A great book manages to speak insightfully both to the culture it was written in and to the present context. The Brothers Karamazov by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky is such a book. The last novel ever written by Dostoevsky, it tells the story of three brothers, Ivan, Dmitri, and Alyosha, each with radically different approaches to life. Dmitri is passionate and worldly. Ivan is cynical and coldly rational. And Alyosha, a monk in training, is reverent, innocent, and loving.

Ultimately, though, the book is about the problem of evil and how we can treat life as a gift in the midst of suffering. That’s one of the main reasons we keep going back to it. In one of the most famous chapters ever written, “The Grand Inquisitor,” a disillusioned cardinal complains to Christ how his incarnation has failed since evil and suffering have remained so rampant. How does Christ respond? By kissing the inquisitor in silence.

The celebrated Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard recently wrote a new meditation in The New Yorker on Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, commenting on “The Grand Inquisitor,”

In a way, it is as if all the novel’s various themes, attitudes, and events come together here, in that kiss. It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the novel that Jesus responds not with arguments, not with words, dogma, or abstraction, but rather through something physical and concrete: an act. It occurs there and then, and it concerns the two of them. It is interpersonal. And its significance cannot be fixed. Is it a refutation? Is it an act of forgiveness? Is it an example?

In chaotic times, filled with political upheaval, confusion over what’s real and what’s AI-generated, and the enduring problem of evil and suffering, Dostoevsky’s book continues to console, vex, and inspire. It may not present neat answers to our problems, but it presents a vital picture of what it looks like to cherish life and hold onto to the inherent value of human life. As new forms of technology like AI and notions of transcending basic human limits continue to be pushed for, it helps to revisit great texts like these to ground us. Great books always ask, “Who are we?” and “What are we living for?” These are questions ChatGPT and Google can’t answer for us.

Dostoevsky opposed materialistic understandings of the human person and avidly believed in the existence of the soul. People aren’t animals, nor are they machines. He writes this haunting line in The Brothers Karamazov: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

Materialism tries to discount any such things as beauty and mystery, but these are daily imprints of the human experience, and one of history’s greatest novelists poured his whole literary life into trying to show them to us.