The Other Trial in The Brothers Karamazov

Abstract

The Brothers Karamazov ends with one of the most famous criminal trials in world literature, but few readers remember that it begins with a frivolous civil suit: Pyotr Miusov’s dispute with the monastery over land rights. The lawsuit drags on for years, and it gives Miusov a pretext for joining the Karamazov family on their visit to the Elder Zosima at the beginning of the novel. In this essay, I argue that far from inconsequential, Miusov’s lawsuit establishes the novel’s concerns about boundaries and their relationship to justice. This legal dispute over the monastery’s borders sets up a contrast between legal justice, predicated on (often meaningless) binaries, and an alternative vision of justice based on inclusion and shared responsibility. Miusov’s interest in defining the monastery’s boundaries is juxtaposed with Zosima’s view of the monastery walls as porous. I draw on Al Katz’s Boundary Theory to explore how these two opposing views of the monastery’s borders offer spatial way to think about the novel’s moral questions. Miusov’s unresolved property dispute may seem far less weighty than the murder trial, but it introduces the legal system’s reductionist binary logic of mine or yours, right or wrong, innocent or guilty. At the end of the novel, that same logic will cause the wrong man to be convicted through a “judicial error.”

Keywords: Dostoevsky; The Brothers Karamazov; Boundary Theory; Law and Literature; Binaries; Brotherhood