Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Kolya harmed no one except the goose in this particular exhibition of egoistic playfulness, but the same is not the case with his treatment of poor, suffering Ilyusha. Even though Kolya knew that Ilyusha wished to see him most of all, he failed to join the other boys in visiting the bedside of their stricken comrade. Kolya’s need to dominate others and to control every situation in which he becomes involved mimics the aim of Ivan’s creation, the Grand Inquisitor, to relieve humankind of the burden of freedom. Indeed, Kolya’s relation to Ilyusha in the past may well be seen as a callow facsimile of Ivan’s poetic invention. Ilyusha “was proud,” Kolya tells Alyosha, “but he was slavishly devoted to me, and yet all at once his eyes would flash, and he’d refuse to agree with me, fly into a rage.” Ilyusha seemed to be developing, as Kolya puts it, “a little free spirit of his own.” The reason was that “I was cold in responding to his endearments,” and “the tenderer he became, the colder I became” (14: 480, 482). Kolya’s aversion to “sheepish sentimentality” excludes any reciprocity of feeling, just as Ivan’s rationalism excludes (or represses) any emotions stemming from his moral conscience. But when Kolya comes face-to-face with the wasted, fever-ridden visage of the dying Ilyusha, his posture of commanding self-control breaks down, and he gives way to his feelings of pity and compassion.

  Dostoevsky uses the long-suffering Snegiryov family, and the poignant love that exists beween Ilyusha and his father, as a foil to set off the rankling hatreds of the Karamazovs. The family’s condition has improved because the captain has accepted the charity of Katerina. But nothing can relieve his wrenching agony as he watches his doomed son expire before his eyes. Kolya had scornfully called the captain “a mountebank, a buffoon,” but Alyosha’s analysis presents Dostoevsky’s own understanding of this particular character-type. “These are people of deep feeling,” Alyosha says, “who have been somehow crushed. Buffoonery in them is a sort of resentful irony against those to whom they daren’t speak the truth, from having been for years humiliated and intimidated by them. Believe me, Krasotkin, that sort of buffoonery is sometimes tragic in the extreme” (14: 483). By such observations, Alyosha brings the boy to an awareness of how badly his pride had misled him in his treatment of Ilyusha and his contempt for the captain.

  Zosima had sent Alyosha into the world to do his work there, and the scene with Kolya and the boys is the first illustration of how such work might be accomplished. Alyosha listens patiently to all of Kolya’s prattle about “Socialism” and the various other “subversive” notions that he has picked up from Rakitin about Voltaire, God, and so on, all of which ape Ivan. Alyosha answers him “quietly, gently, and quite naturally, as though he were talking to someone of his own age, or even older.” Kolya thus undergoes a miniature conversion experience, similar to that of Alyosha and Dimitry, and confesses, “I am profoundly unhappy, I sometimes fancy . . . that everyone is laughing at me, the whole world, and that I feel ready to overturn the whole order of things.” He realizes now that “what kept me from coming [to see Ilyusha earlier] was my conceit, my egoistic vanity, and the beastly willfulness which I can never get rid of, though I have been struggling with it all my life.” After this avowal, he asks Alyosha if he does not find him “ridiculous,” and Alyosha admonishes him to overcome any fear of confessing his faults. Indeed, such vanity is now “almost a sort of insanity,” Alyosha declares. “The devil has taken the form of that vanity and entered into a whole generation.” “ ‘It’s simply the devil,’ added Alyosha, without a trace of the smile that Kolya, staring at him, expected to see” (14: 503). Alyosha takes the devil seriously, refusing amusedly to dismiss such an antiquated superstition. Ivan will soon find himself oscillating between Kolya’s incredulity and Alyosha’s gravity as he struggles to determine whether the devil he sees is (or is not) a hallucination.

