25 Letopis, 3: 478.
26 Ibid., 493.
27 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 227–228; November 8, 1880.
CHAPTER 58
The Brothers Karamazov: Books 1–4
The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ya Karamazovy) achieves a classic expression of the great theme that had preoccupied Dostoevsky since Notes from Underground: the conflict between reason and Christian faith. The controlled and measured grandeur of the novel spontaneously evokes comparison with the greatest creations of Western literature. The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, King Lear, Faust—these are the titles that come to mind as one tries to measure the stature of The Brothers Karamazov, for these too grapple with the never-ending and never-to-be-ended argument aroused by the “accursed questions” of mankind’s destiny. By enlarging the scale of his habitual poetics of subjectivity and dramatic conflict, Dostoevsky imparts a monumental power of self-expression to his characters that rivals Dante’s sinners and saints, Shakespeare’s titanic heroes and villains, and Milton’s gods and archangels. Dostoevsky’s personages seem to dwarf their surroundings with the same superhuman majesty as the figures of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.
The characters of The Brothers Karamazov are not only contemporary social types, they are linked with vast, age-old cultural-historical forces and moral-spiritual conflicts. The internal struggle in Ivan Karamazov’s psyche, for example, is expressed through the legends and mystery plays of the Middle Ages in Europe, the autos-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition, the eschatological myth of the returning Christ, and the New Testament narrative of Christ’s temptations by Satan. Dimitry is surrounded with the atmosphere of Schiller’s Hellenism and the struggle between the Olympian gods and the dark, bestial forces that had subjugated humankind before their coming. Zosima is the direct inheritor of the thousand-year-old rituals and traditions of the Eastern Church and a representative of the recently revived institution of starchestvo, both of which are evoked so solemnly in the early chapters. Alyosha is situated in this same religious context, and his crisis of doubt, which, like those of King Lear and Hamlet, calls into question the entire order of the universe, is resolved only by a cosmic intuition of the secret harmony linking the earth with the starry heavens and other worlds.
Feodor Pavlovich’s anecdotes about Diderot and Catherine the Great, as well as his quotations from Voltaire, tinge his grossness and cynicism with a distinct eighteenth-century flavor. He is also placed much farther back in time when he takes pride in possessing “the countenance of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period” (14: 22). Dostoevsky always associated these later years of the declining Roman Empire with rampant licentiousness and moral breakdown, and in 1861 he wrote that this period was the world “to which our divine redeemer descended. And you understand much more clearly the meaning of the word redeemer” (19: 137). Nor should one forget the rich network of biblical and literary allusions and parallels that interweave with the action throughout the book.1 This symbolic amplification thickens and enriches the texture of the work, and gives its conflicts the range and resonance we are accustomed to finding in poetic tragedy rather than in the more quotidian precincts of the novel.
All these factors contribute to the impression of classic grandeur made by the book, but most important of all is the weight and dignity of its theme. With The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky takes up the subject of the breakdown of the Russian family that had begun to preoccupy him in the early 1870s and had furnished the starting point for A Raw Youth. But if that novel had shown him anything, it was that he could not confine this subject to a social-psychological level. For Dostoevsky, the breakdown of the family was only the symptom of a deeper, underlying malaise: the loss of firmly rooted moral values among educated Russians stemming from their loss of faith in Christ and God. The morality deriving from these values had once again become accepted—but not their linkage to the supernatural presuppositions of the Christian faith, which for Dostoevsky offered their only secure support. Concurrently, therefore, there is also, for the first time, the extensive presentation of another world of true faith, love, and hope in the monastery, as well as in the evolution of the relations between Dimitry and Grushenka and among the children.
The conflict between reason and faith—faith now being understood as the irrational core of the Christian commitment—was thus, as Dostoevsky saw it, posed more centrally in current Russian culture than in the 1860s. And its new prominence gave him his long-cherished opportunity to place this conflict, grasped at its highest moral-philosophical level, at the center of a major work. In his last novel, he thus brought all the resources of his sensibility, his intelligence, his culture, and his art to cope with this new version of radical ideas—just as he had done earlier with Chernyshevsky’s materialism and Utilitarianism in Notes from Underground, with Pisarev’s Nihilism in Crime and Punishment, and with the revolutionary amorality of the Bakunin-Nechaev ideology in Demons.
