Tuesday, March 5, 2013

The Brothers Karamazov

For two months now, my book club has been reading "The Brothers Karamazov" by Dostoyevsky. I am quite happy to have finished all 700 pages, but it was not all happy reading. Certainly, the whole point of free will is that man can choose which master he will serve. While anyone can attempt to fool the world with intelligent speeches and lofty philosophies, our integrity is what we are like when no one else is looking/listening. Overally, I really enjoyed this powerful apologetic by a clear-eyed religious man. As narrator, Dostoyevsky manages to illumine both sides of the drama -- over faith, reason, loyalty, family, ethics, and love. (I loved the irony of "The Grand Inquisitor" best of all.) Actually, the worries of "modern" Russians in 1880 were not that much different from my "post-modern" peers in 2013.

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