  Book 10 ends with a variation on the Job motif that runs throughout the novel, and Dostoevsky now makes no effort to soften its emotionally devastating impact. The captain gives way to abject despair when the doctor from the capital fails to hold out any hope, and Kolya poignantly tells his father to “get a good boy” when he dies and “love him instead of me.” But the grief-stricken father, on leaving the room, tells Kolya and Alyosha “in a wild whisper”: “I don’t want a good boy, I don’t want another boy. . . . ‘If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my tongue. . . .’ ”—a biblical allusion that Kolya does not understand and asks Alyosha to explain (14: 507). Such a scene could well have been maudlin, but from Dostoevsky’s pen it conveys an overpowering purity and intensity of emotion. The death of his son Aleksey just two years before certainly contributed its share to the moving pathos of these pages. And he had written, in an anguished letter in 1868 on the death of his two-month-old daughter, Sofya, expressing the same inconsolable grief as the captain’s: “And now they tell me in consolation that I will have other children. But where . . . is that little individual for whom, I dare to say, I would have accepted crucifixion so that she might live?”1

  In Book 11 the focus returns to the main characters and events in the two-month interval since Dimitry’s arrest. When Alyosha goes to visit Grushenka, she reports that Ivan has also been to see Dimitry secretly in prison, and the two appear to be involved in some private plan. The mystery of Ivan’s behavior and motivation thus begins to move into the foreground.

  Dostoevsky, as we know, often introduces a serious theme by first giving it a comic or scandalous form. As Alyosha goes from Grushenka to visit Liza Khokhlakova he is, as usual, waylaid by her garrulous mother, who rambles on about the impending trial, and the satire becomes more serious as the loquacious lady chatters on about the possibility of a plea of temporary insanity, which Dimitry had insisted he would not accept because it implied his guilt. But Mme Khokhlakova is enchanted by the notion that crime could be just an “aberration” for which Dimitry was not really responsible. “They found out about aberrations,” she tells Alyosha happily, “as soon as the law courts were reformed.” Indeed, for her no one can be guilty of anything, because “who isn’t suffering from aberration nowadays?—you, I, all are in a state of aberration and there are ever so many examples of it” (15: 18–19). This universal malady thus becomes a parodistic reversal of Zosima’s universal guilt, in which all are responsible for all. Mme Khokhlakova’s mindless volubility also brings into view the motif of mental instability and madness that will soon be illustrated by Ivan.

  Mental imbalance, specifically linked with the devil, appears both frighteningly and pathetically in the next chapter. On visiting Liza, who is now able to walk again, Alyosha notices a change for the worse in her mental state. She has begun to revel in sadomasochistic fantasies of destroying both others and herself—and hence has become “the little demon” of the chapter’s title. “Yes, I want disorder,” she tells Alyosha, affirming her desire that “everything might be destroyed.” Alyosha admonishes her that “you take evil for good,” though he cannot simply negate one of her provocative taunts: “Listen, your brother is being tried now for murdering his father, and everyone loves his having killed his father.” Then she tells him of a dream in which devils assailing her withdraw when she crosses herself, but return when she begins to revile God out loud. “It’s awful fun,” she says, “it takes your breath away” (15: 22–23).

  Liza has also been visited by Ivan, who, instead of attempting, like Alyosha, to counter her sadomasochistic inclinations, had reinforced them by his complicity. When she tells him of how “nice” it would be to eat pineapple compote (an extreme luxury) while watching the prolonged agonies of a crucified child, “he laughed and said it really was nice” (15: 24). (Unfortunately, Dostoevsky could not resist the anti-Semitic implication that the child had been crucified by fanatical Jews to obtain Christian blood, and Alyosha refuses to deny that possibility.) Ivan, as we shall soon learn, is now being visited by a devil himself, and the implication is that he has brought his own illness with him to aggravate Liza’s. But she is not yet completely possessed by the e
vil spirit, and she appeals to Alyosha as her only rescuer, crying “Alyosha save me!” Liza still struggles against her worst impulses, and at the conclusion of this scene she puts her finger in the crack of the doorjamb, slams the door shut, and mutilates herself as punishment. “I am a wretch, a wretch, wretch, wretch!” she whispers, duplicating Ivan’s self-castigation as “a scoundrel” after he had departed on the day of the murder (15: 25).

