the girls are reading Dostoevsky this Lent

what if we read an 800-page piece of Russian literature in 40 days?

This post is sponsored by Hallow. What’s beautiful about this, however, is that I was planning on reading “The Brothers Karamazov” before Hallow announced it would be the centered work for this year’s Pray40 challenge… now we get to work together to share the love of the Father and encounter Him through this epic work this Lenten season. Praise be to God!

The Return of the Prodigal Son, Rembrandt (1668-9)

I shall get up and go to my father and I shall say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son; treat me as you would treat one of your hired workers.” So he got up and went back to his father. While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him. (Luke 15:18-20)

The first penance I received upon coming back to the Church was to sit and meditate on the parable of the prodigal son for fifteen minutes. I set my Bible in the pew in front of me in a very empty church, and read it over, and over, and over again. By God’s grace, something new was revealed to me through each read. I’m sure many of you reading now have had the same experience, maybe even the same penance, if you reverted or converted.

Every Ash Wednesday I feel a bit of what I felt in that pew. Flinging yourself without care to His feet, showing Him all you’ve tried to keep hidden, revealed brutally quickly with the emblazoning of a reminder of your own death stamped across your forehead. Just like the son in the parable, staring at the suffering he finds himself trapped in without the love of his father, hungry to come back and recover his relationship and the bounty that flows from it.

This Lent, I am so, so beyond excited to dive headfirst into the second piece of classic Russian literature I’ve ever read — focusing intently on this parable, on coming home, on rejecting the love of the world and being loved by the one who made us. If you were subscribed to Virtue Signals last November, you might remember I began The Death of Ivan Illyich by Tolstoy, to focus on the liturgical season of Allhallowtide and going into Advent. Law school and an AI cover photo on the copy I ordered from Amazon got in the way of finishing, but I resolved that I’d commit to The Brothers Karamazov for Lent. And here we are, with the one and only Hallow App to help us along!

In this article, I’m detailing three ways to follow along with The Brothers Karamazov this Lent and resources for tackling a project like this.

The most beautiful Brothers Karamazov cover in existence, for sure.

Alden, isn’t that one of the thickest books ever? How on earth can you do that in 40 days?

You actually don’t have to!

Hallow has put together 40 days of scripture, reflections, plus readings from The Brothers Karamazov and The Return of the Prodigal Son by Fr. Henri Nouwen, all guiding you through the story and its key themes without you having to pick up the (hefty!!!) book at all.

Or, you could follow the abridged reading plan — Hallow has structured a plan for people who don’t want to commit to reading cover-to-cover but still want to engage with the literature outside the app. Here’s a glance at what that looks like:

If you want to read the whole text, they’ve also created a 100-day reading plan, breaking up the 800-ish page novel across Lent and finishing around the time of Pentecost this summer. If you choose this route, you won’t be missing the literary action tying into your Lenten focus, don’t worry.

OR, you could go absolutely crazy with me and try to conquer Brothers Karamazov in forty days. But it’s actually not that crazy. It’s about an hour to an hour and a half of reading each day, which is something I already have penciled into my daily routine. The goal is to complete 20-25 pages each day.

If you’re an avid mystery, thriller novel lover like me, you’re going to love this. The Brothers Karamazov is a detective story, a whodunit with existential spiraling. I liked how The Library Company and Coby’s Desk described it — “all the trappings are here: accusations, clues, evidence, trials, testimonies, sentences, but also…

The Brothers Karamazov is a novel about all of the deepest questions: Who is God? How can he be good when he allows us to suffer? What does it mean to be free? In what sense are we free, and how can our freedom be best used? How can we be good? How can we be forgiven? How can we be sure that our lives mean something? How can good triumph over evil when it is always sacrificing itself?”

One Book to Change Your Life: Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

Think about it, pray about it — if you’re ready to take the leap and pick up a book that feels incredibly uncomfortable (both in the complexity of character names but also in the weight it adds to your purse), I’ve rounded up a few ideas to help get us started:

1. keep a reading journal

This is my favorite practice that I picked up from my favorite professor in college while reading through the Summa’s Treatise on Law. Half our grade in his class was based on our reading journals — we were required to reflect in some way on the readings for each class. It didn’t have to be deep or profound. There were really no parameters at all. We just needed to put pen to paper in expressing a reaction to what we’d just read: agree, disagree; connect it to a modern issue; draw analogies; explain it to yourself again; was there a particular piece of language that was really beautiful?; did it remind us of something else we’d read before? The possibilities are endless.

