A new word on The brothers Karamazov 9780810119499, 9780810119505

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Preface (page ix)
List of Abbreviations (page xi)
The Brothers Karamazov Today (Robin Feuer Miller, page 3)
Refiguring the Russian Type: Dostoevsky and the Limits of Realism (Robert Bird, page 17)
Mothers and Sons in The Brothers Karamazov: Our Ladies of Skotoprigonevsk (Liza Knapp, page 31)
Shame's Rhetoric, or Ivan's Devil, Karamazov Soul (Deborah A. Martinsen, page 53)
Two Fates: Zosima's Bow and What Rakitin Said (Tatyana Buzina, page 68)
Struggle for Theosis: Smerdyakov as Would-Be Saint (Lee D. Johnson, page 74)
Accidental Families and Surrogate Fathers: Richard, Grigory, and Smerdyakov (Vladimir Golstein, page 90)
The God of Onions: The Brothers Karamazov and the Mythic Prosaic (Gary Saul Morson, page 107)
Did Dostoevsky or Tolstoy Believe in Miracles? (Donna Orwin, page 125)
The Sexuality of the Male Virgin: Arkady in A Raw Youth and Alyosha Karamazov (Susanne Fusso, page 142)
Zosima's "Mysterious Visitor": Again Bakhtin on Dostoevsky, and Dostoevsky on Heaven and Hell (Caryl Emerson, page 155)
Dostoevsky—Genius of Evocation: The Scene of Fyodor Karamazov's Murder and Its Symbolic Topography (Horst-Jurgen Gerigk, page 180)
The Legend of Ladonka and the Trial of the Novel (Kate Holland, page 192)
Sensual Mind: The Pain and Pleasure of Thinking (Marina Kostalevsky, page 200)
The Jewish Question and The Brothers Karamazov (Maxim D. Shrayer, page 210)
Alyosha's Speech at the Stone: "The Whole Picture" (Robert Louis Jackson, page 234)
The Brothers Karamazov Tomorrow (William Mills Todd III, page 254)
Contributors (page 259)

Citation preview

A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov

Northwestern University Press Studies in Russian Literature and Theory

Founding Editor Gary Saul Morson General Editor Caryl Emerson Consulting Editors Carol Avins

Robert Belknap Robert Louis Jackson Elliott Mossman Alfred Rieber William Mills Todd III Alexander Zholkovsky

A New Word on

The Brothers Karamazov

Edited by Robert Louis Jackson With an introductory essay by Robin Feuer Miller and a concluding one by William Mills Todd III

ha) NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS / EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois 60208-4210 Copyright © 2004 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2004. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 J

ISBN 0-8101-1949-8 } Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available from the Library of Congress.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Truth dawns in adversity. —Fyodor M. Dostoevsky

Contents

Preface ix List of Abbreviations xi The Brothers Karamazov Today 3 Robin Feuer Miller

of Realism 17 Refiguring the Russian Type: Dostoevsky and the Limits

Robert Bird

of Skotoprigonevsk 31 Mothers and Sons in The Brothers Karamazov: Our Ladies Liza Knapp

Shame’s Rhetoric, or Ivan’s Devil, Karamazov Soul 53 Deborah A. Martinsen

Two Fates: Zosima’s Bow and What Rakitin Said 68 Tatyana Buzina

Struggle for Theosis: Smerdyakov as Would-Be Saint 74 Lee D. Johnson

and Smerdyakov 90

Accidental Families and Surrogate Fathers: Richard, Grigory, Vladimir Golstein

The God of Onions: The Brothers Karamazov

and the Mythic Prosaic 107 Gary Saul Morson

Did Dostoevsky or Tolstoy Believe in Miracles? 125 Donna Orwin The Sexuality of the Male Virgin: Arkady in A Raw Youth

and Alyosha Karamazov 142 Susanne Fusso

Zosima’s “Mysterious Visitor”: Again Bakhtin on Dostoevsky,

and Dostoevsky on Heaven and Hell 155 Caryl Emerson Dostoevsky—Genius of Evocation: The Scene of Fyodor

Karamazov’s Murder and Its Symbolic Topography 180 Horst-Jiirgen Gerigk

The Legend of the Ladonka and the Trial of the Novel 192 Kate Holland

Sensual Mind: The Pain and Pleasure of Thinking 200 Marina Kostalevsky

The Jewish Question and The Brothers Karamazov 210 Maxim D. Shrayer

Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone: “The Whole Picture” 934 Robert Louis Jackson

The Brothers Karamazov Tomorrow 954 William Mills Todd UI

Contributors 259

Preface

It has been said that the great Gothic cathedral, an example of which is to be found in the thirteenth-century Cathedral of Our Lady at Chartres, can never be seen or fully taken in from any single perspective or in any given light; it is manifold and changing from every point of view. The same may be said of The Brothers Karamazov, a work that breathes not the spirit of sublime belief but a God-tormented one, a spirit groping for faith. The Brothers Karamazov stands like Chartres Cathedral. It is a work to be read, experienced, seen from many angles. Critical and scholarly literature cannot substitute for the reading of the novel. It can only suggest points of view: ways of looking, paths to an understanding of the workings of the novel as an artistic text, of its moral, psychological, and philosophical complexities and crises, of its constant search for foundations. What marks the writings in this volume is the comprehensive nature of their grasp of Dostoevsky: on the one hand, an understanding of his artistic thought, his psychological insights, and the artistic means and materials he brings to bear on his work; on the other, a recognition of the value-oriented nature of everything that comprises his artistic effort. “I want to speak out as passionately as possible,” Dostoevsky wrote in connection with his novel The Demons. “I want to speak out to the last word ... even if my artistry perishes in so doing. . . but I will speak my mind.” The paradox here is that his passionate ethical and social intensity—the kind that in a lesser writer often renders the artistic endeavor lifeless— always resulted in a furious energizing of artistic thought and a revolutionary impetus toward new forms of artistic expression. A unity of aesthetic and ethical purpose was typical of almost all of major Russian literature of the nineteenth century. “Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness as the second is Truth,” wrote the English critic John Ruskin. As though reformulating his thought, one of Dostoevsky’s characters in The Idiot remarks reproachfully to another: “You have no tenderness: only truth; hence you are unjust” (U 1X

Preface

vas nezhnosti net: odna pravda, stalo byt’—nespravedlivo). One may discover in these words the breadth and depth of Dostoevsky’s artistic realism and truth. All Dostoevsky criticism and scholarship, however strict the literary focus, toils in this unified field of vision. The present collection is a contribution to an enormous body of Dostoevsky scholarship in East and West. American and English scholars have made their mark: Robert L. Belknap, Victor Terras, Richard Peace, Malcolm V. Jones, Donald Fanger, Robin Feuer Miller, Caryl Emerson, Gary Saul Morson, Nathan Rosen, Edward Wasiolek, Liza Knapp, Diane Thompson, David L. Goldstein, James Jones, Michael Holquist, William Mills Todd III, Harriet Murav, Joseph Frank, William Leatherbarrow, James Scanlan, and many others. The contributions to this volume had their origins in a small gathering of scholars who participated in the last of the Yale Conferences in Slavic Literatures and Culture (October 1-3, 1999), a series that I inaugurated. In these conferences I sought to bring together, as I have in this volume, both scholars of recognized accomplishment and those of recent achievement. A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov brings together the work of scholars of diverse interests and intellectual backgrounds. The sum total of their efforts seeks to provide an introduction to the artistic complexity and moral-philosophical amplitude of Dostoevsky’s last and perhaps greatest

work. ,

Robert Louis Jackson Yale University June 24, 2002

Xx

Abbreviations

AK L. N. Tolstoy. Anna Karenina: The Maude Translation. 2d ed. Ed. and rev. George Gibian. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.

BK Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov. | Various editions cited; see Notes section of each chapter for version used in that chapter. Names of characters follow spellings of English translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. | Letters Fyodor Dostoevsky. Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ed. Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein. Trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Oop L. N. Tolstoi. Ob osnovnykh poniatiiakh psikhologii i fiziologii. St. Petersburg: Tipografia brat’ev Panteleevykh, 1886.

PDP Mikhail Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl

| Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Ps Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. 30 vols. St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1972-90. |The last three volumes of this title were each published in two parts; both volume and part numbers for volumes 28 through 30 are included in subsequent citations. |

T-Pss L.N. Tolstoi. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 90 vols. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1928-58.

WD Fyodor Dostoevsky. A Writer’s Diary. Vol. 1, 1873-1876. Ed. and trans. Kenneth Lantz. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Xl

Abbreviations | — WN Robin Feuer Miller. The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel. New York: Twayne, 1992.

xi

A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov

Robin Feuer Miller

The Brothers Karamazov Today Dostoevsky is our great contemporary. —Octavio Paz?

“READING AS IF FOR LIFE” The extraordinary collection of essays in this volume is The Brothers Karamazov today. The student who lamented that reading The Brothers Karamazov is like carrying nine bags of groceries is The Brothers Karamazov today; so is the young man sitting at the back of the classroom who starts wiping

his eyes. The novel reaches into our hearts, challenges our theories, subverts cherished beliefs, and, even as it cannot firmly answer the questions it poses, offers up a comfort that is not cold, not lukewarm, but hot. The words of W. H. Auden come to mind: O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress;

Life remains a blessing )

Although you cannot bless. O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbor With your crooked heart.’

In 1849, when Dostoevsky traveled through the streets of St. Petersburg on his way to what he thought was his execution, his musings about his life merged with thoughts about his reading, most specifically with Victor Hugo. We can be almost certain of this.? How many generations of us will continue to experience that same fusion of life and art at similarly critical moments? What fragment of this particular novel, what seed, will lodge in each of us to take root at some later time? The essays in this volume will surely con-

tribute to richer, more fruitful readings of this novel, to the sprouting of plants most of us had not noticed growing within it or within ourselves before. None of the essays included here succumbs to the temptation of pretending to be new simply by giving old responses contrived, pseudotheoretical names. These essays reflect the jagged immediacy of a group of adventuresome, informed encounters with Dostoevsky’s final novel. 3

Robin Feuer Miller

A work such as The Brothers Karamazov, which has engaged each successive generation since its writing, suggests a series of answers to the question, “Why do we read?” We read to lose ourselves in plots, to find ourselves in characters, to overhear answers to the big questions, to laugh or to

cry, to reenact, as complex reading beings, individual, social, and moral dilemmas. Such reasons for reading are axiomatic, automatic, and not terribly compelling, though reading itself is. Great novels, like great teachers, do not teach us to answer questions but to find a way to pose them. In my view the quintessential impulse toward reading is as uncertain as it is to describe

both the position and the trajectory of a single electron. As readers, we seek to have an emotionally intimate encounter with the text as well as to generate a cool appraisal of its trajectory within theoretical, formal, critical, cultural,

and historical contexts. But in any given moment, a reader experiences one kind of reading at the expense of the other. Early on in David Copperfield (1849-50), a novel Dostoevsky knew and loved, in a little room adjoining his own, the mistreated and neglected David discovers—to borrow Tsvetaeva’s haunting phrase—his childhood bookshelf, which is in fact really the collection of his dead father’s books. He begins feverishly to read, and soon he is reading, as the adult David narrator (and through him, Dickens himself) tells us “as if for life.” We read “as if for life.” Such reading is both a complete immersion in the act itself and a contemplation of it. Paradoxically, however, the more we are immersed, the less accurately can we contemplate what we are reading, and the more we contemplate, the less actively can we be immersed. This uncertainty principle is, in its totality, the act of reading itself, and why we

read “as if for life.”

Dostoevsky trembled for his novel, especially book 6, as he worked on it.° Following Dostoevsky’s lead, we usually take this to mean: “Will the rebuttals to the Grand Inquisitor’s arguments which are put forth in the book of the novel entitled ‘The Russian Monk’ be sufficient? Are these refutations too indirect, too subtly represented to stand up to the eloquence, the passion, the sheer power of the discourse of Ivan’s rebellion and his poem?” Caryl Emerson offers us a different understanding of Dostoevsky’s trembling at this point—an answer for today. Indeed, Emerson’s essay, like others in

the volume, suggests a reading so new that it is subversive of our usual modes of reading this novel. Through Emerson’s lens we see that rather than answering the irrefutable objections to the ordering of God’s world posed by Ivan and his Grand Inquisitor, Zosima’s telling of the story of the mysterious visitor in fact posits its own moral and theological dilemmas, which are just as troubling as Ivan’s. “In my judgment,” writes Emerson, “there is no moral dilemma anywhere in Dostoevsky’s final novel that can match this little story in efficiency and hopelessness. It is a portrayal of the ‘right thing’ accomplished, but where all parties are guaranteed to lose— 4

The Brothers Karamazov Today

and only the criminal, at the last minute before his death, selfishly reaps relief.” She sends us hurtling back to the unmediated text when she describes this episode as “molten.” The text as molten is hot, flowing, changeable from moment to moment, and above all, its elements are fused together. Emerson’s image in fact describes The Brothers Karamazov in its entirety. (Many of the essays included here will produce similar instances of surprise.) Yet there are moments in The Brothers Karamazov that seem to belie the extreme interconnectedness of characters, plot fragments, and narrative layers that weld this novel into such a tough alloy. Such moments (and for each reader they differ) reach out of the work and into a fictionally unconceived, more everyday space, which usually serves as a bufter be-

tween reader and text. One such moment pops up at the end of the first chapter in the novel. The narrator-chronicler is describing how Fyodor Karamazov ran into the street and began shouting with joy at the news of his first wife’s death in Petersburg. But “others say that he wept and sobbed like a little child, so much so that they say he was pitiful to see, however repulsive they found him. Both versions may very well be true—that is he re-

joiced at his release and wept for her who released him, all at the same time.” As the reader—new to the novel and its many characters—works to process this duality in a character who had seemed both safely removed to a comic distance and slightly repulsive, the narrator-chronicler abruptly closes his chapter with a generalization that reaches out, somewhat uncomfortably, into that undefined zone beyond the novel proper: “In most cases, people, even wicked people, are much more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we” (emphasis added: BK, 9).° Another moment when the narrative of the novel encroaches upon a boundary beyond its typical borders occurs when Zosima tells the grieving peasant woman from afar whose little child has died, “do not be comforted, you should not be comforted, do not be comforted” (BK, 50). The reader is drawn into the narrative in an unexpected way to find unexpected comfort in the assertion to not be comforted. But what does it mean to be urged to be not comforted? Is this not a message for today? Has it not been an unexpected message for today for each generation of readers? V. S. Pritchett

wrote incisively of Dostoevsky that he “is still the master [because] he moves forward with us as the sense of our own danger changes.” Other such moments break through the fabric of the text at unpredictable intervals. There is, for example, the narrator-chronicler’s excursion into art criticism, when he describes, in an extended portrayal of Smerdyakov, the “remarkable painting” The Contemplator by Kramskoy. It depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is “contemplating” something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look 5

Robin Feuer Miller

at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It’s true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it—why and what for, of course, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both. (BK, 126-27)

Throughout his career as both journalist and writer of fiction, Dostoevsky had consistently focused on seeking to understand and portray the experi-

ence and the ramifications of memory and the role within memory of dreams, of waking dreams, of forgetfulness and sudden recollection. This narrative digression encapsulates all of these themes and urges us to understand Smerdyakov’s motivations and his potential for good as well as evil

in a way that most readers have chosen not to do. Do we ever really know whether that third presence in the room when Smerdyakov confesses to Ivan is God or the devil? Why can there not be four presences, or five—for

are we not there as well? |

How many readers encounter this unsettling digression about Kramskoy’s painting after they, too, have just gazed at something, lost in thought,

yet not thinking, having just come to their senses, bewildered? We, too, hoard our impressions, with their full potential for evil and good. Every reader assembles, voluntarily and involuntarily, consciously and without full

consciousness, a rich collection of such impressions. These impressions combine to support a coherent reading of the novel, but much like the pillow that some unknown person places under the sleeping Dmitri’s head after his interrogation and deposition, it is impossible for any reader to know for certain how exactly that supporting understanding—that cherished reading—came into being. We are all “reading as if for life.” For each reader, then, fragments, shards, or loose threads of the novel jut out of the text into an aliterary zone occupied by the reader. Are these moments loose ends in the novel that do not quite cohere to the internal organization of the text? In the collection of such moments that I have offered up here, one sees two throwaway digressions by the narrator-chronicler: a message to be not comforted and the unexplained appearance of a pillow. Tug on any one of them, and instead of being a dangling fragment, shard, or loose thread, the whole novel will tumble into your lap, thus illustrating Zosima’s frequently cited aphorism that “all things are connected.” In the world of this novel, at least, they are; that world comes tumbling down on today’s reader, that uncomforted, yet comforted reader lost in a contemplation fraught with every kind of potential. 6

The Brothers Karamazov Today

A LEAF, A DOOR, A STONE Although Dostoevsky was not a poet in the conventional sense, he used symbols as vigorously as any poet, and as an author, he was consistently aware

of the poet within himself.° Moreover, his characters have been recognized by readers as various as Belinsky, Ivanov, Woolf, Coetzee, and Leonid Tsypkin (perhaps by virtually all his readers) as being the fictional embodiments of a profoundly poetic mind. In his evocative but largely forgotten essay “Dingley Dell and the Fleet,” Auden gives a handy definition of such characters and amusingly ends by comparing Anna Karenina not with a character of Dostoevsky but with Sherlock Holmes. Nevertheless, his observation is keen: All characters who are products of the mythopoeic imagination are instantaneously recognizable by the fact that their existence is not defined by their social and historical context; transfer them to another society or another age and their characters and behaviour will remain unchanged. In consequence,

| once they have been created, they cease to be their author's characters and become the reader’s; he can continue their story for himself. Anna Karenina is not such a character for the reader cannot imagine her apart from the particular milieu in which Tolstoi places her or the particular history of her life which he records; Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, is: every reader, according to his fancy, can imagine adventures for him which Conan Doyle forgot, as it were, to tell us.° Auden goes on to hypothesize that it is usually minor writers who possess this mythopoeic gift, although he offers up Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Dickens as exceptions. Surely Dostoevsky belongs on that list as well.

The sticky green leaves of early spring have become a kind of tag phrase for identifying Ivan Karamazov, for they function as a Bakhtinian loophole, an indication early on in the novel that whatever rebellion may lie ahead for this character, the potential for love and affirmation is there, too. (Later, Zosima asserts, “every little leaf is striving towards the Word” | BK, 295]). Dostoevsky never hesitated to use sentimental images in this partic-

ular way, to pull out all the stops if it would achieve the desired effect of bonding his readers to a character and thereby implicating them in that character's fate. The many images of lost and injured children in the novel function in the same way. For Ivan, the sticky green leaf stands in juxtaposition to his theory, much in the same way as for Dostoevsky himself his love of Jesus stands in juxtaposition to his passion for the truth.

More than a quarter of a century earlier, Dostoevsky had written to Madame Fonvizina, “More than that—if someone succeeded in proving to me that Christ was outside the truth, and if, indeed, the truth was outside Christ, I would sooner remain with Christ than with the truth (Letters, 68). Thus the leaf becomes a symbol for Ivan’s potential conversion. If we knew 7

Robin Feuer Miller

that Smerdyakov had also loved the sticky green leaves, would we have had hope for him, too? Although Dmitri Karamazov, like Ivan, undergoes a conversion in the course of the novel, Dostoevsky primarily focuses on him as a character for whom many plots are possible. Innumerable scenarios hover around him—

scenarios that may or may not have taken place before the events of the novel begin, scenarios that occur during it, and future scenarios. Kate Holland’s essay “The Legend of the Ladonka” demonstrates how Dmitri and his plot cohere in a symbolic way in the mystery of the little bag he wears around his neck. Dmitri’s trial becomes the arena for an extraordinary de- — bate about the meaning and the ultimate usefulness of evidence. This focus on the nature of evidence is yet another way in which The Brothers Karamazov touches upon themes that are of compelling interest to readers today. Evidence, the novel repeatedly tells us, like psychological theory, is a knife (literally “a stick with two ends”) that can cut either way. This insight becomes a commonplace of the novel and one that is frequently epitomized by speculations about whether on the night of the murder the door to the garden was open or closed. Upon the determination of that fact hinges the judgment about Dmitri’s innocence or guilt in the murder of his father. Grigory’s evidence, based on his faulty recollection, becomes crucial. The door becomes the vital piece of evidence, the one small truth on which larger truths hinge. Yet, how many readers of the novel can actually remember, several months after they have finished the novel, whether that door was open or closed? Even as we acknowledge that this is a crucial piece of evidence, do we remember it? What does this forgetfulness signal? Does it perhaps suggest that the individual facts upon which we build a theory may not even be the important ones after allP Should the door, and whether it was open or

shut, have ever become the locus for determining Dmitri’s innocence or guilt? Could not he have been innocent or guilty whether the door were open or shut, or even if there were no door at all? The door, then, becomes symbolic of the need for the fact to fit the theory, even when both fact and theory are in doubt. The door and the confusion about it also symbolize how difficult it is to recollect clearly, to recognize guilt or innocence, to string together a series of events in a truthful way, to identity evidence as such. Dostoevsky (and after him, Bakhtin) asks us to recognize him as a writer whose vision (whether narratively, thematically, or with regard to character)

hovers at boundaries and thresholds. In such a realm, a door, whether opened or closed, is ultimately irrelevant. Some of the essays in our volume, and in particular that of Robert Louis Jackson, touch upon the significance of the stone, that symbol which in its complex symbiotic relationship to bread adheres to Alyosha, to Ilyusha,

8

The Brothers Karamazov Today

and to Jesus and which forms a kind of bedrock of the novel. The very fact that Alyosha’s speech to the boys at the end of the novel is at a stone reminds-us not only of the apostle Peter but of the commandments that were inscribed on a stone. Although those tablets were lost, or were probably nonexistent, they have inscribed themselves upon the memories of hundreds of generations, just as Alyosha’s pronouncements at the stone inscribe

themselves upon the memories of the boys in the novel and upon us as readers. His words there become bread; they offer pleasant nourishment and a basic means to sustain life. Thus Dostoevsky makes use of stones in the novel as a kind of symbol, which is itself firm yet always in flux—a stone can be a stone, a weapon, a word, and it can, miraculously, turn into bread; it is the thing itself and something other. It is firm, a bedrock, yet not fixed.”” Thus the leaf, the door, and the stone each function differently. The sticky leaf signals the reader that Ivan himself is sticky, green, and young. His natural impulses toward life and love exist despite his theory. The door does not illuminate Dmitri’s character but rather points to a debate in the novel about the nature of evidence. The stone remains unfixed, a metaphor always in flux, transforming or not transforming into bread, into words— becoming by the close of the novel the foundation of a spiritual edifice built on the tears of a child. The poet Dostoevsky used symbols to widely varying effect.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND SPIRITUAL PLAGIARISM The other images which adhere to Alyosha and Zosima possess the same potential for metamorphosis and transformation: the seed and the onion. Both also have to do with narrative and suggest different ways to describe the totality of the narrative of the novel. The layers of narration in the novel resemble those in a seed, moving in from the husk to the kernel. Or, the narration of the novel resembles the layers of an onion: sliced in half, the onion appears to have discrete layers, but in fact the unspiraling layers are the onion itself; it can unwind into an unbroken spiral so that each layer is not only a microcosm of the whole, it is the whole.’ These metaphors for the narrative of the novel are powerful because at the same time that they represent the narrative of the novel, they also stand for important ideas within the novel. Form and content coincide. Both John 12:24 and the story of the onion told by Grushenka to Alyosha are dominant ideas of the novel that have the open-ended potential of either a positive or a negative effect. Bad seeds can as easily take root as healthy ones. Although Grushenka’s story is about an old woman whose one good deed, the giving of an onion, is not sufficient to save her from the

9

Robin Feuer Miller

burning lake in hell, it is told as an optimistic parable in order to give a redemptive onion both to Grushenka (the narrator) and to Alyosha (her audience, and to the readers). Moreover, Alyosha, in giving back the onion to Grushenka, repeats a precious routine that he has already enacted in the novel, that of spiritual plagiarism. In giving back to Ivan the kiss that Ivan’s Jesus gave to the Grand Inquisitor (“That’s plagiarism,” says Ivan. Earlier he had told Alyosha, “it’s wonderful how you can turn words as Polonius says in Hamlet... You turn my words against me. Well, I am glad.”)” and in giving back to Grushenka

the onion she had given him, Alyosha returns to each of them akermel of grace, which each had already unknowingly possessed.

Ironically, when Dostoevsky proudly inserted this tale of the onion into his novel, he thought he had been the first to set down this remarkable peasant parable.”* This obsession with being original, with saying something new, an obsession depicted for us by him in Ivan, had stayed with Dostoevsky

for his entire career. He passionately valued his intellectual property—his originality, even as he unconsciously borrowed and even plundered the work and the ideas of others. More ironic still is that this kind of intellectual ownership is consistently depicted by him in his fiction as stillborn, isolationist, and represen- — tative of the seed that dies and does not bear fruit. What does bear fruit in his created world is mutuality, the kind of spiritual plagiarism in which Alyosha indulges so freely and to such powerful effect. Only when Ivan recognizes and accepts with “animation,” “nervous laughter,” and an “almost childish glee” (BK, 643-44) the fact that his devil had plagiarized his story about the rebellious philosopher in space can Ivan himself get up from the road and begin his own positive journey. The devil’s plagiarism mimics Alyosha’s to similar spiritual effect, for the devil in his recitation of the story of the philosopher gives back to Ivan something valuable that in fact he already had. Without the devil’s plagiarism of the parable Ivan himself had long forgotten, Ivan would still be standing on the road, more like the peasant in Kramskoy’s painting than like any philosopher, lost in unconscious, unproductive contemplation. In our reading of the novel today—when issues of intellectual property intersect with the many breathtaking, interactive means at our command to disseminate and receive ideas rapidly—these ideas about seeds and onions exert a special force. Neither a seed nor an onion can be fixed permanently in time, because each is organic, alive and in itself representative of the capacities for regeneration and change, which the novel seeks to express in so many different ways. The novel is both a seed and an onion: its seeds die and then take root in us; it both offers us an onion and is itself one. Dostoevsky resorts to more kinds of narrative than do most authors in order to achieve his effects. As Bakhtin and others have noted, his novels 10

The Brothers Karamazov Today

abound with anecdotes, newspaper articles, legends, several simultaneous narrators—an enormous bag of tricks, in short, but, despite its great size, one just as easy to overlook as the little bag around Dmitri’s neck. These various modes of narration underline the fact that any ongoing written communication replicates a process. As David Lodge wrote in 1990, The novel is a form of narrative. We can hardly begin to discuss a novel without summarizing or assuming a knowledge of its story or plot; which is not to say that the story or plot is the only or even the main reason for our interest in a novel, but that this is the fundamental principle of its structure . . . The novel therefore has a family resemblance to other narrative forms, both the purely verbal, such as the classical epic, the books of the Bible, history and biography, folktales and ballads; and those forms which have non-verbal components, such as drama and film. Narrative is concerned with process, that is to say, with change in a given state of affairs; or it converts problems and contradictions in human experience into process in order to understand or cope

with them. Narrative obtains and holds the interest of its audience by raising questions in their minds about the process it describes and delaying the answers to these questions. When a question is answered in a way that is both unexpected and plausible, we have the effect known since Aristotle as peripeteia or reversal." A few pages later in this remarkable essay, Lodge wryly observes that “every

decoding is another encoding.” He goes on to quote from his own comic novel Small World. There Morris Zapp gives a lecture entitled “Textuality as Striptease.” Zapp’s words, like Zosima’s, have a particular relevance for us today. Zapp says: If you say something to me I check that I have understood your message by saying it back to you in my own words, for if I repeat your own words exactly you will doubt whether I have really understood you. But if I use my words it follows that I have changed your meaning, however slightly .. . Conversation is like playing tennis with a ball made of Krazy Putty, that keeps coming back over the net in a different shape. Reading of course is different from conversation. .. . [But] the same axiom, every decoding is another encoding, applies to literary criticism even more stringently than it does to ordinary spoken discourse. In ordinary spoken discourse the endless cycle of encoding—decoding—encoding may be terminated by an action, as when for instance I say, “The door is open” and you say, “Do you mean you would like me to shut itP” and I say, “If you don’t mind,” and you shut the door, we may be satisfied that at a certain level my meaning has been understood. But if the literary text says, “The door was open” I cannot ask the text what it means by saying that the door was open, I can only speculate about the significance of that door— opened by what agency, leading to what discovery, mystery, goal.°

Zapp’s half-mocking parody of literary theory actually touches upon the same nexus of ideas inherent in Alyosha’s generous acts of spiritual plagiaimi

Robin Feuer Miller

rism (and even, by lucky coincidence, uses the example of an open door to signify the complexity of reaching agreement on questions about significance, memory, and meaning). We have here in comic form the same concerns with evidence, with mutuality and communication, with the effects of narrative as we do in The Brothers Karamazov.

CHAOS AND CONSILIENCE Like Tolstoy in War and Peace (1869), Dostoevsky is endeavoring in The Brothers Karamazov to represent through the lens of fiction the large human questions of how to live and how to believe. Each tackles the representation of these immense and general questions against a backdrop of an everyday reality imported from outside the novel. For Tolstoy, the primary shapes in that backdrop are historical persons and events; for Dostoevsky, they are the political questions and moral and religious dilemmas of his own time; but in each case, the canvas is huge. Most important, in each work, the attempt to apprehend the nature of causality on both a local and a cosmic scale is important. Pierre Bezukhov and Alyosha Karamazov experience at pivotal moments in their lives an unshakable intuition about their place in the great chain of being. Pierre tells Andrei, “Don’t I feel in my soul that I am part of this vast harmonious whole? Don’t I feel that I form one link, one step, between the lower and higher beings in this vast harmonious multitude of beings in whom the Deity—the Supreme Power if you prefer the term—is manifest? If I see, clearly see, that ladder leading from plant to man, why should I suppose it breaks off at me and does not go farther and farther?”'° Zosima periodically imparts similar beliefs to Alyosha: “For each blade of grass, each little bug, ant, golden bee, knows its way amazingly,” and “for all is like an ocean, all flows and connects: touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world” (BK, 294-95, 319). Alyosha has fully assimilated Zosima’s understanding when he senses “threads from all those innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, ‘touching other worlds’” (BK, 362). These well-known passages have their equally important philosophical underpinnings, roots, and sources. But most important for our contemporary reading of The Brothers Karamazov is the way in which both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even as they scrutinize and try to represent the impossibility of demarcating the collisions and interactions among minute and vast chains of causality, share an overriding, instinctive awareness of what today is called chaos theory. It is precisely the dichotomy between these two kinds of causality that chaos theory also addresses:

Only a new kind of science could begin to cross the great gulf between knowledge of what one thing does—one water molecule, one cell of heart tissue, one neuron—and what millions of them do. 12

The Brothers Karamazov Today

Watch two bits of foam flowing side by side at the bottom of a waterfall. What can you guess about how close they were at the top? Nothing. As far as standard physics was concerned, God might just as well have taken all those water molecules under the table and shuffled them personally. Traditionally, when physicists saw complex results, they looked for complex causes. When they saw a random relationship between what goes into a system and what comes out, they assumed that they would have to build randomness into any

realistic theory, by artificially adding noise or error. The modern study of chaos began with the creeping realization in the 1960s that quite simple mathematical equations could model systems every bit as violent as a waterfall. Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming difterences in output—a phenomenon given the name “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.

When the explorers of chaos began to think back on the genealogy of their new science, they found many intellectual trails from the past. But one stood _out clearly. For the young physicists and mathematicians leading the revolution, a starting point was the Butterfly Effect."’

Pierre, Alyosha, Zosima, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—would not they all have affirmed the butterfly effect? Might not they even say, reaching across their fictional worlds or from the grave, “We told you so”? It is a fine thing today to remember and affirm that disciplines as disparate as nineteenth-century Russian literature and chaos studies can nour-

ish and perhaps even inform each other. Certainly a fragment of literary evidence cannot contribute directly to a physical derivation. Nor can the opposite apply. But disciplines nevertheless can be and are consilient in meaningful ways. Recent literary works such as Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998) are creations that find their very existence within the realm of the consilient. In his pathbreaking and controversial book Consilience, the renowned biologist E. O. Wilson tells us (in a diction that frequently sounds like Tolstoy’s but with a rhetorical structure of argumentation that echoes Dostoevsky) that “the greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities . . . Consilience is the key to unification.” He draws his term “consilience” from the philosopher William Whewell, who in 1840 “was the first to speak of consilience, literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.” Wilson warns his readers that

the belief in the possibility of consilience is a metaphysical worldview “which cannot be proved with logic from first principles or grounded in any definitive set of empirical tests”'® but he nevertheless sets out to demonstrate

its truth. The butterfly effect and the possibility of consilience are vital, 13

Robin Feuer Miller

even basic, ideas for us today; our understanding of these contemporary ideas deepens as we read The Brothers Karamazov, surely a novel for our time.

Notes 1. Octavio Paz, On Poets and Others, trans. Michael Schmidt (Manchester, Eng.: Carcanet Press Limited, 1987), 94. 2. W. H. Auden, “As I walked out one evening,” in The Collected .

Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1967), 198. : 3. Joseph Frank writes, “If we are to judge by his references to it later, no creation of Hugo meant more to Dostoevsky than the grisly little novel, Le dernier jour dun condamné. This book—filled, as Herzen suggestively

put it, with ‘the strange, terrible lights and shadows of a Turner’—is the imaginary diary of a condemned criminal awaiting execution for some unspecified crime .. . and there is something truly prophetic in Dostoevsky’s evident fascination with this work. For he was one day to suffer exactly the same agonies as Hugo’s character, and, in reliving all his torments, to reveal how indelibly Hugo’s book had bitten into his mind. On returning to prison after the mock execution in 1849, when he had believed himself to be only a moment away from death before a firing squad, his first reaction was to

write a letter to his brother Mikhail. And this moving document contains the French phrase, not otherwise explained—on voit le soleil! These are almost the very words used by Hugo’s condemned man to express his desire for life at any price, even at the price of exile and hard labor that Dostoevsky had just learned he was to be forced to pay himself. It is not surprising that, having ingested this text so thoroughly, Dostoevsky should later have drawn on it for his novels.” Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 18211849 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976),109. 4. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (New York: Pocket Books, 1958), 53. o. On August 24, 1879, he wrote to Pobedonostsev that he had written

his answer “to that whole negative side. And for that reason I tremble for it in this sense: will it be answer enough?” See the array of interesting letters Dostoevsky wrote about book 6 in Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, ed. Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 465, 467-70, 47778 et passim [hereafter referred to as Letters |, as well as a discussion of them in Robin Feuer Miller, The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (New York: Twayne Macmillan, 1992), 71-74. 6. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Intro. Malcom V. Jones (New York: A. Knopf,

1990), hereafter cited in text as BK with page number. 14

The Brothers Karamazov Today

7. V. S. Pritchett, The Myth Makers: European and Latin American Writers (New York: Random House, 1979), 72. I am grateful to Donald Fanger for turning my attention to this work as well as to that of Octavio Paz. 8. In October 1870, Dostoevsky had written to his niece, Sonya Ivanova, “the thing is that I always choose themes beyond my power. The poet in me pulls the artist back and forth, and this is bad.” See F. M. Dostoevskii,

Polnoe sobranie sochinenti v tridtsati tomakh (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1972-90), vol. 29, bk. 1, p. 143 [hereafter cited as Ps]. For a more complete discussion of Dostoevsky’s emphasis on the competing qualities of the poet and the artist within him, see Robin Feuer Miller, “The Narrative Impera-

tive,” in Dostoevsky and the Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 23-32. 9. W. H. Auden, “Dingley Dell and the Fleet,” in The Dyers Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 407-8. 10. Thomas Wolfe’s A Stone, a Leaf, a Door is a little book which is a text, now largely unread, for adolescents. Its terrible poetry is nonetheless a powerful evocation of youth. I borrowed its title for this section of my essay in part to remind us that The Brothers Karamazov is a novel populated with adolescents and young adults—Alyosha, Ivan, Dmitri, Smerdyakov, Lise, Katerina Ivanovna, Ilyusha, Kolya, Smurov, Rakitin, Grushenka, and others. We know Dostoevsky wanted to write about children, but he ended by writing about young people. As we become immersed in the stories and the potential stories of these characters, we can forget that they are adolescents or young adults. Moreover, Wolte did not even write these poems for

which he is so well remembered; they were “discovered,” selected and culled from his prose by the obscure editor Sergeant J. S. Barnes, in a manner not unlike the way in which Alyosha collated his account of Zosima’s thoughts and exhortations. Thomas Wolfe, A Stone, a Leaf, a Door: Poems, selected and arranged in verse by John S. Barnes, forward by Louis Untermeyer (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945).

"11. See Robert L. Belknap, The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov (1967; reprint, Evanston, IIL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 39-45, 90-97: and Miller, Brothers Karamazov: Worlds, 84-86, 88. 12. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, in its effort to be accurate, actually misleads the reader here. They substitute an actual quotation

from Hamlet, in which Polonius uses the phrase “implorator of unholy suits” (BK, 239) but this correction obscures Ivan’s important misquotation. See Ps, vol. 14, pp. 217-18. The translators tell us that they “have substi-

tuted an appropriate line from the passage Dostoevsky quotes in Russian translation” (BK, 785). Unfortunately, in this case, as in many others in the novel, the meaning lies in misquotation and faulty translation. 13. He wrote to his editor, “I particularly beg you to proofread the legend of the little onion carefully. This is a gem, taken down by me from a 15

Robin Feuer Miller

peasant woman, and of course published for the first time” (Dostoevsky’s emphasis). In Letters, Frank and Goldstein tell us that in fact this story had already appeared in two versions of A. N. Afanasev’s collection of Russian

legends published in 1859 (Letters, 489). See also Sarah Smyth, “The ‘Lukovka’ Legend in The Brothers Karamazov,” Irish Slavonic Studies 7 (1986): 41-53. 14. Lodge’s emphasis upon the novel as narrative that converts human problems and contradictions into process resembles that of the early Stan-

ley Fish in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (London and New York: Macmillan, 1967). And, as is well known, it is Fish who provided. important inspiration for one of Lodge’s most compelling, lovable, humor-

ous characters—Morris Zapp, who appears in several of Lodge’s novels. David Lodge, The Practice of Writing (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 181-82. This essay was originally published in 1990 in a collection entitled Ways of Communicating. Gary Saul Morson has also written about what he calls the processual or processual intentions. See, for example, his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 142-45. 15. Quoted in Lodge, Practice of Writing, 192. 16. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, ed. George Gibian, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York: Norton, 1966), 421. 17. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 8.

18. E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1998), 8-9.

16

Robert Bird

Refiguring the Russian Type:

Dostoevsky and the Limits of Realism

IN THE PROLOGUE to The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky warns the reader apologetically that while I do call Alexei Fyodorovich my hero, still, I myself know that he is by no means a great man... The thing is that he does, perhaps, make a figure, ‘but a figure of an indefinite, indeterminate sort. . . . One thing, perhaps, is rather doubtless: he is a strange man, even an odd one. But strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any claim to attention, especially when

everyone is striving to unite particulars and to find at least some general sense in the universal senselessness. Whereas an odd man is most often a particular and isolated case.'

Like much in Dostoevsky’s coy and cryptic foreword, this paragraph takes some sorting out. Dostoevsky claims that the contemporary tendency is “to unite particulars” and find “general sense,” that is, to synthesize the chaos of empirical facts into a cogent image that represents both the whole and its particulars. However, he only tentatively asserts that Alyosha “makes a figure” at all, and an “indefinite, indeterminate” one at that. Moreover, this figure is not representative of the whole, but eccentric to it, “a particular and isolated case.” Despite his singularity, however, Alyosha is still typical: For not only is an odd man “not always” a particular and isolated case, but, on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind. (BK, 3)

Dostoevsky is implying that, although empirical data can be synthesized into a coherent, unified image, this image might actually be false or “torn away,” while an image that seems eccentric to historical reality might turn out to be its “heart.” Paradoxically, the improbable hero Alyosha might turn out to be more essential, more real, than his more typical brethren taken 17

Robert Bird : from empirical reality. Empirical reality turns out to be mistaken concerning its own essence and therefore illusory. Indeed, what Dostoevsky presents is not only a logical paradox but also a literary one: Dostoevsky implies

recognition of and fidelity to the realist tradition of the type while proclaiming the type’s limitations. In what follows, I examine the concept of type in Dostoevsky, especially in The Brothers Karamazov, and with reference to the thought of Yury Lotman, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Robert Louis Jackson. It has long been recognized that Dostoevsky’s characterizations stand

in complex relation to those of European realism. Dostoevsky’s characters are undoubtedly types, but at the same time they are profoundly individual, eccentric, even improbable. One might note that this use of type was to a certain degree traditional in Russian literature. Yury Lotman identified a similar use of type in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and in the literary tradition it engendered, which sought to augment the sense of authenticity or veracity of characters by freeing them from the literary convention of harmony and completion. Since reality was unpredictable, so should its representative be. Next to the open-ended character, even the author ended up seeming like an observer on the outside looking in on the world of the novel; the

author was in the same predicament as the reader, and the world of the novel became seen as “a fragment of living life.”? The book therefore was seen to participate in historical life, and the formation of the characters was completed only by their afterlife in the consciousness and lives of the readership. For Lotman, “Pushkin’s task . . . [was] not to turn life into a text, but the text into life.”®

In a passage that echoes Dostoevsky’s prologue to The Brothers Karamazov, Lotman wrote: Earlier, there was a tendency to view life as a series of disconnected observations and to regard the artist as the one who could see the underlying unity or harmony; now |i.e., after Eugene Onegin] the reverse occurred. To the ordinary observer man seemed simple and noncontradictory and life appeared unified, while the artist saw that “which unheeding eyes see not”—tragic ruptures and profound contrasts.*

In the Russian tradition, the type referred less to a statistical average of some social group than to the individuals who were emerging from the mass,

often in direct challenge to it. For Lotman, the very concretization of this “rupture” (Lotman’s term) was itself an important catalyst in the transformation of the individual in Russian society—in the development of individual consciousness. For example, chronologically, Onegin and Pechorin preceded the social phenomenon of the “superfluous man,” and it is an open question whether these literary characters merely predicted this phenomenon or actually created it, or perhaps both in equal measure. Furthermore, 18

Refiguring the Russian Type

the appearance of a new “type” in literature meant that, from its very genesis, it was endowed with a particular semantic aura: the type of the isolated individual entered Russian cultural self-awareness not as a neutral fact, some disembodied constituency, but embedded in a broad depiction of its particular place and even of its specific consequences. Similarly, Dostoevsky’s types were not born typical, but they became typical as they spread out into the world. The artistic type according to this conception is less mimesis than mathesis, less a mode of representation than revelation and a mode of learning.° Dostoevsky’s novels are filled with recurring kinds of characters, who, though differing in individual traits, largely fall into the classification elaborated by Leonid Grossman: They are the thinkers and dreamers, the humiliated girls, the sensualists, the voluntary buffoons, the doubles, the underground men, the Russian broad nature (“the impetuous ones”), the pure in heart, the righteous (“the most wise teachers of life”), the outcasts, the shady dealers, the virtuosi of investigating detectives and the court, the nihilists, the proud and meek women, the impressionable children and meditative adolescents.°

The impression is that of a Dickensian gallery of conventionalized social types, similar, perhaps, to what one finds in Gogol. Dostoevsky, however, was critical of “the gruesome world of the Gogolian masquerade—whose participants were not real people but masks.”’ While they may sometimes seem susceptible to categorization according to social position and general sentiment, in their rich individuality Dostoevsky’s characters depart from the typical in the sense of the statistical average; they are famously neurotic, pathological, exaggerated; in a word, improbable. It was for this that Ivan Goncharov upbraided Dostoevsky in his famous 1874 letter to the writer: “You say yourself that ‘such a type is arising’; forgive me if I let myself note a contradiction here. If it is arising, then it is not yet a type.”® As Donald Fanger comments, “For a realist like Goncharov, the mere fact that a character may seem improbable already constitutes an artistic fault.”* In his own defense, Dostoevsky appealed to a concept of realism based less upon observation than upon intuition, moreover an intuition not so much into the general tendency of society than into its future human progeny, which, even if numerically unique, would be fully justifiable, explicable, in a word, typical, like the pinnacle of a vast and unsurveyable mountain. Fanger again comments: The realist in a higher sense . . . is looking for the adumbration of just those types Goncharov claims do not yet exist—looking not for the statistical average, or the recognizably universal, but rather for the statistical exception and the new guise of the universal that is just coming to birth." 19

Robert Bird

As shown by the rather uninspiring Oblomov and Stolz, Goncharov’s types are closed, limited in their capabilities by their initial potential, by their type. Dostoevsky’s characters, as Fanger observes, “are compounded of contradictions, always in flux, always liable to realize in action some potentiality hitherto dormant.”" This dilemma can be illustrated by the character of Ivan Karamazov, the bedeviled Russian intelligent of The Brothers Karamazov. In some respects, Ivan is typical in the traditional realist sense. His roots lie in the intellectual climate of the 1840s; in his famous refusal of a “ticket” to God’s salvation, he explicitly echoes the sentiments of Belinsky regarding the unjustifiability of human suffering.’** In 1902, Sergei Bulgakov wrote of Ivan: “Of the entire gallery of types of the novel this image is closest and most akin to us, the Russian intelligentsia; we ourselves experience the pain of his sufferings, we understand his needs.”"’ On the other hand, while no one was surprised to see a Russian intelligent of the 1860s dissecting frogs in Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, few would find it typical for the intelligentsia of any time to be publishing articles on theocracy in the ecclesiastical press, as had Ivan. The possibility that Ivan had as his prototype Vladimir Solovyov illustrates Dostoevsky’s approach to the type. Dostoevsky was quite impressed by the young Solovyov as an exception to the rule of Russian intellectuals, and he hoped that Solovyov’s example would be followed. At the same time, the precarious foundation of Ivan’s religious thought—Zosima

intuits that Ivan does not even believe in God—would indicate an astute estimation of the inherent ambivalence of modernist religious thought. It was quite prescient of Dostoevsky to foresee the significance of religious issues for the intelligentsia of the 1900s, but even more prescient for him to intuit the inner contradictions of their religious belief and their incompati-

bility with the more forthright piety of the established church. With the generation of Bulgakov, Florensky, and Rozanov, Ivan became typical to a far greater degree than he was typical at the time of Solovyov’s generation. On the other hand, nobody contributed to the spread of this type more than Dostoevsky himself, whose final novel became the source of continual inspiration for the generation of Bulgakov, Berdiaev, Viacheslav Ivanov, and countless others. The religious intellectual of the early 1900s was just as in-

debted to Dostoevsky as the superfluous men were to Pushkin and Lermontov. These authors intuited and described these abnormal types. Thus the problem of type requires a more sophisticated conceptualization, for which I shall refer to the works of Robert Louis Jackson and Mikhail Bakhtin. Jackson focuses on the temporal vector, so to speak, of Dostoevsky’s characterization: Type for Dostoevsky is the artistic medium through which the artist reveals the dynamics of reality, the configuration not only of the past, but also of the future, as it is disclosed in the indications of the present.” 20

Refiguring the Russian Type

The artist, writes Jackson, “must be a historian of the future . . . The problem content and the spiritual ideals of reality, poetically visualized (formed) by the artist, come back to reality in type and serve, in turn, to educate and re-form man.”'® This statement echoes Dostoevsky’s words to his young friend Evgeny Opochinin: “They say that the artistic work must reflect life, and so forth. All that is rubbish: the writer (the poet) creates life, a life in such full amplitude as did not exist before him.”*’ I shall return below to this idea, that Dostoevsky’s types are “formed” in order that they might “reform” man, which points to what I call their quality of mathesis. First, though, I must review Bakhtin’s conceptualization of Dostoevsky’s types. Here one finds an interesting tension in Bakhtin’s construction, between the temporal or phenomenal “unfinalizability” of Dostoevsky’s characters and their rather finalized inner content. On the count of unfinalizability, Bakhtin seems to mean that no character can ever be pinned down, defined, and limited by anyone outside of his innermost self, not even by his own consciousness. By way of an example, Bakhtin cites Liza’s reproach of Alyosha after the latter deigns to predict that Ilyusha’s father will finally overcome his pride and accept charity: Listen, Aleksei Fyodorovich. Isn’t there in all our analysis—I mean your analysis .. . no, better call it ours—aren’t we showing contempt for him, for that poor man—in analyzing his soul like this, as it were, from above, eh? In deciding so certainly that he will take the money?”®

The ultimate closing judgment of a man is uttered in a court.of law, and Bakhtin notes what “bad psychologists” the authorities at Dmitri’s trial are,

when they assume that they have defined and delimited “the unfinalized and undecided core of Dmitri’s personality.” At the same time, however, these comments of Bakhtin refer less to Dostoevsky’s characters as such than to their various statements about human character. Bakhtin tends to treat Dostoevsky’s novels less as art than as literary tracts in which the characters are mouthpieces of ideology. In his analyses of works, Bakhtin himself would appear to delimit and limit each character in Dostoevsky by assigning him a particular “idea” toward the embodiment of which the character strives. And in this resolution of a thought (an idea) lies their entire real life and their own personal unfinalizability. If one were to think away the idea in which they live, their image would be totally destroyed. In other words, the image of the hero is inseparably linked with the image of an idea and cannot be detached from it. We see the hero in the idea and through the idea, and we see the idea in him and through him.”

Here one clearly sees the influence upon Bakhtin of such conceptions as that of Boris Engelgardt, who viewed Dostoevsky’s works less as character dramas than as “ideological novels.” While, like Jackson, Bakhtin sees Dos21

Robert Bird

toevsky’s characters as oriented toward the future, it is in a sense a closed, predetermined future; it is the future expression of a predetermined content. Characters are, in Bakhtin’s term, “images of ideas,” and Dostoevsky’s novels received their inner dynamics from the “quarrel” that resulted between “ideas and worldviews, which in real life were absolutely estranged and deaf to one another.””' The plot is the unfolding of these ideological standpoints; understanding the plot is equated with Bakhtin’s ideology. This, in effect, is Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue. He concentrates on the form of the dialogue and the idea of the dialogue but fails to see that the » specific ideological dialogues of Dostoevsky’s works must remain open to another, unpredictable participant—the reader—in order for them to remain effective as works of art. Dostoevsky’s novels may be character-driven narratives, but they are still narratives, which, by ordering the world, order the reader’s consciousness, making sense of reality and communicating meaning. It may be concluded, then, that Bakhtin’s conception of Dostoevsky’s characters shares surprisingly much with the realist view expressed by Goncharov, in that although the characters may develop in a unique manner,

they are based upon and limited to an empirically existing model, be it based on observation, as for Goncharov, or on an “idea,” as for Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, the artist’s job is to set these types against each other, arranging the

battlefield and dictating the strategy. What is more, Bakhtin neglects the role of the reader in this dialogue. One can derive two possible stances for the reader in Bakhtin’s conception: either the reader remains a passive observer from a foreign vantage point, viewing the conflict of characters and deducing in a purely intellectual fashion the desirability of dialogue; or else

the reader begins to formulate his or her own inherent “idea,” as a silent participant in the dialogue of the work. The work itself, however, seems to have nothing of its own to communicate to the reader. This conception ignores the mathetic and not simply mimetic nature of Dostoevsky’s charac-

ters, their ability not only to predict future human types but even to “re-form” man, in Jackson’s formulation. When Dostoevsky describes a character, he inscribes this image into his artistic world, but he does not conscribe it to a predetermined ideological content; instead description liberates meaning. The alternative framework I would suggest for understanding Dostoevsky’s characterizations addresses the general question of Dostoevsky’s mathetic stance by placing the concept of type into the perspective of Dostoevsky’s creative evolution prior to The Brothers Karamazov. Arkady Dolinin once characterized Dostoevsky’s major novels as one cumulative attempt to

locate and depict a “beautiful man.”” This search obviously consisted not only of empirical research or reading the newspaper, as if a beautiful man could be discovered in observed reality, but it also consisted of Dostoevsky’s 22,

Refiguring the Russian Type

creative attempts to introduce into Russian cultural consciousness a realistic ideal of beauty, similar to how Pushkin had created a self-fulfilling ideal of the superfluous man. In Crime and Punishment, the mystery-like plot of

murder and investigation culminates in an even more mysterious “epilogue” that promises Raskolnikov’s rebirth as a new man: Here, however, there begins a new story, the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual rebirth, his gradual passage from one world to another, his acquaintance with a new, hitherto utterly unknown reality.”

It is legitimate to see Myshkin as a depiction of this new man, but, as Viacheslav Ivanov asserted, Myshkin remained a “stranger” to the world, a passive incarnation of heavenly content, an ideal that was insufficiently inscribed into. reality.** In Dostoevsky’s artistic world, positive types either languish on the brink of rebirth without fully achieving it or perish at the hands of

more potent historical forces. ,

In Dostoevsky’s next novel, The Demons, the locus of positive charac-

ter energy moved from the hero, who suffers complete degradation and perversion, to the heroine, the minor character Maria Timofeevna Lebiadkina (known as Khromonozhka, “the lame creature”). Stavrogin is a black hole, the immensity and gravity of which hints at the positive content that once was possible and perhaps still remains possible within him. Emptied of this potential, Stavrogin serves as the conduit of destructive ideologies in which he does not believe and which supplant the true content of the personalities they infect. Each of the other characters becomes strangely dependent on Stavrogin, who is, however, totally unable or unwilling to perform the leadership role he has assumed. There are two partial exceptions to this: Kirillov, the theomachist man-god, who retains personal energy despite his

utter isolation; and Shatov, who idolizes the nation as the bearer of God without believing in God. Even they, however, appear as fragments off Stavrogin’s massive homunculus or else masks by which he conceals his own

facelessness. With the abdication of their prince, they are therefore rendered incapable of manifesting themselves fully in their utter isolation. Both Kirillov and Shatov are on the brink of establishing sincere interpersonal contact when they are destroyed in the wave of violence unleashed by Verkhovensky with Stavrogin’s compliance. While Crime and Punishment and The Idiot had pursued a positive (if

nonextant) type, The Demons shows the historical impotence of types in general, understood as existent and existentially closed attitudes of the human will. If Dostoevsky’s novels were in some sense “ideological novels,” then The Demons presents the tragic failure of ideology as such. If one con-

nects the type to the ancient concept of daimonia, the title The Demons might indicate that the novel is concerned precisely with the miscarriage of “noetic” personalities, based on a predetermined “idea.” None of the ideas 23

Robert Bird , current in the world is capacious enough for a human personality without a

violent repression of personal freedom. Man had to be reformed not as some personified idea but as man. Robert Louis Jackson has noted that it was a mighty task for Dostoevsky “to reconcile his classical higher aesthetic with the demands of a realism that essentially called for a new aesthetic of disfiguration.”” Jackson also notes, however: “All his life Dostoevsky worshipped ideal form as the symbol and embodiment of moral and spiritual transfiguration. But he did not find this form, this unchangeable unity of being, either in himself, in .

Russian man, or in human nature at large.” But he could, having perceived the image in some form, work toward its realization. So was it Dostoevsky’s task to present, against a background of human types, the nucleus of a new man capable of refiguring the types he discerned in lite. The resolution of this dilemma lies in the way Dostoevsky re-formed modern social

| types as the tragic source of a new reality. From the self-destructing rubble of ideology he seeks the emergence of man. Our understanding of Dostoevsky’s goal must not be reduced to a narrowly artistic order. Dostoevsky was concerned with the fate of the human personality in the previous two centuries of Russian cultural history. The Europeanization of Russian culture had introduced the individual as a category of social and metaphysical understanding, yet the resulting individuals had remained only types, only grotesque sketches of an elusive, new

identity. And Dostoevsky’s goal was not merely to point this out but to deepen and strengthen the very fact of individual consciousness and being in Russia. Literature in Russia performs a peculiarly important role as legislator of cultural meaning; it not only endows reality with meaning and valuation but also inscribes values into culture through aesthetic creation. With respect to The Brothers Karamazov, my hypothesis about Dostoevsky’s open-ended type suggests that Dmitri and Ivan represent closed types, expressive of an inner idea, but only one that is stillborn in life, which disproves their inner idea at every step. It is notable that, judging by Dostoevsky’s manuscripts and other evidence, both characters arose in connection with particular prototypes.”” Despite boundless potential, they have both delimited their personalities in terms of particular ideas or stereotypes

that have closed off their development. Their catastrophe is not merelya personal one, however, for their ideas—the critical humanism of Ivan and the romantic individualism of Dmitri—were ones that inspired large portions of Russian society. Their individual catastrophes are, in a sense, the apotheosis of the intelligentsia and of the superfluous idealist. The fact that future generations nonetheless embodied aspects of Ivan’s insincere theological makeup served to confirm the inner contradictions of the type. The overall catastrophe of the novel is, by extension, that of historical Russia: of the church (represented by the monastery), of the courts, of the provinces. 24

Refiguring the Russian Type

The very name of the Karamazovs’ town, Skotoprigonyevsk, recalls the swine being driven off the cliff in order to destroy the demons that have possessed

them, a scriptural parable that gave Dostoevsky the title and ruling metaphor of his novel The Demons. (Ps, 15:15; cf. Ps, 15:453-55). Skotoprigo-

nyevsk is where the remnants of ideological types are cast together in a spectacular, renewing explosion. This catastrophe communicates to the reader a cathartic energy, opening him or her up to what Dostoevsky is “teaching”

in the novel and leading up to the application of this teaching in praxis.”® And what he is teaching, above all, is the image of a nonexistent, vague, yet credible “beautiful man.” In Dostoevsky’s manuscripts, Alyosha is often called

“the Idiot,” which links him to Dostoevsky’s earlier attempt to depict the “beautiful man” (Ps, 15:413-14). In contrast to Myshkin, however, Alyosha is precisely unformed; his actions belong to the future, projecting out from the novel into extra-artistic space. One might say that in Dostoevsky’s novel

and specifically in the character of Alyosha, new humanity achieves a foothold in Russian culture and opens Russia up in a new direction.”

| In his discussion of Dmitri, Robert Jackson focuses on the temporal aspect of the character: the need for his future self to find an anchor in the past, through the memory of his highest (and tragically thwarted) aspirations. In reply to Dmitri’s claim that he has been reborn as a “new man” in prison, Alyosha answers, “I say just remember that man always, all your life |.. .] and that is enough for you” (BK, 763). As Jackson comments, “Memory here serves to foreground the purity of intention, the point of light toward which Dmitri can strive.”*° The tragedy of Dmitri’s character is that he has rejected this light in favor of a series of stereotypical decisions, which have conscribed his character. Yet he remains free to reclaim his original existential openness, to redescribe himself and reinscribe himself into his world—through memory. In the terms of my analysis, memory serves a hermeneutical function with respect to the revelation of a new man, spurring the old man to active work toward a perhaps unreachable goal. Moreover, this existential imperative goes equally for the character, for the reader, and even from the author, who can receive from his own works an existential spur.

The artistic process that Dostoevsky intended and Jackson intuits in Dostoevsky’s works follows the Aristotelian triad which Viacheslav Ivanov first formulated in his essay “On the Russian Idea”: cleansing (catharsis),

teaching (mathesis), and action (praxis).°' In this formulation, it is somewhat reminiscent of the hermeneutical theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer, which stresses both catharsis, as the source of art’s efficacy vis-a-vis the spec-

tator, and application, as the crowning act in the process of understanding by the spectator.” Both concepts elucidate how understanding works of art plays an important role in the individual’s construction of a sense of his or her place in time. Catharsis resolves the artwork’s and the spectator’s hori2.5

Robert Bird

zons of meaning into a single event, providing the individual with an interpretation of his or her self vis-a-vis the world outside. This horizon shift and act of understanding is then constitutive of the continuum that grounds all future acts of understanding. At a similar level of generality, one can draw support from Paul Ricoeur: Fiction has the power to “remake” reality and, within the framework of narrative fiction in particular, to remake real praxis to the extent that the text intentionally aims at a horizon of a new reality that we may call a world. It is this world of the text that intervenes in the world of action in order to give it a new configuration or, as we might say, in order to transfigure it.

For Ricoeur, as for Gadamer, the artwork illuminates the spectator’s past and inspires action in the present in order to direct the future.“ To sum up, The Brothers Karamazov instills in the reader the image and memory of an “atypical” man, atypical precisely in the degree of his humanity, uncontaminated by reductive ideologies and utterly nonpredetermined. One might object to this interpretation that Dostoevsky intended to provide a continuation of Alyosha’s story, which would close up the character and impose a concrete image or type on the author's vision of new Russia. The fact is, however, that he did not provide this continuation and that it would be pointless to conjecture on Alyosha’s further exploits or on whether or not he would become the “Great Sinner” of Dostoevsky’s earlier drafts. The reader is provided with the negative example of the prosecutor at Dmitri’s trial, who, in the chapter entitled “The Prosecutor’s Speech. Characterizations,” paints the members of the Karamazov family as types from Russian society: Fyodor Pavlovich “is a father, and one of our modernday fathers”; Ivan “is one of our modern young men, brilliantly educated, with quite a powerful mind, who, however, no longer believes in anything, who has already scrapped and rejected much, too much in life” (BK, 696; Ps, 15:126); Dmitri “seems to represent ingenuous Russia . . . she is here, our dear mother Russia, we can smell her, we can hear her” (BK, 696; Ps, 15:128). In a draft of this scene, the prosecutor says: The eldest [. . .] is a model of the intelligentsia layer of our society, who has in an abstract-philosophical manner rejected everything, but in whom in a practical sense youth and the good seeds of science and enlightenment are locked in conflict. ... The other son is mysticism and chauvinism. There remains [i.e., in Dmitri] Russia herself |neposredstvennaia Rossiia]. (Ps, 15: 352; translation mine)

These stereotypical characterizations, as Bakhtin points out, are false insofar as they preclude further development of the characters’ innate poten-

tial; but they do capture something of the characters. The prosecutor’s characterization of Alyosha is false in another sense. Alyosha, according to the prosecutor, betrays “that timid despair that leads so many in our poor 26

Refiguring the Russian Type

society, fearing its cynicism and depravity, and mistakenly ascribing all evil

to European enlightenment, to themselves, as they put it, to the ‘native soil.’” Nothing in Alyosha justifies such an explanation of his novitiate at the

monastery, but the prosecutor uses it to predict Alyosha’s future membership in another Russian stereotype: “I hope that his youthful radiance and yearning for popular foundations will not turn later, as so often happens, into dark mysticism on the moral side, and witless chauvinism on the civic side” (BK, 697; Ps, 15:127). With respect to Fyodor Pavlovich, Ivan, and Dmitri, the prosecutor’s psychological myopia results in dismissive stereotyping, but in Alyosha’s case it leads to utter fantasy. Alyosha simply does not fit any of the patterns extant in Russian society. One of the few indications of Dostoevsky’s plan for the second volume of The Brothers Karamazov tells us that “Alyosha Karamazov was going... to be a hero from which | Dostoevsky] wanted to create a type of Russian socialist, not that common [khodiachii| type that we know and which arose fully on a European soil” (Ps, 15:485; translation mine). Despite such fragmentary testimony, however, not only is Alyosha’s future open, but its very vector remains unknown and unpredictable. And it is because of this profound indeterminacy that the prosecutor's predictions for Russia also ring false. Claiming that “certain basic, general elements of our modern-day educated society shine through, as it were, in the picture of this nice little family,” he implies that these are the Sobakeviches, Nozdryovs, and Chichikovs that are drawing the Russian troika to certain doom (BK, 695; Ps, 15:125). It is no longer Gogol’s types drawing this troika, however, but the atypical hero of the new epoch of Russian culture, whose future and fate still hang in the balance. In conclusion, from the beginnings of the Russian novel in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, characters had been based on types, whether empirically observed or more intuitively foreseen. Dostoevsky’s characterizations followed this pattern, allowing for differences in social milieu and psychological makeup. But in his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky creates a truly open-ended character, one whom the reader must finish beyond the novel. As the critic Evgenii Lundberg wrote, “The novel about the Karamazovys was not finished. Alyosha did not take off his cassock and leave

the saving monastery shell for the world. We see what Dostoevsky was preparing for, but we do not know what he could achieve.”*’ This unfulfilled achievement is what is passed on to each reader of the novel.

