Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  A characteristic of Dostoevsky’s mature technique is to refract a thematic motif through a succession of characters, each of whom expresses a different aspect of its meaning. The totally unprincipled Rakitin is thus another version of Ivan, completely lacking those moral-religious yearnings that Zosima had instantly detected in the young, controversial publicist. The narrator exhibits no mercy whatever toward Rakitin, who is now shown tempting the weakened Alyosha on another level by leading the innocent to Grushenka, who wished to obtain revenge by seducing the religious novice, her presumed despiser. But hearing of Zosima’s death, everything is transformed, and memories of her unsullied childhood resurface as she retells the folktale of the onion, heard long ago from a peasant woman.

  This tale embodies that condemnation of a totally self-centered egoism that, according to Dostoevsky, was typical of the morality of the Russian folk character, and it is narrated by Grushenka in a style imitative of folk poetry. A wicked old woman, submerged in the fiery lake of hell, had once given an onion to a beggarwoman, and her guardian angel endeavors to save her because of this one good deed. The angel lowers an onion to pull her up, but when other sinners cling to her as she rises, she cries back at them, “It’s my onion, not yours.” At this expression of selfishness the stem snaps, she falls back into hell, and the angel sadly departs (14: 319).

  This childhood recollection provokes an even stronger crisis of conscience in Grushenka, and Alyosha is so moved by her confession and repentance, as well as the strength of her desire to forgive her Polish betrayer, that he tells Rakitin, “She is more loving than we” (14: 321). When the disgruntled cynic asks what Alyosha has said that stirs Grushenka so profoundly, she falls on her knees before the “cherub” and answers, “I’ve been waiting all my life for someone like you. I knew that someone like you would come and forgive me . . . would really love me, not only with a shameful love” (14: 323). The scene recalls the first meeting between Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot, when the Prince recognizes the purity of her spirit despite her past degradation.

  Just as in The Idiot, where Nastasya asks Myshkin to decide whether she should marry, Grushenka asks Alyosha to make the fateful decision whether she should now forgive her seducer. Alyosha replies, “You have forgiven him already.” Having hoped to debauch Alyosha, Rakitin spitefully refers instead to his intended victim as having “turned the Magdalene onto the true path.” The sarcasm of his embittered words nonetheless reluctantly recognizes the truth: “So you see that the miracles you were looking for just now have come to pass” (14: 322). Genuine miracles occur when faith succeeds in aiding the morality of love to conquer egoistic resentment, hatred, and revenge.

  Alyosha’s encounter with Grushenka restores him to himself and reveals the depths of unselfish love hidden in the human conscience. Men and women are not as weak and selfish as Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor had claimed; they are capable of putting into practice the morality of love stemming from a faith in Christ. The meeting thus serves as a transition to the resolution of Alyosha’s crisis, which begins when he reenters the cell where Paissy, holding a vigil beside Zosima’s corpse, is reading aloud from the Gospel of Saint John. His state of mind had entirely changed, and “the odor of corruption . . . no longer made him feel miserable and indignant.” Instead, “there was a sweetness in his heart . . . and joy, joy was glowing in his mind and in his heart” (14: 325).

  Such joy, a leitmotif of this chapter, indicates the first effect of his meeting with Grushenka, and it continues to dominate his subconscious. After dozing off, his thoughts mingle with what he hears being read—the account of the wedding feast in “Cana of Galilee”—it’s “the first miracle,” he tells himself, the miracle in which Christ changed water into wine at the wedding feast of a poor, humble couple. The Mother of Christ was present at the feast, and Alyosha muses that she “knew that He had come not only to make His great, terrible sacrifice” but also to bring joy to humankind. By now asleep and dreaming, Alyosha suddenly sees Zosima, no longer lying in his coffin but moving among the guests, inviting him to join the feast, explaining his presence at the joyous occasion by saying, “I gave an onion to a beggar. And many here have given only an onion each—only one little onion.” Alyosha too had “known how to give an onion to a famished woman today,” and Zosima tells him, “Begin your work, dear one, begin it, gentle one,” in effect instructing Alyosha to continue the “work” he had instinctively begun with Grushenka. Christ, also among the guests, is not named but referred to as “our Sun,” and when Alyosha is too overcome even to cast a glance in Christ’s direction, Zosima urges him to do so. “He is terrible in His greatness, awful in His sublimity, but infinitely merciful”; he “had made Himself like unto us from love and rejoices with us.” His Christ did not view earthly life only as “a vale of tears” but rather as the venue for the happiness and joy of mutual love and forgiveness. With this resurrected image of Zosima still before his mind’s eye, and as “tears of rapture rose from his soul,” Alyosha awakens (14: 325–327).

