Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoeyevsky
New York: Airmont Publishing Co.
1879/1880 (1966)

Who killed Fyodor Karamazov? An old profligate, Fyodor Karamazov, is murdered and his eldest son is tried and convicted for the crime; all the sons of the Karamazov family, however, each in his own way, feels complicity and the need to atone for his part in the death of the old man. Their "punishment" is self-realization--the recognition of their father in themselves. By extension, the novel reveals the hostility of all sons to all fathers and all men to all imposed authority.

A sampling of quotations:
"AS a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose." p. 13.

"He completely abandoned the child of his marriage with [his first wife]... not from malice, not because of his matrimonial grievance, but simply because he forgot him." p. 13.

"Fyodor Pavlovitch was all his life fond of acting, of suddenly playing an unexpected part, sometimes without any motive for doing so, and even to his direct disadvantage." p. 14.

"At her [the second wife's] death, almost exactly the same thing happened to the two little boys as to their elder brother, Mitya..... completely forgotten and abandoned by their father." p. 17.

"There was something about him [Alyosha] which made one feel at once...that he did not care to be a judge of others--that he would never take it upon himself to criticize and would never condemn anyone for anything." p. 22.

"Though those young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices and that to sacrifice for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply ten-fold their powers of serving the truth...such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them." p. 28.

"...he [the elder named Zossima] had acquired the keenest intuition and could tell from an unknown face what a newcomer wanted, and what was the suffering on his conscience ... sometimes astounded and almost alarmed his visitors by his knowledge of their secrets before they had spoken a word." p. 30.

Fyodor: " But I have been lying...my whole life long, every day and hour of it...I am a lie and the father of lies." p. 44.

"You defile everything you touch." p. 45.

"Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more..... Such grief doesn't desire consolation...feeds on the sense of its hopelessness.... Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to reopen the wound." p. 47.

Etc.