Notes 1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1991), 3 [hereafter cited parenthetically in text as BK with page number]; cf. F. M. Dostoevskii, Pol27

Robert Bird

noe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90), 14:5 [hereafter cited as Ps with volume and page number]. 2. Turii Lotman, “The Tradition Generated by Onegin,” Russian Views of Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin,’ trans. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 177; I. M. Lotman, Pushkin (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1995), 462. 3. Lotman, Pushkin, 453.

4, Lotman, “The Tradition Generated by Onegin,” 176; Lotman, Pushkin, 461. 0. “Mode of learning” is the formulation of James Redfield: “pathe and learning together constitute the characteristic value of a well-made narrative,” which is how Redfield interprets the Aristotelian idea of katharsis: “we reconceive our own emotions as the necessary conditions of our comprehension of a formally coherent order. . . . they stand between reality and unreality and are purified as we come to conceive them within the formal order which the work provides”; “pity and fear become modes of learning rather than raw experience”; James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975),

67, 236-37. |

6. L. Grossman, “Dostoevskii—khudozhnik,” in Tvorchestvo FE M. Dostoevskogo, ed. N. L. Stepanov (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1959), 330-416, at 399; cited by Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, 2d ed., foreword by Caryl Emerson (Evanston, IIl.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 265. 7. A. L. Bem, “Dostoevskii—genial’nyi chitatel’,” O Dostoevskom vol. 2 (Prague, 1933), 19; cited by Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism,

252-53. Dostoevsky asserted that the Gogolian type “is only half of the truth, and half of the truth quite often is a lie” (Ps, 26:313). 8. Quoted in Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 216; Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1966; reprint, Pittsburgh, 1978), 109. Alexis Klimoff has suggested (in a personal communication to the author) that Goncharov’s criticism of Dostoevsky’s “arising” types may stem from his likely negative reaction to Turgenev’s 1869 note “Po povodu — ‘Ottsov i detei’,” where Turgenev describes the genesis of Bazarov as the incarnation of “a hardly born, still fermenting principle, which later received the name of nihilism” (I. S$. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem [Moscow-Leningrad: Nauka, 1967], vol. 14, p. 97). The relationship between Goncharov and Turgenev had soured after Goncharov accused Turgenev of plagiarism in connection with the latter’s 1860 novel On the Eve. 9. Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 216. 10. Ibid., 217. 28

Refiguring the Russian Type

11. Ibid., 264. 12. Vissarion Belinsky, “Letters to V. P. Botkin,” Russian Philosophy, 1, The Beginnings of Russian Philosophy: The Slavophiles, the Westernizers, ed. James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin, with the collaboration of George L. Kline (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 304-11, at 304-5. 13. S. N. Bulgakov, Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), vol. 2, p. 17 (translation mine). 14. Marina Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev: The Art of Integral

Vision (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 65-67; Sergei Solovev, Zhizn’ i tvorcheskaia evoliutsiia Vladimira Solov’eva (Brussels: Zhizn’ s Bogom, 1977), 41; Ps, 15:417-18, 471-73. 15. Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form, 108. 16. Ibid., 123.

17. E. N. Opochinin, “Besedy s Dostoevskim,” Zven’ia, vol. 6, ed. L. P. Grossman (Moscow and Leningrad: Academia, 1936), 454-95, at 472. Translation cited from Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form, 91.

| 18. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, intro. Wayne C. Booth (Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota Press, 1984), 60. ,

19. Ibid., 62. 20. Ibid., 87. 21. Ibid., 91. 22. The theme of the “positively beautiful man,” as Dostoevskii called Myshkin (Ps, vol. 28, pt. 2, p. 251), has also been identified as the common

thread in his later novels by Arkady Dolinin; see A. S. Dolinin, ed., FM. Dostoevskii. Pis’ma. I. 1832-1867 (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928), 13.

23. Ps, 6:422; cf. Fedor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. David McDutf (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 630. 24. Viacheslav Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (Brussels: Foyer chrétien oriental, 1971-86), 4:428. 25. Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form, 1138. 26. Ibid., 1. 27. Dmitri was based on Dmitri IVinsky, whose story of wrongful im-

prisonment for the murder of his father is mentioned in Notes from the Dead House; Ps, 15:403-5. Possible prototypes for Ivan include Vladimir Solovyov (as mentioned earlier in my essay), but he can also be seen as a de-

velopment of the type represented by Raskolnikov and Stavrogin. In the central chapter “Rebellion,” Ivan famously repeats Belinsky’s sentiments; see ibid., 15:470. 28. On this triad of aesthetic principles, see Viacheslav Ivanov, Selected Essays, ed., trans., and annot. Robert Bird, intro. Michael Wachtel 29

Robert Bird

(Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 142-43; Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:337-38. 29. Cf. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:577ff. 30. Robert L. Jackson, Dialogues with Dostoevsky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 282.

31. Ivanov, Selected Essays, 142; Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:337-8. 32. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., trans. rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1998), 130ff. (catharsis), 307ff. (application). 33. Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IIl.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 11. 34, On this Aristotelian tradition of Russian hermeneutical thought, see also Robert Bird, “Understanding Dostoevsky: A Comparison of Russian Hermeneutic Theories,” Dostoevsky Studies: The Journal of the International Dostoevsky Society, n.s., 5 (2001): 129-46.

35. Evgenii Lundberg, Ot vechnogo k prekhodiashchemu (Berlin: Skify, 1923), 50.

30

Liza Knapp

Mothers and Sons in The Brothers Karamazov: Our Ladies of Skotoprigonevsk

FROM NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS TO THE GRIEVING MOTHERS OF SKOTOPRIGONEVSK What Zosima calls “maternal grief” manifests itself in various ways in The Brothers Karamazov.' From the shriekers (klikushi) and the peasant woman grieving for her son who wait for Zosima as the action of the novel begins, to Ilyusha Snegiryov’s mother home mourning for her son as Alyosha preaches to the boys at the stone as the novel closes, the mothers of Skotoprigonevsk let loose a hysterical lament. Their lament echoes throughout the novel. The grieving mothers of Skotoprigonevsk are intimately connected to Mary, Jesus’ mother, whose maternal grief—palpable on icons—has far-reaching theological and spiritual consequences. Direct references to iconic, biblical, apocryphal, and literary representations of the Mother of God abound in The Brothers Karamazov. Thus, for all its concern with parricide and brotherhood, The Brothers Karamazov is also permeated with the presence of the Mother of God. Ifin The Idiot Dostoevsky attempted to depict a Christlike man in Myshkin, then in The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky presents to us Mary-like women and perhaps also Mary-like men. In its complex network of evocations of Mary and all that she embodies, The Brothers Karamazov recalls and responds to Victor Hugo’s NotreDame de Paris (1831), a novel that Dostoevsky had been proud to publish in its first Russian translation in his journal Time in 1862.* Most of the action of Notre-Dame de Paris takes place in and around the Gothic cathedral built in Mary’s honor. At key points in the novel, characters, from Esmer-

alda to the king of France, pray to “Our Lady.” The novel opens with a pageant, entitled “The Good Judgment of Our Lady the Virgin Mary,” which attempts to bring Mary to life on stage.® (The pageant flops.) In introducing his “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” Ivan Karamazov cites this example from Notre-Dame as a precedent for poems that “bring divine powers down

3]

Liza Knapp

to earth” and show figures such as the Virgin Mary interacting with ordinary folk (Ps, 14:225; BK, 247).4 But Hugo does not limit himself to these overt references to the Vir-

gin Mary. Her role in Notre-Dame de Paris is more complex—as will be the role of Mary in The Brothers Karamazov. Specifically, Hugo evokes the

popular view of Mary as the protectress of orphaned children: it was the practice to leave orphaned and unwanted children on a wooden bed near a statue of the Virgin in Notre-Dame. One such foundling, adopted by a deacon of the cathedral and christened Quasimodo, became the bell ringer. The only physical mother he has known is Notre-Dame (the cathedral): “Notre-Dame had been to him successively, as he grew up, his egg, his nest, his house, his country, his universe” (148). But his spiritual mother is Mary herself. This son of Notre-Dame rescues Esmeralda, as she is about to be executed for witchcraft outside the cathedral. He carries her inside NotreDame, bellowing “Sanctuary!” Quasimodo was aware that “all human jus-

tice expired on the threshold” (347). Thus, Hugo sets forth Notre-Dame and, by extension, “Our Lady” herself, as forces that potentially provide sanctuary and mercy to those persecuted and condemned by the temporal order and “human justice.” (Here, too, Hugo prepares the ground for The Brothers Karamazov. )

Aside from our Lady, the main mother depicted in the novel is Gudule, a mother grieving for her child who was kidnapped and presumably murdered by Gypsies. Gudule has left her home in Reims and settled in a cell not far from Notre-Dame, where she mourns for her lost child. In her lamentations, in the narrator’s commentary, and in the plot of the novel, attention is focused on the shoe of her lost child. The narrator writes of the delight mothers take in contemplating their infants’ shoes but then notes that for a bereaved mother who has lost her child, a shoe left behind becomes an instrument of torture, an instrument that eventually cracks the heart of the mother: Here’s the shoe, where is the foot? (330-31). This motif is also found in religious poetry of the Russian folk.® At the beginning of The Brothers Karamazov, the grieving mother tells Zosima, “I

look at his clothes, at his little shirt or his little boots, and I start howling” (Ps, 14:46; BK, 48). At the end of the novel, Ilyusha Snegiryov’s grieving fa- _ ther catches sight of his dead son’s boots, rushes to them, and kisses them, crying, “|WJhere are your little feet?” (Ps, 15:194; BK, 773). In accordance with the general principle of multiple sources and rich intertextuality that Robert Belknap has outlined for the genesis of Dostoevsky’s novel, Dostoevsky most likely drew this motif of a parent’s grief over a dead child’s shoes

from both Hugo and Russian folk poetry, and possibly other sources as well.° But the fact that this motif may be found in both these places suggests that the process of Russifying Hugo’s Notre-Dame was in some ways a very natural one for Dostoevsky. 32

Mothers and Sons in The Brothers Karamazov

In Gudule, the grieving mother of Notre-Dame, Hugo creates a distorted Marian double, who evokes the idea that Mary’s maternal grief raises disturbing questions about Providence. Gudule rails against what has been

done to her, “hurlling] bitter denunciations toward heaven,” as well as “touching lamentations” (330). After fifteen years of weeping, her tears are still bitter. She begs to see her daughter again, if only for a minute. This grieving mother protests hysterically against God and his universe. Unlike Job, she is ready to curse God for what he has done to her. In her despera-

tion, Gudule turns her laments from God to Mary, hoping that Mary, at least, will show her the compassion that God has denied her. Gudule thinks that Mary ought to pay particular heed to her prayer because her agony is

one that Mary herself has undergone: “Good Virgin! Good Virgin of Heaven! My own infant Jesus! They have taken her from me; they have stolen her; they have eaten her on the heath; they have drunk her blood; they have chewed her bones! Good Virgin, have pity on me! My daughter!” (330). In a Gothic plot twist, Gudule is eventually reunited with her daughter, who was not killed by the Gypsies after all but has grown up to become _ Esmeralda. At this point, Gudule, full of joy, expresses her gratitude to the “Good Virgin” (475). But she is fated to lose her daughter all over again, for it turns out that even Quasimodo and Notre-Dame prove unable to protect Esmeralda from those bent on killing her. Gudule rebels against the execution of her daughter: she bites the executioner viciously and then falls dead.

Her hysterical laments, echoing through Notre-Dame de Paris, present a challenge to God’s order—in the name of the Virgin. Hugo’s contemporaries found Notre-Dame de Paris bleak, perhaps in part because the forces associated with Our Lady fail to achieve certain results: the temporal order, doing the will of the king and the mob, triumphs

and Esmeralda is hanged. Hugo’s friend Sainte-Beuve complained that Hugo had “deprived the great cathedral of celestial light.” As Hugo wrote the novel, his soul was, as he put it in a poem addressed to his daughter, “empty of faith.”’ And yet, Dostoevsky saw Notre-Dame de Paris as a work that embodied what for him were the ultimate Christian questions and “the fundamental idea of all of the art of the nineteenth century” (Ps, 20:28-29). In writing The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky explored the meaning, for his contemporary Russia, of the web of Marian themes that Hugo

exposed in Notre-Dame. In Dostoevsky’s novel, the pitiful laments and metaphysical protests of Gudule are transferred to Russian soil, where they may be heard from the lips of the grieving mothers of Skotoprigonevsk. (Gudule also finds a spokesman in Ivan Karamazov.) But the Mary who figures in Dostoevsky’s last novel is closely linked to Russian spirituality, with

its especially rich Mariology. This Russian Mother of God appears to be more responsive to the grief, suffering, protest, and rage of the people, who entrust themselves to her protection. Shanti Elliott has argued that the 33

Liza Knapp Russian folk’s understanding of Mary has infiltrated not only the thematics but the aesthetics of The Brothers Karamazov. The way in which Mary is portrayed in part explains why The Brothers Karamazov is perceived as being, if not full of, then at least not “deprived of,” the faith and “celestial light” many readers found absent from Hugo’s “Notre Dame”—the novel, the cathedral, and the saint. In The Demons (1871), Dostoevsky presented both the Sistine Madonna and the more indigenous embodiments of the Mother of God as different expressions of a holy ideal, which was threatened by forces of evil and mediocrity. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky draws overtly on the Mary of Russian folk spirituality as he tries to find ways of representing Russian reality, in all its chaos, but he still shows his creative debt to Western models and aesthetic ideals, which also inspired what Robert Louis Jackson has called Dostoevsky’s “quest for form.”® In this spirit, Dostoevsky used the material of Notre-Dame de Paris to create something magnificent of his own.

FROM THE DOSTOEVSKY FAMILY CHRONICLE

TO THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV: |

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A DEDICATION

The Brothers Karamazov has been perceived as more intimately connected with the Dostoevsky family drama than other novels he wrote. Dangerous as it is to speculate about how the life of an author relates to the fictional text, The Brothers Karamazov is the one novel of Dostoevsky that readily invites this kind of approach. Most specifically, scholars have noted the possible ways in which the novel was affected by the death in 1878 of Alexei, Dostoevsky’s three-year-old son. The writing of The Brothers Karamazov has been regarded as a kind of bereavement therapy for Dostoevsky. Further, in dedicating The Brothers Karamazov to his wife Anna Grigorievna Dostoevsky, who was herself grieving for their son, Dostoevsky may be marking this novel as one that connects to his own family life. The dedication makes the novel into a message to his wife—that we, the public, are reading. Scholars have also remarked on the “reincarnation” of Alyosha Dostoevsky in the Alyoshas of the book: Alyosha Karamazov and the dead three-year-old son Alyosha of the grieving mother who is comforted by Zosima early in the book. And the town of Skotoprigonevsk is modeled on Staraya Russa where the Dostoevsky family spent its summers. As Dostoevsky’s wife explains in her memoirs, among the particulars of the Dostoevsky family’s chronicle that found their way into this work of fiction are the words of consolation of Father Amvrosy of the Optina Pustyn monastery. Urged by his wife, who was worried about Dostoevsky after the death of their son, Dostoevsky made a journey to Optina Pustyn in the company of Vladimir Solovyov. While there, Dostoevsky described to Father 34

Mothers and Sons in The Brothers Karamazov

Amvrosy his wite’s grief, and Amvrosy imparted to Dostoevsky a message for Anna Grigorievna. These words are echoed in one of the opening scenes in the novel in the words that Father Zosima pronounces to the bereaved mother, who mourns her three-year-old Alyosha’s death. Thus, husband and wife each tried to offer consolation to the other after their son died. Dostoevsky’s wife sent him to Optina Pustyn in the hope of distracting and consoling him, and Dostoevsky, in return, brought her back Amvrosy’s words of consolation, which he eventually wrapped in a glorious fictional package: The Brothers Karamazov. Zosima’s efforts to console the grieving mother are memorable. He speaks of the mother’s tears of grief turning with time into tears of joy. He shows an apparent willingness to let her cry. He consoles her with the notion that her son is an angel in heaven. He makes references to another desperate mother, Rachel (Ps, 14:46; BK, 48-49). However, these words of consolation are not so very different from those found in the novels of Dickens and others. According to Laurence Lerner, arguments of this kind were all but formulas commonly used to console grieving mothers.’ These lines _ tended to be spoken by fathers: fathers of the dead child and fathers of the church. These consolations, eventually used by Dickens in numerous descriptions of child death, making Britain into what Oscar Wilde referred to as a “sob-in,” had been rejected in Hugo’s earlier Notre-Dame de Paris. Gudule counters, “What matters it to me if she be in heaven? I don’t want your angels; I want my child!” (330). As we know, Dostoevsky appealed to Hugo’s fiction in critical moments of his life: an eyewitness reported that Dostoevsky was moved to cite Hugo’s Dernier jour d’un condamné a mort when he was about to be executed in 1849. When Dostoevsky experienced the death of his firstborn child, Sonya, in 1868, he may well again have thought of Hugo. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s letters describing Sonya’s death, and The Idiot, the novel Dostoevsky was working on at the time, show Dostoevsky

poignantly evoking the dilemma of Notre-Dame de Paris, the dilemma which Gudule embodies so rawly: How can one have faith in God while living in a world that God appears to have forsaken, in a world where the most precious beings die?!” In The Brothers Karamazov, written after the death of Alyosha, Dostoevsky mediates between the Dickensian sermon (“console

yourself with the thought that your child is an angel in heaven”) and the Hugolian protest (“I don’t want your angel, I want my child”).""

The elder (starets) Zosima’s interaction with the grieving mother, which begins with him showing tolerance of her tears and empathy for her suffering, ends with a directive. After consoling her, Zosima sends her home. He declares that this woman, who had left home a couple of months earlier

to travel two hundred miles on her pilgrimage to Zosima, joining the “shriekers” and others waiting to see him, should go home. “Get back to 35

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your husband, mother, go this very day” (Ps, 14:47; BK, 50). Zosima even appeals to her maternal guilt when he asks: What if the spirit of your boy were to return to his childhood home looking for you and find you absent and his father, your husband, left to his own desperate devices? Zosima goads her back to her husband. In her Reminiscences, Dostoevsky’s wife tells us that after the death of her son, her joie de vivre disappeared, she became apathetic. “I cooled to everything: to the housekeeping, to business matters, and even to my own children, and I was utterly consumed by memories of the past three years.” She further notes that “many of [her] own doubts, thoughts and even words” are “inscribed” in The Brothers Karamazov in the chapter where the woman who has lost her child tells about her grief to the elder Zosima.” Indeed, the mother in The Brothers Karamazov comments that she had begun to

hate her home and had stopped paying attention to her husband before leaving on her pilgrimage. In this way, the dedication of The Brothers Karamazov to Anna Grigorievna Dostoevsky (herself a grieving mother) and the relevance of this

particular episode involving a grieving mother, positioned as it is at the opening of the novel, may have an extra level of meaning. The dedication and this episode remain a beautiful and empathetic tribute to mother’s grief and love, yet they insist also on the notion that life goes on. As far as the el-

der (and the author?) is concerned, at a certain point, enough is enough, and grieving women need to get back to their husbands and hearth. Is this, too, the message of Brothers Karamazov to its readers at large, as well as to its dedicatee, Anna Grigorievna?

SHRIEKERS (KLIKUSHI): HYSTERIA AND RUSSIAN MOTHERS The mother consoled by Zosima speaks in a singsong voice and rocks back and forth. Dostoevsky notes that her grief is not of the quiet, long-suffering variety; rather, it is a grief that is strained: a moment comes when it breaks through with tears, and from that moment on it pours itself out in lamentations. Especially with — women. But it is no easier to bear than the silent grief. Lamentations ease the heart only by straining and exacerbating it more and more. Such grief does not even want consolation; it is nourished by the sense of its unquenchableness. Lamentations are simply the need to constantly irritate the wound. (Ps, 14:45; BK, 48)

Although she is not identified as such, this grieving mother is akin to the “shriekers” (klikushi) who appear earlier in this same chapter. According to the definition in the dictionary of Dal’, the klikushi were “possessed by a 36

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type of epilepsy, to which peasant women are especially liable: during attacks, there is a loss of consciousness and the afflicted woman screams in a frenzied fashion in bestial voices, spewing forth abuse.” Dal’ ofters a second, simpler, definition of a klikusha as a possessed woman (besnuiushchaiasia).

The shriekers who appear in The Brothers Karamazov are the Russian folk equivalent of the hysterical women of western Europe, the scrutiny of whom was all the rage in Paris at Jean Martin Charcot’s Salpétriére during this same period. Dostoevsky joins the debate over hysteria, the disease of the nineteenth century. As James Rice has argued, hysteria held a particular interest to Dostoevsky because it was a condition that was so often compared to (and even confused with) epilepsy, from which Dostoevsky suffered.8 Moreover, Dostoevsky’s son, Alexei, had died from an epilepsylike illness, if not actual epilepsy. In describing his illness, his mother used the term rodimets, defined by Dal’ as “epilepsy in babies, or, more accurately, an inflammation of the brain accompanied by convulsions.” To describe the convulsions of the shrieker, Dostoevsky used a closely related word, rodimchik, the colloquial term for the convulsions of a mother or child at the time -of birth.

The phenomenon of shriekers (klikushi) had been discussed in the Russian press, most notably by Ivan Gavrilovich Pryzhov.* Although the subject itself was sufficient to attract his attention, Dostoevsky was especially interested in what Pryzhov had to say because they had both grown up during the same period on the grounds of the Marinsky Hospital for the Poor. In Pryzhov’s descriptions of shriekers in Russia, he notes the widespread nature of the phenomenon in the nineteenth century. Of special relevance among Pryzhov’s extensive observations are the following: that the affliction of the shriekers was identified as hysteria (107); that it is a genetic

predisposition inherited from the mother; that otherwise healthy women could be brought to this condition by witnessing women undergoing these attacks; and that authorities brought klikushi to trial, where they pronounced them evil-intentioned fakers and sentenced them to the asylum. In marked contrast to the prevailing official attitudes that he reports, Pryzhov himself responds to the shriekers with enlightened sympathy (110). Pryzhov attempts to give his readers a sense of the suffering and grief that characterizes the Russian peasant woman's existence. Her husband is likely

to be “a beast and a tyrant. His wife suffers terribly from him... . Night barely falls and there he is climbing into her bed, and this continues right up until he’s buried in his grave.” Pryzhov presents the hysteria of the shriekers as these women’s physiological protest against the bestiality and tyranny of their husbands.” In the description of the shrieker who is presented to Zosima for heal-

ing, an authorial “I” intercedes in the narrative to comment on the phenomenon of shriekers and to reveal his childhood experience of them. (The 37

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effect of this authorial intrusion is like that created when the author attempts

to explain and justify his hero Alexei Karamazov in the section at the beginning of the novel, “From the Author.”) The author signals his intent to take a stand on the subject of shriekers. Of the shriekers, the authorial “T”’ explains: I do not know how it is now, but in my childhood I often used to see and hear these “shriekers” in villages and monasteries. Taken to the Sunday liturgy, they would screech or bark like dogs so that the whole church could hear, but

when the chalice was brought out, and they were led up to the chalice, the “demonic possession” would immediately cease and the sick ones would calm down for a time. As a child, I was greatly struck and astonished by this. And it was then that I heard from some landowners and especially from my town teachers, in answer to my questions, that it was all a sham in order to avoid

work, and that it could always be eradicated by the proper severity, which they confirmed by telling various stories. But later on I was surprised to learn

from medical experts that there is no shamming in it, that it is a terrible woman's disease that seems to occur predominantly in our Russia, that it is a testimony to the hard lot of our peasant women, caused by exhausting work too soon after difficult, improper birthgiving without any medical help, and, besides that, by insurmountable grief, beatings, and so on, which the nature of many women, after all, as the general examples show, cannot endure. (Ps, 14:44: BK, 47)

In this passage, Dostoevsky presents a familiar dynamic in his works: a child

witnesses the suffering of abused, feminine creatures and feels empathy, only to find that his elders, the authorities, ignore or justify the suffering. (A famous example is Raskolnikov’s dream of the beaten horse in the first part of Crime and Punishment.) In The Brothers Karamazov, the author’s declared empathy for the shriekers—he acknowledges the reality of their suffering and sees their affliction as a direct response to it—is linked to the critical scenes describing the Karamazov brothers championing suffering mothers. Dostoevsky’s view of the shriekers coincides in many ways with Pryzhov’s empathetic view, just as it opposes the contemptuous and dismissive view of the authorities, who maintain that the women are faking their ailment to avoid work. M. S. Al’tman has explored the common commitment to writing empathetically about Russian suffering that characterizes the works of both Pryzhov and Dostoevsky, despite their differences in religious and political views. He suggests that this characteristic may have been inspired by what they witnessed as children at the Marinsky Hospital for the Poor, where their fathers worked.'® Dostoevsky specifically links the ailment of the shriekers to their being forced to return to heavy labor in the fields—and to the beatings of their

husbands—too soon after childbirth. Of significance here is the fact that these shriekers are identified as wives and mothers. These hysterical women, 38

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the Russian klikushi (shriekers) depicted by both sons of the Marinsky Hospital, Dostoevsky and Pryzhov, are strikingly different from the stereotype of the hysterical woman described by expert authorities. Popular views of hysteria were influenced by the etiologic understanding of hysteria, whereby hysteria (with its root in the Greek word for uterus) was thought to result from roaming wombs. Plato speaks for this view in the Timaeus: [T]he womb is an animal which longs to generate children. When it remains barren too long after puberty, it is distressed and sorely disturbed, and straying about in the body and cutting off the passages of the breath, it impedes respiration and brings the sufferer into extremist anguish and provokes all

manner of diseases besides.

The best cure for hysteria was thought to be marriage, sex, motherhood, and family life.

Although Dostoevskian heroines have been found who fit the more Freudian and Platonic models of hysteria (among them Katerina Ivanovna in The Brothers Karamazov),’* the shriekers are a different species of hysterical women. Their problem is not the result of a lack of sex or of an obsession with sex. Rather, Dostoevsky straightforwardly insists, their hysteria is caused by the violence and hardship of their family lite. In some profound way, it is linked to their experience of motherhood, which is colored by suffering. In this respect, their hysteria is still related to the womb. But their hysteria is the bodily expression of the anguish these mothers feel in response to giving birth to children—to bringing them from the safety of

their wombs out into a world where mothers and children suffer, into a world where God allows this suffering to happen. Many of the mothers in The Brothers Karamazov show symptoms of the disease of the shriekers, even if they stop short of barking like dogs. Among these are the grieving mother of the little boy named Alyosha whom Zosima comforts at the beginning of the novel and the mother of Hyusha Snegiryov who beats her breast and cries hysterically as the novel comes to an end. The mother of Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov, Sophia Ivanovna, suffered from a form of hysteria, which is specifically associated with the hysteria of the shriekers: “this unhappy young woman, who had been terrorized since childhood, came down with something like a kind of feminine nervous disorder, most often found among simple village women, who are known as shriekers (klikushi) because of it. From this disorder, accompanied by terrible hysterical fits, the sick woman would sometimes even lose her reason” (Ps, 14:13; BK, 13-14). Fyodor Karamazov called her his shrieker (klikusha) and even used the diminutive, Alikushen’ka. In his drunken ramblings to the sons of the shrieker, Ivan and Alyosha, Fyodor gloats that her convulsions would arise in response to his sexual advances and to his assaults against her beloved icon of the Mother of God (Ps, 14:126; BK, 136-37),

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These Russian mothers respond deeply to the violation of what they hold sacred. They protest against it, body and soul. Dostoevsky’s works portray Russian women being tormented, beaten, abused, and violated. Often these women are meek. Implicit or explicit is the question: How much can they bear before they take action? Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer examined a number of cases involving abused women who retaliated violently. Others, such as the heroine of “The Meek One,” killed themselves. The shriekers may be seen as part of this spectrum of suffering Russian womanhood portrayed in Dostoevsky’s works. The shriekers manifest one form that the protest of the seemingly meek and gentle Russian woman can take. Dosto-

evsky presents the hysteria of Russian mothers, which is embodied in its pure form by the shriekers, as a feminine and ultimately maternal reaction, coming from the womb, against the suffering and violence of the world, and against masculine assaults on what they hold sacred.

THE MOTHER OF GOD AND HYSTERICAL PROTEST In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky links the hysterical, grieving, and shrieking mothers to the Mother of God. While this linkage may seem surprising, Mary, as understood by the Russian folk, did not shy away from the

squalor of human life.’ In scenes describing maternal hysteria, the presence of the Mother of God manifests itself in various ways. In descriptions of the hysteria of the mother of Alyosha and Ivan, an icon of the Mother of God figures prominently: Alyosha’s one early memory of his mother is of her entrusting him to the protection of the Mother of God as she holds him out to an icon and cries hysterically. As mentioned earlier, Alyosha and Ivan’s mother goes into hysterics when Fyodor spits on her icon of the Mother of God. In other cases, the grieving, hysterical mothers evoke the Mother of God by imitation of her experience. Like Hugo before him, Dostoevsky pays homage to Mary in creative ways, not simply by venerating her but by showing how she and her experience relate to human life in all its misery. To this end, he presents a series of figures who seem to imitate Mary, but in a distorted or parodic form. As Susanne Fusso has shown in regard to the evocations of the Madonna in The Demons (a work also known as The Devils and The Possessed), Dostoevsky uses a method akin to parodia sacra.” Thus, in The Demons, when the holy fool Marya Lebyadkina grieves for her dead baby (who never existed), Dostoevsky presents a carnivalized version of Mary grieving for Jesus. Likewise, when the weary traveler, Marie Shatov, arrives in town to give birth to Stavrogin’s child, and Shatov takes care of mother and child, the scene amounts to a profane and humorous parody of the birth of Jesus, and yet, at the same time, this birth scene captures what is sacred in the Nativity of Jesus. In the same parodic but meaningful way, the hysterical mothers of 40

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The Brothers Karamazov imitate the Mother of God in her role as grieving mother. Part of the point of these parodies is that these violated women have been effectively cut off from other forms of imitation of Mary—imitation of her role as Handmaiden of the Lord, as Mary Full of Grace, as Bearer of the Word, or as the Mary of the Protective Veil (pokrov). As understood within the Russian spiritual tradition, Mary’s grief expresses much more than her motherly sorrow for her son: “From the pain of personal loss grief becomes transformed into compassion for the universal grief, into pain caused by the very fact that suffering exists as an inalienable element of the world’s order.”*! Mary’s grief is often quite palpable on Russian icons, including those that depict her holding Jesus as a baby. Dostoevsky’s wife reports that Dostoevsky found there to be sorrow in the smile of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which was a favorite painting of his (Ps, 7:396). (Mary is depicted barefoot standing on clouds, holding a healthy baby in her arms and bearing a slight smile on her face; the grief that Dostoevsky detects is perhaps not the feature most likely to strike the average viewer.) This report, together with Svidrigailov’s remark in Crime and Punishment that the Sistine Madonna’s face was sorrowful and like that of a holy fool (Ps, 6:369), suggests that Dostoevsky considered grief to be an inalienable feature of Mary.” (Perhaps his rationale is that one would have to be something of a fool for Christ to go through what Mary went through, to witness what she witnessed.) Still, for all the grief they may express, iconic and artistic portrayals of Mary certainly stop short of evoking frenzy like that of the disheveled mothers in The Brothers Karamazov. The Mary of artists and iconographers may swoon, but she does not wail or bark like a dog.

Are the shriekers and hysterical mothers of The Brothers Karamazov parodic distortions of Mary, or do they represent a facet of her experience, one that Dostoevsky, like the Russian folk, was loath to effaceP Or, more bluntly, does their hysteria contain a theological message? Shanti Elliott and Tatyana Buzina have discussed how the (hysterical) mothers in The Brothers Karamazov imitate the grieving mothers, including Mary, of the spiritual poems (dukhounye stikhi) of the Russian folk. But where does the official church stand on Marian hysteria? The Mary who appears in Russian Orthodox liturgy is, for the most part, composed and full of grace. However, on one all-important day of the liturgical year, Holy Friday, the Russian Orthodox faithful behold a Mary who loses her composure: And Thy Mother, standing by Thee, cried with a mother’s sorrow: “How shall I not lament and strike my breast, seeing Thee stripped naked and hung upon the wood as one condemned.” Today the most pure Virgin saw Thee hanging on the Cross, O Word; and

with a mother’s love she wept and bitterly her heart was wounded. She groaned in anguish from the depth of her soul, and in her grief she struck her Al

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face and tore her hair. And, beating her breast, she cried lamenting: “Woe is me, my divine Child!”

In these dramatic moments of the liturgy, Mary shows symptoms that recall the shriekers and hysterical mothers of The Brothers Karamazov. These physical outbursts from the Mother of God are theologically quite significant.“ In Mary’s lamentations Gregory Dobrov sees an “irreconcilable conflict between ‘natural’ grief... and the Orthodox doctrines of

redemption, resurrection.” In lamenting, the Mother of God “asserts her ‘natural’ right to mourn in an implicit rejection of any artificial theological resolution of this conflict.” Thus, there is a hidden message to these laments, encoded in the hysterical manifestations: not only are the women mourning the death of their loved ones, they are also protesting against the attempts of the patriarchal institutional church to console them with its doctrines (of redemption, of resurrection). To be sure, many of the early church fathers were nervous about Mary’s hysterical laments. They did their best to contain them. A representative voice among the church fathers is that of Basil the Great of Caesarea,

in the fourth century, who declared in his homily that “neither men nor women should be permitted too much lamentation and mourning.” Rather, “they should show moderate distress in their affliction, with only a few tears, shed quietly and without moaning, wailing, tearing of clothes, and groveling in the dust, or committing any other indecency commonly practiced by the ungodly.””° John Chrysostom was even more censorious of behavior such as that of the Mother of God in the foregoing passages. Chrysostom scolds: “What are you doing, woman? Tell me, would you shamelessly strip yourself naked in the middle of the marketplace, you, who are a part of Christ, in the presence of men and in the very marketplace? And would you tear your hair, rend your garments and wail loudly, dancing and preserving the image of Bacchic women, without regard for your offence to God?””’ Chrysostom fears lest Mary—and other Christian mothers, following her example—behave like the frenzied bacchante of pagan culture, who passionately rebelled against their traditional roles, and abandoned husband and home. A lamenting and hysterical woman is subversive to the patriarchal status quo. Chrysostom’s response to a keening Mary sets a precedent for the official attitudes that both Pryzhov in his article and Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov report in reference to the shriekers (klikushi). They note that the authorities tried to undermine and control the shriekers. Their behavior could not be condoned because it defies and disrupts the social and domestic order. The authorities think that these women should get back to work (and back in bed with their husbands) and stop the fuss. Is the elder Zosima’s attitude different? Is the author Dostoevsky’s? E. V. Barsov (who was among the men of letters who met Dostoevsky at the Moscow train station in 1880 as he arrived to give his “Pushkin Speech” [Ps, 42,

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30.1:157]) noted in the introduction to his collection of folk laments that the spokesmen of the church admonished people not to weep and wail too much over the dead. According to Barsov, these preachers explained “the wailings over coffin and grave as coming from a lack of faith in the immortality of the soul.” Thus “preachers tried to stop them by awakening hope in the resurrection of the dead.”** In regard to Barsov’s comments and how they relate to what happens in The Brothers Karamazov, Robert Louis Jackson has observed that Zosima “takes a more conciliatory view toward the wailing of the mothers” than did the priests mentioned by Barsov. Thus, Zosima indulges the women in their grief as he tells them “Do not console yourself, but weep.” But since he is aware “of the rebellion latent in the lamentation,” Zosima “seeks to cope with this danger by arousing faith in the resurrection of the dead.” Barsov also notes that Peter the Great attempted to do away with the ritual lamentations of the Russian people as part of his program to make Russian life conform to Western customs. Though the upper echelons of society complied with Peter’s ban on lamentations, the folk continued to wail over their dead. Thus, in his (relatively) tolerant attitude to the wailing of mothers, the elder Zosima to a degree defies oppressive temporal authorities (Peter and his legacy) as well as oppressive spiritual authorities (hardline priests). Yet the elder Zosima still promotes Orthodox faith. The Brothers Karamazov thus explores what Dobrov termed the “irreconcilable conflict” between grief and the theology of redemption and resurrection. This “irreconcilable conflict” is beautifully captured in Romanos the Melodist’s kontakion known as the Lament of the Mother of God.*® Parts

of his kontakion have remained in the liturgy of Holy Friday.’ The kontakion takes the form of a dialogue between Mary and Jesus, which occurs as a desperate Mary comes out of her house, insisting on following her son to Calvary. Jesus adopts an authoritarian stance with his mother, admonishing her not to behave like other common women (“Do not cover up your title with weeping”) and asking her, with some annoyance, why she is crying. Reluctant or unable to understand her mother-griet, he keeps explaining to her that he is doing his Father’s will, that his death is necessary for doctrinal reasons, to redeem Adam’s sin, for which Eve is to blame. According to Jesus, Mary ought to be content with her glory as his mother and with visions of heaven. Mary agrees at one point to dry her tears and stop the protest, at least outwardly: See, my Child,” she said, “from my eyes I wipe away my tears. I break my heart even more,

but my thought cannot be silent.” But she still refuses to see why Jesus needs to suffer and die in order to save Adam: Is there no other way?

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At the end of the kontakion, Mary manages, at least, to persuade Jesus to let her accompany him to his death—she cannot remain home under the circumstances: “I am vanquished by loving grief, child, vanquished And cannot bear the thought of being in my chambers while you are on the Cross;

J, at home while you are in the tomb. Let me come with you! The sight of you soothes my pain.”

This dialogue dramatizes the binary opposition between feminine pathos and masculine Logos,” as it goes back and forth between Mary’s desperate expressions of maternal grief and Jesus’ patriarchal theologizing. In the end, Jesus has the last word. But his last word manages neither to mend her breaking heart nor to silence her thought. A similar dynamic is at work in The Brothers Karamazov in regard to lamenting mothers. The grieving mother of the small Alyosha, like Mary in the kontakion, had not wanted to stay home. Her grief drove her out of the house. Zosima indulges her tears but also attempts to console her with visions of her resurrected son, which amount to dramatizations of the doctrine of the Resurrection. And he tells her to go home to her husband. Dostoevsky’s hysterical mothers, like Mary in the kontakion, may eventually wipe away their tears, they may stop protesting out loud, they may return to the hearth, but their thoughts, like Mary’s, refuse to be silent. In some cases, these thoughts of protest manifest themselves in hysterical outbursts or in nervous disorders like those of the shriekers. Their hysteria (a raw expression of pathos) is loaded with theological significance, because it presents a threat to Christian doctrine (Logos). MOTHERS AND SONS: HYSTERICAL PROTEST AS MATRILINEAL LEGACY In The Brothers Karamazov, the hysteria of the mothers is visited on the sons. In his pathology of the shriekers (klikushi), Pryzhov noted that this condition is hereditary, through the maternal line. Alyosha and Ivan both show hysterical tendencies, which here, as when the Mother of God laments hysterically, are expressions of protest against suffering. In this manner, the sons of shriekers imitate their mother and, by extension, Mary. Alyosha Karamazov’s one memory of his “shrieker” mother is of her holding him “so tightly that it hurt,” in front of her icon of the Mother of God, and “sobbing as if in hysterics, with shrieks and cries’—until a nanny rushed in to snatch him away “in fear” (Ps, 14:18; BK, 19). Here, the nanny maintains domestic order. In doing so, she plays the role of the disapproving

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authorities who attempt to contain the shriekers and of the church fathers who chide Mary for behaving like a follower of Bacchus. The power of this childhood memory, his maternal legacy, comes to the surface when Alyosha listens to his father tell how he spat on his mother’s icon. Fyodor narrates: “When she saw that, Lord, I thought, now she’s going to kill me!” But, instead of killing him, she “just jumped up, clasped her hands, then suddenly covered her face with them, shook all over, and fell to the floor...” In the

midst of his narrative, Fyodor notices that “something very strange suddenly happened to Alyosha—namely, the very same thing he had just told about the ‘shrieker’ repeated itself with [Alyosha]” (Ps, 14:126-27; BK, 137). Alyosha has a hysterical attack just like his mother’s. What happens in this scene follows Pryzhov’s observations about the disease of the shriekers: aside from noting that it may be inherited through the mother, Pryzhov observes that otherwise healthy women can develop symptoms simply from witnessing a shrieker undergo an attack. Here, Alyosha’s attack is doubly determined: not only is he genetically predisposed to it, but, although quite healthy (a fact that the author takes pains to establish earlier), his empathy is so strong that even hearing about his mother’s attack triggers one in him. Old Karamazov is quite struck by the fact that Alyosha is the spitting (shrieking) image of his mother. Fyodor seems to have forgotten that Ivan, who is also present, is likewise the son of the shrieker. Ivan has to remind him: “But my mother, I think, was also his mother, wouldn’t you agree?” (Ps, 14:127; BK, 137). Ivan clearly resents his father’s attempt to deny him his matrilineal heritage. Ivan shows certain symptoms associated with his mother’s ailment, but they manifest themselves in a more cerebral form. According to Pryzhov, popular belief held that shriekers were possessed by devils. Ivan is visited by a devil, with whom he has witty, intellectual conversation. Ivan also eventually succumbs to “brain fever,” which suggests that Ivan, not unlike women in hysterics, has given up trying to express his outrage and grief in words.** His mother’s condition is also manifested in Ivan through his fanatic obsession with the suffering of children, which he reveals to Alyosha at their first meeting after Alyosha’s fit. Shriekers, according to both Pryzhov and Dostoevsky, get to the point where they can no longer stand their own suftering and that of their loved ones: their wombs rebel against it. As explained in the novel, Ivan’s mother’s “shrieking” resulted from a life of domestic abuse that began in childhood and was exacerbated by her marriage. Ivan has collected tales of suffering parents and children in order to make himself suffer, too. But Ivan’s suffering is intellectual and vicarious.

In his own way, Ivan carries on a protest in the name of his mother and the other grieving mothers in the novel.® His protest also captures something of the spirit that is associated with the Mother of God. Before

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reciting to Alyosha his tale of the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan mentions the apocryphal “Descent of the Mother of God into Hell.” This apocryphal tale cel-

ebrates a Marian and maternal rebellion against the paternal authority. Tormented by what she sees in hell, Mary wants God to do something about

it. She does not question the “justice” of these punishments, but she still rebels against the suffering they bring. Functioning in the Mother of God is an emotional and spiritual impulse that can easily turn to hysteria: her empathy for the suffering she witnesses is so great that she must protest. But, here, instead of manifesting her protest hysterically, she shows political instinct: Mary organizes the angels and stages a type of sit-in aimed at getting God the Father to give way. Hysterical lament and passive resistance are both forms of subversive protest against the fact that suffering is a part of the world’s order. The Cana of Galilee story from the Gospel of John, which is read during the vigil over Zosima’s corpse, becomes part of the mystic vision that crowns the renewal of Alyosha’s faith. The story pits the feminine (Mary) against the masculine (Jesus, speaking for his Father): At a wedding, the mother of Jesus tells him that there is no more wine, implying that Jesus can

and should do something about it. Jesus at first resists, wondering what business it is of his and declaring his time not yet to have come.”° But, as Alyosha listens to the verse where Jesus tells his mother, “Mine hour is not yet come,” Alyosha speculates that Jesus “must have smiled meekly to her” as he said this (Ps, 14:326; BK, 360). This meek smile imagined by Alyosha undercuts the potential rudeness of his words. Alyosha’s inner monologue continues: “Indeed, was it to increase the wine at poor weddings that he came down to earthr” Even in the throes of his vision, Alyosha is subconsciously aware of the theological implications of this miracle that Jesus is being asked to perform. This miracle has been regarded as specious for various reasons, but perhaps the mistrust results in part from the fact that Jesus—admittedly, after some protest—is submitting to maternal authority and obeying his mother. Certainly, the rest of his life is marked by his obedience to his Father’s will, for, as he is well aware, it was to do is Father’s will that he came down from heaven (John 6:39). But, this one time, he submits to doing what his mother wants and creates wine out of water. The miracle at Cana of Galilee, as interpreted by Alyosha in his vision, celebrates human joy—as opposed to suffering and grief: “Ah, that miracle,

ah, that lovely miracle! Not grief, but men’s joy Christ visited when he worked his first miracle, he helped men’s joy.” Alyosha delights in the miracle (which, we learn, was also a favorite of Zosima’s), despite his awareness that Jesus, albeit under pressure from his blessed mother, is doing something that may not have been his Father’s will. Alyosha’s question, with its possible echo of John 6:39, implies that God the Father had not sent Jesus down from heaven to increase the wine at poor weddings. 46

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Each inspired by his Marian text*’—Ivan by the “Descent of the Mother of God” and Alyosha by “Cana of Galilee”—the sons of the “shrieker”

carry on their mother’s rebellion against suffering in different forms. Ivan rebels against God’s universe because it is built on suffering, whereas Alyosha has ecstatic Marian inklings about the possibility of joy on earth.

CONCLUSION: A FAITH THAT DOES NOT SILENCE THOUGHT The hysterical behavior of grieving mothers, whether that of a shrieker or that of the Mother of God, amounts to a nonverbal (although not necessarily silent) refutation and rejection of what Dobrov calls “artificial theological” solutions to the problems of suffering. Ultimately, the hysterical protest of grieving mothers may be harder to answer than that of Dostoevsky’s “metaphysical rebels” who engage in intellectual arguments about how God has structured the universe. Much as Romanos’s kontakion creates a tension between Mary’s hysterical response and Jesus’ theologizing one—a tension between pathos and logos that perhaps cannot be resolved—The Brothers Karamazov also presents a tension between the hysteria of these mothers and the words of comfort provided, for example, by Father Zosima to the erieving mother and the shrieker or by Alyosha to those who mourn for Ilyusha. Again, the shriekers who wail, woof, and whimper in the opening epi-

sode of the novel are emblematic of the novel as a whole. One of these women, the author tells us, calms down when Zosima covers her head with his vestment and says a short prayer. The author recalls how in his childhood the shriekers would suddenly grow calm as they approached the sacraments of bread and wine at the Eucharist. Despite the skepticism of various authorities (and city-dwelling teachers), the author maintains that this healing was, in fact, the result of the faith of the shriekers in the miracle of the Eucharist. The author of The Brothers Karamazov does not maintain that the healing was permanent: the shriekers’ faith soothes their hysteria only for a period. Their thoughts, like Mary’s in Romanos’s kontakion, cannot be silenced completely. But the author does at least suggest that faith—in an elder (starets) or in the Eucharist and the Resurrection of the dead—brings

some respite from the thoughts that torment these women and from the hysteria these thoughts bring on. Faith, however, in Dostoevsky’s book, does not permanently cure hysteria in suffering mothers, nor does it silence their thinking (to borrow from Romanos). Here a question posed by the real-lite elder Amvrosy to Dostoevsky is relevant. Apparently, when Dostoevsky told Amvrosy of how his wife had succumbed to her grief over the death of Alyosha and was neglecting her duties (children, husband, house), Amvrosy asked Dostoevsky whether she 47

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was a believer. When Dostoevsky answered affirmatively, then Amvrosy gave Dostoevsky the message for his wife about maternal sorrow eventually turning to quiet joy and about her son watching her from heaven. Amvrosy seems to have known that his words would be pointless without faith. The Brothers Karamazov then responds to the questions raised in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris about the relationship of the Mother of God to human suffering. But in Hugo’s novel, “Our Lady” is stonily silent and nobody offers any comfort to the hysterical grieving mother, who becomes nearly demonic. By contrast, the grieving mothers of Skotoprigonevsk have recourse to a Mother of God, who has herself been known to wail and tear her hair, who mobilized angels and cherubim in protest against the Father’s will, who dared to ask her son for a favor in order to provide joy at poor people’s weddings, and who may have wiped her tears away but whose “thought cannot be silent.”

Perhaps the difference between these two Mothers of God helps explain why Dostoevsky’s novel appears to offer a solution that evaded Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris, and this solution is, simply, faith, Whereas Hugo’s grieving Gudule declares, outright, that “a mother who has lost her child can no longer believe in God” (330), Dostoevsky’s grieving mothers have not lost their faith; at least, this is what the chapter title “Peasant Women Who Have Faith” (Veruiushchie baby) asserts.

Notes 1. My discussion here has been informed by the rich and insightful lit-

erature discussing the grieving and hysterical mothers (and sons) in The Brothers Karamazov and how they relate to the Mother of God. See Robert Louis Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); Robert Belknap, The Genesis of “The Brothers Karamazov”: The Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Making a Text (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990); Diane Thompson, “The Brothers Karamazov” and the Poetics of Memory (Cam-.

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Robin Feuer Miller, “The Brothers Karamazov”: Worlds of the Novel (New York: Twayne, 1992); Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992); Tatyana Buzina, “Motivy dukhovnykh stikhov v romane F. M. Dostoevskogo Brat”ia Karamazovy,” Dostoevskii i mirovaia kultura: Almanakh 6 (1996): 62-81;

Shawn Kate Elliott, The Aesthetics of Russian Folk Religion and “The Brothers Karamazov” (unpublished dissertation: University of California at Berkeley, 1997). The importance of the cult of Mary to Dostoevsky’s aesthetics is discussed in: Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoeusky’s Quest for Form: 48

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A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966; reprint, Pittsburgh, 1978). Iam grateful to Hugh McLean for his insightful comments on this essay, as well as to the participants of the Focus on The Brothers Karamazov

conference (Yale University, 1999). ! 2. On the impact of Hugo’s Le Dernier jour @un condamné a mort on Dostoevsky, see A. L. Bem, “Pered litsom smerti,” O Dostojevském. Sborntk stati a material, ed. Julius Dolansk and Radegast Parolek (Prague: Slovenské knihovna, 1972), 150-82: on Les Misérables, see Nathalie Brown, Hugo and Dostoevsky (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1978); and Sven Linner,

Starets Zosima in “The Brothers Karamazov”: A Study in the Mimesis of Virtue (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1975); on Notre-Dame de Paris,

see Belknap, Genesis, 112-14; Liza Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 241, 262-63, 267; and Liza Knapp, “The Idiot”: A Critical Companion (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 39-40.

| 3. Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, trans. Walter J. Cobb (New York: Signet, 1965). Page numbers of references to this translation appear in parentheses in the text. 4. For citations and references to Dostoevsky’s works, the complete Russian edition (F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols. [Leningrad: Nauka, 1972—90]) is hereafter cited parenthetically in text as Ps, with relevant volume and page numbers. Quotations

in English are from The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Quartet Books, 1990), hereafter cited as BK, with page number and occasional emendations. o. Buzina, “Motivy,” 72-783.

6. This is a central argument of Belknap’s Genesis, esp. 89-90. 7. Victor Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1984), 64. 8. See Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form. 9. Laurence Lerner, Angels and Absences: Child Death in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997). 10. For discussion of how the death of Dostoevsky’s firstborn, Sonya, may have informed The Idiot, see Knapp, Annihilation of Inertia, 100-1, and Knapp, “The Idiot” Companion, 16-20, 207-9. 11. In the opinion of Lerner (Angels and Absences), Dostoevsky stands out among nineteenth-century novelists because he was able in The Brothers Karamazov to represent the pathos of the death of a child in a way that is artistically acceptable to the modern reader. 12. A. G. Dostoevskaia, Vospominaniia, ed. L. P. Grossman (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. izd., 1925; reprint [n.p.], Gregory Lounz Books, 1969), 232, translation mine.

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13. See James L. Rice on the connection between epilepsy and hysteria and how it relates to Dostoevsky (Dostoevsky and the Healing Art: An Essay in Literary and Medical History |Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985]). 14. J. G. Pryzhoy, “Russkie klikushi,” Ocherki. Stat’i. Pis’ma, ed. and intro. M. S. Al’tman ([Leningrad]: Academia, 1934), 88-116. (Page numbers of subsequent references to this source appear in parentheses in the text; translations mine.) A year later, this same Pryzhov participated in the Nechaev affair and was exiled to Siberia. He appears in fictionalized form as Tolkachenko in Dostoevsky’s The Devils. For discussion of Pryzhov and Dostoevsky’s response to his work, see M. S. Al’tman, “Pryzhov i Dostoevskii,” Katorga i ssylka 81, no. 8/9 (1931): 57-71, and Murav, Holy Foolishness. See also Ps, 15:531-32. 15. Here, in his liberal stance, empathetic to the lot of women and cognizant of their lack of domestic and political power, Pryzhov’s view of the hysteria of the “shriekers” prefigures that of French feminists, who regarded hysteria as the expression in the language of the body of an outrage against woman’s lot that, given the patriarchal structure of society and even of language, cannot be expressed by women in words. “Freud had located the origins of Victorian hysteria in the restrictive social and sexual codes of the day, while the first feminist critics traced it to the direct social, legal, and political oppression of women” (Mark Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations |Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995], 74). 16. A’tman, “Pryzhov i Dostoevskii,” 57-71. 17. Plato, quoted in Micale, Approaching Hysteria, 19. 18. Nina Pelikan Straus views Katerina Ivanovna as a hysteric along

Freudian lines, specifically, Dora (Dostoevsky and the Woman Question: Rereadings at the End of a Century [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994], 133-35), 19. For detailed examination of this feature, see Elliott, Folk Religion. 20. Susanne Fusso, “Maidens in Childbirth: The Sistine Madonna in Dostoevskii’s Devils,” Slavic Review 54 (1995): 261-75. 21. A. I. Anissimov, quoted in Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky,

The Meaning of Icons (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989), 93. 22. Jackson, Dostoevusky’s Quest for Form, 214. For discussion of how Dostoevsky’s heroines with links to Mary reflect Dostoevsky’s view of a holy-

foolish or possessed Mary, see Harriet Murav, “Reading Woman in Dostoevsky,” A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston, IIl.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), p. 51 23. The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1977), 597, 599. These or analogous passages repeat: 612, 617, 618, 619. 50

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94, In the Orthodox liturgy, the Mother of God is seen lamenting on Holy Friday, but by Easter she has composed herself. 95. Gregory Dobrov, “Dialogue with Death,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 35 (1994): 386. Dobrov argues that Romanos’s lament should be read “not simply as the beginning of the ‘appropriation’ of lament by the church or the ‘symbolic substitutions’ of one form of lament for another, but as a dialogical negotiation, within the contexts of community and ritual, between various responses to death—Christian and non-Christian, physical and spiritual, demotic and institutional, political and devotional, male and female. Viewed in this light, the male composer may occupy a ‘third’ position as an interpreter or mediator of a conflict between the community, on the one hand, and a given institution—political, ecclesiastical, or intellectual—on the other.” 26. Quoted in ibid., 397. 27. Quoted in ibid. 98. E. V. Barsov, Prichitaniia severnogo kraia, ed. B. E. Chistova and K. V. Chistov (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1997), 9. It is likely that Dostoevsky knew Barsov’s book; see K. V. Chistov, “Prichitaniia severnogo kraia, sobrannye E. V. Barsovym v istorii russkoi literatury,” in Barsov, Prichitaniia severnogo kraia, 451-52. 29. Jackson, Art of Dostoevsky, 321. See also Buzina, “Motivy.”

30. Discussed by Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 128. 31. John Meyendorff discusses how monastic opposition led to the kontakia of Romanos being replaced by less lyrical and “more distinctly theological and doctrinal” hymnography. Thus, only “short pieces of Romanos’ poetry were kept in the liturgical books” (Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes |New York: Fordham University Press, 1979], 122-23). The lyricism expurgated from the official hymnography resurfaces in the spiritual poetry (dukhounye stikhi) of the Russian folk. 39. Romanos Melodus, Cantica, ed. Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963-70). 33. Logos/pathos—along with father/mother, head/heart, and intelligible/sensitive—figures among the binary oppositions discussed by Héléne Cixous, “Sorties,” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1981), 90. 34, Nina Pelikan Straus suggests a link between Ivan’s brain fever and Katerina Ivanovna’s hysteria (Woman Question, 123). 35. Robert Louis Jackson has linked Ivan’s desperate laments over human suffering (and especially the death of children) to the laments of the grieving mothers described in The Brothers Karamazov: “The lamentation of the mothers, in all its explosive potential, is a forerunner—both in its 51

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rhythms and spiritual content—of the wails of despair in Ivan’s prose poem at the end of ‘Rebellion’” (Art of Dostoevsky, 323). 36. For discussion of the dynamic between Mary and Jesus in this passage, see Raymond Brown et al., Mary in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press; New York: Ramsey; Toronto: Paulist Press, 1978), 191. 37. Elliott, in discussing “Cana of Galilee” and “The Descent of the Mother of God” as texts with folk religious elements, sees “inclusiveness” and a “feminine universal embrace” expressed in these Marian texts and considers these features critical in Dostoevsky’s art (Folk Religion, 131-32). See also Buzina, “Motivy”; Jackson, Art of Dostoevsky, Miller, Worlds of Novel, and Thompson, Poetics of Memory on the significance of Ivan’s reference to “The Descent of the Mother of God” and how it brings to the fore the idea of the Mother of God protesting against the God the Father.

