As I mentioned earlier (1), my first taste of The Brothers Karamazov came more than six decades ago. I swallowed that jumbo novel in big bites, dazzled by Dostoevsky’s grasp of psychology and religion, not to mention his way of dissecting the Russian soul of his time. And the multiple tendrils of his story kept me on high alert.

            It was a book that demanded to be read again. I skimmed through it a couple of years later when I was a first year medical student, but it was a cursory read, not fully satisfying. After that the years stretched out busily, keeping me otherwise engaged up to the time when I no longer received a regular pay check. As I eased into retirement, I picked up a newer translation of Dostoevsky’s finest, but that volume was outranked by other interests at the time, so it was wedged into a lower shelf where it languished for years. I discovered it a few months ago and finally promoted it to a place beside my reading chair.

            That hasn’t gone well. For some odd reason that I’m only now beginning to examine, I almost never schedule myself to read fiction during the day.  My to-do lists focus on other activities. I live alone, so much of my daily chores are routine. I prepare my meals. I keep house. I head out for errands and grocery shopping, I read newspapers, magazines. I socialize, I write, I walk, I even tussle with a weight machine at times, but with the rarest exception, I read novels only late in the evening, when the world is dark and fading, and my comprehension is short on fuel.

            You probably can see where this is going. This time I am sampling The Brothers Karamazov in microbites, dawdling along, swallowing only a few pages at a time, reading at a snail’s pace, and comprehending at a similar sluggish rate. Naturally I’ve forgotten much of that book after 65 years. The overall plot is still vaguely familiar, but it is a struggle for me to keep all members of the cast on stage, to remember each of their proper roles.

            It has taken me over 600 pages to fully realize this, but I think I have it now, and a resolution is finally forming. Before this month is out, I have decided, I shall sit down in full sun light and finish the final 150 pages of this fabulous book on that one day.

            Now, having exposed the futility of my reading thus far, I must add that it was not all bleak. This time I spotted passages in the book that surely flew high over my head on my first reading. To give a single example, below is Dmitri, the oldest Karamazov brother, talking to the youngest, Alexei (this translation by Pevear and Valokhonsky [2]).

            “Alexei, I’m lost, you man of God! I love you more than anything. My heart trembles at you, that’s what. Who is this Carl Bernard?”

            “Carl Bernard?” Again Alyosha was surprised.

            “No, not Carl, wait, I’ve got it wrong: Claude Bernard. What is it? Chemistry or something?”

            “He must be a scientist,” Alyosha replied, “only I confess I’m not able to say much about him either. I’ve just heard he’s a scientist, but what kind I don’t know.”

            “Well, devil take him, I don’t know him either,” Mitya swore. “Some scoundrel, most likely. They’re all scoundrels.”

            That made me chuckle. Claude Bernard was a groundbreaking French physiologist with extraordinary skills. The likelihood that I knew of him on my first reading is exactly zero, but now, after having in times past actually referred to myself as a physiologist, I ‘m quite familiar with that famed man. In fact, I have on one of my bookshelves a rare translated copy of his Cahier Rouge, the red laboratory notebook in which Bernard wrote his innovative ideas from about 1850 to 1860. Was Bernard a scoundrel? Hardly. But in this brief segment, Dostoevsky tells us a bit more about Dmitri’s mind and the manner in which it functions, simple evidence of a remarkable novelist at work.

I read The Brothers Karamazov (here) a long time ago, when I was an undergraduate. By that time I had learned (finally!) that rounding up a cluster of neurons and throwing them into action (with purpose) could be exhilarating.

I plowed through that prodigious novel over a three-day weekend. A marathon event! One so dramatic that to this day I can conjure up the chair in which I sat enthralled for most of those hours. Occasionally, to ease creeping stiffness, I read with the book between elbows on my desk, or while stretched prone on my bed, a pillow under my middle, all of this in my small upstairs room on North Brook Street in Madison, Wisconsin.

Like many English speakers immersed in Russian literature, I initially had trouble sorting out the huge cast of characters. Their multiple names also confused me, but my brain was fresh enough to see that the youngest brother, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, (for example) might be referred to as Alyosha, Alyoshka, Alyoshenka, or Alyoshechka, or even Lyosha or Lyoshenka.

Never had I read such a book! Dostoevsky’s insight awed me. I remember thinking his psychological acumen had anticipated Sigmund Freud, and probably even inspired him. Two years later, during my rebellious first year of medical school, I stupidly shunned textbooks and immersed myself in fiction, diving deep and making my way through a good number of Russian classics. I even skimmed through The Brothers again that year.

As I’ve said elsewhere, that bone-headed year of medical school produced oodles of painful regret (here). Finally, to exorcise all remaining demons, I wrote The Colors of Medicine and forced my protagonist to repeat much of my intractable behavior from that year. Relief at last!

I’ll talk more thoughts about my favorite Dostoevsky novel next time, describing my turtle’s pace of lumbering through it this time (not three days but three months!) along with other musings about the book. I won’t put that up for a few days. I’ve averaged about a post per week on this blog, and I think that’s a good pace for me. (An old guy, like an old forest, surely is more susceptible to burnout.)