It is against this vast cultural-historical background, and the eternal struggle of humankind with the contradictions of its own nature, that the story of Dimitry’s involvement with Katerina unfolds. Only when he is seen as this sort of Antaeus, irrevocably bound to the earth, can the calamity of their engagement be rightly understood. Dimitry had set out to seduce Katerina solely out of wounded vanity at her contemptuous indifference. The very means he chose to bend her to his will, offering to save her father from disgrace as the price of her surrender, was a profound insult; his refusal to take advantage of her when she complied was an even deadlier blow to her pride and gave him the psychological advantage in their relations. Katerina’s only weapon in this struggle of wills was a magnanimity that, in constantly reminding Dimitry of his moral inferiority, would allow her to maintain the upper hand. Life has thus become intolerable for Dimitry under the burden of Katerina’s “gratitude,” which at the same time deprives him of any cause for grievance.
Attention shifts to Smerdyakov in the next four chapters, this haunting and enigmatic character who inspires pity and repulsion at the same time. Smerdyakov had been sadistic and blasphemously scornful of religion even in childhood, someone completely devoid of any natural feeling of gratitude or obligation. These personal traits are ideologically transposed in the discussion that he carries on with Feodor, Ivan, and Grigory. Here he is revealed as another of the “rationalists” who people the book; and like Feodor’s obscene jests and scoffing sacrileges, Smerdyakov’s “rationalism” is another caricature, in the form of crafty logical sophistry, of Ivan’s tortured moral ratiocinations. Debating the heroism of Foma Danilov, the Russian soldier who had been tortured and put to death by Muslim enemies for refusing to renounce his Christian faith, Smerdyakov argues that the heroic martyr had really been a fool. The mere thought of renouncing Christianity to save his life would have immediately separated him from God and Christ, and he would thus not have committed any sin as a Christian. Weakness of faith is in any case the most ordinary and venial kind of sin, because nobody any longer can command nature to perform such miracles as moving mountains—except perhaps, as he concedes, much to the delight of Feodor, one or two hermits in the desert. And do not the Scriptures, Smerdyakov asks triumphantly, promise such powers to all those who have faith?
His arguments are those of a petty and calculating nature, which seeks to rationalize its own inclinations for treachery and uses “reason” to undermine and dissolve any firm moral commitment. At the same time, though, Smerdyakov is enough of a credulous Russian peasant to believe in the wonder-working powers of one or two hermits in the desert. The importance of this point is stressed when Feodor asks Alyosha, “That’s the Russian faith all over, isn’t it?” and Alyosha agrees, “that’s purely Russian” (14: 120–121). Smerdyakov’s casuistry cannot entirely destroy his belief in the sanctity of those two hermits.
Smerdyakov serves as Ivan’s alter ego in the same fashion as Svidrigailov had done for Raskolnikov; he carries Ivan’s theories to their logical and repugnant extreme, and exhibits their distorted and dangerous refraction in a more uncouth and less high-minded nature. But Smerdyakov is also meant to convey more than mere thematic extrapolation. For he is a well-marked social type—the peasant who has been uprooted from his community and his group values, who has acquired a smattering of urban culture and manners, and who feels immeasurably superior to his benighted fellow peasants and resentful at his inferior social status. It is among such peasants, Dostoevsky is suggesting, that the destruction of the Christian faith by the “rationalism” of the Ivans is most likely to be greeted with admiration and to have the most explosive consequences.
Indeed, he evokes such possibilities in Aesopian imagery when his fictional narrator compares Smerdyakov with a type of peasant “contemplative” depicted in a painting by I. N. Kramskoy. “There is a forest in winter, and on a roadway through the forest, in absolute solitude, stands a wandering peasant in a torn caftan and bark shoes.” He is not thinking but brooding inwardly, “contemplating.” If asked about what was passing through his mind, he would not be able to reply; but “probably he had hidden within himself the impression which had dominated him during the period of contemplation.” And then he “may suddenly . . . abandon everything and go off to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage for his soul’s salvation, or perhaps he will suddenly set fire to his native village, and perhaps do both” (another instance of the “broad” Russian nature) (14: 116–117).
