by Colin Wilson
In The Brothers Karamazov, all that Dostoevsky had learned from his earlier experiments with Outsiders is summarized. We have, at once, the beetle-man, Raskolnikov, Myshkin combined in this, the great synthesis. They are the three brothers Karamazov—Mitya, Ivan, Alyosha—the body, the intellect, the emotions. And since Dostoevsky himself was the intellectual Outsider, it is Ivan who claims the centre of the stage in his biggest novel. In Ivan the question of the ‘evil principle’ is attacked from within.
The plot of the novel is simple; Mitya and his vile, sensualist father are rivals for the love of the same girl. When the father is murdered by Mitya’s bastard half-brother Smerdyakov, the evidence against Mitya is overwhelming, and he is convicted and sent to Siberia (Smerdyakov in the meantime having committed suicide).
Together with this story there are two parallel themes, connected with Ivan and Alyosha. Alyosha has Van Gogh’s temperament, but fortunately he has fairly early found orientation in religion; when the novel opens he is a novice in the local monastery (like Narziss in Hesse’s book). Alyosha’s story concerns his mental upheaval caused by the death of Father Zossima, the Abbot (or Elder) whom he idolizes; it ends with Alyosha going into the world (like Goldmund and Joseph Knecht) to look for his salvation.
Ivan’s story is almost static; it lies in his position as an intellectual Outsider, a man who thinks too much to enjoy living. There is something of Raskolnikov’s ruthlessness about Ivan. And his bastard half-brother worships him and apes him; a constant reminder that he is not all intellect, but fifty per cent, flesh and crass stupidity. Nothing happens to Ivan. Dostoevsky uses him to pose the question: What happens when a man believes that life is unlivable? The answer appears when Ivan is visited by an embodiment of his unbelief, by the Devil. The Brothers Karamazov was never finished. We are not told whether Ivan found an answer or whether he went mad. Neither are we shown what happens to Alyosha when he goes ‘into the world’. (This was to be the subject of a sequel that Dostoevsky never lived to write.) For all that, we have in The Brothers Karamazov a more conclusive attempt at solution of the Outsider’s problems then any we have yet considered.
Of the three ‘stories’, Mitya’s tells us least. Dostoevsky was always a bad craftsman. [Crime and Punishment is his only complete artistic success; the other novels are as unshapely as pillow-cases stuffed with lumps of concrete.) The central ‘plot’ of the novel is no more than a background for the more important stories of the other two brothers, and in fact it has hardly any direct bearing on their stories at all. The idea that Ivan is morally responsible for his father’s death, having wished it, is completely irrelevant to his problems as an Outsider. (This particular view is made much of by the ‘Christian’ school of commentators, who always try to treat the novels as Just-so-stories with a moral on the last page.) If a moral can be drawn from Ivan, it is an Outsider’s moral: that the man who thinks too much is likely to go to exhausted extremes where the world becomes a shadowy paradigm of ideas. To keep sane he must continually come back to reality.
Alyosha is not such a fool. There is no danger of his leaving reality behind by overworking his brain. But he falls into the same pit as Van Gogh instead; he allows emotional problems, problems about human beings, to obscure fundamentally sane vision. That is his ‘moral’.
And Mitya? Well, Mitya seems to be one of those characters who meant more to his creator than he does to us (like Shatov in Devils). He embodies Dostoevsky’s obsession about shame; he strikes himself on the chest and calls himself an insect; he plunges from towering rages into ecstasies of self-abasement, and behaves generally with a complete lack of emotional discipline that is repugnant to a Western European. Certainly he is ‘Russian’, and perhaps for that reason he fails to awaken the interest of the Western reader as Ivan and Alyosha do. His ‘moral’ seems doubtful, unless we can interpret his acceptance to prison-sentence as his recognition that he needs to discipline himself, and will have to discipline himself, or sink into utter degradation, in Siberia.
This of course is not to dismiss Mitya; for Mitya, in a sense, knows better than Ivan. Primarily, he is ‘a man of motion’, like Nijinsky; and if he finds ‘salvation’, that is, unity of his impulses and certainty of purpose, it must be through action. At the end of the novel, Mitya’s story too is only half-finished.
