Just now I finished re-reading The Brothers Karamazov, not without relief but with more appreciation, especially for the trial. The defense speaks of Russian justice as redemptive, quoting Peter the Great’s aphorism that it is better that ten guilty men are acquitted rather than one innocent man be convicted. The defense attorney sees redemptive justice as Christian; I don’t think Peter the Great saw it that way.
Rachael and Eldon advised me to look for the humor, and they helped me to see that, both the ironic and the gentle, and Tod Mixson suggested that I remember that there is much drama of the old pulp magazines sort, and I became aware of that too. Ingrid said…oh, what did Ingrid say?
But the trial – that is something I mean to re-read soon.
So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world; and he will bear witness for his countrymen in the last judgment of the nations.
-Nicholas Berdyaev, quoted in The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel, Robin Feuer Miller
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