The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)

We have one guy in our family Book Club that always requests a classic Russian tome, and his books almost never get selected. War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Idiot—actually that last one did get selected way back in 2018!

The Brothers Karamazov was a shocking selection this year, though, especially considering how several members implied they couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. It’s been around for 146 years now—43 of those mine—so I figured I could wait a bit longer. After reading 85 pages (or roughly the first 5% of the book), I now know I can.

Note: this post includes Amazon affiliate links.

Brief Summary of The Brother Karamazov

Of course, it’s possible that I butcher this summary, since I chose not to finish the book. And if you struggle with on principle with someone reviewing a book he hasn’t finished, there’s precedent. For insight into the liberties I take in my reading, check out Lit! by Tony Reinke (2011).

The Brothers Karamazov follows the psychological and spiritual struggles of three brothers, each of whom responds quite differently to family trials in Czarist Russia. I knew this much going in, and even then, my appetite had not yet been whetted. Watching it unfold in real, dragging time dried me out even more.

Why I Chose Not to Continue

Drama isn’t my first choice when it comes to fiction genres, so that was an initial mark against. I generally don’t mind theological, political, or even social discussion in fiction, but I prefer it to be braced by action—or at least by the promise of some mental resolution. I couldn’t appreciate the ‘action’ in these first 85 pages, and ‘resolution’ was hard to imagine with 95% of the same plodding dialogue still to go.

I also fare much better when such discussions stem from a location, time period, culture, or spiritual worldview I share. The Book of Job, for example, offers a similar type of discourse between men, yet I connected with that because I share it worldview (and, of course, because it’s God’s Word!). Wealthy, Orthodox brothers in 19th-century Czarist Russia check none of those boxes for me—except that they’re men. That’s just not enough to draw me in.

Perhaps I didn’t give it enough time, but I also had no love yet for any of the characters. They were about as cold and rigid as I expected Russian characters to be, and I didn’t see myself warming up to the them in due time. I’m ok with family drama, like we get in the Pearl S. Buck’s Kinfolk (1949)—and I don’t mind reading about the plight of peasants, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s phenomenal One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). But characters can’t be wooden, and that’s the sense I got in the few pages I read here.

Reading Simultaneously with The Fixer

It was strange that I chose to read Karamazov while reading another fascinating (and much shorter) book about Russia history, Bernard Malamud’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Fixer (1966). Perhaps that choice was unfair to Dostoevsky, since it forced a comparison, but I found Malamud having the same type of existential debates through philosophy and theology that Dostoevsky had, yet in like 1/5 of the space! It was eminently readable.

The Fixer contained the requisite amount of action to keep me engaged, and it couched its debates in drama I felt invested in as a reader—and I’m neither Jewish nor Russian, and I’m also neither poor nor persecuted! Still, he drew me in and kept me so well that I longed for resolution, and I was willing to wade through the muck and lice and frozen turds of prison to get there.

It’s not worth creating a whole separate section for favorite lines, so I’ll just share two that I enjoyed from my short foray into The Brothers Karamazov:

It has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity. (70)

These are the people we are most afraid of. They are dreadful people. The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist. (84)

Conclusion

I’m sure this book remains popular for a reason—and I hope that it’s because people enjoy reading The Brothers Karamazov more than they love having read The Brothers Karamazov. It’s this distinction, honestly, that keeps me from reading most “classics”—and I venture to guess that it’s also a lack of this distinction that peppers the Amazon reviews with 5 stars.

Quitting on page 85 was wise for me, because looking ahead to 1,663 pages of this same Russian drama filled me with misery…like looking into the depths of a long, dark Siberian winter, where only the occasional flicker of a candle would give me light and warmth.

Kudos to you if you’ve read and enjoyed this book. And extra kudos if you’ve got good reason to harass me because I didn’t. Finishing this book is just not how I want to spend my time.

©2026 E.T.

Want more reviews? Get Elliot’s Weekly Digest.