Barry Buckley

Don't read this if you don't want anything to be spoiled... "Hurrah for Karamazov." I was disappointed to have accidentally discovered that that would be the last line in the book, I had made it 3 quarters in and thought "this must be a good ending for Dmitri Karamazov. The people in the courtroom are cheering for him"...I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was the school boys cheering for Alyosha Karamazov and the light he had brought to a dark situation. Am I the only one who felt some sympathy for Smerdyakov? It seems to me that he murdered Fyodor Karamazov because he thought Ivan Karamazov wanted him to and because Ivan had placed in his mind that without God anything goes. Neat book. On the surface, Fyodor Dostoyevsky did a good job setting emotional moods, and on a deeper level, a good job presenting some philosophies. I got Christian existentialism from father Zosima, and Nihilism from Ivan... I think if Ivan Karamazov and Yevgeny Bazarov (from Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev) were real people, the mechanism that influenced them to think the way they did was the same, they were the "new men."