The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov

A seventy-year-old doctor rises from the witness bench in a dusty provincial courtroom. A parricide trial is under way, the room is packed to the walls, and the ladies are waiting with their fans out for the sensation. The old doctor, though, does not want to talk about the evidence. He is German and never quite learned Russian properly, so every so often he stalls on some simple word and waves a hand in the air until it comes back to him. That is how he tells it, haltingly: twenty-three years earlier he saw a barefoot little boy in one of the yards. The boy's trousers were held up by a single remaining button. The doctor bought him a pound of nuts and taught him three German words: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. That was all that happened.

Years later the boy became a grown man, and one day he knocked on the doctor's door. He said the three words he had learned as a child, then added: you are the only person in my whole life who has ever given me a pound of nuts. The old doctor burst into tears. Now, in the courtroom, when he reaches this point, a man worn down to nothing cries out from the prisoner's dock: I am weeping even now, old German, I am weeping even now.

That man's name is Dmitri Karamazov. In a few hours he will be sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in Siberia for a murder he did not commit. And the novel that contains God, freedom, the Inquisition, a corpse and the conscience of an entire country is, in the end, about what that pound of nuts is worth.

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel asks three questions and dodges none of them. Can a person be good if there is no God? Who is responsible when somebody else kills? And what holds a person up once all of their arguments have run out? The answers do not arrive as an essay. They arrive as the story of a family that has fallen apart, where four sons are responsible in four different ways for the death of the same father.