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Shame’s Rhetoric, or Ivan’s Devil, Karamazov Soul And I couldn’t restrain myself. . . —F, P. Karamazov

IN THEIR THIRD MEETING, Smerdyakov tells Ivan: “You won’t want to ruin your life forever by taking such shame upon yourself in court. You’re like Fyodor Pavlovich, most of all, sir; of all his children you came out resembling him most of all, having the same soul as him,

sir” (Ps, 15:68; BK, 632).' However puzzling this statement seems at first, Ivan’s response is more so: ““You’re not stupid,’ Ivan said as if struck; blood rushed to his face.” This enigmatic interchange begs for elucidation, but the implied solution, comparing the souls of father and son, poses further problems: while Fyodor Pavlovich wears his soul on his sleeve, Ivan, in Mitya’s words, “is a grave” (Ps, 14:101; BK, 110). In book 11, however, Ivan’s creator plunges into Ivan’s soul and reveals a devil, a shabby sponger who shares much with Ivan’s father. Around fifty years old, punsters who specialize in pakosti, Ivan’s devil and Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov are both

vrun’y, exhibitionist liars (rather than deliberate deceivers), who wield vran’yo, shame’s rhetoric, to expose shame’s content. By examining these two liars and two punning anecdotes, I will expose the family connection, reveal how contrasting responses to shame shape the novel’s action, and show how Dostoevsky’s metaliterary play arouses a sense of pleasure that offsets but does not erase the shame affect he uses as a narrative strategy to implicate readers in the text’s ethical action. Dostoevsky’s Diary writer identifies vran’yo as the rhetoric of shame by defining shame as a critical motive for lying. In fashioning Ivan’s devil, Dostoevsky exuberantly plays with embodied shame. Shame relates broadly to identity, and his devil is, in Ivan’s words, “the embodiment of myself, but

only one side of me... of my thoughts and feelings, but only the most loathsome and stupid of them” (Ps, 15:72; BK, 637). Although he represents

those parts of himself that Ivan is ashamed to acknowledge, Ivan’s devil paradoxically provides Ivan with the occasion for self-knowledge and selfacceptance. By reflecting Ivan’s worst side to him, thus causing him to con53

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front his shame, Ivan’s devil may, in fact, bring out the best in Ivan. As Robin Feuer Miller argues, Ivan’s devil may operate as a homeopathic dose.” Shame positively applied may cure shame. Ivan’s devil appears suddenly, thus reflecting the experience of shame, which comes upon individuals unawares. By exposing Ivan to himself, the devil expresses and embodies Ivan’s self-consciousness. Ivan desires to rid himself of his devil, thereby cutting himself off from the painful aspects of

himself. Yet Ivan’s devil also tries to plant the seeds of belief in Ivan, thereby reconnecting him with others in such a way as to reorient himself, healing his pain. The devil as Ivan’s self-consciousness thus epitomizes the central paradox of shame: a profoundly isolating experience, shame intimately relates individuals to the universe and their place, or lack of place, in it. [van’s devil represents Ivan’s physical and metaphysical alienation. Yet, while his job may entail division, Ivan’s devil longs to join in the general “Hosanna.” Ivan’s devil thus reflects Ivan’s divided self: his sense of alienation as well as his desire for belief and community.” Although psychoanalysts focus on exposure as visibility, being seen by self or others, the psychologist Carl Schneider points out that exposure entails a spatial, relational metaphor.* Exposure, whether one employs its English definitions or its Russian equivalents,° involves something being put out of place, deprived of shelter, or laid open. As Schneider notes, “To place out suggests a spatial image in which various things have their proper place. They ‘fit.’ Shame arises when something doesn’t fit.” In this view, shame arises from a felt disproportion or dissonance. Ivan experiences both his father and his devil as dissonant with his positive self-image. Though the scenes that feature Ivan’s devil (“The Devil. Ivan Fyodorovich’s Nightmare,” bk. 11, chap. 9) and his father (“The Old Buttoon,” bk. 2, chap. 2) are separated by nine books and five hundred pages, Dostoevsky keeps their similarities alive to readers. Most strikingly, the two share the epithet shut (buffoon), an epithet that is marked as the devil’s in Russian folklore® but as Fyodor’s in The Brothers Karamazov. When Ivan calls his devil “a buffoon,” he thus evokes the memory of his father. Ivan also refers to his devil as a lozh’ (lie), thus recalling the memorable scene in which Fyodor Pavlovich calls himself first the father, then the son, of the lie (otets Izhi/syn Izhi). Fyodor Pavlovich and the devil are both accused of exhibitionist lying (vran’yo). The devil even refers to himself as an aged Khlestakov, the archetypal liar (vrun) of Russian literature, thereby accentuating the novel’s metaliterary play. The devil’s age (pushing fifty) makes him the same generation as Fyodor Pavlovich (fifty-five). Fyodor Pavlovich and Ivan’s devil have both lived as spongers (something they share with Ivan, who experienced his childhood dependency as shameful). The narrator further links them by noting that Ivan’s devil belongs to a type, mostly bachelors (the devil) or widowers who first give their children to others to o4

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raise and then forget them (Fyodor Pavlovich). In addition to acting as divisive spirits, Ivan’s devil and Fyodor Pavlovich both specialize in pakosti (dirty tricks). Finally, both tell a number of stories that resonate thematically, further linking these figurative and literal embodiments of Ivan’s shame. Dostoevsky’s narrator emphasizes Ivan’s shame with his lengthy description of the devil’s imaginatively embodied form, including his shabby dress. He doesn’t have a watch, a hint of his relation to another possible world where chronometric earthly time is irrelevant.’ He does, however,

have “a tortoiseshell lorgnette on a black ribbon,” a sign of his role as voyeur, a role that he shares with Ivan, who adopts “The Observer” as his journalistic nom de plume. The devil reflects Ivan back to himself: “Indeed, you're angry at me because I didn’t present myself to you in some sort of red glow, ‘thundering and shining,’ with scorched wings, but appeared in such modest form. You’re insulted, first, in your aesthetic feelings, and, second, in your pride: how, you ask, could such a banal |poshlyi] devil enter such a great man?” (Ps, 15:81; BK, 647). The creator of the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan feels ashamed at having such a poshlyi devil.

| Dostoevsky uses the devil’s mimetic dimension to reflect Ivan’s shame, his thematic dimension to express Ivan’s internal divisions, and his synthetic dimension to entertain his readers and enhance their aesthetic pleasure.® In elaborating on the devil’s incarnation, Dostoevsky evokes Gogol’s story “The Nose,” one of the clear Gogolian references in this rich interchange. For instance, the devil’s attempt to thank the doctor who cured his cold by plac-

ing a thank-you announcement in the newspaper clearly evokes Major Kovalev’s efforts to place an inquiry regarding his missing nose in the newspaper. Both stories take jabs at Russian censorship. Dostoevsky also mocks Russian liberalism: Ivan’s devil is rebuffed because it’s not progressive to

believe in the devil. This incident thus foregrounds the question of the devil’s objective existence, thereby mimetically reflecting Ivan’s metaphysical doubts. The devil comically reduces the metaphysical issue to a social one by complaining about the disjunction between his feelings and his social position: “And would you believe that incident still weighs on my heart. My best feelings, gratitude for instance, are formally forbidden solely because of my social position” (Ps, 15:76; BK, 641). As a comic rhyme, this incident also reflects Ivan’s own painful experience with Katerina Ivanovna: his feelings of love are forbidden because he is her fiancé’s brother. The devil’s thematic and synthetic dimensions join forces as Dostoevsky lays bare his own poetics by having Ivan produce a devil who discusses incarnation, an issue that evokes the image of Christ and thus reflects the battle between the devil and Christ in Ivan’s heart. Early in the scene, the devil complains to Ivan that he caught cold when he took on human form and was exposed to the elements. Adapting a line from Terence, the devil notes, “I become incarnate, so I accept the consequences. Satanum sum et

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nihil humanum a me alienum puto” (I am Satan and nothing human is alien to me; Ps, 15:74; BK, 639). Even as he identifies himself as Satan, Ivan’s devil plagiarizes,° thus signaling his liar status. By linking incarnation with a cold, the devil comically debases the concept, but he also comically emphasizes the relationship of incarnation and exposure. The human condition is to be exposed. Even though the devil (Ivan’s unconscious creation) overtly reminds Ivan of the divine Logos later in their conversation, Dostoevsky (the devil’s conscious creator) plays with the issue of incarnation to evoke the image of Christ. Dostoevsky thus links this scene with the Pro and Contra scene of book 5 by deploying, and thus calling attention to, the rhetorical strategy used in each. Before introducing the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan raises the issues of injustice and forgiveness, thereby pushing Alyosha to mention Christ. In this strategy, the character narrator draws an image latent in his audience’s unconscious to conscious awareness. What Ivan consciously does to Alyosha, his devil (his unconscious) does to him (the devil’s talk of incarnation first evokes thoughts of the incarnate God, then the devil speaks overtly of Christ as Logos). Dostoevsky, who stages this scene, does the same with his readers. He thereby uses a mise-en-abyme to reveal his authorial hand.

Furthermore, Dostoevsky entertains his readers with thematically charged metaliterary play. While both Christ and Ivan’s devil are incarnate, the contrasts between them could not be clearer. Whereas Christ takes on human form to redeem the sins of the world, Ivan’s devil takes on human form to attend a cocktail party. Whereas Christ is exposed to mockery and humiliation, Ivan’s devil is exposed to the elements. Whereas Christ is put

to death, Ivan’s devil catches cold and suffers from rheumatism. These comic contrasts emphasize Christ’s transcendent and the devil’s nontranscendent nature, thereby reflecting the struggle in Ivan’s soul between ethical action and earthly desire. Ivan’s shame at having a poshlyi devil is matched by his shame at having a poshlyi father. While scholars have pointed out similarities between Ivan’s father and devil,'° Dostoevsky displays his psychological acumen and metaliterary savvy by making them both vrun’y, exhibitionist liars. As defined by Dostoevsky’s Diary writer, vran’yo has three interrelated aspects— hyperbole (exaggeration for emphasis), bullshit (assertions made without concern for truth value), and plagiarism (stealing someone else’s story and passing it off as one’s own).’* Fyodor Pavlovich and Ivan’s devil are liars who

discuss the shame that animates their rhetoric. By foregrounding their hyperbole, Dostoevsky comically portrays their efforts to transcend the ordinary.’” By noting their disregard for truth, Dostoevsky underscores the price of self-fashioning. By highlighting their plagiaristic proclivities, Dostoevsky parades his metaliterary mastery while demonstrating that intended function marks the critical difference between lying and fiction. 56

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While Fyodor Pavlovich and Ivan’s devil both tell a number of anecdotes, a comparison of two will elucidate their similarities and differences. Both anecdotes are identified as vran’yo by their ostensible motive: hospitality. Their content is similar: both are salacious and confessional; they also relate to honor, thus to identity. Their functions differ dramatically, however, as the two anecdotes represent antithetical responses to shame. The standard, generally acceptable responses to shame are forms of concealment, denial, flight, and paralysis. Most characters in the novel engage in these. Fyodor Pavlovich chooses the socially unacceptable response of sharing his shame.“ Ivan’s devil represents yet another response: the confrontation of shame. As the sociologist Helen Merrill Lynd points out, confronting one’s shame “may throw unexpected light on who one is and point the way toward who one may become. Fully faced, shame may become not primarily something to be covered, but a positive experience of revelation.”’° Early in the novel, after Fyodor Pavlovich tells a series of shameless, self-vaunting stories that embarrass others and incite them to humiliate him, thus actively perpetuating a cycle of shame and punishment, Zosima advises him that “above all, do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is the cause of everything” (Ps, 14:40; BK, 43). Late in the novel, Ivan unconsciously enacts this advice. Ivan’s devil tells a story that posits suicide (self-effacement) as an escape from shame. He thus implicitly presents Ivan with two alternatives: to commit suicide or to face his shame. Ivan decides to expose Smerdyakov and himself at the trial, thereby facing his shame publicly. Both these anecdotes partake of Dostoevsky’s metaliterary project: both are metaconfessions, that is, stories that expose shame while thematizing shame’s exposure. In keeping with their metaliterary nature, both anecdotes thematize audience response as well. Fyodor Pavlovich tells his Aesopian anecdote in Zosima’s cell in response to Miusov’s taunting. In it, he casts himself as a social inferior (as Ivan’s devil will do later), thus signaling his subversive intentions. To illustrate his assertion that his desire to please harms him, Fyodor Pavlovich declaims: And that’s how I am, I’m always like that. Without fail I damage myself with my own courtesy [liwbeznost’]! Once, many years ago now, I said to one influential person, “Your wife, sir, is a ticklish woman |[shchekotlivaia zhenshchina-s],” meaning her honor, her moral qualities, so to speak. And he suddenly replied to me, “Did you tickle her? [A vy ee shchekotalir|” I couldn’t help myself; suddenly, go ahead, I thought, I'll be courteous [dai, dumaiu, poliubeznichaiu]. “Yes,” I said, “I did tickle her, sir [Da, govoriu, shchekotal-s].” Well, right then he gave me quite a tickling . . . [nw tut on menia i poshchekotal]! But that happened long ago, so it’s already not shameful to tell about it. Pm forever damaging myself like that! (Ps, 14:38; BK, 41)

In this anecdote, Fyodor Pavlovich consciously provokes the man he constructs as his interlocutor, who then takes his revenge by beating him. By

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telling this anecdote, Fyodor Pavlovich gleefully parodies his relationship with Miusov and predicts what happens next: he offends Miusov (his interlocutor), who then revenges himself by publicly shaming Fyodor Pavlovich (a moral beating). Fyodor Pavlovich’s iterated assertion “I vse-to ia tak, vsegda-to ia tak” (“And that’s how I am, I’m always like that”) emphasizes his anecdote’s confessional nature, thereby signaling an authorial polemic with Rousseau. As Liza Knapp has pointed out, in contrast to Augustinian-style confessions that describe a person’s struggle to leave past ways behind and become a new person, Rousseauist confessions display the person in all his or her inertial glory.’ Robert Belknap characterizes the Augustinian confession as a statement that can take the form “I did (or do, or am) this, and it is wrong.” He notes that Rousseau largely engages in apologia, which takes the form “I did (or do, or am) this, and it is right.” As Belknap argues, Fyodor Pavlovich indulges in an another kind of confession, an unrepentant confession that takes the form “I did it, it’s wrong, but that’s the way I am.”"’ In this anecdote, Fyodor Pavlovich flaunts his willingness to besmirch a woman’s honor for the pun of it. As Fyodor Pavlovich knows, the most effective way to provoke those who uphold the status quo—people like Miusov, at whom he directs his story—is to act or speak inappropriately or shamelessly, thereby implicating his interlocutor in a breach of decorum. In thus disrupting the status quo, Fyodor Pavlovich acts like a devil, whose job is to divide. Puns are the perfect vehicle for Fyodor Pavlovich. Like jokes, puns create an intimacy between speaker and audience as they assume a shared body of knowledge or beliefs. To understand a pun or a joke means that one understands the speaker's field of reference.’ By exploiting shared references, puns can provide the cognitive pleasure of understanding; by exploiting multiple meaning and economy of expression, they can provide aesthetic pleasure. Both kinds of pleasure depend on a sharing that creates intimacy but a distance that allows for appreciation. On the other hand, depending on their content and the relationship between speaker and audience, puns can also cause pain. The puns I will discuss, for instance, provide pleasure for Dostoevsky’s readers while causing pain for their fictional audiences. Fyodor Pavlovich deliberately offends reluctant interlocutors with puns that assume a shared understanding. By collapsing the intersubjective boundaries between himself and his interlocutors with the shameful content of his story, he removes its humor, which requires a comfortable, not a threatening, intimacy. In telling this story, Fyodor Pavlovich not only makes his interlocutors witnesses to his shame, thereby evoking feelings of shame, but also subjects them to shame by association. They feel shame at sharing cultural and linguistic ground with this shameless buffoon. Fyodor Pavlovich thus uses puns as rhetorical weapons to assault his audience. Ivan’s devil, on the other hand, does not pun to cause pain, yet he causes pain by reflect58

Shame’s Rhetoric, or Ivan’s Devil, Karamazov Soul

ing Ivan back to himself. Ivan’s devil thus uses shame much the same way Dostoevsky does: by giving Ivan a chance to confront his shame, he aims to save him.” As Fyodor Pavlovich self-consciously tells the story of his own shame, his synthetic function, which is to reveal the constructed nature of Dostoevsky’s text, rivals his mimetic function. Dostoevsky’s readers are thus positioned to witness this scene of shame and respond viscerally but also to appreciate and thus enjoy its metaliterary function. Ivan’s devil has a doubly mimetic and synthetic function: first, he is the product of Ivan’s unconscious as well as of Dostoevsky’s pen; and second, he self-consciously tells the story of someone else’s shame, thereby reflecting Ivan back to himself. The devil’s anecdote reflects Ivan’s semiconscious understanding of the choices facing him: “My friend,” the visitor observed sententiously, “it’s still better to have your nose put out of joint, than sometimes to have no nose at all [s nosom vse zhe luchshe otoiti, chem inogda sovsem bez nosa], as one afflicted marquis . . . uttered not long ago in confession to his Jesuit spiritual father. I was present— _ it was a delight. ‘Give me back my nose!’ he said. And he beat his breast. “My

son, the priest hedged, ‘through the inscrutable decrees of Providence everything has its recompense, and a visible calamity sometimes brings with it an extraordinary, if invisible, advantage. If harsh fate has deprived you of your nose, then your advantage is that now for the rest of your life no one will dare tell you that you have had your nose put out of joint [chto vy ostalis’ s nosom|.’ “Holy father, that’s no consolation!’ the desperate man exclaimed. ‘On the contrary, [’d be delighted to have my nose put out of joint lostavat’sia s nosom| every day of my life, if only it were in the place it belongs!’ “My son,’

the priest sighed, ‘one cannot demand all blessings at once. That is to murmur against Providence, which even here has not forgotten you; for if you cry out, as you have just cried out, that you would gladly have your nose put out of joint [ostavat’sia s nosom|] for the rest of your life, in this your desire has already been fulfilled indirectly; for, having lost your nose, you have thereby, as it were, had your nose put out of joint all the same [vy tem samym vse zhe kak by ostalis’ s nosom] .. .”

“Pah, how stupid!” cried Ivan. , “My friend, I merely wanted to make you laugh, but I swear that is real Jesuit casuistry, and I swear it all happened word for word as I’ve told it to you. That was a recent incident, and it gave me a lot of trouble. Upon returning home, the unfortunate young man shot himself that very same night; I was with him constantly up to the last moment . . .” (Ps, 15:80-81; BK, 646)”°

Like Fyodor Pavlovich’s, this anecdote takes decorum and identity as its subject. As author of both anecdotes, Dostoevsky displays his metaliterary wit as well as his deep understanding of shame dynamics. As Schneider notes, “The very notion of ‘face’ (for example, ‘saving face,’ ‘losing face’) suggests the degree to which the self is literally identified with the face, which

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in turn.symbolizes the integrity of the individual.” As Leslie Johnson demonstrates, Dostoevsky activates the metaphor in the Russian term for characters, deistvuiushchie litsa, literally, “acting faces.” The Russian word for decorum is prilichie, literally, the presence of face. Prilichie can signify social conventions as well as ethical awareness of the other. In both anecdotes, Dostoevsky’s liars play with the literal versus figurative meanings of words. Fyodor Pavlovich, for instance, activates the potential sexual connotations of the verb shchekotat’, “to tickle,” as well as those of the verb poliubeznichat’, which can mean “be courteous to” or “pay court to.” He thereby hints at his sexual misconduct with the influential person’s wife, as well as his indecorous behavior with the man himself. As Fyodor Pavlovich notes, he could not restrain himself (ne uderzhalsia) in his response. While Fyodor Pavlovich’s anecdote is not obscene in the same patent way as his farcical blessing of “the paps” that Zosima sucked as a child, it is nonetheless obscene, that is, a deliberate violation of the sense of shame.”® His verbal play violates social decorum, earning him the same kind of reward, that is, a beating, that the legendary Aesop regularly received from his master for his verbal one-upmanship. He thus perpetuates the cycle that he describes. In telling an indecorous anecdote in a monastery, that is, in telling a story out of place, Fyodor Pavlovich succeeds in shaming his interlocutors. But his triumph over his humiliators is short-lived, for his story elicits a vengeful response that once again humiliates him, thereby metaphorically re-

turning him to his place. The devil’s anecdote involves wordplay on the literal and figurative meanings of expressions using the word “nose,” which not only designates the openly visible olfactory organ but also suggests the hidden sexual organ, an eighteenth-century commonplace that Gogol exploited in his well-known story “The Nose,” an intertext for Dostoevsky’s anecdote. The standard expression “to be made a fool of” is ostat’sia s nosom. Dostoevsky introduces the concept by having Ivan, then his devil, use the verb otkhodit’, the verb

used to denote the process of dying. The imperfective verb stresses process rather than result. The expression otkhodit’ s nosom links shame with the general process of dying as well as with the marquis’s specific case of syphilis.” The devil’s anecdote also plays with the concept of place. The nose is out of place, misplaced, displaced, no place. Its out-of-placeness identifies the nose as a source of disgrace-shame, that is, shame felt after exposure. The nose also reveals that the marquis has not heeded the urgings of discretion-

shame, that is, shame felt before exposure, a shame that deters a person from inappropriate action and thus preserves dignity and integrity. Having exposed himself to disgrace-shame, the marquis faces personal disintegration. Dostoevsky, here as elsewhere, links ethics and aesthetics—a fundamental of Dostoevsky scholarship that we owe to Robert L. Jackson.”’ 60

Shame’s Rhetoric, or Ivan’s Devil, Karamazov Soul

The marquis tries to regain a sense of self by exhibiting a sense of discretion-shame. The devil’s anecdote locates the marquis’s confession in a confession booth—a private, appropriate place for a confession of shame. Fyodor Pavlovich confesses his shame in a monk’s cell, an ostensibly appropriate place but one inappropriate for his behavior. First, he engages in an unrepentant, self-vaunting confession that violates the spirit of the place. Second, he confesses in front of a mixed audience, which has assembled for an entirely different purpose. Fyodor Pavlovich thereby engages in the very

behavior he incoherently denounces later: “Is it permitted to confess out loud? The Holy Fathers instituted whispered confession, only then will your confession be a secret [tainstvom|, and that has been so from of old. Otherwise how am I to explain to him in front of everyone that I, for instance, did this and that . . . well, this and that, you understand? Sometimes it’s even indecent to say it [Inogda ved’ i skazat’ neprilichno]. Like that it’s a scandal!” (Ps, 14:82; BK, 88). Though both anecdotes form part of Dostoevsky’s long-standing attack on Rousseau’s Confessions, the differences in the anec-

dotes reflect the characters of their tellers. Fyodor Pavlovich flaunts his shame publicly. The marquis of Ivan’s devil, on the other hand, confesses his shame in private, thus proving as shame-filled as Ivan himself.*® Fyodor Dostoevsky uses Fyodor Karamazov’s commentary on confession to highlight its sacramental nature. Old Fyodor uses the word tainstvo

to characterize whispered confession. He thus uses the word in its archaic sense as “a secret,” something that is kept private, alluding to the shame of self-exposure. Dostoevsky, however, activates all the word’s meanings: tainstvo also means “sacrament” and “mystery.” Dostoevsky thus prepares the way for the Grand Inquisitor’s use of chudo, taina i avtoritet (miracle, mystery, and authority) as “the three powers on earth that can forever conquer and capture the conscience of these weak rebels, for their own happiness” (Ps, 14:232; BK, 255). Dostoevsky also reminds readers of contfession’s

sacramental status. As a sacrament, confession allows a person to own, acknowledge, or avow unworthy or sinful thoughts or deeds. While the focus is frequently on guilt, that is, a person’s actions, confession also establishes a place where shame can be acknowledged and absolved.” Fyodor Karamazov's declamation thus prepares for the anecdote of Ivan’s devil. Like Fyodor Pavlovich’s, the devil’s anecdote takes audience response as its subject, a metaliterary move that signals Dostoevsky’s authorial hand. The Jesuit in the devil’s anecdote approaches the marquis’s problem intellectually, not compassionately, thereby proving himself an inadequate spiritual counselor: the marquis ldlls himself. The devil thus reminds Ivan that mind is not everything. Furthermore, in a novel of situational rhymes,*° the Jesuit’s uncompassionate response contrasts with Zosima’s compassionate response to Fyodor Pavlovich, a response that identifies shame as the immediate cause of Fyodor Pavlovich’s aggressive exhibitionism. These contrast-

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, Deborah A. Martinsen ing responses to shame are critical to my argument, and to Dostoevsky’s project, for they express a fundamental thematic opposition between unbelievers and believers, sowers of discord and sowers of love. Dostoevsky displays his narrative virtuosity as shamed characters telling stories about shame dramatize the author’s social, political, and metaphysical thematics regarding Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy, materialism and spirituality, belief and unbelief, unity and separation, God and the devil in the human heart. The devil’s introduction of the Jesuit confessor recalls the Grand Inquisitor, thereby reminding readers of Ivan’s authorial status. It also signals Dostoevsky’s authorial hand and thus his metaliterary play—tor the devil’s story is embedded in a text that thematizes fictionalizing and, under mimetic cover, reveals its storytelling devices. The devil tells a story in which the Jesuit confessor fails because he does not acknowledge the pain of the marquis’s shame. The Jesuit thus proves himself a poor listener and a poor imitator of Christ. He lacks Christ’s compassion—Christ’s firsthand understanding of the shame inherent in the human condition, a shame that Christ assumes through the act of incarnation. Furthermore, by exacerbating the marquis’s shame, the Jesuit acts like Miusov, the Westernized Russian who serves as a negative model of audience response, rather than like Zosima, who serves as a positive model. The Jesuit’s lack of compassion works paradoxically like shame. In making shamed persons acutely aware of loss, shame can also arouse a longing for what is lost. The Jesuit’s lack of compassion arouses readers’ sense that his response is flawed, thus evoking the missing response—compassion. The devil’s story thus illustrates Ivan’s unconscious and Dostoevsky’s conscious rhetorical strategy: by modeling a negative response, they evoke a positive response. Dostoevsky goes even further: he models both negative and positive responses and lets readers choose. Following Dostoevsky’s lead and moving by association, I return to vran’yo—the rhetoric of shame. The Diary writer identifies shame as the second source of vran’yo. The first source is the fear that truth (istina) is not poetic enough: “In this way, we’ve completely lost the axiom that truth, especially in its purest form, is more poetic than anything that exists in the world” (Ps, 21:119). In the context of Dostoevsky’s christological poetics, where Christ figures as the ultimate truth, an incarnate God is, in fact, literally prosaic and quintessentially poetic. As the Word made flesh, Christ literalizes the figurative. In the context of the novel, imitation of Christ translates into the concept of active love—which, as Gary Saul Morson has noted, involves not miracles, the unusual, or the poetic, but many prosaic acts.°' Yet, however prosaic these acts may be, they are infused with love, a higher principle, thus making them poetic in the same way that Christ is, for as flesh that embodies Word, Christ is pure poetry. This returns us to 62

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Robin Feuer Miller’s observation that The Brothers Karamazov is a novel in which so much cuts both ways.” Like Fyodor Pavlovich, Ivan’s devil tells anecdotes that literalize figurative expressions. Both exhibitionist liars thus choose a literary device that characterizes them as comic figures but also that moves in the direction opposite to the novel’s Johannine epigraph of the seed, which figuralizes the

literal. By choosing to literalize the figurative, thus inverting Christ’s rhetoric, Fyodor Pavlovich and Ivan’s devil parody Christ. Christ, speaking in parables, raises the literal to the figurative. Dostoevsky, imitating Christ, uses his mimetic art to reveal glimpses of a higher truth.

In the novel’s progression, shame passes from father to son. But whereas Fyodor Pavlovich is mired in an inertial cycle of shame and punishment that he perpetuates with his own discourse, Ivan proves to have a soul that is a true battleground for God and the devil. Though Ivan has a vrun, a spiritual sponger in his soul, he also, as his devil reminds him, authors The Grand Inquisitor, and thus has a compassionate, forgiving Christ in his soul.

. Dostoevsky thus shows readers how to heal the paternal legacy of shame and pain. While Fyodor Pavlovich passes his on, Ivan confronts his. The Brothers Karamazov closes with Ivan still unconscious. We understand that the battle within him still rages. Yet in generating a progression from father to son, Dostoevsky gives us hope. Ivan’s devil may be an exhibitionist liar, but Ivan is not. Like Dostoevsky, Ivan creates fictions that have the power to change, even to save, their readers. In short, Dostoevsky gives Ivan the power to save himself.

Notes 1. Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols. (Leningrad, 1972-90), hereafter cited parenthetically as Ps, with volume and page numbers. Although all translations are my own, except where indicated, for the benefit of those who do not read Russian, I have supplied a second citation for Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s excellent translation of The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Vintage Classics, 1991), hereafter BK, with page number.

2. Robin Feuer Miller, “Dostoevskii and the Homeopathic Dose,” in American Contributions to the Twelfth International Congress of Slavists, ed. Robert A. Maguire and Alan Timberlake (Slavica, 1998), 118-27. 3. While Ivan’s devil invokes Mephistopheles, he resembles Hugo’s Satan, who suffered from alienation and regret. As Jeffrey Burton Russell notes, for Hugo, “Satan became a metaphor of the longing of humanity to be reintegrated into that loving spirit of life from which we have exiled our-

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selves by our own foolishness and selfishness.” J. B. Russell, The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1988), 230. While early Hugo made Satan a symbol of evil, the later, progressive Hugo made Satan a representative of both oppressive governments and rebellion against oppression: “Hugo felt that alienation, defeat, sadness, and regret are as inherent in evil as cruelty and selfishness, and he painted a dimension of evil that had been neglected: the poignant sadness and isolation of the sinner.” In this longing for reintegration, readers of Dostoevsky recognize Ivan Karamazov's devil. Hugo’s belief in the ultimate reintegration of dark and light would also appeal to Dostoevsky’s sensibilities.

4. Carl Schneider, Shame Exposure and Privacy (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1992), 34-35. 5. The Russian equivalents are raskryt’, “to open; to expose; to reveal, disclose, lay bare; to discover”; oblichit’, “to expose, unmask, denounce’; razoblachit’, “to disrobe, divest; to expose, unmask.” 6. My thanks to Ganna Bograd for pointing this out to me. See also Vladimir Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, 4 vols. (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1978); and Linda Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1989). 7. For a discussion of the physics and metaphysics of the devil’s watch-

lessness, see Liza Knapp, “The Fourth Dimension of the Non-Euclidean Mind: Time in Brothers Karamazov or Why Ivan Karamazov’s Devil Does Not Carry a Watch,” in Dostoevsky Studies 8 (1987): 105-20. 8. The term “synthetic,” which originates in James Phelan’s Reading People, Reading Plots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), is “that component of character directed to its role as artificial construction in the larger construction of the text; more generally, the constructedness of the text as an object.” In my discussion of The Brothers Karamazov, \ use the term “synthetic” in its general sense. For a discussion of the mimetic, thematic, and synthetic dimensions and functions of characters, see Phelan’s book. 9. Terence’s line, which Freud also cites, emphasizes the human: “I am man, nothing human is alien to me.” In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky gives this line to Svidrigailov, another demonic double. 10. For particularly interesting discussions, see Diane Oenning Thomp-

son, The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), chap. 4. 11. For my understanding of the concept of bullshit, I am deeply indebted to Harry G. Franktfurt’s insightful and witty analysis in his article “On Bullshit,” in his The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 117-33. 64

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12. See Dostoevsky’s 1873 article “Nechto o vran’e,” Ps, 21:117-25: “Something About Lying,” in F. Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 1, 18731876, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, IIl.: Northwestern University Press, 1993).

13. See Stephen Webb, Blessed Excess: Religion and the Hyperbolic Imagination (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1993), for a discussion of hyperbole’s religious potential. 14. Fyodor Pavlovich passes on his shame by deed and by word. For instance, he returns to the monastery “to revenge himself on all of them for his own nasty tricks” (Ps, 14:80; BK, 86). Fyodor Pavlovich also aggressively passes on his shame through the use of stories, thereby living up to his epithet “Aesop.” Fyodor Pavlovich has much in common with Aesop, a man

who rose from servitude to independence on the strength of his god-given wit, a legendary figure associated with physicality, sacrilege, and theft, both a generator of fiction and generated by it, and the site of revenged humiliation. Most important for my purposes, Fyodor Pavlovich passes on his shame by telling stories that not only provoke acute audience discomfort _ but also excite a desire for revenge. For instance, Fyodor Pavlovich gives his illegitimate son Smerdyakov a name he hates, thus potentially contributing to his own death. 15. Helen Merrill Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958), 20. 16. Liza Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 16-19. 17. Robert L. Belknap, “The Unrepentant Confession,” in Russianness, edited by R. L. Belknap, 113-23 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1990), 120-21. 18. I owe this insight to Ted Cohen’s Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on

, Joking Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). In his Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious (trans. J. Strache [New York: W. W.

Norton, 1989]), Freud also discusses the relationship between the person telling a joke and his or her audience. 19. I thank Caryl Emerson for sharing this vision of Dostoevsky as a writer who actively engages readers in order to save them. 20. I use Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of ostavat’sia s nosom. 21. Schneider, Shame Exposure and Privacy, 48. 22. For an insightful discussion of how Dostoevsky focuses on faces as

an area for ethical exploration in The Idiot, see Leslie A. Johnson, “The Face of the Other in Idiot,” Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (winter 1991): 867-78. 23. I take this definition of the obscene from Schneider, Shame Exposure and Privacy, 50. 24, Like the mythical trickster figure, Fyodor Pavlovich challenges and disrupts the status quo, but, given his own limitations, fails in his efforts

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to transcend the quotidian. See Roger Anderson’s discussion of the trickster figure in his chapter on Notes from the Underground. Roger B. Anderson, Dostoevsky: Myths of Duality, Humanities Monograph Series No. 58 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1986). 25. I thank Olga Meerson for pointing out the subtleties of these Russian expressions.

26. As Dostoevsky, the creator of the dying Ippolit well knew, the process of dying itself can be profoundly shameful. As Schneider points out, “The open display of bodily functions—defecating, great pain, the process of dying—threatens the dignity of the individual, revealing an individual

vulnerable to being reduced to his bodily existence, bound by necessity. The function of shame is to preserve wholeness and integrity” (Shame Exposure and Privacy, 49). The ailing marquis thus has multiple sources of shame: he is dying; he is dying from syphilis (the consequence of exposing his penis in the wrong place); and others can see the shameful cause of his death.

27. While Jackson’s linking of ethics and aesthetics permeates his work on Dostoevsky, it finds early expression in his seminal work Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966). 28. The discretion-shame and disgrace-shame that inform these anec-

dotes help account for audience response to father and son. To respond appropriately to Fyodor Pavlovich’s shameless self-flaunting requires the wisdom and tact of Zosima. Readers may enjoy his shameless antics, but, like Alyosha, we also feel acutely uncomfortable witnessing the public display of normally private matters. On the other hand, characters who display discretion-shame evoke reader sympathy. While confronting his devil proves painful for Ivan, readers feel safe. Ivan confronts his shame in the privacy of his own mind. We feel his pain, but we appreciate his discretion. We are free to delight in Dostoevsky’s metaliterary play without the anxiety of witnessing inappropriate behavior. 29. Michael Lewis identifies four methods of dealing with shame: (1) “owning it,” which allows shame to dissipate with time; (2) denial or forgetting; (3) laughter, which allows individuals to distance themselves from the feeling of shame; and (4) confession. M. Lewis, Shame: The Exposed

Self (New York: Free Press, 1992), 127-28. Lewis also identifies three groups of people who are traditionally viewed as capable of extending forgiveness: (1) priests; (2) the person shamed or harmed; and (3) people of status, “people whom society has endowed with special authority by reason of their profession, wealth, power, etc. People in the healing professions, for example” (134). Lewis believes that withdrawal of love is the prototypical cause of shame. In his view, the love offered by the confessor heals the original wound: “If, as I believe, prototypic shame is caused by withdrawal of love, which is caused by violation of standards, then love through con66

Shame’s Rhetoric, or Ivan’s Devil, Karamazov Soul

fession banishes the shame. Confession, then, is a reenactment of the original source of shame. Through it, we are able to dissipate our shame and restore our intrapsychic life to balance” (135). 30. I borrow this term from Robin Feuer Miller, (The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel [Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1992], 13) who cites J. M. Meier, “Situation Rhyme in a Novel of Dostoevsky,” in Dutch Contributions to the Fourth International Congress of Slavists, Moscow, September 1958, Slavistic Printings and Reprintings no. 20 (The Hague: Mouton, 1958), 115-228. 31. Gary Saul Morson, “Introductory Study,” to the Lantz translation of the Diary (see footnote 12):1-117. For Morson’s discussion of prosaics in the Diary, see pages 97-101. 32. Feuer Miller, Worlds of Novel, 50-51.

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Two Fates: Zosimas Bow | and What Rakitin Said

THERE IS A stark and unpredictable moment in The Brothers Karamazov in the chapter “Why Is Such a Man Alive!” (bk. 2, chap. 6). In the course of an ugly scandal, Fyodor Pavlovich, foaming at the mouth, challenges his son Dmitri to a duel across a handkerchief. “Why is such a man alive!” growls Dmitri. Everybody is poised in the expectation of

something terrible. In the midst of the general confusion and bewilderment, the elder Zosima unexpectedly bows down to Dmitri: The elder stepped towards Dmitri Fyodorovich and, having come close to him, knelt before him. Alyosha thought for a moment that he had fallen from weakness, but it was something else. Kneeling in front of Dmitri Fyodorovich, the elder bowed down at his feet with a full, distinct, conscious bow, and even touched the floor with his forehead.’

The unseemly brawl breaks up, the elder leaves, and the rest are left wondering as to his possible motives. Later, Zosima himself explains to Alyosha the true reasons for his bow: I bowed yesterday to his great suffering .. . Yesterday I seemed to see something terrible . . . as if his eyes yesterday expressed his whole fate. He had a certain look . . . so that I was immediately horrified in my heart at what this man is preparing for himself. Once or twice in my life P’ve seen people with the same expression in their faces . . . as if it portrayed the whole fate of the person, and that fate, alas, came about... But everything is from the Lord, and all our fates as well. (BK, 285)

We shall argue that Zosima’s prediction of the fate Dmitri is “preparing for himself” points ultimately to Dmitri’s future transition from a condition of passion, lust, and greed to that of a free human being capable of bearing responsibility and “great suffering,” that is, to a state of Christian atonement and repentance for the sinfulness of humankind. Zosima’s prediction, however, is not the only one at this point in the novel. Other characters, such as Rakitin, also try to fathom what will come to pass. Zosima,

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according to Rakitin, “smelled a crime.” Dostoevsky’s aesthetic-religious perception of the two contradictory views of the future, Zosima’s and Rakitin’s, deserves close attention. Dostoevsky presents the reader with two predictions or prophesies concerning Dmitri. The first, involving a Christian interpretation of “fate,” is disclosed through the words of the elder Zosima. The elder does not predict either death or crime: he says only that he “was immediately horrified in my heart at what this man was preparing for himself.” All fates are from God, says Zosima. Yet, Zosima emphasizes, fate is something that a man prepares for himself through action taken on his own free will, through a freedom that is the highest gift of God. Thus Zosima implicitly places Dmitri’s

action within the realm of human volition; he does not view his fate as something inevitable or inexorable; he does not acquit him of guilt, but neither does he condemn him in advance as a parricide. The view of fate as lying outside the realm of human volition is essentially pagan, and as such it corresponds well to Dmitri’s initial attraction

to Greek mythology as distilled through Schiller’s imagery. In predicting Dmitri’s great suffering, Zosima predicts his spiritual development. At the beginning of the novel—the time when Zosima’s prediction is made— Dmitri might be said to be the epitome of the Karamazov, pagan sensual principle. Zosima, in effect, holds out the possibility, indeed promise, that Dmitri will abandon his ways and enter the truly Christian world of freedom and responsibility. To this Christian affirmation of freedom Dostoevsky opposes another,

non-Christian view of fate: a view of fate as death. Such is the essence of another interpretation of Zosima’s bow, another prediction of the future made by Rakitin. He explains the elder’s unexpected behavior in the following words:

The old man is really perspicacious |prozorliv| if you ask me: he smelled crime. It stinks in your family [Smerdit u Vas]. ...A crime in your nice little family. It will take place between your dear brothers and your nice, rich papa. So Father Zosima bumps his forehead on the ground, just in case. Afterwards they'll say: “Ah, it’s what the holy elder foretold, prophesied,” though bumping your forehead on the ground isn’t much of a prophecy. No, they'll say, it was an emblem, an allegory, the devil knows what! They'll proclaim it, they'll remember: “He foresaw the crime and marked the criminal.” It’s always like that with holy fools: they cross themselves before a tavern and cast stones at the temple. Your elder is the same: he drives the just man with a stick and bows at the murderer's feet. (BK, 78; emphasis added)

Rakitin’s prediction, viewed as detail, is remarkably accurate. He predicts a crime that will take place “between your dear brothers,” that is, between Dmitri and Ivan, including Smerdyakov. By using the word smerdit (stinks),

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dyakov. He implies that Dmitri would kill Fyodor for the 3,000 rubles. However, by choosing money (an essentially pagan marker) as the motive for the crime, Rakitin also signals the nature of his kind of prediction; he indicates where he stands: on the pre-Christian, pagan, even demonic side of things. Indeed, Rakitin’s prediction, in contrast to Zosima’s, might be called a real fate-prediction, that is, he predicts the death of Fyodor as something inevitable, inexorable. In mistakenly accusing Dmitri, Rakitin prefigures, too, the erroneous

verdict of the human trial. What is more, the allusion to the devil in the phrase “the devil knows what!” (chert znaet chto!), carries us forward to the appearance of the devil in Ivan’s nightmare. This devil certainly knows, that is, he openly voices everything that Ivan tries so hard to suppress. Rakitin’s mention of the devil, finally, finds an echo in Dmitri’s words when he says that devil tempted him to kill his father but that God saved him. Thus Rakitin’s words in certain respects provide us with a more detailed and precise prediction of future events than we find in the words of Zosima. Rakitin’s prediction, however, parodies Zosima’s and is faulty in the most important aspect: he fails to recognize the actual criminal and views Dmnitri as a future patricide. On the other hand, Zosima in predicting Dmitri’s “great suffering” points ultimately toward his moral acquittal. The words “sreat suffering,” coming from a monk, refer to a suffering of a very special, religious kind: a suffering that, however unjust that suffering may be from the point of view of purely human justice, is voluntarily taken on.

The opposition, and at the same time the apparent unity, between Rakitin’s and the elder’s predictions become much more stark as Rakitin claims that the reasons for his predictions are the same that the elder had: he, Rakitin, suddenly had seen it. Rakitin succeeds in getting Alyosha to admit that he “thought” about the possibility of murder. “You see? .. . You see [ty vidish’|P Today, looking at your papa and your brother Mitenka, you thought about a crime.” Alyosha, taken aback, asks Rakitin what led him to believe Dmitri is a potential killer: “‘But wait, wait,’ Alyosha interrupted uneasily, “‘what led you to see all this (iz chego ty-to vse eto vidish’)?’” Rakitin replies: Why do I see something |[Pochemu ia vizhu|? I wouldn’t have seen anything

[Nichego ia by tut ne videl] if today I hadn’t suddenly fully understood Dmitri Fyodorovich, your brother, . . . all at once and suddenly, fully for what he is. By one particular trait [po kakoi-to odnoi cherte| I grasped him all at once. (Ps, 14:73; BK, 79)

Rakitin correctly remarks that the elder Zosima was prozorliv, that is, “perspicacious,” “penetrating,” “capable of predicting,” literally, one who “sees through” something. Typical of his own rationalist mentality, however, Rakitin asserts that he suddenly “understood” Dmitri. His kind of “understand70

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ing” or “seeing,” however, is superficial; it is no accident that he insists, both literally and figuratively, in his conversation with Alyosha—‘“You see? . . . You see? Today, looking [gliadia] at your papa and your brother Mitenka, you thought about a crime.” Rakitin attempts to impose his kind of surface “seeing” on Alyosha and, by implication, on Zosima. His kind of “seeing,” however, has nothing at all in common with Zosima’s deep perspicacity, his sagacity, his prophetic intuition; each type of “seeing,” in short, leads to radically different conclusions. It is not accidental that the word cherta (trait), with its striking similarity to the word chert (devil) creeps into the text here: Rakitin’s “seeing” is not only detective but demonic. The opposition between true and false seeing is fundamental to Dos-

toevsky. The whole question is adumbrated in a lengthy passage devoted to Father Ferapont and his seeing abilities in the chapter “Father Ferapont” (pt. 2, bk. 4, chap. 1). Old Father Ferapont claims to be seeing devils everywhere: “I was up at the Superior’s last year, at Pentecost. ... I saw one sitting on one monk’s chest, hiding under his cassock, with only his little horns sticking out; another monk had one peeking out of his pocket, looking shifty-eyed because he was afraid of me; another had one living in his stomach, his unclean belly; and there was one who had one hanging on his neck, clinging to him, and he was carrying him around without even seeing him.” “And you... could see?” the monk inquired. “Tm telling you—I see, I see through [things]. As I was leaving the Superior’s, I looked—there was one hiding from me behind the door, a real beefy one, a yard and a half tall or more, with a thick tail, brown, long, and he happened to stick the tip of it into the doorjamb, and me being no fool, I sud-

denly slammed the door shut and pinched his tail. He started squealing, struggling, and I crossed him to death with the sign of the Cross, the triple one.

He dropped dead on the spot, like a squashed spider. He must be rotten and stinking in that corner now, and they don’t see, they don’t smell a thing.” .. .

“[I]s it true... that you are in constant communication with the Holy Spirit?”

“He flies down. He does.” “The Holy Spirit in the form of a dove?” “There is Holy Spirit, and there is the Holispirit. The Holispirit is ditterent, he can descend as some other bird—a swallow, a goldfinch, a tomtit.. .. And do you see this tree? .. . Do you see those two branches? In the night, behold, Christ stretches forth his arms to me, searching for me with those arms, and I see it clearly and tremble.” (BK, 168-69; emphasis added)

Ferapont insists that he sees devils and the “Holy Spirit.” True seeing, however, is a sign of sainthood. The source of this motif is indirectly pointed out in Rakitin’s words about the elder: “It’s always like that with holy fools: they cross themselves before a tavern and cast stones at the temple. Your elder is 71

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the same: he drives the just man with a stick and bows at the murderer’s feet.” Rakitin’s words are almost a verbatim quote from a folk legend published by the historian and folklorist Aleksandr N. Afanasiev in 1852: And God took the angel’s wings away, and sent him to earth for three years. The angel started working for a village priest. .. . Once the priest sent him

somewhere with an errand. As the worker was passing by the church, he stopped and started throwing stones at it trying to hit the cross... . The worker went on his way, saw a tavern and started praying to God before it... . He was on his way again, and saw a poor man and started chastising him and calling him a beggar. The passers-by heard it and went to the priest to complain: your worker walks the streets and behaves like a fool, blasphemes over the holy, scolds the poor. . . . “I did not throw stones at the church, I did not pray to God before a tavern! I was passing by the church and I saw that because of our sins the unclean spirits were circling God’s temple, were clinging to the cross; so J started hurling stones at them. And as I was passing by

a tavern, I saw many people, they were carousing, drinking, not thinking about the hour of death; so I prayed to God not to let the Orthodox Christians drink and be damned... . And that poor person! He has a lot of money, and he still begs for alms and takes the bread away from the truly poor. That’s why I called him a beggar.” |

The worker sees the true nature of things because he is an angel of God. Unable to perceive the nature of things, mortals cannot comprehend his actions. Rakitin is one of those mortals who is lacking in real comprehension. He is one of Dostoevsky’s characters who stumble across a true idea but are unable to pursue it or develop it in a proper manner. He senses the importance of seeing but is unable to see truly, that is, deeply. He seems to be totally unaware of the true meaning of what he is saying and seeing, yet he, just like Ferapont, claims to have the power of seeing: “Po kakoj-to odnoi cherte tak i zakhvatil ego razom vsego” (“By one particular trait I grasped him all at once”). Rakitin is much like Father Ferapont, who claims to see spiritual entities but transforms them in flesh and blood: the devils die and stink, the Holy Ghost takes the form of a tomtit, Christ is actually the elm,

and so on. |

Rakitin, too, offers a mundane murder-mystery explanation for a deeply

spiritual issue that is manifested in the elder’s words. Yet one should note: both sides in this opposition are located within the same Orthodox church. (Rakitin, we should not forget, is a seminarian). Oppositions exist within the same collective entity, within the church, within the very church that is presumably the most harmonious of all institutions. In short, pitfalls and impasses await people everywhere in Dostoevsky’s world. Belonging to the church is no guarantee of one’s righteousness. Dostoevsky, then, presents his reader with two types of predictions: he connects the search for minute, naturalistic predictions with the absence 72

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of true Christian faith in the God who is the sole Lord of all human fates: he equates this kind of prediction with a literal and hence superficial understanding of Christianity and life, the kind of understanding that is typical of Rakitin and Father Ferapont. The understanding of fate as an outcome of free human volition, in contrast, is inherent in those characters who have a firm faith in the One True God. Such a perception of fate signifies and encompasses belief in the freedom of human will and in the power of human action; such a perception of fate we see in the example of the elder Zosima. Yet in Dostoevsky, as we have noted, these two perceptions of fate are not separated by an abyss. On the contrary, they coexist within a single body and mind—the collective body of the church. This church, supposedly unified, exhibits the same signs of tension and struggle as elsewhere. Whether people live in the secular world full of temptations or in the secluded world of a monastery where temptations assume different forms, it is still up to people themselves to make their choices and thus seal their fates—tates, as Dostoevsky perceives it, that are “from the Lord” who gave people free will to take charge of their own lives.

Notes 1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1991), 74. All English quotations are from this source, hereafter cited parenthetically in text as BK with page number. For purposes of more precise analysis, I have occasionally altered the translation. Words and phrases in Russian are quoted from F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenti v 30-ti tomakh, 30 vols. (Leningrad, 1972), hereafter cited as Ps with volume and page numbers. 2. The word “Holispirit” (Sviatodukh) has the clear mark of sectarianism, if it is not actually a direct borrowing from a sectarian lexicon; it finds curious confirmation in Ferapont’s later exclamation, “moi Gospod pobedil!” (“My Lord won!”) after the body of Zosima starts to stink (Ps, 14:304). The devil tells Ivan in his nightmare that the stench emanating from the elder’s body was his deed; we might conclude from this that Ferapont’s lord is most likely the devil; such a conclusion would be in line with Dostoevsky’s general distrust of sects. 3. See A. N. Afanasiev, Narodnye russkie legendy (Novosibirsk, 1990), 138-39. Ferapont, in fact, claims to have similar powers of sight, yet his eyes see everything in a very material light.

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Struggle for Theosis: Smerdyakov as Would-Be Saint

AS A BOY, he enjoys spending his free time engaged in the ceremonial hanging of cats. As a young man, he shares some of his childhood tricks of the trade with a local youth, teaching the boy a particularly novel method of torturing dogs. Following a pattern common among animal torturers, he eventually sets his sadistic sights on a human being— in this case, murdering his blood father without much in the way of any apparent, serious motive. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a more thoroughly repugnant character in all of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s oeuvre than Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov. And yet, this ostensible characterization must give us pause. Robert

Louis Jackson has said that the central questions posed by The Brothers Karamazov as a whole can be distilled to the simple query: Is the human being good by nature?’ And, as a correlative question, one might also ask: In the world of Dostoevsky’s final novel, are all human beings worthy, essentially good? Certainly, any reasonable consideration of the morally repulsive character of Smerdyakov would lead us to the brink of answering at least the latter, broader question in the negative: some human beings are morally bankrupt, unworthy, and, in the common Christian sense of the word, evil. And, indeed, many critics have rightly seen in Smerdyakov a demonic

element, identifying him with Ivan’s hallucinatory devil and tracing the

lackey’s purely nefarious influence throughout the novel.’ But is this the final word on this illegitimate Karamazov son? Would it not be detrimental to the author’s conception of free will and salvation to create a character born of pure evil, a man wholly bereft of innate goodness and thereby deprived of any considerable chance for redemption? A closer reading of the Smerdyakov character reveals surprising evidence toward an answer to these questions, evidence which suggests not only that Dostoevsky imbues Smerdyakov with traits he deems worthy and noble, but that he uses precisely this seemingly base character to embody some of his most cherished religious beliefs. That is to say, despite Smerdyakov’s violent, 74

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nihilistic exterior, there are subtle indications of a much different nature within him, of a deeply spiritual side. In particular, Smerdyakov unwittingly displays signs of a latent, unconscious understanding of a religious concept central to Orthodox theology and crucial to the religious thematics of The Brothers Karamazov on the whole. This concept is known as theosis—the Orthodox belief that human beings are capable of partaking in the very divinity of God, that such participation is, in fact, the end goal of all Chris-

tians. As the fourth-century saint Athanasius summarizes, “For He was made man that we might be made God.” From its incipience, this doctrine of theosis, or deification, was staunchly distinguished by the Eastern church fathers from the seemingly similar but originally pagan concept of apotheosis, whereby a human being does not so much share God’s divinity as be-

come a god himself. Indeed, the doctrinal battles that gave birth to the Seven Ecumenical Councils (the councils that form the backbone of the Eastern Orthodox Churches) were primarily concerned with achieving precise Trinitarian and christological formulas, carefully balanced definitions that would, on the one hand, preserve the possibility of theosis without, on the other, opening the door for any heretical tendency that remotely resembled the pagan concept of apotheosis. Dostoevsky, well read in patristic literature, incorporates these religious conceptual battles into the thematic structure of his novel, and in the character of Smerdyakov we see a struggle between his innately felt but consciously stifled yearnings for true theosis and the distorted surface manifestation of such yearnings, which find their expression in a form resembling that of apotheosis. At the point of Alexei Karamazov’s spiritual nadir, when the public disgrace visited upon his elder’s funeral seems to shake the very foundations of his religious faith, Alyosha’s thoughts and words suddenly bear a striking resemblance to those of his brother, Ivan. Alyosha burns with indignation at God's apparent lack of justice and even goes so far as to quote his older brother’s most blasphemous pronouncement: “I’m not rebelling against my God, I simply ‘do not accept his world,’” Alyosha said with a sudden, crooked

smile” (BK, 341; Ps, 14:308).* However, the narrator is careful to identify the source of Alyosha’s despair: “‘No, he was not with those of little faith.’ Moreover, it was quite the opposite: all his confusion arose precisely because of his great faith” (BK, 338; Ps, 14:305). That there is a profound longing for God behind Alyosha’s momentary rebellion is, perhaps, not surprising; but surely Alyosha’s close borrowing of Ivan’s ideas at this juncture must lead the astute reader to question whether there might not be a similar “confusion” in Ivan himself—a spiritual yearning recast as spiritual revolt. And would it not also be logical to seek signs of this same spiritual confusion in the other character who readily adopts Ivan’s ideas, and who speaks of them with a similar, queer smile of collusion—Ivan’s ideological ally, Smerdyakov?® 75

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Vasily Rozanov has said that it is precisely the element of the divine within the human being that leads him to rebel against God.° This phrase may well be applied to Smerdyakov, as a close examination of this character evinces a strange inner element beneath much of the lackey’s rebellious behavior and blasphemous speech. His foster father, Grigory, asks Smerdyakov why it is that he has not married and why he will not allow Grigory to find the young man a wife. Grigory’s question is easily seen in conjunction with the narrator’s repeated references to Smerdyakov as having the ap-

pearance or demeanor of a eunuch. Such a striking comparison has led Richard Peace to associate Smerdyakov with the religious sect of the Castrates, or Skoptsy.’ And certainly, these references bring to mind the biblical verse that speaks of “eunuchs from birth” and “those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 19:12 NRSV).

However, this persistent detail can also be read as emblematic of Smerdyakov’s spiritual desires on the whole. One senses that he, too, on some level, seeks the kingdom of heaven, but that in his efforts he has stifled and mutilated his natural self, and the multiple descriptions of his “sallow eunuch’s complexion” would seem to indicate an inner calling that is in some way stunted from living expression.° Similarly, Smerdyakov is stricken with epilepsy, a disease that Dostoevsky had previously associated with moments of mystical lucidity in connection with The Idiot’s Prince Myshkin and his own experiences with the illness. That Dostoevsky would now choose to associate a condition that had accrued such spiritual significance for his readers, that he would link a symbol fraught with established meaning to this professed atheist leads us to question further whether there is more to Smerdyakov than is initially apparent.” And yet here, too, there remains a sense of spirituality gone awry, of a deep yearning for the sacred turned profane. This illness—normally an involuntary paroxysm that, in Dostoevsky’s writings, overcomes the afflicted person like the sudden flash of light that knocks St. Paul to the ground on the road to Damascus—is, instead, consciously feigned as an alibi for murder. Unlike his namesake, Pavel Smerdyakov is not lifted up to third heaven by a higher power but willfully chooses to fall into a basement with a sham

attack, and his disease is consistently referred to by the antiquated term paduchaia bolezn’, the “falling sickness.” There is ever a struggle between the Saul and the Paul in Smerdyakov, and it is highly significant that Pavel’s attempt to wrench control of his illness from the hands of God by feigning a fit at his own predesignated time is followed by a particularly strong and

unexpected real attack of epilepsy. Despite his best efforts to deny and overcome it, there is within him an otherworldly force that he cannot suppress. After his mystical epiphany, St. Paul was sent “a messenger of Satan to torment [him], to keep [him] from being too elated” (2 Cor 12:7 NRSV). This messenger, which biblical scholars have traditionally identified as a dis76

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ease or physical disability of some sort, is meant to keep St. Paul’s pride in

check, to restrain him from boasting. By contrast, it is precisely Pavel Smerdyakov’s pride that will not let him succumb to any mystical inclinations, and in this sense he is his own messenger of Satan."° Seeing Smerdyakov in a state of real illness after his epileptic fit, Ivan is puzzled. “But you did predict the day and hour!” he exclaims (BK, 606; Ps, 15:44), as though Smerdyakov, like Jesus speaking with foreknowledge of his own death, would know when his hour had come. But despite all of his careful calculations, Smerdyakov cannot predict the real seizure that overtakes him, leaving him feeling very weak, speaking slowly and having difficulty moving his tongue. Indeed, it is generally worth noting Smerdyakov’s taciturn nature with its sudden, intermittent verbal outbursts, followed by an eventual period of difficulty speaking whatsoever—as we shall see that Smerdyakov’s speech itself is the greatest indicator of the spiritual state within. Fyodor Karamazov repeatedly refers to Smerdyakov as “Balaam’s

ass’—a playfully derisive reference to the donkey in the story from the Book of Numbers—implying that Fyodor, like Balaam, is obliged constantly to scorn and berate his servant in order to keep him in his place and get him to serve his master properly. There is, of course, a great deal of irony here at the expense of Fyodor, who doesn’t seem to remember or care about the rest of the biblical story. In the Bible, Balaam’s path is blocked by a sword-

bearing angel he does not see, and when the ass on which he rides turns from the road to avoid this angel, Balaam strikes it three times to get it to turn back and obey. Suddenly, the donkey speaks to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?” But when the animal’s pleas inspire only further anger on its master’s part, the angel intercedes, chastising Balaam, “[Y]our way is perverse before me. The donkey saw me and turned away from me these three times. If it had not turned away from me, surely just now I would have killed you... !” (Num 22: 32-33). When one realizes that it is the donkey who holds the very life of Balaam at its mercy, the narrator’s seemingly humorous borrowing of Fyodor’s phrase takes on a more ominous tone: “Balaam’s ass turned out to be the lackey Smerdyakov” (“Valaamivoiu oslitsei okazalsia lakei Smerdiakov’; BK, 124; Ps, 14:114), as surely those three metaphorical blows will be answered when Smerdyakov’s three violent blows to Fyodor’s head will crush his skull.

However, while this biblical allusion most clearly draws attention to Fyodor’s tragic hubris, there is another element of meaning here that is easily overlooked. Namely, it is the donkey, now so thoroughly identified with Smerdyakov, that sees the angel in the first place—yet another indication that there may be an unexpected spiritual affinity, a higher vision of sorts hidden within Smerdyakov. It is also emphasized in the biblical story that

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the sudden speech of the animal, though spoken by it and expressing its concerns, is ultimately orchestrated by a higher source. This detail would seem to ask us to take particular note of the speech of Smerdyakov as well, especially given that the next chapter prompts the reader again by beginning, “But Balaam’s ass suddenly spoke” (BK, 127; Ps, 14:117)." Could there not be a similar duality of voices in many of Smerdyakov’s words? And might this duality also entail a conjoining of the high and low—the views of a beastly creature, nonetheless orchestrated to express also the ideas of an unseen, perhaps even divine source? Let us briefly consider a few examples. In the second chapter of book 5, the young girl, Marya Kondratievna,

openly flirts with Smerdyakov, coquettishly asserting, “I wouldn’t trade a certain dandy I know for three of the youngest Englishmen” (BK, 225; Ps, 14:205). Again showing his eunuch’s nature, Smerdyakov seems oblivious to, or at least wholly unconcerned with, any amorous overtones, and answers, in the original text, “Eto kak kto obozhaet-s” (BK, 225; Ps, 14:205). Translated figuratively, this phrase means, “Well, everyone has his preference,” or, “To each his own.” But literally, the phrase could be translated as something like, “Everyone worships in his own way,” an aphorism which itself neatly contains much about the novel as a whole, as it can rightly be said that many of its major characters are seeking to worship in their own way, searching for God on their own terms (this phrase may even contain evocations of the ultimate search for God, the quest for theosis, or obozhenie). Smerdyakov himself is no exception to this search, and though he hides this fact from himself, there are moments when it emerges nonetheless. Of particular interest along these lines is the song that Smerdyakov sings to Marya. The author draws our attention to its three seemingly superfluous verses by placing them at the center of their own chapter, which is given the title, “Smerdyakov with a Guitar.” Recorded by Dostoevsky some forty years earlier from actual servants overheard singing it, it was considered important enough by the author to preserve and include in his final novel.” Although Smerdyakov himself dismisses the song as trivial— “Verse is useless” (“Stikhi ne delo”; BK, 224; Ps, 14:204)—this is merely the pronouncement of his conscious mind, whereas the music, as the expression of the soul, reveals a deeper reality. These are the words: Nepobedimoi siloi, Priverzhen ia k miloi, Gospodi pom-i-ilui Ee i menial! Ee i menial!

: Ee i menia! 78

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Tsarskaia korona— Byla by moia milaia zdorova. Gospodi pom-i-ilui Ee i menia! Ee i menia! Ee i menial! Skol’ko ni starat’sia Stany udaliat’sia, Zhizn’iu naslazhda-a-t’sia I v stolitse zhit’!

Ne budu tuzhit’. Sovsem ne budu tuzhit’, Sovsem dazhe ne nameren tuzhit’! (Ps, 14:203~-6)}8

An invincible power Binds me to my sweetheart, Lord have me-e-ercy, On her and me! On her and me! On her and me! Crown of the Tsar— Grant my sweetheart good health. Lord have me-e-ercy, On her and me! On her and me! On her and me!

No matter how I must try, I will get away, And life I will enjo-o-oy, And in the capital I'll live! I will not grieve! I will not grieve at all! [ have no intention whatsoever to grieve! (BK, 223-26)

In Smerdyakov’s mind, this is a frivolous love song, particularly worthy of disdain, perhaps, because of its folk nature. In the first verse, the “invincible power” (nepobedimaia sila) that “binds him to his sweetheart” is love, or perhaps God in the sense of romantic kismet. The “Crown of the Tsar” (Tsarskaia korona) in the second verse is that of the Russian monarch, by whose authority he wishes his sweetheart good health. And finally, the third verse speaks of running away to live a romantic life of fun in the capital, presumably accompanied by this same sweetheart. This third verse is

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perhaps the first clue that for all Smerdyakov’s dissociating himself with the song, there is something in it directly relevant to him. For Smerdyakov has

confessed that he really does dream of running away to the big city, to Moscow, to open up his own café some day, and perhaps he might even take his listener Marya, as Moscow is her hometown.” On a spiritual level, however, Smerdyakov’s song can be interpreted quite differently, and it is on this level that we can once again see Smerdyakov unwittingly expressing ideas that not only are religious in nature but that begin to spell out the basic concepts of Orthodox theosis, albeit in laconic form. Consciously, Smerdyakov seeks to stand alone, to assert that “All is permitted,” and to assume a godlike stance in taking upon himself a role not unlike Balaam’s angel, deciding who is perverse before him and therefore deserving of death. In short, he desires a form of personal apotheosis. Despite the fact that Smerdyakov wishes to place himself in a godlike position, however, there can be only one Christian God, who cannot be overcome. “An invincible power / Binds me to my sweetheart, / Lord have me-e-ercy, / On her and me!” (“Nepobedimoi siloi, / priverzhen ia k miloi, / Gospodi pomilui, / Ee i menia!”) Here are his true inner desires, quite in keeping with Orthodoxy in general and with the notion of theosis, with its emphasis on universal return to godhead. By an invincible power we are all bound, to each other and to God, from whom we came and to whom we must return, whereupon we, too, will share in divinity. It is only by God’s mercy that such a return is possible, as it cannot be achieved without him.” Similarly, the “Crown of the Tsar” (Tsarskaia korona), by which the singer wishes his sweetheart good health, can readily be interpreted as the divine crown, thereby having a greater sense of consistency when followed by “Lord have mercy / On her and me!” (“Gospodi pomilui / Ee i menia!”). In fact, Dostoevsky’s first-draft variant of the line was even more openly spiritual in its connotations: “Glorious crown” (Slavnaia korona).'® In the third verse—“No matter how I must try, / I will get away, / And life I will enjo-o-oy, / And in the capital Pll live!” (“Skol’ko ni starat’sia / Stanu udaliat’sia, / Zhizn’iu naslazhda-a-tsia / I v stolitse zhit’”)—again, we see the task of universal return. The capital can be understood in terms of the heavenly kingdom, toward which all Christians must strive. The word naslazhda-atsia (“enjo-o-oy”) on the one hand recalls the sensualist dreams that constitute one half of the Karamazov nature; but at the same time, the Church Slavic root of this word evokes the spiritual sweetness so often used to describe divinity in Russian religious texts, and as such it can be paired with the word pom-i-ilui (“have me-e-ercy”), as both words are drawn out in the song as though to give them a liturgical feel. In his personal notebooks, Dostoevsky writes, “The human being strives on earth toward an ideal that is contrary to his nature” (“Itak, chelovek stremit’sia na zemle k idealu protivopolozhnomu ego nature”; Ps, 20:175). Surely this sentence accurately 80

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describes Smerdyakov, who consciously rejects Christianity, and yet whose unconscious strives to return to divinity, to return to the wearer of the glorious crown. Again, in his personal notebooks, Dostoevsky writes, Khristos ves’ voshel v chelovechestvo, i chelovek stremitsia preobrazit’sia v ia Khrista kak v svoi ideal. Dostignuv etogo, on iasno uvidit, chto i vse, dostigavshie na zemle etoi zhe tseli, voshli v sostav ego okonchatel’noi natury, to est’ v Khrista. (Ps, 20:174)

Christ entered wholly into humanity, and the human being strives toward the ideal of personal transformation into the “I” of Christ. Having achieved this, the human will clearly see that all those who have attained this goal on earth have merged with His ultimate nature, that is, with Christ.

