Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Dimitry is seen as a symbol of Russia itself. He, argues the prosecutor, “represents Russia directly. . . . Yes, here she is, our Mother Russia, the very scent and smell of her. Oh, we are spontaneous, we are a marvelous mingling of good and bad, we are lovers of culture and Schiller, yet we brawl in taverns and pluck the beards of our boon companions” (15: 128). Both are part of the Karamazov character, which is “capable of containing the most incongruous contradictions and simultaneously contemplating both abysses, . . . the hightest ideals, and . . . the lowest and foulest degradations” (15: 129). These words echo Dimitry’s about the ceaseless conflict between the ideal of Sodom and that of the Madonna, but the entire book has shown his struggle to wrench himself free from the temptations of Sodom and commit himself to the Mother of God.

  In conclusion, the prosecutor returns to the image of the Russian troika made famous in Gogol’s Dead Souls, where Russia is compared with a troika, furiously galloping to some distant destination and before which all the other nations give way. The jurors represent, he tells them, all “of our holy Russia, . . . her principles, her family, everything that she holds sacred!” The whole country awaits their verdict, as “our fatal troika dashes on in headlong flight, perhaps to destruction, and for a long time past men have stretched out imploring hands and called a halt to its furious, reckless course.” Other nations stand aside, “not from respect . . . but simply from horror,” and he warns that some day they may “form a firm wall confronting the hurrying apparition . . . for the sake of their own safety, enlightenment, and civilization.” The jury, Ippolit Kirillovich warns, must not increase “their growing hatred by a sentence justifying the murder of a father by his son” (15: 150).

  The famous defense attorney Fetyukovich, the star of the Petersburg bar, now offers a masterly defense of Dimitry in terms that the reader recognizes as accurate. His defense not only discredits the psychological inferences drawn by Ippolit Kirillovich, he also understands that Dimitry could act under the influence of love, honor, and pity, as well as out of the rage and jealousy considered his sole motivations by the prosecutor. Dostoevsky’s main criticism of the legal profession in his journalism, however, had been that defense lawyers, carried away by their task, often lost sight of the larger moral implications of their arguments, and this is exactly what occurs here. Fetyukovich goes too far, swept beyond the bounds of the morally legitimate by the desire to defend his client (who in this case at least was innocent).

  Fetyukovich treads on dangerous ground when he raises the question of whether the murder of such a reprehensible father as Feodor Pavlovich could be condemned. While insisting that Dimitry is innocent, he nonetheless argues that such a murder could well be justified, driving home the point with examples taken from a tirade of the villainous Karl Moor in Schiller’s The Robbers. The indignant narrator now labels him “an adulterer of thought” (the chapter’s title); and it is here that the defense plea intersects with the novel’s deepest moral-philosophical motifs. “Filial love for an unworthy father,” Fetyukovich insists, “is an absurdity, an impossibility. Love cannot be created from nothing: only God can create something from nothing” (15: 169). If fathers wish to be loved by their children, they should earn such love by their deeds. Love for a father should rest on a rational, responsible, and strictly humanitarian basis”; it should not derive from a “mystical meaning which I cannot comprehend with my intellect, but only accept by faith, or better, on faith, like many other things which I do not understand, but which religion leads me to believe” (15: 170). The courtroom audience, as the narrator notes sarcastically, went wild over this denunciation of a filial love based solely on faith. “Even persons of high position, old men with stars on their breasts, sitting on specially reserved seats behind the judges, applauded the orator and waved their handkerchiefs” (15: 171). The bitter irony of this comment is certainly reminiscent of what had occurred in the Zasulich courtroom, when high government officials had frenziedly applauded her acquittal.

