Resumo de The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880), is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons ? the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha ? are all at some level involved. Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disastrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the author's most cherished causes and beliefs are presented with a note of irreverence, so that orthodoxy and radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrong are no longer mutually exclusive. Rebecca West considered it "the allegory for the world's maturity, but with children to the fore." This new translation does full justice to Dostoevsky's genius, particularly in the use of the spoken word, which ranges over every mode of human expression.

In Dostoevsky's final novel, the three sons of Fyodor Karamazov may be seen to embody various aspects of the human condition: the sensual (Dmitri), the intellectual (Ivan), and the spiritual (Alexey or "Alyosha"). The two older brothers vie for the love of several women, Alyosha becomes the student of a famous elder of the Orthodox Church. Dmitri is tried for the violent murder of their father (Freud LOVED this book), Ivan discusses the nature of justice and forgiveness with Alyosha in the famous "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor." It's hard to believe this roiling, turbulent masterpiece of psychological realism could have been nothing more than a prologue; had Dostoevsky not died a year after it was published, he might have realized his plan to write a trilogy about the adult life and trials of Alyosha.

Reading THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a journey through the human soul with no signposts along the way. To stay on the path requres firm reason, so we think, but when the signs fall down, we are left only with faith to guide our way. Dostoevsky well understood the limitations of reason as an infallible guide in maintaining our human institutions of family and justice. The Karamazov family is the living symbol of a family and a society that runs only inefficiently at best and malicioucly at worst.

Each member of the Karamazov family is a distinct character type, with each type hiding a series of conflicting and mutually exclusive traits. From the first few pages, we can see that in this clan at least the cement that binds the family is not based on just reason, nor on a sustaining faith that there is a divine guiding principle hovering above everyone, but upon a rigid but flawed reason that dictates that the patriarch must be right in all matters. Later, reason again is assailed in the court trial of Dmitri when reason points to him as the killer of his father, but the true murderer escapes legal justice only to punish himself with suicide, a form of divine justice.

Fyodor Karamazov is nobody's idea of a caring and nurturing patriarch. He is a caricature of a gross, insensitive, control freak who sees no reason why he should not be a sexual libertine as well. But he is the family head, and in the Russian culture of the era, that made him the unquestioned leader. His three sons are conflicting and confusing complexes of a life suffered under Fyodor's cruel hand. Dmitri, the eldest, sees clearly his father's faults, while acknowledging that he himself has inherited some of his vilest ones, yet he also knows that within himself is a counterbalancing core of goodness. Ivan, the middle son, is the poet/seer/intellectual of the family. Although he has no direct role in his father's murder, he cannot absolve himself of at least moral culpabilDostoevski chooses Ivan to be in the fugue Grand Inquisitor scene to stand trial with only Ivan and his personal devils in court. And there is the youngest, Alyosha, one who is good, noble, and trusting. It is only Alyosha who is capable of allowing faith to triumph over reason.

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