So none of the three stories The Brothers Karamazov is finished: which is to say that none of the Outsider’s problems is finally solved. Yet the analysis of these problems is on a scale we have not considered before. Here is Ivan, for instance, the thinker, so like Raskolnikov in many ways. Where his detestable father and his uncontrolled brother are concerned, he is ruthless. ‘One reptile will devour the other—and serve them both right too.’ He has no sentimentality. Yet he is obsessed by pity, pity for human misery, and with the intellectual question that, since human beings are such a wretched lot, what is there to do except call them beetles and acknowledge yourself one of them? Ivan’s instinct is like Nietzsche’s, towards great health. And, like Nietzsche, he is always aware of the Pro and Contra, Ultimate Yes and Ultimate No. The chapter called ‘Pro and Contra’, in which Ivan analyses the problems at length, is an Outsider Scripture, a monumental piece of summarizing. Critics are agreed in regarding it as the apex of Dostoevsky’s creative edifice. We must now examine this at length.
Alyosha and Ivan are alone together for the first time. Immediately, without preamble, Ivan states his credo:
‘...if I lost faith in the order of things, if I were convinced that everything is a disorderly, damnable, devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusion—still I should want to live...’2
And here is Ivan’s denunciation of the ‘thought-riddled nature’:
‘I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha. I know it is only a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard. Precious are the dead that lie there; every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, such passionate faith in their work.... I shall steep my soul in my feeling. I love the leaves in spring, the blue sky—that’s all. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic— it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.’
‘I think everyone should love life above everything else in the world,’ Alyosha tells him.
‘Love life regardless of the meaning of it?’
‘Certainly—it must be regardless of logic—’it’s only then one can understand its meaning.’
We can see how far Dostoevsky has advanced beyond Lawrence’s horror of’lack of pattern and purpose in Nature’. Behind man lies the abyss, nothingness; the Outsider knows this; it is his business to sink claws of iron into life, to grasp it tighter than the indifferent bourgeois, to build, to Will, in spite of the abyss. Ivan has half-solved the Outsider’s major problem. Alyosha recognizes this; he tells him:
‘Half your work is done. It only remains to do the other half now.’
‘What other half?’
‘To raise up your dead, who have perhaps not died after all.’2
Alyosha is right, but he does not understand the magnitude of the problem of’raising up the dead’. Ivan goes on to explain this. He also has the makings of a monk, for he tells Alyosha:
‘I accept God and I accept his wisdom, his purpose, which are unknowable to us; I believe in the underlying order and meaning of life; I believe in the eternal harmony. ... I believe in the Word to which the Universe is striving. ... I seem to be on the right path, don’t I ? Yet— in the final result, I don’t accept God’s world.’
Then begins the great discussion, or rather, the great monologue, for it is mostly spoken by Ivan. What Ivan now explains in full is the difficulty of the ‘second half of the solution. Cruelty and misery: that is Ivan’s theme. He confines himself to cases of cruelty to children, and mercilessly describes these for a dozen pages. He concludes with his well-known statement: ‘It’s not God I don’t accept, Alyosha—only that I most respectfully return him the entrance ticket.’
It is an
Existentialist argument. To build on the abyss, you must have a foundation. For Ivan, the sufferings of one tortured child are enough to blast any foundation apart. Lawrence asserted that bodily sufferings have ultimately no power over the Will. That would be a good enough foundation to build on, to Will on. But what about the children’s sufferings ? A child cannot be expected to exert tremendous Will-power. The child’s sufferings just are; they cannot be reduced or resolved into a universal harmony, a System.