  Fetyukovich is here making the same argument against unconditional filial love, based only on faith, that Ivan had made against a God-father who incomprehensibly permits the undeserved suffering of his children. But the lawyer goes still further when he suggests that, even if Dimitry had entered the house—which he denied having done—with no intent to kill, he might have struck Feodor Pavlovich precisely because “The mere sight of the father who hated him from his childhood, had been his enemy, his persecutor, and now his unnatural rival, was enough.” His feeling of hatred would have become so strong that he might have dealt him a blow, “not knowing that he would kill him” and not intending at all to do so. But if he had killed him, “the murder of such a father,” Fetyukovich insists, “cannot be considered parricide . . . can only be reckoned a parricide by prejudice” (15: 172).

  Fetyukovich undermines his own case, however, by raising doubts as to whether he himself believed in the innocence of his client. And we know that the terms of Fetyukovich’s argument recall those that Ivan had made against the God-father. But in asking the reader to accept Ivan’s attack on God and Dimitry’s hatred of Feodor Pavlovich as equally impious assaults on the sacrosanct principle of fatherhood, Dostoevsky was taking a considerable artistic-ideological risk. Indeed, if there is some question among interpreters as to whether Dostoevsky ever truly succeeded in blunting the force of Ivan’s rebellion, an even stronger doubt arises over his effort to merge the levels of this same thematic motif. God, after all, bestowed on man the immense gift of freedom, however badly this gift may have been abused and misused, and while he can be held implicitly responsible for all the horrors that have ensued, they occurred, as even Ivan conceded in his Legend, because he refused to enslave the dignity of the human conscience.

  It is entirely different, however, to substitute Feodor Pavlovich for God and to ask readers to accept a refusal to love him unconditionally as an equivalent violation of the sacred principle of fatherhood. The stark realism with which his cynicism and debauchery are displayed, and his complete lack of any redeeming features, undermine the parallel that Dostoevsky was trying to establish. Readers, in this case, are likely to ally themselves with Fetyukovich’s insistence that mundane filial-paternal love should involve reciprocity and mutual responsibility. Nonetheless, just as Dostoevsky had not softened the asperities of Ivan’s attack on the shortcomings of both God and Christ, so here too he dares to proffer the protection of the sacrosanct principle of fatherhood, unassailable by reason and justified by faith alone, even to so odious a specimen as Feodor Pavlovich. One cannot help wondering whether the extremity of this effort was not a forlorn response to the nerve-racking situation that all of Russia was then living through, as one attempt after another was made on the life of the Tsar-Father.

  After appealing to reason to defend a crime that Dimitry had not committed, Fetyukovich then concludes by evoking a totally opposite principle—that of Christian mercy. As he goes on, Fetyukovich’s eloquent words continue to ask for mercy in a manner implying Dimitry’s guilt. “Let other nations think of retribution and the letter of the law, we will cling to the spirit and the meaning—the salvation and reformation of the lost” (15: 172). The argument is thus a tissue of contradictions, more an apologia for the crime than a clear-cut defense of Dimitry’s innocence.

  These concluding words excite a demonstration from the audience that was like “an irresistible storm.” Everyone wept, and even “two important personages shed tears” at this combination of rationalism and an appeal to a sentimental humanitarianism deriving from Christian principles. When Ippolit Kirillovich rose to protest, “shaking with emotion . . . people positively looked at him with hatred.” In his articles, Dostoevsky had often criticized the abuse of the Gospels by defense lawyers, and Ippolit Kirillovich charges Fetyukovich with such malpractice by his reference to Christ as “the crucified lover of humanity . . . in opposition to all of orthodox Russia, which calls to Him, ‘for thou art our God.’ ” “Religion and the G
ospels,” Ippolit Kirillovich cries, “are corrected—that’s all mysticism, we are told, and ours is the only true Christianity which has been subjected to the analysis of reason and common sense” (15: 173–175).

  The jury retires, and while the courtroom waits for its decision, the narrator sets down snatches of conversation among the public. Everyone, it seems, was convinced of an acquittal despite the weight of the evidence. Many believed he would get off because, as one official said, “suppose he did murder him—there are fathers and there are fathers!” (15: 177). These choral voices seem to justify Ippolit Kirillovich’s opening statement that murder is now taken as a matter of course in Russia. Like the public, Fetyukovich too was convinced that he had won the case, but after an hour’s deliberation the jury returned to find Dimitry guilty on all counts and, even worse, made no recommendation for mercy. During the indescribable hubbub in the courtroom, the narrator recalls one exclamation: “Well, our peasants have stood firm!” (15: 178).

