Book #9: The Brothers Karamazov

It’s commencement season, which means that pretty much every day there’s another picture of a celebrity or a dignitary getting a fake diploma and giving a speech. One day I hope to do something that gets me invited to speak at a graduation, even if it’s just a preschool graduation. I’m not picky.

Well, I had a graduation of sorts this week, but there were no fancy speakers for me. For the past seven weeks, I have been dutifully attending two classes at Emory at night. Not real classes, but personal enrichment or continuing ed or whatever they call it when nerds want to go back to school but not so badly that they go to graduate school. One of my classes was Introduction to Pilates, and the other was a literature class on “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The classes just came to a close, but rather than a diploma, I get slightly more toned abs and the satisfaction of having read a literary masterpiece. In this blog, I intend to discuss the latter.

Though I have made my way through epic Tolstoy books, reading Dostoevsky has always intimidated me, I guess because I see him as so much darker and twisty than Tolstoy. So I was very eager to take this class to be guided through the process. If you wonder why I haven’t blogged terribly much lately, it’s because reading such a long book in seven weeks takes up a lot of your spare time. Still, the class definitely helped me notice some things that I don’t know that I would have noticed otherwise.

This book, as you might guess, is about a family named Karamazov. The dad, Fyodor, is a real asshole. He has four sons by three women, if you count the son that is illegitimate and never fully claimed by Fyodor, which most people do. That illegitimate son was born to a mentally handicapped homeless woman who died after giving birth, which should tell you something about this guy’s character.

If you could made a line graph of the human psyche, with one side representing enlightenment and the other side representing meanness, with various degrees of selfishness and hopefulness in the middle, then each of the brothers would fall in various places. The “good” one is Alyosha, and our class spent a lot of time discussing him because the professor believed that he was the model by which people should strive to live their lives. He lives his best life, to borrow a term from Oprah, because he doesn’t judge, he doesn’t covet and he doesn’t destroy himself the way the others do. The rest are too blinded by their desires and their shortcomings.

We spent a lot of time discussing ego vs. real self, with real self being a somewhat perfect state of grace in which life could be peaceful, creative and whole, and the ego being seduced by illusions, alienation, fear, guilt and manipulation. I hesitate to write too much more about it, though, because I got the sense that this was the basis for our professor’s next book. I don’t want to get sued. The last time I wrote a book review the author commented on the blog, after all. While Dostoevsky might be dead, my professor isn't.

During the class, the professor kept talking so seriously about “good literature,” with the type of conviction that makes you believe good literature is so amazing and transformative that it could make a person give birth to a duck. Therefore, we spent a lot of time discussing what lessons Dostoevsky was trying to teach through his “good literature.” Still, for all our lectures on philosophy, psychology and religion, and the external vs. the internal, and morality and free will, and the nature of transformation, and everything else in the world that is “heavy,” this is a very enjoyable, readable book. As one of my classmates said, it reads like a soap opera, what with its love triangles, its murders and its poignant deathbed scenes.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and even though I was skeptical of my professor sometimes, I think it did make me into a better person, or at least one who notices more often which way the path to better personhood is pointed. In conclusion, I am glad I read this book in a class that was just for fun, as opposed to a class where I might have actually had to write a paper on it, because just writing this non-complex blog entry made my head hurt.