  Alyosha’s awakening is the prelude to the great scene in which, symbolically, the spirit of Zosima becomes reembodied in the young novice. After gazing at the corpse lying in state, whose voice he had just heard in his dream, Alyosha walks out into the night, where “the vault of heaven, full of soft, shining stars stretched vast and fathomless above him.” Dostoevsky exerts all his poetic powers to evoke the beauty of the spectacle, and to infuse it with a sense of religious awe. “The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire sky,” and Alyosha, invaded by a feeling that “the mystery of the earth was one with the mystery of the stars,” throws himself down, following the injunctions of his teacher, to embrace the earth and water it with his tears. “There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over ‘in contact with other worlds.’ He longed to forgive everyone and for everything, and to beg forgiveness” (14: 328). The climax of this scene is a famous and oft-quoted passage:

  With every instant, [Alyosha] felt clearly and, as it were, palpably, that something firm and unshakable as that vault of heaven had entered into his soul. It was as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his mind—and it was for all his life forever and ever. He had fallen to earth a weak youth, but he rose up a resolute champion. . . . ‘Someone visited my soul in that moment,’ he used to say afterward, with firm belief in his words. (14: 328)

  During these hours, Alyosha recovered not so much a faith in God that he had never lost as a faith in the ultimate beauty and goodness of God’s universe. The confluence of the earthly and the heavenly that Zosima had proclaimed cannot be mistaken, and it is reinforced by Alyosha’s decision to leave the monastery three days later, obeying Zosima’s command to “sojourn in the world.”

  In the same time interval during which Alyosha was undergoing his spiritual awakening, Dimitry was frantically watching to see whether Grushenka would visit his father, and searching desperately for the means of obtaining the money that might allow him to begin a new life with her. These semi-comic episodes culminate in the fateful moment when “ ‘God,’ as Mitya himself later said, ‘watched over me then’ ” (14: 355). Earlier, Dimitry had declared the ideal of the Madonna and the ideal of Sodom were battling in the heart of man, and his own character is an embodiment of this conflict. Despite his tumultuous passions, the ideal of the Madonna, the all-merciful Mother of God, had exerted her power again in staying his hand against his father. It is this same ideal that now affects his feelings for Grushenka, and his new “normal” love relation with her lifts their mutual love above sensuality to a level that Kierkegaard would have called “ethical.”

  Dimitry too thus undergoes a decisive moral transformation, and his “spiritual purification” is completed during the several hours of the preliminary investigation to which Book 9 is devoted. The titles of the chapters (3, 4, and 5) devoted to the questioning of Dimitry are “A So
ul’s Journey through Torments,” and three such torments (mitarstva) are enumerated. A Russian reader would recognize this structure as an allusion to the Orthodox belief that the soul after death, as it ascends from earth to heaven, is subject to trials by various evil spirits. In a notebook entry of 1877, Dostoevsky mentions wishing to write about the sorokovina (a memorial service held on the fortieth day after death) in the form of “a book of pilgrimages” that would describe the trials of such a soul. This idea is now secularized and applied to the “torments” that Dimitry experiences as, in effect, he bares his soul under the pressure of the pitiless questioning. But the ordeal leads him to a much more severe self-examination than he had ever known before, and culminates not only in an overwhelming feeling of pity for human suffering as a whole, but also a desire to suffer himself for all his past misdeeds.

