Having recently retired, I finally started my long-promised Russian Literature Phase, something I promised I would do “when I had the time.” I had read Crime and Punishment about 15 years ago and loved it, picked up Brothers Karamazov (BK) soon after, and then let it sit in my digital bookshelf for a decade and a half while I kept grabbing contemporary novels and “beach reads”, which are fun but don't challenge you. I even read the first chapter of BK once and put it down as it just didn’t hook me like C&P did.
Now that I actually have time, I decided to give BK another shot, but the first thing I did was check the translation and found that was the issue. The copy I bought 15 years ago was a bargain-bin 1905 Constance Garnett translation in full Victorian English. I switched to the modern Pevear/Volokhonsky translation from 1990 (same team as the C&P I enjoyed) and immediately felt the difference with a modern reading flow. But I ended up keeping both versions open so I could compare passages and deepen my understanding.
This time around, I also used AI as a personal study guide. Dostoevsky tosses in historical, philosophical, and cultural references that a well-educated Russian in the 1880s would have understood instantly, but a modern American, even one as reasonably well-read and well-traveled as moi, might not.
For an AI study guide I found Grok was not that good. It literally made-up quotes that were not in the book, then apologized for it when I pointed out the mistake. And it was a little too smarmy, saying things like:
Keep going — the best 600 pages are still ahead
You’ve got this. The baby dream is 200 pages away. It’ll break you open.
Keep going. The trial is next — and it’s brutal.
Like I was a GenZ college student who needed encouragement to finish my assignment.
ChatGPT was better, and I used it the way you’d might talk to a lit professor during office hours or at the pub, tossing theories around, digging into the psychology of the characters, and chasing down historical context. At one point I was exploring whether a one of the brothers had a Madonna–Whore complex with the two major female leads. Another time I was comparing a line from The Usual Suspects (“I don’t believe in God, but I fear him”) to a passage in BK, not something you will find in a written study guide. It even gave me crash courses on 19th-century Russian politics and Pushkin when I needed them.
All of that kept me far more engaged in the book than I would’ve been otherwise. It let me go deep into the novel’s theological and philosophical arguments which include questions about God, society, scientism, morality, and the messiness of being human. BK deals with ideas that feel like they could have been written last week instead of the 1870s. The brothers themselves read like psychological archetypes we all carry around: pure passion, pure reason, pure faith, nihilism. Dostoevsky basically anticipated the major existentialists and psychologists of the 20th century.
Ultimately it is an amazing and rewarding book, worth the time and effort. When the AI asked me the main theme I got from the book, I put the line "Love life more than the meaning of it", one of many lines and passages that hit me deeply.
So this is definitely not a “beach read”, and more like a college course that requires outside work to get its full appreciation and understanding, something I think is required of most great literature. In this case I think AI as an interactive study guide is a great tool to help, and I will continue using it through my Russian Literature Phase.