Love, attention and teaching: Dostoevsky'sThe Brothers Karamazov

Abstract

Fyodor Dostoevsky's final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, is one of the most influential works of the nineteenth century. To date, however, the potential value of the book for educationists has been largely ignored. This article addresses a key pedagogical theme in The Brothers Karamazov, namely, the notion that 'love is a teacher'. Love as Dostoevsky understands it is active and difficult; it focuses not on the abstract idea of loving humankind but on the messy particulars of everyday life. Active love, it will be argued, has much in common with Iris Murdoch's concept of attention. The first part of the article examines several passages in The Brothers Karamazov that address the theme of active love. The second section analyses these examples from the text in the light of Murdoch's ideas and explores some of their broader educational implications.

Mental health, resilience and existential literature

“…Alison M. Brady https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1410-2572 ENDNOTES 1 This policy was implemented not without controversy (Whittaker, 2019), but its controversy is not directly related to its focus on mental health. 2 In Roberts (2018), the importance of suffering is discussed in relation to The Brothers Karamazov and the concepts of 'active love' in Dostoevsky and 'attention' in Iris Murdoch, the latter of which is defined as a 'just and loving gaze upon an individual reality' where we encounter others not abstractly but as particular human beings. Our relationship with others is infinitely perfectible in this sense and can also be embodied through our relationship with fictional characters such as the Underground Man.…”