Though he cannot know or accept it, this merging is Smerdyakov’s innate ideal as well. Smerdyakov’s song ends with the near repetitions, “I will not grieve! / I will not grieve at all! / I have no intention whatsoever to grieve!” (“Ne budu tuzhit’ / Sovsem ne budu tuzhit’, / Sovsem dazhe ne nameren tuzhit’”). This final line seems an eerie evocation of his ultimate, heinous deed. He will kill his father as an act of sheer will or intention— partially to prove his belief that “All is permitted”—and, as such, he has no intention to grieve. To enable himself to commit parricide, he may very well have had to convince himself over and over that he will not mourn. However, there may be ironies of a spiritual nature here as well. The discourse of the mystic “emerges from a mourning, an unaccepted mourning,” writes Michel de Certeau. “One suffers the pangs of absence because one suffers the pangs of the One.”"’ That is to say, at the heart of any mystical yearning lies the desire to be whole again, to fill the void between God and human. Once this chasm has been bridged, if only in the spiritual imagination, there can be no mourning. Smerdyakov unwittingly seeks to atone with God, to be at one with God, and thus to end the mourning of separation. In essence, he seeks the same advice that the so-called Veruiushchie baby (Women of Faith) seek from Zosima, who, in return, tells them not to fear their grief of separation but to be assured

that their deceased children have returned to God and yet retain contact with this world. Once one has faith in this idea, grief will turn into a quiet joy.

The clearest indication of an innate, unconscious, but deeply felt understanding of theosis in Smerdyakov comes when he is still a boy, when his foster father, Grigory, attempts to teach him the biblical Scriptures. By the second or third day, Grigory finds the boy grinning at him derisively during the lesson. Annoyed, he asks, “What is it?” “Nothing, sir,” Smerdyakov answers. “The Lord God created light on the first day, and the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day. So just where did this light shine from on the first 81

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day?” (BK, 124; Ps, 14:114). Clearly, before any influence from Ivan, we can already see in young Smerdyakov’s character the cold, intellectual literalism that will later become the hallmark of his adult philosophical outlook. Already we see the focus on logical details at the deliberate expense of any

sanctity accorded to Christian teachings, and, in this case, a rejection of Christian cosmogony itself, the very foundations upon which the Christian God’s world is created. Grigory is appalled at such apparent disrespect and strikes the boy across the face. This blow seems to affect Smerdyakov very strongly, as he then sulks in the corner for a few days, and then, within a week, he has his first epileptic seizure. There is undoubtedly yet another meaning to this brief anecdote, however, and the first clue to it can be found in the words introducing the incident: “Grigory taught him to read and write and, when he had reached twelve years old, began teaching him the Scriptures” (BK, 124; Ps, 14:114). In all of the Scriptures of the Bible, there is only one mention of Jesus in his youth, and this is when he is precisely of this age: “Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival

was ended, they started to return, but the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem without his parents knowing it” (Lk 2:41-43 NRSV). It would seem that Jesus is disobeying and displeasing his father here, just as Smerdyakov does his. But, of course, Joseph is not Jesus’ real father, and when they at last locate the boy, Jesus claims to be in the house of his true Father. “When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days, they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers” (Lk 2:45-47 NRSV). That is to say, young Jesus’ innate comprehension of the most erudite of theological questions seems to dety utterly his years. I assert that young Smerdyakov, at twelve years old, also asks his teacher a question far beyond the ken of any normal child his age. His question hints at an almost otherworldly understanding of profound theological matters. Without consciously realizing the full import of his query, Smerdyakov asks about the source of the light created on the first day, before there were astronomical bodies to produce any light in accordance with the laws of science. This cosmological conundrum is, in fact, one of the cornerstone questions of the Eastern Orthodox conception of theosis. According to this tradition, this mysterious primordial luminescence is called the Hidden Light, a light that emanates directly from God himself, that shines at the beginning of time, and that shall shine forth clearly at the end of time. It is this same supernatural light that is thought to afford certain saints with an inexplicable white glow, and, most important, it is this light that illuminates Christ atop Mount Tabor. 82

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It is because of the importance of the concept of theosis that the Easterm Orthodox churches place such great emphasis upon the story of Christ’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, when the divine nature of Christ, hitherto imperceptible to those around him, began to make itself manifest on earth through the illumination of his garments. This event can be seen to reveal a dynamic, rather than static, relation between Christ’s human and divine natures. The fact that Christ’s divinity seems to unfold gradually from his humanity has been interpreted by early Christian thinkers as symbolic of the teleology that Christ made possible for all humans: we, too, can share in some part of divine grace while on earth, and just as Christ rose to Heaven, we, too, will eventually experience divinity.

This concept of corporeal transformation by way of the light upon Mount Tabor was certainly familiar to Dostoevsky, and he writes in the notebooks for the novel, “Your flesh will be transformed. (The Light of Tabor.) Life is Paradise, the keys to which are in our possession” (“Izmenitsa plot’ vasha. [Svet favorski.] Zhizn’ est’ rai, kliuchi u nas”; Ps, 15:245). And it is precisely this dynamic sense of divinity hidden within humanity that Smerdyakov displays throughout the novel, in the subtle but unmistakable details

of his words. He, too, has the ability to transform himself in accordance with Christ’s example, though he does not, or will not, recognize that he holds the key. When Smerdyakov at one point protests the fatherless status of his birth, saying to Marya, “I rebel against [my] nativity” (“ia protiv rozhdestva buntuiu”; Ps, 14:204),’° his strange wording seems to evoke a denial not only of his own birth but of Christ’s birth, and perhaps more keenly,

it is a denial of the birth of Christ within himself.

As the novel progresses, Smerdyakov’s inner light struggles to come to the surface, to change him completely. At the same time, however, his logical mind inexorably moves forward with his plans to assert his own godlike status through an act of parricide, which for him is inevitably linked with a form of philosophical deicide, and ultimately, with suicide. Finally, during his last day alive, just when he is certain that he must kill himself, not only is Smerdyakov’s self-destructive drive toward would-be apotheosis in evidence, but his formerly unconscious sense of theosis seems to break into his conscious thoughts, compelling him to make statements wholly uncharacteristic of the earlier Smerdyakov. What previously had been hidden in unthinking lines of sung verse—“An invincible power / Binds me to my sweetheart” (“Nepobedimoi siloi, / Priverzhen ia k miloi”)—is now spoken aloud as a conscious idea. He says to Ivan,

“Nikakogo prizraka tut net-s, krome nas oboikh-s, da eshche nekotorogo tret’ego. Bez sumleniia, tut on teper’, tretii etot, nakhoditsia, mezhdu nami dvumia.” “Kto on? Kto nakhoditsia? Kto tretii?” “Tretii etot—bog-s .. . tol’ko Vy ne ishchite ego, ne naidete.” (Ps, 15:60) 83

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“There isn’t any ghost here, sir, aside from the both of us, sir, and a certain third one. Without doubt, he’s here now, that third one, located between the two of us.” “Who is this he? Who is located? Who is this third one?”

“The third one is God, sir . . . only don’t search for him, you won’t find him.” (BK, 623)

Whether Smerdyakov’s previously mysterious knowledge of Orthodox theology has at last manifested itself in overt, albeit simple terms, or whether this strange outburst is the result of his reading Grigory’s book of Isaac the Syrian’s writings is unclear, but these words clearly recall the biblical maxim that serves as a foundation for much of the Orthodox notions of deification,

as well as for Eastern theology in general. In Matthew 18:19, Christ says: “Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Eastern theologians have extrapolated from this concept, developing the idea, given the name sobornost in nineteenth-century Russia, which holds that the more Christians who agree and gather in his name, the greater is the presence of God. The same early Christian thinkers who first wrote on the concept of theosis— Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasius—also postulated about the eventual possibility of gathering all people in God’s name, whereby a universal return to godhead would be enacted, universal deification. At any rate, it seems clear that Smerdyakov’s unexpected assertion that “God is located between the two of us” stands as proof that the young man. had reached a crossroads in his lite, the very brink of a deeply religious epiphany—a fact that, in Dostoevsky’s worldview, makes his suicide all the more tragic. Smerdyakov had only to recognize the divine capacity within to effect his salvation. His haunting words “Only don’t search for him, you won't find [him]” (“[T]ol’ko Vy ne ishchite ego, ne naidete”) are directed to Ivan but better apply to his own self-imposed condition. Now that the path Ivan had represented to him—the path to godlike freedom—has proved an illusion, Smerdyakov’s search for a logical, external connection to divinity

such means. 7

has reached a dead end; no matter how he seeks, he will not find God by Thus Smerdyakov’s confused evocation of Jesus’ words at this point is laden with dramatic irony. In speaking to the Pharisees, Jesus says, “I will be with you for a little while longer, and then I am going to him who sent me. You will search for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come” (Jn 7:33-34 NRSV, emphasis added; “Budete iskat’ Menia, i ne naidete; i gde budu Ja, tuda vy ne mozhete pridti”). The path to death, resurrection, and return to godhead is not open to the Pharisees, who, like Smerdyakov, will not allow themselves to believe. For such people, death alone is the only realizable end. 84

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Jesus again addresses the Pharisees, “I am going away, and you will search for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going you cannot come.” But the Pharisees are uncomprehending and respond, “Is he going to lall himself? Is that what he means by saying, “Where I am going you cannot come’?” (Jn 8:21-22 NRSV). Again, like Smerdyakov, the Pharisees can-

not conceive of the miracle of Resurrection; they see only the road to suicide. But despite this stunted vision, such people are doomed to death not by necessity but by choice. Both Smerdyakov and the Pharisees see God

immediately in front of them—the Pharisees see flesh and blood, while Smerdyakov senses a ghostlike presence—but they choose not to comprehend the evidence before them. Instead, they think only in terms of superficial logic and, in particular, the struggle for power. Nonetheless, there is an unconscious part of Smerdyakov that knows the one he seeks is an “invincible power”; he cannot conquer this power, he can only recognize that he is inextricably bound to it. It is this same internally felt power that has drawn Smerdyakov to pore over the Bible in his last remaining days, and this same divinity that, despite Smerdyakov’s hopeless words to Ivan, keeps the possibility of salvation within the immediate reach of even the most inveterate sinner: “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find [ishchite, i naidete]; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks, receives, and everyone who searches, finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened” (Mt 7:7-8, Lk 11:9-10 NRSV; emphasis added). Smerdyakov’s intellect has repressed his spiritual

side for so long, it is now fatally stunted by unbelief. He cannot bring himself to find what is only a hair’s breadth away for him. He cannot logically grasp what he has so powerfully felt but not understood all his lite: the path that follows Christ to Resurrection and reunion with God cannot be found in an external source—the divinity he seeks is within him from the Start.

In the chapter that serves as our introduction proper to Smerdyakov, the narrator compares the young man to the subject of Kramskoy’s painting The Contemplator, and his characterization of the man in the portrait also says a great deal about the nature of Smerdyakov’s enormous potential for great mystical awakening, a potential that remains suppressed and unrecognized unto the moment of his death. |H]e is not thinking, he is “contemplating” something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It’s true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away

in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it—why and what for, of course, he does 85

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not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both. (BK, 126-27; Ps, 14:116-17)'°

Notes ,

1. Robert Louis Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 310. 2. Cf., e.g., René Fuelop-Miller, Fyodor Dostoevsky: Insight, Faith and Prophecy, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1950), 54; Leonid Grossman, Dostoevskii (Moscow: Izd. Molodaia Gvardiia, 1962), 505; Richard Peace, Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 229, 237; Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), 176-77, 181. 3. St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, “Treatise on the Incarnation of the Word,” A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the

Christian Church, vol. 4, Selected Writings and Letters of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, ed. Archibald Robertson, trans. Cardinal Newman (Durham, Eng.: Wm. Eerdmans, 1891), 65. 4. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Citations from The Brothers Karamazov are followed by parenthetical references to the corresponding passages in two sources, the first being The Brothers Karamazov, trans. and annot. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990) [hereafter cited as BK, with page number], and the second being the original Russian text found in F. M. Dostoevskii,

Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh, 30 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90) [hereafter Ps, with volume and page number]. 5. Cf, e.g.: “‘Why don’t you go to Chermashnya, sirr’ Smerdyakov suddenly turned up his eyes and smiled familiarly. ‘And as to why I smiled, you yourself should understand, if you’re an intelligent man,’ his squinting left eye seemed to say” (BK, 268; Ps, 14, 244). . 6. V. V. Rozanov, “O legende ‘Velikii inkvizitor,” O velikom inkvizitore: Dostoevkskti i posleduiushchie (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1991), 128. 7. Peace, Dostoyevsky, 261-63.

8. Michael Holquist interprets this “eunuch” status as symbolic of Smerdyakov’s inability to progress from the role of son to that of father, an indication of his permanent state of adolescence. This notion of stunted growth on a primarily psychological level can be read as a correlate explanation to the present essay’s consideration of Smerdyakov’s retarded spiritual development: an inability to progress toward God the Father. Michael 86

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Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 182. However, while critics have tended to view Smerdyakov in a more static manner, as a character mired in this stunted state without any potential for change—Holquist sees Smerdyakov as “condemned always to be the helpless son” (Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel, 182); Grossman refers to him as a “moral monster and spiritual corpse” (Grossman, Dostoevskii, 505); Peace describes the lackey as one who “suffer[s] from ‘nar-

rowness’” and whose “nature is not open to beauty” (Peace, Dostoyevsky, 237)—the present essay argues for a broader, more dynamic conception of Smerdyakov, a character whose latent spiritual proclivities ceaselessly struggle to break into the conscious fore. 9. One cannot help assuming, however, that the author’s own attitudes toward his litelong ailment must have suddenly taken a morose turn at this stage in his life. In 1878, the epilepsy that Dostoevsky’s three-year-old son, Alexei, had inherited from his father took the small child’s life. The resulting erief and guilt on the father’s part are well known, and thus, in a sense, it is not surprising that, in a novel grappling with these now extremely personal themes of innocent suffering and universal guilt, the central instrument of death, Smerdyakov, should be associated with the same merciless disease that took the author’s own child from him. Nonetheless, such poignant, intimate associations only invite further investigation into the spiritual complexities of a character who, from the moment of his “cursed birth,” is invested with so much meaning in terms of the novel’s theodicy. The author's development of Smerdyakov’s role as murderous proxy to Ivan may be, in part, a way of corning to terms with the guilt of what Dostoevsky perceived to be his own indirect role in the death of his son (not to mention potentially similar feelings of guilt in connection with the deaths of his father and his first wife). In this sense, the questions surrounding the nature of Smerdyakov’s character lie at the crux of the novel’s most painful spiritual and philosophical soul-searching.

10. In the Gospels, illness is frequently connected with stubborn, impious pride. Epilepsy, traditionally associated with demonic possession, can only be cured by giving oneself over to an abiding belief in God. After Jesus cures a young epileptic, driving the demon from his body, the disciples ask him why they had not been able to heal the boy. Jesus replies, “Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Mt 17.20-21 NRSV).

Throughout The Brothers Karamazov, there are indications that Smerdyakov, too, need only shed his demonic pride and allow himself to discover faith in God in order to be healed.

11. In a drunken outburst, Fyodor himself makes special note of Smerdyakov’s speech: “Our Balaam’s ass has started to talk, and how he 87

Lee D. Johnson talks, how he talks!” (“U nas valaamova oslitsa zagovorila, da kak govorit-to, kak govorit!”; BK, 123: Ps, 14:114).

12. In a letter to his editor, Liubimov, dated May 10, 1879, Dostoevsky evinces a fair amount of pride in his having been the only person to have recorded this folk song, which he clearly considers something of a gem (Ps, 15:448). 13. Presented in three separate stanzas. 14. This surface interpretation of the song’s meaning—as a desire to run away to the capital—connects it generally with the religiously rebellious

ideas shared by Ivan and Smerdyakov, and, more specifically, with the notion that such ideas are ultimately little more than moral escapism. Ivan reveals the full extent of his blasphemous ideas to Alyosha at the tavern, Capital City (Stolichnii gorod), to which Smerdyakov directs Alyosha immediately after singing the final verse (quoted earlier); Ivan then attempts to evade responsibility for his father’s welfare by running away to Moscow at a crucial juncture, an act Smerdyakov nonetheless takes as his initial cue for murder (clearly, leaving for Moscow is here a moral half measure, as it is neither a refusal to leave nor an assent to the rehearsed destination, Chermashnya); and, finally, when Ivan is on his way to confront Smerdyakov for

the last time over their shared role in the parricide, he nears this same Marya Kondratievna’s home, where the words of a passing peasant’s song overwhelm him with rage: “Akh, Vanka’s left for Peter[sburg], / I won’t wait!” (“Akh poekhal Van’ka v Piter, / Ja ne budu zhdat’!”; BK, 621; Ps, 15:57). In

these instances, the desire to run away to the city reflects the conflicted spiritual urges shared (on different levels) by both Smerdyakov and Ivan— an unconscious longing to divest oneself of responsibility, to avoid the horrible repercussions of their own conscious thoughts, and to flee to an idealized, faraway city, a City of God. The consequences of the ideas he shares with Smerdyakov are, indeed, unbearable for Ivan to contemplate, hence his seemingly irrational fury at the drunken peasant’s unwitting, musical reminder. In short, the theme of running away to the city is not unlike Alyosha’s urge to enter the monastery—an inner, spiritual need to escape the evils of life, but an escape made at the expense of ethical involvement with the external world. .

15. Corroboration of this spiritual interpretation can be found in Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor “poem,” as early in the novel both Ivan and Smerdyakov express in lyric form more than they would otherwise consciously admit. Despite Ivan’s attempt—expressed through the words of the Grand Inquisitor character—to denigrate God’s moral authority and usurp the role of Christ on earth, he unexpectedly chooses to depict a Christ to whom all people are instinctively drawn. He cannot resist describing in the general populace of sixteenth-century Seville the same deep-seated, spiritual attraction to Christ that he himself feels. Ivan particularly draws Alyosha’s 88

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attention to the fact that all the people immediately recognize the identity and power of the silent Jesus, calling this detail “one of the best points in the poem” (BK, 249; Ps, 14:226). He then uses the same phrase to describe this attraction to Christ that the singer in Smerdyakov’s song uses to characterize the force that binds him to his sweetheart: “Moved by an invincible power, the people strive toward him, surround him, form around him, follow him” (“Narod nepobedimoiu siloi stremitsia k nemu, okruzhaet ego, narastaet krugom nego, sleduiet za nim”; BK, 249; Ps, 14:226; emphasis added). 16. The actual folk song, as sung by the servants and overheard by the young Dostoevsky, contained the word Tsarskaia. For the song’s inclusion in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky changed this word to Slavnaia. However, he then had the word changed back to Tsarskaia just before the printing, presumably in the name of faithfulness to the original. But despite the author’s request that the editor return the original Tsarskaia to the final manuscript and excise the author’s “chance” interpolation of Slavnaia in the novel’s first draft, Dostoevsky intimates that the religious overtones of the word slavnaia will still be conveyed: “Preserve, for the love of God, the word ‘tsar’s’ instead of ‘glorious,’ which I had switched by chance. (This ‘glorious’ will be conveyed of its own)” (“[S]okhranite, radi boga, slovo ‘tsarskaia’ vmesto ‘slavnaia,’ kak ia peremenil na sluchai. [‘Slavnaia-to’ samo soboi proidet.]”; Ps, 15:448).

17. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1-2.

18. Rather than the expected word for “birth’—rozhdenie—here Smerdyakov opts for rozhdestvo, a term that evokes the Nativity, the birth of Christ. 19. Pevear and Volokhonsky’s English translation for BK used here.

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Vladimir Golstein

Accidental Families and Surrogate Fathers: Richard, Grigory, and Smerdyakov Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged. —Matthew 7:1 AV

Woe to him who offends a child. —Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

IN 1876, DOSTOEVSKY wrote in a letter: “One of the most important problems at the present time to me, for example, is that of the younger generations and, along with it, the contemporary Russian family, which I feel is far from what it used to be even as recently as twenty years ago.”’ Indeed, from 1855 on, that is, after the death of Nicholas I and

in the subsequent Great Reforms, Russia underwent a series of drastic social and economic changes that transformed beyond recognition the Russian family and the relations between generations. These changes were so momentous that the plight of the Russian family began to be perceived by Dostoevsky as “one of the most important problems” that he wanted to address. Small wonder that the novelist turned the Russian family into the subject of intense scrutiny. Not only his major novels but also A Writer's Diary were used by Dostoevsky as a vehicle to highlight and investigate the new reality and its possible ramifications. In the January 1876 issue of A Writer's Diary Dostoevsky confesses: For a long time now I have had the goal of writing a novel about children in Russia today, and about their fathers, too, of course, in their mutual relationship of today. .. . I will take fathers and children from every level of Russian society I can and follow the children from their earliest childhood. A year and a half ago, When Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov asked me to write a novel for Otechestvennye zapiski, I almost began my Fathers and Sons; but I held back, and thank God I did, for I was not ready. In the meantime I wrote only A Raw Youth, this first attempt at my idea.’ Of course, Dostoevsky’s view of A Raw Youth (1875) as the first sample of his idea is somewhat misleading, since The Demons (1871) seems to be directly 90

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concerned with the relations between “present-day fathers and their Russian children.” Yet regardless of the first attempts at the idea, it is Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, that analyzes the modern-day fathers and children most intensively. The opening of the novel, the first sentence of the first chapter, announces the centrality of the father-son theme: “Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner from our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, well known in his own day (and still remembered among us) because of his dark and tragic death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago” (BK, 7).° A son, a father, and a father’s tragic death are announced from the start. And so are the ideas of history and memory: the outcome of the conflict is remembered, it leaves a trace and has an impact upon others. The first line of the next chapter reinforces the centrality of the novel’s problem content, while at the same time introducing the issue of a child’s upbringing into the picture: “Of course, one can imagine what sort of father and mentor such a man would be” (BK, 10). In the opening lines of these two chapters we find the whole of Dostoevsky’s novel: fathers, sons, failed upbringing, tragic death, and the repercussions that are remembered through the years.

| In fact, the first book of the novel is subtitled “A Nice Little Family.” This book consists of five chapters. The first one introduces the old Karamazov, the next three chapters describe his three sons, while the last chapter switches to elders, usually addressed as “fathers” in Russian. The structure of this first book is thus rather transparent: the stories of children that are

placed in the middle are surrounded by the stories of various types of fathers, either physical or surrogate, either real or failed. The novel’s progression, introduced by the first book, will be later replayed over the expanse of the whole novel. It is not the progression from fathers to sons, however, but rather the movement from false fathers to the true, usually surrogate ones; from selfishness to sacrifice, from neglect and abuse to love and engagement.’ Dostoevsky, of course, experimented with a similar progression in his previous novel, The Raw Youth. There the protagonist Arkady (a clear tribute to Arkady Kirsanov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons), while trying to return to his biological father, Versilov, returns in fact to his surrogate father, Makar Dolgoruky, and, through him, to Christ. Arkady’s last name is Dol-

goruky; he is legally the son of Makar, however. The symbolism of his return is complex, but Dostoevsky’s suggestion is clear: in the world of accidental families where blood relationships are not really honored, anyone can be potentially a father. The problem for the son who wants to return, however, is to find a true father. In Dostoevsky’s scheme of generational interaction, it is thus the wandering and the return that truly matter. Dostoevsky, of course, has a particular return in mind. His frequent appeal to the parable of the prodigal son QI]

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suggests not only a literal return to one’s father, but also—-a traditional Chris-

tian reading—a figurative return to God. The Brothers Karamazov features, of course, a wide range of fathers, sons, families, and generations. The typical nineteenth-century family novel is transformed beyond recognition in Dostoevsky’s literary universe. The family becomes the locus of the most intense social, political, moral, and theological conflicts. It is within the accidental family that the new generation forms not only its views of its biological fathers but also its views of all other father figures: a government official, a czar, and God. In March 1878, Dostoevsky wrote to one of his female correspondents: Imagine that your child, grown up to the age of fifteen or sixteen, comes to you (influenced by bad friends in school, for example) and asks you or his father: “Why should I love you and why should this be my duty?” Believe me, no knowledge of questions will help you there, nor would there be much sense in answering him. And therefore you must make sure that he never comes to you with such a question. (Ps, 30-1:17; emphasis added)

What Dostoevsky suggests here is that the only way to prevent children and the czar’s subjects from questioning and challenging various authorities is to prevent the very emergence of such questions. Eager as he is to insist on personal responsibility, Dostoevsky is equally eager to underscore the power of environment to shape a person. Dostoevsky merges these two concerns by stressing the parental responsibility for creating the right environment. Better than any Russian radical, Dostoevsky knew that the modern-day fathers had failed. He does not, however, call for the abolition of the institution of the family. Nor does he blindly uphold the family in the manner of conservatives. Instead, he calls for a new type of family, one in which parental love and lifelong dedication result in a dissolution of the conflicts and tensions.

It is clear that the primary responsibility for the creation of such a family lies with the parents. No matter how critical Dostoevsky was of the radical youth, he would emphasize again and again the role and responsibility of the “fathers.” In his drafts to The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky is quite explicit about his desire to reconstruct a family as a microcosm of divine love and unity. One entry acknowledges “family as the practical source of love” (Ps, 15:249). Another maintains that “the Elder says that God gave us close kin [rodnykh]| so that they could teach us to love” (Ps, 15:205). Utopian as it all sounds, Dostoevsky is aware that the alternatives are quite terrifying. It is these alternatives that Dostoevsky highlights in The Brothers Karamazov. If parents fail to turn the family into a school of love, sacrifice, and patient endeavor, the family becomes the place of judgments, violence, and crime.

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In his Writer's Diary, Dostoevsky writes about the impact of family violence upon children: “This dismal picture will remain in their souls forever

and might painfully undermine their youthful pride .. . The result will be an inability to cope with life’s problems, early pangs of vanity, a blush of false shame for their past, and a dull, sullen hatred for people, and this, perhaps, may last a lifetime” (WD, 303). The failure of fathers results in various forms of rebellion in children ranging from social to religious and cosmic. Two characters of the novel whose maturation had been accompanied by their contact with incompetent parental figures fully embody the dynamics of the rebellion of children. While Smerdyakov reveals that there is a small step between rejecting one’s father and killing him, Ivan Karamazov clearly shows that there is only a small step between rejecting one’s father and rejecting God. Parricide is, of course, the most vivid and striking form of rebellion against the fathers. In order fully to appreciate Dostoevsky’s deep vision of family interaction, one must examine the social and psychological dynamics leading the failed fathers to create the forces that destroy them.

THE ORPHAN RICHARD AND HIS FAILED FATHERS Among the unforgettable examples of cruelty and injustice that Ivan Karamazov collects and then recites in the chapter “Rebellion” (bk. 5, chap. 4), one particular example might strike a reader as rather odd, confusing, and out of place. It does not quite fit into Ivan’s usual script of demonic adults torturing angelic children. I refer to the story of a man named Richard, a person who during his short life managed to be a victim, a murderer, and then a victim again. Richard, a six-year-old illegitimate child, was handed over by his parents to some Swiss shepherds. These peasants exploit and mistreat him. They seem to care more for their pigs than for the orphan boy. The child, however, survives, grows up, and moves to Geneva, where he lives in poverty and dissipation. Eventually he robs and kills an old man. He is caught. Inspired by numerous priests who surround him in prison, he undergoes a religious conversion. Regardless of his conversion, Richard is taken to the execution, while his “brothers,” as Ivan puts it, weep in joy at his forthcoming meeting with his Maker (BK, 240). Ivan informs Alyosha that he read this story in one of the proselytizing publications that were floating around Russia at that time.° This story is

remarkable for many reasons. It is a bitter mockery of the idea of “the restoration of a fallen man” (Ps, 20:28), an idea that Dostoevsky considers central in nineteenth-century European literature and one that permeates his own works. The story of Richard also recalls Dmitri’s fate at the end of

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the novel. After his various visions and epiphanies, after his readiness to sing his hymn to God, the Russian court hands down a severe sentence. More important, the story brings to mind Smerdyakov, whose fate, with the exception of the conversion, parallels that of Richard. The similarities between Smerdyakov and Richard are too striking to be coincidental: both are illegitimate, both are raised by foster parents who use them as servants and treat them like wild animals; both turn into untamable and unsociable adults. Even the crimes of Richard and Smerdyakov are similar: each one kills and robs an old man; each one commits his crimes at the same age of twenty-three.°

The story also presents its narrator, Ivan, in a rather curious light. With his rejection of “harmony” resting on the suffering of innocent children, Ivan is outraged that Richard is led to slaughter for the sake of the harmony of Western civilization. Ivan manifests sympathy for Richard and hatred for his self-righteous tormentors; he mocks the hypocrisy of killing one’s brother in Christ. Yet Ivan fails to recognize his brotherhood with his own blood brothers, one of whom, Dmitri, he frequently calls “a monster” and the other, Smerdyakov, “a stinking lackey.”

Ivan’s complete identification with the child victims of his stories is clearly problematic. Ivan is no longer a child. He grew up into a powerful father figure for his own brothers. In other words, Ivan fails to acknowledge fully all the moral implications of Richard’s story. He fails to recognize him-

self in various participants of this story and glosses over the fact that he himself is not only a victim but a victimizer, not only a Richard but also the church that let down its brother and spiritual son. Richard’s story clearly implicates Ivan, as it does the readers of The Brothers Karamazov. The latter tend to share Ivan’s sensitivities and sympathize with Richard, though they ignore Smerdyakov’s fate.’ There is another crucial difference between the story of Richard and the other stories that involve tortured children. Richard’s story has roots. It involves the fate of a child abandoned by one set of parents, abused by an-

other, and then let down by a third group of parents: the priests. In other words, the story places abused children not only within a rather abstract context of morality or theology (the problem of theodicy) but also within a

more immediate one of family and generations. }

Compared to the cosmic scope of theological justice, the issue of social justice does not appear to be particularly dramatic or profound. Yet in terms of our novel, the ferocious strife that fathers’ failure generates is fundamental. Richard’s story, at least in the way Ivan constructs it, testifies to the total failure of fathers. Shepherds, both literal and spiritual, prove incapable of carrying out their duty of guiding and saving. In Ivan’s story, Richard compares himself to a prodigal son. Yet, as the outcome of the story suggests, Richard’s return to his father is greeted by execution. Ivan’s story completely 94

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discredits the fathers and thus bodes no good for them. Fyodor is absolutely correct to be wary of Ivan. When in the first serious discussion of Smerdyakov (in the early chapters entitled “The Disputation” and “Over the Cognac” [bk. 3, chaps. 7 and 8]), Ivan calls him “peredovoe miaso” (the one who is leading the attack), he seems to acknowledge that Smerdyakov harbors enough anger to be at the forefront of rebellion against the fathers in power. Typically, however, Ivan does not explore the implications of his own words or actions. Rather than probing into the causes of Smerdyakov’s anger, Ivan immediately dismisses Smerdyakov as a “broth-maker” (bul’onshchik) and maintains that “so far the people do not much like listening to these broth-makers” (BK, 132). In other words, Ivan prefers to discuss Smerdyakov’s potential rebelliousness and his possible influence among the peasants without truly looking into the causes of such a rebellion. Smerdyakov’s tortured past, a matter Dostoevsky had already introduced in the chapter immediately preceding Ivan’s musings on Smerdyakov, somehow eludes Ivan. Ivan recognizes the impact that the past abuses have upon some dis-

tant and romantic Richard, but not upon the unattractive lackey and half brother, Smerdyakov. Ivan is justifiably offended by the fact that a human being, an orphan Richard, is treated like a swine. He is aware that Richard's monstrous attributes were not his essential quality. The story of Richard’s conversion suggests quite the opposite. Smerdyakov, like Richard, was never an incorrigible villain, either.® Here an examination of the people and forces that shaped Smerdyakov’s character is in order. We know that in the case of Richard, it was his toster parents, the failed shepherds, who turn him into a criminal and then let him die. The failure of Smerdyakov’s father, Fyodor, and of his moral and intellectual mentor, Ivan, is evident. Our main focus must be the person who raised Smerdyakov, his foster parent, Grigory Kutuzov, a person who treated him no better than the Swiss shepherds treated Richard. Grigory, the failed surrogate father of Smerdyakov, bears his share of guilt in the murder of Fyodor Karamazov.

FAMILY: THE SCHOOL OF LOVE OR THE SCHOOL OF JUDGMENT Throughout his writings, Dostoevsky suggests that the proliferation of judg-

ment, anger, and malice is tied to the absence of family love, to the tendency of grown-ups to judge, criticize, and punish their young. Behind the conflict of generations, behind the sons’ eagerness to judge and condemn the old, traditional, and habitual, lies the fathers’ failure to turn a family into a school of love. Dostoevsky, as his own musings on the importance of family disclose, was well aware that without love, such important social forces 95

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as duty, sacrifice, obedience, continuity, and tradition would be perceived as restrictive and tyrannical, as something that one would want to overturn and trample upon. In Dostoevsky’s view, there is only one step from dysfunctional families to the emergence of criminals, murderers, and rebels. Already his two previous novels suggest such a progression. In the case of Stepan Verkhovensky (The Demons), his liberalism is by far less important in the making of his son than his absenteeism; the same can be said about Versilov and his children (The Raw Youth). Fyodor Karamazov, who, besides being a cynic, egoist, and a sinner, simply forgets about his children, is one more manifestation of a similar paradigm. Dostoevsky’s view of an absentee father becomes explicit in his presentation of Ivan’s devil, a character compared to a type of a widower who dumps his children on distant relatives and happily forgets about them (BK, 636).

The demonic nature of these absentee fathers, the progenitors of what Dostoevsky calls “an accidental family,” hardly needs further elaboration. However, another type of a father deserves mention: the one who is physically present but who acts as if harshness and cruelty were substitutes for love and pity. On one occasion, Dostoevsky calls such a person “a father

unaccustomed to fatherhood” (WD, 380).

The Grand Inquisitor is the ultimate emblem of such a “father.” Of course, as failures in the school of love, absentee fathers and tyrannical ones

like the Grand Inquisitor are quite similar: both are absent at least on the emotional and spiritual level. Dostoevsky coined the phrase “unaccustomed to fatherhood” in reference to a man named Kronenberg, a sadistic father whose scandalous trial Dostoevsky covered in his Writer’s Diary. Kronenberg was first an absentee father who abandoned his daughter in an orphanage in Geneva. (It is very likely that it was the Kronenberg af-

fair, along with the story of Rousseau, that led Dostoevsky to associate Geneva with the plight of abandoned and abused children.) Kronenberg would later become a tyrannical father. After taking his daughter out of an orphanage, he returned to Russia and began to torture the six-year-old girl in order to rid her of some undesirable habits.

GRIGORY AND HIS FAMILY The archvillain of The Brothers Karamazov, Smerdyakov, was ushered into the world by absentee fathers: by his biological father and, most important, by the person nominally responsible for raising him: Karamazov’s servant, Grigory. Grigory is one more example of a father “unaccustomed to fatherhood.” His destructive role in the shaping of Smerdyakov has so far eluded the readers of the novel. On those occasions when Grigory is mentioned at all, he is usually described as tender or pious.® There is something in Grigory that elicits trust. Not only Fyodor Karamazov trusts him, but the reader 96

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does as well. We trust Grigory because he took care of Fyodor’s abandoned children, and we trust him because his negative views of Smerdyakov seem to confirm our view of Smerdyakov as an embodiment of evil. Grigory, obviously, does not lie on purpose, yet he can be spectacularly wrong. None of his testimony given under oath in the court of law is, in fact, correct; it is there that he characterizes Smerdyakov as honest but

foolish (how little, indeed, he knows about the person he cared for from birth); and it is there that he affirms that on the night of the murder, he saw open the door that leads into Fyodor’s room. Grigory’s remarks clearly constitute the most damning testimony against Dmitri. It was Grigory’s tendency to misjudge that in fact contributed to his master’s death. When he saw Dmitri running toward the fence, Grigory charged toward him, screaming, “Parricide!” (otseubivets). He did not hesitate or seek to find out what happened. Here is how Dostoevsky describes Grigory’s actions and thoughts: “Just so, his forebodings had not deceived him; he recognized the man, it was him, the ‘monster,’ the ‘parricide’! “Parricide!’ the old man shouted for all the neighborhood to hear” (BK, 371). Dostoevsky rarely reproduces verbatim the thought processes of his characters, especially minor ones. This glimpse into Grigory’s mind is therefore extremely important. Dostoevsky clearly felt the need to underscore Grigory’s compulsive need to formulate and then convince himself of his forebodings. It did not even occur to Grigory to check on his master’s well-being. Had he returned to his master, who was alive and well at the moment, the murder would most likely have been prevented. The murderer Smerdyakov acknowledges that much to Ivan: I went to have a look in the corner, and stumbled over Grigory Vasilievich, lying near the wall, all covered with blood, unconscious. “So it’s true, Dmitri Fyodorovich was here,” jumped into my mind at once, and I at once decided to finish it all right then and there, sir, since even if Grigory Vasilievich was still alive, he wouldn’t see anything while he was unconscious. (BK, 628)

In other words, not only did Grigory raise the man who was the actual murderer of Fyodor Karamazov, but he also served as an unwitting accomplice

in the murder. |

Grigory—his name, ironically, means “wide-awake” in its Greek origins—appears at key junctures of the novel. Critics do not usually identify Grigory with those other people in the novel who bear guilt and responsibility for the murder of Fyodor. Yet Grigory has something to feel guilty about: his foster child, Smerdyakov, commits suicide; he plays a fatal role in sending another foster child, Dmitri, to Siberia; and his own child is dead at two weeks old, Grigory might indeed be described as a sort of Chronos figure who devours his own children. The majority of the novel’s characters, including Smerdyakov, are tortured by guilt. Grigory, on the other hand, 97

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never questions his actions or convictions. In this respect he joins company with the novel’s obvious villains: Rakitin, Father Ferapont, and the merchant Samsonov. When his wife gives birth to a child, Grigory immediately condemns the baby as “a dragon” only because the boy has six fingers. Much later in the novel, the defense attorney Fetyukovich asks Grigory how many fingers he has—a seemingly unrelated and insulting question. On a symbolic level, however, this question points to something else: figuratively speaking, it is Grigory who has dragon fingers. Instead of counting the fingers of newborn

babies and dubbing them dragons, Dostoevsky seems to suggest, Grigory might have taken a good look at his own dragonlike behavior."°

In fact, the failure to love and pity coupled with the eagerness to judge, despise, and condemn is as pronounced in Grigory as it is in Ivan Karamazov or the Grand Inquisitor. In Grigory’s case, however, this combi-

nation of attributes is manifested on the concrete level of domestic life. That realm contrasts with the more abstract moral, philosophical, and religious spheres where these attributes are to be found in Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor. In any case, the outlook and conduct of Grigory, Ivan, and the Grand Inquisitor clearly demonstrate that hell is not only the inability to love, as Zosima remarks, but also the ability and craving to judge. Grigory judged his newborn babe a “dragon.” He deliberately refuses to help his wife take care of the baby: for three days he withdraws into the garden and wastes his time digging holes there. As a result, the baby dies of thrush, an infectious fungal disease caused by unsanitary conditions. Grigory, as is the case with demons, is frequently associated with dirt and un-

cleanness. In this context, it is hardly surprising that his foster son, Smerdyakov, is extremely fastidious. When the tyrannical old benefactress of Fyodor’s second wife arrives to collect Fyodor’s children from Grigory, she immediately perceives him as the source of uncleanness: “Seeing at a glance that they were unwashed and in the dirty shirts, she gave one more slap to Grigory himself” (BK, 14). Even Grigory’s imagination is ruled by dirt. Thus he accuses Smerdyakov of “growing from the mildew in the bathhouse” (BK, 124). Grigory’s stubbornness, dogmatism, and constantly judgmental nature might have been praiseworthy under some other circumstances, but not within the family. His behavior instills in his foster children the conviction that the family is the place of willful, self-righteous, and cruel judgments. Once he judges and condemns someone, Grigory, in the language of Ivan’s civil court, cuts off the “harmful member” (BK, 55). He does not seek to change the situation through patience and love. In this respect, it is instructive to compare Grigory with another father in the novel, Captain Snegiryov. Encouraged by Smerdyakov, Snegiryov’s son Ilyusha commits a series of rather pugnacious misdemeanors. 98

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Yet rather than condemning or punishing his son in the manner of Grigory, Snegiryov treats his son with love and compassion. And of course, it is love that survives against all odds in the bitter and mistreated boy. Grigory’s double is Father Ferapont. This half-mad monk who sees devils everywhere approaches the world with an apocalyptic mentality. Like Grigory, Ferapont is forever ready to judge and condemn. When Zosima’s corpse begins to stink, one of the monks recalls Ferapont’s accusations of Zosima: “Yes, apparently Father Ferapont judged rightly yesterday” (“Vidno, otets-to Ferapont spravedlivo vchera sudil”; BK, 333; Ps, 14:301, emphasis added). This remark provides a vivid characterization of both the speaker and Father Ferapont: of all people, Christian monks should not judge. That is why in response to Ferapont’s accusations, Zosima’s friend Father Paisy replies, “Get thee hence, Father . . . it is not for men to judge, but for God” (BK, 335). Zosima, of course, makes a similar point when, in reply to Alyosha’s request to mediate between Fyodor and Dmitri, he asks, “| W]ho made me a judge over them?” (BK, 32). The belief that judgment can be just contradicts the very spirit of the novel itself. Justice and judgment consistently occupy opposite poles in Dostoevsky’s novelistic world. That is apparent not only on the level of the plot, which culminates in the trial and its miscarriage of justice, but also in the lives of numerous characters who are frequently mistaken in their rash judgments of others. In fact, the novel is so pervaded by misjudgments and misreadings that had it not been for its tragic content, it might have been

viewed as a comedy of errors. As it now stands, it is might be called a tragedy of misjudgments.” Grigory reads only two books, which, according to the narrator, he scarcely comprehends: the Book of Job and the homilies of Isaac the Syrian, in other words, a book of God’s mysterious ways and a book of his mysterious power of love. In the transparently clear world of Grigory, however, there is no place for mystery. Once a monster, always a monster; once a stinking lackey, always a stinking lackey; once a rebel, always a rebel: such are the conclusions of his Euclidean mind, conclusions that he shares, of course, with his intellectual superiors Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor. Like Ivan’s devil who does not carry a watch, Grigory does not even know the date and the year, as he reveals during the trial. Grigory’s existence outside of time concords with his apocalyptic outlook (when time shall be no more) and with the finality of his judgments. There is no possibility of change or growth in his world. That is why he reads the same two books over and over again. Not surprisingly, Zosima, in his musings on hell, remarks that sinners in hell are tortured by the awareness that “there will be no more time” to rectify their failure of love (BK, 322). Even if he is not yet tortured by it, Grigory already inhabits this loveless and timeless hell. 99

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For some reason, we are told, Grigory dislikes one of Fyodor’s wives and adores another. And these predilections or prejudices of his are unchanging. His rigorous dogmatism does not even allow him to conceive of Smerdyakov as a helpless child or to imagine that the boy might view Grigory and Marfa as his parents. As far as Grigory is concerned, Smerdyakov is the fruit of “the devil’s son” (BK, 100). That is why Grigory, with his usual insensitivity, makes sure that everyone in Moscow knows of Smerdyakov’s scandalous heritage when the boy is sent there. Even as an adult, Smerdyakov complains about Grigory’s betrayal, a fact that discloses how much it must have wounded him. Alyosha happened to eavesdrop on Smerdyakov’s complaints: I could have done even better, miss . . . if it wasn’t for my destiny ever since childhood . . . I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were

shoving that in my face in Moscow, it spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativ-

ity. “You opened her matrix,” he says... I’d have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss. (BK, 224)

There is a bitter irony in Grigory’s reproach to Smerdyakov. The expression lozhesna razverz (opened the womb) comes from Exodus: “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast: it is mine” (Exodus 13:2 AV). Any firstborn, be it man or beast, is sanctified and belongs to God. Yet Grigory treats these very firstborns, these sanctified and Godly creatures, as if they were dragons or accursed anathemas. Grigory does his best to prevent Smerdyakov from growing; the latter appears to be forever tainted and defined by his last name (“a stinking one”). While the boy’s first name, Paul, suggests a possibility of a change, those around Smerdyakov made sure that the possibility of such an outcome was slim indeed. Grigory’s verbal abuses underline his simplistic mind-set. He reduces those he attacks to their base, inescapable, frequently nonhuman origins. This is how he talks to a boy Smerdyakov: “‘You think you are a human being?’ he would suddenly address Smerdyakov directly. ‘You are not a human

being, you were begotten of bathhouse slime, that’s who you are’” (BK, 124). As the narrator reports, Smerdyakov could never forgive Grigory these words. Grigory, of course, is offended when during the trial Dmitri compares his loyalty to that of a dog. “Iam not a poodle” (BK, 666), he mutters in indignation. Upon the birth of Smerdyakov and the death of his son, Grigory declares that “God’s orphan child is everyone’s kin, all the more so for you and me. Our little dead one sent us this one, who was born from the devil’s son and a righteous woman. Nurse him and weep no more” (BK, 100). Of this

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complex lineage—an orphan, a God’s child, “from the devil’s son and a righteous woman”—Grigory would later remember only the most offensive ones and would be forever happy to remind Smerdyakov of his dubious ancestry and otherwise to condemn and denigrate him. Late in the novel, when Ivan threatens to denounce Smerdyakov, the latter articulates to Ivan his possible court defense: “I will certainly say right out that I never told you any such thing, sir, and that you . . . invented all that against me since you've considered me like a fly all your lite anyway, and not like a man” (BK, 632). Such an attitude, expressed by the majority of Smerdyakov’s superiors, is, of course, infectious. Thus, in turn, Smerdyakov begins to see others as no more than beasts (and we, of course, remember what he did with cats). On one occasion, Smerdyakov remarks of Grigory that “he is not a man [eto ne chelovek], let me tell you, but just like a stubborn mule, sir: he didn’t see it, but he fancied he saw it—and you'll never be able to shake him sir” (BK, 630). This assessment of Grigory’s stubbornness parallels Grigory’s own sentence: “You are not a human being [ty ne chelovek].” Moreover, he seeks to accomplish the same task: to deny another person his humanity. Like father, like son, or in the words of the New Testament, frequently quoted and misquoted in the novel, “with what mea‘sure ye mete, it shall be measured to you” (Mark 4:24 AV).

This world of harsh immutable judgments was bound to implode. Discussing parents’ cruelty, Dostoevsky once remarked that “when a society ceases to pity its weak and oppressed, it will itself be afflicted; it will grow callous and wither, it will become depraved and sterile” (WD, 383). Is it so surprising, then, that the depraved Fyodor and sterile Grigory are despised, beaten, and even murdered by their children? Chickens come home to roost. Even though on one occasion the narrator notes Grigory’s fondness for children (BK, 95), neither Grigory’s words nor his actions support this assertion. Grigory, in fact, is very quick to abuse the boy Smerdyakov. He hits, whips, and curses him from the boy’s earliest childhood. It is Grigory’s violence, in fact, that the narrator connects with Smerdyakov’s first epileptic attack at the age of twelve; at that time, unhappy about Smerdyakov’s theological cynicism and his questioning the logic of Genesis, Grigory gives the boy “a violent blow on the cheek” (BK, 124). Even F yodor is touched by the outcome of this incident and forbids Grigory to punish the boy. In earlier years, Dostoevsky criticized such methods of correction. He wrote in reference to another violent father: “[H]e supposed that one could erad-icate at once, with one stroke, all that evil that had been sown and that had taken root in the heart of the child over the years. But that cannot be done; one must act slowly and have patience” (WD, 381). Needless to say, physical abuse of children is a grave sin in the world of Dostoevsky. As the result of such beatings, Smerdyakov usually would 101

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retreat to the corner of the room: the quintessential gesture of a child victim in Dostoevsky’s world:

Do you know what it means to abuse a child? Their hearts are full of innocent, almost unconscious love, and blows such as these cause a grievous shock and tears that God sees and will count. For their reason is never capable of grasping their full guilt. Have you ever seen, or heard of little children who were tormented, or of orphans, say, who were raised among wicked strangers? Have you seen a child cowering in a corer, trying to hide, and weeping there . . . not knowing himself what he is doing, not clearly understanding his own guilt or why he is tormented but sensing all too well that he is not loved. (WD, 380)

“Sensing all too well that he is not loved”: here is a feeling that must have accompanied Smerdyakov throughout his life and that certainly explains, in part, at least, many aspects of his character and behavior, including his cruelty, anger, envy, and tendency to blame others. It is useful, in this respect, to recall Dickens’s approach to one of his most repulsive and negative characters, Uriah Heep. While not denying Heep’s bad qualities, the narrator of David Copperfield stresses also the formative aspects of his upbringing: “I had never doubted his meanness, his craft, and malice: but I fully comprehend now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengetul spirit must have been engendered by this early, and this long, suppression” (David Copperfield [New York: Airmont Publishing House], 484). In his essay on the bloodthirsty terrorist Nechaev, entitled “One of Today’s Falsehoods” (1873), Dostoevsky claims that he could never have become another Nechaev; this is only because he had been loved as a child, and had remembered this love: “As far back as I can remember I recall my parents’ love for me” (WD, 289). On another occasion, he asserts: “The family is created by a ceaseless labor of love” (WD, 381). In fact, Dostoevsky stresses the same point in his presentation of Zosima, a man whose fond memories of childhood, shaped by the love of his mother and brother, gave

him strength to renounce his old ways and change." |

In his portrayal of the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky, one surmises, does not condemn him simply for treating his subjects as children but rather for being a bad father, a father “unaccustomed to fatherhood,” a person who thinks only the worst of his children and sees them as weak and corrupt creatures, incapable of finding their own way.’® Paradoxically, such fathers seem to care about their children, yet because they interpret any sign of independence as ingratitude or rebellion, they are prone to immediate violence.'4 Both Grigory and Smerdyakoy, father and son, embody the vicious circle of harsh judgments and harsh sentences. It is thus hardly surprising that Smerdyakov so resembles Grigory. Grigory is a loner, pompous and tac-

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iturn. He never bothers to talk to people around him, including his wite, and presumes an air of superiority. Of Smerdyakov we learn that “he had an arrogant nature and seemed to despise everyone” (BK, 124). The name of Grigory’s obedient wife is Mara Ignatievna. Smerdyakov’s pomposity impresses a woman named Maria Kondratievna, who views him as her groom and tries to accommodate him in a manner reminiscent of Grigory’s wife. Both Grigory and Smerdyakov use glasses for reading, a fact that Dostoevsky finds relevant enough to stress, especially when Ivan with his usual benevolence muses on the bespectacled Smerdyakov: “Such a creature and in spectacles to boot!” (“Ekaia tvar’, da esche v ochkakh”; BK, 613; Ps, 15:50). It is noteworthy that besides Grigory and Smerdyakoy,

the novel features one more character in obvious need of glasses: Ivan’s devil. He appears to Ivan carrying a “lorgnette” (BK, 636). Smerdyakoy, in fact, needed his glasses to read Isaac the Syrian, that is, the favorite book of Grigory. Both, obviously, hardly have any understanding of the content. The

reason seems quite plain: both prefer to judge and condemn instead of yielding to Christian love and forgiveness. SMERDYAKOV

In one of his rare monologues, Smerdyakov expresses the Job-like wish never to have been born. This comment alerts us (though not Alyosha, who overhears this complaint) to the harsh reality of his life. During another of his rebellious moments described in the chapter “The Disputation” (bk. 3, chap. 7), Smerdyakoy, like Job, proceeds publicly to question God in the presence of his senior friends, such as F yodor, Grigory, Ivan, and Alyosha. Like Job’s friends, these people prefer to blame the victim, accusing Smerdyakov of apostasy or monstrosity or pontificating about the Russianness of

his beliefs. ,

Rather than concentrating on the Joban subtext, however, the narrator gives the story a twist when he characterizes this unexpected rebellion

with the following words: “but Balaam’s ass suddenly spoke” (BK, 127). This

reference casts the events of the chapter in a totally different light. We remember from the Book of Numbers that Balaam’s ass, after she balks upon seeing an angel blocking her way, gets a sound beating from Balaam. After the beating has been repeated three times, and after the ass addresses Balaam in a human voice, Balaam finally begins to see what she has been seeing all along. By calling Smerdyakov a Balaam’s ass, yet by treating him as if he is just an ass, his “fathers” show the blindness of the Geneva citizens who call

Richard “a brother” and then chop his head off, or the blindness of Ivan, who self-righteously condemns them without being aware that he himself is

| committing a similar moral blunder.

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This refusal to recognize the message of Balaam’s ass, the message of the ever-present power of miracles and faith which can be revealed to anyone, including an ass, informs the whole scene. Even though Smerdyakov undergoes a barrage of insults, as does Balaam’s ass, he, as opposed to this she-ass, denies the plausibility and relevance of both miracles and faith. While God is ever present in the story of Balaam, it is relegated to the useless beyond in the exchange that takes place between Smerdyakov and his listeners, Ivan and Fyodor. The ground is cleared for the world of “two vipers eating each other up” (BK, 143). Small wonder that Fyodor Karamazov gets very upset with Smerdyakov’s performance, especially after Ivan explains to him that the suppression of religion would result in the suppression of him, Fyodor Karamazov. Following Ivan’s explanation, Fyodor exclaims, “Ah, what an ass I am [kakaia zhe ia oslitsa|” (BK, 143). Fyodor’s exclamation not only underscores Fyodor’s kinship to Smerdyakov but also reminds us of the difference that separates the world of Balaam from the world of Karamazov’s Skotoprigonievsk.

In the Bible, the ass speaks in the language of humans and sees angels; in the novel, humans persistently reject God’s relevance to their life and act like beasts. The scene, in fact, is dominated by the persistent comparison of human beings to roaches, pigs, and vipers. Of course, the reference to Balaam’s ass takes on a different meaning at the end of the novel. While the earlier scene suggests that the world of the novel reverses the biblical situation, some later events indicate the presence of visions and miracles. In the long run, Smerdyakov himself begins to be aware of God’s presence. During his final interview with Ivan, Smerdyakov indeed speaks like Balaam’s ass, as he accuses Ivan of being blind: “There’s no ghost, sir, besides the two of us, and some third one... . That 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” (BK, 623).

Cruelty within the family—the desecration of the divine ideals of love, pity, and forgiveness—becomes for Dostoevsky one of the most disturbing and pervasive offenses. To underscore it, Dostoevsky has the main family offender, Fyodor, spit on an icon. In a similar vein, another failed father, Versilov in The Raw Youth, breaks an icon. These sacrilegious acts highlight the fact that instead of being fathers, these men have become, as it were, antifathers. The neglect and abuse of children, these images of God, as well as the desecration of icons constitute the most direct and immediate subver-

sion of the divine. They are presented as truly demonic. It is hardly surprising, then, that cosmic religious imagery pervades Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the family. It is also no surprise that the description of a failed family that opens The Brothers Karamazov is juxtaposed with the image of a new kind of family in the novel’s conclusion, that is, the family of an ideal foster par104

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ent, Alyosha, and his twelve boys. To paraphrase Dostoevsky, “God and devil are fighting with each other, and the battlefield is a human family.” The outcome of the battle will depend on what kind of family will prevail.

Notes 1. F M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh, vol. 24-2 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1986), 78. All quotations from Dostoevsky’s works, unless otherwise indicated, refer to this edition of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh, 30 vols. (1972-88), hereafter cited parenthetically as Ps with volume and page number. The translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. 2. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, vol. 1, p. 302, 1873-1876, ed.

and trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), hereafter cited parenthetically as WD with page number. 3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). All English quotations from The Brothers Karamazov refer to _ this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically as BK with page number. 4, Cf. Michael Holquist, “How Sons Become Fathers,” in Dostoevsky and the Novel (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1986), 17377; see also Frederick T. Griffiths and Stanley J. Rabinowitz, “Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov,” in Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky, and National Narrative (Evanston, IIl.: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 137-44. 5. Nina Budanova found this publication among Dostoevsky’s books. She discusses its relevance to Dostoevsky’s own views on the subject of crime and punishment (Nina Budanova, “Rishar i Dostoevski,” in Dostoevskii: Issledovaniia i materialy 13 [1996]: 106-19). Budanova, however, does not connect Richard’s story with the events, characters, or problem content of the novel itself. 6. A story of an orphan adopted by shepherds takes us, of course, to the myth of Oedipus and its theme of parricide. The tale of a baby abandoned in Switzerland and executed in Geneva hints at Rousseau’s biography; it contains an obvious warning to fathers who abandon their children. I am grateful to Liza Knapp for drawing my attention to these subtexts. 7. As Olga Meerson has observed, “The injustice done to him | Smerdyakov] somehow eludes Ivan’s (and everyone else’s) indignation” (Olga Meerson, Dostoevsky’s Taboos [Dresden: Dresden University Press, 1998], 199).

8. For a contrary view of Smerdyakov as radically evil, see Gary Saul Morson, “Verbal Pollution in The Brothers Karamazov,” in Critical Essays on Dostoevsky, ed. Robin Feuer Miller (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 236. 105

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Y. For a more sympathetic discussion of Grigory, see Robin Feuer Miller, The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 43; Harriet Murav, H oly Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels

and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 129; and Valentin Nedzvetskii, “Misterial’noe nachalo v romane F. M. Dostoevskogo,” in Dostoeuskti i mirovaia kul’tura 9 (1997): 46. 10. Incidentally, Grigory’s last name is Kutuzov, that is, the name of

| the greatest Russian military leader (at least if we trust Tolstoy's judgment of Kutuzov’s military abilities). Once again we have a sly suggestion on Dostoevsky’s part that Grigory is a leader of the army, an army of dragons whom he brings forth into the world. 11. With the exception of Zosima and Alyosha, it appears that every-

one calls Dmitri a monster or parricide at one time or another. Zosima, of course, kneels in front of Dmitri, an emblematic gesture that points to anything but judgment and condemnation. The refusal to judge moves even such sinners as Fyodor, who confesses to Alyosha: “I feel that you’re the only one in the world who hasn’t condemned [osudil] me, you are, my dear boy, I feel it, how can I not feel it” (BK, 19). 12. It is telling that in the presentation of numerous criminals in his House of the Dead, Dostoevsky never mentions their families, unless he talks about criminals who clearly do not belong in prison. Dostoevsky’s favorite person in prison is a young man, Alei, whose description, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to that of Alyosha Karamazov. He is presented as the most loving and devoted son and brother. Alei stresses his mother’s love for him at the very first conversation with the narrator (Ps, 4:53). 13. The Grand Inquisitor, of course, is the parody and perversion of

the true Father, Christ, hence their confrontation over the fate of their “children” or their flock. Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the Grand Inquisitor contains a profound insight, one that has been known since the Antichrist of Revelation. The relevance of this insight became especially clear in the twentieth century: any figure with a claim to a surrogate fatherhood has to assume a religious aura, to utilize, or rather abuse, “miracle, mystery, and authority.” The great tyrants of the twentieth century, of course, did so

rather successfully. |

14. Dostoevsky argues that only he who observes, encourages, and participates in the spiritual growth of his children embodies a true fatherhood: “These little creatures only enter into our souls and attach themselves to our hearts when we, having begotten them, watch over them from childhood, without leaving them from the time of their first smile: and then we continue to grow into one another’s souls every day, every hour, all through our lives. Now that is the family, that is something sacred” (WD, 380-81).

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The God of Onions: The Brothers Karamazov and the Mythic Prosaic

PROSAICS AND ESCHATOLOGY

Dostoevsky renders with remarkably consistent power the ideas he opposes, but his alternative often remains vague. The wrong view is almost always the idea that intellectuals possess some theory—utilitarianism, socialism, nihilism, or any other—that can account for all of human existence and ensure salvation if properly applied. For Dostoevsky, the idea that any set of abstract ideas could specify what we do would necessarily reduce us to “piano keys” or “organ stops.” And a guarantee of salvation would make all our efforts meaningless. Salvation and a meaningful life must both by their very nature be uncertain. In A Writer’s Diary, Dostoevsky observes that if some demon should grant our every wish, the result might at first look like utopia but would soon turn into hell precisely because it is certain. People in such a

world would soon realize that “their lives had been taken away for. . . ‘stones turned into bread’ . . . that it is not possible to love one’s neighbor without sacrificing something to him of one’s own labor . . . and that happiness lies not in happiness but only in the attempt to achieve it.”* With its im-

age of a demon, this passage looks forward to the devil chapter in The Brothers Karamazov, and the reference to stones turned into bread—to the temptations of Christ—of course anticipates the Grand Inquisitor legend. In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin ascribes the true horror of capital punishment to its certainty. A man whose throat has been cut by brigands may still hope, he observes: why, there have been cases when a man begged for

mercy even after his throat had been cut! But a death sentence ofters no hope at all because only one outcome is possible. Time is closed, and we are human only insofar as time is open. Scientific determinism also allows for only one outcome at every moment, and so it constitutes a sort of philosophical capital punishment. It deprives us of our capacity to choose, to surprise, to make ourselves unexpectedly different, and so we lose our 107

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humanness. In yet another way, socialism removes uncertainty and surprise by taking away risk. Dostoevsky hesitated between two very different, if not contradictory, alternatives to the theoretical mind-set of the intelligentsia, and he found a way to reconcile them only in The Brothers Karamazov. One alternative is pure faith, to which one clings in spite of all “opposite proofs.” It leads to ecstatic visions and eschatological hopes. The other alternative that appears repeatedly in Dostoevsky’s novels and essays is eschatology’s temperamen-

tal opposite: the belief in small acts of prosaic goodness, in ordinary decency guided by neither theory nor religious visions but by practical reason. From this perspective, a better world is to be achieved not by a sudden leap or a grand act, which both are almost sure to lead to disaster, but by what Dostoevsky calls “microscopic actions,” one small step at a time.” In Crime and Punishment, Sonya represents faith and Razumikhin prosaic, practical

goodness. I think that the key reason so many readers have found that novel's epilogue to be an artistic failure is that while most of the novel leans toward the Razumikhin idea, the epilogue is cast wholly in Sonya’s terms: and so it does not seem to follow from the novel as a whole. Both ideas remain present and active in each of Dostoevsky’s great works. Yet it is hard to reconcile them. The problem may be stated as follows: practical reason and small acts of goodness clearly seem to be what really work, but they do not seem terribly Christian or spiritual. Razumikhin

is not especially pious. On the other hand, dramatic actions and eschatological strivings seem to reflect deep religious faith but risk making things much worse, as extremism of all types usually does. Basic decency, concern for the person before you, is sacrificed to a grand vision of the whole. Is Fa-

ther Ferapont not the madman of The Brothers Karamazov? In The Demons, Kirillov, Shatov, Pyotr Stepanovich, the insane “prophet” Semyon Yakovlevich—all the madmen, whether believers or atheists—are possessed by one or another eschatological vision leading to horror or disaster.

