In the beginning there will have been violence: justice and law. The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Abstract

The realistic novel "The Brothers Karamazov" raises critical questions about modernist poetics, which refer to questions of religion, justice, law, and order within the narrative. They are interpreted both on the universal and the individual conceptual level, making the novel a complex system of narrative sequences. In the sequence related to the character of Ivan Karamazov, questions of fiction within fiction, writing and creation, repetition of the roles of the author and spectral characters in the story and the character of Ivan Karamazov are raised. These questions are modernist-critical and it is the intensity of their appearance that is referred to here. Modernism establishes the problematic situation of art itself, placing in the form of a meta quality, not only the question of artistic quality but also the field it belongs to in the foundations of the works of art themselves. The question raised is rooted in the basic meaning of literature. Literary forms bend self-referentially towards themselves, in order to twist anew and express reality. Modernist works ask readers whether all literary themes are legitimately literary or whether literature can deal with "any" topic. These questions have arisen since art has self-referentially bent towards the entirety of culture and art, and all the various questions raised in specific scientific fields. Therefore, it is sometimes said that literary works are, for example, philosophical, psychological. However, that refers to the entire literary order, whereas in the stated narrative the questions are so complex and the question of the literary status itself is entwined with their complexity.