This Schillerian ambiance is indicated in the notes only by a laconic sentence, “Karl Moor, Franz Moor, Regierender Graf von Moor” (15: 209). These words link the novel with Schiller’s sensational first play, The Robbers, whose importance for Dostoevsky’s novel is highlighted by a mocking sally of the old Karamazov. “That is my son,” he says of Ivan, “flesh of my flesh, and most beloved of my flesh! He is my most respectful Karl Moor, so to say, while this one who has just come in, Dimitry Feodorovich, against whom I am seeking justice from you [Zosima], is the unrespectful Franz Moor—they are both out of Schiller’s The Robbers, and so I am Regierender Graf von Moor. Judge us and save us!” (14: 66).
The ironic distortions contained in this speech illustrate the manner in which Dostoevsky plays his own variations on Schillerian themes. No one could be less like the tenderhearted, weak-willed, and abused Graf von Moor than the cynical, domineering, and rapacious Feodor Pavlovich, but they are structurally related as fathers involved in contentions with their sons. Karl Moor revolts against both the legal and the moral order because he believes (falsely) that his father denied him love and forgiveness; and although he resembles Ivan thematically because of his revolt against God’s universe on behalf of a suffering humankind, his fiery, explosive temperament brings him much closer to Dimitry as a character type. The cold-blooded intellectual Ivan, unable to love humanity except in the abstract and from a distance, is similar to Franz Moor, Schiller’s Machiavellian villain, whose rationalism causes him to doubt God and immortality and ruthlessly to order the murder of his father.
Not only does The Robbers depict the tragedy of a family split by deadly rivalry between father and sons, as well as between the sons themselves (Karl and Franz Moor both desire Amalia, just as Dimitry and Ivan are rivals for Katerina Ivanovna), it also poses the theme of parricide in even more lurid terms. For Schiller as for Dostoevsky, the sacredness of family ties and family feeling is the temporal reflection of the eternal moral order of the universe. It models God’s relation to his creation, and since the negation of the first involves the destruction of the second, it is the atheist and blasphemer Franz Moor who pours scorn on the belief that family ties create mutual obligations of love. “I’ve heard so much chatter about a so-called love based on blood ties that it’s enough to make the head spin . . . But even more—it is your father! He gave you life, you are his flesh, his blood—so for you he must be holy!”26
Franz’s rationalism, like that of Ivan, dissolves these primordial ties and obligations of family love in words that are echoed in the trial scene: “I must ask you, why did he create me? Surely not out of love for me, who first had to become an I?”27 The remainder of this speech, and a later one along the same lines, are transposed by the defense attorney Fetyukovich into the argument that “such a father as the old Karamazov cannot be called a father and does not merit the name. Filial love for an unworthy father is an absurd and impossible thing.” An unworthy father impels his son to ask the questions: “Did he really love me when he begat me? Did he beget me for my sake? He did not know me . . . at the moment of passion, perhaps intensified by wine” (15: 171).
If The Robbers shows the morally disintegrating effects of such rationalism on the instinctive moral roots of human life, it also reveals, like The Brothers Karamazov, the strength of these roots in the human spirit and the inevitability of their triumph or revenge. Franz Moor’s cynicism, at the last, gives way to a frenzied fear of eternal damnation for his manifold crimes; and he dies in a fit of terror, pleading for a prayer from his old servant. Karl Moor, appalled by the disastrously inhuman consequences of his revolt against the social iniquities of his time—a revolt that only unleashes the worst passions among his robber band, and includes the murder of a child—finally surrenders voluntarily as a sacrifice to the eternal moral order whose avenging instrument he had wished to become. Ivan, too, is appalled by the consequences of his own intellectual revolt as he sees his ideas put into practice by Smerdyakov, and, like Franz Moor, he is tormented by the impossibility of resolving the inner conflict between his skeptical rationalism and the religious faith supporting a moral order. Dimitry follows Karl Moor in being led through suffering to a sense of pity and compassion for others and an acceptance of the technical injustice of his conviction as a sacrifice for the temptation of parricide that he had willingly harbored in his breast.
