Having just finished all 911 pages of Karamozov, as part of the continued project to explore novels I read 40-odd years ago, I was right a few posts back about its likely impact: it is without question the greatest novel I’ve ever read. It has been such a joyful experience to read, to be made aware that one person could create such an astonishing mix of artistic brilliance and humanistic concern.
On the first, the great Joyce Carol Oates is very good on the novel here.
As she says: “What has made Dostoevski so highly esteemed a writer is, perhaps, not his understanding of human nature or his ability to work intelligently with ideas, but rather his fluid demonstration of the art of writing—the splendid unpredictability of the writer as writer, who can leave nothing unsaid, whose imagination is so nervously rich that characters and ideas multiply themselves as if by their own volition.”
She is so right about that. He plays constantly with the notion of art and of writing, so that by the end we are simply awed by the confidence of a writer who recognised no barriers in his approach to form and structure. His much-commented-upon omnipotent narrator form evolves and transforms constantly: at one point, he is a real person in the courtroom watching Mitya’s trial, at others he is entirely invisible, lost in the consciousness of the characters. This is a writer who is so confident of his art that he can show you, the reader, how he is speculating about form without losing the grip of the story.
Oates too points well to his psychological insights. Freud adored this novel, as did many others, and he was inevitably fascinated by the notion of patricide which lies at the core of the book. But she also points out the fascination with doubles, or in Jungian terms, the shadow. So many of the characters have their own double or shadow, and even talk about them, with poor demented Ivan at the end realising his with his summoning of the devil in his room. Even the ghastly rivalry between father and son for the alluring Grushenka is a terrible internal play about doubles and shadows.
Some critics see the precocious schoolboy Kolya as another double for Ivan, but he read to me as an ironic self-reference, an amused sketch of self-criticism by an author whose curiosity was limitless.
There is so much in this novel that one can understand those who keep returning to it; Wittgenstein loved it so much he could recite whole passages by heart. There is no character too minor to be taken seriously by the author, to have their psychology explored, their lineage analysed.
It has been a privilege to discover it again.