“The Brothers Karamazov,” Reviewed | The New Yorker

“No, gentlemen of the jury, they have their Hamlets, while we still have only our Karamazovs!” Arguments are under way in the state’s case against Dmitry Karamazov, on trial for the murder of his father, Fyodor Karamazov, and for the theft of three thousand rubles from the old man’s room. In a crowded courtroom, the prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich, is reminding his audience of the unpredictable, inconsistent nature of the Russian character. Dmitry has a reputation for generosity (he was known to treat peasants to champagne), but this does not make a man incapable of murder, least of all in Russia. “We possess broad natures, Karamazov natures,” the prosecutor declares. “We’re capable of combining all possible contradictions and simultaneously contemplating both abysses at the same time, the abyss above, that of lofty ideals, and the abyss below, that of the most vile and stinking degradation.”

The prosecutor’s speech is crammed with quotable lines for journalists who have flocked to the town of Skotoprigonevsk (derived from the Russian word for “cattle yard”) to attend Dmitry’s trial. “ ‘They have their Hamlets, while we still have only our Karamazovs!’ That was clever,” someone in the crowd remarks afterward. The trial is national news, the object of “feverish, irritating interest” across Russia. A star defense attorney has arrived from Moscow, and medical experts trained in the latest science, psychology, have been shipped in to determine whether Dmitry was overtaken by a newly discovered phenomenon: a fit of passion. “I read about this recently,” one of the townswomen offers. “Doctors confirm it: they confirm everything.”

By 1878, when Dostoyevsky sat down to write “The Brothers Karamazov,” Russia was in the throes of a true-crime craze and courtroom trials had become media events. A few years earlier, the reformist tsar Alexander II had opened the courts to public audiences and, separately, granted greater freedom to the press. The two developments created a Russian reading public that was rabid for shocking tales of murder and a liberated press that was happy to supply them. There were periodicals devoted to crime, such as Glasnyi Sud (“Open Court”), and “The Criminal Chronicle” became a standard feature of Russian newspapers. (Dostoyevsky found the germ for “Crime and Punishment” in a newspaper story about a young man who killed a chef and a washerwoman with an axe; the paper said he was an Old Believer, a Raskolnik.) Sensing an audience, both in the courtroom and beyond, prosecutors and defense attorneys alike began to argue and persuade in style, often invoking fictional killers whose stories might distract jurors from the real case in front of them. Raskolnikov, the impoverished axe murderer of “Crime and Punishment,” was a popular choice.

Dostoyevsky was as addicted as anyone to the crime stories flooding the papers. He contributed to the frenzy, covering trials in his magazine, A Writer’s Diary, where his reporting sometimes slipped into personal testimony. Of a woman whose attacker was acquitted, he wrote, “She endured several minutes (far too many minutes) of mortal fear. Do you know what mortal fear is? . . . It’s almost the same as a death sentence being read to one tied to a stake for execution while they pull the hood over his head.” He was drawing from memory. In 1849, when he was twenty-seven, Dostoyevsky had been arrested for participating in a discussion group called the Petrashevsky Circle, whose members debated socialism and read banned literature. Along with other members of the circle, he was sentenced to death by firing squad. On December 22nd, just before he was to be executed, a messenger from the Tsar suddenly arrived with a last-minute reprieve. Dostoyevsky was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia, followed by six years of compulsory military service.

In the labor camp, Dostoyevsky experienced a political and spiritual conversion that led him to reject the French utopian socialism of his youth and embrace the idea of a benevolent autocracy guided by the Russian Orthodox faith. As a way of atoning for his earlier radicalism, he devoted much of his career to depicting wayward Russian youth confused and corrupted by Western ideas of progress. Years later, at a literary gathering, one such youth asked Dostoyevsky, “Who gave you the right to speak like this, on behalf of all Russian people?” The author lifted the hem of his pants, revealing scars left on his ankles from years of wearing shackles. “This is my right to speak like this,” he told the crowd.

Dostoyevsky’s experience colored his views on the new court system. His commentary could be conflicted, as if he were cross-examining his own soul. He had seen for himself what hard labor could do to a man, and, noting Russia’s large number of acquittals, he praised his countrymen for applying the law “from a Christian point of view.” (In 1889, Russian juries acquitted violent offenders at a rate—thirty-six per cent—that far exceeded those in Western Europe, an indication of pervasive mistrust of the state.) But he also feared that verdicts of not guilty were being confused with spiritual absolution. Acquittals left no room for remorse.

