{"id":140661,"date":"2025-10-21T08:01:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T12:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=140661"},"modified":"2025-10-21T19:03:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T23:03:07","slug":"dostoebsky-and-the-light-of-the-brothers-karamazov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=140661","title":{"rendered":"(New Yorker) Karl Ove Knausgaard–Dostoevsky and the Light of \u201cThe Brothers Karamazov\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fyodor Dostoyevsky began to write what would become his last novel, \u201cThe Brothers Karamazov<\/a>,\u201d in 1878. It was published in serial installments in the magazine\u00a0Russkiy Vestnik<\/em>\u00a0from 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, \u201cHe 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!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one could claim that \u201cThe Brothers Karamazov\u201d is polished, or even beautifully written\u2014it is characteristic of Dostoyevsky\u2019s style that everything is desperately urgent and seems to burst forth, and that the details don\u2019t 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\u2014the reader must be kept in a state of suspense until the next installment\u2014runs against something else, something heavier and slower, a patiently insistent question that is related to everything that is happening: What are we living for?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On May 16, 1878, just months before Dostoyevsky began writing \u201cThe Brothers Karamazov\u201d in earnest, his son Alyosha died following an epileptic fit that lasted for hours. He would have turned three that summer. Dostoyevsky \u201cloved Lyosha somehow in a very special way, with an almost morbid love, as if sensing that he would not have him for long,\u201d Anna wrote later. When his son stopped breathing, Dostoyevsky \u201ckissed him, made the sign of the cross over him three times,\u201d and broke down in tears. He was crushed with grief, Anna wrote, and with guilt\u2014his 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\u2014the starets\u2014Ambrose. \u201cWeep and be not consoled, but weep,\u201d he said to Dostoyevsky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this made its way into \u201cThe Brothers Karamazov.\u201d The protagonist bears the name of Dostoyevsky\u2019s son Alyosha and many of Solovyov\u2019s traits. The monastery is central to the story, and its elder\u2014named Zosima in the novel\u2014comforts 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>

\u201cThe Brothers Karamazov\u201d asks what we are living for, and it \u201cseeks the answer in the little life, among the small people, in the frail, the fragile, the fallible, the failed,\u201d Karl Ove Knausgaard writes. https:\/\/t.co\/llTCBZ9rHR<\/a><\/p>— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) October 21, 2025<\/a><\/blockquote>