Every contemporary reader would know that such a “contemplative” contained a threat of revolution, or at least of a jacquerie, and this suggestion is reinforced a few pages later in the conversation about Smerdyakov between Feodor and Ivan. Noting that the lackey is enthralled by Ivan, his father asks, “What have you done to fascinate him?” Ivan answers, “Nothing whatsoever,” but then adds, “He’s a lackey and a mean soul. A prime candidate, however, when the time comes.”5 From the context, it is understood that this means “a prime candidate” for some sort of uprising, though Ivan also adds, “There will be others and better ones. . . . His kind comes first, and better ones after.” But it is also possible, he continues, that “the rocket will go off and fizzle out, perhaps. The peasants are not very fond of listening to these soup makers, so far” (14: 22). (Smerdyakov had been sent to Petersburg to learn cooking, and his speciality was soup.) Elsewhere, Ivan directly calls Smerdyakov “raw material for revolution,” thereby providing a distinct social-political subtext to their relation.
Just as Smerdyakov, in ridiculing Danilov, is shown as advocating a betrayal of moral principle, so we see Ivan in the next scene also justifying such a betrayal, though with much less complacency. The discussion with Smerdyakov ends when Dimitry, frantically in search of Grushenka, suddenly invades the room in which the three—Feodor, Ivan, and Grigory—have been talking. Flinging his father to the floor, Dimitry “kick[s] him two or three times with his heel in the face.” Ivan wrestles Dimitry away, helped by Alyosha, and later remarks that “if I hadn’t pulled him away, perhaps he’d have murdered him.” Alyosha exclaims: “God forbid!” To which Ivan replies, “with a malignant grimace, ‘One viper will devour the other. And serves both of them right, too.’ ” Ivan declares that, although he would always act to defend the father he hates, “in my wishes I reserve myself full latitude in this case” (14: 128, 129, 132). He instinctively behaved according to the accepted moral code, but nothing in his thoughts (“wishes”) would cause him to oppose such a murder; his moral sensibility and his external behavior are thus totally at odds. This scission in his personality will deepen and intensify as the book proceeds, and his statement about “the vipers” will come back to haunt him.
The scene between Katerina and Grushenka in the next chapter echoes Katerina’s relations with Dimitry. Just as with him, she tries to gain control over Grushenka with her condescending “magnanimity.” But she is herself humiliated in the presence of Alyosha by Grushenka’s refusal to be dominated. Grushenka’s turning of the tables nakedly reveals the egoistic roots of Katerina’s “kindness” and “generosity”; these are merely the means she uses to attain moral-psychological mastery over others.
In Book 4, Dostoevsky keeps the spotlight focused on Katerina and devotes another chapter to her—“Laceration in the Drawing Room”—in which the supremely intelligent Ivan analyzes her behavior with exemplary acuity, and explains why she is incapable of any but a “lacerated” love. “You need [Dimitry] so as to contemplate continually your heroic fidelity and to reproach him for infidelity. And it all comes from your pride. Oh, there’s a great deal of humiliation and self-abasement about it, but it all comes from pride” (14: 175). Ivan’s insight springs from a thematically relevant source since the character traits of both are fundamentally the same: Ivan has only to look into himself to understand the motives of his tormentress.
The parallels between the two are an example of Dostoevsky’s carefully wrought thematic texture. All the attitudes exhibited by
Katerina vis-à-vis the other characters are the exact replica, on the moral-psychological level, of Ivan’s ideological dilemma. Katerina thus expands and rounds out the human qualities of Ivan’s character, presented mainly in the transposed form of theological argument and poetic symbol. Ivan’s intellectual arrogance and spiritual egoism will prevent him from surrendering to the mystery of faith and the reality of God’s love; and Katerina’s inability to love anyone but herself exhibits the same qualities in terms that are social and personal; her “painful brooding” will only serve to reinforce and strengthen the rampant egoism concealed under the elegant surface of her civilized manners. Just as Katerina needs Dimitry’s betrayals to reinforce her own virtue, so Ivan tortures himself with the horrors of the sufferings of the innocent to nourish the pride of his own rejection of God’s world and its inhabitants. When Katerina hysterically cries in a frenzy, “I will be a god to whom [Dimitry] can pray” (14: 172), she reveals the deepest symbolic meaning of Ivan’s Legend.