Many references to Schiller’s poetry are scattered throughout The Brothers Karamazov as well, and used to deepen its thematic range. A cosmic and historical-philosophical dimension is provided for Dimitry’s inner conflict between the ideal of the Madonna and that of Sodom by fragments of Schiller’s “Das eleusische Fest” (“The Eleusinian Feast”) and the famous “An die Freude” (“To Joy”). Less overtly, Ivan’s rebellion also moves within the orbit of the Schillerian lyric. When he hands back his “entrance ticket” to the promise of an ultimate eternal harmony of God’s world because the price to be paid for it is too high in human suffering, Ivan repeats the gesture and uses the same terms as the protagonist of Schiller’s poem “Resignation”:
Empfange meinen Vollmachtsbrief zum
Glücke!
Ich bring’ ihm unerbrochen dir zurucke;
Ich weiss nichts von Glückseligkeit.28
Of even greater importance are the two lines from Schiller’s “Sehnsucht” (“Longing”), which, placed at the beginning of his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, condense an important aspect of the religious theme. The Russian version, by the poet V. A. Zhukovsky, is a free translation of Schiller that fits more closely into Dostoevsky’s context than does the original. The literal sense of the Russian is
Believe what the heart tells you,
Heaven does not make any pledges.
Dostoevsky’s notes also contain additional traces of his reading, and two other works have plausibly been linked with The Brothers Karamazov. Both are by George Sand, another writer whom Dostoevsky had adored in his youth and recently recalled in the Diary of a Writer. The research of V. L. Komarovich has brought out convincing resemblances between George Sand’s novel Mauprat (1837) and the plot action of The Brothers Karamazov. Both novels contain a crucial scene in which a young woman is on the point of being forced to sacrifice her honor, but at the last moment her presumptive ravisher renounces his villainous intentions, and this leads to an emotional entanglement between them in the future. In both, the young man is falsely accused of a murder, and tried and convicted on what seems unimpeachable circumstantial evidence. Sand’s heroine, Edmée, like Katerina Ivanovna, reverses her testimony—but to exonerate rather than condemn. The surprise introduction of a letter written by the accused to the heroine, and prefiguring the crime, also plays a major role in the condemnation. A comparison of parallel passages from the trial scenes makes clear that some of the plot elements of Mauprat had left ineradicable traces in Dostoevsky’s memory.29
Another work of George Sand’s, her unprecedented religious-philosophical novel Spiridion (1839), foreshadows The Brothers Karamazov on a deeper thematic level. Spiridion takes place entirely in a monastery and consists largely of conversations between a dying monk, Alexis—the inheritor of a semiheretical religious tradition handed down to him by his dead mentor, Spiridion—and a young novice named Angel. Alyosha Karamazov is also constantly called “angel,” and his adoring relation to Father Zosima is similar to that of Sand’s young disciple to his saintly teacher, also regarded with great suspicion by monks of a more orthodox persuasion. Like Zosima, Alexis is on the point of death; and he conveys his dying words to Angel, whom he calls “the son of my intelligence,” exactly as Zosima confides the story of his life and his teachings to Alyosha, whom he considers the reincarnation of his brother Markel. Of course, Dostoevsky had long nourished the project of writing a work set in a monastery, and it could well be that Spiridion, which he had read on publication, encouraged such an intention at the very outset of his literary career.30
At the novel’s climax the monastery i
s invaded by the armies of the French Revolution. Alexis is put to death, but he forgives the rampaging soldiers in his last words because he sees them acting “in the name of the sansculotte Jesus,” on whose behalf “they are desecrating the sanctuary of the Church.” Jesus was thus for him a revolutionary figure, a sansculotte, whose ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity were being fulfilled in practice, though entirely unconsciously, by the marauding soldiers.31 Here we have the Utopian Socialist Christ of Dostoevsky’s own early manhood—the semisecularized Christ whose social ideals he had never renounced but whose aims, particularly in Russia, he had long ceased to believe could be attained through revolutionary violence.
