One of my favorite dinner party questions is, “Name three books that changed your life.” I love to hear people really think about this question and answer, as I usually learn a lot about them. If someone were ever to ask me this question, the first book I would name is Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky.
Why this book? I am not Russian and have no historical or ancestral connection to Russian culture. I picked up my first book by Russian writer, Tolstoy, at the age of 14 because of its size. I have always been a voracious reader, devouring books like a firebird sitting in a golden apple tree in the king’s garden. I would walk through my school library and check out the thickest books I could find. One day, in 1983, that book was War and Peace. At 1225 pages, it was long, and juicy, and I loved it. Of course, I loved the parts about peace much more than the parts about war. A while later I picked up the 840-page tome, Brother’s Karamazov. I was about to take a long flight to Norway to meet my lover and work at the local kindergarten, and I wanted a long book to read. I didn’t know I was about to embark on a journey of soul discovery that would inform my beliefs for the rest of my life. I had jet lag in Norway, and because I awakened at midnight like it was morning, I spent many of my Norwegian nights in the spellbinding arms of Dostoyevksy, although his arms were made of words. Each night I disappeared into his world, surprised and delighted by the fast-moving intricate plot, the humor, and all its delicious philosophy. I haven’t re-read it since 1991, because I like to savor my memory and my interpretation of it back then, which has evolved over time as I’ve grown older.
When people look at long classic russian literature, they probably think one word: boring. But Brothers Karamazov is not boring: it’s fascinating and funny, and not afraid to explore hard questions from wildly different points of view.
From Marci’s memory: the book centers on three brothers, who in my opinion, give voice to different sides of the human own psyches–the wild sensual brother who seeks only momentary pleasure; the intellectual atheist who questions everything and refuses to believe anything; and the all-loving faithful brother, a monk, who questions nothing and lives in perfect faith. Eventually, a fourth brother shows up, the dark twisted criminal-minded illegitimate brother, who can’t find a place for himself.
Don’t we all have these sides to ourselves: pleasure-seeking (Dimitry), intellectual and skeptical (Ivan), all-loving and faithful (Alyosha), with a self-destructive shadow side (Smerdyakov)? At different times in our lives, one side is stronger than another.
For me, when I read the book at the age of 20, I had been struggling with organized religion and feminist scholarship, the place of women within religion, and the suffering of children in this world. In a very famous chapter, Ivan’s chapter called “The Grand Inquisitor” (so famous it is often printed by itself outside of the book), Ivan put into words my own feelings about religion, helping me crystallize my personal questions. My biggest and most concerning question: if there’s an all-good all-powerful god, how can there be so much suffering in the world? And when Ivan talks about suffering, he says he doesn’t mean adults as they can make their own choices and leave a situation at any time, but what about children? He gave the example of an abused child locked in a room, crying to a higher power to save her and no one comes. He definitively states that to him, all of heaven is not worth that one child’s tear.
This made sense to me.
I have devoted much of my life to easing the suffering of children through my volunteer work. Reading this book and rejecting the idea of “organized religion” helped me to move forward into the world doing my work in my own way, not for some reward after death (heaven) or to avoid a punishment (hell); not because I think it’s good “karma” and I will be “blessed” in some way; but because I care about children and I want to make their lives beautiful and full of light.
What I discovered is that organized religion is not for me. I now consider myself a “seeker” who is comfortable existing with the mysteries of the world. What I also found, is that my version of “god” exists in the face of children, all children. I worked with terminally ill children for ten years, and I found my version of “church” in an unusual place: playing a gentle, but rollicking game of tag with the kids in their wheelchairs, holding them in my arms, softly singing to them in their last moments… these moments were my “church” and their faces were my version of “god.” All these years later, I still consider my “church” to be my volunteer work with children: from homeless children in shelters here in Boston to granting wishes to terminally ill children for the Make-A-Wish foundation.
Brothers Karamazov is not a perfect book. In any great work of literature, we impose our own ideas and experiences onto the story. There have been other books that impacted me, but I still own that tattered first copy with its missing cover and all the pieces I underlined in blue ballpoint pen. Once every few years, I will pick it up and thumb through it, reading some of underlinings to get a glimpse into the pieces that really spoke to me. It’s like a little window into the mind of 20-year-old Marci. And one of the first sections I underlined? “Love redeems and saves everything… Love is such an infinite treasure it can buy the whole world…”
I guess if someone were to ask me now what I believe in, I would say children, love, light, laughter, books, flowers, magic, music, barefoot dances under the moonlight, firebirds that eat golden apples, and of course… a dash of fairy dust.
