The Map
Today I am mapping a novel that has more than ninety chapters.
What is The Brothers Karamazov about? A landowner nobody mourns, three sons who want different things from him, and a murder that lands about halfway through. This is a full summary of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, so it spoils everything, the ending included.
Most summaries stay in the plot. I am going to follow the plot and the clock. I counted how much page space each book gets, because the proportions say a lot about what this novel cares about.
Which Edition
I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number twenty-eight thousand and fifty-four, in the English translation by Constance Garnett. Its header gives the release date as February twelfth, two thousand nine. Every name here follows her spelling, so Dmitri is also Mitya, and Alexey is Alyosha.
By my count the story runs about three hundred and fifty thousand words. It has twelve books and an epilogue, in four parts, and ninety-six chapters in all. The murder comes in book eight, which is about half the text. The trial starts at about eighty-four percent. So this is a novel that spends its first half on the family and its last fifth on the trial, and in between it argues with itself.
A Family and a Quarrel
Book one is a family history, and it is short, five chapters and about twelve thousand words. The narrator introduces Alexey, the third son, and says his father died a gloomy and tragic death thirteen years before. Then he backs up.
Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov married twice. His first wife, Adelaida, left him, and his son Mitya, then three, was looked after by the servant Grigory and later taken in by a cousin of the mother’s. The second wife, Sofya, gave him Ivan and Alexey, and she died when Alexey was in his fourth year. Fyodor forgot the boys as well, and Grigory raised them too.
At the time of the story the sons are twenty-seven, twenty-four and twenty. Mitya is a hot-tempered former army officer who says his father cheated him out of his mother’s money. Ivan is the clever one, the thinker. Alyosha is a novice in the local monastery, devoted to its elder, Father Zossima.
The Unfortunate Gathering
Book two puts all of them in one room. To settle the quarrel between Fyodor and Dmitri, the family meets in Father Zossima’s cell. It goes badly. Fyodor plays the buffoon, Dmitri arrives late, and at the end the elder does something nobody can explain. He bows down to the floor at Dmitri’s feet.
That bow matters later. Alyosha’s acquaintance Rakitin tells him, right after, that a crime is coming in this family, and Alyosha admits he has thought so too.
Book three is where the triangle forms. Fyodor and Dmitri are both after the same woman, Grushenka. Mitya pours out his heart to Alyosha in three chapters called The Confession of a Passionate Heart. And we meet Smerdyakov, a servant in Fyodor’s house, and hear of Ivan’s idea that if there is no God and no immortality, everything is lawful.
Lacerations
Book four is a run of painful scenes for Alyosha, sent back and forth between the people his brothers have wounded. Father Zossima is dying. Alyosha meets the proud Katerina Ivanovna, Mitya’s former fiancee, and a gang of schoolboys at a bridge, the first glimpse of the boys who matter at the end.
This is also where Lise Hohlakov, a girl who teases him, and Alyosha agree to marry some day. Alyosha says he must marry if he leaves the monastery, and that his elder told him to.
Pro and Contra
Book five is the one everybody quotes. In a restaurant, Ivan tells Alyosha why he rejects the world God made. His case is the suffering of children, and I will not repeat the stories he lists. Then he tells a poem he invented.
In it, Christ returns to a sixteenth century city and is arrested by the Grand Inquisitor, a cardinal of almost ninety who says people cannot bear freedom and want miracle, mystery and authority instead. The prisoner says nothing and kisses the old man on the lips. The Inquisitor lets him go and tells him never to come back.
Alyosha answers by kissing Ivan. Ivan says he will leave town. Hold that, because the leaving matters.
The Elder
Book six is the life and teaching of Father Zossima, told as he is dying. I read the opening of it, and it is warm and plain, a dying man talking to the people he loves. Then, in book seven, he dies, and the town expects a miracle. Instead a smell of decay comes from the coffin, and Alyosha, who loved him, is badly shaken.
Rakitin leads him to Grushenka, expecting a fall. Instead she tells a story about a woman whose single good deed was giving away an onion. That night, at the coffin, Alyosha dreams the wedding at Cana, goes out, and kisses the earth. Within three days, as his elder had asked, he leaves the monastery.
Mitya’s Night
Books eight and nine are the plot at full speed. Mitya needs three thousand roubles, runs from one person to the next, and learns Grushenka has left for a village called Mokroe. He climbs the fence into his father’s garden. He taps the secret signal on the window. His father leans out, and a rush of hatred makes Mitya pull out a brass pestle.
Then old Grigory, awake against all odds, catches him at the fence. Mitya hits the old servant over the head with the pestle and runs. He reaches Mokroe, there is a night of feasting, and then the police walk in. Fyodor has been found dead in his room, his skull battered, an envelope for Grushenka torn open and empty. Mitya is arrested.
In the investigation he reveals a secret: half of Katerina’s three thousand, fifteen hundred roubles, he had sewn into a rag. The chapter title says it is received with hisses. After the questioning he dreams of a crying baby in a burnt village.
The Boys and the Visits
Book ten leaves the murder and spends seven chapters on a group of schoolboys around the dying Ilusha, with a boy named Kolya Krassotkin at the center. The reason for it comes back at the very end.
Book eleven returns to Ivan. He visits Smerdyakov three times. In the last, Smerdyakov says he killed Fyodor and that Ivan, by going away, gave him permission. He hands over the money and gives a full account. Ivan goes home and meets a visitor who is only in his mind, a devil. That same night Smerdyakov hangs himself and leaves a note saying he ended his life of his own will.
The Trial
Book twelve is the trial, fourteen chapters and the longest book in the novel, and I count about forty-six thousand words. Ivan stands up as a witness, lays the money before the judges and says Smerdyakov did it and he incited him. He has no proof, and a doctor tells the court he is on the edge of brain fever. Then Katerina produces a letter Mitya wrote in a tavern, which describes in advance how he would kill his father. She means to save Ivan, and it destroys Mitya.
The prosecutor and the defense lawyer each give a long speech. The jury is out for an hour and comes back with guilty on every question. Mitya swears he is innocent.
The Epilogue
The epilogue is three chapters. Ivan lies unconscious in a fever in Katerina’s house. She and Alyosha plan Mitya’s escape. Mitya, sentenced to twenty years of hard labor, is willing to go.
Katerina visits him in the hospital, and she and Grushenka meet. Then Ilusha dies, and the boys gather at the stone near his grave. Alyosha tells them to remember him, and to be kind. The book ends on the boys cheering.
My Counts and My Reading
Here are my counts, from the Garnett text. The name Alyosha appears about twelve hundred and forty times. Dmitri and Mitya together, about thirteen hundred. Ivan, about seven hundred. Smerdyakov, about three hundred and eighty. Father Zossima’s name, about a hundred, and he is gone by book seven.
This is my reading, and it is an opinion. The murder is the engine, but the book is about what each brother does with the idea of guilt, and the last page belongs to the boys, not the killer.
If this helped, subscribe, tap like, and tell me in the comments which brother you think carries the book.
