Sow Help Me God: Love’s Difficult Harvest in Dostoevsky’s The Karamzov Brothers

Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone:but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.–John 12:24 In The Karamazov Brothers, a grievance can become so precious that giving it up feels like a kind of death. Dostoevsky’s people protect their resentments with an ingenuity they seldom extend to anyone’s happiness, then wonder why their lives have grown uninhabitable. Before we meet the family, the Gospel places something almost weightless in our hands. Christ’s words promise life for others through his death, and the epigraph carries that promise into a household where giving is inseparable from keeping accounts. The grain’s descent also suggests an inward surrender. To let another life reach us, we must relinquish the self we have made indispensable. This prospect terrifies the Karamazovs more consistently than the possibility of doing wrong. They can confess to almost anything, provided the confession lets them stay as they…