On opening the tomb of Spiridion after Alexis’s death, Angel finds buried with him the Gospel of Saint John (Dostoevsky’s own favorite, from which he took the epigraph for The Brothers Karamazov), Jean de Parme’s Introduction to the Eternal Gospel (a book written by a disciple of Joachim di Fiori, denounced as a heretic and burned in 1260), and Spiridion’s own commentary on this latter text. He had interpreted it as a prophecy predicting the arrival of the reign of the Holy Ghost—the reign of the principles represented by the French soldiers, who were thus accomplishing God’s will. His spiritual guide passes on this doctrine to Angel, who will take it into the world—just as Father Zosima passes on his teachings to Alyosha. Both mentors hold out the equally messianic hope (if only, for Zosima, at the end of time!) of a total transformation of earthly life into a realm of Christian felicity.
Aside from such similarities, it is impossible to read Spiridion without being struck by the concordance between some of Alexis’s utterances and Dostoevsky’s own most cherished convictions. No theme was more important for him in the 1870s than that of the first temptation of Christ, the turning of stones into bread. To yield to this temptation could only result in the surrender by humankind of its freedom of conscience; and Sand expressed the same thought forty years earlier. “This gigantic task of the French Revolution was not, it could not be,” Alexis declares, “only a question of bread and shelter for the poor; it was something much loftier. . . . [I]t had to, it still must . . . fully accomplish the task of giving freedom of conscience to the entire human race. This soul that torments me, this thirst for the infinite which devours me, will they be satisfied and appeased because the body is safe from want?”32
Nor was anything of greater moment for Dostoevsky than to emphasize the supreme significance for human life of the prospect of eternity, and to combat the atheistic confinement of existence to the limits of life on earth. Here too we find Alexis eloquently expressing the same longing, the same innate human need to transcend terrestrial boundaries. “And . . . when all the duties of men among themselves are established through a system of mutual interest, will this suffice for human happiness? . . . No matter how peaceful, how sweet one supposes life on earth to be, will it suffice for the desires of mankind and will the world be vast enough to encompass human thought?” Alexis also proclaims one of Zosima’s most sublime moral principles: the universal responsibility of each for all.33 One can well understand why Dostoevsky felt no hesitation in stretching the literal, historical truth when, in his obituary of her in the Diary, he spoke of George Sand as “one of the most perfect confessors of Christ.”
On returning to Petersburg on October 3, the Dostoevskys moved into a new apartment for reasons that Anna poignantly explains: “We could not bring ourselves to go on living in that apartment, filled with memories of our dead child.” Anna also dwells on the shadow that continued to hang over their lives because of Alyosha’s death. “No matter how my husband and I strove to submit to God’s will and not grieve, we could not forget our darling Alyosha. All that autumn and the following winter were darkened by desolate memories. Our loss had the effect on my husband (who had always been passionately attached to his children) of making him love them even more intensely and fear for them even more.”34 All this time Dostoevsky was working on The Brothers Karamazov, and the very problems raised in the impassioned declamations of Ivan—the unmerited suffering of little children and the difficulty of reconciling oneself to God’s will because of their torments—lay at the very center of his own life and feelings.
In the beginning of November 1878, with the first two books of The Brothers Karamazov completed, he traveled to Moscow to make the financial arrangements for publication. Dostoevsky called on Lyubimov, who was co-editor now of the Russian Messenger and would be in charge of publishing the novel. Katkov had fallen ill and could not receive Dostoevsky, who then felt obliged to assure Anna, who might be suspicious, that “of course he is not making excuses. He is really sick.” He himself was suffering from constipation and censoriously declares that “everything is vile.” “I am terribly lonely here,” he complains, “unbearably so.”35
Visits to his relatives provided the only bright spots in his unending catalogue of woes, though even with them the talk turned on Alyosha’s death. Nor was his temper improved by visits to the lawyers who were haggling over the details of the never-ending litigation concerning the Kumanina estate. Katkov’s cashier at long last came to the hotel with Dostoevsky’s advance, and he was able to leave Moscow two days later after tidying up his other affairs. The strain of this trip probably took its toll on Dostoevsky’s health. At the end of the month he visited his physician, Dr. von Bretsall, who advised him not to leave the house for several days.
1 One symbolic indication of this new status was his election in 1878 to membership in the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Division of Russian Language and Literature. He was pleased with such official recognition, though remarking to his wife that, compared with some of his contemporaries, his thirty-three years of literary activity made the distinction rather belated. See Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 297.
