What do you do when you've thought carefully about the suffering in the world, and you cannot find a single framework — religious or secular — that makes it acceptable?
That is Ivan Karamazov's question. And it is one of the most honest questions in all of literature.
The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky's final novel, finished four months before he died. It is the book Freud called the most magnificent novel ever written, that Einstein said gave him more than any scientist, that Wittgenstein carried to the front in the First World War and knew by heart. It is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, a philosophical debate, and a novel about three brothers and a father nobody mourns. But at its center is a single conversation between two brothers — one who cannot accept God's world, and one who cannot argue him out of it — that cuts closer to the bone of the faith-and-doubt question than almost anything else ever written.
In this episode we cover the full story: Dostoevsky losing his three-year-old son to epilepsy while writing the book, and the monastery visit that changed what the novel became. The four brothers and what each one represents. The Grand Inquisitor, Ivan's unanswerable parable about freedom and suffering. And Dostoevsky's answer — which is not a logical answer, but the only kind that actually works.
What we talk about:
— Ivan's argument: not that God doesn't exist, but that the price of admission is too high
— The Grand Inquisitor and why Christ says nothing in response
— Why Ivan goes mad, and what it means that he does
— Alyosha as Dostoevsky's answer to a question he couldn't logically refute
— The last scene Dostoevsky ever wrote, and why he chose to end there
Next episode: Simone de Beauvoir.
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