I love this book so much. If anyone here attempts to read I’ll only say this much - the second quarter of the book (25% to 50%) can be a bit of a slog, but after that it becomes hard to put down. The sense of urgency in the story won’t allow you to.
This book is also notable for me in that I fundamentally disagree with one of the author’s main idea - that humans need religion as a source of morality. At least, that’s how I interpreted Ivan’s fate - he went mad trying to make sense of the world without God, purely through a rational lens. This disagreement with the author doesn’t matter to me though, because the book is a work of art. That much was clear to me, even as I was turning the pages for the first time. The vitality and detail of each of the characters, especially Dmitri - only a great artist could do that.
I also wonder how Dostoevsky would have felt, if he had written his book 150 years later. While our world was far from perfect, it is far from the universal misery of Tsarist Russia, where serfs starved to death. I feel like you can’t make sense of life in those circumstances with religion explaining why there’s so much pain in the world, so I understand where he was coming from. But would he still have felt the same even if life was substantially better for most people?
Lastly, if anyone can explain to me - why do they call Agrafena Alexandrovna Grushenka? Is this a standard nickname for Agrafena, like Alyosha is for Alexei? I feel like everyone in the novel just took the name for granted, like it was normal to call someone a little pear.
> This book is also notable for me in that I fundamentally disagree with one of the author’s main idea - that humans need religion as a source of morality.
I think in Dostoyevsky's world it's not just religion that is necessary but specifically God: "If there is no God, everything is permitted". Which is a different question, e.g. I agree with you on the part where one can get by without God, but I also think that religion is necessary in a sense that any set of beliefs complex enough to guide you through life is indistinguishable from one.
> Lastly, if anyone can explain to me - why do they call Agrafena Alexandrovna Grushenka? Is this a standard nickname for Agrafena, like Alyosha is for Alexei? I feel like everyone in the novel just took the name for granted, like it was normal to call someone a little pear.
Apparently so, it's hard to tell for sure because the name had completely fallen out of fashion. I was about to write you that I never met anyone who come by that name, however I started reading about it and was quite surprised to learn that Grunya is another short name for Agrafena and one of my great-grandmothers had that name. Never heard anyone call her Grushenka though.
I see where Dostoevsky was coming from. God and religion helped him process the grief of losing his little boy. I cannot possibly speak about how I’d process grief like that.
I feel like I have a set of principles that boils down to “treat people how you would want to be treated”. But those principles don’t cover situations like the one Dostoevsky or his characters found themselves in.
This is a fundamentally gentler world than the one he lived in. Maybe in this world we can rely on the State preventing situations where “Everything is permitted”, as Ivan was worried about. Maybe people aren’t as desperate as the people were in Tsarist Russia. They’re not exposed to as much violence, and so don’t feel compelled to commit that themselves.
I don't think that the State can somehow solve or sidestep the morality problem. The laws of the state are the consequence of beliefs and culture of the citizens (or the elites), not the other way round. Everyone needs to be able tell good from evil in their daily lives, this process can be partly codified in laws but then neither the laws cover it all nor do they work if people don't believe in law.
In that sense very little had changed since Dostoyevsky's time. Or since Homer's time for that matter.
I see where you’re coming from - the state is just the will of the people.
From my perspective, the State’s capacity to enforce the will of the people has improved dramatically. People both then and now would have wanted no indentured servitude, no starvation, better healthcare, safety from violence and so on.
But governments can actually deliver on most of those to a reasonable degree now. In that sense “everything is permitted” is limited by what the state will allow you to get away with. Is murder permitted? Yeah, but you’re probably getting caught. Is littering permitted? Same. We don’t need a belief in God to prevent people from committing crimes against their fellows. Less violence, less starvation, fewer children dying.
People haven’t become better, but the world has become gentler. Whether a person believes “everything is permitted” or not, there’s a lot less permitted now than back then. A simple morality of “I’ll follow the laws of society”, which you have to do anyway, is probably good enough to make a stable society.
On some level, this makes the Brothers Karamazov feel a bit less timeless. It feels like those difficult questions Ivan was grappling with aren’t eternal, just a problem of the circumstances he was living in. If he lived in 2025 he’d probably just be an atheist and he wouldn’t lose his mind over it. It doesn’t matter to me thought, the book is still a masterpiece.
Thank you for discussing this with me. This book is a bit niche so I can’t remember the last time I got to discuss it with someone.
The edition of Crime and Punishment that I read had an appendix with a detailed character listing mapping characters to their nicknames (and giving an overview of their relationships also I think): I was so grateful for that.
I am bad at tracking things like character's surnames already when books call people by different names, I probably wouldn't have been able to enjoy the book as much as I did without this help.
This book is also notable for me in that I fundamentally disagree with one of the author’s main idea - that humans need religion as a source of morality. At least, that’s how I interpreted Ivan’s fate - he went mad trying to make sense of the world without God, purely through a rational lens. This disagreement with the author doesn’t matter to me though, because the book is a work of art. That much was clear to me, even as I was turning the pages for the first time. The vitality and detail of each of the characters, especially Dmitri - only a great artist could do that.
I also wonder how Dostoevsky would have felt, if he had written his book 150 years later. While our world was far from perfect, it is far from the universal misery of Tsarist Russia, where serfs starved to death. I feel like you can’t make sense of life in those circumstances with religion explaining why there’s so much pain in the world, so I understand where he was coming from. But would he still have felt the same even if life was substantially better for most people?
Lastly, if anyone can explain to me - why do they call Agrafena Alexandrovna Grushenka? Is this a standard nickname for Agrafena, like Alyosha is for Alexei? I feel like everyone in the novel just took the name for granted, like it was normal to call someone a little pear.