Hi Friends!

This week I’m going to be writing about one of my favourite books — an unhinged Russian opus that came in at a respectable (if a little low) No. 28 on The Guardian’s contentious new list of the ‘100 Greatest Novels’.

But first, a couple of life and cinema updates! Sydney Film Festival is kicking off next week, which means, as is tradition, the wet season is upon us. Thankfully I’ve been able to squeeze in a whole lot of travels around NSW before the chill set in — celebrating Dad’s 70th with a wine-soaked weekend in Orange, playing board games with besties in Canberra, a romantic retreat with Samuel in the Blue Mountains, and hiking the Light to Light Trail down in Eden with two of my oldest mates (the rain started thundering down just as we began the drive home!).

In movie news, you might have already gotten wind that intrepid director Toby Morris has picture locked Cooee, which means we’re moving into the last stages of post-production! Word about our little movie is starting to seep into the world — one of the stars, the wonderful Mia Artemis, spoke about the film with FilmInk in a piece that also debuted a couple of gorgeous stills. And then I was on hand with Toby and producers Rebecca Matthes and Georgia Moraitis to accept a large novelty cheque for Completition Funding from Queer Screen (our wonderful resident LGBT+ film organisation), which will help us with expenses like music rights in the final stretch. I got to say a few words of thanks on-stage at the Mardi Gras Film Festival Closing Night, and hopefully didn’t whiff it. There’s still many months to go before anyone can actually watch it (sorry), but the finish line is in sight!

Now perhaps predictably, when The Guardian dropped their 100 Greatest Novels of All Time last week there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth online. I actually think the list is… pretty solid! Like the once-a-decade Sight & Sound cinema poll, it’s an aggregate of the top tens of 170+ novelists, critics and academics, resulting in a mix of familiar classics at the top (yes, Ulysses and Jane Eyre and Gatsby are all here), a few idiosyncratic surprises in the lower rungs (Kindred, Left Hand of Darkness and Nervous Conditions, hell yeah!), and a merciful lack of “how do you do, fellow kids” pandering towards pop culture favourites (I miss you Tolkien, but we nerds don’t deserve any more validation).

Most intriguing (if controversial) is the rise of Toni Morrison — whose Beloved is all the way up at No. 2 — and Virginia Woolf, who has a remarkable five novels on the list, besting even Jane Austen. Perhaps a little excessive, but I’m delighted to see them catapult over the insufferable, naval-gazing crop of post-war American writers (Kerouac, Roth, Updike, Mailer and their ilk) who dominated lists like these twenty years ago and have been long overdue a kick in the teeth. Of course, I’m inevitably going to be a cheerleader for any list that puts my all-time fave Middlemarch by George Eliot at No. 1. Whatever it takes to get more people to read Eliot, my literary ride-or-die.

My own list would have to include Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Voss, The Lord of the Rings, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Austen (Pride & Prejudice or Persuasion?), Ferrante (can I include the whole Neapolitan Quartet?), LeGuin (probably The Dispossessed)… and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Yes, that’s No. 28, the real subject of this week’s newsletter!

Earlier this year my friend Joseph Lavelle Wilson, a wonderful lawyer and poet, told me he was gearing up to re-read The Brothers Karamazov and asked if I’d like to join him. We’d both first read the novel almost 15 years ago at university — even sharing the same dog-eared copy, passed back and forth — so it was quite special revisiting it together. Joe and I live in separate cities these days, so our informal Dostoevsky book club was a great way to stay in touch, and sharing our hot takes chapter-by-chapter has been one of the highlights of my year.

Instead of putting this tome back on the shelf after we reached the final “Hurrah for Karamazov!”, we thought it would be fun to transform our conversation into a piece we could share. This format is little bit of an experiment, but we hope you enjoy it!

A Karamazov Conversation

STUART: First off, thank you for suggesting we re-read Karamazov! It’s been such a treat revisiting this tempestuous, sprawling, brilliant book, and getting mad at it all over again.

For those new to the novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final work, centred on the three sons of the repulsive rural landowner Fyodor Karamazov. The oldest, Dmitri, is a former army officer battling his father for his share of the estate and the love of the enterprising local hottie. The middle child, Ivan, is an atheist intellectual bent on climbing the social ladder in St Petersburg. And the youngest, Alyosha, is a novice at the local monastery who yearns to save the souls of his wayward family. 

