I first read The Brothers Karamazov at the age of sixteen, absorbing it with greater intensity than any novel I have read since. I had just moved away from home, setting myself up in a tiny studio above a shoeshop on Eighth Street, with a night job at a bookstore on the Upper East Side. The copy I read was a used hardback, translated by Constance Garnett, that I found for ten cents in one of the sidewalk book bins that lined Fourth Avenue at the time. It was water-stained and had an acrid, smoky odor, as if it had been carried out of a fire. Sometimes the pages tore away as I turned them.

I had little idea of who Dostoevsky was, and was unprepared for what seemed to me a feverish dramatization of the aggression my four brothers and I felt towards each other, and towards our father. There appeared to be great similarities between the Karamazov and Greenberg brothers. We were equally magnetized by our fathers’ moods, seeing our most troubling traits in him, lingering in his orbit, perhaps, to get a glimpse of our future selves. I made no secret of the fact that I didn’t like what I saw, ridiculing my father’s outbursts that frightened my brothers but made him seem weak to me and out of control. We were quick to forgive each other, and quick go at it again. My mother used to say that I was the son most like him. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri, the eldest brother, rails against his father’s depravity because it is just like his own. He compares his carnal hungers to that of an insect driven to feed. “In short – a Karamazov!”

While reading the novel, it became clear to me that I had left home to let my brothers and father battle it out among themselves. The murder of old man Karamazov made me feel that the unraveling of my family was inevitable, that we had no chance of surviving our animosities—though of course we did survive them. I could easily imagine the brother most outwardly devoted to my father committing the crime, like Smerdyakov in the novel, Karamazov’s bastard son and servant. My eldest brother was like Dmitri, I thought, loudly contending for our father’s business, and ending up taking the rap due to an accretion of cleverly planted evidence that he is unable convincingly to explain. My younger brother, too young to be corrupt, was the saintly novice Alyosha. And I fancied myself like Ivan, the intellectual atheist who lays out the cynicism of the Grand Inquisitor, then coolly leaves town with the idea of making a name for himself in more exalted circles.

Since then, I have tried to reread the novel several times, but have been unable to get further than fifty or sixty pages before putting it aside. It was as if I was protecting a memory that I had come to consider a permanent part of myself; I was unwilling to see the Karamazovs through the eyes of the critical reader I have become. The memory itself is surprisingly fragile, consisting most vividly of the waterlogged weight of the book in my winter coat pocket, and the lunch counters where I drank it in. The trouble was that after a few pages I would find myself agreeing with Nabokov’s complaint, that Dostoevsky was a “mediocre” writer who succumbed to a “rush and tumble of words with endless repetitions. . . and wastelands of literary platitudes.” He was “sentimental” rather than “sensitive” in Nabokov’s equation, with the cruelty of a “Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea [and] distribute his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them.” Nabokov implied that this was what was to be expected from a man whose own sadistic father was murdered by his coachman; who at age twenty-eight was arrested as a revolutionary, taken to the Semyonovsky Parade Ground in St. Petersburg to be tied to a post and executed, only to be told at the last minute that the Tsar had granted him his life; and who, like countless others, found Jesus while in penal servitude. I began to suspect that my idealization of The Brothers Karamazov had exerted a narrowing influence on my own writing when I was younger, leading me to reach for lunatic emotions and grand ideas instead of looking at things as they really were.

Last summer my friend Mark Lilla offered to assemble a group of five or six people to read the novel at an improvised book club. We met once a week on the roof of Mark’s apartment in Brooklyn. Included in our little club were two of Mark’s former students from the Committee on Social Thought, both now living in New York: Megan Buskey, and Sam Munson whose intimate knowledge of Dostoevsky’s work continuously amazed me. The night before each session I raced through 200 pages. On the roof the next day, the others seemed to be as lit up and perturbed by Dostoevsky’s spectacle as I was. The translation we used was the modern one by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which, according to Pevear, brings out the novel’s comic and “joyful” side that previous translators, unattuned to the eccentricities of Dostoevsky’s language and style, had “smoothed over.” It added to the sense I had of reading an entirely different book from the one I had encountered forty years ago. In the group, I heard myself defending the novel against my own former doubts about it. The anxiety of the characters seemed more modern and unpredictable than ever. Had I failed before to see that Ivan was driven insane by his belief that he had been indirectly responsible for the murder of his father? “It’s not my head that will roll, but what was in my head,” he tells his brother Alyosha. It is one of several passages that Garnett ignored. Instead, she has Ivan say, almost as an aside, “It was all over with me.”

This time I admired Dmitri. The poorer townsfolk see him as “a little child,” hungry for experience. “I’ve grown to love life so much it’s disgusting,” he says. “Enough!” Every day he beats his breast promising to reform, and every day he “does the same vile things.” It wasn’t Dostoevsky the novelist that Nabokov really objected to, I thought, but his anti-cosmopolitanism, his mystical belief in ultimate salvation and “sinning one’s way to God.” The parallels with my brothers seemed less apparent. We were middle-aged and tame now, the way the Karamazov brothers might have become had Dostoevsky lived to write the two sequels to the novel he had planned.

Michael Greenberg is a columnist for the Times Literary Supplement. He is also the author of Hurry Down Sunshine and, recently, Beg, Borrow, Steal: a Writer’s Life.