Exordium
Education in The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic, The Brothers Karamazov, is, for my money, mainly about the soul of Russia as it was in the late 19th century. It is mainly about the tug-of-war between the swelling tide of atheism (as represented by Ivan, Rakitin, and Smerdyakov) and the flickering light of theism as expressed in traditional Russian Orthodoxy (represented by Zosima and Alyosha). It is not mainly about education. And yet the few moments in which education comes Read more…