He said we’d be likely to forget the exact words that St. Thomas or Locke or C.S. Lewis wrote no matter what, but if we could just memorialize our reactions, we’d carry them with us all the time and be able to draw back on the central arguments and themes of the work. He was very, very correct.

I type mine in a long-running Google Doc. My thoughts flow faster than I can handwrite legibly. You could keep one in your phone’s Notes app, in a cutie notebook, or you could use Hallow’s space for written reflection at the end of each Pray40 challenge. It doesn’t even have to be all collected in one space — it’s lovely to go back and read your reflections later, but the exercise is more about locking in your response in the present by taking time to capture it physically.

2. practical resources

The Beauty of Things wrote a wonderful article on “How to Read a Long, Complicated Novel Very Quickly” with staying fully engaged with The Brothers Karamazov in mind. Here are a few of the tips and tricks I saved from her article:

• Visually breaking it up into parts: Hallow has already done this for you if you’re following the abridged or 100-day reading plan. The Brothers Karamazov has twelve books that are then subdivided into chapters — if you’re reading this in the six and a half weeks of Lent, you can pretty evenly divide this into two “books” a week. Dog-ear or sticky-note the book up so you can see your progress as you go! Here’s my copy:

  

• Marginalia: to preface, this isn’t for everyone. I meticulously color-coded my casebooks in my first year of law school (yellow for reasoning, blue for party names, pink for the rule, orange for the holding yadayadayada) and dropped it after one semester because I’d learned to read cases and sorting that information in my head had become second-nature. I find the same thing usually happens when I read a new classic — I have a lot to talk about in the margins at first, a lot of new people and places to sort through, a different and distinctive writing style, and then eventually, I’m fully immersed and those “aids” are just slowing me down. Find ideas for different mark-up systems in Zina’s article, but don’t let them prevent you from just diving in and starting —

How to Read a Long, Complicated Novel Very Quickly

• Reading guides: Does anyone else still feel a deep sense of shame lingering from high school English literature classes when you consult Sparknotes as an adult? We’re going to need to push that aside to get some help understanding Dostoevsky. When things get thick and confusing, I’m a big fan of reading summaries before the next chapter, not after. Here are the resources Zina listed in her article —

  • An FAQ-styled summary of The Brothers Karamazov written by Brandon Monk on Medium.

  • Dr. Jessica Hooten’s lecture series, book-by-book. Each lecture is under 20 minutes!

  • Sparknotes ⚡🧨🪄💥!!!

3. book club & accountability partners

Lent is a solo journey — we’re instructed from day 1 on Ash Wednesday to fast, give alms, and pray in secret. While reading The Brothers Karamazov, reflecting on your own, and engaging with Hallow’s accompanying daily challenge can certainly be part of your Lenten prayer practice between you and Christ alone, I don’t think fellowship with others in discussing the text takes away from that journey. In fact, I think it adds a layer of depth to your own experience, holds you accountable, and forces you to think critically when you know someone’s counting on you and your thoughts, opinions, and reflections.

Organize a group of friends (or just one friend!) to meet up after Stations of the Cross on Fridays to chat about the week’s reading and what you took away from the Pray40 reflections — I think this could be so helpful especially if you’re not doing the exact same reading pace.

Invite your fiancé or husband to take part in the challenge with you! I have a feeling that most men are a little bit less inclined towards 40-day devotionals and more towards challenges like this one. We’ve got a weekly husband-and-wife-book-club date marked in our GCals for the next forty days, and we’re so excited.

If you are going at this alone, no worries. I’ll be posting about my progress through the book weekly, sharing reflections I love from Pray40, and generally keeping the Russian literature hype up when it starts getting tough. Maybe we should start something up on the subscriber chat, too? 💭

4. offer it up

This is a challenge. “Lord, calm my mind”, “Lord, help me understand,” “Lord, show me what you want to show me.” We’re going to have to stop and say prayers like this often throughout our reading. There will be mornings, afternoons, and evenings where the last thing you’ll want to do is pick up this book. Thank goodness we aren’t relying on our own strength. Keep St. Thomas Aquinas’s prayer before study close to your heart:

Creator of all things,
true Source of light and wisdom,
lofty origin of all being,
graciously let a ray of Your brilliance
penetrate into the darkness of my understanding
and take from me the double darkness
in which I have been born,
an obscurity of both sin and ignorance.
Give me a sharp sense of understanding,
a retentive memory,
and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.
Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations,
and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm.
Point out the beginning,
direct the progress,
and help in completion;
through Christ our Lord. Amen.

I’m praying for you! I’m so excited to share more about this in weeks to come. What an honor indeed.