  The culmination of this central plot action thus creates a mixed impression—one both negative and positive. An obvious “miscarriage of justice” (the title of Book 12) has occurred on the legal level, though Dimitry has inwardly accepted the justice of suffering for his parricidal impulses. But “the peasants have stood firm” against justifying the murder of a father for any reason, thus upholding the “mystic” sanctity of the moral-religious law that Dimitry had violated in thought if not in deed.

  The epilogue is composed of two episodes, one detailing the relations between Ivan, Katerina, and Dimitry, the other between Alyosha and the group of boys who had clustered around the bedside of the ailing Ilyusha. Ivan’s future remains unknown, though he is left in the care of Katerina, and this uncertainty was no doubt intended to sustain interest for the next volume. Dimitry has fallen ill with “a nervous fever” and is waiting to be sent to Siberia; whether he will escape along the way is left in doubt. Dimitry has concluded that he is too weak to bear the burden that, in a moment of rapture, he had believed he could assume: “I am not able to resign myself. I wanted to sing a ‘hymn’; but if a guard speaks to me, I haven’t the strength to bear it.” Alyosha agrees that “you are not ready, and such a cross is not for you,” that is, the cross of an imitatio Christi, the acceptance of punishment by an innocent as expiation for the sins and injustices of others. Dimitry had wished to make himself “another man by suffering” and had in fact gone a long way toward becoming that “other man” spiritually. Alyosha assures him that if “you only remember that other man always, all your life and wherever you escape to . . . that will be enough for you” (15: 185). The disciple of Zosima is prepared to break the letter of the law by conniving in Dimitry’s possible escape so as to avert an obvious injustice and a human tragedy.

  The book ends with the funeral of little Ilyusha. No one but Dickens can rival Dostoevsky’s well-known “philanthropic” manner here, as he depicts the anguish and despair of the desolate Captain Snegiryov and his afflicted family. Twelve of Ilyusha’s schoolmates, gathered around his bier, were soon joined by Alyosha, and this symbolic number provides a Christological aura to the pathos of the scene. Kolya, foremost among the boys as usual, exclaims about Dimitry: “So he will perish an innocent victim for the truth—though ruined he is happy!” Astonished at this reaction, Alyosha objects, “but not in such a cause, and with such disgrace and such horror.” Kolya agrees, but then continues, “I would like to die for all humanity, and as for disgrace, I don’t care about that. . . . I respect your brother!” (15: 190). Dostoevsky had emphasized this desire to “die for humanity,” to sacrifice oneself for “the truth,” as typical of the new generation of the 1870s, and perhaps we catch a glimpse here of what he intended the future to hold for both Kolya and Alyosha.

  The boys pass the stone under which Ilyusha had wished to be buried and here Alyosha, addressing them as “my dear, dear children,” explains that he will soon part from them. But he asks them to make a pact never to forget Ilyusha or one another, “whatever happens to us later in life.” He urges them to remember “how good it was once here when we were all together united by a good and kind feeling.” Alyosha then proclaims, “there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood and home” (15: 195). A “good and sacred memory” of this kind is the best protection against the evil that may arrive, and will remain so no matter how badly some among them may go astray.

  Alyosha’s words grip the hearts of his young listeners, and when the boys promise to remember, shouting at the same time, “Karamazov, we love you,” Alyosha adds: “And may the dear boy’s memory live eternally!” The mention of eternity impels Kolya to ask whether “It is true what’s taught us in religion,” that a bodily resurrection will occur and we “shall live and see each other again, all, Ilyushechka too?” Alyosha answers, “half laughing, half ecstatic”: “Certainly we shall all arise again, certainly we shall all see each other” (15: 196). The tragedy of the Snegiryovs thus vanishes into “a sacred memory” that will guard against evil in the future; and death is overcome by the Christian hope of resurrection—when, as Alyosha promises, “we shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened” (15: 197). The book ends on this boyish note of innocence and optimisim, providing a welcome relief, similar to the epilogues of eighteenth-century plays, to all the tragic tensions that have gone before. And just as those earlier examples pointed to the moral of the story, so Dostoevsky reaffirms, in a naïvely acceptable and touching form, the basic beliefs and moral-religious convictions he has sought to champion so peerlessly all through his greatest novel.

