The Brothers Karamazov
And, his final novel, his magnum opus— The Brothers Karamazov, branches out new senses and intellectual capacities like an energetic sprout in your mind.
This book is deeply philosophical. But, like novels of the later period, like Remembrance of Things Past, the author is not living the philosophy (existentialism in the aforementioned case), but explains it in detail in the author's voice. Let me enumerate the ideas being covered: Christianity and related concepts of sins, soul, free will, and kindness, psychology, law and jurisprudence, and life through his infinite lenses.
He is, in a sense, the sincerest novelist I have encountered. Ivan is one of the most powerful atheist characters I have ever read of, that too, in a novel about Christianity.
The first part is deeply about Christianity, or, to be specific, Dostoevsky's interpretation of Eastern Orthodoxy. In his mind, suffering and joy are intertwined, as if one joyfully suffers in a feast of suffering.
In the chapter The Grand Inquisitor, we see a battle between absolute submission and relative comfort (championed by the Grand Inquisitor) and free will and suffering (by Jesus). Only to see that Jesus' silence wins over the argument (not in the mind of Ivan, though), by the very act of coming back silently to suffer in his free will.
While The Grand Inquisitor remains the most intense of all chapters in the novel, the ultimate and deeper question posed at the end of the book is the nature of crime.
Dimitri didn't kill his father. He merely wanted to kill him, for very real reasons, but never attempted it. Ivan wanted to get rid of his father, deep down, without making his hands dirty, of course, being an intelligent man. But all brothers, including Alyosha, never really liked their father, and if not killing him directly, would've found the world a better place without him.
If you accuse Ivan of his deadly despise, well… all the brothers are guilty of that. Yet, none was guilty enough, not because of the lack of action, not because of how they were brought up, leaving them less guilty, but because they never really wanted to profit from the murder. Yet, they bear guilt too, in their soul, for the flick of moments they despised their father.
But, Smerdyakov, the vile and the crook, and the veritable villain to the core of his heart, is really a complete villain. He has every reason to despise the old man, and probably more than the legitimate children. Cannot his bright future really be traded against the person who is not only the reason for his sufferings, but is also completely oblivious to that and bears no regrets and three thousand roubles?
This whole courtroom drama poses a serious battle between the modern jurisprudence that was being slowly established instead of the old legal codes,[1] in Russia. He questioned the very basics of what is a crime, and to what degree, the fine lines between intentions, impulses, and actions. He questioned why we should be punished or not.
Like a true philosopher, who is aware of the insignificance of our knowledge by far, Dostoevsky never gave any solution, but asked such really important questions, and asked how! As if, just like Socrates, he also wants an unassuming general reader to slowly work out the answer in the depths of his mind.
Modern law is more holistic and corrective instead of vindictive, put succinctly. ↩︎