Choosing the Good: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky's saga of familial love and strife prompted this praise from Sigmund Freud, who called it, "the most magnificent novel ever written." Albert Einstein offered similar kudos, calling the novel "…the most wonderful book I have ever laid my hands on." The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1880, and set in provincial Russia, is the story of four brothers and their father. That story includes intra-familial sexual obsession and infidelity, financial dishonesty, murder and a court case. It also includes, on a higher plane, religious and philosophical inquiry into whether human happiness flows from strict obedience to absolute authority or from loving kindness nurtured by freedom. Freud's and Einstein's praises are for the volatile relation in the novel of its two planes—the earthy, sometimes squalid life of the body and the spiritual, sometimes tormented life of the soul. Sordid and sublime even merge, at times in this novel. The course is a group exploration, largely through discussion, of the relation of sordid and sublime reality in the book. The main focus is on how Dostoevsky, in this familial saga, heroically and tenderly presents the close struggle in the human heart between aspiration and spite and how he urgently and intimately dramatizes the moral struggle assailing any conscience trying to do good in the world.