I have recently reread Fyodor Dostoevsky’s (1821-1881) masterpiece and longest novel The Brothers Karamazov, translated from the Russian by Michael R. Katz (2023). Sigmund Freud called it “the most magnificent novel ever written”. This is the third time I have read it. The first was when I was in high school and the second when I was in my fifties. It had a great impression on me as a teenager as a philosophical, psychological and spiritual study of the three brothers and their father. Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, is a scheming debauched, buffoon successful in business but a failure as a father. He neglected his sons and left them to be raised by a servant after their mothers died. He is a despicable character that used everyone around him for his pleasure and was completely self-centered. He is described as beginning with almost nothing who was “utterly worthless and depraved and yet he was on of those people with no sense who knew how to take very good care of his worldly affairs, and, apparently, not much else”.

His eldest son, Mitya, eventually becomes a soldier but spends his life as a profligate enamored of women, a spendthrift and ne-er-do-well. The second son, Ivan, gets a good education and becomes a rationalist and atheist whose motto is if God does not exist “everything is permitted’. The third son, Alyosha, is a devout Christian, who is educated in the monastery by the elder Father Zossima, whose life’s story exemplifies the journey from unbeliever to a follower of Christ. Alyosha is a sweet young man, loves everybody, judges nobody and is Dostoevsky’s hero.

The three brother exemplifies Kierkegaard’s three stages on life’s way defined as the three broad stages of human development: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The aesthetic life is living for the moment, lives for pleasure, dominated by impulse, immediate desire, or instinctive drive. This is characterized by Mitya. The ethical life recognizes no authority beyond himself but chooses to accept certain values of his own making such as his reason for living. Ivan cannot believe in God because he sees the world from the point of view of injustice and suffering. He reflects the early Dostoevsky who joined the socialist party, identified with the victims of society and saw unjust suffering as a barrier to belief in a just and merciful God. He tells about human cruelty to innocent children and the famous story of The Grand Inquisitor who rebukes Jesus and tells him that the Church has corrected his teaching. Ivan in the end suffers a nervous breakdown. On the other hand the religious life is knowing God as revealed in Jesus Christ, not through reason, which is limited, but through faith which is a gift of God. Jesus teaches us what human life is meant to be and how far from that life we are. We discover our sinfulness and our need for a Savior. This is seen in the life of Alyosha.

The novel climaxes in the murder of the father and the trial of Mitya for it but concludes with words from Alyosha to a group of children who have just buried their friend. One of them asks,”Is it really true what religion says, that we’ll all rise from the dead and be resurrected, and will live again to see one another?” He replies, “Absolutely, we will all rise again, and we will surely see one another and gladly and joyfully tell each other everything that’s happened.”

The epitaph inscribed on Dostoevsky’s tombstone are also the first words of his novel: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” (John 12:24)