Another important thematic motif in Book 4 is seen in the chapter devoted to Zosima’s enemy, the old ascetic Father Ferapont. His unbalanced fanaticism allowed Dostoevsky to dissociate himself from the harsher and more repellent forms of Russian asceticism, and to stress, on the contrary, the humane and enlightened features of Zosima’s Christianity, which did not fear to open itself to the influences of the modern world. Ferapont is more than a caricatural figure intended to bring Zosima’s virtues into higher relief; he also takes on a symbolic importance as part of the great theme of reason and faith. For the ascetic, in his own fashion, is also a literalist of the supernatural like Feodor. There is a concealed “rationalism” in his reduction of spiritual life to the observance of external rules about fasting and in the naïvely materialistic fashion in which, concretizing the mysteries of faith, he claims to see devils with his own eyes and to have killed one by catching its tail in a door. For both the cynically Voltairian Feodor and the superstitiously pious Ferapont, religious faith depends on such physical evidence of its reality; and they are thus thematically united in this manner despite their evident divergences otherwise. Nor should one overlook Ferapont’s fierce pride—he is convinced that Christ will come to carry him away like the Prophet Elijah—a claim that again is counterpointed against Zosima’s profound meekness and humility. The treatment of Ferapont illustrates the subtlety and delicacy of Dostoevsky’s handling of his theme of faith and the profundity of his intuition, rivaling that of Kierkegaard, of its total irrationality and subjectivity.
Two chapters of Book 4 are devoted to the Snegiryovs, a family that, after the disappearance of the monastery world from the novel upon the death of Father Zosima, will provide Dostoevsky with his major contrast to the world of the Karamazovs. The Snegiryov family is familiar to all readers of Dostoevsky. They are the equivalent of the Marmeladovs in Crime and Punishment and of all the insulted and injured he had depicted since the beginning of his literary career. Captain Snegiryov is a buffoon type like Feodor, but one whose masochistic ironies conceal a deeply wounded sensibility that has not turned resentful or revengeful. Far from having neglected his family, the cashiered captain has done his best, under impossible conditions, to provide them with love and care. His little son Ilyusha, who bites Alyosha’s finger to revenge his father’s public humiliation by Dimitry, also sturdily defends his father against the insults of his jeering classmates, and even Ilyusha’s sister Varvara—a “progressive” student with “rational” ideas, home from her Petersburg studies—sacrifices herself unselfishly, if resentfully, to care for her hapless kinfolk.
The adolescent Ilyusha will later, along with his classmates, allow Dostoevsky to fulfill his long-cherished desire to depict the relation between a charismatic Christian figure and a group of children. The scene in which Alyosha visits the miserable hovel of the Snegiryovs, entitled “Laceration in the Cottage,” is placed immediately after Katerina Ivanovna’s “Laceration in the Drawing-Room.” The laceration in the drawing room is the result of self-will and pride, which perverts suffering into an instrument of domination; the laceration in the cottage, when the captain hysterically tramples on the badly needed money offered by Alyosha, is a pathetic effort to maintain a last, remaining shred of self-respect and to justify Ilyusha’s desperate faith in his father’s honor and dignity.
By the time he completed Book 4, Dostoevsky had presented all his characters, clearly indicated the future course of the main plot action, and raised his primary ideological issue of reason and faith in a fascinating variety of scenes and characters. In Books 5, 6, and 7, this theme comes to the foreground and is treated directly in some of the greatest pages in the history of the novel.
1 For an impressive “poetic” reading of the novel, which tries to do justice to this dense web of references, parallels, and figural anticipations, see Diane O. Thompson, The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory (Cambridge, UK, 1991).