2 An introduction to Feodorov’s thought can be found in George M. Young, Jr., Nikolai Feodorov (Belmont, MA, 1979).
3 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 13–15; March 24, 1878.
4 Reminiscences, 297.
5 Ibid., 325.
6 Quoted in Samuel Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers, and Trials under the Last Three Tsars (New York, 1953), 217.
7 G. K. Gradovsky, Itogi, 1862–1907 (Kiev, 1908).
8 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 42–44; August 29, 1878.
9 Letopis zhizni i tvorchestvo F. M. Dostoevskogo, ed. N. F. Budanova and G. M. Fridlender, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1995), 3: 243, 247.
10 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 21–25; April 18, 1878.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 40–41; July 21, 1878.
13 Reminiscences, 297–298.
14 Grand Duke Konstantin, who had serious literary interests, later published poetry and plays under a pseudonym, and a number of his poems were set to music by Peter Tchaikovsky.
15 LN 86 (Moscow, 1973), 135.
16 Reminiscences, 292.
17 Letopis, 3: 273.
18 Reminiscences, 292, 293.
19 Ibid., 294.
20 Cited in John B. Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy (Belmont, MA, 1972), 60–61.
21 Letopis, 3: 279.
22 Ibid.
23 Reminiscences, 291–292.
24 V. S. Solovyev, Sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1911–1914), 3: 197.
25 See Vladimir Solovyev, Chteniya o bogochelovechestve (St. Petersburg, 1994), 195–196.
26 Friedrich Schiller, Samtliche Werke, 16 vols. (Stuttgart, n.d.), 3: 15.
27 Ibid., 16.
28 Translated literally, this reads: “Receive back my authorized permit to good fortune! / I return it to you unopened / I know nothing of happiness.”
29 V. L. Komarovich, “Dostojewski und George Sand,” in Die Urgestalt des Brüder Karamasoff (Munich, 1928), 214–219.
30 See the excellent book of Isabelle Hoog Naginski, George Sand (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991), 260. An appreciative discussion of Spiridion is contained in chapter 6.
31 Ibid., 146.
32 Quoted in ibid., 149–150.
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br /> 33 Ibid., 150, 143.
34 Reminiscences, 294.
35 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 48–49; November 9, 1878.
CHAPTER 53
The Great Debate
The first installment of The Brothers Karamazov was published on February 1, 1879. A few days later the governor-general of Kharkov—a cousin of the anarchist revolutionary Peter Kropotkin—was killed, and in March an unsuccessful attempt was made on the life of the new head of the secret police, the successor of General Mezentsev, as he was driving his carriage through the center of Petersburg. In April, a revolutionary acting on his own, but with the knowledge of the Populist Land and Liberty, attempted to assassinate the tsar as he was taking his morning walk in the Winter Palace grounds. The would-be assassin, Alexander Solovyev, missed his mark and was publicly hanged in May. It was in this atmosphere of murder and mayhem that Dostoevsky’s novel was being written and read. It was also the atmosphere in which he and Turgenev appeared together at benefit readings and banquets to represent the two extremes of the great debate that was taking place in the minds and hearts of all educated Russians—the debate between a despotic tsarism, unwilling to yield an inch of its authority, and the longing for a liberal, Western-style constitution that would allow for greater participation of the public in government affairs.
Just how intensively Dostoevsky was working at this time may be judged from the dispatch of Chapters 6–11 of The Brothers Karamazov on January 31, even before the first installment had been published. The galleys of the first two chapters had just arrived, and he enlisted the help of Elena Shtakenshneider with the proofreading. She returned the proofs along with a request to send back a borrowed copy of Zola’s L’Assomoir. Dostoevsky evidently wished to keep up to date, and The Brothers Karamazov contains ironic references to the physiologist and psychologist Claude Bernard, the main source of Zola’s theories about heredity and environment. The literary prominence given by Zola to Bernard’s deterministic theories of human character imparted to the French novel an ideological as well as a literary significance. Dostoevsky was writing his own family novel, with its defense of the freedom of the human personality, in direct competition with Zola’s deterministic Rougon-Macquart series.
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