Fyodor Dostoyevsky began to write what would become his last novel, “The Brothers Karamazov,” in 1878. It was published in serial installments in the magazine Russkiy Vestnik from January, 1879, to November, 1880. Dostoyevsky had a deadline to meet every month, and his wife, Anna, later complained about the pressure he was always working under. Unlike many other contemporary writers, such as Tolstoy or Turgenev, who were well off, Dostoyevsky lived by his writing and struggled throughout his life to earn enough money. If not for this, Anna wrote, in her memoirs, after his death, “He could have gone carefully through [his works], polishing them, before letting them appear in print; and one can imagine how much they would have gained in beauty. Indeed, until the very end of his life Fyodor Mikhailovich had not written a single novel with which he was satisfied himself; and the cause of this was our debts!”
No one could claim that “The Brothers Karamazov” is polished, or even beautifully written—it is characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s style that everything is desperately urgent and seems to burst forth, and that the details don’t much matter. Reckless and intense: we are headed straight to the point of the matter, and there is no time. This urgency, this wildness, the seeming unruliness of his style, which is echoed in the many abrupt twists and turns in the action toward the end of the chapters—the reader must be kept in a state of suspense until the next installment—runs against something else, something heavier and slower, a patiently insistent question that is related to everything that is happening: What are we living for?
On May 16, 1878, just months before Dostoyevsky began writing “The Brothers Karamazov” in earnest, his son Alyosha died following an epileptic fit that lasted for hours. He would have turned three that summer. Dostoyevsky “loved Lyosha somehow in a very special way, with an almost morbid love, as if sensing that he would not have him for long,” Anna wrote later. When his son stopped breathing, Dostoyevsky “kissed him, made the sign of the cross over him three times,” and broke down in tears. He was crushed with grief, Anna wrote, and with guilt—his son had inherited epilepsy from him. Outwardly, however, he was soon calm and collected; she was the one who wept and wept. Gradually, she grew worried that his suppression of grief would have a negative impact on his already fragile health, and she suggested that he visit the Optina Pustyn monastery with a young friend, the theological wunderkind Vladimir Solovyov. There they met the elder of the monastery—the starets—Ambrose. “Weep and be not consoled, but weep,” he said to Dostoyevsky.
All of this made its way into “The Brothers Karamazov.” The protagonist bears the name of Dostoyevsky’s son Alyosha and many of Solovyov’s traits. The monastery is central to the story, and its elder—named Zosima in the novel—comforts a woman who has lost her child, aged two years and nine months, with words that echo those uttered by Ambrose. But more important to the story than the autobiographical details, which in any case are swallowed up by the vortex of fiction, is the devastating loss of meaning that accompanies the death of a child.
Read it all.
