His last few years, in spite of the fatal illness which would shortly overtake him at the age of fifty-nine, were probably the most stable and relaxed period of Dostoevsky’s life, and the notebooks for this novel are the most coherent. He had married Anna Grigorevna, his second wife, in 1867, having employed her in a crisis to take down The Gambler in shorthand as he composed it. Thanks to her good housekeeping his financial affairs were in order for the first time in his life. The greater part of the book was written at Staraia Russa, a provincial town about a hundred and fifty miles south-east of St Petersburg, where the Dostoevskys bought a house in 1877, and the novel was completed at Bad Ems, a German spa near Koblenz, to which Dostoevsky repaired from time to time for health reasons. In the summer of 1880 he had been hailed as a great contemporary prophet by representatives of the warring factions in the Russian intelligentsia on the occasion of his famous ‘Pushkin Speech’, delivered to mark the unveiling of the Pushkin statue in Moscow. Moreover he was now persona grata in government and court circles. He was on good personal terms with Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the reactionary and increasingly influential Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, and corresponded with him about the religious aspects of The Brothers Karamazov. Moreover the Emperor had asked him to act as spiritual guide to his younger sons. Still, tragedy haunted him. In May 1878 his little boy Aleksei died and he made a pilgrimage in the company of the young philosopher Vladimir Solovyov to the monastery of Optina Pustyn. Both these events had a profound effect on the writing of the novel.
If Dostoevsky’s last days saw increasing acceptance and respectability, it had not always been so. His life story seems to swing backwards and forwards between extremes. His introduction to the great critic Belinsky and the literary circles of St Petersburg in the mid-1840s had, owing to the success of his first novel Poor Folk, momentarily turned his head. But hubris invited nemesis: his flirtation with groups of Utopian socialists in St Petersburg at the end of the decade led to his arrest, a death-sentence, the commuting of the sentence at the place of execution and eight years in Siberia.
The sixties and seventies, after his return to St Petersburg from exile, did indeed see his transformation into the great European novelist we know, with the publication of Notes from Underground (18(14), Crime, and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1808), and The Possessed (1871). But the price in personal terms was considerable. These years also saw him racked by illness, with increasingly severe epileptic fits, by a gambling obsession and consequent debts, which he only began to get on top of with his wife’s help in the 1870s. Indeed the tormented character of the novels themselves is evidence enough of his state of mind.
All Dostoevsky’s major novels turn on murder. The Brothers Karamazov is exceptional in this respect only in the nature of the murder, parricide. In spite of the assurance in ‘From the author’ that the hero of the novel is Alyosha, the main story line is about his brother Dmitri who has the motive, the means and the opportunity to kill his father and is deeply incriminated by circumstantial evidence. Many readers, when the book first came out in serial form, were held in suspense month by month wondering if he would do it, if he had done it, whether he would be convicted and if so whether he would escape. And this narrative still grips the imagination.
In curious ways the theme of parricide haunted Dostoevsky all his life. As a boy he had been fascinated by Schiller’s play The Robbers. In 1838 he entered the Engineering Academy in St Petersburg, housed in the building where the Emperor Paul had been murdered, some believed with the collusion of the future Alexander I. In 1839 Dostoevsky’s father died, presumed murdered by his serfs, and though Dostoevsky certainly had no hand in it, and there is even doubt about whether it was murder at all, the point is that he always believed in the murder story and perhaps felt guilty about his absence at the time. Freud certainly associates this event with the working out of the Oedipus complex in Dostoevsky’s life and work, as also the metaphorical threat to the Tsar implicit in his association with the Utopian socialists in the forties, for which Dostoevsky accepted punishment in Siberia. Late in life he returned to The Robbers which he read to his young children and to which their are allusions in The Brothers Karamazov. Most important of all for the plot of the novel was an encounter in Siberia with a convict called Ilinsky, who served ten years for the murder of his father, before the real murderers confessed and he was exonerated. At the time of his trial he had denied all knowledge of the crime though the evidence was overwhelming. Dostoevsky was convinced of Ilinsky’s innocence after meeting him.
Yet in each case one is struck more by the fascination than by the reality, and in each there is a certain distance between Dostoevsky and the act of parricide. Either we are dealing with fiction ( The Robbers or George Sand’s Mauprat which also has striking parallels with the plot of Dostoevsky’s novel), or doubt and error (Alexander I seems not to have known about the intention of killing his father; Dostoevsky certainly had no hand in his father’s death, which may not even have been murder; he never had any intention of assassinating the Tsar; Ilinsky was actually innocent).
So it is with the novel. Guilt and guilt feelings vaguely motivate the action of all rather than focus on the one who physically committed the crime. Is there parricide at all? Assuming Dmitri did not commit the deed and Smerdyakov did: is Dmitri still in some sense morally culpable? Is Smerdyakov definitely Fyodor Karamazov’s son? Is not Ivan in some sense to blame? Is not even Alyosha guilty of dereliction? Is not everybody, in Zosima’s words, in some sense guilty for everything?
So we find ourselves drawn from our focus on the murder story to questions of moral responsibility and guilt, complicity and collusion. We also find ourselves drawn into Ivan Karamazov’s thinking about religion: is his rejection of God not a sort of religious parricide, a killing in his own mind of the Divine Father, reminding us of the nearly contemporaneous claim by Nietzsche that God is dead? Similarly we find ourselves thinking about whether Fyodor Karamazov brought his death upon himself, about his treatment of his wives and the Karamazov children, of innocent suffering (the source of Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion and the stories he gathers from the newspapers). The very nature of fatherhood is discussed at the trial itself, reflecting another of Dostoevsky’s long-term ambitions, to write a novel about children.
The reader who reads exclusively for the excitement of the story may of course become impatient with, or even skip, Books Five and Six. But for Dostoevsky they were the heart of the novel. Ivan’s rebellion against God and his ‘Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ have been widely read as an immensely powerful indictment of Christianity on the one hand and as a uniquely prescient analysis of totalitarianism on the other.