Eschatology resembles gambling fever: both intoxicate with the promise of a sudden transformation, a metaphysical jolt out of the ordinary world, but in fact make us and our neighbors much worse off. Like epilepsy, they leave us with a horrible disorientation and, like a drinking spree, with

destruction and one or another kind of hangover, as we see from Smerdyakov and Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov. For all the ecstasy of his epileptic visions, Prince Myshkin cannot forget that idiocy faces him as the direct consequence of those “higher moments”; and Dostoevsky, we know, suffered massive loss of memory and feared death from his own epileptic seizures.”

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Readers of The Brothers Karamazov will remember how often the apocalypse is mentioned. Most notably, it forms the basis for the discussion of Ivan’s article in Father Zosima’s cell, and the chapter title “So Be It! So

The God of Onions

Be It!” (bk. 2, chap. 5) cites a call for the Second Coming. The end of the world, the reign of the Antichrist, or the Last Judgment: one or another eschatological motif is envisaged in “Rebellion” (bk. 5, chap. 4), anticipated in “The Grand Inquisitor” (bk. 5, chap. 5), made fun of by Ivan’s devil, and suggested countless other times. What readers generally do not know is that only a few years before writing The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky, in The Diary of a Writer, had himself openly proclaimed that the apocalypse was literally imminent and that the Kingdom of God would at last be realized when Russian troops should occupy Constantinople. These ideas surely will seem quixotic, Dostoevsky asserts, but will be proven literally correct: soon people will have to admit that Don Quixote is now more realistic than Metternich! Realism is changing because the world itself is becoming rapidly and radically different: “Behold, I make all things new!” In 1876, Dostoevsky was specific enough to predict the Kingdom of God for 1877. When his prediction rather obviously failed to be vindicated, he suspended the Diary and set to work on The Brothers Karamazov. It is therefore not surprising that this novel should have reconsidered the apocalyptic interpretation of Christianity and experimented with the alternate, prosaic view."

But could prosaics be Christianized? In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky found a way to do so. He arrived at a paradoxical set of formulations I like to think of rather oxymoronically as “the mythic prosaic.” In fact, the theology of The Brothers Karamazov has been little understood. It

represents a fundamental departure for Dostoevsky and is much stranger than it at first seems. It centers around Alyosha and it directs our attention to the third person of the Trinity. HOW LOVE BECOMES HATRED

Alyosha begins the novel with the wrong sort of faith. How he finds the right faith is his story in this novel. As The Brothers Karamazov begins, the narrator describes Alyosha as sharing the same uncompromising, extremist sense of life and human action

as the socialists and revolutionaries, only turned to God. He is a revolutionary of the spirit, a utopian seeking sudden, absolute perfection. Alyosha believed in God and immortality, but in the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today, the question of the tower of Ba-

bel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on living as before. It is written: “Give all thou hast to the poor and follow 109

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me, if thou wouldst be perfect.” Alyosha said to himself: “I can’t give two rubles instead of “all,” and only go to mass instead of ‘following Him.’”®

What the atheists and revolutionaries share with such Christians is belief in paradise and assurance that it is to be achieved by a sudden transformation. Revolution or Revelation: either would save all humanity at a stroke. Revolutionaries and Christians of this sort share another characteristic: they are extremists. They will not compromise on “two rubles” or, for that matter, on two thousand rubles. Dostoevsky was quite taken with the idealism of the radicals with whom he disagreed. He understood their psychology of selfless devotion because, after all, he had himself been almost executed as a result of just such idealism. And yet this whole complex of beliefs—in imminent paradise, sudden transformation, extremist action, and absolute certainty—turns out to be fundamentally mistaken. One does not have to have lived through the twentieth century, which

realized the totalitarianism predicted with astonishing accuracy in The Demons, to grasp that nothing causes more evil than the attempt to eliminate it entirely and that no one is more cruel to particular people than those who love Humanity. One need only think of the French Revolution or the Spanish Inquisition, both of which are, of course, mentioned in The Brothers Karamazov. In each, love of humanity turned to hatred because of a special law of human psychology that Dostoevsky calls the “law of reflection of ideas” and illustrates with a striking example: [I]t more than once has been noted how, in a family dying of starvation the father or mother, toward the end when the sufferings of the children have become unbearable, will begin to hate those same children whom they had previously loved so much precisely because their suffering has become unbearable. Moreover, I assert that the awareness of one’s utter inability to help suffering humanity, coupled with one’s complete conviction of the existence of that suffering, can even transform the love of humanity in your heart to hatred for humanity.°

This process of transformation has clearly progressed rather far in Ivan, moved so much by the suffering of children whom he cannot help that he has begun to hate humanity. Out of compassion he becomes the most profound misanthrope in world literature. In “Rebellion,” Ivan maintains that one simply cannot love one’s neighbors (much less one’s enemies) and asks “whether that’s due to men’s bad qualities or whether it’s inherent in their nature” (BK, 281). Ivan means that if evil were only a matter of “bad qualities,” then it might be eliminated by education or a different social milieu; but in fact, our very nature is to blame and we are rotten to the core. Theologically, Ivan accepts original sin without the possibility of grace; he correctly sees the propensity for evil as fundamental but mistakenly denies that the potential for goodness goes just as deep. Ivan’s creation, the Inquisitor,

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has also begun to hate people as pitiful empirical beings created in jest and to despise them as so many sheep. His attempt to save them by depriving them of freedom reflects precisely the peculiar form of hatred that is born from heartfelt helpless love. At some point in the career of everyone who expects a sudden trans-

formation of the world, of humanity, and of himself, the failure of the

miraculous change to happen becomes apparent. In a realist novel, as op- . posed to a saint’s life, such a disappointment is presupposed in the story’s very genre. Miracles do not arrive on time, as Alyosha learns when Father Zosima’s corpse begins to stink. In fact, this miracle not only fails but almost

seems to come in reverse. Far from remaining free from the taint of corruption, the elder’s corpse stinks in “excess of nature”’—much as a revolution may not only fail to establish heaven on earth but may actually create hell. Whether by divine will or (more likely) by its own internal logic, the “law of reflection of ideas” shows what is wrong with eschatological hopes, be they secular or religious. They beget the opposite of what they strive for. Antichrist triumphs in the church itself.

IMMEDIATE EXPLOITS When such hopes fail, one experiences hatred of both humanity and one’s self, as we see when Alyosha goes to Grushenka intent on his own fall. Alyosha’s expectation of a miracle, now disappointed, grew out of the very dedication that led him to Zosima and the monastery in the first place. Just before the passage about the tower of Babel and “two rubles,” the narrator describes the importance Alyosha places on the suddenness of the expected transformation: He was to some extent a youth of our time—that is, honest by nature, demanding the truth [pravda], seeking it and believing in it, and, having once believed, demanding rapid participation in it with all his soul, demanding an immediate exploit, and with an absolute desire even to sacrifice everything for this exploit, even life itself... . Alyosha only chose the opposite path from all others, but with the same thirst for an immediate exploit. (BK, 25; emphasis added, translation modified) The repeated phrase “immediate exploit” (skoryi podvig) links Alyosha first of all to terrorists, who also are prepared to sacrifice life to make a sudden change. As has often been pointed out, the name Karamazov recalls Kara-

kozov, the terrorist who made an attempt on the life of the czar, and this novel repeatedly takes glances at the revolutionary movement. Just as important, the phrase also connects Alyosha to the heroes of other literary genres. “Exploits” are performed in folktales, in epics, and in saints’ lives, but the term cannot be used without irony in a realistic novel, where it necessarily comes under the shadow of the quixotic.

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In introducing Alyosha, Dostoevsky therefore makes him what I have elsewhere called a “generic refugee,” someone who enters the realist novel from another genre.’ The prologue to Middlemarch compares its heroine to

Saint Theresa, whose nature “demanded an epic life”; but “later-born Theresas” unfortunately live in a time, and a genre, that makes epic or saintly action impossible. Dorothea’s story thus becomes the story of a heroine from one genre forced to live in another. In much the same way, the hero of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Prince Andrei, thirsts for “glory hovering over me in the mist” as he tries to live an epic life in a novelistic world. Like these two displaced figures, Alyosha thirsts for epic and saintly “exploits.” He wants to

be a hero of the spirit, to witness and participate in the evident triumph of the Christian idea. For Alyosha such exploits must be “immediate”: sudden, dramatic, visible, and unmistakable. And so he expects a miracle to honor Zosima ostentatiously, to silence all the doubters. In this expectation, Alyosha runs counter to the very teachings of Zosima himself. For Zosima emphasizes prosaic Christianity. He seeks the slow internal improvement of each soul, change that happens almost invisibly and whose beneficent results must be taken largely on faith. He alludes repeatedly to the Gospel command not to make a show of piety or goodness. And he does not seem to think “two rubles” a pitiable sum. At the end of the chapter “Peasant Women Who Have Faith” (bk. 3, chap. 3), he is gladdened by a donation of sixty kopecks. Exhorting clergymen, Zosima tells them not to sacrifice all their time

but just another hour a week to reading Gospel stories to the illiterate. In

passages that remind us of what he has already said to Madame Khokhakova, he stresses not grand tests, dramatic struggles, and heroic deeds

but small acts of love and kindness “every day and every hour, every minute.” What matters is what we do at every ordinary moment. You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You don’t know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him. (BK, 383)

As for ordinary evil, so for ordinary good actions: each may inspire others in endless ramifications. The Kingdom of God will come, Zosima explains, only if and when such prosaic acts of kindness change us, bit by bit, from

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within. What happens at every moment matters. Cast a little bread upon the waters. Therefore, we help “humanity” most by not worrying about it. We must, instead, perform the much harder task of being kind to the person before us at every moment. Zosima tells Madame Khohlakova about a doctor he once knew:

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“T love humanity,” he said, “but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams... I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together, as I know by experience. . . . In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. . . . But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.” (BK, 64)

Crucifixion would be an “immediate exploit,” sudden, dramatic, and visible to all but, if Zosima is to be understood, not what Alyosha should be seeking.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUK The failure of the expected miracle provides the catalyst for Alyosha’s change from apocalyptic to prosaic Christianity, which he experiences as intensely as a conversion from atheism to faith: [With every instant he felt clearly and, as it were tangibly, that something Grm 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 and for ever and ever. He had fallen on the earth a weak boy, but he rose up a resolute fighter. . . . “Someone visited my soul in that hour,” he would afterwards say, with firm faith in his words. (BK, 437)

At this moment, he realizes that he has found his new and renewed faith, but the renewal itself has taken place earlier that evening, when he visited Grushenka and heard Father Paissy read the story of Jesus’ first miracle. These two chapters, “An Onion” and “Cana of Galilee” (bk. 7, chaps. 3 and 4), clarify the novel’s interpretation of Christianity, the beliefs that have inspired Zosima, and the sense of the world that will shape Alyosha’s future life. The remarkable story of the onion (luk) falls into two parts, each teaching an important lesson. As Grushenka has heard this tale from her old cook, a wicked woman dies and is cast into the burning lake. Her guardian angel recalls that the woman once carelessly gave an onion to a beggar and informs God of this solitary good deed. You take that onion, God replies, and pull her out of hell with it. Grushenka comments that she is herself just such a wicked woman but has given an onion; and at the end of the chapter, Alyosha also claims to have given her an onion. What have they done for each other? Grushenka wickedly bribed Rakitin to bring Alyosha to her so that she could accomplish his ruin, not because Alyosha has done her any harm but

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ones we associate with Dostoevsky characters. They testify to a source of evil that he comprehended better than anyone else who ever lived. The very existence of goodness offends the sinner personally; it is just this kind of offense that, in The Idiot, defeats Prince Myshkin’s efforts and turns his very beneficence into a source of evil. Alyosha does not know of Prince Myshkin, of course, but the author seems to be posing the Myshkin question anew: How can Christian goodness actually produce good? The answer is: by concentrating on small acts, by giving onions. Grushenka tells Alyosha that he has been her “conscience” and so has unwittingly insulted her very dignity. This is the same logic that motivates Fyodor Pavlovich:

He longed to revenge himself on every one for his own unseemliness. He suddenly recalled how he had once in the past been asked, “Why do you hate so and so, so much?” And he had answered them with his shameless impudence: “T’ll tell you. He has done me no harm. But I once played a dirty trick on him, and ever since I have hated him.” (BK, 98-99)

We hate those who are better than ourselves and we hate even more those who do not resent our injuries precisely because their goodness reminds us of our own baseness. Dostoevsky was the first to articulate in detail this objection to Christianity and to answer it. Innocence begets crime, pacifism leads to war, and turning the other cheek invites bloodshed: or at least such perverse effects may result. But they do not when Alyosha visits Grushenka. Alyosha comes to her not as a saint but as an ordinary sinner. He is in “rebellion,” the same state of soul in which she has wallowed for five years.

He treats her as someone better than he is, as unexpectedly kind to him; and that unwitting kindness of hers, performed as carelessly as the woman in the folktale gave the onion, turns out to make a significant difference. She hardly knows what has happened but feels their roles unexpectedly reversed. Allowing her to think of herself as the one who is superior, who has helped him, constitutes Alyosha’s unexpected gift to her. She gives him an onion, and allowing her to do so is the onion that he gives her. These onions, small things in themselves, overcome the spiteful logic

of offense and resentment as no grand act of goodness ever could, for a grand act of kindness would only make the recipient resent it the more. Sometimes an onion surpasses a banquet.

THE CHOICE AND THE SEED In the second part of Grushenka’s story, when the angel has almost pulled the wicked woman out of hell, the other sinners grab on to her so they may be saved, too, but the woman kicks them off: “[I]t’s my onion, not yours!” she says spitefully. At that moment, of course, the onion breaks. What has 114

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happened here is that the woman has been given a choice to redefine her life. She may make it resemble all her myriad deeds but one, or she can make it resemble the single act of giving an onion; and she makes the wrong choice. If the first part of the story stressed the importance of ordinary acts of goodness, the second emphasizes our power of choice. Our lives consist of good acts and bad, and we may make them like either. As we reflect on our lives, we repeatedly face the wicked woman’s choice. That is another reason that good memories are so important. Even a single one, even the smallest part of a life, can be the basis for our redefinition if we act to make it so. Grushenka’s initial act of kindness to Alyosha was performed carelessly;

but truly to choose goodness, she must do so deliberately. The Pythagoreans held that the first number is really two, for no one counts up to one; and it is in repeating a good act that we make it truly our own. We see this point almost immediately when Grushenka asks Alyosha whether she should forgive her old lover or act spitefully. At this point, she may make the onion she has given Alyosha the principle of her life, or it may remain an isolated incident, as it did for the wicked woman. Alyosha tells her, “but you have forgiven him already” (BK, 428). And will she continue to forgive? What she will do remains open, but she understands what her choice entails. Small things may have great consequences; that is also the logic of the novel’s epigraph. To produce much fruit, it takes only a grain of wheat,

a mere seed. The seed, as we have seen, is how Zosima describes each good and evil act we do every day (“you have planted a seed”). But not all seeds sprout. It is up to us whether the seed will abide alone or bring forth much fruit. The lesson of the onion recurs through this novel. Doctor Herzenstube gave the boy Mitya a small gift, a pound of nuts, and he remembered it all his lite. This unspectacular deed really mattered, and it forms the basis of a good memory, which, as the novel repeatedly teaches, may save one at a crucial moment. A good memory is itself a sort of onion, a small thing with potentially great consequences, as the novel’s ending emphasizes.

THE DREAM AND THE PILLOW Every reader of this novel remembers Mitya’s dream of “the babe”: how, driving past the burned-out peasants, he sees the suffering babe and demands to know not just why this child and these peasants are poor, but why anyone is poor or suffers. And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless, yet

he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it just in that way... . and he wanted to do something for them all, so that the babe should weep no more ... that no one should shed tears again from that moment, and he 115

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wanted to do it at once, at once [seichas zhe, seichas zhe|, regardless of all obstacles, with all the recklessness of the Karamazovs. (BK, 616)

Dostoevsky evokes Ivan when Mitya identifies evil with a suffering child and Alyosha when he desires to eliminate all suffering “at once, at once.” Mitya, too, wants an immediate exploit. But such problems are not solved at once,

and the recklessness of the Karamazov brothers makes matters worse, as Mitya’s life and disastrous decisions demonstrate. As if to show him what the right answer to his question is, Mitya’s dream receives a very different answer when he awakes and is suddenly struck by the fact that there was a pillow under his head, which hadn’t been there when he had leant back, exhausted on the chest. “Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?” he cried, with a sort of ecstatic gratitude, and tears in his voice, as though some great kindness had been shown him. He never found out who this kind man was, perhaps one of the peasant witnesses, or Nikolay Parfenovich’s little secretary had compassionately thought to put a pillow under his head, but his whole soul was quivering with tears. (BK, 616)

Taken together, the dream and the incident with the pillow that immediately follows form a question and its answer. How shall we solve the problem of evil and suffering? By one small good deed at a time, by acts too small for anyone to remember or reward: placing a pillow under a tired person’s head, buying a boy a pound of nuts, or giving an onion to a beggar.

THE EVERYDAY MIRACLE When Alyosha returns from Grushenka’s to the monastery, he feels joy, and joy itself reminds him of Father Zosima, who preached the small joys of life. Alyosha thinks, ““‘He who loves men loves their gladness, too.’ ... He was

always repeating that, it was one of his leading ideas” (BK, 433). These everyday joys are onions, God’s onions to us. Every smile, every ray of sunshine, every onion is an onion. Zosima’s Christianity, as all the monks have commented, contrasts with the grim kind that seeks only terrible sacrifice, despises joys, wears chains, as Ferapont does. The story Father Paissy is now reading over the body, “Cana of Galilee,” emphasizes the peculiar theology that regards Jesus as the bringer of small prosaic delights. Pause for a moment to consider what a strange text Dostoevsky has chosen to exemplify Christianity. This miracle appears in only one of the four Gospels, and it lies entirely outside Jesus’ mission (“Mine hour has not yet come”). Even in this scene, Jesus’ act is not so much as noticed by others: the governor of the feast remarks that the married couple have saved their

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best wine for last, not that their guest has performed a miracle. This miracle is unspectacular because it is the unspectacular that is truly miraculous. In all respects, this passage could not differ more strongly from the one that fills the analogous role in Crime and Punishment, the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Everyone witnesses that dramatic act, and afterwards, people come to see Lazarus, who was raised. That was the most and the marriage of Cana the least dramatic of Jesus’ miracles. Meditating on “Cana of Galilee,” Alyosha remembers that Zosima found holiness in the appreciation of life itself: Gladness, the gladness of some poor, very poor people. . . . Of course, they were poor, since they hadn’t wine enough even at a wedding. .. . and another great heart, that other great being, His Mother, knew that He had come not only to make His great and terrible sacrifice. She knew that His heart was

open even to the simple, artless merry-making of some obscure and unlearned people, who had warmly bidden Him to their poor wedding. “Mine hour is not yet come,” He said with a soft smile (He must have smiled gently to her). And indeed was it to make wine abundant at poor weddings that He had come down to earth? (BK, 434)

In a very real sense, that was why he came down to earth, and it is why the earth itself is sacred. He came not only for his great sacrifice but also to teach us the importance of ordinary joys, ordinary gladness, ordinary kindness and hospitality. “Ah, that miracle! Ah, that sweet miracle! It was not men’s grief, but their joy Christ visited, He worked His first miracle to help men’s gladness,” Alyosha thinks (BK, 433). As Alyosha muses, he dreams he attends the marriage at Cana, for it is always going on, and Jesus is always bidding new guests to that wedding. Father Zosima is there, too, and he explains that anyone who gives an onion can come: Why do you wonder at me [being here]? I gave an onion to a beggar, so I, too,

am here. And many here have given only an onion each—only one little onion. ... What are all our deeds? And you, my gentle one, you, my kind boy, you too have known how to give a famished woman an onion today. (BK, 435)

Here the two sanctifications of the prosaic, the folktale of the onion and the Gospel account of Cana, join in a celebration of the God of wine and onions.

PROLEGOMENON TO ANY FUTURE THEODICY This conception of God shapes not only the novel’s portrait of Jesus but also its entire conception of the Trinity.° The Brothers Karamazov develops not only a Christology but also a pneumatology—a theology of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. Dostoevsky extends the traditional associa-

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tion of the Spirit with Life, with the Creation (brooding over the abyss, the Spirit “mad’st it pregnant”), and with Inspiration.” In this novel, these associations identify the Spirit with the life force, with the sheer love of existence and with the joys always available to us. If we love the earth, we love the Spirit. As if to signal the Trinity’s importance to the novel’s theology, Dostoevsky repeatedly has it mentioned even when nothing in the plot demands

it. Recall that in giving the boy Dmitri a pound of nuts, Herzenstube teaches him to say, in German, “God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit”; Dmitri gets the phrase wrong, so Herzenstube (and Dostoevsky) must repeat it; and when Dmitri, remembering the kindness, strides into Herzenstube’s study twenty years later, he again repeats the German words for the Trinity. In several passages, we learn that the insane Father Ferapont believes that the Holy Spirit comes down to talk personally with him. Less explicitly, when Alyosha says that “someone visited me at that hour,” he presumably means the Holy Spirit, for such inspiring visions and moments are traditionally the gifts of the Spirit. And it may well be that the many memories that turn one to good at crucial moments and the power that restrains Dmitri from killing his father are also the gifts of the Spirit. The Brothers Karamazov has often been described as a novel of enig-

mas, and Ivan, who is always posing them, is himself several times described as a riddle incarnate. And yet, he does not guess the novel’s central riddle, even though his own speeches contain both it and its answer. For this is a riddle about the nature of God and, if Ivan guessed it, he would be on the road to salvation. The riddle appears encoded in the three chapters in which Ivan and Alyosha discuss the ultimate questions, “The Brothers Make Friends,” “Rebellion,” and “The Grand Inquisitor” (bk. 5, chaps. 3, 4, and 5). In “Rebellion,”

Ivan offers his diatribe against God the Father, as Creator of the world in which children suffer. This attack demonstrates the futility not only of all existing theodicies but also of any conceivable attempt to “justify the ways of God to men.” No theory, no ultimate reward, no punishment, could ever make up for, cancel, or otherwise erase the suffering of that little girl in the outhouse or the boy torn to pieces by the dogs. For this is not a question of a mistake made by some theologian but of a flaw in the very project of theology itself. Ivan refutes the very possibility of justifying the Creator. Here is how Ivan summarizes his reasons for rejecting “the higher Harmony’:

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It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to “dear, kind God!” It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for... . But how can they be atoned for? .. . By their being avenged? ... What good

can hell do, since those children have already been tortured... . I want to

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forgive. ... And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. | don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don’t want harmony... . I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. (BK, 290-91; emphasis in the original)

Ivan’s point is unassailable, and Dostoevsky means it to be so. The mother cannot forgive the torturer for the child’s suttering, even if the child should do so, and vice versa. The compass of our love extends far beyond our right to forgive. Some suffering cannot be redeemed. When, at the end of the world, we see not as through a glass darkly but face-to-face, even then there could not be an answer because “the fact”

of the child’s suffering would remain. On the one hand, we might have some abstract and utterly correct justification of the suffering of children; on the other, the fact that they have suffered: Which should we choose? Ivan’s point is that greater love lies with sticking with “the fact” rather than with any theory, even a true theory, for the suffering of innocents outweighs theory. That is what Ivan means in maintaining his position “even if I were wrong,” and he is paradoxically right to do so. It is passages like these that make us see why The Brothers Karamazov retains the power to move and persuade us as Paradise Lost no longer can. When Milton’s God explains that our responsibility is not diminished by God’s foreknowledge and that

everyone, even the children, receive their proper reward or punishment since evil is our own fault, then we can hear Ivan’s moral outrage and “catalogue of facts” subjecting this tissue of theological quibbles to the mockery it deserves.

THE SPIRIT Alyosha at last replies that all Ivan has shown is why the question of suffering cannot be answered with only God the Father. But we are not Jews or Muslims, we have God the Son, Alyosha adds, and so your argument actually strengthens Christian, as opposed to merely theist, belief: “You said just now, is there a being in the whole world who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? But there is a Being and He can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave his Innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him” (BK, 292). 119

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But Ivan has not forgotten him. In fact, as it turns out, Ivan’s question about whether there is a being who could forgive was a prompt, a reminder to Alyosha to mention Jesus, whom Alyosha should have remembered even sooner. “Ah! The One without sin and His blood!” replies Ivan ironically. “No, I have not forgotten Him; on the contrary, ’ve been wondering all the time how it was you did not bring Him in before, for usually all arguments on your side put Him in the foreground” (BK, 292). It is at this point that Ivan offers to recite his “poem” about the Grand

Inquisitor. He presents this legend as a continuation of the argument in “Rebellion.” As that chapter attacks God the Father, this one shows what is wrong with God the Son. Ivan has set up the discussion in just this way, and when Alyosha remembers the second person of the Trinity, he has fallen into Ivan’s trap. Now, for any Christian who recognizes the structure of Ivan’s argument, an obvious question arises—so obvious that I am at a loss to explain

why it does not dominate discussion of this novel but instead remains unasked. There are three persons to the Trinity: If the first two have been refuted, where is the third? In fact, the Holy Spirit, mentioned so often in the novel, is present in the dialogue of Ivan and Alyosha and it provides the tacit solution to Ivan’s questions. In The Brothers Karamazov, the Holy Spirit appears as sheer force of life and love of life. It inspires Zosima’s dying brother to bless all of life, even the birds of the air, who sow not, neither do they reap, yet the heavenly father feedeth them; and the lily, for even Solomon is not clothed in such raiment. Thinking of his brother, Zosima implores: “Love every leat, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things” (BK, 382-83). The poem Dmitri cites from Schiller thus becomes a hymn not only to joy but also to the Spirit, for the two are the same, as we see in the marriage at Cana and in Zosima’s insistence that the joy of life is itself holy. In the lines Dmitri cites, joy inspires all creation, turns the flower to the sun and the soul to God. It echoes and is echoed by Zosima’s words."® Ivan has in fact experienced this joy, though he does not recognize its theological significance. He describes it in “The Brothers Make Friends,” just before his attack on God the Father in “Rebellion” and God the Son in “The Grand Inquisitor.” If I were struck with every horror of disillusionment, he tells Alyosha, I should still want to live. At least until he is thirty, Ivan expects that the “frantic and unseemly thirst for life,” which he considers “a feature of the Karamazovs,” will triumph over everything. The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. ... I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky—that’s all it is. It’s 120

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not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. (BK, 273-74)

Ivan begins ironically by using a materialist metaphor—centripetal force—to describe his longing for the earth. He experiences the joy but remains ironic about it precisely because it is unexplained, inexplicable, “non-Euclidian.” But that’s the whole point, as Alyosha tells him. One must first love life for it to make sense; one cannot love it because one has made sense otf it. “Do you understand anything of my tirade, Alyosha?” Ivan laughed suddenly. “I understand too well, Ivan. One longs to love with one’s inside, with one’s

stomach. You said that so well and I am awfully glad that you have such a longing for life,” cried Alyosha. “I think one should love life above everything in the world.” “Love life more than the meaning of it?” “Certainly, love it, regardless of logic, as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it’s only then one will understand the meaning of it.” (BK, 274)

Ivan is not at all convinced that one must love life more than the meaning of it, love it in spite of logic, and he bans all such “non-Euclidian” considerations from his conversation in the next two chapters. Ivan tries to find justice and meaning by theory, and he shows, more clearly than anyone ever has, that theory cannot answer such questions. Ivan therefore concludes that meaning cannot be found, but his conclusion does not follow. Meaning can be found, but not by theory. It comes not from the top down but from the bottom up, not by argument but by experience—the experience of active love, of sharing people’s joy and exchanging onions with them. Earlier in the novel, Madame Khokhlakova has asked Zosima to prove the soul’s immortality. She demands a theoretical proof, an answer to the atheist doctrines she has heard, which tell her, as Turgenev’s Bazarov says, that only “burdocks” will grow on the grave. Zosima replies not by citing the cosmological or the ontological arguments for the existence of God and im-

mortality but by denying there can ever be a theoretical proof. But that hardly matters, for faith does not come from proof or theory anyway; it comes from experience, from the bottom up: “There’s no proving it, though you can be convinced of it.” “How?”

“By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul.” (BK, 63)

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depends on uncertainty, for only then can we be freely choosing God. Proof of God comes from the devil. That is why in the stories of the temptations, the devil precisely demands of Jesus that he prove his divinity by a miracle: but “Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith freely given, not based on miracle” (BK, 304). We become convinced of God by practicing love. Live in the Spirit and discover life’s meaning. There is no other way. Zosima emphasizes that such love must be performed untheatrically, without any public acknowledgment; love is given as something ordinary, as one gives an onion to a beggar. Love life and love others, and faith may follow. That is what Alyosha means when he tells Ivan that in loving the sticky green leaves, in loving life

more than the meaning of it, he is halfway to salvation. For the Spirit is there for him. Ivan dismisses the love of life as the mere force of the Karamazovs, but in the context of this novel, Karamazovism itself is in reality the perversion of the Spirit. It is the love of life turned in the wrong direction, but at its core is the love of sticky leaves. Karamazovism interprets the love of life as mere sensuality, much as the Inquisitor understands love of humanity as perversely eliminating human freedom. Both perversions reflect how the “law of reflection of ideas” can turn the sacred into its opposite. But the sacred is nevertheless there.!! The answer to Ivan’s riddle, then, is already present in its preface, though he does not see it, much as his diatribe against two persons of the Trinity evokes a tacit answer in the third. Dmitri does learn that the answer to “the babe” is the pillow and Alyosha that one must seek not a public miracle to astonish the unbelievers but the small gift of an onion. We may anticipate that those two brothers, in spite of all the suffering they may still undergo, will be saved, but Ivan may be destined to miss the meaning that lies right before his eyes. He does not see an answer as simple as a leaf: it remains cloaked in its ordinariness, and so a very ordinary demon comes to taunt him. This devil specializes in “witty anecdotes about the other world” and in paradoxes of theology. But the Spirit who gives faith precedes all theology. The God we seek is always before us, in every seed, in the active love we may always practice, and in the onions we may ever give and receive.

Notes In this chapter, Constance Garnett’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov was used.

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, vol. 1, 1873-1876, ed. and trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, II].: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 122

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335 (January 1876, chap. 3, article 3, emphasis in the original) [hereafter cited as WD with page number]. All citations from this and other works of Dostoevsky are occasionally modified for accuracy by comparison with F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenti v tridsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90). 2. I discuss “microscopic actions” in the “Introductory Study” to Dostoevsky (WD, 1-117). This idea represents Dostoevsky’s rethinking of an idea usually associated with Tolstoy, and he alludes to Tolstoy in this connection in Crime and Punishment when Porfiry Petrovich mentions Gen-

eral Mack (a scene in War and Peace). See also Robin Feuer Miller’s comments on connections of Tolstoy with The Idiot in Miller, Dostoevsky and “The Idiot”: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 59-60. 3. See the discussion of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy in the years he prepared for and wrote The Brothers Karamazov in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 4. I discuss Dostoevsky’s apocalypticism in the “Introductory Study” (WD, 1-117); and see Frank’s discussion of Dostoevsky’s religious and political views (Frank, Dostoevsky).

5. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Random House, 1950), 26, hereafter cited parenthetically as BK with page number. 6. WD, 735 (December 1876, chap. 1, article 3; emphasis in the original). Frank interprets this passage as Dostoevsky’s attempt to demonstrate to the populists the danger of accepting Christian values without actually believing in Christ. See Frank, Dostoevsky, 235.

7. I coined the term “generic refugee” in “Genre and Hero/Fathers and Sons: Intergeneric Dialogues, Generic Refugees, and the Hidden Prosaic,” in Literature, Culture, and Society in the Modern Age, ed. Edward J. Brown, Lazar Fleishman, Gregory Freidin, and Richard Schupbach, Stanford Slavic Studies 4:1 (1991): 336-81. 8. For more on the Trinity in The Brothers Karamazov, see Gary Saul Morson, “Dostoevsky and the Holy Spirit,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook: A Publication of Mediterranean, Slavic and Eastern Orthodox Studies 16 (2000): 1-17.

9. “And Chiefly Thou, O Spirit . . . Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first / Was present, and with mighty wings outspread / Dovelike satst brooding on the vast Abyss / And mad’st it pregnant.” John Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1962), p. 6 (bk. 1, Il. 17-22).

10. I think Robert Louis Jackson is correct to observe in regard to Ivan’s arguments for atheism: “Atheism for Dostoevsky is not so much an 1238

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ideology as a state of behavior and consciousness. When the hero of A Raw Youth declares that he is not a believer, his father remarks, “No, you are not an atheist, you are a cheerful person.’ ... One may declare oneself an atheist and yet not be one because of one’s love of, or longing for, life.” Robert Louis Jackson, “Last Stop: Virtue and Immortality in The Brothers Karamazov,” Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 299-300. 11. Robert L. Belknap stresses “love of life” as part of Karamazovism and its connection with its opposite, the tendency to suicide, in Belknap, The Structure of “The Brothers Karamazov” (The Hague: Mouton, 1967; reprint, Evanston, II.: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 22-24 (page citations are to the reprint edition).

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Did Dostoevsky or Tolstoy Believe in Miracles?

SEANCES AND MEDIUMS claiming to be in contact with the dead were very fashionable in the 1870s among the educated Russian public. Within the context of larger debates of that time, spiritualism had a weightiness and plausibility not apparent when we view it in isolation. In the United States, where the modern spiritualist movement had arisen in 1848, the eminent philosopher and scientist William James investigated it in the 1890s and found its claims to be valid.' Two scientists at the University of St. Petersburg, chemist A. M. Butlerov and zoologist N. P. Vagner, spearheaded the spiritualist movement in the 1870s in Russia.” In polemics of the time, the chief antagonist of these two was N. N. Strakhoy, a close friend of both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.’ Philosopher V. S. Soloviev, a protégé of Strakhov and a friend of Dostoevsky, met his philosophical mentor, P. D. Iurkevich, at a séance in 1874 and supposedly remained in communication with him after his death.* In this climate, it is not surprising that both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy comment on the subject in their writings. For both, it is connected to the larger issue of the role of miracles and religion in the modern world. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy created a medium named Jules Landau based on a clairvoyant whom he himself had seen in Paris in 1857 and who had “conducted seances and lectures in Russia in the early 1870s.”? When the hysterical and sexually repressed Lydia Ivanovna convinces Aleksey

Karenin to consult Landau on whether he should grant Anna a divorce, Landau, whether by accident or design, obliges the secret wish of Lydia Ivanovna and Karenin to torture Anna by forbidding the divorce.® This surrender of his conscience to a clairvoyant signals the moral bankruptcy of Karenin, who now also believes in miraculous salvation without good works or repentance. Yet it is appropriate that it is he and Lydia Ivanovna rather than Stiva Oblonsky (who is horrified by the whole event) who are drawn to

spiritualism. It supplies answers, debased and compromised though they may be, to ethical questions that do not even exist for Stiva. Dostoevsky’s January 1876 Diary of a Writer included a satire on spiritualism in which he argued that the discord on this issue was sown by dev125

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ils whose real existence it therefore proved.’ The implication is that the whole debate about devils and angels, if scientifically illegitimate, is psychologically and ethically understandable and sound. Dostoevsky subsequently

visited a séance in February and reported on it in the Diary for March and April (Ps, 22:98-101, 126-32). This séance, with its concealed springs and wires, as he explained in April, deprived him of any wish he might have had to believe in spiritualism and therefore any possibility that he might ever actually believe in it. Although spiritualism itself is not a topic in The Brothers Karamazov, as it is in Anna Karenina, the issues with which Dostoevsky associates it in his three issues of the Diary are. Both the erstwhile existence of devils and the relation between a wish to believe and the possibility of religious belief become important themes in the novel. The malicious and prideful monk Ferapont sees devils because he wants to, and Alyosha believes both in God and in miracles because he is temperamentally inclined to do so. Given Dostoevsky’s forceful denunciation of spiritualism in the April Diary, it is striking that it includes an important caveat. He tells his readers that “even now,” despite his resolute rejection of spiritualism, he does not deny the possibility of “spiritualist phenomena” [spiritskie iavleniia]: in other words, he does not think that these “phenomena,” of which he has had some personal experience, can simply be disproved by the learned commissions currently investigating séances (Ps, 22:127). Spiritualism interested Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as psychologists and moralists because it expressed at one and the same time the spiritual poverty of contemporary lite and a suppressed longing for spirituality. Both Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov locate the cause of spiritual impoverishment in modern scientific thought; and both novels contain experiences that cannot be explained “scientifically.” In this essay, I will explore the status of the miraculous in the two novels with an eye, finally, to defining what kind of “spiritual phenomena,” if any, the two writers might have regarded as real.

In both Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, characters question their belief in God and religion. Konstantin Levin weathers a religious crisis to ground his belief firmly in his own life and consciousness. The Brothers Karamazov, begun in 1878 just after these final episodes of Tolstoy’s novel were published, seems to stand in relation to them as an inferno to a brush fire that the town brigade beats back before it burns out of control. Not only the four Karamazov brothers but also many other characters in the novel wrestle with the temptation of atheism and its consequences. No matter how much Dostoevsky, in his typical fashion, has chosen to escalate the drama, however, and no matter how Tolstoy, as is his wont, plays it down, the situations are similar at their core. Of the various crises of faith that occur in The Brothers Karamazov, the one that most resembles Levin’s is that of Alyosha Karamazov. Both are

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reactions to the death of someone close—in Levin’s case, his brother Nikolai, and in Alyosha’s, Father Zosima. Before these deaths, both men are said to have believed in miracles that would somehow save themselves and others from annihilation (AK, 720; BK, 26). When his brother dies, Levin abandons his innate optimism and interprets the death—and, by extension, the fate awaiting all men—as “an evil mockery by some sort of devil” (AK, 721).

Ideas acquired from an education dominated by scientific concepts— “organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development”—are cold comfort to Levin (AK, 711). No matter how hard he tries to escape the conclusions of scientific reasoning, he eventually has to concede that if one relies on thought alone, the human individual seems to be nothing but a bubble that persists for a while and then bursts. This “untruth” is understood by him as “the cruel mockery by some evil power, a wicked and disgusting power to which it was impossible to submit” (AK, 714). In his February 1877 Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky calls Levin “pure of heart” [chistyi sertsem|] (Ps, 25:56). Alyosha Karamazov is a Dostoevskian version of this new Russian type. Alyosha had attached himself to Father Zosima in order to “escape the world.” He longs for a spiritual purity that _ the world lacks and Father Zosima exemplifies. The rapid putrefaction of Zosima’s corpse seems to Alyosha to be a direct slap in the face by “Someone,” bent on humiliating the best of men. For Alyosha as for Levin, this in-

sult takes the form of the subordination of everything human to mere physical laws. Where was Providence and its finger? Why did it hide its finger “at the most necessary moment” (Alyosha thought), as if wanting to submit itself to the blind, mute, merciless laws of nature? (BK, 340)

Nineteenth-century science of course conceived of nature as merely indifferent. Levin and Alyosha experience it as hostile because it makes no provision for and indeed denies the value of the human individual. Belief in science and especially in physiological materialism, which became widespread in Russia for the first time in the 1860s, gave rise to the modern psychological dilemma, described first by Turgenev in Fathers and Children, then by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground, of the human personality trapped inside a machine.® Turgenev’s Bazarov advocates a scientific understanding of nature, but he mistakenly thinks that he will be exempt from the rules as he formulates them for others. His creator is content simply to make this point and to record Bazarov’s response when he is hoisted on his own petard. In Notes From Underground Dostoevsky goes a step beyond Turgenev to explore the effects on personality of an internalized belief in physiological materialism. The underground man makes fun of those whose actions are not consistent with their science, and at the same time he struggles irra127

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tionally to assert his own freedom. A decade later, similar beliefs in a purely mechanistic universe prompt Konstantin Levin’s desire to kill himself. In the 1870s, both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky worked out responses to the threat posed by modern scientific views. If these responses seem similar, that may be because each man was separately discussing his ideas with their mutual friend Strakhov. The many letters preserved from an intense correspondence between Tolstoy and Strakhov give us some idea of their conversations, which mostly took place at Iasnaia Poliana. Dostoevsky and

Strakhov were together in Petersburg for most of the 1870s and met frequently. They were no longer soul mates, as they had been in the early 1860s, but they were still close intellectual friends. In a letter to Tolstoy written in May 1881, Strakhov wrote that he keenly missed the recently deceased Dostoevsky, who as “his most ardent reader” had read and “subtly understood” his every article.’ One of these articles, a long monograph pub-

lished in several installments in 1878 in the Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshchentia (Journal of the Ministry of Public Education), is called Ob osnovnykh poniatiiakh psikhologii (Basic Concepts of Psychology). It is both a history of modern psychology from Descartes onward and a treatise on the nature of the soul and its relation to external reality. It is also a continuation of Strakhov’s polemics against the spiritualists, in which Strakhov sets out to delineate the physical and spiritual spheres with their

respective and mutually exclusive laws."° |

There can be no doubt that Strakhov was discussing these subjects with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as he planned and wrote his monograph. If proof were needed, Tolstoy at least supplies it when he writes Strakhov that

he had learned a great deal from reading the book, but not as much as he would have had he read it two years ago: “[N]ow what you demonstrate is so indubitable and simple for me (as it is so for 99.999 percent of humanity) that, not carried away by proof of what rings so true to me, I see as well inadequacies in the methods of the proofs.”"’ During the two years in which Tolstoy was absorbing the psychological truths that he finds so ably stated in Strakhov’s monograph, he was writing Anna Karenina. The monograph came out just as Dostoevsky was beginning The Brothers Karamazov.

Both novels depend upon an account of psychology similar to that given in it; and both authors use that psychology in their defense of the possibility of religion in a scientific age.” To ground that psychology in transcendent reality, both rely on “methods of proof” that are very different from

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Strakhov’s.

Strakhov proposes a psychology that validates the individual in terms that are not simply hostile to science. He borrows from empirical psychology, which he credits but which he also corrects in one critical respect. According to him, Descartes, when he emptied the external world of spiritual content, laid the basis for a modern psychology that relocates all meaning

Did Dostoevsky or Tolstoy Believe in Miracles?

in the individual soul. Only my soul, understood as “just the self itselt” (prosto samogo sebia) indubitably exists for me. Everything else, including my body, is part of the external world, whose existence can be doubted (Oop, 20-25). The self becomes Descartes’s Archimedean point, from which he can investigate everything else. To know something means to separate it from the self and hence to objectify it. Each object of analysis requires a subject, which, as the knower, cannot itself be known. The subject, then, by its very nature is not susceptible to being known as an object. By the self, Strakhov claims that Descartes meant that part of the soul that generates not only thoughts, but all emanations of psychic life (Oop, 10). All thoughts,

feelings, and acts of will can.be objectified and studied, but their cause within the soul cannot. The cause itself has no content, no number, it is “always one, and always unchanging” (“vsegda edinoe i vsegda neizmennoe’; Oop, 58). We can know it only negatively, by stating what it is not. This insistence on the unknowability of the self is Strakhov’s main departure from contemporary empirical psychology, and both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky develop its implications. Strakhov defends human autonomy and dignity from attacks by science by distinguishing between what is and is not susceptible to scientific analysis: according to him, materialists and scientists alike make the mistake of applying tools appropriate to the investigation of the objective world to the subjective one (Oop, 30, 60). As he prepared in his notes to the novel to defend Alyosha’s faith and specifically his belief in miracles, Dostoevsky put it this way: “And as for so-called scientific proofs, he [Alyosha] did not believe in them, and was right in not be-

lieving in them, even though he had not finished his studies, it was not possible to disprove matters that by their essence were not of this world, by knowledge that was of this world.”** What we speak of as scientific knowledge, moreover, has its own limitations. Materialists and positivists believe that we can know only objective or empirical reality. On the contrary, argues Strakhov, the only thing an individual experiences directly is himself, his own existence, and psychic phenomena that are reactions to an external world to which he has no direct access. Even the ways in.which we organize reality are in fact the results of a priori categories of time and space inhering in our own minds rather than

in external reality. If that is so, and if, in the other direction, the self is unknowable, then Strakhov paints a bleak picture indeed of what human beings can hope to understand. But neither Strakhov nor Tolstoy or Dostoevsky actually accepted these limitations on knowledge as absolute. While Strakhov agreed with Schopenhauer that “the world is my representation,” he did not mean by it that the world did not exist. Perceptions do reflect some kind of physical reality, and, most important, feelings, thoughts, and will must be grounded in transcendental principles that make them more than merely subjective. 129

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What Strakhov has done in his monograph is to put a Kantian spin on early modern philosophy. Descartes was most concerned to establish the self as the point from which an objective scientific investigation of the world could proceed. To do so, he was willing to sacrifice the very possibility of self-knowledge by positing the self as the “pure subject” (chistyi sub’ekt) of

all objects. Inaccessible to dissection by human reason, after Kant the self becomes a potential safe haven for spiritual truths not verifiable by empirical science. This inner spiritual reality is often said to be known to the heart rather than the mind; as such, it is more the purview of poets than philosophers, and it was his belief in the greater profundity of the knowledge of the heart that made Strakhov feel inferior to his poet friends.’* Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky benefited from Strakhov’s dualism. Self-knowledge understood as knowledge of that supposedly unknowable subject which is the self is reconstituted in their works as inner knowledge of metaphysical reality, the true realm of the “miraculous.” To anticipate what follows, Dostoevsky goes further than Tolstoy in depicting the “other world,” as he sometimes calls it, whose objective existence cannot be proven. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky employs the ideas briefly sketched earlier to solve the problem of the possibility of religious belief

in the modern world. All the characters in the novel are originally selfcentered and unsure of the feelings or thoughts of others, which is presented as natural. All of them see external reality through the subjective lens of their own personalities, and each creates a version of the world corresponding to these visions. The clashes that arise among them stem from the incompatibility of these multiple subjective realities. Such is the case even for Alyosha, who makes the mistake (and cannot but make it) of assuming that all others share his own consistently good intentions. Once he has changed his opinion of Grushenka, for instance, he feels certain that she will give herself to her former lover rather than knife him. The reader, listening to Grushenka and observing her expressions, cannot be so sure. The solution to the conflicts that arise from this natural self-centeredness

lies not in an escape from the self, as might have been required in earlier Christianity, but in deeper self-understanding. In the notebooks to the novel, one of Zosima’s maxims reads: “What is lifeP—-To define oneself as much as possible. I am, I exist. To be like the Lord who says I am who is, but already in the whole plenitude of the whole universe.”'? When characters reform in the novel, they affirm their own existence and, for the first time, the existence of others “in the whole plenitude of the whole universe.” This paradigm applies very neatly to Alyosha Karamazov. He is introduced to the reader as a man who naturally believes in miracles because his subjective point of view mandates this belief. He is as much a realist as is the atheist whose exclusive belief in the laws of nature predisposes him to

discount any miracle. “In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but 130

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miracles from faith” (BK, 26). Alyosha’s education results not in a repudiation of miracles but in a reassessment of the concept of the miraculous. When Zosima’s body begins to stink, Alyosha, already shaken by Ivan’s argument about divine injustice or indifference, experiences this situation as a kind of reverse miracle: Why, he asks himself, did the body have to decay so rapidly and conspicuously? In other words, Alyosha, as the narrator tells us, remains true to his fundamentally religious temperament, but, provoked by Ivan, he rebels against God’s world. What restores Alyosha’s trust in God is the revelation of Grushenka’s innate goodness. Like his brothers, Alyosha has created the world in his own image. With his passionate commitment to purity—what the narrator calls in one place his “wild, frenzied modesty and chastity” (“dikaia, istuplennaia stydlivost’ i tselomudrennost’”; BK, 20)—-Alyosha has denied his own corporeality and especially his sensuality. He projects onto the world a distorted image of humanity divided into saints like Zosima and sinners like Grushenka, whom he sees as a prisoner and advocate of the dumb and blind laws of carnal pleasure. In revenge for the humiliation of Zosima, Alyosha decides to submit himself exclusively to her and those laws. When he arrives at Grushenka’s, however, he finds her

in a state that cannot be explained with reference to them. In the final, ~ fourth chapter of book 7, Alyosha’s faith in humanity then not only revives but expands. For all its ecstatic tone (which is meant to convey Alyosha’s mood), the description of Alyosha’s reconciliation with faith is very precise and psychologically detailed. First, he has a sensation of inner commotion and orderliness at the same time. His soul was overflowing, but somehow vaguely, and no single sensation stood out, making itself felt too much; on the contrary, one followed another in a sort of slow and calm rotation. But there was sweetness in his heart, and, strangely, Alyosha was not surprised at that. (BK, 359) Alyosha is having the experience, dubbed “sweet” and rare in Dostoevsky’s world, of feeling himself altogether in one place. The “sensations” (oshchu-

shcheniia) do not move in and out, as they would in a moment of active involvement with the world, but circle slowly, not forming into actual perceptions. These sensations are wholly internal, yet they are reactions to external events, their internal assimilation. After them (and perhaps arising out of them) come thoughts: Fragments of thoughts [mysli] flashed in his soul, catching fire like little stars

and dying out at once to give way to others, yet there reigned in his soul something whole, firm, assuaging, and he was conscious of himself. (BK, 359)

Sensation by its nature is not self-conscious, but thought is, and so at this moment, the same “I” that feels sweet both emits thoughts and at the same 131

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time is conscious of itself as something “whole.” As he recovers from the disorientating experiences of the previous day, during which he has doubted his connection to immortality, the “one and unchanging” part of Alyosha’s soul (to use Strakhov’s terminology) makes itself felt. There follows Alyosha’s half-waking dream in which thought weaves sensation into fantasy and commentary on the text of the marriage at Cana that is being read over Zosima’s body in the background. Awakening from the dream, Alyosha runs outdoors to fall down on the earth (as he had done when his crisis began), but this time in ecstatic joy. Nature presents itself to him in the form of a great cathedral, with the sky its dome (nebesnyi kupol). Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn flowers in the flowerbeds near the house had fallen asleep until morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars .. . Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, threw himself to the earth. (BK, 362)

In the last sentence Alyosha is said to be “cut down” by the appearance of nature as a sacred cathedral. But the appearance is itself a product of his newly formed consciousness, and in this sense, it is as much a fantasy as the dream sequence that precedes it. It differs from the dream only because it presents itself to Alyosha as external reality. Alyosha’s own thoughts, which were said to have flashed like stars through his soul and therefore anticipate the starry sky that he sees, are responsible for this new interpretation. His mind actively if unself-consciously interprets and thereby shapes sensations stimulated in him by external reality; it turns them into perceptions, which in this case are more like symbols. Alyosha responds to the symbolism as if it came from outside. Alyosha’s embrace of the earth is a physical expression of his embrace of the “whole plentitude of the whole universe” of which Dostoevsky had spoken in the notebooks to the novel. Once he has opened himself in this

way, he experiences the sensation of being at a center point where all worlds meet and vibrating in tune with all of them. He is in a frenzy of forgiving and forgiveness, in a state where boundaries ‘between himself and the world seem to be dissolved. At the same time as he flows outward, however, a reverse motion is occurring:

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But with each moment he felt clearly and almost tangibly something as firm and immovable as this heavenly vault [nebesbyi svod] descend into his soul. Some sort of idea, as it were, was coming to reign in his mind—now for the whole of his life and unto ages of ages. He fell to the earth a weak youth and

Did Dostoevsky or Tolstoy Believe in Miracles?

rose up a fighter, steadfast for the rest of his life, and he knew it and felt it suddenly, at that very moment of his ecstasy. Never, never in his life would Alyosha forget this moment. “Someone visited my soul in that hour,” he would say afterwards, with firm belief in his words . . . (BK, 362-63)

As Alyosha moves out of the erotic frenzy of which (like David dancing naked before the ark) “he was not ashamed,” something from outside and above—it is “like” the heavenly arch, and therefore is not it—seems to him to possess his soul and organize it according to what he calls an “idea” that turns him from a weak boy into a warrior. As should be clear by now, Alyosha’s later version of what happened to him—*“Someone visited me”—

does not jibe in any simple way with the narrator's account of the event as it unfolds. A complex interaction between Alyosha and “reality” takes place in which Dostoevsky intentionally leaves uncertain what comes from inside and what from outside. The “heavenly vault” itself is one case in point: it is a metaphor built on the unavoidable but scientifically false human perception of the sky as round and finite. In this sense, it comes not from reality but from Alyosha, who then feels something “like” it enter him in the form of moral principles. The heavenly vault makes an appearance in book 8 of Anna Karenina -and also in Basic Concepts of Psychology. Strakhov cites it—using the term nebesnyi sood—as an example of the reality of universal perceptions whether or not they correspond to external reality (Oop, 38). Levin uses it to assert the validity of his “subjective” belief in a humanly meaningful universe: Lying on his back he was now gazing at the high cloudless sky. “Don’t I know that that is infinite space, and not a rounded vault [kruglyi svod|? But however I may screw my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot help seeing it as not round and not limited, and despite my knowledge of limitless space I am in-

dubitably right when I see a firm round vault [tverdyi goluboi svod], and more right than when I strain to see beyond it.” (AK, 724.)

Dostoevsky’s use of the heavenly vault may be a hidden reference to one or both of the previous ones. Be this as it may, the metaphor figures in all three texts as part of a defense of the human from the degrading reductionism of science. The two poets carry this argument much further than the scientist-

philosopher, but Strakhov lays the groundwork for their more ambitious visions when he modifies empirical psychology to move the nucleus of the psyche, the self, into the realm of metaphysical knowledge that is inaccessible to human reason. For both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the individual psyche becomes a gateway to a transcendental reality otherwise inaccessible. Despite these connections, however, and even if both Dostoevsky and Strakhov are quoting Tolstoy, the two poets have differing ideas of what we

can actually know about the transcendental reality in which both need to believe. This is evident from a comparison of the respective epiphanies of 1338

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Alyosha and Levin. Levin discovers a truth that he feels he has always known.

Fyodor’s words “produced in his soul the effect of an electric spark, suddenly transforming and welding into one a whole group of disjointed impotent separate ideas which had never ceased to occupy him. These ideas unbeknownst to himself were occupying him when he was talking about letting the land” (emphasis added). So internal but separate ideas that together make up a larger truth were waiting only for an external catalyst to make themselves known. When they do come together, Levin declares that he now “knows” what not only he, but all of humankind, have always known. “And I did not find this knowledge in any way, but it was given to me, given

because I could not have taken it from anywhere.”’® Levin says, furthermore, that he has been living right while he thinks wrong. That, of course, is what saves him from the fate of Anna, who, because she lives wrong, does not have access to the knowledge that is hidden in her, too. Unlike Levin, Alyosha feels that his new knowledge comes from outside: this is what he means when he says, “Someone visited me.” He has a

sense that a formative moral idea enters him and turns him from a “weak youth” to a warrior. As I have shown previously, this sense is mistaken to the extent that Alyosha’s fortitude rests upon newly constituted inner foundations. Despite this fact, however, Alyosha’s perception that his new resolu-

tion comes from outside him is a valuable clue both to his state of mind and also to the relation of real and ideal according to Dostoevsky. As with Levin, another person’s words—in Alyosha’s case, the words and deeds of Grushenka—create the initial conditions for his epiphany. As with Levin, these words both unsettle his feelings and thoughts and precipitate significant knowledge. Before this knowledge can coalesce, however, Alyosha has another experience, a dream. He falls asleep as the biblical passage about the marriage at Cana is being read over the coffin of Zosima. He comments on this passage in his sleep, and then Zosima appears before him and summons him to the marriage feast. At this point, Alyosha’s dream state deepens and the physical laws of nature are suspended. To mark this shift from objective to subjective reality, Dostoevsky mentions that (in Alyosha’s perception) the room moves (komnata razdvigaetsia); and then to emphasize

it, he repeats the information in the same paragraph (opiat’ razdvinulas’ komnata). When the physical laws that hold a room in place no longer obtain, the decree of death visited on every individual who has lived or lives is also lifted. Zosima does not rise from his coffin, which has disappeared. Alyosha simply recognizes him as one of the guests at the table. It is Zosima who calls Alyosha with words that suggest his resurrection: “Why have you buried yourself here where we can’t see you . . . come and join us” (“Zachem siuda skhoronilsia, chto ne vidat’ tebia . . . poidem i ty k nam’; BK, 361). The effect is that Alyosha wakes from the dead to the living life of his dream.

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The status of dreams in the novel and the appearance in them of transcendental, ideal reality becomes clearer if we compare Alyosha’s dream with the appearance of the devil to Ivan later in the novel. As is appropriate for an advocate of philosophical materialism, the devil insists that he is part of the physical world. Ivan, however, wants desperately to believe that the devil is a figment of his imagination. He is in fact dreamed up by Ivan and vanishes when Alyosha knocks on his window, but—most significantly—that does not mean that the devil is not real. Using analytic reason, Ivan has assumed the stance of an outside observer vis-a-vis not only external but also his own internal reality. He cuts himself off from transcendental reality through his rationalism and his egotism. When his imagination conjures up the devil, he wants to keep this stirring of spiritual life safely

fictional, even though his devil is much closer to him personally than, say, the Grand Inquisitor in his safely distanced story of medieval times. Alyosha, by contrast, takes his dream literally, as a timeless visitation to him by Zosima and even Christ. This is what he means when he says that “someone visited him.” Just how real is this other, deathless world? Dostoevsky seems to suggest that it can actually appear to us in our dreams and fantasies.*" Alyosha’s

dream seems to transpose him to another world not apparent in our waking life because a priori rules of time and space block our access to it. In dreams, these rules are suspended, and Alyosha’s final epiphany takes place at the crossroads of “numberless” worlds that momentarily intersect within him. The confidence that Dostoevsky has in the “reality” of Alyosha’s vision is expressed in his use of the Russian word kupol—dome—tor the sky as it appears to Alyosha when he steps out into nature (BK, 362). A few lines later “something as firm and immovable as this heavenly vault [nebesnyi svod]” is said to descend into Alyosha’s soul. A kupol in Russian is not the

inside of the dome of a cathedral but its outside: Dostoevsky’s choice of words suggests that at this epiphanic moment Alyosha momentarily sees the other, transcendental world whole and from the outside. Back in Anna Karenina, Levin has no dream, and his epiphany runs a different course from Alyosha’s. Fyodor’s words ignite a chain of interwoven thoughts and reminiscences, but during this process Levin remains entirely within himself. His inspired idea organizes “a whole swarm of various, impotent, separate thoughts that had always preoccupied him.” It comes not

from the Bible but from traditional peasant wisdom, which, Levin maintains, is both universal and natural. Whereas Alyosha finds his ideals in a book—and later writes a book himself—Levin finds the truth only when Fedor’s words release “unclear but significant thoughts” that before had been “locked up” in his soul but now, “all streaming toward a single goal, began to whirl in his head, blinding him with their light” (AK, 719). When he has finished spinning out the consequences of his return to truth, he 135

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stops thinking and listens “to mysterious voices joyfully and earnestly discussing something among themselves” (AK, 724). Elsewhere in the novel, Levin, too, makes contact with another world. This happens not when he is contemplating but during fundamental life experiences: courtship and marriage, the death of his brother, and the birth

of his son. Birth and death are “miracles” that elevate the ordinary life above mechanical process and infuse it with the sacred. In the words of the

poet Fet commenting on the connection between Nikolai’s death and Mitya’s birth, birth and death are “two holes [from the material] into the spiritual world, into Nirvana.” They are “two visible and eternally mysterious windows.”'® In Mir kak tseloe (The World as One Whole), published in 1872, Strakhov argued that birth and death, the main events of organic (as opposed to mechanical) life, cannot be understood scientifically. Here |in birth and death] everything is incomprehensible, everything is mysterious and science does not see even a path by which it might arrive at a resolution to the questions that present themselves. . . . Investigations show that these miracles ... are taking place now, here, before our very eyes. From this point of view, it is very just to say Divine creation does not cease even for a minute, that the great secret of the creation of the world is taking place before us up to this very moment.”

These are the central mysteries that elevate ordinary life above the merely mechanical and, of course, give a sacred dimension to the family. Although Tolstoy nowhere acknowledges this, the “family idea” in Anna Karenina may derive its theoretical validity from The World as One Whole, which he very much admired.” If this is so, then Strakhov is one important source of the pantheism that is still present in Anna Karenina, albeit in a different and much diminished form than in War and Peace. The “family idea” (like the “idea of the people” in War and Peace) has nothing to do with the mind at all. In the passage from The World as One Whole, Strakhov places limits on what human reason can discern, and this idea would have been very attractive to Tolstoy. Wherever Strakhov stepped beyond those limits, Tolstoy would take him to task for doing so. In Basic Concepts of Psychology, in a chapter entitled “The Real Life of the Soul” (“Real’naia zhizn’ dushi”), Strakhov tries to prove the objective status of psychic lite, whether awake or asleep, by deducing a priori objective categories of truth (istina), goodness (blago), and freedom (svobodnaia deiatel’nost’) that underlie thought, feeling, and will, respectively. Our thoughts have to comprise real knowledge; our feelings have to relate to our real good, they have to be part of our real happiness; our desires have to be possible to realize, destined for realization and [destined to] be translated into real actions. Under these conditions our inner world takes on the significance of full reality and loses its illusory character; life turns from a dream into real life. (Oop, 73) 136

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Although Tolstoy agreed that it was necessary to anchor the life of the psyche, and especially moral life, in transcendental truths, he regarded Strakhov’s way of doing this, by logical deduction, as the weakest part of his book (T-Pss, 62:45). For Tolstoy as for Dostoevsky, you can’t get to meta-

physical reality via deduction. Logic must be suppressed, or at least subordinated to feeling before we have access to higher truths. The “truth” (istina) or “sense” (smysl) that Levin discovers comes to him in the form of the “voices” of what Boris Eikhenbaum has called “moral instincts.”?! These

voices originate in the conscience, which is presented as harmonious and dialectical rather than logical, and Levin contemplates it directly after he stops thinking. “Levin had already ceased thinking and only as it were hearkened to mysterious voices that were joyously and earnestly discussing something among themselves” (AK, 724). The voices are “mysterious” (tainstvennye) because they are not accessible to the mind. In Anna Karenina, voices from the other world may speak moral truths in our souls, and the birth and death of each individual may have something otherworldly about it, but no direct images of it ever appear, even in dreams. Tolstoy indicates the uncertain status of Levin’s experience with the words “as it were” (kak by): neither Levin nor Tolstoy’s reader can be sure that Levin “really” hears those voices.