“The Brothers Karamazov” is the last in Dostoyevsky’s tetralogy of so-called murder novels, following “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” and “The Possessed.” In it, Dostoyevsky satirizes the theatrical nature of Russia’s court system and treats what he sees as its limitations with deadly seriousness. Though no longer a socialist, Dostoyevsky could never shake his faith in the collective. He was wary of any system that held individuals responsible for the failures of society. In a country, as in a family, guilt was a collective inheritance.

In “The Brothers Karamazov,” now available in a lively, fast-flowing new translation by Michael Katz (Liveright), Dostoyevsky blended the family novel with the whodunnit, revealing the capaciousness of the novel as a form and the power of blood as a metaphor. The Karamazovs fit what Dostoyevsky described in A Writer’s Diary as “an accidental family,” sons merely by birth, brothers in name only. In this, they resembled Russia, which he saw as a family at war with itself. There are three Karamazov brothers. Dmitry is Fyodor’s eldest son. Alyosha, the youngest, has been living in a local monastery. Ivan, the middle brother, has been working in Moscow as a book critic. (There is also a possible fourth brother, Fyodor’s servant Smerdyakov, who is thought to be his illegitimate son.) Neither Alyosha nor Ivan is a suspect in their father’s murder, but the novel tries them for spiritual culpability. Did they do enough to prevent the murder, or did they look away? In “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky puts Russia itself on trial, forcing all its children to fess up to their bad behavior.

Though Dmitry swears he is innocent, the case against him is, from a legal standpoint, open and shut. Dmitry had a motive: he believed his father had stolen his inheritance, which he needed to run off with his girlfriend, a sweet temptress with a name to match, Grushenka (Russian for “little pear”), whom Fyodor was trying to woo himself. Dmitry also had the means: he was one of two people—the other being Smerdyakov—who knew the secret knock, signalling that the “little pear” had arrived in the night, that would make Fyodor open his door at once. Then, there is the fact that after the murder Dmitry appeared in town covered in blood and waving a wad of cash around.

The only wrinkle in the prosecutor’s case is the victim. No one liked Fyodor Karamazov. He was a landlord and a lecher, a proud “sensualist” who likened himself to “an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period.” He held drunken orgies in front of his children. The town doctor testifies that as a little boy Dmitry was left to wander by himself on the estate with just one button holding his trousers together. Ivan and Alyosha, Fyodor’s sons by his late second wife, were left unwashed and underfed. Smerdyakov, the son of a mentally ill woman named Lizaveta, whom Fyodor was rumored to have raped, suffered from epilepsy, possibly induced by beatings. Ippolit Kirillovich gets all this out of the way at the start of the trial, anticipating the defense. “There were no paternal, spiritual obligations,” he tells the jury, of Fyodor: “he raised his little ones in the backyard, and was glad when they were taken away from him. He even forgot about them completely.” In short, the prosecutor concludes, quoting another cold, uncaring patriarch, the French monarch Louis XV, “the old man’s only moral principle was après moi, le déluge.”

The subject of regicide hangs over the courtroom. What responsibilities does a father—of a family, of a nation—have to his children? And what recourse do these children have when their basic needs are not met? These questions had political echoes that had already determined the fate of nations all over Europe. During the trial, it becomes obvious that the journalists are less concerned with who killed Fyodor Karamazov than with the nature of the crime: in a country ruled by one man, patricide was inevitably a symbolic act. The novel is set in 1866, a “transitional progressive epoch,” the narrator, the town gossip, tells us. It has been five years since Alexander II abolished serfdom, and yet Fyodor’s serf Grigory has stayed behind to serve his master, to the protestations of his wife, Marfa. “Do you understand what duty is?” he chides her. “I do understand what duty is, Grigory Vasilievich, but what sort of duty do we have to remain here?” she implores. “That I don’t understand at all.” When Grigory sees Dmitry in the garden at night, he screams—even without knowing that Fyodor is dead—“Patricide!” The talk about masters no longer being masters, about the order of things being rearranged, has him on edge.

By the time Dostoyevsky wrote “The Brothers Karamazov,” Grigory’s worries had become those of a nation, and anxiety had given way to terror. Bazarov, the charismatic nihilist of Ivan Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons,” which was published in 1862, was smoking in parlors and seducing society women with talk of science and reason. Fifteen years later, the country’s radical youth had traded their cigarettes for dynamite, and the women in their midst were being handed lists of targets to assassinate. In 1878, Vera Zasulich—a clerk who had come under the influence of a student revolutionary named Sergey Nechayev—shot the governor of St. Petersburg in his office. In a decision that shocked Europe, she was acquitted by a Russian jury. Zasulich became an international celebrity and settled in Switzerland, spreading the gospel of violent revolution; Oscar Wilde’s first play, “Vera; or, the Nihilists,” first performed in 1883, was inspired by her.