Not a rational solution, perhaps, Alyosha admits; but what of the irrational solution, the religious solution that Christ died as a pledge that the world’s suffering would be ultimately resolved? Ivan has an answer for that too; his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.3
Christ returned to earth once, Ivan tells Alyosha, in Seville, at the time of the Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor had him seized and cast into prison. The same evening he visited him, and explained why he could not allow him to resume his ministry in Seville. This, in summary, is what he tells Christ: ‘What message did you preach in Palestine? That all men must strive for more abundant life, that they must Will unceasingly to realize that “The Kingdom of God is within them”, that they should not be content to be men, but should strive to be “Sons of God”? You raised the standard of conduct of the Old Testament; you added to the Ten Commandments. Then you left us to build a Church on your precepts. What you didn’t seem to realise is that all men are not prophets and moral geniuses. It is not the Church’s business to save only those few who are strong-willed enough to save themselves. We are concerned about raising the general standard of all the race, and we can’t do this by telling every man that he had better be his own Church—as you did. That is tantamount to telling every man that he must be an Outsider—which God forbid! The Outsider’s problems are insoluble, and we, the elect, know this. You raised the standard too high, and we have had to haul it down again. We the elect, are unhappy—because we know just how terribly difficult it is to “achieve salvation”. But we have always kept this a secret from the people—who are not much better than dogs and cats, after all. Now you come back, proposing to give the show away! Do you suppose I can allow that ? I am afraid I shall have to have you quietly done away with and it is entirely your own fault. Prophets are all very well when they are dead, but while they are alive there is nothing for it but to burn or crucify them...
As the Grand Inquisitor ends his indictment, Christ leans forward and kisses him on his pale lips. This is his reply: Your reasoning is powerful but my love is stronger.
But Ivan has stated the case against religion as it has never been stated, before or since. Christ’s love is no answer to that.
Dostoevsky’s avowed intention in writing The Brothers Karamazov was to analyse and refute atheism. There are many critics who believe that in this his artistry overcame his intention, and that he made Ivan’s case unanswerable. Let us agree at once that ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is an artistic tour de force, and the statement of the opposite case (in the ‘Russian Monk’ section) cannot compare with it in power and conviction. But let us not confuse the dramatic effectiveness of an argument with its final truth. What Ivan has done is to express the ultimate No that drove Lawrence to mind-suicide, and Van Gogh, Nijinsky and Nietzsche insane. He has done this so brilliantly, so finally, that we must pay a great deal of attention to his argument, and get its full significance quite clear, before we go on to consider the ‘refutation’ of it. It is the most tremendous Outsider indictment ever written. The picture we have built up of the Outsider shows him as a halfway house to a higher type of man than the ‘once-born’ man; he loses more sleep, eats less, and suffers from all kinds of nervous diseases. Nevertheless, when we have analysed the Outsider’s uneasiness, his state of nervous tension, we have found it to have an objective cause in his sense of the precariousness of human life, as exemplified in the passage from Beddoes quoted on p. 108.
Now the once-born bourgeois might object that the precariousness is there; everybody knows it; it would be folly to live in a state of nervous tension on account of it. (He might instance the ancient Greeks, that nation of healthy, once-born optimists whose art is full of the consciousness of death and its inevitability.) But this is to ignore the biological truth that the preservation of life depends on awareness of death. If you inoculate a man with a small quantity of a disease he becomes immune to a large quantity; if you subject a man to extremes of heat and cold, he develops a resistance to both and can survive under conditions that would kill another man. The Outsider can regard his exacerbated sense of life’s precarious-ness as a biological measure to increase his toughness; in fact, to make him capable of ‘living more abundantly’. This is the conclusion that Steppenwolf reached.
Dostoevsky has considered the question from the angle of freedom. His beetle-man stated his credo, ‘that man’s whole business is to prove that he is man, not a cog-wheel’. Freedom means life; it has no meaning in relation to a chest of drawers or a dead body. It has less meaning for a tree than for a man. In the same way, it has less meaning for an incurable dipsomaniac or drug-addict than for a normally healthy person. The more life, the more possibility of freedom.