  Dimitry had dealt a near-fatal blow to Grigory when the faithful servant had attempted to stop him from fleeing his father’s garden on the night the old man was murdered. Learning that Grigory is still alive, Dimitry is overjoyed, and because he knows he did not kill his father, he assumes at first that the whole matter can easily be settled. Time and again, though, he candidly acknowledges all the overpowering impulses that might have led him to commit such a murder and, under the calculated questioning of the investigators, unwittingly builds the case against himself. Dimitry has now begun that process of self-scrutiny and self-judgment that will lead to his moral metamorphosis. “I’m not very beautiful,” he says, “so that I had no right to consider him [his father] repulsive.” None of these responses is taken into account, any more than his statement that he is “a man who has done a lot of nasty things, but has always been, and still is, honorable at bottom, in his inner being” (14: 416).

  As the circumstantial evidence piles up against Dimitry, and the rashness and intemperance of his earlier statements and actions against his father are thrown back in his face, he sees himself at last through the eyes of those he calls “blind moles and scoffers,” and struggles to define himself against the image they have been constructing (14: 437–438). At the core of his character are concern and anguish over others—over Grushenka, to be sure, but also a terrible sense of remorse over Grigory. It is this realization that now pierces through, even as he flares up against his questioners and displays all the storminess and irascibility of his temperament. The climax of this development comes after Dimitry has been reduced to despair and is at the end of his considerable physical tether: “His eyes were closing with fatigue.” He had declared publicly to Grushenka once more that he was innocent, and she had accepted his word after crossing herself before the icon. “He’ll never deceive you against his conscience,” she affirms to his questioners. “He’s telling the whole truth, you may believe it” (14: 455). But such utterances of faith are futile, and Dimitry finally sinks into a deep sleep on a chest in the room. Like Alyosha, he then dreams a dream crystallizing the moral conversion that has taken place within him as a result of all his “torments.”

  Dimitry’s dream, “utterly out of keeping with the place and time,” visualizes him driving somewhere in the steppes during a snowstorm. In the distance he could see the ruins of a burned-down village, and as his carriage approaches he meets a line of women standing along the road, “all thin and wan,” and especially one, “a tall, bony woman” looking much older than her years and carrying a crying baby. “Her breasts must have been so dry that there was not a drop of milk in them.” Dimitry asks the driver why the baby was crying, and the peasant assumes he is referring to the immediate situation: “They’re poor people burned out. They have no bread.” But Dimitry is really asking the same question that had been posed so vehemently by Ivan and led to his attack on God. “Why are people poor?” Dimitry queries. “Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? . . . Why don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they dark from black misery? Why don’t they feed the babe?” (14: 455–456).

  No answer is given to these questions, which Dimitry himself felt “were unreasonable and senseless,” but his response is a sudden upsurge of emotion that marks the completion of his moral-spiritual transformation. “And he felt that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before, was rising in his heart, and he wanted to cry that he wanted to do something for them all . . . that no one should shed tears from that moment, and he wanted to do it at once, regardless of all obstacles, with all the Karamazov recklessness.” Quite appropriately, he also hears “the voice of Grushenka,” full of emotion, saying, “I won’t leave you now for the rest of your life.” On waking, he finds that someone had put a pillow under his head, and he is moved “with a sort of ecstatic gratitude” by this little gesture of concern (14: 456–457).

  Dimitry’s dream objectifies the transformation that has taken place in his conscience as a result of his own suffering, bringing on a new awareness of the wretchedness of others. Such human distress, though of a different nature, had led to Ivan’s upsurge of rebellion against God, but with Dimitry it leads to a passionate desire to throw himself into alleviating the world’s miseries instead of, as in the past, increasing their number by giving free rein to all his impulses and appetites. Just before departing under escort back to the town, he describes the new realization to which he has come. In the past, “I’ve sworn to amend every day of my life, beating my breast, and every day I’ve done the same filthy things.” But now, under the blows of fate, he has undergone a decisive change: “I accept the torment of accusation, and my public shame, and I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified.” Once more he declares himself not guilty of his father’s blood, but adds: “I accept my punishment, not because I killed him, but because I meant to kill him and perhaps I really might have killed him” (14: 458).