: We are now in a position to judge the relative position of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on “spiritualist phenomena” in Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov. In his battle with the spiritualists, Strakhov insisted wpon a clear separation between matter and spirit. He considered spiritualism itself to be improper because it countenanced the “miraculous” suspension of the laws of space and time in the realm of matter where these are immutable.” In Anna Karenina and subsequently, Tolstoy accepted Strakhov’s dualism and therefore limited the “miraculous” to the sphere of ethics. Another world may in fact exist, and it may elevate the ordinary to the level of the sacred, but it expresses itself in us only through the voice of the conscience. While Levin remains alone after his epiphany, he sees the world around him in symbolic terms.” This assimilation of objective to subjective reality comes to an abrupt halt when he rejoins his family and guests in a return to active life. The insinuation, as Levin himself formulates it for himself later on, is that self-consciousness and conscience do not transform the world, although they give individuals some measure of self-control and dignity within it. Levin will have to be content with that and hence content with his own limited knowledge and moral fallibility. Dostoevsky, too, limits “spiritualist phenomena” to psychology and ethics. In The Brothers Karamazov, however, subjective reality intrudes upon the objective world so powerfully as to transform it into various hybrids that mix the two. “Spiritualist phenomena” enter the world through the human psyche, through dreams, fantasies, and visions. They have no 137

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physical, natural existence that can be validated by a scientific commission such as the one set up in 1875 by D. I. Mendeleyev to study spiritualism, but they are nonetheless real. It is through these phenomena, good and evil, that moral progress (or regress) takes place, and the human world actually changes to reflect their presence. Alyosha’s dream of the marriage of Cana is such a visitation. His embrace of the earth and his vision of it as a sacred temple is an imposition on external reality of a psychological disposition conditioned by his vision. Through men like Alyosha, who fell down a “weak youth” and rose up a “fighter, steadfast for the rest of his lite,” the world acquires a spiritual dimension. Alyosha not only becomes the compiler and arranger of a saint’s life, but the end of the book finds him busy implanting sacred memories in the boys who represent Russia’s next generation. Alyosha is not psychologically transformed by his experience; rather, one might say that he is psychologically confirmed. Even after his divine visitation, he still may be said to have too rosy and therefore subjective a view of the human condition. Reality as it appears in the novel is something different from what Alyosha imagines it to be during this privileged moment. Carnality and egotism are still present in sexual love along with the erotic desire to sacrifice the self that Alyosha witnesses in Grushenka and experiences himself in his ecstasy. The real miracle of human life that we readers are meant to extract from the scene with Grushenka is that the potential for

good as well as pure egotism coexist in the soul and that we are free to choose the good even when the laws of nature give us no reason for doing so. But Alyosha is more, not less, convincing as a character because he is not all wise. Through Alyosha, Dostoevsky sets out to fulfill two of his most cherished goals. Having failed (by his own lights) in The Idiot, he tries once again to create a man who is both truly good and convincingly human. This good man will move from a naive understanding of the miraculous to a valid one. His faith will be psychologically grounded and comprehensible but not simply subjective. Rather than argue for the existence of religious principles, Dostoevsky will embody them in Alyosha (and other characters in the book). The strength of his argument will depend on the degree to which

we accept these characters as psychologically plausible. I we do, and if we take their self-understanding as plausible as well, then Dostoevsky will have succeeded in planting seeds of religious belief in the modern world. In the future, moreover, these seeds will transform not just individuals but the world.

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Notes

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Russian in 2000 in a Festschrift for L. D. Gromova-Opulskaya. See “Psikhologiia vevy v “Anne Kare-

Did Dostoevsky or Tolstoy Believe in Miracles?

ninoi’ i v “Brat’iakh Karamazovykh,’ in Mir filogii Posviashchaetsia Lidii Dmitrievne Gromovoi-Opulskoi (Moskow: Nasledie, 2000), 235-45. 1. Two sisters, Katherine and Margaret Fox, from Hydesdale, New York, near Rochester, became world famous when they claimed in 1848 to have communicated with the spirit of a man murdered in their house. They later confessed that they themselves had made the tapping sounds that sup-

posedly came from the dead man, but this confession did not stop the movement they had started. 2. Linda Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov, Philosopher, Man of Letters, Social Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 162. 3. His journal articles against Butlerov and Vagner were eventually republished in a collection entitled O vechnykh istinakh (St. Petersburg, 1887).

4. Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov, 167-68. Kennoske Nakamura compares the tendency to mysticism in Soloviev and Dostoevsky. See Kennoske Nakamura, Chuvstvo zhizni i smerti u Dostoevskogo (St. Petersburg: Izdanie Dmitrii Bulanin, 1997), 265-71. o. C. J. G. Turner, A Karenina Companion (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1993), 178. 6. L. N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: The Maude Translation, 2d ed., ed. and rev. George Gibian (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 661-68 [hereafter cited parenthetically in text as AK with page number].

7. F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols. (Leningrad,1972-88), 22:32-37 [hereafter cited parenthetically in text as Ps with volume and page number]. Here and elsewhere in the essay, translations from the Russian are my own. Citations of The Brothers Karamazov are from the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), and translations of Anna Karenina are from AK, but I modify both where necessary to bring out special features in the Russian text. 8. David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 5, 55. 9. The relations between Strakhov and Dostoevsky were complicated.

On this subject, see, among others, A. S. Dolinin, “F. M. Dostoevskii i N.N. Strakhov,” in Shestidesiatye gody: materialy po istorii literatury i obshchestvennomu dvizheniiu, ed. N. K. Piksanov (Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1940), 238-54; Robert Louis Jackson, “A View from the Underground: On Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov’s Letter about His Good Friend Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky and on Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s Cautious Response to It,” in Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,

1993), 104-20: L. M. Rozenblium, Literaturnoe nasledstvo 83 (1971): 17-23, reprinted in L. M. Rozenblium, Tvorcheskie dnevniki Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Nauka, 1981), 30-45; and N. Skatov, “N. N. Strakhov 139

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(1828-1896),” in N. N. Strakhov, literaturnaia kritika (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1984), 40-41. 10. Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov, 164-65. 11. Tolstoy to Strakhov, 29 May 1878. See L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1928-58), 62:425 (hereafter cited as T-Pss with volume and page number). 12. The monograph was reprinted in 1886 as part of book called Ob osnovnykh poniatiiakh psikhologii i fiziologii (St. Petersburg: Tipografia brat’ev Panteleevykh) [hereafter cited as Oop with page number]. Page references to the monograph are from this edition, which is the one preserved with Tolstoy’s marginalia at the lasnaia Poliana library. 13. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for “The Brothers Karamazov,” ed. and trans. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 27. 14. See, for instance, his concessions to Dostoevsky in the early 1860s (Literaturnoe nasledstvo 86 [1973]: 561-62) and his many expressions of admiration for Tolstoy’s poetic gifts. One example of this would be an exclamation in an 1873 letter to Tolstoy: “[H]low joyful for me is the thought that you, the kindest of all poets, confess faith in good as the essence of human life. I imagine that for you this thought has a warmth and light completely incomprehensible to blind men such as I” (N. N. Strakhov, Perepiska L. N. Tolstogo s N. N. Strakhovym 1870-1894, vol. 2, ed. and intro. B. L. Modzalevskii [St. Petersburg: Izdanie obshchestva Tolstovskogo muzeiia, 1914], 93-24), 15. Dostoevsky, Notebooks, 98.

16. As Liza Knapp points out, the name Feodor comes from the Greek “Theodoros” meaning “gift of god,” and it is the peasant Fyodor who ignites the train of thought in Levin’s mind. See Knapp, ““Tue-la! Tue-le!’: Death Sentences, Words, and Inner Monologue in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and “Three More Deaths,’” Tolstoy Studies Journal 11 (1999): 12. 17. On the eve of beginning The Brothers Karamazov, in his Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky published a little story, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” which depends on just such a reversal as occurs to Alyosha between waking reality and dreams. In both instances, the ontological status of the dreams is left deliberately vague. 18. L. N. Tolstoi, L. N. Tolstoi: Perepiska s russkimi pisateliami, ed. S. Rozanova (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1962), 336. 19. N. N. Strakhov, Mir kak tseloe. Cherty iz nauki o prirode (St. Petersburg, 1872), 78-79, 82. 20. See his letters of November 12 and 17, 1872 (T-Pss 61:345—49) and of late 1875 (T-Pss 62:235). 140

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21. Boris Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi, vol. 2 (1928/1931; Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1968), 216. 92. Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov, 164—66.

23. On this subject, see Donna Tussing Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847-1880 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 200-1.

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Susanne Fusso

The Sexuality of the Male Virgin: Arkady in A Raw Youth and Alyosha Karamazov

IVAN KARAMAZOV ASKS, “Who doesn’t desire the death of his father?” thus seeming to anticipate Freud’s Oedipal theory of human sexual development. But one must remember that Ivan speaks out of madness and error and that the novel ends by emphasizing the love that exists between fathers and sons, not the hatred and rivalry. In pre-Freudian thought about sexuality, and in Dostoevsky’s created world, there are no master narratives of human desire—there are only case studies. There are temperamental quirks, moral choices, and, especially in Dostoevsky, divine intervention. A close examination and reconstruction of the pre-Freudian, nineteenth-century European understanding of sexuality is central to a better understanding of Dostoevsky’s artistic representation of human desire.’ In this essay I would like to consider one of his case studies, the sexual development of Alyosha Karamazov. The corruption of female innocence is of course a major theme in Dostoevsky’s novels, where the rape of female children is a haunting, obsessively recurring motif. But Dostoevsky was also concerned with depicting the way in which the virginity of young men is assaulted by the world. In the Diary of a Writer for January 1876, Dostoevsky described the hero of his 1875 novel A Raw Youth in terms that emphasize the theme of virginity and corruption: Ja vzial dushu bezgreshnuiu, no uzhe zagazhennuiu strashnoiu vozmozhnostiu razvrata, ranneiu nenavist’iu za nichtozhnost’ i “sluchainost’” svoiu i toiu shirokost’iu, s kotoroiu eshche tselomudrennaia dusha uzhe dopuskaet soznatel’no porok v svoi mysli, uzhe leleet ego v serdtse svoem, liubuetsia im eshche v stydlivykh, no uzhe derzkikh i burnykh mechtakh svoikh,—vse eto ostavlennoe edinstvenno na svoi sily i na svoe razumenie, da eshche, pravda, na boga.” J took a soul that was sinless, but already befouled by the terrible possibility of depravity, by an early hatred caused by his insignificance and “accidental” 142

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birth, and by that breadth with which a still chaste soul already consciously admits vice into his thoughts, already nurtures it in his heart, feasts his eyes upon it in his shamefaced but already daring and passionate daydreams—all this being left exclusively on his own strength and his own powers of understanding, and also, it’s true, on God.

There are several ideas in this passage that I would like to develop in relation both to the hero of A Raw Youth, Arkady Dolgoruky, and to the ostensible hero of The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha Karamazov, the course of whose sexual development, I will argue, is being unobtrusively narrated alongside the more lurid story of his father’s murder. First is the idea that physical virginity does not coincide with moral virginity, that the sexually inexperienced person can yet have a rich and even debauched sexual life. The second, related idea is the power of mechty (dreams) to create such a lite. Finally, there is the idea that God may play a role in helping the individual in his or her struggle with what Dostoevsky calls “depravity.” How does depravity—razvrat—enter the virginal soul? Through the ears. Arkady has been educated in a typical Russian boarding school, where conversations “on a certain nasty subject” (Ps, 13:273) are the norm. By the age of nineteen, he knows about “various nasty and swinish things” that “the

filthy imagination of the filthiest debauchee could not dream up” (Ps, 13:78). “I of course acquired all this knowledge in elementary school, even before the .gymnasium, but only the words, not the deed [lish’ slova, a ne delo|” (Ps, 13:78).° The typical next step after hearing dirty stories is to develop them in fantasy, those “shamefaced but daring and passionate daydreams” of which

Dostoevsky speaks in the Diary of a Writer. In Emile, Rousseau warns of the power of such images: “The memory of objects that have made an impression upon us, the ideas that we have acquired follow us in our retreat and people it in spite of ourselves with images more seductive than the objects themselves.”* Such dreams are apt to lead to masturbation, which in turn leads to countless physical maladies: It would be very dangerous if instinct taught your pupil to trick his senses and to find a substitute for the opportunity of satisfying them. Once he knows this dangerous supplement, he is lost. From then on he will always have an ener-

vated body and heart. He will suffer until his death the sad effects of this habit, the most fatal to which a man can be subjected.” In the Confessions, Rousseau explains that it is precisely the dreamer of the Dostoevskian type who falls prey to this practice: This vice, which shame and timidity find so convenient, has a particular attraction for lively imaginations. It allows them to dispose, so to speak, of the whole female sex at their will, and to make any beauty who tempts them serve their pleasure without the need of first obtaining her consent.® 143

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Dostoevsky was clearly aware of this passage. In preparatory notes toward the writing of The Devils (1871), the following phrase appears (probably in a speech destined for the lips of Pyotr Verkhovensky): “Drunkenness, homosexuality, and masturbation like Rousseau are also useful. It all leads everything to the common level” (“Polezno tozhe p’ianstvo, muzhelozhestvo, rukobludstvo, kak Russo. Eto vse podvodit k srednemu urovniu”; Ps, 11: 972).

Rousseau’s emphasis on the power of the imagination to provide sexual experiences that are as “real” as any physical sensations is echoed in an 1869 Russian sociological text, G. I. Arkhangelsky’s “Life in St. Petersburg According to Statistical Data.”’ Arkhangelsky goes so far as to assert that virginity is impossible for men, if one defines it as “lack of familiarity with sexual pleasure, with the pleasant shock to the organism that accompanies the ejaculatio semenis.”* Even religious “fanatics” who have fled to forests and deserts in order to preserve their chastity are not safe: “Semen continues to be produced in the body, a reflex in the brain calls forth thoughts of a woman, a reflex of sight and hearing calls forth hallucinations, and the ascetic, who does not have the possibility of encountering a woman for hundreds of miles around, falls, seduced by a woman created by his imagina-

tion.”’ Clearly Dostoevsky could find multiple sources for the idea that virginity is a matter not just of body but of mind. Arkady is a quintessential dreamer, who has concocted his own rich fantasy life, based on the idea of becoming a Rothschild. But he indicates that he has not succumbed to the temptation Rousseau warns against. According to the medical wisdom of the time, the masturbator could be recognized by his complexion, which is either excessively pale or jaundiced. Arkady bears on his face the physical proof that he has abstained: Yes, I daydreamed |mechtal] with all my might, to the point that I had no time to talk to people; from this they deduced that I was unsociable, and from my absentmindedness they deduced even nastier things about me, but my rosy cheeks proved the opposite. (Ps, 13:73)"°

Still, there is a sense that Arkady’s excessive devotion to his mechty has something masturbatory about it; he repeatedly speaks of “hiding under a blanket” when indulging in his fantasies (Ps, 13:98, 164, 273). The main object of Arkady’s fantasy life, Katerina Nikolaevna, a seemingly unattainable, older, society beauty, actually meets Arkady for a téte-atéte, mainly because he possesses a document that could lead to her being disinherited by her father. When Arkady’s father, Versilov, who is also obsessed with Katerina Nikolaevna, learns of their meeting, he sends her an insulting letter accusing her, in so many words, of being a female Svidrigailov or Stavrogin:

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My Dear Lady, Katerina Nikolaevna, No matter how depraved you may be by your nature and art, J still thought that you would restrain your passions and at least not make an attempt on a child. But you were not embarrassed to do this. .. . Do not corrupt a young man for no reason. Spare him, he is still a minor, almost a boy, immature both mentally and physically; what use is he to you? (Ps, 13:258)

Although Versilov’s jealousy and incipient madness have dictated this letter,

there is a measure of truth to it. The reader has the queasy sense that Arkady is easily taken advantage of by sexual predators like Katerina Nikolaevna and his schoolmate Lambert, even if their seduction remains a matter of words, not deeds. Arkady is the narrator of A Raw Youth, and the novel has no compelling plot to compete with the story of his sexual awakening. Although Alyosha Karamazov is introduced as the “hero” of The Brothers Karamazov, his own story is often eclipsed by the stories of his brother, father, and spiritual mentor. But he, like Arkady, is in the interesting and somewhat perilous situation of being a virgin, physically if not mentally. If we read books I through 7 of The Brothers Karamazov using A Raw Youth as a guide, the story of Alyosha’s sexual development can be traced. Like Arkady, Alyosha has been subjected to “certain words and certain conversations about women” (Ps, 14:19; BK, 20) foisted on him by his school classmates. But unlike Arkady, who found to his own surprise that he “really liked to listen” (Ps, 13:274), Alyosha cannot bear it: “[he] would tear himself away, get down and lie on the floor and cover his head, and all without saying a word to them, silently bearing the insult” (Ps, 14:20; BK, 20).

Although the narrator states that the boys’ obscenities are a matter of “outer, not inner depravity” (Ps, 14:19; BK, 20), Alyosha’s violent reaction betrays his sense that there is real danger to his virginal soul in these words, these ideas. His very innocence is a magnet for the boys’ “certain words.” Schoolboys are one thing, but Alyosha’s father and two older brothers have

the same uncontrollable desire to tell dirty stories to a virgin. The most striking instance, of course, is when Fyodor’s stories of his sexual torture of Alyosha’s mother bring on an attack of hysteria. (Here, as in school where the boys call Alyosha “little girl” (devchonka), he takes on a female identity, suffering an attack of the exclusively feminine “shriekers’” illness.) Less obviously, the major conversations Alyosha has with his two brothers carry a tinge of verbal depravity. Dmitri’s “Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Anecdotes” (bk. 3, chap. 4) begins as a set of sexual confessions that would not be out of place in a barracks. In the chapter titled “Rebellion” (bk. 5, chap. 4), Ivan speaks of his collection of sadomasochistic stories in the coy diminutives of a pornographer:

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7 Susanne Fusso Ja, vidish’ li, liubitel’ i sobiratel’ nekotorykh faktikov i, verish’ li, zapisyvaiu i sobiraiu iz gazet i rasskazov, otkuda popalo, nekotorogo roda anekdotiki, iu menia uzhe khoroshaia kollektsiia. (Ps, 14:218)

You see, I am a fancier and collector of certain little facts and, if you can believe it, I write them down and collect from newspapers and stories, wher-

ever I can get my hands on them, a certain kind of little anecdotes, and I already have a good collection. (BK, 239)

As Alyosha tries to preserve his spiritual virginity, the men nearest to him do their best to deprive him of it with their salacious words. Like Arkady, Alyosha has red cheeks (Ps, 14:24; BK, 25), the telltale sign that he has not succumbed to the solitary vice of onanism. But there are also indications that his fantasy life has moved ahead of his physical experience. When Rakitin expatiates on the power of women’s physical charms, Alyosha blurts out, “I understand that” (Ps, 14:74). Rakitin replies: Stalo byt’, tebe uzh znakomaia tema, ob etom uzh dumal, o sladostrast’e-to. Akh ty, devstvennik! . .. Chert znaet o chem ty uzh ne dumal, chert znaet chto tebe uzh izvestno! Devstvennik, a uzh takuiu glubiny proshel. (Ps, 14:74) That means it’s already a familiar subject to you, you've already thought about it, about sensual pleasure. Oh, you virgin! . . . The Devil knows what you've already thought about, the Devil knows what you already know about! A virgin, but you’ve already plumbed such depths. (BK, 80)

Alyosha’s constant blushing in the first part of the novel is a sign not only of his chastity but also of the potential impurity of his thoughts. As he says to Dmitri, “I blushed not from what you said and not for what you did, but because I am the same as you . . . It’s all the same ladder. ’'m on the lowest

rung, and you’re up above, maybe on the thirteenth. . . . Whoever has stepped onto the lower rung will inevitably step onto the higher one too” (Ps, 14:101; BK, 109).

Despite his “Karamazov nature,” Alyosha does not often display a strong sexual instinct. In the early chapters of the novel, his direct encounters with a potential erotic object, his betrothed Lise Khokhlakova, are affectionate but sexually tepid. The scene in which he becomes most obviously aroused is the scene at Katerina Ivanovna’s, where he witnesses a moment of homoerotic passion, as Katerina kisses Grushenka repeatedly on her plump red lower lip: “Alyosha kept blushing and trembling with a slight, imperceptible tremble” (Ps, 14:138; BK, 149). We are told later that he dreams of this scene the whole night (Ps, 14:170; BK, 186). Although Alyosha is not eavesdropping in this scene—the women know he is there— his position as physically uninvolved but sensually aroused observer recalls that of the heroine-narrator of Thérése Philosophe, an eighteenth-century French erotic novel mentioned by Dostoevsky in The Gambler." Virtually all the scenes in Thérése Philosophe involve Thérése viewing and listening 146

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to the erotic encounters of others from a concealed spot or from the next room, and they end with her relieving her inflamed feelings through masturbation. It is often remarked that the narrative machinery of A Raw Youth relies heavily on scenes in which Arkady is conveniently secreted so as to overhear important conversations in the next room. It seems likely that, beyond serving as an expository convenience, these scenes allude to the archetypal scene of masturbatory arousal in Thérése Philosophe. As with Arkady, one of the objects of Alyosha’s fantasies steps into his

life and threatens to seduce him, in a reversal of the usual Dostoevskian configuration of older man preying on girl child. In the early chapters of the novel, Alyosha hears from Rakitin, Dmitri, and finally from Grushenka herself that she wants to “tear the cassock off his back” (Ps, 14:74; BK, 80), “eat him up” (Ps, 14:101; BK, 110), and “swallow him” (Ps, 14:318; BK, 352). At first Alyosha ignores these threats, but in his despair over the injustice of Father Zosima’s posthumous disgrace, he succumbs to Rakitin’s temptations not only to eat salami and drink vodka but also to lose his virginity to Grushenka. As the scene transpires, Alyosha ends up not physically tasting salami, vodka, or Grushenka, but something important does happen to him that changes his life and personality. Liza Knapp has analyzed the scene of Alyosha’s visit to Grushenka, _ showing how his encounter with her simple-hearted humanity transforms his despair and rebellion against the laws of nature into a new embrace of earthly existence.’* As Alyosha says, I came here in order to perish, and said, “So be it, so be it!"—and this because of my faint-heartedness, but she, after five years of torment, the first time someone came and said a sincere word to her—she forgave everything, forgot everything, and is weeping! . . . I just now, today, learned this lesson ... She is higher in love than we are. (Ps, 14:321; BK, 355)

Alyosha returns to the monastery, where the smell of corruption from Zosima’s corpse no longer disturbs him, thanks to his new acceptance and understanding of all things human. He has a dream vision of the marriage at Cana, at which Father Zosima appears as a guest, and then rushes outside and falls to the earth, kissing it and watering it with his tears. This final scene is usually read as the initial stage in Alyosha’s spiritual development, a development whose further stages promise to be narrated in the “second novel” of which Dostoevsky speaks in the author’s foreword (“Ot avtora,” Ps, 14:6; BK, 3-4). I would like to suggest an alternate reading of the scene: as a culminating stage in Alyosha’s sexual development, the stage at which he ceases to be a virgin susceptible to verbal and mental depravity. The arc of our expectation from the moment Alyosha goes with Rakitin

is for Alyosha to lose his virginity at the end of the episode. This expecta147

, Susanne Fusso tion is supported at the end of the chapter “A Spring Onion” (bk. 7, chap. 3), when it is mentioned that Rakitin “procured Alyosha for Grushenka” (“svodil Grushen’ku s Aleshei”; Ps, 14:324; BK, 358). The expected consummation of the episode is missing, replaced by the emotional high point of Alyosha’s dream and kissing of the earth. The expectation does, however,

linger as a phantom presence, lending the denouement an orgasmic quality. Dreams can of course be a space for sexual arousal. Arkady’s first orgasm is quite explicitly described as occurring during a dream in which Katerina Nikolaevna and Lambert appear: I am seized by a new feeling, an inexpressible feeling that I never knew at all before, a feeling as powerful as the whole world... Oh, I no longer have the strength to walk away! Oh, how I like the fact that it’s so shameless! (Ps, 13:306)

Against this background, the end of Alyosha’s dream takes on a new coloration: “Something burned in Alyosha’s heart, something suddenly filled it

up to the point of pain, tears of ecstasy were torn from his soul... He stretched out his arms, gave a cry, and woke up” (Ps, 14:327; BK, 362). Alyosha’s dream is of the wedding at Cana; what traditionally follows a wed-

ding is a sexual consummation. The language used to describe Alyosha’s union with the earth has the potential for double entendre, thanks to the feminine gender of zemilia (earth): He didn’t know why he was embracing her, he didn’t try to explain to himself why he had such an uncontrollable desire to kiss her, to kiss her all over, but he kissed her weeping, sobbing, and watering her with his tears, and he frenziedly swore to love her, to love her forever. (Ps, 14:328; BK, 362)

This moment has the ritual significance of “making him a man,” a significance usually reserved for the loss of virginity: He fell to the earth a weak youth, and rose up a warrior firm for the rest of his life, and he recognized and felt this immediately at the very moment of his ecstasy. And Alyosha never, never could forget that moment for the rest of his life. (Ps, 14:328; BK, 363)

Alyosha has been initiated into manhood not by Grushenka but by God, through the mediation of mother earth. After this moment, Alyosha disappears from the narrative for two books, as the story centers on Dmitri. When Alyosha reappears, his demeanor has changed dramatically from what it was in books 1 through 7: his

constant blushing and lowering of his eyes has ceased. He blushes only once, in response to Kolya Krasotkin’s “declaration of love” (Ps, 14:504; BK, 558). It is as if this conversation with a schoolboy who reads salacious books on the sly has reminded Alyosha of the impure thoughts of his own earlier

life. But in general, Alyosha’s blushing days are over—he has become a 148

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sober, self-possessed man. Without physically losing his virginity, Alyosha has lost the virgin’s terrible susceptibility to verbal and mental depravity. God has granted him a kind of spiritual knowledge that has neutralized the power of masturbatory fantasy. Peter Gay has written of the nineteenthcentury view of masturbation as “a loss of mastery over the world and oneself.”'* Alyosha’s moment of spiritual awakening is also a moment in which he gains mastery over the self. He has learned not to abuse the formidable sexual power of the Karamazovs in relation either to himself or to others. To conclude, I would like to discuss briefly two other virgins in The Brothers Karamazov, Smerdyakov and Lise Khokhlakova. Smerdyakov’s sexuality has attracted the attention of several scholars. The physical description of him upon his return from learning to be a cook in Moscow is suggestive: “He suddenly had aged unusually quickly, had developed wrinkles completely incommensurate with his age, had acquired a yellowish complexion, and had come to resemble a castrate” (Ps, 14:115; BK, 125). Michael R. Katz has called Smerdyakov “the most fully developed negative portrait of a male homosexual in Dostoevsky’s fiction.”'° But the narrator states that Smerdyakov despises both the male and the female sex (Ps, 14: 116; BK, 126). Gary Saul Morson more accurately refers to him as “both ageless and sexless.”'° Has Smerdyakov always been sexless? A castrate is one who has been deprived of the sexuality he once had. Smerdyakov, after all, is probably a Karamazov—where is his Karamazovian sex drive? The answer may lie in a work that Laura Engelstein calls “the classic text on sexual abuse . . . most frequently cited by Russian educators”: Samuel-Auguste-André-David Tissot’s 1758 dissertation on masturbation, which was published in many editions in Russia in the nineteenth century.” Tissot, quoting one of his myriad sources, provides the following physical description of the chronic masturbator: “Young people . . . take on the appearance and the infirmities of old men; they become pale, effeminate, dull, lazy, cowardly, stupid, and even imbecile. .. . Some succumb to seizures.” Smerdyakov’s premature aging, yellow complexion, and loss of sexual appetite are all symptoms cited by Tissot.” Most telling of all, however, is his epilepsy (which worsens upon his return from Moscow). Tissot repeatedly adduces epilepsy as one of the major illnesses caused by masturbation. This supposed causal link may explain why Fyodor Karamazov proposes to cure Smerdyakov’s epilepsy by finding him a wife (Ps, 14:116). Strangely enough, we can also read Smerdyakov’s desire to learn French as yet another clue that he is a masturbator. Here our source is not Tissot but Dostoevsky himself. In the Diary of a Writer for July and August 1876, in the essays “Russian or French?” and “What Language Should a Future Father of Our Country Speak?” Dostoevsky offers a lengthy

discussion of the fact that learning French too early has a stunting effect on the intellectual growth of Russian youth, who are thus deprived of their 149

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own language but will never be as creative in French as the most common Frenchman (Ps, 23:79). Then he makes a strange and intriguing comparison: Every mother and every father, for example, knows about a certain horrible childish physical habit that in some unfortunate children begins already at the age of ten, and if not attended to, can transform them sometimes into idiots, into flaccid, decrepit old men while they are still youths. I will be so bold

as to say straight out that the French nanny, that is, learning French from early childhood, from the first childish prattling, is the same thing in the moral sense as that horrible habit is in the physical sense. (Ps, 23:83)

Morson has brilliantly analyzed the self-referentiality of Smerdyakov’s discourse: “His self-destruction re-enacts the self-cancellation of language in paradox.”*? Smerdyakov refers to himself and kills himself; is it not likely, given his telltale physical symptoms, that he also has sex with himself? There is one more virgin with a yellowish complexion in The Brothers Karamazov: Lise as she appears in the chapter “The Little Demon” (bk. 11, chap. 3). Her “pale yellow face” (Ps, 15:20, 24; BK, 580, 584) is mentioned twice; she has been reading “nasty books” (durnye knigi; Ps, 15:23; BK, 582)

stolen from under her mother’s bed pillows; she is racked by sadomasochistic fantasies of the torture of children; and she uses Alyosha as a messenger to carry notes “offering herself” to Ivan, who has clearly become the main object of her depraved mental life (Ps, 15:38; BK, 600). Alyosha expresses sympathy and solidarity with her, claiming to have had the same recurring dream she has of demons encroaching on her bed. But his failure to blush even once in this scene betrays the fact that he has moved beyond the stage of masturbatory fantasy in which Lise is mired. In the context of the pain that her evil fantasies are causing her, the following words, quoted

by Lise from the young Kalganov, have a tragic significance: “He walks around daydreaming all the time. He says: Why live in reality, it’s better to daydream. You can dream up the jolliest things, but it’s boring to live” (“On vse khodit i mechtaet. On govorit: zachem vzapravdu zhit’, luchshe mechtat’. Namechtat’ mozhno samoe veseloe, a zhit’ skuka”; Ps, 15:22; BK, 581). Alyosha’s “marriage at Cana,” his spiritual consummation, has replaced

the planned marriage to Lise. As a result, he has been liberated trom the pernicious power of a virgin’s dream life. The chapter “The Little Demon” implies that Alyosha’s liberation has spelled Lise’s doom, her fatal enslavement to the spiritually dangerous world of fantasy. Freud reacted to the nineteenth century’s campaign against masturbation by constituting it as a normal and ubiquitous stage in the development of the infant, child, and adolescent. For Dostoevsky, masturbation is not normal and inevitable but a “horrible childish physical habit.” It is the act of the individual who does not feel part of the social—the dreamer, the

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outsider, the holy fool.** Such an individual may succumb to his or her pow-

erful fantasies and descend into hysterical madness, like Lise, or commit suicide, like Smerdyakov. Or, with the help of God, he may, like Alyosha, overcome the dangerous power of “daring and passionate daydreams” and end by mastering the self.

Notes I would like to thank Robert T. Conn for his comments on an earlier version of this essay. Research for this essay was made possible by a Project Grant from Wesleyan University. 1. For valuable work on “decoding” references to taboo forms of sexuality in Dostoevsky’s writings, see Irene Zohrab, “Dostoevsky and Meshchersky and ‘Homosexual Consciousness,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 12, no. 1 (1998): 115-34; and “Dostoevsky in Europe: “The Life of a Great Sinner’ as Source Material for The Possessed and The Adolescent, and Ulrich’s Confessional “Third Sex’ Theory and Some Court Cases in German: First Installment,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal 35 (2001): 241-64. 2. F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Leningrad: _ Nauka, 1972-88), 22:8, hereafter cited parenthetically in text as Ps with volume and page number. All citations are from this edition. All English trans-

lations are mine. Citations of The Brothers Karamazov are from the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1991), hereafter cited as BK with page number. 3. See also his remark early in the novel: “I have heard from depraved people that very often a man, when having sex with a woman, begins without saying a word, which is of course the height of monstrous and nauseating behavior” (Ps, 13:11, emphasis added). 4, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, on Education, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 333 (bk. 4). 5. Ibid., 334. 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Har-

mondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 109 (bk. 3). For an excellent discussion of the role of the imagination in Rousseau’s attitude toward masturbation, see Vernon A. Rosario II, “Phantastical Pollutions: The Public Threat of Private Vice in France,” in Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism, ed. Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario II (New York: Routledge, 1995), 101-30. I am grateful to Carol Flath for sharing with me her work in progress, on “sexuality, secrets, and sacrament” in Dostoevsky.

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, Susanne Fusso 7. G. I. Arkhangelsky, “Zhizn’ v Peterburge po statisticheskim dannym,” Arkhiv sudebnoi meditsiny i obshchestvennoi gigieny, no. 2 (June 1869), pt. 3, pp. 33-85; no. 3 (September 1869), pt. 3, pp. 84-143. All English translations of this source are mine. My attention was directed to this source by a reference in Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siécle Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). 8. Arkhangelsky, “Zhisn’ v Peterburge,” no. 2, pp. 71-72. 9. Ibid., p. 72. 10. See also a later speech by Arkady’s father, Versilov: “You’re always

secretive, at the same time that your honest appearance and red cheeks clearly attest that you could look everyone in the eyes with complete innocence” (Ps, 13:90).

ll. Thérése Philosophe, ou Mémoires pour servir a Uhistoire du P Dirrag et de Mlle Eradice, attributed to Boyer d’Argens, afterword Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert (n.p.: Babel, 1992). For the reference in The Gambler, see Ps, 5:306. William C. Brumfield has explored the novel’s libertine philosophy in relation to Dostoevsky’s works in his article, “Thérése

Philosophe and Dostoevsky’s Great Sinner,” Comparative Literature 32 (1980): 238-52. For more on Thérése Philosophe in relation to eighteenthcentury medical texts on masturbation, see Théodore Tarczylo, Sexe et liberté au siécle des Lumiéres (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1983), 222-27. 12. “Ia s nego riasku stashchu,” “ona mne govorila odnazhdy, chto ona kogda-nibud’ tebia s”est,” “khotela ego proglotit’.” Compare Lise’s words in the chapter “A Lady of Little Faith”: “Vot on vdrug menia teper’ boitsia, ia ego s”em, chto lip” (“Suddenly he’s afraid of me now; does he think I’m going to eat him up?”; Ps, 14:55; BK, 59). Grushenka’s peremptory requests that Rakitin bring Alyosha to her (“privedi da privedi!”; Ps, 14:74; BK, 80) are echoed by Dmitri’s words when he asks Katerina Ivanovna’s half sister

to send her to him to be seduced: “prishlite mne . . . vashu institutku sekretno” (“send me your schoolgirl on the sly”; Ps, 14:103; BK, 112). Katerina Ivanovna’s “extraordinary desire” (“chrezvychainoe zhelanie”; Ps, 14:133; BK, 145) to see Alyosha is a high-toned version of Grushenka’s crude requests. 13. Liza Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 198-205. 14. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. I, Education of the Senses (New York: Oxtord University Press, 1984), 317. Jane Caplan relates this development to the rise of capitalism: “One may speculate that the prohibitions on masturbation came to prominence at this time as one theme in a many-sided discourse on individual continence and _ self-restraint, corresponding to the development of a capitalist mode of , production which was highly individualist, and which emphasised restraint 152

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on spending in favour of accumulation” (“Sexuality and Homosexuality,” in Women in Society: Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Cambridge Women’s Studies Group [London: Virago, 1981], 165 n. 4).

15. Michael R. Katz, “Dostoevsky’s Homophilia/Homophobia,” in Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilisation, ed. Peter J. Barta (London: Routledge, 2001). I would like to thank Michael Katz for providing me with a copy of his paper before publication. 16. Gary Saul Morson, “Verbal Pollution in The Brothers Karamazov,”

in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 88. 17. Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 226. The edition of Tissot that I was able to consult is LOnanisme, dissertation sur les maladies produites par la masturbation, par Mr. Tissot, Doct. med., 8th ed. (Lausanne: Franc. Grasset and Comp., 1785). I also consulted two Russian editions: Onanizm ili Rassuzhdenie o bolezniakh, proiskhodiashchikh ot rukobludiia. Soch. G.

Tissotom . . . perevedennoe s poslednego original’nogo izdaniia, protiv prezhnego znachitel’no umnozhennoe i ispravlennoe. V trekh chastiakh (St. Petersburg: V tipografii Imperatorskogo Vospitatel’nogo Doma, 1822) and Onanism ili rassuzhdenie o bolezniakh, proiskhodiashchikh ot rukobludiia, Sochinenie Doktora Tissota. S frantsuzskogo perevel doktor meditsiny Aleksandr Nikitin (St. Petersburg: V tipografii Iv. Selezneva, 1845). All English

- translations from these three sources are mine. On Tissot and other early writers on masturbation, see Gay, Bourgeois Experience, 294-309; Ludmilla Jordanova, “The Popularisation of Medicine: Tissot on Onanism,” Textual Practice 1 (1984): 68-80; Roy Porter, “Forbidden Pleasures: Enlightenment Literature of Sexual Advice,” in Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism, ed. Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario II (New York: Routledge, 1995), 75-98; Rosario (on Tissot’s relationship with Rousseau), “Phantastical Pollutions,” 103-7; and Tarczylo, Sexe et liberté, 108-39. 18. LOnanisme, 8; Onanizm (1822), 2; Onanizm (1845), 6. 19. See, for example, the 1845 edition of Onanizm: “People of both sexes who indulge in masturbation have the common symptom of becom-

ing indifferent to hymeneal pleasures. .. . One man devoted to masturbation who entered into marriage felt such great repulsion for it that he fell into ennui and the deepest melancholy [zadumchivost’|, from which he could hardly be cured” (31; Onanizm [1822], 50). 20. Morson, “Verbal Pollution,” 93. 21. See Thomas Laqueur’s discussion of masturbation (“the solitary vice”) and prostitution (“the social evil”) as “social pathologies that visited

destruction on the body in the same way that in ages past blasphemy or lechery produced monsters”: “The problem with both masturbation and prostitution was essentially quantitative: doing it alone and doing it with lots

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, Susanne Fusso of people rather than doing it in pairs. .. . The paradoxes of commercial society that had already plagued Adam Smith and his colleagues, the nagging doubts that a free economy might not sustain the social body, haunt the sexual body” (Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud |Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990], 227, 232-33).

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Caryl Emerson

_ Zosimass “Mysterious Visitor’:

Again Bakhtin on Dostoevsky,

and Dostoevsky on Heaven and Hell

ALMOST EVERYONE who has taught The Brothers Karamazov has experienced in the classroom an anxiety similar to that which

Dostoevsky suffered while writing it. Is the elder Zosima a sufficiently vigorous, convincing rebuttal of the “extreme blasphemy” of the Grand Inquisitor?' Can Zosima be made to seem equally tough, unsentimental, novelistically compelling, a man who has also thought things through to the end and is anchored in the realities of the world? From Konstantin Leontiev to the present day, critics haven’t much liked the elder, although their reasons for rejecting him have varied widely;* the fact that Leo Tolstoy was loudly enthusiastic over book 6, “The Russian Monk,” has not helped its reputation.? Dostoevsky admitted to Pobedonostsev that his refutation of inquisitorial logic was “not direct.” Atheism, he wrote, could not be disproved point by point; to counter it, an entire “artistic picture” was required.* Does that picture persuade us? And in a novel of ideas during the age of realism, how indirect can the argument afford to be? Such questions are compelling, for much is at stake. As Robert Louis Jackson has suggested, a major burden of the novel is to test the correctness of the Grand Inquisitor’s view of humanity.’ In that view, the basic human unit everywhere acts like Dmitri Karamazov before his arrest: impulsive, profligate, self-absorbed, perhaps an earnest seeker but undisciplined, and willing to be deceived. Decades of experience taught the Inquisitor that human beings, innocent as well as guilty, are creatures made better (and made happier) by external constraint. His challenge to us—that we prove we are not Dmitri and do not require prison to become our best selves—is urgent, practical, worthy of direct address. But book 6 appears to answer the Inquisitor’s challenge with little more than abstract radiant maxims. Zosima himself eludes our grasp.

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, Caryl Emerson One sympathetic critic, Sven Linnér, locates the problem in a confusion of genres. Dostoevsky refrains from pure hagiography in his portrait of Zosima (he allows no miracles, for example, and hardly mentions God or the mission of the church), yet at the same time he fails to exploit “the foremost resources in the realist’s arsenal”: internal tensions as reflected in a hero’s outer development. Zosima lacks concreteness in either genre, and thus he appears impassive, even “incomprehensible.”® An important ally in this negative verdict has been, of course, Mikhail Bakhtin. In his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin consigns Zosima’s life to the category of zhitiynoe slovo, “hagiographical discourse,” a type of word that is authoritative by definition and thus unsuitable for novels—so unsuitable, we read in a later discussion, that it “falls out of the text” in which it is embedded.’ The present essay aims to revise Bakhtin’s verdict on “Zosima’s word” by applying to it earlier, more complex and flexible concepts from Bakhtin’s own

ethical philosophy. It can be shown, I believe, that book 6 is an even stranger, richer confusion of genres than Linnér supposed and that Bakhtin

can be profitably used to read it. My focus will be the innermost nested story in book 6 (and in the novel as a whole): the life and death of Mikhail, the mysterious visitor.

BAKHTIN, ZOSIMA, AND THE AUTHORITATIVE LIFE In The Brothers Karamazov, Zosima and the Inquisitor, two venerable servants of two competing Christian churches, are juxtaposed to one another and given free rein to preach their truths. But they do so under different

narrative handicaps. The Grand Inquisitor is Ivan’s fiction, designed to speak to Christ (and to Alyosha) in a defensive and impassioned personal monologue that all parties experience as something vocal, aural, confrontational, imposed “from without.” Zosima, in contrast, is a real-life character in the novel; his teachings are compiled after his death by a disciple and designed to speak abstractly (without hostile interruptions) to a community of reverent readers, in a voice that resounds self-confidently from within. So

powerful is the Inquisitor’s dramatic presence that we often forget his handicap, that is, the fact that Dostoevsky has wrapped his resentful Jesuit in a loving frame that conditions our responses. (As Pavel Fokin has pointed out, from Alyosha’s perspective and from the reader’s, the kiss of the captive Christ might look like forgiveness; from within the Inquisitor’s own worldview, however, it can only be the kiss of Judas.)*® And the maxim-studded

fabric of Zosima’s reconstituted life is overall so placid that we tend to forget how desperately unresolved certain portions of it are. Among its moral torments is what Robert Belknap identifies as “a central theme of the novel,” namely, “delay in the operation of grace.”® This delay operates both within Zosima’s life—his own conversion is a delayed reaction to his brother 156

Zosima'’s “Mysterious Visitor”

Markel’s—and within the larger novel. How long should we be willing to wait for grace to descend? The question has inspired a huge polemic. Robin Feuer Miller, in her fine discussion of books 5 and 6 (what she calls the novel’s “Deep Heart’s Core”), suggests that Dostoevsky would prepare us to wait indefinitely. She defends Zosima’s understanding of the world’s true “miracle, mystery and authority” by reminding us—as the dying elder reminded his disciples— that the biblical Job did manage to love his new life, even after the fact of his slaughtered children; this irrational recovery of the ability to love was Dostoevsky’s most precious point of faith. The “great mystery of human life” is that “old grief passes into quiet joy,” even though we will never know

the mechanism for it nor predict the moment of its coming. In Zosima’s teaching, the “mystery remains a mystery” (WN, 75). But such indefinitely open-ended stretches of time, however much we admire them as vehicles for the spirit, disconcert readers of a modern novel. Mikhail Bakhtin makes this argument. The chronotope of an authentic novel everywhere relies on boundaries (between speaking consciousnesses, between concrete events earlier and later, between antagonistic layers of a single utterance) and yet here, in Zosima’s mouth, boundaries seem to blur and dissolve. The “I” is not brought to responsibility for its singular act—as, say, Raskolnikov is brought inextricably to confess his murders, in that most perfectly con~ structed of Dostoevsky’s novels. Instead, in Zosima’s famous formulation, all are responsible (the Russian word is vinovat, “guilty”) for all. Why “suilty’?

Because, although I act in the world, true relation and causality—dotted lines we draw between bounded events that permit us to pass critical judgment—are so completely hidden from human perspective that my action cannot be clarified (or pardoned) by its immediate context. I must answer for acts of omission as well as commission. Just as the absolute worth of my

own actions is unknowable, so will I never know the full context of the other’s act, and thus my reaction to the other must always be the same: “loving humility.” There is nothing passive or easy about this humility, Zosima reminds us. It is extremely hard work. It cannot be justified logically in advance; one simply must begin to act in this way, out of faith, before one can hope to be convinced of its truth. But is such humility the work of novels, which are built out of value judgments, differentiation, and the particularity of borders? In Zosima’s chronotope, time is eternal, space undivided. Or as we read in that section of Alyosha’s compilation of Zosima’s Word on “Prayer, Love, and Touching of Other Worlds”: everything slides and flows into everything else, “everything is like an ocean.”"” Currents in the ocean cannot be said to engage in articulate, answerable dialogue; hence the familiar Bakhtinian critique. The elder comes to us an already consummated thing, quite “ready-made.” To be sure, his was a fraught and dramatic life, with elements in it that scrupulously recapitu-

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| Caryl Emerson late the fate of the three Karamazov brothers. But time and distance have worn down the raw energy and risk of these events. By the time we examine them, the dominant tone is Good calling forth more Good: “[A]ll things are good and splendid, because all is truth,” we read; “every little leaf is striving toward the Word” (BK, 295). To the skeptic, of course, Zosima’s portrait—so full of affirmation and tears of joy—might well seem a case of salvation solely for the strong and serene at heart, for those chosen few who are capable of forgetting pain, ignoring injustice, and turning toward God

without bitterness or regret. The elder appears to represent exactly the breed of extraordinary man that the Inquisitor, proudly, declines to serve. For Zosima’s sort of personality (at least in the version of his life we are privy to) requires no one’s services. It is not needy and reaches out to no particular person or thing. Thus its love can stream outward unimpeded; it can turn miserable life into paradise instantaneously by an altered act of perception. Its duties, so it seems, are entirely horizontal: to love and beg forgiveness of nature and of fellow human beings. We feel keenly that this is a Zhitie (a life) and not (like Dmitri’s spiritual progression through the novel proper) that far more precarious genre, a passion.’ And yet for a sacred life it is far too grounded in realism, too devoid of miracles, and, scene by scene, more sentimental than austere. Everywhere within it “the emphasis is on man’s psyche rather than on God’s grace.” Thus the elder Zosima remains in the memory of most of the novel’s readers—and Bakhtin in their spokesman—a static and insulated model, of uncertain relevance to a world that hurts and doubts minute to minute and where we are not prepared to wait forever. Let us now turn from this local critique of hagiographic discourse within a novel to the larger question of Bakhtin’s reading of Dostoevsky. What are the major charges leveled against it? It has often been noted that Bakhtin is reluctant to deal with precisely those personality traits that the Grand Inquisitor considers most fundamentally human: apathy, paralysis, despair, the craving to coerce others, and the inability to formulate any response at all when denied the guidance of an authoritarian word. The charge is true. As a theoretician, Bakhtin was not much impressed by the abject and destructive passions. Only recently were jottings by Bakhtin from the 1940s uncovered and published which attest to the: possibility of utterly failed dialogue, a failure that collapses the world and sucks all parties in to a single point.’ Such, Bakhtin observes, are the realm of the lie, the word in the service of violence, and the desecrated, exiled, silenced author who is unable to act, unable even to make a gift of his word to others. These notes are suffused by all that is inquisitorial, not-Zosima, Dostoevsky’s darkest side. But the word as deceiver or trickster-monologist never becomes Bakhtin’s primary focus. His book-length readings of Dostoevsky (1929, expanded 1963) are overall permeated by a hopeful, communal, cog158

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nitive bias. In Bakhtin’s famous formulation, the unit for personality in Dostoevsky’s novels is the “idea-person,” basically the fusion of an individual body and a thought. According to this scheme, what a personality wants to do most of all is to share its singular idea with others, optimally (because

most durably) through words but—should words fail—through glances, gestures, mutually salutary interaction. This rosy hypothesis (reminiscent, in a way, of Zosima’s outstreaming benevolence) has begun to be vigorously rebutted. In an essay in the spring 2001 issue of Voprosy literatury (Questions of Literature) entitled “Perechityvaia Dostoevskogo i Bakhtina” (“Rereading Dostoevsky and Bakhtin”), the Russian critic S. Lominadze argues, largely on the basis of scenes from The Brothers Karamazov, that Dosto-

evsky avoids dialogue as much as he engages in it.4 His heroes lecture at one another and then run off; the real dialogues take place within the reader’s head (as happens in all novels) and the “plotless” polyphonic novel is more or less Bakhtin’s theoretical fiction. If Dostoevsky is great, Lominadze insists, it is because of his magnificent extended monologues, uttered by supremely self-contained heroes (the elder Zosima in particular is mentioned) and scattered throughout a shrewdly constructed crime narrative.

Other criticisms focus not on the word but on the embodied scene, which Bakhtinian analysis, so this argument goes, is curiously prone to ~ avoid.!5 Of course, Dostoevsky cared about the uttered “idea” (he is a novelist of ideas), but he attends with equal care to the purely somatic side of his fused “idea-person” unit. Such scenes include the body in pain, indifferent to who’s watching; the body in mystic rapture, indifferent to anyone's

outer understanding; and the body paralyzed, divided between an idea it cannot refute and profound disgust at the acts it must commit in accor-

dance with this idea. Just such considerations were remarked upon by Bakhtin’s friend and fellow Dostoevsky scholar Grigorii Pomerants. “The inner spring of action in the Dostoevskian novel lies deeper than the level of murders, unexpected meetings, and equally unexpected scandals,” Pomerants writes; “almost everyone agrees with that. [But] I think it also lies deeper than the level of the idea. Dostoevsky’s heroes can be martyrs for the idea, but they are not, in any sense, marionettes of the idea.”"° This suspicion, that in its eagerness to demonstrate “ideas in productive contact” a Bakhtinian reading tends to underplay the pain, loneliness, and dull confusion experienced by those being martyred by their idea, has visited many readers of Bakhtin. Ivan, and his Inquisitor as well, are indeed driven to talk—but not necessarily in order to share their idea or enter it into dialogue. They wish to lessen, somehow, its terrible burden. For the great ide-

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ologues of the novel, the act of speaking out passionately (even if their topic is radical doubt) is largely a way of securing the floor and silencing others. In fact, in The Brothers Karamazov, it is not clear how attentively anyone

| Caryl Emerson actually listens to anyone else—except, of course, for Smerdyakov, the novel's one indisputably keen ear and proactive agent.”

THE LIFE OF A SINNER WITHIN THE LIFE OF A SAINT: THE MYSTERY [TAINA] OF MIKHAIL As an authoritative genre within a polyphonic novel, Zosima’s Zhitie does not receive close analysis in Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Such an analysis cries out to be done, however, for this placid, relatively unproblematic life contains one episode that has more than its share of anger, cruelty, crime, doubt, years of awful suffering and unresolvable ethical confusion. That episode is the story of the murder, confession, and subsequent death of Mikhail, Zosima’s “mysterious visitor.” Worthy attempts have been made to interpret its sequence of events from within Zosima’s zone of faith, most notably by Paul Contino, who extracts from Bakhtin’s early ethical writings a theory of “prosaic confessional dialogue” and considers the elder’s monitoring of Mikhail to be exemplary of this difficult art.* But such

readings, which emphasize the piety and inner rightness of the sinner’s path, are liable to downplay the external costs. Morally right decisions—as both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky affirm—can be astonishingly selfish, and neither novelist would have us forget it. On this cautionary note, we might turn our attention to the vexed, not the blessed, side of Zosima’s behavior in this doubly embedded tale, which sits at the epicenter of the entire novel. What should we seek in the mysterious visitor’s story? As readers, are we meant to judge only Mikhail, the man on trial, or must we judge also his confessor, his accusers, perhaps even the “living God” into whose fearful hands the criminal has fallen? Or perhaps the scales of justice are so fastidiously balanced in this deep heart’s core of the novel that judgment of any sort is precluded, as indeed Zosima’s teaching later counsels us; for the world is an ocean. Not knowing how far our deeds extend, we should refrain from condemnation (“Remember especially that you cannot be the judge of anyone”), empathize with all sufferers, and allow catharsis to occur. It might help to review the sequence of events in the “mysterious visitor” episode—for, although the plot is a commonplace of European romanticism, psychologically it is rather curious. Much in it appears disjointed, weakly motivated, and almost every detail takes place on the threshold between the profane and the divine. Zinovy, converted during his duel, is on the brink of withdrawing from the world but has not yet been tonsured as the monk Zosima. At one of his final social evenings, he is sought out by his fellow townsman Mikhail, a stern and taciturn presence amid the laughing, kissing, loving crowd. After a series of enigmatic visits, Mikhail reveals the ghastly story of his “perfect crime,” the murder of a young woman who did not return his love, in which no suspects survived and all traces, it appears, L60

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were erased. Mikhail proceeded to live a virtuous life, untroubled by conscience. He became a benefactor to society, respected by all the town. But it turns out that this first decade is no more than a delay in the operation of grace. The torment begins. Having acquired a beloved wife and children, Mikhail feels unworthy of caressing them: “[WJhat if they knew?” Ceasing to caress them, however, would hurt them even more—and it is this pincer movement that paralyzes him and strains his spirit to the breaking point. Perhaps oddly, the criminal act itself, even as a subtext, seems not decisive in Mikhail’s decision to confess to Zosima. What occupies him at the first step of the confession process is his conviction that “life is paradise’— which, he insists, could become an earthly reality tomorrow if people would only acknowledge its truth. The reason they fail to acknowledge it is not, as we might expect from a penitent confronting his crime, because they murder one another (and get away with it) but because they are isolated from one another and have ceased to believe that others are an inseparable part of their lives. They live alone, accumulate wealth or public honor, attempt to be autonomous, and such behavior breeds an insane, “suicidal impotence.” From this passionate outburst, it would seem that the murder itself bothers Mikhail less than the fact of having accumulated, since that time, so many pure good deeds and virtues in the eyes of others—all by strength of his isolated will. He has managed to need no one, and he feels guilty pri~ marily about that. This emphasis on autonomy is important, because the relative claims of past sin versus present virtue, the phenomenon of a fallen self now surrounded by (and responsible for) others who are highly vulnerable and in no way to blame, is the focus of Mikhail’s torment. He speaks to his confessor so warmly of immediate paradise because his current situation is, by Zosima’s own later definition, absolute hell: “the suffering of being no longer able to love” (BK, 322).'° Seeking to move off this dead center, he discloses the murder to Zosima, who urges him to confess. But that just sharpens the conflict. (Zosima’s “Go and tell” is almost all we hear of his direct discourse, which is as absent here as is Alyosha’s voice during Ivan’s “Inquisitor” recitation.) Mikhail keeps putting the terrible moment off; Zosima

continues to listen in silence. Mikhail returns with ever firmer arguments for transcending—that is, continuing to conceal—the murder for the sake of those alive now. All are legitimate, loving, dialogically sensitive arguments. Zosima will not budge, however; he stands behind his initial counsel to confess publicly. “But is there any need?” Mikhail exclaims testily (BK, 309), insisting that Zosima consider the claims of the present alongside the claims of the past. “Is there any necessity? No one was condemned, no one was sent to hard labor because of me, the servant died of illness. I have been punished by my sufferings for the blood I’ve shed. And they will not believe me at all... . I am ready to sutfter still, all my life, for the blood

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| Caryl Emerson I have shed, only so as not to strike at my wife and children. Would it be just to ruin them along with myself?” Recourse is made to the Bible, a passage that also served Dostoevsky

as epigraph for the entire novel: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24 AV). True, Mikhail mutters upon hearing those words; “in these books one finds all sorts of terrible things ... Who wrote them, were they human beings?” When Zosima replies that the Holy Spirit wrote those lines, Milchail remarks spitefully, “It is easy for you to babble.” Dostoevsky draws the battle lines here with exquisite impartiality. On the one side, the Holy Spirit, moving through the detached and unfamilied Zosima, assures Mikhail that he first must confess and then “all will pass, the truth alone will remain” (BK, 308). And on the other side, human beings, who in Mikhail’s judgment also represent a living truth and whose “passing” is for him no cavalier matter: those beloved members of his family who, as an inseparable and precious part of his life, have potent claims upon it. If indeed it is “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”—and this final passage recited by Zosima is not from the Gospels but from the Epistle to the Hebrews, in a paragraph that recalls Old Testament justice and symmetrical vengeance—then it is not clear to Mikhail whom this living God would serve. It suggests a parody on that brilliant legal brief of the Inquisitor, servant of Satan, designed to guarantee everyday happiness and secure forms of love.

The denouement is swift. Mikhail makes his final mysterious visit to his confessor, where, driven to desperation by these contradictory mandates, he is on the edge of murdering Zosima with a knife. But looking into his host’s face, suddenly he smiles, rises, departs, and confesses the next day—thereby causing universal confusion, pain, disbelief, the predicted diagnosis of madness, the ruin of his family, his own death, and a lingering

aftermath of resentment on the part of the aggrieved wife and stunned townsfolk against Zosima, the meddling confessor, who endures the calumny (again in silence) and then leaves town. This is Zosima’s final interaction as

a layperson, before departing the world for the monastery. What indeed had been gained by this act, in the real world of loving human beings? Absolutely the only thing in its favor is that it was the truth. In my judgment, there is no moral dilemma anywhere in Dostoevsky’s final novel that can match this little story in efficiency and hopelessness. It is a portrayal of the “right thing” accomplished, but where all parties are

guaranteed to lose—and only the criminal, at the last minute before his death, selfishly reaps relief. It is up to the reader to decide whether a “delay in the operation of grace” is sufficient compensation for the survivors. (Zosima insists that Mikhail’s children will come to understand the good of

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it, but why should they? Why should his wifeP Or the townsfolk? Why was it so out of the question that Mikhail, with Zosima’s guidance, unobtrusively

grant himself forgiveness, paid for by inner anguish and external good deeds? Would that not have been more in the spirit of Christian love, instead of this noisy and misunderstood self-display?) Before the violence and

pathos of this tiny tale, which at so many points could go either way, the defensive, grandiloquent rhetoric of the Grand Inquisitor pales in comparison. The Inquisitor is tormented, yes, but his story—like most ideologies— is predictable in its conclusions once the initial premise is accepted. Mikhail, driven to commit a confession needed by no one, possesses none of that security or, as it were, institutional support. All he knew for certain was that by this step he would destroy everything that loved him.

With good reason, I believe, does Dostoevsky insert the story of Mikhail’s ordeal into Zosima’s Zhitie at a place precisely analogous to the three temptations of Christ in the Inquisitor’s monologue. Like the Gospel text, the story of Mikhail is a tribulation narrative set at the center of another embedded narrative, perhaps signaling to us that here as well a difficult, almost superhuman test is being conducted from which no easy victor will emerge.” But this trial, while recalling events and even utterances of earlier Dostoevskian heroes, replicates none of Dostoevsky’s other moral sequences. Mikhail’s story does not resemble that of Ivan or Dmitri Kara. mazov, who, for all their fantasies, do not kill and do not die. He is also not a Raskolnikov, who, despite a similarly “smooth” crime and delayed con-

flicted confession, committed a cold-blooded, theoretical murder, not a hot-blooded, impulsive one. There are more parallels, perhaps, with Svidrigailov, another strong, taciturn organism who is ready to kill without looking back for the sake of sensual love and who does not rush to inflict on himself extravagant penance. And then there is Stavrogin: also a criminal not recognized as such by society and chafing from its excess of love, a bad man adored by decent folk who would make him the center of their lives. All these Dostoevskian heroes, to various degree criminals in hiding, share features with the mysterious visitor. But let Mikhail open his mouth and an entirely different personality emerges, distant from any prototype in Crime and Punishment or The Demons. His ecstatic orations on “hell instantly becoming paradise” replicate not only the words of Markel and Zosima, whose offstage conversions we must accept on faith, but even more closely those of the Ridiculous Man, a person as devoid of intellectual ambition and authentic piety as he is of sexual possessiveness. Much in Mikhail’s conflated character seems an awkward graft of sensational crime to saintly prototype. Given this impossible harvest, it is hardly surprising that Dostoevsky’s most persistent detractor in the far more secular era that followed, the proletarian activist Maxim Gorky, produced a parody of the mysterious visitor's tale

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: Caryl Emerson in the form of a short story “Izvozchik” (“The Coachman”), published irreverently on Christmas Day 1895.”

