From an intro to the Brothers Karamazov

I won't type it out because it's too long, but the intro to the Bantam paperback edition (Andrew R. MacAndrew trans.) of the Brothers Karamazov is interesting. The writer shows how BK sums up all of Dostoevsky's previous works. In the great novels that came before each had a single protagonist at its center where Dostoevsky presented a part of personality (he even shows how D. has a theory of personality and essence though he saw it as the shell of personality and the inner part where the spirit resides). Then in BK he created three brothers who each represent together the total personality (Ivan = intellectual, Dimitri = emotional, Alyosha = will).

Basically, without knowing it, this intro writer, very knowledgeable of Dostoevsky and his works, was describing Work knowledge regarding centers and personality and essence and so on.

Yes, I'm embarking on a thousand page novel: the Brothers Karamazov. A very handsome paperback edition, by the way. Nice cover.

I may regret it (or decide it is not what I want to do after reading 30 pages or so), but it IS one of the ten great, iconic, canonic novels I have identified.

An aside: it's interesting how critics mock or deride Dostoevsky's Christianity. They want to claim his works as part of their intellectual world, but they don't want the Christianity. Harold Bloom mocks the Epilogue to Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov (oh, I won't say, in case anyone hasn't read it and wants to). This writer I am referring to now doesn't mock the Christianity in this intro, but I've seen it elsewhere. Like I noted with CandP: liberals of the 20th century couldn't have really read Dostoevsky since D. saw directly through them and made such fun of them in his novels...