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ is required reading. Stewart Sutherland’s book brings the insights of an Anglo-Saxon philosopher tf bear on the religious philosophy of the novel with some surprisingly positive and fruitful results. Gibson’s book, also written by a philosopher, adopts a more conventional, but no less informative approach. In Cambridge, Diane Thompson has recently published a fine and convincing study of the fundamental structuring role of memory in the novel which is sure to stimulate much interesting discussion.

Some readers will be fascinated by Wasiolek’s English translation of the Notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov. Notebooks can be very difficult to translate because by their very nature notes are often elliptical and obscure: the associations which they had in the mind of the writer, using another language, are often impossible to capture, especially in translation. Very often too notebooks are distinguished by what the author rejected rather than what leads directly into his text. So they should always be used with caution in interpreting obscure parts of the published work. But with these warnings the enthusiastic reader may find much of interest in them and explore the writer’s workshop at leisure. As a matter of fact the drafts that remain are relatively late and close to the text we know.

There are many biographies of Dostoevsky. The most recent, which can be thoroughly recommended, is Geir Kjet-saa’s Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life.

Last of all (or possibly first of all) some readers may like to explore W.J. Leatherbarrow’s magisterial and invaluable Reference Guide, which lists, with commentary, over twelve thousand books and articles in many languages by and about Dostoevsky. Many of them are, of course, in English and many of them are relevant to The Brothers Karamazov. This is a book above all for the specialist, but for him or her it is indispensable.

So I return to my starting point. That, for better or for worse, is the fate of classics.

Malcolm V. Jones

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, University of Manchester Press, Manchester, 1984.

Belknap, Robert, The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov’, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1989.

— The Genesis of ’The Brothers Karamazov’, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1990.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Notebooks for ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, edited and translated by Edward Wasiolek, Chicago University Press, Chicago and London, 1971.

Gibson, A. Boyce, The Religion of Dostoevsky, S. F. V. Press, London, 1973

Jones, Malcolm V., and Terry, Garth M., eds., New Essays on Dostoyevsky, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983.

Kjetsaa, Geir, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life, Macmillan, London, 1987.

Leatherbarrow, W. J., Fedor Dostoevsky, a reference guide, G. K. Hall & Co., Boston, Mass., 1990.

Mochulsky, Konstantin, Dostoevsky, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1967.

Peace, Richard A., Dostoyevsky, an Examination of the Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1971.

Sandoz, Ellis, Political Apocalypse: Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1971.

Sutherland Stewart R., Atheism and the Rejection of God: Contemporary Philosophy and ‘ The Brothers Karamazov’, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977.

Terras, Victor, A Karamazov Companion, University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 1981.

Thompson, Diane Denning, The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991.