Now we can begin to see the full meaning of Ivan’s arguments. His argument builds up carefully to the conclusion of James’s vastation: ‘There is no freedom.9 He agrees, there is life; he loves life, ‘the sticky buds in spring’, but he cannot accept any meaning of life. It just ‘is’—a senseless, devil-ridden chaos. In the section on cruelty to children, Ivan paints his Nietzschean picture of human nature: human, all too human, futile, deluded; the intelligence that makes him man only making him (as Mephistopheles says) more brutal than any beast. Now Ivan passes on to Christ; and here we are reminded of a speech by Kirilov, when he tells Netchaev:4
‘Listen to a great idea: there was a day on earth and in the middle of earth were three crosses. A man on one cross had such faith that he said to another: “Today you will be with me in paradise”. The day ended, both died, and neither found paradise nor resurrection.... Listen, that man was the greatest of all on earth.... The whole planet... is sheer madness without that man. And so if the laws of Nature didn’t spare even him ... if they made even him live among lies and die for a lie, then the whole planet is a lie, and is based on a lie and a stupid mockery.’
Ivan also believes that ‘that man was the greatest of all on earth’, and his ‘Grand Inquisitor’ legend is an expansion of Kirilov’s speech. The Inquisitor is a man of spiritual insight; he has starved in the desert to achieve freedom; but, as Ivan says, ‘he saw it was no great moral blessedness to achieve perfection if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of God’s creatures have been created as a mockery: that these poor rebels can never turn into giants!’ The Inquisitor’s feeling about mankind is one of deep pity. Perhaps the Outsider can be aware of depths of human misery, but these poor insects, leading their blinded lives, who would open their eyes to their own bondage and wretchedness ? What good would it do, anyway? Give them bread and amusements; give them shallow little creeds to fight for and silly little superstitions to sing hymns about, but don’t ask wisdom of them. Christ asked: Which of you can drink of the cup that I drink of? Yet he behaved as if everyone could. He said: ‘My Yoke is easy and my burden light,’ but this is a lie, for freedom is the greatest burden of all: to tell every man to think for himself, to solve the problem of good and evil and then act according to his solution: to live for truth and not for his country, or society, or his family. It is kinder to men to think of them as insects; eternal life for such creatures must be a monstrous superstition. There will always be those few who strive to realize the ideal of freedom by being their own judge; these will know the agony of standing alone. Tor only we, who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy,’ the Inquisitor tells Christ. This is the conclusion of the Treatise on the Steppe nwolf. The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is the agent that ensures happiness for millions of ‘Insiders’. Haller’s reaction to this t
ruth, we remember, was the decision to cut his throat. Alyosha asks Ivan: ‘How can you live, with such a hell in your heart and head?’ And Ivan answers: There is a strength to endure everything.’ This is Ivan’s case, case for Ultimate No. What of the other side?
The Recollections of Father Zossima’ are Dostoevsky’s reply to the ‘Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’. Zossima is the Abbot of the Monastery where Alyosha makes a record of his last conversations; these form an autobiography, with appended ‘moral exhortations’. Zossima begins by speaking of his elder brother, who died of consumption when Zossima was a child. This brother was an intelligent youth, a free-thinker, who declared that Lenten facts were twaddle, and there was no God. But when the disease confined him to bed, a change came over him; suddenly he became tolerant of his mother’s devotions; a curious mystical frame of mind possessed him (which the doctors attributed to the disease). ‘Life is a paradise; we are all in paradise but we won’t see it.5 When the doctor told him he might have many days yet to live, or months and years, he answered, ‘Why reckon days? One day is enough for a man to know all happiness.’5
This made a deep impression on his young brother’s mind. Connected with this was an occasion when he heard the Book of Job read in Church: ‘Naked I came out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return to the earth...’ and Tor the first time I understood something read in the Church of God’. It is the mystical sentiment of Blake’s ‘Go, love without the help of anything on earth’; the experience laid the foundation for Zossima’s later religious fervour, Zossima’s story of his youth seems to follow the pattern of other Outsiders’ (Emil Sinclair and Tolstoy in particular): he forgets the childish impressions when he becomes a cadet in the army; he ‘sins’, and riots, does his best to behave like a ‘young blood’. The turning-point comes when he has challenged someone to a duel; suddenly the realization of his folly bursts on him; he allows his opponent to fire at him, and then throws away his pistol, and preaches a sermon: ‘Nature is sinless...only we are sinful; we don’t understand that life is paradise, for we have only to understand it and all will be fulfilled in all its beauty....’
