As I mentioned a couple of months back, I started re-reading The Brothers Karamazov for the first time since I took Robert Jackson's course of Dostoieveskii and Tolstoi in 1985. I started, and then I put it down and read something else (Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree [currently paused] and also a mystery novel by Elizabeth George).
I must confess that the Dostoievskii is rough going. I remember this book as really being his crowning achievement, but I am frustrated by the inability of any of his characters to have a conversation which doesn't plumb some corner of the depths of the human soul, and also by the relatively unmotivatedness of so much of their behavior and beliefs. I get that Fiodor Mikhailovich was taking the novel in a completely new direction, he was trailblazing into the human psyche and the novel itself, no mean feat. But what the actual fuck? I could use a sunrise, or a tree, or a description of a meal, or a horse galloping, a little something. Man does not live by flashing eyes and soul bearing alone.
Mikhail Bakhtin, in his highly influential Problems of Dostoievskii's Poetics, puts forth the theory that Dostoievskii ushers in a new era in the novel by virtue of what he called "polyphony," the fact that many of the author's characters have full-fledged, distinctive voices that compete for and sometimes overwhelm the authority of the author: we don't know who is right, what to believe. I'm actually not feeling that. I think that all the characters sound much too much the same. Obviously Zosima is an exception, and by extention Alyosha, but we really don't hear that much from them.
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