2 V. E. Vetlovskaya, Poetika romana “Brat’ya Karamazovy” (Leningrad, 1977), chap. 1.
3 Ibid.
4 Robin Feuer Miller, The Brothers Karamazov (New York, 1992), 23.
5 The “prime candidate” here (Garnett-Matlaw translation) renders peredovoe myaso in the Russian text, which Victor Terras translates literally as “progressive flesh” in his indispensable, almost line-by-line commentary on The Brothers Karamazov. Terras also offers “cannonfodder of progress” as an alternative. The adjective peredovoe (progressive) is what gives the phrase a specific social-political meaning. See Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion (Madison, WI, 1984), 181.
CHAPTER 59
The Brothers Karamazov: Books 5–6
The two set pieces of Book 5, Ivan’s “rebellion” and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, reach ideological heights for which there are few equals. In the nineteenth century one can think only perhaps of Balzac’s Seraphita and Louis Lambert, George Sand’s Spiridion, or possibly Flaubert’s La tentation de Saint Antoine. These inspired pages take their place in a Western literary tradition that begins with Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and the book of Job. They also continue the Romantic titanism of the first half of the nineteenth century, represented by such writers as Goethe, Leopardi, Byron, and Shelley. The Czech critic Vaclav Cerny, in a penetrating book, saw Dostoevsky (along with Nietzsche) as the culmination of this Romantic tradition of protest against God on behalf of a suffering humanity.1
Formally, the three chapters devoted to Ivan illustrate again that sudden vertical expansion of a character that enlarges his symbolic status and poetic power. Now the coldly conceptual Ivan is consumed by the same passionate thirst for life as Dimitry. Alyosha tells him affectionately during their conversation in the tavern, “You are just a young and fresh nice boy, green in fact!” “It’s a feature of the Karamazovs, it’s true,” Ivan replies, “that thirst for life regardless of everything, you have it no doubt too, but why is it base?” Of course it can become so, as in old Feodor or Dimitry’s escapades, but it can be a life-sustaining force as well. As Ivan acknowledges, “even if I . . . lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusionment—still I would want to live, and, having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it.” This loss of faith “in the order of things” is exactly what torments Ivan, but his primordial love for life is powerful enough to counteract the dispiriting conclusions of his reason: “I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic” (14: 209).
Enumerating all the endearments that still link him to life, he lists not only nature (“I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring, I love the blue sky”) but also “the previous graveyard” of European civilization, filled with the glories of the past, before which he “shall fall to the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them.” Such thoughts and actions may be totally irrational, but “it’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it
’s loving with one’s insides, with one’s guts.” This capacity for an irrational love, whether of nature or the monuments of culture, is the first step toward an understanding of the meaning of life; for such understanding is possible only when the ego is taken beyond itself. To Ivan’s question whether we should “love life more than the meaning of it,” Alyosha replies: “Certainly, love it regardless of logic as you say, . . . and it’s only then one can understand the meaning of it.” But because Ivan’s “logic” had already concluded that life has no meaning, he predicts that when “I am thirty . . . I shall begin to turn aside from the cup, even if I have not emptied it” (14: 209–210). Such words raise the specter of a suicide out of despair, but the emphasis on Ivan’s youthfulness and his “longing for life” hold out hope of other possibilities.
This friendly encounter of the two brothers is placed in the foreground of Chapter 3, but the shadow of an archetypal murder lurks in the background and has already been suggested. Questioned about Dimitry’s whereabouts, Smerdyakov had answered “superciliously”: “How am I to know. . . . It’s not as if I were his keeper.” A few pages later, after learning about Ivan’s imminent departure, Alyosha anxiously asks about the quarrel between Dimitry and their father: “How will it end?” And Ivan irritably snaps back, “What have I to do with it? Am I my brother Dimitry’s keeper?” Then he suddenly smiles “bitterly”: “Cain’s answer to God about his murdered brother—wasn’t it. Perhaps that’s what you’re thinking at this moment?” (14: 206, 211). Both Ivan and Smerdyakov, who echo each other’s thoughts, are thus linked with the murder motif by this biblical reference, which also intimates their subterranean connection.
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