  When Alyosha next visits Dimitry in prison, he finds his brother upset because Rakitin has been attempting to undermine his faith in God. The revelatory effect of Dimitry’s dream about the burned-out village and the crying baby has permanently altered his own character and sense of values. Rakitin intended to write an article about the crime “to prove some theory,” namely, that Dimitry “couldn’t help murdering his father, he was corrupted by his environment, etc.” In a seriocomic recitation of Rakitin’s physiological determinism, Dimitry expresses his dismay. “I’m sorry to lose God,” he says. God has been replaced by “sorts of little tails, the little tails of those nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering—then an image appears. . . . That’s why I see and think, because of those tails, and not at all because I’ve got a soul and that I am some sort of image and likeness” (that is, of God) (15: 28). When Dimitry had objected to this explanation, paraphrasing Ivan’s thesis that “without God and immortal life all things are lawful,” Rakitin laughingly agreed that “a clever man can do what he likes.” This reiteration of Ivan’s doctrine by the unscrupulous Rakitin lays the groundwork for the upcoming depiction of Ivan’s struggle with his conscience in the chapters that immediately follow. All the same, as Dostoevsky makes clear, the despicable Rakitin and the tormented Ivan are not comparable. “Brother Ivan is not Rakitin,” says Dimitry explicitly. “There is an idea in him” (15: 29).

  Dimitry’s faith remains unshaken by Rakitin’s scornful sallies. Innocent though he knows himself to be, Dimitry is ready to go to Siberia “for all the babes . . . [and] because we are all responsible for all,” echoing again the doctrine of Zosima and implying the analogy with Christ (“I go for all”) (15: 10). Dostoevsky then probably draws on memories of his own imprisonment when Dimitry exclaims: “One cannot exist in prison without God, it’s even more impossible than out of prison. And then we men underground will sing from the bowels of the earth a tragic hymn to God, with Whom is joy. Hail to God and His joy! I love Him!” Dimitry’s rapturous affirmations rise to a climax when he declares: “I think I could stand any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment: ‘I exist’ ” (15: 31).

  The five remaining chapters of Book 11 focus on Ivan, who has been constantly alluded to in the preceding four. Ivan finally appears in person during Alyosha’s visit to Katerina. Aware of his own increasing mental instability, oscillating as he does between states of lucidity and what he fears to be hallucinations (such as being visited by the devil), he asks Alyosha if it is possible to know that one is going mad.

  On the surface, Ivan refuses to accept “the myth about that crazy idiot, the epileptic Smerdyakov” (15: 39) having committed the murder. Nonetheless, Alyosha possesses Zosima’s intuitive gift of moral-psychological penetration, and realizes that Ivan has been brooding these last two months over his own possible responsibility. When Ivan calls Dimitry a “murderer” and a “monster,” Alyosha objects; and when challenged to name someone else, he replies: “I know only one thing . . . it wasn’t you who killed father.” Ivan is so taken aback by this reply touching on all his own hidden fears that he thinks Alyosha must know of his hallucinatory conversations with the devil on the same subject (15: 40). The haughty Ivan suddenly decides to visit Smerdyakov—not for the first but for the third time, the two earlier encounters having already led to the demented condition in which we find him.

  A violent snowstorm begins as Ivan makes his way through the unlit streets on his way to Smerdyakov’s cottage, and he stumbles into a drunken peasant singing the first two lines of a popular ditty: “Ach, Vanka’s gone to Petersburg / I won’t wait till he comes back.” This song recalls to Ivan his own departure for Moscow, and what had occurred before he returned; and although such a connection is not made explicitly, no doubt this is why “Ivan felt an intense hatred for [the peasant]” (15: 57). When the peasant lurches against him, Ivan knocks him down and leaves him lying in the snow, although the thought crosses his mind that the peasant will freeze to death.

  Smerdyakov had become ill again, and each immediately remarks on how sickly the other looks; both are being undermined by the same moral-psychic anguish. Smerdyakov, however, now has the upper hand. As he has come to understand, Ivan is fearful that his implicit consent to the crime would be exposed. Disgusted by Ivan’s unwillingness to face the truth, Smerdyakov admits his own guilt while refusing to assume it alone. “You murdered him,” he tells Ivan, “you are the real murderer. I was only your instrument, your faithful servant . . . and it was following your words that I did it” (15: 57). Under Ivan’s persistent questioning—he is avid to learn all the details—Smerdyakov explains how the crime had been committed just after Dimitry had struck Grigory and leaped over the fence, fleeing his father’s house.

