What would Friedrich Nietzsche have thought of Dostoevskys The Brothers Karamazov if he had read it?
I think that Nietszche’s attitude to The Brothers Karamazov would have been profoundly ambivalent. On the one hand, I think this is exactly the novel by Dostoyevsky that Nietzsche would have disliked the most. The is the most profoundly Christian of all Dostoyevsky’s novels (in my opinion), and we know how Nietzsche would have felt about that. For Dostoyevsky, the person who deserves the most respect, the real hero, is the one who is capable to abandon all personal pride in the search for deeper values. For Nietzsche, pride is essential to make a heroic human being. I’m sure that Nietzsche couldn’t have possibly approved of Dostoyevsky’s view of Christianity. Prostrating yourself before God, before the moral authority of certain people, would be something that Nietzche could not have accepted. At the same time, I have no doubt that Nietzsche couldn’t fail to feel a certain affinity with the spirit of Dostoyevsky’s work. What Dostoyevsky’s novels announce is the painful advent of modern