  The preliminary investigation thus ends with Dimitry acknowledging his moral guilt but insisting, so far as legal guilt is concerned, that “I’ll fight it out with you to the end, and then God will decide” (14: 458). Both Alyosha and Dimitry have chosen to follow Zosima’s path of love and Christian faith, each in his own way. It will be the turn of Ivan to follow the same route, but one that, in his case, leads to a tormenting, brilliantly depicted, more severe inner struggle and total mental breakdown.

  Dostoevsky interrupts the narrative course of Dimitry’s fate after his arrest and shifts to a thematic motif introduced earlier, realizing one of his long-held literary ambitions—to present, on a larger canvas than in The Idiot, the interaction between an idealistic Christian character and a group of children. Alyosha becomes the spiritual guide of the boys introduced earlier as the classmates of Ilyusha Snegiryov. The chapters of Book 10 center on the relations of the gravely ill Ilyusha, Alyosha, and the group of boys.

  Kolya Krasotkin is the most daring and independent of the lot, a future leader, who in the past had taken Ilyusha under his wing. Kolya is portrayed as a prideful youth, haughtily insisting on his independence from the others, intelligent and self-assured, ready to take unusual risks to prove his superiority—he lies between the railroad tracks while a train passes over him—and scornful of any sort of “sheepish sentimentality.” His poor, widowed mother, who slavishly devotes her life to him, would tearfully “reproach him with his coldness”; but he was not really cold-hearted, only resistant to displays of emotion that might suggest any weakness, any loss of self-control (14: 463). Despite this assumed façade of strength, he breaks down when his mother goes into hysterics on learning of the train episode, and he “sobbed like a boy of six” (14: 465).

  Rakitin has also been busy among the schoolchildren, in competition with Alyosha, and he is cited by Kolya as an authority who has converted him into being a “Socialist” (14: 474). Critics have long recognized Kolya as an embryonic Ivan, through whom Dostoevsky brilliantly transposes some of the dominating motifs of his book into an adolescent register. Kolya, for example, tells Alyosha that “God is only a hypothesis” (exactly Ivan’s position) and that “it’s possible for one who doesn’t believe in God
to love mankind” (as does, in his perversely pitying fashion, Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor). Dostoevsky amuses himself when he has Kolya repeat what he has picked up from Rakitin: “I am not opposed to Christ . . . , He was a most humane person, and if He were alive today, He would be found in the ranks of the revolutionaries, and would perhaps play a conspicuous part” (14: 499–500). When asked for the source of this claim, Kolya can only reply that “they say he [Belinsky] said it”—and of course it was Dostoevsky himself who had made public this utterance of Belinsky’s in the Diary of a Writer.

  Dostoevsky uses Kolya not only to parody the already familiar image of Ivan but also to anticipate the drama soon to be played out. One of Kolya’s escapades was to induce a peasant lad, “a stupid, round-mugged fellow of twenty,” to see what would occur if a cart was moved just as a goose was nibbling at a bag of oats with its neck under the wheel. A slight displacement of the cart then breaks the neck of the goose. When the two are hauled into court by the infuriated owner of the goose, “the errand boy” blubbered that Kolya had egged him on. But “I answered,” he explains to Alyosha, “with the utmost composure that I hadn’t egged him on, that I simply stated the general proposition, had spoken hypothetically” (14: 495–496). Ivan had assumed exactly the same role with Smerdyakov, stating the general proposition that “everything was permitted” and, at least for the moment, refusing like Kolya to accept any responsibility for what might occur as a result. The justice of the peace, amused by Kolya’s sophistry, lets him off with only a warning; but Ivan’s conscience will not allow him to escape so lightly.