  1 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 297; May 18/30. 1868.

  2 Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion (Madison, WI, 1984), 385.

  3 I am indebted to Robin Feuer Miller for her analysis of the devil as a practitioner of metaphysical homeopathy. See The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (New Haven, CT, 2008), 123–125, and Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey (New Haven, CT, 2008), 150, 166–170.

  CHAPTER 61

  Death and Transfiguration

  After the intense pressure under which he had been laboring for the past three years, Dostoevsky might well have felt a need to relax, rest, and recoup his strength. But now that the first volume of The Brothers Karamazov had been completed he threw himself, with his usual assiduity, into gathering material for his revived Diary of a Writer. Well aware of the severe demands this renewal would make on his gradually deteriorating health, he was driven by economic need—other sources of income were quite insufficient—and also by the mission he had assumed to speak out against the forces disintegrating the fabric of Russian society.

  Two memories portray Dostoevsky at this time as aged, feeble, and sickly. I. I. Popov, a student at the Pedagogical Institute and later a member of the terrorist organization People’s Will, lived close to the Dostoevsky residence and often saw the writer sitting in the park of the nearby church, watching the children at play. “Hunched up, emaciated, with a yellowish-colored face, hollow cheeks, sunken eyes. . . . He gave the impression of a person seriously ill.”1 Popov once saw him walking with his old friend and fellow author Grigorovich, dragging himself along and leaning heavily on an umbrella, and he thought that Grigorovich would surely outlive his companion. A similar image is given by Letkova-Sultanova, who saw Dostoevsky at the home of the marquis Paulucci, where he took part in a benefit evening. In the stately and brilliantly lit reception room, filled with fashionably dressed society, he was attired in an ill-fitting formal evening suit too large for his frame and appeared “even more shrunken, more emaciated, more pallid than ever,” and she was struck by “his look of suffering.”2

  Whatever the state of his physical health, and perhaps because he knew that his days were numbered, Dostoevsky felt it imperative to speak out in defense of his ideas that were now under attack by both liberals and radicals. Many entries in the notebooks rebut K. D. Kavelin, an important lib
eral Westernizer and university professor who had been tutored by Belinsky as a young student. Kavelin had attacked Dostoevsky’s belief that personal and moral betterment could provide the basis for an improved (indeed, for an “ideal”) society. Society, he argued, could be changed for the better only by social-political action, not by that Christian self-perfecting of individuals advocated by Dostoevsky as an infallible remedy for Russia’s social ills.

  Dostoevsky’s notes reaffirm, in the very last month of his life, one of the basic beliefs that had sustained him ever since emerging from the Siberian prison camp in 1854. At that time, he had written the famous letter declaring that, “if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality, the truth were outside of Christ, then I would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”3 The same type of choice is posed more than twenty years later with reference to the Christian commandment of selfless love: “Turn the other cheek, love more than yourself, not because it is useful, but because it is pleasing, to the point of a burning feeling, to the point of passion. Christ made mistakes—it has been proven! This burning feeling says: It is better for me to stay with a mistake, with Christ, rather than with you” (27: 57). Another passage recasts the idea of the extreme nature of the demands made by Christ on the human personality and stresses its opposition to Utilitarian reasoning. “All of Christ’s ideas,” he writes, “can be debated by the human mind and seem impossible to fulfill. To turn the other cheek, to love more than yourself. For goodness sake, now why should that be? I am here for an instant, there is no immortality, I will live in my [obscenity]” (27: 56).