It occurred to me as I was reading The Brothers Karamazov that I should write down some of my thoughts so I don’t forget them, not in the grocery list sense of writing things down, but in the sense that committing thoughts to paper can make them clearer. There are so many things going on in this novel that I don’t want to forget, that I don’t want to place in some boxes of theme or characterization for the sake of making categories.

So I told myself that I would stop from time to time and write during the course of my reading. And of course I didn’t. But then I got to the last page, and the beautiful image of Alyosha and the boys holding hands, their backs turned to the novel’s camera, having made their vows to one another to remember Ilyushechka, to remember the ways he changed from the angry, alienated boy who felt he had to fight everyone to recapture the honor of his father to a boy not unlike Zosima’s brother, dispenser of a kind of wisdom that might be the province only of those Russian boys who see in the promise of death almost a respite from the harshness of Russian life. My visual acuity is something of a joke – I can’t see anything that’s not literally there – but for some reason, this final image made a lasting visual impression for me.

So here are a few things I want to get at in the next few posts, assuming I’ve rehabilitated myself from my abysmal record of the last two years.

First and most important: the beauty of Alyosha’s characterization, the homilies and details of Zosima’s life, which influenced him so profoundly, the way Alyosha’s obedience lead him to Kolya Krasotkin and his wondrous character.

The question of Ivan Fyodorovich, the primary dialectic in the novel. This will be a toughie, what with the questions of God’s existence, and the uncertainty of the character himself about the positions he’s staked out. The Grand Inquisitor and The Devil can exist each as their own short stories. This might also be a place for a comparison between the Elder Zosima and Father Ferapont, and the difference between a faith in which one gives oneself to the world God created and a faith in which one gives oneself to the concept of God.

And then there’s probably a different post about the presence of BK’s dialectics in other literature I’ve read, most specifically between Ivan’s observations about virtue and Zosima’s observations about the possibilities as they exist in Septimus, from Mrs. Dalloway, and the tension between the platonic heart of Alyosha and the sensualism of Fyodor Pavlovich as it exists in Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, which you really should read if you like really, really funny writers.

Lastly, it might be interesting to look at the confused arguments of the prosecution and the defense in the trial of Dmitri Fyodorovich. As a Law & Order junkie, I had to put aside my evidence-based concept of jurisprudence and look at the trial as if I were looking at a nation that had yet to reconcile its past with its present. Pevear and Volokhonsky’s notes make it clear that Dostoevsky was very critical of those who bought credulously into every new idea (the opportunist Rakitin?). It’s a useful thing to think about as we’re confronted with dual messages about change in the presidential election, and it’s also interesting in light of the first major work I’ll use with my AP class this year, Oedipus Rex, also written to dramatize the problems of reconciling different generations in a time of “progress.” But maybe I’ve already said all I have to say about that, and all I could add is a summary of Ippolit Kirillovich’s impassioned circumstantial “novel,” and the evidence-based argument of Fetyukovich that just couldn’t withstand the final undermining piece about Dmitri’s possible guilt.

So there’s the plan. Who knows if it will be executed?