In some ways it’s a remarkably intimate tale, throwing you into the roiling dysfunction of this utterly unhinged family. But it soon expands out into a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, a lacerating social critique, and an interrogation of God and faith and the very depths of the human soul. It is 19th Century Russia after all. 

What struck me coming back to the story is just how young the Karamazov brothers are. Dmitri is 28, Ivan is 24, Alyosha is only 20! The first time I read it, I really bought into the idea that the trio were archetypal, each representing part of the human experience. Dmitri is emotion, Ivan is intellect, Alyosha is faith — stir them together and you’ll find the entirety of human nature, symbolic in a Captain Planet sort of way. Now I wonder if these divisions are merely a symptom of their youth; insecure men trying to mark their territory in opposition to each other and their father. Ivan is smart, but in the peacocking, provocative way of a uni student who’s just read his first Richard Dawkins screed (why yes, I did over-identify with him in my early 20s), whereas Alyosha has flung himself into the Orthodox faith on the basis of good vibes rather than much deep thought. And Dmitri is… an absolute mess, which makes him the perfect bad boy murder suspect. 

How do you feel about the Karamazov brothers now that we’re older than them? 

JOE: Ah, what a book, what a crime. I loved this re-read and exchanging thoughts and hot takes as we went along was a delight!

My feelings towards the brothers have certainly shifted — I see less to like in goodie-two-shoes Alyosha who flops like a foolish but lucky salmon through a river of bears. But I have more time for Dmitri, the strain of holding two incompatible realities together propels him forward in a terribly human way. I agree the brothers each reflect facets of their parents, and more than anything the desire to be a something and only that something, whatever that is, seems to drive them.

What hasn’t changed for me is how deeply funny the book is (or at least, I suppose, Pevear & Volokhonsky’s translation). As the brothers careen around their little village smashing up lives and loves, their tragedy is illuminated in a hilarious way by the wry and idiosyncratic asides of the narrator, usually beginning with ‘incidentally’. The grotesque patriarch, Fyodor, repeatedly needling a local landowner/his son/his other son/his loyal servant/his loyal servant’s doting wife, reminded me so much of Danny Devito’s deranged Frank from It’s Always Sunny. “I ain’t got a lotta time left, I’m gonna get real weird with it” could easily have been Fyodor’s words before trying to seduce his son’s lover with a fat wad of roubles. The book’s devious schemers like Fyodor and the unctuous Rakitin get their comeuppance in bleak, hilarious ways, bringing that Russian black humour to its glorious apex. I couldn’t believe the cutaway from the climax of the novel to a comic relief chapter… about the death of a child.

Dostoevsky’s three-year-old son (also named Alyosha) died during the writing of the novel, and reconciling that kind of unimaginably unfair pain and loss with the idea of a loving Christian God is arguably the philosophical core of the novel. Does Dostoevsky get there, for you?

STUART: Absolutely agree about the gags! My personal favourite is when the narrator spends a whole chapter introducing a new character for no discernable reason, only to drop at the end “incidentally, I have forgotten even to mention” that this is the until-now-unnamed schoolboy who was stabbed a couple of hundred pages ago. Whoops. And because the narrator is a small-town bore and gets easily carried away, he adds a fun layer of subjectivity atop the Safdie-grade intensity that might otherwise swallow the book whole. 

But I’m putting off answering your question, because the honest answer is that I’m still not sure. The big philosophical questions are what I find most compelling and infuriating about the novel — I’m suckered in by the debate, but rebel against Dostoevsky’s conclusions. As I see it, the contest plays out between Ivan and Alyosha; I suspect the only time Dmitri has ever lifted a book is so he can pawn it for vodka. In the first half, Ivan articulates his anti-God position so convincingly that it’s tempting to theorise that his author is, like Milton, “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. Ivan’s big chapters — the diatribe ‘Rebellion’ and the parable ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ — are so extraordinary, disturbing and provocative that they have their own afterlife independent of Karamazov — I realised midway through this read that Ursula K. LeGuin’s legendary short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a dramatisation of Ivan’s argument about whether we dare accept a heaven built on foundations of injustice. 

That said, I suspect I have a little more patience for Alyosha than you (though “lucky salmon” is a perfect description!), particularly because he’s not all talk. He expresses his Christian creed through good deeds, becoming a positive role model to a band of rudderless teenage boys — which feels particularly relevant in 2026 — whereas Ivan makes virtuoso arguments against God that hinge on the grotesque suffering of children, but remains more invested in the intellectual one-up-manship than actually embodying these values. Meanwhile, Dmitri’s contribution is to dream about a crying “wee one” and burst into tears “with all his Karamazov unrestraint” (thanks for that Dmitri). 