This opposition between reason and faith is dramatized with incomparable force and sublimity in Books 5 and 6, the famous ideological center of The Brothers Karamazov. It contains Ivan’s revolt against a Judeo-Chrisitan God in the name of an anguished pity for a suffering humanity, and the indictment of Christ himself in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor for having imposed a burden of free will on humankind too heavy for it to bear. In reply, there is Zosima’s preachment of the necessity for a faith in God and immortality as the sole guarantee for the active love for one’s fellow man demanded by Christ. Here this conflict is expressed in overt religious terms and in relation to the age-old problem of theodicy, which, ever since the book of Job, has furnished the inspiration for so much of the religious problematic in the Western tradition. But it is not enough to focus attention solely on these magnificent set pieces. For the same theme of reason and faith appears in all the multiplicity of action in the book, and its specifically religious form serves as a symbolic center from which it radiates analogically through all the situations in which the major characters are involved.
Dostoevsky rather incautiously spoke of the utterances of Zosima in Book 6 as having been designed specifically to answer the accusations of Ivan against God, but he did so partly to pacify the fears of Pobedonostsev that the reply would not be as powerful as the attack. Later, however, in an entry in his notebook set down after the work had been completed, he wrote that “the whole book” was a reply to the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (27: 48). This remark indicates much more accurately the linkages that exist among the various parts and levels—a linkage based on the analogy between the dominant situation reflected in Ivan’s poem and the conflicts of all but the most accessory and secondary characters.
For an intellectual like Ivan, his anguish at the sufferings of humankind opposes any surrender to the Christian hope—a hope justified by nothing but what Kierkegaard called a “leap of faith” in the radiant image of Christ the Godman. Similarly, all the other major characters are confronted with the same necessity to make a leap of faith in something or someone beyond themselves, to transcend the bounds of personal egoism in an act of spiritual self-surrender. For these characters, this conflict is not presented in terms of a specific religious choice but rather in relation to their own dominating drives and impulses, their own particular forms of egoism. They too are called upon to accomplish an act of self-transcendence, an act “irrational” in the sense that it denies or overcomes immediate ego-centered self-interest. The identification between “reason” (which on the moral level amounted to Utilitarianism) and egocentrism was deeply rooted in the radical Russian thought of the period, and this convergence enables Dostoevsky to present all these conflicts as part of one pervasive and interweaving pattern. Indeed, the continuing power of the novel derives from its superb depiction of the moral-psychological struggle of each of the main characters to heed the voice of his or her own conscience, a struggle that will always remain humanly valid and artistically persuasive whether or not one accepts the theological premises without
which, as Dostoevsky believed, moral conscience would simply cease to exist.
Such a pattern, indeed, may be found not only in the thematic involvements of the book but even in the organization of the plot action. The central plot is carefully constructed so as to lead, with irresistible logic, to the conclusion of Dimitry’s guilt; the accumulated mass of circumstantial evidence pointing to him as the murderer is literally overwhelming. The fact remains, however, that he is innocent of the crime (though implicated in it by his parricidal impulses), and the reader is thus constantly confronted with the discrepancy between what reason might conclude and the intangible mystery of the human personality, capable even at the very last moment of conquering the drives of hatred and loathing. The entire arrangement of the plot action thus compels the reader to participate in the experience of discovering the limitations of reason. Only those among the characters who are willing to believe against all the evidence—only those whose love for Dimitry and whose faith, deriving from this love, are stronger than the concatenation of facts—only they are able to pierce through to the reality of moral-spiritual, as well as legal, truth in its most literal sense, and this motif illustrates why Dostoevsky could legitimately maintain that “the whole book” is a reply to the “Euclidean understanding” that created the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.
