I am so glad we get this insight into Ilya's home life and especially we get a more fleshed out Alexei. It gives much better context to who Ilya is and why he reacts to emotionally strained situations the way he does. I have an affinity for complicated familial relationships in fiction and for it to be obvious there was once love and admiration between the two of them and it's now so soured that they can't even talk on the phone without getting at each other's throats. The confrontation at the funeral is particularly good because it's when Ilya can finally put an end to this, he feels he has the chance to, and when he pushes Alexei and raises his fist to him, there is a moment of fear in Alexei's eyes. It's apparent how precarious this power imbalance has been and how Alexei only managed to keep Ilya under his thumb under some long standing threat. Alexei knows he has lost but he's also afraid of what Ilya could do to him in this moment. And it's just as much about knowing there is no saving whatever was left of this relationship. They can never be brothers, not like how they could have been. There is a real and unending grief in this even if the relationship hasn't been good. It's the mourning of what you could have had. You can hate someone and what they did to you and how they will never admit it but still wish the love could have been there. Wish it could have fixed it, that it could have saved you both from this. They didn't always hate each other, I have to know it's not that easy, and even at the end, Ilya was saying when Alexei is scared, he acts terrible. Ilya knows his brother. And, tragically, knows him well enough to justify his anger. The love was there, buried, and it changed nothing.