But rather than carry this battle of ideas right through to the end, I find Dostoevsky puts his finger on the scales in Alyosha’s (and God’s) favour. Everything from the resolution of the murder mystery — we really should talk about this murder! — to an unlucky bout of brain fog seems designed to show up Ivan, without ever fully refuting the substance of his argument. Not to reduce a masterpiece to a meme I found on Reddit, but I think this sums up Dostoevsky’s game pretty well…

JOE: Excellent meme. But it could just as easily have Dostoevsky as the rabbit! I was also frustrated by those slightly ungracious sidesteps, it made me wonder how much he’d convinced himself vs. settling for wanting to be convinced. In a novel about the possibility of the renewal of faith, I felt that more time is spent pillorying “modern ideas” than exploring the value of piety or devotion. But it’s also these caricatures of modern ideas which give rise to my favourite character — the brilliant teenager Kolya, who is simultaneously deeply insecure and brimming with unearned confidence. When finally meeting Alyosha, he drops “I have to tell you, Karamazov, I’m an avowed socialist.” This is literally me talking to any adult when I was 14. I would read an entire book of Kolya’s adventures.

And yes, we've forgotten to discuss the murder! Fyodor’s death and the facts surrounding it unfurl deliciously, from second hand reports and through various perspectives. Even when “all is revealed”, we’re left with huge questions about whether the murderer acted on the orders of another, whether it was reasonable for them to think that, and whether the person ostensibly giving the orders should have known how their words would be interpreted. The question of culpability reaches backwards in time too – how did Fyodor treat these brothers, that any one of them (except Alyosha) could have murdered him?

STUART: Speaking of the murder suspects in the Karamazov family tree — 145-year-old spoilers, you’ve been warned — there’s one very important character we haven’t mentioned yet: Smerdyakov, Fydor’s servant, personal chef, (possible) illegitimate son, and (rather likely) true murderer. 

The cloying Smerdyakov operates in the background, eager to convince his “betters” of his helplessness; he grovels in the face of conflict, and suffers debilitating epileptic seizures. But he’s not a Shakespearean bastard who dreams of displacing his brothers, nor an embittered social climber like Uriah Heap. His true nature is hinted at through a series of conversations with Ivan before and after the murder. I find them deeply unsettling. Smerdyakov speaks as if in code, with feints and dark implications and circular logic, testing us and Ivan, never admitting to anything whilst suggesting that something horrible has occurred — and that Ivan might be responsible for it. “It was your pride,” Smerdyakov notes matter-of-factly, “made you think I was stupid.”

There’s a void in Smerdyakov, a malignancy even more motiveless than Iago’s, that sets him apart from his tortured, multi-faceted brethren. To me, this void is not a failing of Dostoevsky’s, but a suggestion that Smerdyakov is less a man than the brothers’ dark id made flesh. He is the morally untethered end point of Ivan’s philosophy that “everything is permitted”; he fulfills Dmitri’s patricidal intent without his equivocations, and indulges in the sins that Alyosha entertains only in his dreams. Even if the brothers don’t swing the weapon themselves, aren’t they spiritually complicit in their father’s murder all the same?

But there’s still the actual court case to consider. As our resident lawyer, did the investigation and trial ring true for you? I’ve got to say, the procedural fairness was far better than I expected from 19th Century Russia!

JOE: 100% agree about the procedural fairness! Granted, Dmitri is the son of a rich landowner, but I was surprised by how the investigation and trial proceed on a basis of presumed innocence, and he ends up getting a fair shake of the adzhika bottle. Even when the evidence seems stacked against Dmitri and the outcome should almost be a foregone conclusion, the judicial system does not rush to convict but makes sure to step out important protections against unjust deprivation of liberty. I was also surprised that the most severe sentence considered by the court for murder of one’s own father seemed to be hard labor in Siberia, rather than death (although I suppose it may just have been a crueler, slower death).