The Brothers Karamazov begins with a preface labeled “From the Author,” and some question has arisen as to whether this “author” is Dostoevsky himself or the fictional narrator of his story. This question raises the more general issue of his fictional narrator as such, who determines the perspective from which a good deal of the novel will be read. In fact, two narrators are provided: one who comes to the foreground and is indirectly characterized as a resident of the town personally acquainted with the Karamazov story, another who allows the characters to express themselves in lengthy monologues or in dramatic confrontations with hardly any commentary. Dostoevsky was well aware of this problem of narrative perspective, and the solution he adopts here is similar to his earlier choice for Demons. There we find the same two types of narration, one expository and the other dramatic; but while the expository narrator in that novel participated in the dramatic action, in The Brothers Karamazov he is totally detached from the events. Since these took place thirteen years earlier, he serves only as a historian or chronicler, but one who indicates some personal acquaintance with the events at the time they occurred. Although he may disappear as a presence in the dramatic scenes, he is nonetheless important otherwise and exhibits a distinct physiognomy.
The Russian scholar V. E. Vetlovskaya writes that Dostoevsky deliberately blurred the lines between himself as author and his fictional narrator because this indistinction allowed him to express his own opinions in a veiled and seemingly naïve fashion.2 He was writing what she calls a “philosophical-publicistic” work, which advanced a definite tendency and advocated a specific moral-religious point of view—and one to which, as he well knew, many of his readers would be opposed. He thus tried to defuse negative reactions by creating a figure that evokes a “modernized” version of the tone and attitude typical of the pious narrators of the hagiographical lives of Russian saints. His language constantly plays on associations that would recall such saints’ lives to the reader, and other attributes of the narrator’s style, such as syntactical inversions that would be felt as archaisms, can also be traced to such an intent. The fumbling, tentative quality of his assertions, his uncertainty about details, his moralistic judgments and evaluations, his emotional involvement in the lives of the characters, his lack of literary sophistication, and the heavy-handedness of his expository technique—all can be seen as an up-to-date version of the pious, reverent, hesitant, hagiographical style of the Russian religious tradition. Such a narrator would be apt to produce a sense of trust in the reader by his very awkwardness and simplicity, and his constant appeal to the opinion of the community also imparts a chorus-like quality to the testimony that he offers. Dostoevsky thus uses him to insinuate his own point of view without arousing an instantly hostile response.3
The preface, however, contains remarks about Russian criticism and critics that would come more naturally from the pen of a professonal writer. It is more the author than the provincial chronicler who explains that from the outset he wished to focus attention on Alyosha, even though he is still “a vague and undefined protagonist” (14: 5) who will become more important in a second volume. Because Dostoevsky wished to indicate the future importance of Alyosha, he felt it necessary to say a few words about him outside the framework of this first story.
Dostoevsky sets out immediately to counter the prejudices that he knew would be stirred by Alyosha’s Christian commitment and the other peculiarities of his character. Alyosha, he writes, is “an original” (chudak), but his singularity does not mean that his strangeness and eccentricity have nothing to teach others. “For not only is an eccentric ‘not always’ a particularity and a separate element, but on the contrary, it happens sometimes that such a person . . . carries within himself the heart of the whole, and the rest of the men of his epoch have for some reason been temporarily torn from it, as if by a gust of wind” (14: 5). Alyosha and his teacher, Zosima, were certainly the heart of the Russian “whole” for Dostoevsky, and one aim of the book was to drive this point home to those who rejected the divinity of Christ while revering the values of the Russian people who came to adore him through the person of Zosima.
Book 1 opens with a series of short background chapters devoted to the history of the Karamazov family in which Dostoevsky touches on all the main characters and thematic motifs that he will develop so luxuriantly later. Dostoevsky’s characters, always portrayed in a relatively brief time span, obviously cannot undergo a long process of maturation. Instead, they appear to grow in size and stature because, even if a change occurs, it is accomplished through developing latent aspects of the personality already present from the start. This is probably why, as the characters visibly amplify before our eyes, the reader receives so strong an impression of their monumentality.