  There is an aspect of this dialogue that should not be overlooked. Just after Smerdyakov has made his confession and his interlocutor has “shuddered all over with a cold shiver,” Ivan mutters that “I’m afraid you’re a dream, a phantom sitting there before me.” Smerdyakov replies that there “are only us two and one other,” immediately adding: “No doubt that he is here, that third, between us.” This reference to “a third” terrifies Ivan, who takes it as a mention of the devil and looks around, with “his eyes hastily searching for someone in all the corners.” Smerydakov, however, explains “that this third one is God, sir, Providence itself, sir, it’s right here with us now, sir, only don’t look for it, you won’t find it” (15: 60). While the devil has been appearing to Ivan’s tormented and demented consciousness, Smerdyakov apparently has been returning to the sources of his own faith since losing his respect for Ivan’s ideas. That he has been seeking moral comfort in such a return is indicated by a small detail: he covers the money he obtained from the murder, and which he now displays to Ivan, with a copy of The Sayings of the Holy Father Isaac the Syrian, a collection of popular religious texts by a sixth-century ascetic. Father Isaac has replaced the French grammar Smerdyakov had been studying at the time of the second visit, and we may recall that, even at the height of his fascination with Ivan and his ideas, this offspring of stinking Lizaveta had still readily accepted the existence of the two or three hermits in the desert who could move mountains.

  Smerdyakov is filled with contempt for Ivan’s dismay at the recognition of his own share of guilt, and his struggle to diminish it as much as possible. “ ‘God sees,’ Ivan raised his hand, ‘perhaps I, too, was guilty, perhaps I really had a secret desire for my father’s . . . death, but I swear I was not as guilty as you think and I didn’t urge you on at all.’ ” Nonetheless, he assures Smerdyakov that he will disclose the truth at the trial the next day, including his own share of responsibility; but Smerydakov refuses to believe that he will have the courage to perform what would, in any case, be only a futile gesture. Smerdyakov would simply deny Ivan’s testimony and argue that he was trying to save his brother. Most wounding of all, he taunts Ivan with the inconsistency between his sentiments and his ideas: “You used to say yourself that everything is lawful, so now why are you so upset, too?” (15: 66–67). Smerdyakov, however, is caught in a similar inner conflict: denying that he again believes in God, he no longer has any faith in what had replaced God for him, namely, Ivan’s ideas. His peasant conscience has made him ill, just as Ivan’s educated sense of guilt has been undermining him, and the suicide of Smerdyakov will coincide exactly with Ivan’s mental breakdown in the next chapter.

  The scene ends with Ivan, as he walks out into the snowstorm, firmly deciding to meet Smerdyakov’s challenge. Stumbling against the inert b
ody of the peasant, Ivan now brings him to a police station, arranges for a doctor, and saves his life. This is the first effect of his new resoluteness, which overcomes all the contempt for erring and sinful humankind that he had previously exhibited, and which perhaps foreshadows his role in the envisaged second volume. Although he is now capable of such a spontaneous gesture of personal human solidarity, it is a different matter when he thinks of going to the prosecutor at once to denounce Smerdyakov as the murderer and reveal his own share of the responsibility.

  Choosing to put off this ordeal until morning, his determination to act decisively thus wavers; once again he is caught in the toils of his moral-psychological dilemma—the dilemma of intending to follow the dictates of a conscience whose precepts his reason cannot justify. Entering his room and, trying to keep from falling asleep, he “got up uneasily and walked across the room to shake off his drowsiness” (15: 66–67). This last phrase, conveying Ivan’s own awareness, turns out to be entirely illusory; he is now in fact asleep and only dreaming that he walked across the room. “I have dreams now,” Ivan tells Alyosha in the next chapter, “yet they are no dreams but reality. I walk about, talk, and see” (15: 86). Ivan has become incapable of distinguishing between his dreams and the objective world; and when he looks uneasily at a sofa in his room, he observes someone sitting there “who had not been in the room when Ivan Feodorovich came into it” (15: 70).