RETURNING TO BAKHTIN WITH MORE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS That the story of Mikhail is of a different, more urgent and less resolved nature than the homilies that surround it is clear. How can Bakhtin help us, rather than hinder us, in reading it? Much in the “mysterious visitor” episode is congenial to “Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky” in its classically novelistic form: intense life-and-death exchanges across thresholds, face-to-face utterances that simultaneously liberate and condemn, boundaries that are really extreme brinks, epitomized by the ecstatic (if gloomy) rhetoric of “hell into heaven in an instant.” Although Mikhail is nowhere discussed by Bakhtin in detail, in his notes for revising the Dostoevsky book (1961-63) there are a

handful of passing references to tainstvennyi posetitel’ (mysterious visitor)—or, alternatively, tainstvennyi neznakomets (mysterious stranger). In all these cases, Mikhail is identified not morally (that is, with his crime, his fourteen years of suffering, his intolerable back-and-forth struggle with its no-win options) but, as it were, chronotopically: he is associated with the liminal moment, that sudden flash of insight experienced over a threshold by an isolated sufferer for whom “one moment of right thinking can change the world” and turn a thing into its opposite. “Life is a hell that can instantly turn into paradise,” Bakhtin jotted down in the early 1940s, while making some notes on the genre of the soliloquy—and then he added, in brackets, tainstvennyi neznakomets Zosimy (Zosima’s mysterious stranger). The comment reappears in his 1961 notes.” Significantly, Bakhtin recalls Zosima’s “stranger” in the context of soliloquy and sudden inner transfiguration, not in the more leisurely domain of extended, accretive dialogue. In a further notebook entry from the same year, this sentiment is ex-

panded and darkened. It is also linked with the more lacerating passions that elsewhere Bakhtin tends to downplay in Dostoevsky’s poetics. The topic under discussion is dialogicheskaia vyrazitel’nost’ (dialogic expressiveness), and Bakhtin is talking about mirrors. He has in mind not the ordinary cosmetic mirror-on-the-wall into which I gaze when no one is looking, fantasizing another’s face smiling delightedly at me, all the while knowing that I could never look like that to anyone because a real other would not elicit that expression (others are not passive panes of glass; you see me only as I respond to you). Bakhtin speaks eloquently about such mirror fraud in his early writings. But here he has in mind the much riskier real thing: my image registered on the reflecting surface of another person’s responsive, probing eyes. “The Dostoevskian hero is always in front of a mirror,” Bakhtin writes. “That is, he is looking at himself and at his own reflec164

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tion in another’s consciousness.””> But this defining trait of the Dostoevskian hero has an outer negative limit, as Bakhtin goes on to suggest: “An excessively heightened and strained relationship toward one’s own reflection in the mirror of another's consciousness, up to the point of hating that

mirror, of wanting to shatter it.” And then Bakhtin adds, in parentheses: “(tainstvennyi posetitel’).”

_ The reference is to Mikhail’s final visit to Zosima. That unhappy man returns at midnight to “fetch his handkerchief,” with dagger in hand, prepared to commit a second murder. As we later learn from the dying and blissful penitent, it was not that he feared Zosima would ever turn him in;

there was only the fear that were he not to confess—and were Zosima, knowing everything, to remain alive in the world—he would never escape

his mentor’s eyes on him, judging him (BK, 312). Here then is the sequence: kill the messenger, shatter the mirror, put out the eyes of the one in whom you see yourself. Or, more precisely for this species of preverbal dialogue, put out the eyes of the one who, by gazing at you, has brought you round to seeing whom you have become. For those eyes will remain witness to whatever else in your life you resolve to do. In these brief references, Bakhtin affirms what he elsewhere identifies as the signature Dostoevskian chronotope: contact over a threshold as an instantaneously transfigurative event. At the same time he acknowledges,

more distinctly than ever, its passionate and murderous potential. For a dialogue of mutually vulnerable glances need not only redeem and elevate (as such eye contact ideally does in the ethics of, say, Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher who confessed to being profoundly indebted to the example of the elder Zosima). It can also spiral down like a vortex in the opposite direction, picking up speed and hatred along the way, encouraging violence against the live reflective surface that had registered its shame and indecision.* Using the “mysterious visitor” episode as test case—and it is arguably the most difficult such test in the corpus—I would like now to consider the ethical question posed by such confession and salvation scenarios in Dostoevsky’s novels. Can the power of the divine (or, for that matter, demonic) threshold moment, so all-encompassing for the afflicted hero, hold its own against the long-term demands of “active love” in the novel and the welfare of its innocent inhabitants?

There have been attempts to soften the tension between these two value systems by concentrating on Zosima’s thought as an integral (if highly

peculiar) whole. Roger Anderson, for example, has argued that Zosima is surely eccentric as a Christian monk but fully persuasive as a mystical pantheist, whose sense of cosmic interconnectedness arises from the mythic assumption that we are not bound by linear time or rational explanation— indeed, were we so bound, we could only observe the world, not participate

in it25> In 1986, Rudolf Neuhauser provided a passionate “ecological”

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| Caryl Emerson defense of Zosima’s worldview, emphasizing the “rebirth within a natural cosmos” that visits all major characters (including Mikhail) and reminding us that, for Dostoevsky, “heaven and hell” are not thresholds, destinations, or even conditions: they are attitudes.”° The world is a joyous place if only we would “open our eyes to it’—which makes the transformation of hellishness into heavenliness a practical possibility on the personal plane (if not, of course, an objective fact). To insist on love or justice working out in a way comprehensible to the novel’s inhabitants is to analyze the novel on an inappropriate level. Joy cannot be tethered to justice. Recent work on the role of mirth in The Brothers Karamazov—surely the most laughter-filled of all the novel-tragedies—confirms this view: that joy, whether or not justified by events, is indispensable in Dostoevsky’s cosmos for survival or creativity.”’ Such spiritually anchored discussions of Dostoevsky’s final novel cannot be faulted in their wisdom or their correctness. But they cannot, in my view, walk us barefoot through the killing fields as Dostoevsky, his Ivan Karamazov, or the anguished mysterious visitor would have us walk. As those doubting and divided men would say: from afar, with a faith already in place, “it is easy to babble.” Zosima speaks from just such a secure zone in book 6. But Dostoevsky never assumes this belief zone as a given. His most fervent authorial love is devoted to struggles for faith on, as it were, the second day, after the Crucifixion and before the Resurrection, when Jesus was reduced to the bruised dead body trapped in Hans Holbein’s painting. To anyone relying on ocular proof on that day, it would seem impossible that he could ever rise again. For the most awful test case is Dostoevsky’s omnipresent case. With this much said, Bakhtin on Zosima deserves a second look. But to do so, we must lay aside our favorite precepts from Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics about polyphony and dialogic double-voicedness. Although enormously helpful, as Bakhtin demonstrates, for analyzing the complexly layered intentionality of profane conversations in The Brothers Karamazov, such dynamics are too limiting and too word-centered to satisfy all of Dostoevsky’s aims in this ultimate, theocratically inspired fiction. The story of Zosima and his visitor, so deeply embedded and pressed in upon by the rest of the novel as to be almost molten, must cope with a ditferent, pre- or postnovelistic chemistry.

RECONSIDERATIONS Let us remind ourselves why, in the context of Dostoevsky’s own mature ideology, the Mikhail episode is so painful. One reason has to do with love. A persistent theme in The Brothers Karamazov is the difficulty and blessedness of loving up close. In book 2, chapter 4, the sentimental and flighty Madame Khokhlakova approaches Zosima with doubts about God and immortality. When the elder advises her to practice “active love”—that is, to 166

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love her neighbors “actively and tirelessly’—she remarks that she dreams of doing so but is checked by her fear that those for whom she does good deeds will be ungrateful or unresponsive. Then she will cease to love them (BK, 56-58). Zosima answers her kindly and at length, for after all, her anxiety is hardly a frivolous one. It sits at the heart of all dialogic interaction: I act, but what if the other does not respond in a way that meets my need? Zosima’s counsel is to ignore the strictly dialogic side of things, to love steadily regardless of response, to be at all times a source of love, not its needy recipient. But he grasps the seriousness of the problem. He relates the story of an old doctor who had declared that “the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular,” and who positively hated his houseguests after two days. Love for the general coupled with judgmental impatience toward the particular is a common weakness, Zosima admits. To strengthen oneself against it, one must keep a close watch on one’s own lie,

avoid contempt, and avoid fear. But he hastens to add that this advice hardly consoles us, because constant, close-up love is such very hard work;

“active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams.” Getting out of such easy dreams is a benchmark morality for the novel. What happens, however, when we apply Zosima’s wisdom, dispensed so radiantly in the body of the text, to the story of the mysterious visitor? Predictably, Dostoevsky sets up the most difficult test case possible. From _ what we are told, Mikhail (except for that moment of murder) is a decent, sober man. He has no utopian illusions about “loving mankind” over the immediately present and needful other. He is no Raskolnikov, who must be cured of a self-aggrandizing idea, nor is he a Dmitri Karamazov, by turns profligate, sentimental, and ecstatic. Zosima comes to love his visitor's serious, lofty mind and “can see [even without knowing his secrets] that he is a righteous man” (BK, 302). Even if we discount this devoted father’s manifestly “active love” for his family (natural and easy work, it could be argued), Mikhail has always been of generous temperament to those near him, as his beneficiaries in the town knew well. Is this work and love to count for nothing in the face of a long-past and effectively canceled event?

A second reason has to do with reconciliation. We recall that in Milhail’s elliptical confession to Zosima, he begins with a lament on the iso-

lation and dissociation of the modern consciousness. “Paradise is hidden in each of us,” he remarks (BK, 303), but we do not choose to see it. Although each of us is indeed guilty before all and for all, we resist this truth because each person wishes “to experience the fullness of life within himself” alone, “to separate his unit from the whole,” to cease believing that others can offer insight or help. Accumulating wealth, he hides himself away, which results “not in the fullness of life, but in full suicide.” Mikhail’s regeneration, then, begins not with penance (repentance over the murder is a very muffled theme) but with this declaration of interdependence, a humil167

| Caryl Emerson ity to be distinguished from the hypocritical enticement of a general “love for all humanity” that had so confused Madame Khokhlakova. Love is inductive, it works one-on-one and from the bottom up. And there is only one way we can insure that we will remain steady sources of nonjudgmental love in a world that offers uncertain, unsatisfying, even treacherous response: for each of us to “turn on to a different path psychically.” Then isolation will end, because, once taken, “every action has its law.” That “action” will be his confession. In its apparent suddenness and contrariness, it is analogous to several other abrupt turning points in the novel’s most stressed personal stories: Markel’s incongruous burst of pantheistic love for all creation during his final days; Alyosha’s moment of spiritual ecstasy (his response to the wedding at Cana miracle) in the cruelly unjust aftermath of a death; Zosima’s defiance of convention and the norms of honor in extricating himself from the duel. As Jostein Bgrtnes has argued in his illuminating discussion of Dostoevskian fools, such gestures are perfect instantiations of iwrodstvo, or holy foolishness, as the novelist hoped to integrate this behavior into everyday secular lives.”* Although outwardly scandalous and without sense, inwardly these acts accomplish the work of “God’s secret servant.” Bgrtnes points out that the bravest and most exemplary holy fools in Dostoevsky’s final novel—Zosima, Mikhail, Alyosha Kara-

mazov—are laymen at the time they commit their “foolish” deeds. Liminal figures both to canonical church doctrine and to society, they act alone. And paradoxically, such eccentricity and abasement are crucial to the larger dynamic of holy foolishness, in which self-sacrifice is the first step toward ending humanity’s isolation and bringing about universal reconciliation.” At this point, however, the situation again becomes painful and problematic, just as with the mysterious visitor's habitual practice of active love. For universal reconciliation is precisely what does not result from Mikhail’s confession. In the other “foolish” acts in the novel (Markel’s deathbed ecstasies, Zosima’s ringing laughter at his duel, Alyosha’s gathering of the boys around Ilyusha’s grave), there is joy, a suspension of both judgment and resentment, a profound (if incomprehensible) sense of humanity's oneness. The reader is witness to these reconciliations, which, in their public aspect, transfigure those who look on. In contrast, after Mikhail’s “action” we witness increased resentment. There is recrimination, the collapse of family, the falling away of communally expressed love, all capped by Zosima leaving town in an aura of disgrace. His counsel to Mikhail—Go and tell!—had been heeded. The murderer, dying, is convinced it was the right thing. But everyone else in the community is outraged and aggrieved. Isolation and dissociation have increased. Against the grain of Zosima’s later advice to his disciple Alyosha (leave the monastery for the world of need and obligation to the living), this “righteous act” culminates in an escape from the world; the holy man retreats, and the wounded can attend to themselves. Then the 168

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narration reenters the realm of homilies and maxims, spoken from a position of revealed truth. Nothing more is said of this difficult episode in Zosima’s notes. Its plot is over; we are left to meditate on Mikhail’s comment that “every action has its law.” And one reasonable conclusion would be that if this is an instance of “delayed grace,” and if the innocent, loving bystanders of a moral action have any rights at all in the economy of crime or sin, then within the bounds of the novel, such a delay of grace is equivalent to its absence. So loss of active love, lack of reconciliation, resentment for those left alive—these are the immediate harsh realities of the “mysterious visitor” episode, which Dostoevsky is careful neither to soften nor to resolve. What happens to this town in the aftermath of Mikhail’s confession in no way resembles “paradise in an instant”; it would seem to qualify more readily as hell. But here, Bakhtin’s comments on the elder Zosima can provide us with a key to the deeper lessons of the scene. Again, this is not Bakhtin as champion of the polyphonic word, for in that context hagiographic discourse is inevitably discredited as a sort of de facto authoritative epic voice, flattened out and deprived of resonance in the process of being opposed to the novel. More to our purpose is Bakhtin speaking about death, as he does eloquently in the early 1960s, in his notes toward revising his book on Dostoevsky. In these jottings, Zosima—his life, his death, the scandal following that death, , and the ever present blasphemous alternative of the Grand Inquisitor—is a constant, if minor, subtext. Arguments in these notes are associative, not strictly logical or direct. Let us consider one linked (indeed, almost circular) sequence of thoughts. “Artistic finalization is a variety of violence,” Bakhtin writes (PDP, 292). Several pages later, after the phrase “Zosima on Ivan,” Ivan Karamazov’s anguish is defined as the inability to finalize on the part of a mind con-

stituted to seek such finalization: “The type of people who cannot live without an ultimate value and yet at the same time cannot make a final choice among values” (PDP, 294). Forces external to consciousness will attempt to control this vacillation and define it mechanically: these forces range “from environment and violence to miracle, mystery, and authority” (PDP, 297). But vacillation in the personality, although a cause of torment, is precious when openly acknowledged; “in everything that is secret, dark, mystical, to

the extent that it could exert a defining influence on personality, Dostoevsky saw violence destroying the individual” (BDP, 297). And then Bakhtin

notes: “Personality does not die. Death is a departure. The person himself

departs. Only such death-departure can become an object (a fact) of fundamental artistic visualization in Dostoevsky’s world. The person has departed, having spoken his word, but the word itself remains in the openended dialogue” (PDP, 300). This final set of sentences is easily recognizable as Bakhtin’s word-centered paraphrase of Zosima’s much-quoted 169

. Caryl Emerson homily in chapter 3 of book 6, in the section entitled “Can One Be the Judge of One’s Fellow Creatures? Of Faith to the End”: “The righteous man departs, but his light remains” (PDP, 322). Zosima’s next sentence is: “People are always saved after the death of him who saved them.” Within this provocation of posthumous enlightenment and “Faith to the End,” we might review Bakhtin’s sequence of thoughts as it relates to the confounding story of Mikhail. For the dialogue here is truly breathtak-

ing, on a scale far more challenging than the plotted lives (and lines) of “speaking characters in a novel.” What might Zosima—and Bakhtin—have had in mind? My end is not the end of my word or my light. Just as I cannot know what actions caused me, so I cannot know what my action might cause. (It is in this sense only that we are guilty for all: our light could have

shone forth and did not, and who can now calculate the effect of that missed good?) “Mechanical” definitions of cause and effect, which draw boundaries and pretend to know beginnings and ends, are violations of personality. But they are also violations of the cosmos, which my personality models in miniature; together we all constitute one large “vacillation” in perpetual movement—an ocean. Thus the very pursuit of artistic (and perhaps even of moral) closure entails some sort of violence. The only loophole out of our hopelessly limited perspective, the perspective of a completed artwork or a completed life, is the opening out offered by death, which is beyond reach of violence. Bakhtin will later give this “loophole out” a larger

name: “great time.” .

FOUR MORAL PHILOSOPHERS IN THE FINAL YEAR BEFORE THEIR DEATHS: BAKHTIN, DOSTOEVSKY, ZLOSIMA, AND MIKHAIL

The term “great time” (together with its antipode, “small time”) is nowhere fully explicated by Bakhtin. It appears briefly in his writings near the end of his life, in his 1974 sketch for an essay on methodology in the humanities.” Great time is that which enables the various imperfectly realized meanings of a thing to stretch out and seek contexts in which they will be “at home,” not forgotten, sympathetically understood. Most of the time, Bakhtin writes, our analysis “fusses about in the narrow space of small time.” Small time is what is happening now, or what has just happened, or what will happen in a minute: the realm of expected things, which can only give rise to a “trivially human attitude toward the future (desire, hope, fear).” The best essay we have on the concept, by Graham Pechey, offers this set of suggestive definitions: “Great time is not an objective state of things; it is a level of understanding in which the remotest of contexts meet and make mutual sense. It is nothing less than ‘outsideness’ launched into history. It is the temporal dimension of ‘I-for-another’ and ‘the-other-for-me,’ while ‘small time’ is the 170

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equivalent of ‘I-for-myself,’ the easily memorable past and the merely ‘imag-

inable’ future of fear and hope.”*' Great time, which is unpredetermined and often unexpected, knows “absolute innovation” as well as “miracle.”*° Or as Pechey continues his gloss: “The new in this deep-semantic sense is of the order of grace: the future neither hoped for nor feared but in which our completion as finite beings lies.”*° It might seem strange that Bakhtin, lover of concrete close-up things and singer of the here and now of the novel, would consider this triad “de-

sire, hope, fear” to be exemplary of a “trivially human attitude toward the future.” Why trivial? Desire, hope and fear are, after all, building blocks of our immediate life experience and also of most novelistic narrative. But great time is not really part of a theory of the novel, just as Zosima’s homilies are not a comfortable novelistic presence within The Brothers Karamazov. In this loftier, larger realm, the utterance reaches out—but it does not

depend on a responsive counterutterance within the lived space of the scene. It has time. Something else is being asked of meaning, and of the word. Pechey suggests that the “eternity of semantic potential” implied by great time is not opposed to the novel but rather functions as its “friendly dialogizing other.”** I would add to this provocative idea that hagiographic discourse of Zosima’s sort is not only such an “other” inserted (in a friendly dialogizing way) into a novel, but inserted in such a way that the reader discerns at any given moment a patchwork of times—some great, some smal!—

simultaneously competing for meaning. It is in part this simultaneity of valid readings that Zosima has in mind when he speaks of the “touching of other worlds” as a necessary component to our survival in this one. Indeed, without the possibility of some fuller future meaning in great time, love would be very difficult. And that, Zosima insists in book 6, is the only meaningful definition of hell: “The suffering of being no longer able to

love” (BK, 322). Guaranteeing enough “great time” so that this hell is avoided, so that every event might find a loving context that would give it

adequate meaning, is surely one impulse behind Dostoevsky’s own famously categorical statement in his Diary of a Writer for December 1876: that “love for humanity is even entirely unthinkable, incomprehensible, and utterly impossible without faith in the immortality of the human soul to go along with it.”*°

As theology, such “faith to the end” might indeed persuade readers already inclined toward belief. But Dostoevsky was writing a novel, and his anxiety was to demonstrate such simultaneity in humanly embodied secular narrative—where desire, hope, and fear were the human norm and where unbelief was a possible conclusion at every moment of “small time.” Thus we have the story of the mysterious visitor: the suffering, unstable feel of a novel within a placidly resolved saint’s life. We must now, in closing, consider

a novelistic way of reading Zosima’s sacred maxim and Bakhtin’s secular171

| Caryl Emerson dialogic paraphrase of it: “the righteous man/person departs, but his light/ word remains.” To such spiritualized inquiries, postcommunist Russian Dostoevsky scholarship has made very fine contributions in recent years. The ecstatic tone familiar from prerevolutionary and émigré Christian Orthodox read-

ings is being replaced by respectful, more sober research into the means employed by this master novelist to weave religious necessity—tor to Dostoevsky, religious faith was a necessity—into the fabric of a successful nineteenth-century novel. A frequent supporting theorist in these discussions is Mikhail Bakhtin. This support has accrued not only because Bakhtin was a Christian believer, and not only because all new theses on Dostoevsky (over there as over here, for better or worse) must come to terms with this canonical critic. Scholars have long been scrutinizing Bakhtin’s own “theologically inflected poetics”—the phrase is Graham Pechey’s*°—to determine the proper mix within it of philosophy and faith. An important contribution in this vein was made in 1999 by L. G. Krishtaleva in Voprosy filosofti, in an essay on Bakhtin’s early ethical writings (especially his “Philosophy of the Act”) as they relate to Dostoevsky’s final novel.*’ Through it, we glimpse the painfully difficult world Dostoevsky forces us to confront: a world in which every act has its own law, and part of that law is obedience to the meaning of events as understood in great time. This understanding, however, is present not only “then”; it is cryptically present now, and we suffer to the ex-

tent that we refuse to seek out those scattered points of light. But these points will press in upon us. Since consciousness strives for unity, we are not allowed to subsist solely in small time. Thus, as Zosima counsels, “remain

steadfast” and do not judge by results: if people “are not saved now, they will be saved later. And if they are not saved, their sons will be saved” (BK, 322). Our primary and prior faith, Dostoevsky intimates, must not be in people, but in time. Precisely this aspect of Zosima’s teaching matters to Krishtaleva, for she is interested in the dynamics of Dostoevskian conversion. Thus she leaves to one side the canonical, polyphonic “Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky,” structured around talk, and focuses instead on Zosima’s definition of hell as “not being able to love.” Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, Stavrogin all do considerable

time in this hell—but the purest example, she says, is the mysterious visitor’s tale, because there, telling the truth has the most detrimental effect on the most blameless types of love. She focuses on Mikhail (husband and doting father) and on his growing terror that, in his words, he “can no longer caress [ne mogu laskat’].”*° If it were only that, she argues, it could have been borne. But the whole logic of Bakhtin’s “philosophy of the act” ordains

that human beings behave as integrated wholes. There is no “alibi in Being.” We act by necessity. And thus we give ourselves away (as did Raskolnikov) every minute, in our every impulse and gesture. If we cannot love, 172

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we will nevertheless do something, for this is the meaning of life as duration. It will be filled. Imperceptibly, ne mogu laskat’ (I cannot caress) becomes mogu ne laskat’ (I can get by without caressing). And once one is able not to love, one loses all perspective and control over the intending self. Anything can, and will, flow in to fill that void; paralysis sets in, everything becomes mogu (I can). And then, “all is permitted.” Thus Mikhail, at one and the same moment (returning to Zosima at midnight, armed with a knife), can be on the brink of confession and on the brink of a fresh murder. We realize that vsedozvolennost’, a fearful coinage that might be rendered “all-is-permittedness,” is not necessarily evil; it is simply arbitrary.

“Ne mogu..., mogune..., moguvsyo...” (“I cannot”—>*T can get by without”>“I can do anything”): in Dostoevsky’s world, this is the awful progression that unfolds after a crime has been committed or a false principle stubbornly sustained. The sequence can be halted only by public con-

fession, by the check of other consciousnesses. Raskolnikov, Stepan Verkhovensky, the Ridiculous Man, Zosima, and his mysterious visitor even-

tually make it to that point of confession. The underground man, Svidrigailov, Nastasya Filippovna, and Stavrogin do not. Those in the latter group

cannot find the proper responsive mirror—or when they do find it, they shatter it. In contrast, all in the former group find some person, as Mikhail seeks out Zosima, who can serve as a “living icon” in the Eastern Orthodox hesychast tradition,*? a person who (in Bakhtin’s late terminology) has access to both small and great time. With the help of eyes and silences, such persons urge the penitent to account for the whole, and over a long, “nontrivial” stretch of time. These interactions are a matter of long-term vision,

not immediate utterance or intonation; thus the polyphonic verbal dialogues so well analyzed by Bakhtin are of little relevance. Center stage here are the silent exchanges (Christ with the Inquisitor, Alyosha and his dream of the wedding at Cana, Sonya and Raskolnikov on the banks of the Siberian river) that dominate Dostoevsky’s most powerfully efficient spiritual moments, moments that the polyphonic Bakhtin is poorly equipped to appreciate. In a risk-laden operation, Zosima remains as silent as possible in the face of Mikhail’s struggle, thus intensifying the latter’s need to brake the desperate downward progress in which he finds himself. Since these moral progressions are always first person singular (others might facilitate confession, but they cannot assume the burden), the cost to the surrounding world is part of the equation. This cost is borne in small time. We must believe that those others—the innocent parents, lovers, children—would have had to pay even more terribly had matters gone the other way. Does Mikhail, Zosima’s mysterious visitor, help refute the Grand Inquisitor? It would seem that he is indispensable to this refutation. The Inquisitor is armed with miracle, mystery, authority, but (as Alyosha notes gleefully) all are fraudulent: not believing in the divine aspects of human178

| Caryl Emerson ity, the Inquisitor is left with little else than dead matter and, of course, politics. It is not clear that the feeble, rebellious human herds he governs are even happy. Mikhail is the true mystery. Of his unhappiness, and the unhappiness he causes others, there can be no doubt. He confesses and dies, releasing himself into paradise (his “great time”), thus challenging the rest of us to finish the story. Dostoevsky will not finish it for us. In fact, the position of Mikhail’s wife, his children, and the town before which he delivered his unwanted confession resembles the reader’s own position at this moment in the novel: unconvinced, passing judgment out of anger, perilously close to the hell of not being able to love. So we are summoned to forgive Mikhail’s acts, and Zosima’s complicity in them, just as Zosima would counsel us to do in his own voice that frames the tale. We must do so because— the elder would argue—everything is an ocean, in which love is the hardest lesson: for “anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance.” To ensure that our most difficult acts of love are not discredited just because we happen to die, or lose hope, or impatiently demand a response, might be one meaning of the final words in Bakhtin’s final essay: “The problem of great time.”

Notes 1. For a summary and interpretation of these anxieties, see Robin Feuer Miller, The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (New York: Twayne, 1992), 53-79 [hereafter cited parenthetically in text as WN with page number]. Dostoevsky wrote to his editor N. A. Liubimov on May 10, 1879: “The fitth book is in my view the culminating point of the novel . . . the depiction of extreme blasphemy ... My hero’s blasphemy will be refuted in the next (June) issue, on which I am working with fear, trembling,

and veneration.” Later he repeatedly doubted that he had carried it off successfully.

2. In his essay “On Universal Love” (1880), Leontiev, a conservative church thinker of politically reactionary views, reproached Dostoevsky for preaching faith in a worldly utopia of love and harmony. Zosima’s rosy delight in the natural world was incompatible, Leontiev felt, with Christ’s suffering, God’s wrath toward sinners, the severe discipline properly observed in Orthodox monasteries, and respect for a fear of the Lord. For a compact discussion in English of the mixed reception of Zosima (routinely seen as unrealistic, “too sweet,” too unmarked by temptation or struggle), see Sven Linnér, Starets Zosima in “The Brothers Karamazov”: A Study in the Mimesis of Virtue (Stockholm: Alnquist and Wiksell, 1975), 96-104, esp. 96-98. 3. On Tolstoy’s admiration for Zosima, see Vitalii B. Remizov, “‘Ya esm’, i ja liubliu.” Lev Tolstoi za chteniem “Brat’ev Karamazovykh,” in L. N. Tolstoi: Dialogi vo vremeni (Tula: Tul’skii GosPedUniv, 1998), 83-94, esp. 174

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87-89. Tolstoy felt that Dostoevsky’s novel as a whole was flawed by carelessness of style, but he greatly respected the Zosima chapters—which he and his disciple Chertkov wished to reprint separately through their publishing house Posrednik. Anna Grigorievna agreed in 1886, but the censor forbade it. 4. Dostoevsky to Pobedonostsev, 19 May 1879, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, ed. Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 467. 5. “Dmitry Karamazov and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” The

Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes, ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 335-69, esp. 336. 6. Linnér, Starets Zosima, 54. 7. Bakhtin makes this claim twice, although both times in passing. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 248 [hereafter cited parenthetically in text as PDP with page number]: “The hagiographic word is a word without a sideward glance, calmly adequate to itself and its referential object.” See also “Discourse in the Novel,” in M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 344. 8. Pavel Fokin (Kaliningrad), “K istorii sozdaniia ‘poemy’ Ivana Karamazova ‘Velikii inkvizitor’,” in Dostoevsky Studies 2, no. 2 (1998): 92-100,

esp. 99. 9. Robert L. Belknap, The Structure of “The Brothers Karamazov” (1967; reprint, Evanston, IIl.: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 66. 10. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1991), bk. 6, ch. 2, p. 319

[hereafter cited parenthetically in text as BK with page number]. 11. For a provocative expansion of these terms as they can be applied to The Brothers Karamazov, see Carol A. Flath, “The Passion of Dmitrii Karamazov,” Slavic Review 58, no. 3 (fall 1999): 584-99, esp. 586-87. Developing Jostein Bgrtnes’s distinction in hagiography between the saint’s life, which is good all the way through, and the passion (which involves suffering and martyred innocence), Flath argues that Dmitri’s apparent badness is but a mask for the divine, precisely incomprehensible and thus the pertect vehicle for grace. 12. Sergei Hackel, “The Religious Dimension: Vision or Evasion? Zosima’s Discourse in The Brothers Karamazov,” in New Essays on Dostoeusky, ed. Malcolm V. Jones and Garth M. Terry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 139-68, esp. 155. 13. For a lucid discussion in English of these uncharacteristically pes-

simistic documents and a (perhaps exaggerated) hypothesis about their place in Bakhtin’s work, see Ruth Coates, Christianity and Bakhtin: God 175

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and the Exiled Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 6, esp. pp. 114-19. 14. S. Lominadze, “Perechityvaia Dostoevskogo i Bakhtina,” Voprosy literatury 2 (March—April 2001): 39-58.

15. Bakhtin’s preference for the uttered (and even unuttered) word over the embodied scene as a site for interpersonal struggle was first remarked upon, and regretted, by followers of the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky. For a later discussion of this problem, see Yurii Kuriakin, Dostoevskii i kanun XXI veka (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1989), 26-30.

16. Grigorii Pomerants, “Evklidovskii i neévklidovskii razum,” in Otkrytost’ bezdne: Etiudy o Dostoevskom (New York: Liberty Publishing House, 1989), 93. Translation mine. 17. For an unsentimental expansion of this sinister idea, see Vladimir Kantor, “Pavel Smerdiakov i Ivan Karamazov (Problema iskusheniia),” in V poiskakh lichnosti: Opyt russkoi klassiki (Moscow: Moskovskii filosofskii fond, 1994), 149-74; available in English translation as “Pavel Smerdiakov and Ivan Karamazov: The Problem of Temptation,” in George Pattison and Diane Thompson, eds., Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 189-225. Kantor argues that Ivan is the

tool of Smerdyakov and not the other way around. The very breadth and unfinalizability of Ivan’s vacillating, indecisive nature, his integrity, and the open, hypothetical quality of his most painful questions make him helpless before the self-confidence of a limited, vengeful, and servile source of evil. 18. Paul J. Contino, “Zosima, Mikhail, and Prosaic Confessional Dialogue in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov,” Studies in the Novel (spring 1995): 63-86. 19. Zosima’s Zhitie has its own subsection on this topic, “Of Hell and Hell Fire: A Mystical Discourse” (bk. 6, chap. 3 [i]). The alternative to loving, Zosima teaches in this chapter, is more terrible than love’s risks: satanic pride and hatred, wrath that will never be granted the repose of death. 20. I would disagree, therefore, with Sergei Hackel, who argues that the embeddedness of the “mysterious visitor” (who “dwells on his own distant past”) weakens its force in the novel. “The authenticity and effectiveness of each layer are reduced the further each is removed from Zosima’s cell and the time of his death,” Hackel writes (“Religious Dimension,” 141). I make the opposite case here, that Milkhail is a distillation of the most difficult challenges that Zosima, and through him Dostoevsky, believed that righteousness must face.

91. M. Gor’kii, “Izvozchik,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenti v 25-1 tomakh, vol. 2 [1894-96] (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), 373-90 (translation mine). Inspired by a double murder committed in Penza the previous September, Gorky offers in this tale a weirdly compressed digest of Dostoevskian motifs. The protagonist Pavel Nikolaevich, weary of his civil servant’s life and 176

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prompted by an enigmatic personal devil in the guise of a coachman, commits the perfect, undetected murder of a wealthy old woman and her maid. He feels no regret (“I’m no Raskolnikov,” he admits, “no idealist”), invests the stolen money sensibly, raises his family in comfort, becomes a philanthropist and candidate for public office, and is only occasionally bothered by the fact that his feelings have completely disappeared. “Do IJ have an inner law, or not?” he asks himself. At every point where Dostoevsky would activate the criminal’s conscience, Gorky produces the petty devil-coachman— himself a Nietzschean parody—who assures Pavel Nikolaevich that he should cease to seek such things as inner laws, which, long before the murder, he had eliminated from his soul through cynicism, opportunism, and moral relativism. But if you confess, the coachman advises cratftily, your feelings might return. On the eve of a public festivity honoring him, Pavel Nikolaevich is seized by the “insane desire to frighten, shock, crush these people”; he announces that he is the long-sought murderer and that they, the townsfolk, are naive and pitiable. The crowd is not stunned or aggrieved, however, and is not inclined to declare their benefactor mad. Pavel Nikolaevich’s behavior simply disgusts them. In response to his revelations and extravagant insults, the police arrest him on the spot. The coachman materializes one last time with a final maxim: Good. Now you will suffer. One needs a cross, that is life’s first task; with a cross you will always find a firm starting point. The sensible crowd has fulfilled its duty and goes about its business; Pavel Nikolaevich, whose reaction to these events we do not know, is led off to his just punishment. Gorky wraps up his tale—subtitled “A Christmas Story”’— by waking his hero up from a bad dream and having him try to relate its content to his harassed and exhausted wife. In the dream of this Ridiculous Man, practical considerations everywhere triumph. Of romantic redemption there isn’t a trace. Nor is there even a hint of paradise for the contessant, because the guiding spirit behind the murder and the confession is the same: a Dostoevskian petty devil, urging mediocre men to conquer their apathy by attempting the stunning amoral deed. Cold-blooded murder and cold-blooded exhibitionist confession are part of a single unruffled economy, which aims to gratify first of all itself. 22. M. M. Bakhtin, “K voprosam samosoznaniia i samootsenki,” in S. G. Bocharov et al., eds., M. M. Bakhtin: Sobranie sochinenit, vol. 5 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996), 75, 358. 93.M.M. Bakhtin, “Dostoevskii. 1961,” in S. G. Bocharov et al., eds., M. M. Bakhtin: Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996), 369.

24. This, one suspects, is the real inferno of Myshkin, Rogozhin, and Nastasya Filippovna’s relations, rather than the much more flexible “carnival heaven” and “carnival hell” into which Bakhtin would gently place them. See PDP, 173-74. 177

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25. Roger B. Anderson, “Mythical Implications of Father Zosima’s Religious Teachings,” in Slavic Review 38, no. 2 (June 1979): 272-89, esp. 279, 284.

26. Rudolf Neuhauser, “The Brothers Karamazov: A Contemporary Reading of Book VI, ‘A Russian Monk,’” Dostoevsky Studies, no. 7 (1986): 135-51.

27. See, for example, A. E. Kunil’skii, “Problema ‘Smekh i khristianstvo” v romane Dostoevskogo “Brat’ia Karamazovy,” in Evangel’skii tekst v russkoi literature XVIII-XX vekov: Tsitata, reministsenitsiia, motiv, siuzhet, zhanr, ed. Vladimir Zakharov (Petrozavodsk: Izd. Petrozavodskogo universiteta, 1994), 192-200. Although Zosima is the formal “carrier of the theory” of joy, other characters—especially Mitya and Grushenka—survive largely because of their ability to register it irrationally. 28. Jostein Bgrtnes, “Dostoevskian Fools—Holy and Unholy,” in And Meaning for a Life Entire: Festschrift for Charles A. Moser on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Peter Rollberg (Columbus: Slavica, 1997), 165-78, esp. 168. Bgrtnes argues that Dostoevsky distinguished carefully between unmarked (unholy) foolishness—buffoons, jesters, and even honest failures like Prince Myshkin—and the spiritually successful, positively marked holy fools, which include Sonya Marmeladova, Markel, Zinovy/ Zosima, Mikhail, and Alyosha Karamazov. Drawing on the work of Lena Szilard and Harriet Murav, he complicates the role of such “counterintuitive,” canonically misunderstood activity, boldly suggesting that just as one can have iurodstvo Khrista radi (foolishness for Christ’s sake), in Dostoevsky’s fierce, no-holds-barred world, one can also have foolishness for the sake of the devil. 29. Bgrtnes cites here (ibid., 169) Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 160, that self-surrender and self-humiliation “is the role that the holy fool is to play in Dostoevsky’s great project of universal reconciliation.” 30. M. M. Bakhtin, “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences,”

in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 159-72. Three references occur in close proximity—on pp. 167, 169, and 170—and the final sentence in the draft essay is: “The problem of great time” (170). 31. Graham Pechey, “Eternity and Modernity: Bakhtin and the Epistemological Sublime,” in Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin, ed. Caryl Emerson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1999), 355-77. As his opening move, Pechey argues that for Bakhtin, the very phrase “meaning of life” was a monologic reduction; great time makes possible the much more valuable inquiry, the life of meaning (355). 32. The words are Bakhtin’s (“Toward a Methodology,” 167). 178

Zosima’s “Mysterious Visitor”

33. Pechey, “Eternity and Modernity,” 375. 34. Ibid., 356. 35. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, vol. 1, 1873-1876, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 736. The subchapter is entitled “Unsubstantiated Statements,” and throughout his argument, Dostoevsky stresses (as does Zosima later) the need to accept the idea first on faith, to act as if it were true, for only then would its truth be made manifest. 36. See Graham Pechey, “Philosophy and Theology in ‘Aesthetic Activity,” in Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith, ed. Susan M. Felch and Paul J. Contino (Evanston, IIl.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 47-62, esp. 47. 37. L. G. Krishtaleva, “Zametki k filosofii postupka y Dostoevskogo (na materiale romana ‘Brat’ia Karamazovy, ” Voprosy filosofti, no. 1 (1999): 65-76. “K filosofii postupka” (“Toward a Philosopy of the Act”) is the title under which a portion of Bakhtin’s early ethical writings, circa 1919 to 1924, were posthumously published. The title of Krishtaleva’s article translates as “Comments toward a Philosophy of the Act in Dostoevsky (Based on Material from the Novel The Brothers Karamazov.” 38. Ibid., 66-68. 39. For an expansion and documentation of this idea, see David K. Prestel, “Father Zosima and the Eastern Orthodox Hesychast Tradition,” in Dostoevsky Studies, n.s., 2, no. 1 (1998): 41-59. 40. Bakhtin, “Toward a Methodology,” 170.

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Dostoevsky—Genius of Evocation:

The Scene of Fyodor Karamazov’s Murder and Its Symbolic Topography “The door, the door,” Mitya mumbled, staring blankly at the prosecutor, and he sank back into his chair in utter exhaustion. There was a general

silence. “Yes, the door... . It’s aphantom... God is against me!” he cried. His eyes were completely empty of thought now. —The Brothers Karamazov, bk. 9, chap. 6, p. 589°

CONCEPTUALLY, OUR TOPIC centers on the distinction between description and evocation. Our discussion of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov’s house will illuminate the difference between these two categories. The Brothers Karamazov consists of three major settings: the monastery at the beginning, the courtroom at the end, and, in between, the scene of the crime, namely, Fyodor Karamazov's house. The Brothers Karamazov, from one point of view, may be called a detective novel. A crime that happened in the dark must be “detected,” hence

, the heading of the chapter in which the crime is committed: “In the Dark” (bk. 8, chap. 4). The murder of Fyodor Karamazov takes place in his own house. As we know, what happens in the courtroom is a miscarriage of justice. The jury finds Dmitri Karamazov guilty, and he is sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in Siberia. The miscarriage of justice pivots on a false statement unintentionally made by the servant Grigory Kutuzov. In the preliminary investigation and as a witness in the courtroom, he affirms that the door leading from Fyodor Karamazov’s house into the garden had already been opened at the moment

he saw Dmitri running away in the night and was knocked down by him with a pestle. In fact, however, it was Smerdyakov who had induced Fyodor Karamazov to open the door after Dmitri had left the scene and while Grigory 180

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lay unconscious in his blood. Smerdyakov knew the secret signals that would

cause Fyodor Karamazov to open the door and thus facilitate his murder. As a result of Grigory’s testimony that the door had already been open at the time Dmitri was running away, suspicion falls on Dmitri as the probable murderer of his father. In a word, one detail in the scene of the crime looms large: the door that leads into the garden. I would like to say: Dostoevsky turns Fyodor Karamazov’s house into an “intended” object in the sense of Edmund Husserl’s

“intentionaler Gegenstand.”” The house is the center of the scene of the crime and “contains,” as it were, all circumstantial evidence. Dostoevsky visualizes Fyodor Karamazov’s house as a body of circumstantial evidence. The house is never perceived from the viewpoint of a visitor who is just looking around. In place of a description the reader encounters an evocation of the house as the center of Fyodor Karamazov’s specific “life-world.” In other words, the house is mentioned or fully brought into view only in the context of a specific situation. The result is a perspective that focuses on details. Different persons have different perspectives, different perspectives bring out different details. An example, perhaps a surprising one, from the chapter “Lyagavy” (bk. 8, chap. 2) brings out very well the perspectival approach. The main perspective here is Dmitri’s. Indeed, the whole book bears the heading “Mitya.” One will recall that “Lyagavy” is the nickname of a man of peasant stock who, as a timber merchant, has negotiated with Fyodor Karamazov for more than a year over the woods of Chermashnya. Lyagavy wants to buy these woods, but Fyodor Karamazov has not yet accepted his offers.

Dmitri, desiring to make a deal with Lyagavy to get 3,000 rubles, rides out from Skotoprigonevsk into the deep countryside. The whole chapter has a Faulknerian touch. It recalls Yoknapatawpha County. Eventually Dmitri finds Lyagavy sleeping in a shack. Lyagavy is “dead drunk” and half-unconscious

from coal gas, which fills the air of the shack. It’s impossible to talk with him. Dmitri is in despair: A deep anguish enveloped his soul like a heavy fog, a deep, frightening anguish. He sat there sunk in thought. The candle guttered. A cricket chirped. The overheated room was becoming unbearably stuffy. (BK, 455)

Suddenly Dimitri is overcome by a vision that magnifies his state of unbearable jealousy. Directly after the sentence just quoted we read: He suddenly visualized his father’s garden, the passageway in the back of it, the door of the house opening quietly and Grushenka dashing inside... He jumped up from the bench. “What a tragedy . . .” he muttered, gnashing his

teeth ... (BK, 455) 181

| Horst-Jiirgen Gerigk The father’s house is “evoked” here as the house of a sexual rival; the evocation reduces the whole situation to a single detail: the door that leads into the garden, the door Grushenka is entering to meet Fyodor Karamazov. It is noteworthy that this sudden vision comes to torment Dmitri in a small, stuffy, overheated room; here is Dostoevsky’s metaphor of hell, as we know it from his Notes from the House of the Dead (the bathhouse scene, pt. 1, ch. 9) or from Crime and Punishment (Svidrigaylov’s vision of a bathhouse on the Russian countryside, pt. 4, ch. 1). In Dmitri’s case, it is the hell of jealousy nurturing his wish to kill his own father. For Dmitri, in the “Lyagavy” chapter, his father’s house consists of only one detail: the door from the garden that Grushenka must pass through in order to meet his father. His own situation with regard to his father is reduced to a single detail that flashes in his mind. What we have here is evocation and not description. We really see Fyodor Karamazov’s house, although it is only evoked by a single sentence. Only two chapters ahead, Dmitri really appears on the scene: he is nearing his father’s house “In the Dark.” The door leading to the garden is locked. “As he went past it, he carefully noted that the door leading to the garden on the left side of the house was locked” (BK, 472). Dmitri looks cautiously and carefully from the dark garden into the lighted window of his father’s sleeping room. It appears that his father is all by himself. The peculiarity of Dostoevsky’s presentation deserves attention. Our view into Fyodor Karamazov’s bedroom, the view of Dostoevsky’s chronicler overlaps entirely with Dmitri’s perspective: he wishes only to know whether Grushenka is with his father. Thus, for example, the red “Chinese”

folding screen in the middle of the room is mentioned only because Grushenka might be hidden from view behind it. And Fyodor Karamazov’s face, bruised by Dmitri the other day, comes into view here only as an implicit answer to the question: Is Grushenka in the room? This means, poetologically, that everything mentioned is mentioned only as an “intended” object. Dostoevsky, one might say, illustrates Dmitri’s perspective. Dmitri’s attention is dominated exclusively by one question: Is Grushenka in his father’s room or not? He sees his father “all dressed up” for a rendezvous; Fyodor is wearing a new striped silk dressing gown and an immaculate white linen shirt with gold studs.

Dmitri experiences the surroundings as an ensemble of symptoms, which speaks for or against Grushenka being with his father. And this “taking things for signs” (the “Zum-Zeichen-nehmen” in the sense of Heidegger)°

is reproduced by Dostoevsky’s narrator. Here is what we mean when we speak of evocation and not of description. “Evoked by evocation” is the situation in which an object adopts a certain meaning. Strictly speaking, it is the meaning that is evoked; the meaning, however, depends on a situation. Thus, the fact that the door to the garden is closed means that Grushenka 182

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is not with Fyodor Karamazov. But this meaning is truly relevant only to the passionate Dmitri, who jealously is searching for Grushenka. Since Smerdyakov has given him the secret signals, he taps five times

on the window frame to find out whether Grushenka has come. Dmitri wants to know for sure whether Grushenka is with his father or not. But now Fyodor Karamazov opens the window, looks into the dark garden, and asks, almost in a whisper, “[W]here are you?” It is only now that Dmitri knows for certain that Grushenka has not come. Fyodor Karamazov, who is sticking his head out of the window, asks, “But where are you? ... Are you by the door? I'll let you in” (BK, 474). Again the door emerges as the most important detail. At this moment, Dmitri runs away; he has already raised the pestle against his father. Later on, the servant Grigory Kutuzov declares that the door leading from Fyodor Karamazov’s house into the garden had already been open at the time Dmitri ran away. Grigory’s testimony undoubtedly is an unintentionally false statement. Yet it is structured by an amazingly intriguing logic. One could say that Dmitri, as a “father-killer” (BK, 476), is in a special sense an “intended” object, that is, the sum of all that Grigory knows about Dmitri

and of the situation in which Dmitri runs away in the dark. Dostoevsky gives no explanation whatsoever as to whether Grigory’s statement, psychologically, might constitute a delusion of perception or a delusion of remembrance. It is a case, perhaps, for William James.

, Let us sum up: The action on the scene of the crime is not presented in an “objective” manner. Nowhere do we get an “establishing shot,” to use a term from filmmaking. What we do get is a record of situations and their perspectives. The chapter “In the Dark” is seen through the eyes of Dmitri (who is looking for Grushenka) and through the eyes of Grigory (who has witnessed the flight of a “father-killer”) in the still of a dark night.

The fatal door leading from the house to the garden is mentioned for the first time in chapter 9 of book 3. This chapter bears the heading “The Sensualists.” Searching for Grushenka, Dmitri, running through all the rooms, intrudes upon the house of his father. Ivan is present and corrects his own father, who suddenly presumes Grushenka might already be in the house if she had passed by the “back entrance.” But Ivan shouts: “You know it’s locked, and you have the key.” At this point Dmitri checks to see whether the other entrance, the back entrance, is really closed. The fatal door is mentioned again in chapter 6 of book 5, under the heading “Still Unclear.” Here Ivan and Smerdyakov talk to one another. Smerdyakov informs Ivan that he has agreed upon secret signals with Fyodor Karamazov, knocks to be made on the window frame or on the door— three times or five times—meaning for him, Fyodor Karamazov, that he should open the door at once without any questioning about who is knock183

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ing because only he, Smerdyakov, knows of these signals (thinks Fyodor Karamazov). Again the door is mentioned—in connection with Grushenka and Dmitri. Let us first look at Dostoevsky’s technique of evocation and then discuss in detail the function of Grigory’s false statement within the overall context of

circumstantial evidence. Dostoevsky evokes Fyodor Karamazov’ house through only a few details; these, however, always refer to a situation. Thus the dialogue between Ivan and Smerdyakov—the exchange about the secret signals—informs the reader by an aside that Fyodor Karamazov, out

of fear of Dmitri, has taken to “locking himself in at night” (BK, 108). Smerdyakov offers this information with a hidden intention of conspiracy. This, too, is an evocation of the house: Fyodor Karamazov “locking himself in at night.” In book 3 we get a whole passage on Fyodor Karamazov’s house, a

passage which may seem to be a circumstantial description in the usual sense. On second thought, however, we get atmospheric details that serve to document the distrust and the loneliness of this landlord: Although far from the center, Fyodor Karamazov’s house was not altogether on the outskirts of town. Rather old and weather-beaten, though still pleasant looking, it was a two-story gray house with a red iron roof. Old as it was, it seemed solid enough to last many years, and the inside was spacious and comfortable. It had some rats too, but Karamazov didn’t really mind them: “You don’t feel quite so lonely in the evenings with them around,” he used to say. He was usually alone at night, since he sent the servants off to their quarters in a cottage on the grounds, locking himself in until morning. (BK, 108)

It is clear, at least on second glance, that instead of getting a description of the house, we are being provided with an evocation of the owner’s mentality. Dostoevsky, in fact, demonstrates what became of this house after Fyodor Karamazov bought it: it has become a “House of the Dead.” It is a big house, designed originally for a “big family.” Five times as many people as now (including servants) could have lived in it. Fyodor Karamazov, however, spends his lite here in extreme isolation; he “locks himself in,” in the strictest sense

of the word. And it is of utmost importance that all of a sudden a certain door acquires a fatal meaning. In short, Grushenka, the mistress, ought to have entered the “House of the Dead” through this door. She did not come, however, but Smerdyakov, the murderer, comes in and does his work. One should bear in mind that the scene of the crime as well as the parricide are brought about by the victim. It is the victim who with his carnal egoism provides the ritual of the secret signals; who facilitates the open-

ing of the door that will allow the murderer to come into the locked-up house and do his work.

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Dostoevsky—Genius of Evocation fy We must not forget, too, that the victim has engendered his own murderer! This last point is even stressed in the text: When Dmitri “in the dark”

climbs over the fence the thought went through his head (“God knows why,” the narrator puts in) that if Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya had once succeeded in climbing the fence, why shouldn’t he be able to now. Through evocation, then, Dostoevsky creates a symbolic topography. The scene of the crime has to be realized precisely as a symbolic topography. We note, above all, the symbolic meaning of the closed door to the garden. The mistress shall enter from paradise: it is only for her the door is opened. And when the victim eventually looks out into the dark garden, his murderer suggests to him the presence of the long-awaited mistress. Thus

the victim is in just the right position to be killed: looking out from his prison into paradise.

Until now we have considered the door exclusively before the fact. The crime happens, as we know, in chapter four of book 8, “In the Dark.” What really happened is told in chapter 8 of book 11. In this chapter, Ivan pays his third and final visit to Smerdyakov. Smerdyakov relates to the breathlessly attentive Ivan the facts in the case of Fyodor Karamazov. In this short report, all details are summed up; we have encountered them earlier: this is now the tale of the real murderer.

There is the garden in the dark night, there is the lighted window _ from which Fyodor Karamazov looks into the garden. There is the closed door into the garden; it is opened by Fyodor Karamazov in response to the secret signals tapped by Smerdyakov. There is the phantom Grushenka, conjured up by Smerdyakov, a Grushenka who is allegedly standing outside the window.

Smerdyakov reports on how he lett his sickbed after he had heard some noise in the garden; how he went to Fyodor Karamazov, who was quite hypnotized by the suggestion that Grushenka had arrived; how he opened the door for him. Both Smerdyakov and Fyodor Karamazov look into the garden, and Smerdyakov kills Fyodor Karamazov with a heavy castiron paperweight.

When hearing this account, Ivan, after deep and silent meditation, asks: “If father opened the door only to let you in, how could Grigory have seen it open before you even got there?” Smerdyakov answers: “That door that Grigory saw open,” Smerdyakov said with a contorted grin, “he just imagined it all. Let me tell you, he’s not a man, that one, but a stubborn mule. He never saw it open, but he’s convinced himself that he did and nothing will make him budge from that now. It was just a windfall for you and me that he invented that story, because that is what will pin Mr. Dmitri down for good.” (BK, 757)

185

| Horst-Jtirgen Gerigk Two hours after his confession to Ivan, the night before the trial, Smerdyakov hangs himself. Most important, he is fully aware of the consequences his suicide will have for Dmitri: Nobody believes Ivan when, during the trial, he refers to the dead witness. Dmitri is found guilty of murder and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in Siberia. The “Preliminary Investigation” (so the heading of book 9) as well as the “Miscarriage of Justice” (book 12) focus repeatedly on the door that leads into the garden. By repetition in different perspectives, the fatal door evokes in the reader a most vivid mental image of the scene of the crime. This device, of course, is a feature of the detective story: a literary genre that presents different versions of what really happened at the scene of the crime. The “method” of presentation is here, as always with Dostoevsky, an immediate result of the special character of the chosen topic (or as Hegel put it, a result of the “Eigentiimlichkeit der Sache”) .4 The Brothers Karamazov arrives at its summit in the trial of book 12. A murder has to be reconstructed somehow. As we know, the court of justice fails to find the truth. The trial results in a miscarriage of justice. Our task here is not to explain what this miscarriage of justice means for the fnal interpretation of Dostoevsky’s novel. Rather, it is to focus on Dostoevsky’s craft of fiction.

The facts in the case of Fyodor Karamazov are reconstructed by circumstantial evidence. The murderer himself, Smerdyakov, is the only eyewitness to the crime, one which turns out to be a “perfect” crime. Moreover, the murderer has hanged himself during the night before the trial. Those attempting to reconstruct the crime have only evidence to rely upon. We take evidence to mean “symptom” in the phenomenological sense. A symptom shows us something which itself is not visible. The scene of the crime is looked at as a hiding place of symptoms. And it is Smerdyakov, the devil’s own disciple, who committed his crime in the role of Dmitri.

At every step, he is thinking about what he is doing: What would Dmitri have done in my place? The scene of the crime has been set up by Smerdyakov to point to Dmitri as the perpetrator. Dostoevsky’s method, then, consists in a double exposure: the reader hears the truth just before the trial

untruth.

begins (bk. 11, chap. 8); the trial, however, is based on evidence pointing to

Thus Dostoevsky dramatizes the presentation of action on the scene of the crime. The scene of the crime is presented as “lived space” (in German, erlebter Raum): we get the viewpoint of the eyewitnesses Dmitri and Grigory, the viewpoint of the public prosecutor and that of the attorney for the defense; and, last but not least, the viewpoint of Smerdyakoy. All these perspectives are evocations of the scene of the crime. No description could result in such an intensity of perception as Dostoevsky achieves through his evocations. One of the most difficult enterprises for a writer is of course to

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represent “lived space” (erlebter Raum), because you cannot represent “space as such” but only as the “objective correlative” of an emotion. It is a feat of Dostoevsky’s storytelling that all evidence is grouped around a single detail, namely, the question of whether the door had already been open when Dmitri ran away from the house of his father. The result is a “unity of effect” quite in the sense of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Poetic Principle,”® though Poe, of course, would have objected to the length of Dostoevsky’s novel.

A person reading The Brothers Karamazov for the first time will not be sure about who killed Fyodor Karamazov until book 11, chapter 8. Dostoevsky, of course, had good reason to delay confirmation of the truth. The reader is

called upon to experience the suggestiveness of the evidence that spoke against Dmitri. For it is Dmitri himself who really provides a focus for the evidence. Even the false statement of Grigory is in line with everything that is known about Dmitri. The evidence supporting Grigory’s false statement provides true traces of Dmitri’s way of thinking. Dmitri is by no means the wrong man! He had even announced in public that he wanted to kill his father. He is not the actual perpetrator, however. Nevertheless, it is the door that closes the circle. During “The Preliminary Investigation” (bk. 9, chap. 5), the prosecutor surprises Dmitri with a _ strange question: “Did you notice by any chance,” the prosecutor said, appearing to pay no attention to Dmitri’s agitation, “as you were running away from the window, whether the door at the other end of the house, the one giving onto the garden, I mean, was open or closed?” (BK, 570)

Dmitri resolutely affirms that the door had been closed: “On the contrary, it was closed.” The prosecutor, however, insists: “The door was open and your father’s murderer must most certainly have entered the house through it and, when he had killed him, left by it” (BK, 571). In the next chapter, Dmitri is confronted with Grigory’ statement and anticipates that this statement has a sheer magic power of evidence. Suddenly he realizes that only Smerdyakov could be the murderer. The setting is still in Mokroe. He killed father after ’d run away, while Grigory was lying unconscious. I see

it all clearly ... He tapped the signal, father opened the door for him and... Remember, he was the only one who knew the signals and without the proper signals father would never have let anybody in. (BK, 588-89 )

The prosecutor, however, objects, that it was not necessary to tap the signals if the door were already open. At this point, Dostoevsky’s detail of the fatal door obtains the highest level of meaning. Dmitri falls back on his stool and cries out, “Yes, the door! It’s a phantom!®° God is against me” (BK, 589). 187

| Horst-Jtirgen Gerigk For Dmitri the door evokes God. Moreover, when Ivan visits Dmitri during his pretrial confinement and thinks him still guilty, Dmitri conjures up the devil to explain the open door: He [Dmitri] just laughed disdainfully at Grigory’s testimony that the door was open, repeated that it was the devil who had opened it, and was unable to suggest any sensible explanation of how it could have been open. (BK, 726)

Thus the action at the scene of the crime is focused on a single detail. The false statement of Grigory evokes for Dmitri both God and the devil. Dmitri’s

announcement in public that he might kill his father called forth the devil. And “God is against me!” means explicitly that Dmitri realizes that he is not punished by the “hallucination of a madman” (his words for Grigory’s statement) but by the true traces of his own way of thinking. The “hallucination of a madman” is merely a means of “reason in history” (“die Vernunft in der Geschichte” in the Hegelian sense)’ to realize itself. In the gathering of evidence allegedly pointing to Dmitri’s guilt, Grigory’s statement may be called the zenith from which everything else receives its unity of effect. In book 12, the last book of The Brothers Karamazov, everything combines to constitute the circumstantial evidence of Dmitri’s guilt. Smerdyakov’s confession informs the reader of what actually happened in the dark. As a result, the wrong summaries of the crime given in the courtroom provide the reader with a certain delight. The prosecutor triumphantly presents Grigory’s statement and scornfully observes about Dmitri: He had completely forgotten about that door and it had never occurred to him that Grigory could have seen it. The revelation about the door produced a colossal effect on him. He leaped to his feet and shouted: “It was Smerdyakov who killed him, it was Smerdyakov!” (BK, 868)

The chapter that reports this part of the prosecutor’s indictment bears the heading “Full Steam Ahead into Psychology” (bk. 12, chap. 9). Noteworthy, too, is how the attorney for the defense, Fetyukovich, reacts to the open door. In his address he says: Now let us talk about that door a little, gentlemen of the jury. I want you to note that only one witness has testified here that the door was open, a witness who was at the time in a state that renders the reliability of his testimony very questionable . . . But, all right, let us assume that it was open and that the accused denied it and lied claiming that it was closed out of an instinct of selfpreservation. . .. Let us also assume that he had been inside the house. Well, what of that? It still would not necessarily follow that he had killed his father.

188 .

The attorney for the defense seems to trip as he touches upon the fatal detail: he cannot but acknowledge the almost magic power of evidence that inheres

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in this detail. To be sure, the attorney for the defense himself does not believe that Dmitri is innocent. Not by chance is he called a “hired conscience.”

In sum, Dostoevsky’s presentation of the scene of the crime makes use of the door from the house into the garden as a leitmotiv. This door evokes three contexts: psychological, criminological, and metaphysical. All three contexts find a center in Dmitri. The psychological context has Fyodor Karamazov open the door to let Grushenka in. This is Dmitri’s jealous vision that flashes obsessively through his head. The criminological context suggests an answer to the question as to when, exactly, the door had been opened “in the dark.” The unintentionally false statement of Grigory leads the jury to find Dmitri guilty. In the metaphysical context, Grigory’s false statement about the open door evokes for Dmitri the existence of God

and the devil. The scene of the crime is now a theater of battle between Good and Evil, God and the devil. Dmitri suddenly becomes aware that the falsity of Grigory’s statement exactly matches his own premeditation and even announcement of the murder. He feels that God is against him.” All three contexts of evocation are always simultaneously present. Before our very eyes they turn the scene of the crime into a symbolic landscape.