No such change takes place in the elder Karamazov, who incarnates personal and social viciousness on a grand scale. He totally neglects his three children by his two wives, who grow up as members of the kind of “accidental family” that Dostoevsky increasingly felt to be typical of educated Russian society. His presumed bastard, Smerdyakov, is treated with a contempt that only increases the latter’s resentment and hidden rage. Feodor Pavlovich, however, is not simply a monster of wickedness existing solely on the level of his insatiable appetites; he is clever and cynical, educated enough to sprinkle his talk with French phrases, to be familiar with Schiller’s The Robbers, and he is shown to have strange velleities that suggest some concealed modicum of inner life. On receiving the news of the death of his domineering first wife—the mother of Dimitry—he both shouts with joy and weeps. Years later, though continuing to abuse the monks, he donates a thousand rubles to the monastery to pay for requiems for her soul. This leitmotif of the “broad” Russian nature, swinging between competing moral-psychological extremes, characterizes both Feodor Pavlovich and his eldest son Dimitry, and its symbolic significance will be highlighted toward the end of the book.
The narrator sketches Dimitry’s recklessly dissipated army career, and his expectations that he would inherit money from his mother on coming of age, before moving on to the second brother, Ivan, who possesses the familiar traits of Dostoevsky’s young intellectuals. He is a reserved and morose nature thrown back on itself and brooding over the injustices of the world. The ideas that absorb him now express the core of the Populist problematic. Is it possible to transform the world into a realization of the Christian ideal without a belief in Christ? Ivan’s inner conflict is suggested by the ambiguity surrounding his article on the ecclesiastical courts, which had been applauded both by the Church party and the secularists. The issue was whether such courts should be subordinate to the state (and hence secular) authorit
ies, or whether state courts should ultimately be absorbed by ecclesiastical ones, whose decisions would be made according to the law of Christ. Ivan had presented both extreme positions with equal force, and each party thought it could claim him as an advocate. In reality, his apparent refusal to choose already presents the inner conflict that will ultimately lead to his mental breakdown.
It is to Alyosha that, after Feodor Pavlovich, the narrator devotes the most attention. Dostoevsky endeavors to persuade the reader that, unlike the previous incarnation of his moral ideal in Myshkin, such a figure was not “a fanatic . . . and not even a mystic” (14: 17); on the contrary, he was “a well-grown, red-cheeked, clear-eyed lad of nineteen, radiant with health” (14: 24). He is immediately associated with Christian values by his earliest memory, that of his mother, partially deranged by her suffering at the hands of Feodor Pavlovich, who prays for him before the image of the Mother of God, “as though to put him under the Mother’s protection.” Alyosha’s moral sensibility is thus shaped by the all-forgiving love traditionally associated with the Mother of God in Russian Orthodoxy. “There was something about [Alyosha] which made one feel at once . . . that he did not care to be a judge of others—that he would never take it upon himself to criticize and would never condemn anyone for anything” (14: 18).
The depiction of Alyosha’s character and behavior, which the narrator makes no attempt to explain psychologically, conforms to the hagiographical pattern; the moral purity of his nature, and the love that he inspires in everyone despite his “eccentricity,” are traditional saintly attributes. The forces that move him, which are left deliberately vague so as to suggest a possibly otherwordly inspiration, come from the childhood impressions just mentioned, and from the nature of the religious vocation they have inspired. Alyosha was instinctively religious, and until his faith is tested later, he has had no doubts about God or immortality, or even about the truth of the miraculous legends connected with the institution of elders (startsy). Novices who entrusted themselves to an elder committed their will to his guidance in “the hope of self-conquest, of self-mastery” (14: 28), and Alyosha had decided to submit himself to Zosima in this way. He fully shared the Russian peasantry’s adoration of the ideals of holiness embodied in the saintly monk, whom he also believed to possess the gift of a spiritual force—the force of Christian love—capable of redeeming the world.
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