Matt Dinan
I read The Brothers Karamazov for the first time last semester. For someone in my position, a professor in a great books program, never having read one of the greatest novels ever written felt embarrassing, bordering on professional malpractice. So when my co-teacher, Alan, suggested we assign the thousand-page saga to our third- and fourth-year students, I agreed without hesitation. The novel consumed me in a way nothing had in years, maybe decades. I could think of little else. Emails piled up unanswered. I kept blowing past my strict, middle-aged 10 p.m. bedtime. Once, I was so absorbed I forgot to pick up my daughter from ballet. My phone stopped holding my attention.
I wasn’t alone in this. Even as my profession was consumed by public anxiety over the future of education in the age of AI, I was having one of the best semesters of my career. Walking into our seminar room, I’d hear students chattering about Dmitry Karamazov’s chaotic love life and self-destructive partying as though he were living down the hall from them. There were debates, wrongheaded in my view but utterly sincere, about which books might help the stubborn, intellectual brother Ivan claw his way out of despair.
That a group of ordinary twenty-somethings at a public college in one of Canada’s poorest provinces fell in love with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s strange fictional town might look, from the outside, like a small miracle. But as the novel’s own narrator puts it, “Miracles never bother a realist.”
To be a realist about higher education right now is to accept that the real challenge isn’t primarily intellectual. It’s sentimental, spiritual even. In the algorithmic age, effective teaching has to be affective teaching. We tend to blame today’s educational struggles on shrinking attention spans, but attention is too thin a concept to explain what actually transforms a person through learning. What we’re really talking about is passion, however unfashionable that word has become. Passion creates a unity of purpose and urgency, and that urgency is the real antidote to the shallow, scattered distraction that defines this algorithmic moment. Plenty of people pay close attention to their phones. What’s missing is the kind of sustained passion that can endure real difficulty and actually shape a life.
When I asked my students why they thought Dostoyevsky had struck such a chord, two answers came up again and again. First, they were moved by the sheer intensity of the characters’ passions. One student described it to me this way: the characters in The Brothers Karamazov approach life “head first, heels last.” They hurl themselves toward extremity, seize whatever’s in front of them, and drag it back into this otherwise unremarkable village, where it detonates into small, fierce human dramas that somehow take on cosmic weight. In that sense, the novel is an extravagant fusion of form and content: it doesn’t just describe what real, life-altering passion looks like, it stirs something equivalent in the people reading it.
