This novel has a ton of fireworks to go with it. Forgive me for quoting at length from a couple different sources, beginning with Dostoevsky himself: "If I can finish this work, I should have expressed myself completely." And Friedrich Nietzsche, who, although he detested the Russian novelist, yet called him "the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn." The novel offers a polyphonic splendor of multi-leveled aesthetic pleasure. Shakespeare stands on one side of literature, along with Victor Hugo and Sterne: the side of emotional breadth. Shakespeare and his company obsessively try to cram the width of experience into their oeuvre, showing us, in one persistent, observatory light, the range of life. Thus, in Shakespeare, one finds "Prince Hal" cutting up with Falstaff as an adolescent, and later one finds the same person giving the St. Crispin's Day speech with equally moving, equally majestic poetry: "And [they'll] hold their manhoods cheap, whilst any speaks who fought with us upon St. Crispin's Day!" We see Othello, the lovesick fool become the murderous madman, while Beatrice and Benedict trace similar paths backwards from madness to love (madness?). Dante's company, on the other hand, are concerned with the depth. And his poetry reflects this, as Ezra Pound wrote in The Spirit of Romance: "If the language of Shakespeare is more beautifully suggestive, Dante's is more beautifully definite. Both men were masters of the whole art." Dante, Eliot, Shelley, and Dostoevsky sound the depths of single human experiences. So, if Shakespeare gives all dimensions of life under one persistent light, Dante and Co. present to us one dimension of life, looked at prismatically and from every possible side. In the case of this novel, right from the beginning, from the title itself, one hears echoes of a brother with blood on his hands responding defensively: "Am I my brother's keeper?" Beginning here, Dostoevsky gives us an exploration of the "obligation" of brotherhood from every possible perspective, by giving us the stories of four different brothers, an illegitimate son, and two types of fathers. The result is a work of astonishing power, in which Dostoevsky attacks the very question that was asked of a teacher in Nazareth over 2 millennia ago: "who then is my neighbor." Dostoevsky, like every one of the great novelists, will never finally answer the question for the characters in the novel, because the novel as an art form is much more concerned with possibilities than with preaching. But there is, in the story itself, this challenging response from the dying priest, Father Zosima: "Love one another, fathers. Love God's people. We are no holier then those outside, just because we have shut ourselves up behind these walls. Just the opposite, by coming here, each of us has acknowledged to himself that he is worse then those who remain outside, worse then anyone in the world. The longer a monk lives within the monastery walls, the more acutely must he be aware of this. Otherwise there was no reason for him to come here. It is only when it is revealed to him that not only is he worse than all those outside these walls, but also that he is responsible to all men and for everyone and everything, for all human sins, universal and individual --only then will he have achieved the purpose of his seclusion. For I want you to know my beloved ones, that every one of us is responsible for all men and for everything on earth, not only responsible through the universal responsibility of mankind, but responsible personally -- every man for all people and for each individual life on earth." I quote at length, because it is necessary to give the full effect. Of course the Karamazov family doesn't live up to this standard, but their stories give us the chance to examine fully the experience of neighborhood, and to survey all the potentialities latent within the fact that we, often selfish beings, nevertheless are compelled to neighborhood by our own loneliness. Father Zosima pushes Alyosha into the world because he senses his unrest: it is not good for man to be alone. A note on aesthetics: Zosima's radical revision of the common view of love, juxtaposed with the Karamazovs' behavior towards each other and towards their father, offer an opportunity to peer into the "purposes" of art, which, in an increasingly high-speed world, are constantly being questioned. There are those who insist that art ought to serve as the "voice" of some greater cause, or that it ought to incite some action on the part of the people. Using this logic, good art serves good purposes, and art that serves bad purposes is bad art. Yet where would one place this novel? One of Dostoevsky's strongest formal devices consists in the stubborn refusal of his narrators to condemn people who do evil things, and that is nowhere as evident as in this book. In fact, the narrator ties himself into the novel, almost as if he knows that by revealing the family secret of the Karamazovs, he is placing himiself under guilt, but that, given the circumstances, he cannot do otherwise. Whose purposes, then, would this novel serve? It seems to me that Dostoevsky's novel helps us to explore a significant theme in the purpose of aesthetics: that by placing himself under guilt, the narrator is able to table the entire discussion of whose purposes he is serving. By following an invisible impulse, he is able to tell us about invisible things, like "neighborhood." The novel refuses to "speak out" about issues. Rather, it explores the depths of the human in a remarkable confidence that if it can help us feel something, it will have done its job. Art belongs to a new kind of vision of the world, a vision in which humans, by feeling their humanity, are enabled to subsequently work out the difficulties of neighborhood by the incredible agency of charity: of sympathy with other humans feeling their humanity. To quote Gloucester on the master's stage: "I see it feelingly." If we can learn to see each other feelingly, no agenda need be put forth. Art teaches us sympathy, and is able, through its stubborn silence, to speak definitively to the humanity in us. Perhaps, then, we can suggest that all art is redemptive. I sure feel like Dostoevsky, who by all accounts suffered greatly as a man, would have hoped so.