Dmitri’s trial is my favourite part of the book (yes, yes, I’m a lawyer, I know). Dostoevsky was famously an observer of criminal trials, and his sense of the incredible tension and drama of cross-examination rockets us to the book’s climax. In the trial we get the titanic clash of two brilliant lawyers — the small-time but ambitious local prosecutor Ippollit Kirillovich, and the ringer big-wig defence lawyer Fetyukovich. Fetyukovich characterises the Russian approach to justice:

Kirillovich is eventually snared by his rival’s crafty defense and loses his cool:

Their barbed exchanges are gobbled up by swooning true-crime fans who have flocked to see the trial of the heartthrob bad boy Dmitri. Even after the trial, though, we don’t know exactly how things will pan out for our brothers — Dostoevsky choosing to leave us with some tantalising narrative questions after the spiritual and moral conclusion of his tale. Whose fate did you most want to know, after the events of the book?

STUART: It’s bewildering to learn that Dostoevsky saw this 800+ page behemoth as merely the prelude to an even grander novel about the continuing adventures of Alyosha, in which the youngest Karamazov would go on to become a school-teacher (expected) and a radical revolutionary or political assassin (that’s a swerve). Dostoevsky died before he could get his sequel beyond the outline stage, so it’s impossible to know whether he’d have followed through on transforming Alyosha into Luigi Mangione. 

But honestly, even if he didn’t intend this ending to be his final statement on the Karamazov clan, I’m not sure there’s much more I need to know about the brothers. We’ve peered so deep into their souls that there doesn’t seem to be much left to explore — only a chance to witness the slow, difficult work of salvation.

Instead, I’d love to know more about what became of the next generation, the kids Dostoevsky is so worried about. I know your MVP is Kolya the Teenage Socialist, but my pick is Liza Khokhlakov: the chronically sick girl who believes she’s fated to become Alyosha’s wife. Liza might be the only woman in the novel who trembles with the same tempestuous inner life as the men. She has all the livewire intensity of young Kolya, but without the opportunity to act out her youthful rebellion through pranks and property damage. Trapped in her chair and her bedroom, Liza turns that roiling energy inward, with a rebel yell that seems to presage the protagonists of Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa or The Vegetarian by Han Kang:

She even makes Alyosha feel a little more human, drawing out a confession that he’s shared the very same dreams of sacrilege. I think it’s inevitable that Liza and Koyla will meet up in the future, and there will be mad, carnal, death-defying fireworks, and that would make for one hell of a novel.

JOE: Someone please write the epic fan-fiction romantasy novel for those two, I would eat that up! I do feel that for such a satisfying novel, The Brothers Karamazov leaves us with so many tantalising questions like that. I think your point about the slow, difficult work of salvation is really apt too — after the forensic excavation and examination of these souls, I don’t really need to read that next part. And I guess maybe Big D didn’t need to write it. After all, as Vonnegut said, this book “can teach you everything you need to know about life”.

STUART: …Are we really calling Dostoevsky “Big D” now?

JOE: RIP Big D, you would’ve loved true crime podcasts.

A massive thanks the brilliant and erudite Joseph Lavelle Wilson for writing this piece with me, it was a lot of fun! We only just scratched the surface of the novel, but then I suspect it’s not the last time either of us will read it. And I’d love to hear your thoughts — on Karamazov, “Big D”, or your favourite reads that made the Guardian’s list (or were cruelly passed over).

Odds & Ends

• Speaking of ‘best of’ lists, the SMH & Age dropped their Top 50 Australian Films of All Time, which I’m less fond of. It’s a bit too predictable, stacked with the obvious heavy hitters (Mad Max, Wake in Fright, Picnic at Hanging Rock) and way too many “boys doing crimes” films from the past couple of decades. Where are the crazy Ozploitation films and sex comedies of the 70s? Recent horror hits like Talk to Me? Seminal queer films like Head On? Animation like ol’ Harvey Krumpet? And look, while Jane Campion’s The Piano is an all-time great, it’s clearly a New Zealand film and it’s rude for us to claim it.

• A pair of wonderful new essays from Animation Obsessive about the character designs of Mulan, and celebrating the centenary of Lotte Reiniger’s pioneering Adventures of Prince Achmed.

• Meanwhile, tortoises re-introduced into the Sahara are re-foresting the desert after just a few years. They move faster than you think!

• And coming up next week at SFF, you’ll be able to see the Australian premiere of Renée Marie Petropoulos’ Souvenir, the magnificent cinematography of Tyson Perkins in Leviticus, and the globe-trotting doco work of Jack McAvoy in Whistle. See you there!

And that’s it for this week, thanks for reading! Next time, another Harbour History, exploring the centuries-long fight to save green spaces on the Sydney waterfront…