Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow on
November 11, 1821. His father was an
impecunious doctor and his mother the
daughter of a merchant. When he was
sixteen his mother died and he and his elder
brother Mikhail were sent to St Petersburg
to study at the army college of engineering.
During his three unhappy years there, he
spent his free time reading the works of the
most important Russian and foreign
authors. In 1844 he resigned from the army
and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published
the following year.
An incident in which Dostoyevsky
witnessed an aristocrat beating his
coachman mercilessly for not driving fast
enough, had a powerful and lasting effect
on him. His revulsion at the injustices of
Russian society, especially the system of
serfdom, led him into circles where
revolutionary ideas, such as liberating the
serfs and abolishing censorship, were
current.
In 1849 he was arrested and tried with
the others of his group, and sentenced to
death. After eight months’ imprisonment,
the death sentence was commuted by
Emperor Nicholas I to four years’ hard labour, to be followed by four years’ service
in the army as a private. But this
information was not conveyed to the
prisoners, who were taken out onto the
parade ground and made to go through the
preliminaries of an execution. Dostoyevsky
described the experience in a letter to his
brother: “They snapped swords over our
heads, and they made us put on the white
shirts worn by persons condemned to
death. Thereupon we were bound in threes
to stakes, to suffer execution. Being in the
third row I concluded I only had a few
minutes of life before me. I thought of you
and your dear ones, and I continued to kiss
Plestchaeiv and Dourov who were next to
me and to bid them farewell. Suddenly the
troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound,
brought back upon the scaffold, and
informed that his Majesty had spared our
lives.”
One of the prisoners went mad as a
result of the experience. For Dostoyevsky it
was an event which was to leave an
indelible mark on his life. He was put in
chains and sent off to Siberia to carry out
his sentence of four years’ hard labour. At
the end of this period he was transferred to a small town where he served as a private
soldier in a line regiment. Here he fell in
love with the wife of a civil servant who
subsequently died. Despite the fact that she
was in love with another man, she allowed
herself to be persuaded by Dostoyevsky to
marry him, for the sake of her son. Not
surprisingly, the marriage was not a success.
By this time he had become a commissioned
officer, but he was obliged to resign from
the army as a result of his increasing attacks
of epilepsy.
Dostoyevsky returned to St Petersburg,
where over the next twenty years he wrote
his most important works, including Crime
and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869),
The Possessed (1872) and The Brothers
Karamazov (1880).
Three years after the death of his first
wife in 1864, Dostoyevsky married the
young woman he had engaged as his
secretary. His financial affairs were in
turmoil, and he and his new wife were
forced into exile to escape their creditors.
The couple spent the next few years living in
Germany, Switzerland and Italy, during
which time two children were born to them,
only one of whom survived. As their
financial situation began to improve they
returned to Russia, where two more children
were born, but the youngest child suffered
from epilepsy and died at the age of three.
During the years following his release
from prison, Dostoyevsky’s political and
religious opinions became more and more
reactionary, and his acceptance in 1872 of
the editorship of a conservative periodical,
The Citizen, marked his final rejection of
his youthful revolutionary beliefs. He died in
St Petersburg on February 9, 1881.
The Brothers Karamazov
The Brothers Karamazov is often referred
to as Dostoyevsky’s greatest novel. On a
superficial level the story is an intriguing
‘who-done-it’, with a dramatic trial scene as
its finale. But Dostoyevsky, like Shakespeare,
was able to address more than one
audience at a time—in this case not just the
groundlings in the pit or the aristocrats in
the boxes, but the different audiences
which we, his readers, have within us. As
one part of us is enjoying The Brothers
Karamazov at the level of an exciting crime
thriller, our deeper selves are engaged in the
consideration of such primal and universal
themes as the existence of God, sexual
passion, jealousy, sibling rivalry, patricide,
cruelty, evil, poverty and shame.
The characters of the three brothers
themselves may be seen as embodying
different aspects of human personality;
Dmitri, passionate and uncontrolled, Ivan,
proud and self-deluding, and Alexey, pure and compassionate. And woven through
the thread of the narrative, the idea which
would later be developed by Freud as the
Oedipal theory, the wish of the son to
overthrow and kill his father.
Reasons for these particular sons to
murder this particular father are heavily
weighted by the author—Fyodor Pavlovitch
Karamazov is the most negligent of fathers
and a thoroughly repulsive character. Dmitri
considers he has cheated him out of his
inheritance and is wildly jealous because he
is attempting to steal the woman he loves.
Ivan’s intellectual atheism results in the
stifling of his conscience, especially where it
concerns getting rid of his father, and leads
to his eventual mental breakdown. Only
Alexey’s unswerving belief in God and the
essential goodness of man prevents him
from wishing to take revenge for his father’s
cruel treatment of his mentally fragile
mother.
If we examine Dostoyevsky’s own history,
it is clear that many of the themes,
situations and characters in the book are
drawn from experience. His father was a
cruel and merciless master to his serfs, by
whom he was eventually murdered.
Dostoyevsky draws on his personal
experience of epilepsy in order to describe
Smerdyakov’s medical condition. The story
of the death of Grigory and Marfa’s infant child echoes the tragic early deaths of two
of his own children. Ivan’s resistance to
belief in God reflects Dostoyevsky’s
tormented struggle with his religious
doubts, whilst Alexey’s unshakeable faith
represents the calm assurance he wished to
achieve.
But in the end, attempts to draw
analogies with Dostoyevsky’s own
experience are of limited value because, as
with every great artist, the author’s
achievement is to have used the raw
material of life to create an enduring work
of art. The Brothers Karamazov is such a
work, one which transcends the limitations
of skilful storytelling to become a universal
representation of the human struggle, a
compassionate study of man’s battle with
his baser instincts, and his courageous
attempts, frequently doomed to failure, to
grow upwards, out of the darkness and into
the light.
Notes by Neville Jason
The music on this recording is taken from the NAXOS catalogue
SCRIABIN Symphonic Poem in D Minor
8.553581
Moscow Symphony Orchestra / Igor Golovschin
SCRIABIN Symphony No. 2 in C minor
8.553581
Moscow Symphony Orchestra / Igor Golovschin
SCRIABIN Symphony No. 1 Op 26
8.553580
Moscow Symphony Orchestra / Igor Golovschin
BORODIN Symphony No. 3 in A minor
8.550238
CSR Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava) / Stephen Gunzenhauser
SCRIABIN Piano Concerto / Prometheus
8.550818
Konstantin Scherbakov, Piano / Russian State TV and Radio Choir
Moscow Symphony Orchestra / Igor Golovschin
KALINNIKOV Symphony No. 2 in A major
8.553417
National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine / Theodore Kuchar
Music programmed by Sarah Butcher
