I think your average American teenager today might find this heavy duty book from 1880's Russia pretty hard to get through. At least I would have had trouble with the concentration it takes to read it; I was more into romance and not religious drama. Yet this book is categorized as children's literature. Amazing. Have any of you studied this book in high school English? Email me if you have!

Some chapters are purely intense dialogue, others have none at all. Satan is all over this book discussing evil with a Karamazov brother and as a Spanish Inquisitor. The father is murdered, you see, which sets the stage for evil mayhem as the murderer is sought for justice. It is more than a simple murder mystery, though, for issues of God and forgiveness and salvation demand the presence of our soul. You will read of fighting over a wh*re between father and son, another son expressing love for a woman, the youngest torn apart by a beloved priest's death, the oldest put on trial for his father's murder. It is markedly a story of bitter family rivalry that will sweep over you with its complicated emotions in both the characters and you that demands a response.

Brothers Karamazov makes for a rather dark, sensuous novel of people fighting their human nature and destiny, but the mesmerizing ending shimmers with hope. I include here a sample of cynical dialogue from one of the Karamazov brothers:

I am that insect, brother, and it is said of me specially. All we
Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives
in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles...Yes, man is broad, too broad, indeed. I'd have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man...

If you have the time and desire to expand your mind, this is your book. Truly a masterpiece of writing. I was enthralled by the in-depth description that puts you right there in Russia. I loved the unique, explosive characters and how they played off each other because they knew each other, or thought they did. The three brothers are not the Brothers Grim, not a fairy tale, and not for children. While there is no explicit description of sex or foul language, the content is about sexual matters and if man can rise above his passions that lead to murder and other shady affairs.

Dostoyevsky also wrote Crime and Punishment, which doesn't get the raves like this one. Tolstoy, another Russian author of the same period, wrote the very long War and Peace, which does get raves. Of the three, I would recommend The Brothers Karamazov to mature readers. You will be taken back in time to Russia before the Revolution in the early twentieth century when God was feared and men took care of women. If you only like reading about strong women who tell men what to do, you probably will break out in a sweat reading this, but if you can enjoy immersion into a different culture and age, then you should definitely check this novel out.

Recommended: Yes