The Cosmic Library on the Philosophy of The Brothers Karamazov
Featuring Andrew Martin, Katherine Bowers, and more
The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew Bible; season four, Journey to the West; season five, the American short story. Now, it’s The Brothers Karamazov.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky created his ultimate novel of ideas, with brothers Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha pursuing a range of philosophical, theological, and political arguments and questions even as a crime story takes shape. But there’s a shared, perplexing quality of all their grappling with ideas: they tend toward something beyond—beyond the conventions of routine debate and conversation.
The novelist Andrew Martin says in this latest episode of The Cosmic Library’s Karamazov season: “This is a fundamental aspect of the Karamazov legacy, this interest in what can’t be said—it’s like in action and bodily things. Somehow that takes the form of both Dmitri’s wild, manic spree, and maybe the other side of the same coin is Alyosha’s desire for religious transcendence.”
In this episode, we think about how the novel’s philosophizing goes beyond normal modes. Katherine Bowers describes the novel as “kind of a reaction chamber” to explore the interactions of multiple ideas with multiple people. The Brothers Karamazov, in that sense, shows us thinking and feeling that charge each other up, from person to person, in a process that compels characters just beyond what they can say or comprehend in the usual ways—toward a place beyond reason.
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Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library:
Garth Risk Hallberg, author of the novel City on Fire
Andrew Martin, author of the story collection Cool for America
Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU
Paulina Rowińska, author of Mapmatics
Robin Feuer Miller, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University and author of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel
Katherine Bowers, professor of Russian literature at the University of British Columbia and author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic
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