POSTSCRIPT

In a wider sense, the scene of the crime also comprises two sets of stairs. First, there are the stairs within the house of Fyodor Karamazov, where Ivan

Karamazov listens on the landing, a day before the murder, to the movements of his father below: Much later, when Ivan thought of that night, he remembered, with a particularly sickening feeling, getting up several times from his bed, tiptoeing very quietly to the door as if afraid to be caught, letting himself out onto the landing, and listening to his father moving about downstairs. Ivan would stand there for a long time, maybe five minutes, filled with a strange curiosity, holding his breath, his heart pounding wildly, but why he was doing this and what he was trying to overhear he had no idea himself. But throughout his later life he considered it loathsome that he had listened like that and, deep down in the mysterious recesses of his soul, he knew it was the most despicable thing he had ever done in his life. (BK, 332 [bk 5, chap. 7: “It’s Always Rewarding to Talk to a Clever Man”})

This scene in which Ivan listens to the movements of his father provides another evocation of Fyodor Karamazov’s house. Second, there are the stairs leading down to the cellar: Smerdyakov, who had gone to fetch something or other in the cellar, slipped on the first step and fell all the way down the stairs. It was lucky that Martha, 189

| Horst-Jiirgen Gerigk at least, happened to be in the yard at the time and heard him. She did not see him fall, but she heard him cry out. (BK, 337)

Of course, she did not see him fall, since he did not fall at all and had no epileptic fit, either, but had shammed one to furnish himself an alibi in advance. Later on, Smerdyakov confesses to Ivan: J shammed everything. I went down those stairs with no trouble at all, to the very bottom, then I lay down, and once I was lying down I started to scream and yell and writhe until they carried me out of there. (BK, 752 [bk. 11, chap. 8: “The Third and Last Meeting with Smerdyakov”])

Thus two sets of stairs flank the murder. Planning a murder in both cases is connected by Dostoevsky with stairs leading downward. Our discussion, however, has concentrated exclusively on the scene of the crime in the narrow sense. There is no doubt that Dostoevsky’s symbolic topography deserves extensive exploration. The real task, however, will be not just to denote the symbolic topography of, say The Brothers Karamazov, but to show Dostoevsky’s symbolic topography in action: our understanding of characters, plot, and meaning. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Notes

mazov was used. ,

In this chapter, Andrew R. MacAndrew’s translation of The Brothers Kara-

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), hereafter cited parenthetically in text as BK with page number. 2. “Intentionaler Gegenstand”: Cf. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. 2 vols. 5th edition (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1968), vol. 2 p. 378 (V.:Uber intentionale Erlebnisse und ihre “Inhalte,” section 13: Fixierung unserer Terminologie): “Immerhin ist es vielleicht mit Riicksicht auf die historisch tiberkommene und seit Brentano wieder vielgebrauchte Rede von intentionalen Gegenstinden nicht unpassend, in einem korrelativen Sinn von Intention zu sprechen [...].” For an English translation see Husserl’s Logical Investigations, 2 vols., trans. J. N. Findlay from the Second German Edition of Logische Untersuchungen (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York, Humanities Press, 1970), vol. 2, p. 562 (V: On Intentional Experiences and their ‘Contents,’ section 13. The Fixing of our Terminology): “But it is not unfitting, in view of the traditional use of the term ‘intentional object,’ to which Brentano had given renewed currency, to speak in a correlative sense of ‘intention’ [. . .].” 3. “Zum-Zeichen-nehmen.” Cf. Martin Heidegger: Sein und Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), section 17: “Verweisung 190

Dostoevsky—Genius of Evocation

und Zeichen,” 102-11. Heidegger is writing of the distinction between “sions” which are created, e.g., traffic signs, and “signs” which are things in contexts, e. g., the “southwind,” which for a peasant in his context means: rain will fall. Heidegger verbatim: “Zeichen entstehen auch in dem ZumZeichen-nehmen eines schon Zuhandenen” (ibid., p. 107). For an English translation, see Heidegger’s discussion of “Reference and Signs,” section 17, in Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962), 107-14. “Signs also arise when one takes as a sign [Zum-Zeichen-nehmen] something that is ready-to-hand already” (ibid., p. 111). 4, “Kigentiimlichkeit der Sache” (“the special character of the thing itself”). Cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Asthetik. 2 vols. Edited by Riidiger Bubner (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1971), vol. 1. Erster Teil, Drittes Kapitel, C. Der Kunstler, 3. Manier, Stil und Originalitat, p. 411. For a recent English translation of this work, see Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art by G. W. F. Hegel, translated by T. M. Knox. 2 vols. (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. 1, part 1, chapter 3, C. The Artist, 3. Manner, Style and Originality. “. . . so that the special character of the artist’s work appears only as the special character of the thing itself...” (294).

5. Poe’s “unity of effect”: Cf. “The Poetic Principle,” in Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Edward H. Davidson (Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, The Riverside, 1956), pp. 464-65 (“. . . its Unity—its totality of effect or impression . . .”). 6. MacAndrew translates “It was a ghost” (in Russian: “Eto fantom”).

7. “Die Vernunft in der Geschichte.” Cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte. Vorlesungen tiber die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Erste Haltte. Edited by Johannes Hoffmeister. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968. “Dass Vernunft in der Weltgeschichte ist . . . , ist eine Wahrheit, die wir voraussetzen” (p. 29). See, in English translation, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History. With prefaces by Charles Hegel and the translator, J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956). See in particular Hegel’s introduction to his series of lectures on “the philosophical history of the world.” “The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason” (p. 9). “That this ‘Idea’ or ‘Reason’ is the True .. . is the thesis which . . . is here regarded as demonstrated” (pp. 9-10). 8. Cf. my article “Die zweifache Pointe der Briider Karamasow. Eine Deutung mit Riicksicht auf Kants Metaphysik der Sitten.” In Ewphorion 69 (1975): 3383-49.

19]

Kate Holland

The Legend of the Ladonka and the Trial of the Novel

Gentlemen of the jury, I have already made known to you why I consider all this invention about money sewn into an amulet a month earlier not only an absurdity, but also the most implausible contrivance that could have been hit

upon in this situation. If one bet on whether anything more implausible could be said or imagined, even then it would be impossible to invent anything worse than that. Here, above all, the triumphant novelist can be brought up short and demolished by details, those very details in which reality is always so rich, and which are always neglected by such unfortunate and unwilling authors, as if they were utterly insignificant and unnecessary trifles, if indeed they even occur to them. Oh, they cannot be bothered with that at the moment, their mind creates only the grandiose whole—and then someone dares suggest such a trifle to them! (BK, 701)’

Here, and elsewhere, the counsel for the prosecution in the trial of Dmitri Karamazov launches an attack on the credibility of that which he derisively calls the “the legend of the ladonka.” He comes down on Dmitri’s claim that he kept some of the money given to him by Katerina Ivanovna in a ladonka, an amulet made from his landlady’s old cloth cap, in order to show that, although a scoundrel, he, Dmitri, is not a thief. At first sight, Ippolit Kirillovich’s skepticism seems well justified: Can the unpredictable and lawless defendant, whose moral consciousness seems, like all his other qualities, to be a slave to his whims and desires, really place so much emphasis on the

subtle moral distinction between a scoundrel and a thief? Yet this is more than merely an ordinary prosecution attack on the testimony of a defense witness; it is an attack on a different kind of narrative, a narrative based on fundamentally different principles from those of the legal narratives against which it is juxtaposed. Ippolit Kirillovich calls Dmitri a “novelist,” the amulet narrative a “novel,” and launches into an unprecedented attack on the novelistic worldview, as exemplified by the “legend of the ladonka.” Fetyukovich, the de-

192 .

fense lawyer, also denounces the “novel,” which he accuses Ippolit Kirillovich

The Legend of the Ladonka and the Trial of the Novel

of creating. This cluster of references to the novel plays a unique role not merely in The Brothers Karamazov but in the entire corpus of Dostoevsky’s works. His self-referential digressions, whether in the novels or in Diary of a Writer, normally refer to the work of art and the artist, not exclusively to the novel.* With the prosecutor’s denunciation of the amulet narrative, Dostoevsky introduces the idea that it embodies a view of the world that is radically different from those of both lawyers, a worldview that can be specifically characterized as “novelistic.” When they launch into an attack of the “novelistic,” the lawyers seem to be speaking not only of the stylistic conventions of a particular literary genre, but of a worldview that differs from their own in its very foundations, which can be seen as embodying a particular aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical worldview. This cluster of references to the novel and the novelistic also directs us toward this particular novel, and I shall argue that by forcing us to consider the novelistic quality of the “legend of the ladonka,” Dostoevsky encourages us to examine it more closely and detect within it the artistic, moral, and philosophical patterns of The Brothers Karamazov itself. In this essay I shall examine the structural and thematic foundations of the legal narratives before then exploring the different “novelistic” foundations of the amulet narrative to show how Dostoevsky presents an almost programmatic defense of the novelistic perspective and gives us a model of his novelistic universe in microcosm.

| The counsel for the prosecution introduces the idea of the amulet narrative as “novelistic” in an attempt to dismiss its value as evidence. The idea of a “novelistic” narrative is introduced as the antithesis of the legal narrative, which, according to the lawyers, constitutes a search for the truth of the case, based on rational, scientific foundations. The novelistic foundations of the “legend of the ladonka” are revealed in opposition to the legal narratives with which it lies in structural equivalence. The speeches of both lawyers can be seen as examples of the kind of narrative to which Dostoevsky refers in the Diary of a Writer as priamolineinyi (linear).° Like other forms of linear narrative, they are composed in relation to a preordained final goal, here the guilt or innocence of Dmitri Karamazov, which must continually define the structure, content, and philosophical underpinnings of the narrative. In their attempt to explain the case, the lawyers work back from the murder in order to “deduce” what “must have” taken place, and then as they retell the murder for the jury, they rewrite what might have

taken place as a linear narrative, a path of certainty in which gaps and anomalies are ignored. The chronological order of the telling gives an illusory authority to their speculations, an authority that is bolstered by the use of self-referential, organizing discourse. We see the continual emphasis on working through the narrative in order of events, as if the internal chronology of the events depicted exactly replicated the chronology of the narra198

Kate Holland

tive, and the repetition of assurances such as “I assert,” “this fact,” and “Without a doubt” (BK, 693-752). This structure of linearity also defines the subject matter of the narratives. Anything which fails to fit into the tunnel vision of the linear narrative,

with its preordained goal, is considered “astonishing” (BK, 700) “romantic” or “novelistic” (romanicheskii; BK, 731), “contrary to reality” (BK, 701),

“unnatural” (BK, 714), “incredible” (BK, 720), and “fantastic testimony” (BK, 722). The “legend of the ladonka” is accused of being all of these things. This priamolineinost’ (linearity) also defines the lawyers’ attitude toward Dmitri and his moral freedom. The narratives of the two lawyers differ profoundly in their approach to man as a morally free individual, although both can be seen in varying degrees as “linear.” Ippolit Kirillovich sees the

process which leads up to and proceeds from the murder as a straight line leading from cause to effect to aftermath. His narrative is predicated on that same deterministic thought that underlies the worldview of those “linear thinkers” Dostoevsky examines in the Diary: not social determinism of the Chernyshevskian type, but a more humble, everyday determinism. Like the pawnbroker in “A Gentle Creature,” who blames his wife’s death on the blind force of fate, the prosecution lawyer seems to adhere to the idea that human beings are subject to the laws of kosnost’, that is, “inertia” or “immutability” (WD, 717).* The prosecution lawyer maintains that once Dmitri has threatened to kill his father, he has begun a process that, once set in motion, must run its bloody course. This contention corresponds to the pawnbroker’s conviction that once his wife has hold of the pistol with which he has tempted her, he is a dead man. Neither the prosecution lawyer nor the pawnbroker grants human beings the possibility of moral choice. Ippolit Kirillovich repeatedly claims that the murder “was accomplished as written” (BK, 704, 713), meaning by that to imply that the moment Dmitri wrote that he wished to kill his father, he set in motion the inevitable unfolding of the crime, but also invoking the idea of fate, making a pawn of Dmitri and denying him the possibility of moral freedom. His narrative makes a linear progression from probability to certainty, the automatic movement from the conditional to the perfect tense, from the theoretical to the actual, from the abstract and the generalized to the particular and the individual. “Probably” becomes “without a doubt,” while generalizations about how the typical criminal would behave in a certain situation are used to explain the particular behavior of Dmitri in this particular case: “Oh, in such cases the criminal sometimes becomes incredibly careless and credu-

lous” (BK, 719). |

194 |

In contrast, instead of creating a linear narrative that refuses to acknowledge the validity of any other perspective and portrays Dmitri as caught in an end-determined, kosnyi (immutable), murderous momentum,

The Legend of the Ladonka and the Trial of the Novel

the defense lawyer creates an altogether different narrative, one that constitutes a movement into a Borgesian labyrinth of parallel possible narratives, in which the truth becomes illusory, chimerical, vacant. Beginning with his observation that “psychology is a stick with two ends” (BK, 727), the defense lawyer shows that every piece of evidence referred to by Ippolit Kirillovich can be read in many ways, thus opening up a multiplicity of possible narratives to explain the murder. If Ippolit Kirillovich assumes that what is probable must be true, Fetyukovich takes the opposite line: unless something is definite, it cannot be true. If Ippolit Kirillovich turns the dotted lines of possibility into the black lines of certainty, Fetyukovich negates those dotted lines altogether, or rather draws so many other dotted lines that the truth and reality are invariably lost in a maze of possibilities. He questions fact after fact, and the lack of evidence as to the money’s whereabouts leads him to conclude that there was no robbery at all, although he then points out that there may have been. His throwaway comment, “I do not contradict myself: the money could have existed” (BK, 739), reveals that his technique lies not in a single consistent interpretation of the case but in creating a chain of possible scenarios. When he declares that there has been

no parricide because Fyodor Karamazov forfeited his claim to the title of father, we feel he has gone a step too far. If Ippolit Kirillovich, as a linear thinker, peppers his narrative with received wisdom, with unquestioned, unfounded assumptions about human nature, Fetyukovich allows for no _ “prejudices,” shattering the idea that there are certain sacred truths or values. Not even the blood ties between father and son are sacrosanct: a father must earn his son’s love rather than receiving it unconditionally. The defense lawyer's narrative rejects the possibility of any eternal truths about humankind. As we become conscious of the stagnant linearity of the lawyers’ speeches, their failure to grant Dmitri moral freedom, and their failure to take into account anything that lies on either side of the straight line they draw to their preconceived goal, we are naturally drawn to what they reject: the worldview that the prosecution lawyer calls “novelistic” and that, as he continually points out, finds its apotheosis in the amulet narrative. It begins where the speeches of the lawyers end and is rooted in what they exclude: the fantastic, the extraordinary, the contradictory, and the transcendent. This “legend” is fundamentally different from both of the legal narratives in terms of its construction, its subject matter, and its concept of the hierarchy of reality; in terms of its relationship with other narratives; and in terms of its underlying assumptions about the nature of humankind. The structure of the “legend of the ladonka” is altogether different from that of the legal narratives, closer to that of dream or allegory, for it relies on a central image from which we gain a kind of revelation. It is neither linear nor chronological. Its presentation is fractured and splintered. It 195

Kate Holland , is first introduced during Dmitri’s initial interrogation but is told in fits and starts, due to Dmitri’s own reluctance to reveal the inner motivations of his behavior toward Katerina Ivanovna (BK, 489-90). It is then reintroduced by the lawyers during the trial. The “legend” differs from the legal narratives in terms of its spatiotemporal configurations: Mitya cannot pinpoint

the time sequence of the story, nor can he remember when or where he opened the bag. Such details of time and space, which are vitally important to the legal narratives, are swallowed up by the reverberations of the central image of the amulet, out of which the whole narrative unfolds.

In the “legend of the ladonka,” Dostoevsky presents a view of humankind’s moral freedom that refutes both the prosecution’s view of Dmitri as being inevitably propelled toward the act of parricide by the tyranny of kosnost’ and the defense’s view of him as inhabiting a world of unlimited

freedom and unlimited possibilities lacking any consistent moral base. While the money remains around his neck, he retains on his person the physical, tangible proof of the possibility of moral resurrection, the means by which he can go to Katerina Ivanovna and show her that he is not be-

yond repair; that though fallen, he can still be resurrected. The amulet stands for the possibility of a person achieving moral resurrection even at the moment he or she seems most debased. Thus there is no inevitable movement toward disaster, but rather a state of moral freedom where disaster can be averted at any moment. On the other hand, the amulet represents a world in which people have freedom within a hierarchical moral framework, and this view differs markedly from the defense lawyer's vision of humankind. The “legend of the amulet” stands both as Dmitri’s most

powerful detense—tfor it shows that his guilt is not certain; despite his threats he could have resurrected himself at any moment—and as a powerful symbol of humankind’s moral freedom. The central image of the amulet, out of which the whole narrative unfolds, conveys the rich and contradictory multiplicity of meaning so characteristic of Dostoevsky’s fantastic-realist novelistic universe. The ladonka contains only half the money Dmitri has taken from Katerina Ivanovna and thus brings to mind the moral depths to which he has sunk, for it stands for the money he has already squandered, thus reminding us of his moral weakness, impulsiveness, and passion. However, although the ladonka is halt empty, it is also half full. Dmitri has not spent all of Katerina Ivanovna’s money, and what remains represents for him the possibility of remaining only a scoundrel without becoming a thief. Thus the “legend” presents both the possibility of a transcendent ideal and the possibility of moral freedom, the proof that people can avoid the end-determined, kosnyi momentum of the prosecutor's vision of humanity. However, Dmitri spent the money and failed the test of the amulet, thus giving rise to the possibility that such resurrection remains impossible. The central image of the amulet carries within 196

The Legend of the Ladonka and the Trial of the Novel

it the possibility of both scenarios. Unlike the single story of the prosecutor’s narrative, and the complete open-endedness of the defense counsel’s narrative, the “legend of the ladonka” provides us with a series of possible narratives, but at the same time, unlike the defense counsel’s narrative, it allows us to cancel out certain possibilities. The image of the amulet is, like the image of the dead girl in “A Gentle Creature” and so many of Dostoevsky’s other fantastic-realist images, fraught with contradictions, suggesting the possibility of a transcendent ideal without explicitly attesting to its existence. This structured ambivalence, presented through the contradictions of the fantastic-realist image, lies at the very core of Dostoevsky’s novelistic vision, and gives it an impetus that is not merely aesthetic but also ethical and metaphysical. This ambivalence is replicated in the novel’s central ideological conflicts. By observing the aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical principles that underlie the “legend,” which make it “novelistic,” we can begin to understand the complex and contradictory currents that structure the novel itself. The “legend of the ladonka” opens up for us yet another aspect of the “novelistic”: the drive toward what the prosecutor dismissively calls “a grandiose whole” (BK, 721.) Unlike the lawyers’ narratives, the “legend” is not hermetically sealed within itself. It is enclosed within the novel but opens up into the novel: the reverberations of its central image link it paradigmatically to other images and inserted narratives present in the novel. ’ When the district attorney calls the amulet narrative “almost miraculous” (BK, 491), we cannot fail to pick up the subtle link to those other “miracles,” so important within the novel, the series of moral “miracles” that replace the expected miracle of Zosima’s preservation and which come to a head in Grushenka’s onion fable. The inserted narrative of Grushenka’s basnia (fable) and its reverberations within the novelistic frame deal with the same theme as the “legend of the ladonka”: the continuing possibility of moral resurrection at the last possible moment, as represented by the onion.° Like the “legend of the ladonka,” the onion narrative offers us two difterent conclusions: in the fable, the old woman fails the moral test set her by her guardian angel, but in the novel itself, Grushenka takes the onion and refuses to seduce Alyosha, thus beginning her moral regeneration. The paradigmatic connection between the twin images of onion and amulet point

to a recurring theme in the novel, thus forming the foundations of that “grandiose whole,” which, as Dostoevsky informs us through the unlikely persona of the prosecutor, is a vital aspect of a novelistic vision. The theme of the moral test, present in both the amulet and the onion narratives, places them in structural equivalence to the inserted narrative of the Grand Inquisitor, the kernel of the novel’s central problem of the moral condition of humankind. However, the “legend” and the “fable” present a view of human beings that lies in fundamental opposition to that projected 197

Kate Holland | by Ivan and his Grand Inquisitor, and it is these novelistic narratives which provide the ultimate refutation of Ivan’s poema.° This myriad of paradigmatic connections, whether grounded in theme or in image, leads directly to the creation of the grandiose whole, central to Dostoevsky’s concept of the “novelistic.” Thus, we can see that Dostoevsky sets up the trial of Dmitri Karamazov as the forum for a standoff between the two competing narratives of prosecution and defense, before then subverting that opposition by introducing a third alternative “novelistic” narrative, the “legend of the ladonka,” in which he reveals many of the foundations of the artistic philosophy in which he grounds his novel. Against the backdrop of the linear narratives of the lawyers’ speeches, the one denying humans the possibility of any moral freedom, the other refusing to allow for the possibility of any moral foundation, but both restricted by the straitjacket of a preconceived system with which they view Dmitri and the case, the “legend of the ladonka” otters a radically different conception of the moral condition of Dmitri, and of humankind in general. The fantastic-realist image of the amulet is open to a series of possible interpretations, none of which can be excluded, and thus seems to be symptomatic of a more pluralistic, open-ended worldview, but one that is nonetheless grounded in a hierarchical moral framework. This structured ambivalence, an integral part of the “legend of the ladonka,” lies at the root of the novel’s presentation of the moral condition of humankind and could even be seen as a central artistic organizing principle behind the work. Dostoevsky also encourages us to read his novel as the “grandiose whole” that the prosecutor ridicules: the image of the amulet and its theme of the moral test is linked paradigmatically to other narrative strands within the novel and to its moral and aesthetic core, “The Grand Inquisitor” (bk. 5, chap. 5). Thus Dostoevsky first draws our attention to the novelistic value of the “legend of the ladonka” through the prosecution lawyer’s critique, and then, through the narrative and its central image, he reveals the aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical foundations on which The Brothers Karamazov rests, providing us with an artistic cipher with which to read the novel.

Notes 1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1991), hereafter cited parenthetically in text as BK with page number. Dostoevsky is not consistent with his use of the two variants ladonka and ladanka, although ladonka

tends to be used in the novel and ladanka in the notes. I will use the marginally more common ladonka and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s “amulet.” 198

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2. For a discussion of Dostoevsky’s discussions of art and the artist in the novels and in Diary of a Writer, see Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966); and Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre:

Dostoevsky’s “Diary of a Writer” and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 1, 1873-1876, ed. and trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993) [hereafter cited as WD], 641-754 (October-December 1876), see esp., “A Few Remarks about Simplicity and Simplification,” 647-50. For a discussion of Dostoevsky’s critique of priamolinieinost’ (linearity), see Morson’s introduction to WD and Aileen Kelly, “Irony and Utopia in Herzen and Dostoevsky: From the Other Shore and Diary of a Writer,” Russian Review 50, no. 4 (October 1991): 397-416. 4. For a discussion of the role of kosnost’ in “A Gentle Creature” and other works by Dostoevsky, see Liza Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996); and Liza Knapp, “The Force of Inertia in Dostoevsky’s Krotkaia,” Dostoevsky Studies § (1985): 143-56. 5. The form of the onion narrative, the fable or folktale, basnia, also resonates with the “legend.” In The Brothers Karamazov, simple folk genres are shown to project a worldview that is closer to that of the novel than more literary genres such as the poema, in particular the image of a person as a morally free individual, as seen in the onion tale. 6. The enduring quality of Rozanov’s description of the Grand Inquisitor in book 5, chapter 5 as a “legend” leads to a misreading of the complex generic hierarchy that the novel projects. The moral reductionism of _ the Grand Inquisitor’s view of human beings is diametrically opposed to the kind of open-ended image of human beings provided by legends and fables within the novel.

199

Marina Kostaleusky

Sensual Mind: The Pain and Pleasure of Thinking There’s nothing more debauched than thinking. —Wislawa Szymborska, “An Opinion on the Question of Pornography”

IN A WELL-KNOWN 1870 letter to Nikolai Strakhov, Dostoevsky wrote, “I’m weak in philosophy (but not in the love of it; in the love of it I'm strong).”’ In speaking of his weakness in philosophy, Dostoevsky meant his insufficient background in the scholarly discipline called philosophy. In confessing the strength of his love for philosophy, however, he meant his love of thinking. It is generally agreed that all main characters in Dostoevsky’s great novels, from Raskolnikov to Ivan Karamazov, are thinkers. Examining those fictional thinkers of the “Dostoevsky school,” the critics analyze, as a rule, their ideas, that very set of “ultimate questions” that is linked inseparably with Dostoevsky’s name. But what makes Dostoevsky’s work philosophical in the literal sense of the word is his fascination with the human ability to think. If one asks what constitutes the most typical activity for a Dostoevskian character, the answer will be thinking. Raskolnikov, for example, defines his mental exercise as his daily work: “What are you doing?” asks the housemaid. “Work.” “What kind of worker” “I think” (Ps, 6:26). But Dostoevskian characters are not simply absorbed in thought; they are engaged in

a relentless thought process that reinvents meaning as it progresses. The contemporary philosopher Merab Mamardashvili, who meditated all his life on the phenomenon of consciousness, believed that people’s cognitive potentialities reveal themselves each time anew in the process of intellectual pursuit. Mamardashvili considered Dostoevsky the first example of what may be called a “modern intellectual laborer.”* In other words, Dostoevsky’s thought is not preordained; it is born in the very process of thinking. Thereby the dynamics of thought become a determining epistemological factor to Dostoevsky’s mode of operation. One of the first records of these dynamics appeared as early as 1864

in the Notes from Underground. This remarkable example of “mind at 200

Sensual Mind

work” may certainly be viewed as a case study for different types of cognitive analysis. What makes it particularly fitting for our purposes is Dostoevsky’s sensualization of the mind: “A sullen thought was born in my brain and passed through my whole body like some vile sensation, similar to what one feels on entering an underground cellar, damp and musty.”? One may observe that this passage looks, retrospectively, like a step toward mapping the type of connection between feeling and thinking that became a focus of

proliferating studies in neuroscience in the last decade of the twentieth century. This “organic” link between body and mind, which in Dostoevsky forms

a parallel to a corresponding approach to the relationship between body and spirit and between spirit and mind, is further emphasized through the introduction of such notions as “pain” (and “pleasure”) into the epistemological discourse. “I am strongly convinced,” declares the underground man, “that not only too much consciousness, but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.” He contends, “Suffering—why, this is the sole cause of consciousness.” The contemporary scholar of the neuroscience of the mind, Antonio Damasio, echoes this reasoning almost verbatim: “The drama of the human condition comes solely from consciousness.”° In the course of his research, Damasio has refuted the long-standing notion that presented the mind as linked to the brain “in a somewhat equivocal relationship” and the brain as ' “consistently separated from the body rather than being seen as part of a complex living organism.” (One may observe that this “separatist” point of view was often mocked by Dostoevsky, who, of course, criticized not only a separation of mind from body but also from soul. See, for example, Dmitri’s outburst as regards “all these nerves in the brain . .. magnificent science .. . soul and God” [BK, 589])® “Through most of the twentieth century,” continues Damasio, “emo-

tions were not trusted in the laboratory. Emotions were too subjective, it was said. Emotions were too elusive and vague. Emotions were at the opposite end from reason, easily the finest human ability; and reason was pre-

sumed to be entirely independent from emotion.”’ I suggest that in Dostoevsky, one may perceive a revolutionary break from the romantic opposition that affixed reason to the brain and emotions to the body; a break which, on the one hand, links his approach with the Platonic and Christian

tradition of the threefold unity of human nature and, on the other hand, leads in the direction of the late-twentieth-century revision of the mindbody question. Apart from the previously quoted example of thought directly presented as sensation, in Dostoevsky’s world, “a state of thinking” very often plays a role traditionally attributed to “a state of feeling.” Thus, such ultimate “emotional” acts as murder and suicide come not as a result of intense feeling but as empirical proof of the theoretical problem. While 201

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the romantic hero would lall out of hatred and commit suicide out of tragic love, Dostoevsky’s characters (such as Raskolnikov and Kirillov) take such steps out of thinking. Possibly, this “functional reversal” of feeling and thinking may in part be accountable for the self-generated character of Dostoevsky’s “intellectual labor.” The unpremeditated mode of his thinking involves dynamic and uncontrollable freedom, which is usually associated with emotions. As a result, the conventional perception of the rational as an opposite to the emotional stands as inadequate. When one looks at The Brothers Karamazov from this perspective, one begins to appreciate the recognition of pain and pleasure as components of the cognitive experience. Moreover, one begins to notice how “sen-

sualization of mind” leads to the representation of thought as object of desire.

Umberto Eco at one point made a curious remark: “What the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.”® One may argue that Dostoevsky’s characters are tempted by thinking and seduced by the desire to know. They experience what might be called the eroticism of intellectual desires. In this context, one may recall that the link between erotic desire and the desire to know has been made by Freud in the context of children’s epistemophilic approach to sexuality. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky creates a striking metaphor that directly links sensuality with cognition. The thirteenth chapter of the last book, which deals with the concluding argument at Dmitri’s trial by his defense lawyer Fetyukovich, is entitled “Preliubodei mysli,” or “The Adulterer of Thought.” The verb preliubodeistvovat’ means to sin against the Seventh Commandment: “Thou shall not commit adultery” (which is reemphasized in the Tenth Commandment: “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife”). It must be remembered, however, that the Russian noun preliubodeianie has an even stronger sexual connotation than the English “adultery” and that in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was employed not only in designating the breach of fidelity in matrimony but to any extramarital sexual relationship. Consequently, the preluibodei mysli (adul-

terer of thought) is a person motivated by forbidden sexual desire, the object of which is thought. A metaphor or a metaphoric reading of a word, even a single word, may provide the basis for a whole new concept (as was demonstrated, for

example, by Robert Louis Jackson through the conceptualization of the word bezobrazie |ugliness, deformity]).? Mark Turner, an ardent proponent of an interdisciplinary approach between cognitive science and literary studies, has argued that “metaphor is not just a matter of literary wordplay, not even just a matter of language—it is a pattern of thought that underlies 202

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our cognition and knowledge generally.” He proceeds, “A metaphor, in general, provides a way of seeing one conceptual domain in terms of another conceptual domain.”"® Accordingly, it may be said that the title “The Adulterer of Thought” provides a way of seeing an intellectual domain in terms of sensuality. And

even though Dostoevsky applies this expression to only one personage, namely, Fetyukovich, this metaphor extends to the problematics of the entire novel. The attorney Fetyukovich constitutes merely an individual case of intellectual debauchery." His professional task is rather standard for a defense lawyer: to discredit, by all conceivable means, the argument of the prosecution, and to present, in the most persuasive manner, all the facts that could play in the defendant's favor. At the outset of his performance, he develops his argument with relative success, either mocking the prosecutor’s knowledge and application of “psychology” or pointing out logical contradictions in the case against his client. But from the moment he begins to build up his own version of the events, by drawing on “positivist sociology,” the very movement of his thought catastrophically destroys the possibility of Dmitri’s acquittal.

William Mills Todd II characterizes Fetyukovich’s speech as the abuse of narrative;'” one may add that Dostoevsky’s metaphor makes it clear that “The Adultery of Thought” (preliubodeistvo mysli) is exactly what the words say: the abuse of thinking. Thought itself becomes an object of de-

sire, and the process of thinking turns into a sensual process. In other words, Fetyukovich engages in a bit of mental masturbation. It may also be mentioned that the name Fetyukovich is formed from the word fetiuk, a particularly offensive name to call a man because of the letter fita, which obscenely suggests the female sexual organ. Sensuality is a loaded concept in Dostoevsky. For instance, in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (1877), he makes a very controversial (from the Orthodox Christian point of view) statement that “the only source of almost every sin of our human race” is sensuality (Ps, 25:113). In the world of The Brothers Karamazov, this concept of sensuality undergoes a detailed and by no means unambiguous development. On the one hand, most notably in the character of Fedor Karamazov, sensuality generates every kind of sin. On the other, it emerges as a passion for life and becomes a source of love, including Christian love. Therefore, the lower and upper boundaries of sensuality are determined by two notions: lust and love. This duality accounts for a dialectic of sensual mind in the novel, which is stimulated both by lust for thought and love for thought. In the first case, cognitive experience is preliubodeistvo mysli, and in the second, it implies the literal meaning of the word “philosophy” as liubomudrie (love of wisdom). In both cases, however, thought emerges as an object of desire. In theological terms—and no philosophical 2.03

Marina Kostalevsky | discussion of this novel can ignore matters of theology—the same idea is made manifest in the Sophianic doctrine that personifies the Wisdom of God in a feminine figure. In Russia, it was of course Vladimir Soloviev who most powerfully articulated this doctrine; indeed, his entire worldview was intimately and intrinsically tied to it. The sophiological position is fraught with the danger of privileging the motifs of a mystical eroticism, which distorts the more abstract and incorporeal concept of divine wisdom. In Soloviev’s oeuvre, this dilemma is idiosyncratically resolved: his philosophical writings treat Sophia in terms of all-important metaphysical principles, primarily approached from

a theoretical direction. Soloviev’s poetry, however, transforms the same principles into imagery distinctly colored by mystical eroticism. Soloviev’s

differentiation of philosophical and poetic modes of discourse does not eliminate the problems inherent in sophiology but rather illuminates the complexity that arises from the mystically erotic desire of Divine Wisdom.” The distance between the sophiological perception of wisdom as an

object of desire and the metaphorical “lust for thought” in The Brothers Karamazov is to be measured only according to Ivan Karamazov’s metric system: in quadrillions of kilometers. But as Alyosha might say, “the steps are all the same... it’s all... exactly the same sort of thing” (BK, 109). Fyodor and Ivan Karamazov, father and son, provide the two most transparent cases of Karamazov sensualism, one affecting their process of cognition and generating in them what must be called “the pleasure and

pain of thinking.” |

Book 3 of the novel and an individual chapter in the same book are entitled “Sladostrastniki,” or “The Sensualists.” Just as the Russian word preliubodei bears a much stronger sexual connotation than the English word “adulterer,” so too does the Russian word sladostrastnik in comparison with the English “sensualist.” In fact, a sladostrastnik is a person pursuing exclusively sexual pleasure. In the chapter preceding “The Sensualists,” Fyodor Pavlovich, in the midst of his sexually explicit disclosures, remarks to his sons: “Do you know what I love? I love wit” (BK, 133). This confession points to a major characteristic of his intellect. In his case it is not easy to distinguish between the pleasure he derives from wit and the pleasure he derives from the sexual content of his thoughts, since the kind of witticism he favors is concerned almost exclusively with the obscene. Here is just one example of his numerous anecdotes: “I was passing through Mokroe, and I asked an old man, and he told me: ‘best of all we like sentencing the girls to be whipped, and we let the young lads do the whipping. Next day the young lad takes the girl he’s whipped for his bride, so you see, our girls themselves go for it.’ There’s some Marquises de Sade for you, eh? Say what you like, but it’s witty” (BK, 133). It is apparent that in Fyodor’s eyes, wit is associated with sex. This connection is consistently 204

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emphasized by Dostoevsky’s treatment of this character, which evokes the thesis of Freud’s well-known study “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious.” Freud argues that wit operates against reason’s suppression of the

id and thereby breaks the rules and taboos imposed by the “censor” or superego. Since the strictest taboos are those applied to the sphere of sexuality, sexual jokes are exceptionally effective in bringing about the pleasure of liberation from the repressive mechanisms. In a recent study of human consciousness, David Chalmers suggested that the pleasure we get from a joke is placed “partway between emotions and the more obviously cognitive aspects of mind.”'* The portrait of Fyodor Karamazov serves as an illustration of this observation of the link between pleasure and cognition. For Fyodor, wit is the principal positive criterion of the thought process that is transformed into a source of sensual pleasure.

This is apparent, for instance, in the chapter entitled “The Controversy,” where Fyodor experiences an “apotheosis of intellectual delight” on two grounds. First, the old man undoubtedly appreciates the witty aspect of the situation: “Balaam’s ass, that is, Smerdyakov, has started to talk’; and second, he is delighted by the very procedure of following Smerdyakov’s intel-

lectual exercises, which, though incompetent, are not entirely lacking in superficial logic. The sensualism of Fyodor’s reaction to Smerdyakov’s sophistry is emphasized by the fact that he simultaneously feels a gustatory enjoyment: he drinks cognac s naslazhdeniem (with pleasure). The word naslazhdenie here relates to both his mental and sensory experiences. If Fyodor’s sensual mind is oriented toward “the pleasure of thinking,” Ivan’s cognitive efforts are clearly related to the pain of thinking. Traditionally, Ivan is viewed as the incarnation of mind within the triad of mind, soul, and body allegorically represented by the brothers. Sergei Bulgakov was, probably, the first to observe that “there is no description of Ivan’s physical appearance in the novel, even though the appearance of every

other major character is described.” In the context of this discussion, it may be said that Ivan is portrayed not physically but through a series of cognitive processes. He is fully preoccupied with what Heidegger has called “the craft of thinking.” It is exactly this penchant for thinking that is meant by Alyosha when he tells Rakitin that for his brother Ivan, mysl’ razreshit’ (resolving a thought) constitutes a matter of greatest importance. In this conversation it becomes clear that sensualism is the chief Karamazovian characteristic; and Alyosha introduces Ivan’s intellectual passion in the course of a discussion of this sensualism. Moreover, the verb Alyosha uses to describe Ivan’s intellectual activity, in its reflexive form, razreshit’sia, can also denote the act of giving physical birth: razreshit’sia ot bremeni. Thus, Ivan’s cognitive activity is colored by connotations of the physical, both in the context of Alyosha and Rakitin’s larger discussion and through the semantics of the word chosen to describe Ivan’s thinking. 2.05

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Indeed, Ivan himself confesses that he has “a wild and perhaps indecent thirst for life which only passionate, carnivorous, Karamazovian” people have (BK, 230). The frankly erotic connotation of the adjectives used by Ivan accentuates the genetic and even more the typological sensuality of the “Karamazovian” nature that influences not only the realm of sex but any other individual faculty, including intellect. In Ivan’s case, this “wild and indecent thirst for life” takes the form of what one may call the wild and potentially indecent thirst for thought. Alyosha, listening to his brother, recognizes intuitively the dilemma hidden behind Ivan’s confession: “I’m terribly glad that you want so much to live. I think that everyone should love life before everything else in the world.” “Love life more than its meaning?” Ivan asks to clarify, receiving the answer: “Certainly” (BK, 231). This juxtaposition of life and its meaning echoes an even more paradoxical juxtaposition of Christ and truth in Dostoevsky’s famous 1854 letter to Natalya Fonvizina: “If somebody proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it really were so that the truth were outside of Christ, then I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth” (Ps, vol. 28, bk. 1, p. 176). Brought together, these two paradoxes, divided in time by twenty-five years, provide a framework for a startling conclusion: love for Christ, who is canonically identifiable with life, should supersede the love for truth, which, in its traditional unity with the Good and the Beautiful, constitutes the meaning of Christ’s doctrine. The notion of “meaning” that Ivan separates from the notion of “life” pertains, certainly, to the set of categories linked to the concept of human cognition. Ivan is convinced that the possibilities of cognition are a priori limited by the faculties of human mind. “If God exists and if he indeed created earth, then, as we know perfectly well, he created it in accordance with Euclidean geometry, and he created human reason with a conception of

only three dimensions of space .. . I have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind, and therefore it is not for us to resolve things that are not of this world” (BK, 235). In other words, cognition, according to Ivan, is intrinsically connected with the laws of “this world,” that is to say the physical world, and must be based exclusively on the empirical facts: “I don’t understand anything, and I no longer want to understand anything. I want to stick to the fact” (BK, 243).

This desire “to stick to the fact” forces Ivan, on the one hand, to accept the existence of God—not in accordance with his faith or convictions, however, but rather on strictly logical terms. (He, in the manner of Descartes, cannot justifiably deny God’s existence because, for the limitations of the human mind, any intellectual debate about the divine is impossible.) On the other hand, the same reliance on facts makes Ivan repudiate a world that is replete with such an empirical phenomenon as suffering. Furthermore, the examples of suffering that he cites in his conversation 206

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with Alyosha exclusively relate to the empirically persuasive sensory experience of pain. Ivan’s fixation on suffering transfers the entire problematics of the questions he poses from the ontological and epistemological realms to the realm of ethics, traditionally dominant in the history of Russian thought. But at the same time, his position can hardly be called ethical, since it derives not from compassion but precisely from his fixation on suffering, his fixation on pain. Herein lies the qualitative difference that brings us back to the dilemma of life and meaning. Compassion generates a desire to help the other, that is, to commit a life-asserting action, but fixation on suffering is fraught with the desire to understand the meaning of the phenomenon. In other words, Ivan’s concentration on suffering as such stems from his obsessiveness with the meaning of life, the meaning of things, the meaning of

thought.

It is not an accident that Ivan’s first moral act in the novel takes place at the very moment of a critical shift in his consciousness. For the first time, he is not concerned with human suffering as a phenomenon but experiences

compassion for a particular human being, a little peasant he had struck down on his way to the last meeting with Smerdyakov and “who was still lying in the same spot unconscious and not moving” when Ivan returned home (BK, 633). Within the novel’s development, the physical pain that in Ivan’s theodicy functions as the paradigm of human suffering becomes a concrete indicator of his own suffering: more and more often he complains of a headache, as if pain transforms itself from a subject of a discourse into an objective condition. The figurative pain of thought becomes bodily pain. Pain and pleasure belong to the sphere of conscious experience. The treatment in The Brothers Karamazov of the cognitive sphere in terms of conscious experience is singularly modern. The relationship of consciousness and cognition is at the heart of multidisciplinary study of the mind. The ultimate purpose of such study is to produce a unified picture of the mind in which both components are fully accounted for. It is an ambitious project. Consciousness remains a mystery, while cognition has ceased to be enigmatic and can be functionally explained. The International Dictionary of Psychology defines cognition as “the mental processes concerned with the acquisition and manipulation of knowledge, including perception and thinking.” As regards consciousness, however, it declares that “the term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.”"° Dostoevsky’s treatment of what I call “the sensual mind” most defi-

nitely derives from the concept of unity between mind and body as developed by the Orthodox tradition, with its attention to the sacredness of matter. 207

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Surprisingly, Dostoevsky’s handling in The Brothers Karamazov of the interaction between cognitive and sensual spheres also anticipates the newest philosophical approach to the mind-body problem. As was observed by Caryl Emerson in the context of her discussion on Freud and Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s novels contain sufficient support for various theories of the mind. Indeed, Dostoevsky continues to offer a rich material for the exploration of the human mind, particularly for contemporary interdisciplinary work between cognitive science and literary theory.

Notes I would like to thank Dr. Karla Oeler and Professors Elizabeth Frank and Marina van Zuylen for their comments and helpful suggestions. 1. Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols. (Leningrad, 1972-90), vol. 29, bk. 1, p. 125, hereafter cited parenthetically in text as Ps with volume and page numbers. English translations from this source are mine. 2. Merab Mamardashvili, Kak ia ponimaiu filosoftiu (Moscow, 1992),

129; translation mine. 3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pe-

vear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, 1993), 88. 4. {bid., 7, 35.

3. Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (New York, 1999), 316.

6. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, 1990), hereafter cited parenthetically in text as BK with page number. All references in the text to The Brothers Karamazov refer to this edition. 7. Damasio, Feeling of What Happens, 39-40. Damasio makes a subtle distinction between “a state of emotion” and “a state of feeling,” which I am not implementing here because this is a general discussion of the subject. 8. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, 1983), 183. 9. “The concepts of obraz (image or form, but also icon), and bezobrazie (shapelessness, the monstrous, or deformed),” writes Jackson, “are structuring moral and aesthetic categories in Dostoevsky’s art and find their source in traditional Christian theology and symbolism” (Robert Louis Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes {Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981], 18). Therefore, bezobrazie simultaneously signifies disfiguration, a lack of image/form but also desecration, a lack of image/icon. 208

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10. Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty (Chicago, 1987), 9, 17. 11. Jakov E. Golosovker, a scholar who is mostly known for his book Dostoevsky and Kant (Dostoevkii i Kant, Moscow, 1963), elsewhere makes the following observation: “There are some intellectual types whose intel-

lect is sensually active and who seek sensual pleasure in the mental and spiritual spheres” (“Sushchestvuiut intellektual’nye natury, u kotorykh intellekt sladostrastinichaet i ishchet v umstvennom i v dukhovnom sladostrastnogo udovol’stviia.”), Golosovker, Zasekrekchennyi sekret: filosofskaia

proza (Tomsk, 1998), 92. It is interesting to note that Golosokver, despite his language, denies any connection between a “sensual intellect” and sexuality. Also, surprisingly, he doesn’t mention Dostoevsky in his discussion of “strastnost’ mysli” (the passion of thought). 12. William Mills Todd III, “On the Uses and Abuses of Narrative,” in Die Briider Karamasow, ed. Horst-Jiirgen Gerigk (Dresden, 1997), 84.

13. Spinoza’s amor intellectualis represents yet another example of theological integration of the two traditionally separated concepts. 14. David J. Chalmer, The Conscious Mind (Oxford, 1996), 10. 15. Sergei Bulgakov, “Ivan Karamazov v romane Dostoevskogo ‘Brat’ia Karamazovy’ kak filosofskii tip,” in O velikom inkvizitore (Moscow, 1991), 197: translation mine.

16. Norman Stuart Sutherlan, ed., International Dictionary of Psychology (New York: Continuum, 1989), s.v. “cognition,” “consciousness.”

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| Maxim D. Shrayer The Jewish Question and The Brothers Karamazov Both yes and no. Yes!—if one assumes that the human spirit, like a geometrical figure with all its sides and angles, lies in an open hand, fits entirely on a flat surface; no!—because we realize that a human heart possesses a fathomless depth, is a mysterious and self-contained world full of unelucidated hints and insurmountable contradictions. —Aron Shteinberg, “Dostoevskii i evreistvo” (“Dostoevskii and Jewry”), 1928

|T]hat this man should not have come up with even a single word in the defense or justification of a people persecuted over several thousands of years—could he have been so blind?—or was he perhaps blinded by hatred?—and he did not even refer to the Jews as a people, but as a tribe as though they were a group of natives from the Polynesian islands or somewhere—and to this tribe I belonged and the many friends and acquaintances of mine with whom I had discussed the subtlest problems of Russian literature, and to this tribe also belonged Leonid Grossman and Dolinin, Zil’bershtein and Rozenblyum, Kirpotin and Kogan, Fridlender and Bregova, Borshchevsky and Gosenpud, Mil’kina and Hus, Zundelovich and Shklovsky, Belkin, Bergman and Dvosya Livovna Sorkina and the many other Jewish literary critics who have gained what amounts to a monopoly in the study of Dostoevsky. ——Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden-Baden, 1982

WHAT PLACE would be assigned to the Jews in Dostoevsky’s theocracy? Would they be allowed to exist as a Judaic community 210

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within a larger Christian one? That would certainly depend on who the theocrat is: Father Zosima or the Grand Inquisitor. If the church state is structured in keeping with Father Zosima’s teachings, the Jews would probably be expected to merge with the Christians when the conditions for this merger have been created. If the theocrat is the Grand Inquisitor, some of the Jews would be forcefully converted, some probably becoming Marra-

nos, while the rest would be expelled, if not exterminated. Somewhere between these two poles lie Dostoevsky’s own attitudes toward the Jews and Judaism, ranging from moments of idealistic universalism and openmindedness to long streaks of enmity and intolerance.’ Let me state from the outset that I think the Jewish question in Dostoevsky is primarily a religious one rather than a social or ethnic one. Religious considerations permeate and supersede the other aspects of Dostoevsky’s writings on the Jewish question, and in fact “the Judaic question” might be a more adequate representation of what Dostoevsky grappled with when writing of the Jews. Of course there are Dostoevsky’s socioeconomic and political anxieties and phobias, but his dominant concern is this: What is one to do with the Jews in view of the obvious fact that they have refused to recognize Christ and will not convert even as they face persecution? This is the crux of Dostoevsky’s disagreements with, fears of, claims against, animosity toward, and even inspired flights of admiration and compassion for the People of the Book. Of course, there are Dostoevsky’s more or less crude versions of economic Judeophobia—look at his penchant for such terms as Jewish “usury” and Jewish “gold trade”; look at his quasi-Marxist (and quasi-Marxian) and populist explanations of and arguments about Jewish involvement in trade nd banking. And there is Dostoevsky’s anti-Jewish social rhetoric of the “Yid is coming” variety: the menacing Jewish upward mobility (and hence the numerus clausus should be kept in place); the mysterious kahal; the status in statu; the individualism and exclusiveness of the Jews. Once removed from their respective discursive, epistolary, or fictional contexts and summarized, Dostoevsky’s socioeconomic and political statements on the Jew-

ish question argue for the existence of an alleged international Jewish conspiracy and already anticipate the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion that were a concoction of the czarist secret police.* Dostoevsky’s arguments strike historians of Jewry as both familiar and predictable. There is no need to debunk them here: they are the stale bread of the chroniclers of the Jewish question, and only the students of Dostoevsky’s art stare forlornly at those pages where the word “Yid” gapes like a black hole amid other black letters. Still, one should not forget that at the Beilis trial in 1913, Chief Prosecutor O. Iu. Vipper invoked Dostoevsky’s moral authority when speaking, in the name of the people, about “the Yids” who would “destroy Russia.”? One might also find it noteworthy that in 1995, sections 1 to 3 of

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Maxim D. Shrayer chapter 2 of Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer for March 1877 were reprinted by an ultrapatriotic Russian publisher in the same series as Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s nefarious treatise, International Jewry.‘ This brochure, The Jewish Question, which features Dostoevsky’s name on the cover and takes its title from the first section of his essay about the Jews, also contains Adolf Hitler’s “My Political Testament.” Ronald Hingley’s incensed comment comes to mind in this connection: “The idealization of war, the mumbo-jumbo about a great people’s destiny, the assertion of grandiose territorial designs combined with peace-loving professions, and above all the exalted, hysterical and sometimes unharmonious prose style—all these are features uniting The Diary of a Writer with Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”* I will not grace with comments the cohort of Russian ultranationalist litterateurs who have claimed Dostoevsky as their spiritual ancestor. No matter whom else they put on their shield and banner—Sergei Aksakov, Mikhail Bakhtin, or Fedor Tiutchev—the Kozhinovs and Kuniaevs of today’s cultural right will always remain petty salesmen of “Anti-Semite and Co.”° By the middle 1870s, toward the end of his career, Dostoevsky commanded a larger-than-life authority over the Russian reading public. The

trouble with his discursive writings about the Jews, culminating in the March chapters of The Diary of a Writer for 1877, lies not in their novelty or profundity but rather in the fact that through these writings, Judeophobic thinking was given national legitimacy. Indeed, Arkadii Gornfel’d is quite right that Dostoevsky’s indictments of the Jews contain no “serious evidence, nor particularly striking ideas.”’ In fact, on a number of occasions, Dostoevsky plainly lies, as in his irresponsible remarks about the suffering of the Jews in the imperial army: “Ask if the Jew is abused in the barracks as a Jew, as a Yid, for his faith, for his tradition?” (Ps, 25:80). If only once Dostoevsky had spoken of the plight of the kantonisty, the young Jewish recruits who often starved themselves to the point of inanition, refusing to violate the dietary laws of koshrut and continuing to serve Russia and her czars! Or consider Dostoevsky’s ill-advised remark about the Jews in the postbellum United States: “But let them, let them be morally purer than all the nations in the world, and certainly of the Russian nation, and in the meantime I have just read in the March issue of Vestnik Evropy [European Messenger] a report that in America, in the southern states, the Jews have already attacked with all their power the multimillion masses of the freed

Negros and have already taken them under their control, through their known and centuries-old ‘gold trade’ [zolotym promyslom], and are taking advantage of the inexperience and human flaws of this exploited tribe” (Ps, 25:78). Let me also draw attention to the linguistic side of Dostoevsky’s writings about the Jews. In his essay “The Jewish Question,” Dostoevsky offers

a justification for using the term zhid (“Yid” or “kike”): “Could it be that 212

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they accuse me of ‘hatred’ because I sometimes call the Jew “Yid’? But, first, I did not think that it was so offensive, and, second, the word Yid, as far as

I can recall, I have always used to connote a certain idea: “Yid, Yiddism, Yids’ kingdom’ [zhid, zhidovshchina, zhidovskoe tsarstvo], etc. Here a certain notion, a direction, a characteristic of the century was being fleshed out” (Ps, 25:75).° Suggestions have been made that Dostoevsky draws a distinction between evrei (the biblical Hebrews) and zhidy (his contemporary Jews, the “Yids” or “kikes”). Such explanations of these opprobrious word choices are problematic, for the linguistic aspect of Dostoevsky’s attitudes toward the Jews entails too many variables to be packaged into a neat (and apologetic) formula: epoch and milieu, background, authorial intent, verisimilitude, speaker, usage, and speech context.? Whatever his intent may have been, when readers hear the words “Yid” or “kike” from Dostoevsky, the sheer linguistic power of these derogatory terms is tremendous—and obviously much greater than when such terms come from the mouths of street thugs. And yet, to brand Dostoevsky’s rhetoric about the Jews “banal,” as Gornfel’d did, or to ignore the presence of the Jewish question in Dostoevsky’s life and works (as most Soviet scholars were forced to do), is to commit an injustice both to Dostoevsky and to the history of Jews and Judaism.

Scholars and critics have approached this problem in a number of ways, and I would like to assess the variety of judgments that have been made

‘to date.

First, there are the apologists, of whom the finest and most sensitive is Joseph Frank, who famously called Dostoevsky “a guilty anti-Semite.”” Then there are the proponents of psychoanalytic criticism, headed by the Freudian Felix Dreizin, who referred to Dostoevsky as a “compulsive antiSemite”;” the psychoanalysts have sought explanations for Dostoevsky’s hateful remarks in his childhood and his relationships with his parents, as well as through his mental health. Other scholars have focused on various aspects of the poetics of the Jewish question in Dostoevsky, generating

compelling readings of his fictional works: Felix Philipp Ingold, Gary Rosenshield, and Michael Katz.'’* Another approach to Dostoevsky’s morbid

fascination with Jews and Judaism has been to apply the idea of a Dostoevskian double to his writings on the Jewish question. Most recently this idea was formulated by Peeter Torop, who spoke of the Jew as Dostoevsky’s double in whom Dostoevsky is reflected: “he neither loves nor hates himself, but loves or hates himself in this other.”* Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, David Zaslavskii, Felix Dreizin, and others have argued for the idea of “two Dostoevskys.” Refuting this position, Katz remarked that “of course there is only one Dostoevsky, a very complex one.””” Three scholars stand out as the authors of the most provocative works about Dostoevsky and the Jews: Leonid Grossman, David I. Goldstein, and 213

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Gary Saul Morson. Grossman zoomed in on a single case study, Dostoevsky’s correspondence with Avraam-Uria Kovner, the “Jewish Pisarev.” Published in 1924, Grossman’s captivating microhistory, Confession of a Jew, was much ahead of its time in its methods and in the conclusions it offered.’° Its protagonist, Kovner, was, one might say, himself a Dostoevskian character, a Jew and an atheist who converted to Christianity fourteen days prior to his marriage to a non-Jewish woman, a political radical and utilitarian critic, an idealistic embezzler who stole exactly 3 percent of the annual profit of Russia’s richest bank. Kovner made a powerful impression upon Dostoevsky, compelling him to speak of the Jewish question in a polemical essay. In modern Dostoevsky scholarship, Grossman was the first to place religious, and specifically messianic, questions at the center of Dostoevsky’s thinking about the Jews. Grossman brilliantly argued that a Jewish person, Jesus Christ, and a Jewish book, the Old Testament, preoccupied

Dostoevsky’s artistic imagination.’ | David I. Goldstein’s Dostoyevski and the Jews still puzzles many of the writer’s students. Although Goldstein’s book is very useful and reliable, its denunciatory thrust is misplaced. Assessing the book, Gary Saul Morson pointed to Goldstein’s refusal to allow the possibility that passages and even whole works by geniuses may “convey inhumane, fanatic, and morally unacceptable views.” Morson further suggested that the success and outcome of one’s reading of Dostoevsky’s writings about the Jews depended on one’s individual background, position, moral beliefs, and aesthetic predilections: “One reason many critics find Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitic passages disturbing is that the critics are, unlike Dostoevsky, themselves hostile to anti-Semitism. ... It is hazardous to deduce facts about an author's process of creation directly from a value judgment, or from any report of a reader’s response, because the circumstances, constraints, and concerns that shaped the making of a work need not coincide with those that shaped its reception.”"” It may thus follow that one’s thinking and writing about Dostoevsky’s thinking and writing about the Jews becomes thinking and writing about one’s individual act of reading Dostoevsky on the subject. This is a sobering and cautionary idea. What choices does one have in reading and interpreting Dostoevsky on the Jewish question? Is one’s refusal to read Dostoevsky the only truly moral response to his objectionable, Judeophobic attitudes? And, finally, must one make a distinction between the statements that Dostoevsky made about the Jews in his fiction and in his discursive writings? Of all Dostoevsky’s readers past and present, Vladimir Solov’ev has come the closest to understanding Dostoevsky’s divided and yet hauntingly integral views. Solov’ev argued that Dostoevsky realized his own formula of the Russian ideal—a formula Dostoevsky articulated in his Pushkin speech of 1880—‘“more as a sage and artist than as a thinker.””° 214

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As I prepared to write this essay, I reread both Solovev’s essay “The Russian National Ideal” (1891) and Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech (1880). In the New York Times Magazine, I came across an interview with an elderly

lady, Maude McLeod, whose ancestors were black Jews. The interview struck me as Dostoevskian in spirit and relevant to the subject of this essay. I quote from McLeod’s account of her “return” to Judaism: I grew up on the island of Montserrat, and my parents were supposed to be Christian. But in the years that I was home I always wondered why my people were so particular about what they did. We did not eat pork. My uncles were all circumcised. We ate challah bread on Friday night. ... All of that we did, and we did not know why we were doing it—because they told us that we were Christians. But I knew something was wrong, see? My grandfather told my mother we came from West Africa. And many years later I heard that

the people on Montserrat were Hebrews that were taken as slaves from Ghana and carried to the island. .. . I came to New York in 1923 when I was 19 years old... . It was 1927 when I first met Rabbi Matthew on Lenox Av-

enue. He was standing on a ladder with a yarmulke on, and. . . he was preaching that we were not Christians as they had told us, but that we were the lost house of Israel. I heard the call... . I did not join the Hebrew taith— I returned. I simply was on the wrong road and found my way back. ... When I go to synagogue, and the shemah sounds, I sing, “Shemah yisroel adonai elohanu adonai echad,” and my voice is solid.*'

_ What would Dostoevsky say about this “individual case” of a Christian reclaiming her Judaic roots? The prospect of a Judeoized Orthodox Christianity seems anything but unlikely to Dostoevsky. In The Diary of a Writer, he asks a sinister question and gives an even more sinister answer: “And in the meanwhile a fantasy has sometimes entered my head: well, what if there were 3 million Russians, and not Jews, in Russia; and there were 80 million

Jews—well, what would become of the Russians under them and how would they abuse them? Would they give them a chance to have the same rights? Would they allow them to pray among them freely? Would they not turn [the Russians] straight into slavesP Worse yet, would they not rip our skins off [ne sodrali by kozhu sovsem]|?” (Ps, 25:80). I wonder how Dostoevsky would react to an account of Russian villages where the bearded and straw-haired Russian peasants—the followers of the Judeoizers—tfollowed Mosaic law, kept kosher, and fasted on Yom Kippur.” Vladimir Solov’ev was absolutely right to emphasize that religious aspects are central to Dostoevsky’s rhetoric on the Jewish question. Scholars have suggested that Solov’ev started his own campaign for the reconciliation and unification of Orthodoxy with both western Christianity and Judaism in his third Dostoevsky speech of 1883. Almost a decade later, in his essay “The Russian National Ideal,” Solov’ev recognized that Dostoevsky’ intolerance went against the very grain of the writer's proclaimed Christian 215

Maxim D. Shrayer universalism: “If we agree with Dostoevsky, that the true essence of the Russian national spirit, its great merit and advantage, is in its being able to grasp all strange elements, to love them, to be transformed into them, and if, along with Dostoevsky, we accept that the Russian people is capable and destined to realize in a brotherly union with other nations the ideal of all-

humanity [vsechelovechestvo|—then we could never be sympathetic to Dostoevsky’s own wild attacks [vykhodkam|] against the ‘Yids,’ the Poles, the

French, the Germans, against all Europe, against all foreign faiths.” In Jewry and the Christian Question, written in 1884, three years after Dostoevsky’s death, Solov’ev posited three main questions about Russian Orthodoxy and Judaism: “1. Why was Christ a Jew, why is the stepping-

stone of the universal church taken from the House of Israel? 2. Why did the majority of Israel not recognize its Messiah, why did the Old Testament church not dissolve into the New Testament church, and why do the majority of the Jews prefer to be completely without a temple, rather than join the Christian temple? 3. Why, finally, and for what purpose was the most solid (in the religious aspect) part of Jewry moved to Russia and Poland, placed at the boundary of the Graeco-Slavic and Latin-Slavic worlds?””? I would suggest that these same questions haunted Dostoevsky, shaping his struggling vision of the Jews and unifying his divided sympathies. I would further point out that Solov’ev downplayed Dostoevsky’s fear and jealousy of the Jews and his paranoid view of a rivalry between the old Israel (the Jews) and the Russians (the New Israel) in Dostoevsky’s thinking. Writing in 1928 in a Russian émigré journal and stressing—after Grossmian—the centrality of the Jewish Bible in Dostoevsky’s literary imagination, Aron Shteinberg observed astutely that for Shatov-Dostoevsky “the God-chosen Russian people are in essence a present reincarnation of Israel” (Shatov is one of the principal characters of Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed).”® In The Possessed, Shatov explains to Stavrogin his idea of a national religious consciousness: “A people is the body of God. Every people only remains a people so long as it possesses its own God and excludes all other gods without any reconciliation; so long as it believes that, with its God, it will vanquish and expel all the other gods from the world. . . . The Jews lived only in order to await a true God, and they have left the world a true God” (Ps, 10:199). Keys to Dostoevsky’s most problematic statements about the Jews lie in his desire and inability to reconcile a universalist, all-embracing vision with his parochial, xenophobic urges.*’ Dmitrii Merezhkovskii may have said it best in “The Prophet of the Russian Revolution,” a tribute written for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dostoevsky’s death: “When the Christians call Jews ‘Yids,’ they blaspheme Christ through the womb of his Mother, in the mystery of his birth, in holy Israel. The real “Yids’ are not the Jews but those Christians who return from the New Testament to the Old, from the universal Christ to one people’s Messiah.” In the same pages, Merezhkov216

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skii also spoke of the “nationally exclusive, preordained, ‘circumcised,’ Yideoizing Orthodoxy [zhidovustvuiushchee pravoslavie| of Dostoevsky himself.” I wonder, however, whether Merezhkovskii was not giving expression to what the first part of his argument seemed to rally against. In his Pushkin speech, Dostoevsky set for himself an almost unattainable ideal: “Show me at least one of these great geniuses who would possess

the same capacity for universal responsiveness as did our Pushkin... . And what is the strength of the spirit of the Russian people if not its striving in its end goals toward universalism and all-encompassing humanity?” (Ps, 26:147). Did Dostoevsky possess the kind of universal gift that he himself glorified in the Pushkin speech? My goal is not to accuse or denounce. I do not wish to reopen the case against Dostoevsky on the grounds of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. In fact, I confess that as a Diasporic Jew, a post-Shoah Jew, and an ex-Soviet one at that, I have been conditioned to expect Judeophobic behavior. I sometimes get tired of defining my identity by negation, through blaming and self-defending and fighting every Jewish battle that comes my way. I want to be able to face my students without feeling utterly bewildered by the discussion of the blood libel in The Brothers Karamazov, bewildered by Dostoevsky and by my own inability to interpret this scene in the text’s own terms. I would like to unearth in Dostoevsky’s treatment of the Jews—in The Brothers Karamazov and other works of fiction—that which Grossman ‘ once described so lovingly: “But in the depths and at the heights of his creative work, there, where all the minutiae disappeared and the absolute was exposed, he parted with his magazine manifestos and publicistic tendencies. Dostoevsky as the artist and thinker, in the flashing scraps of his pages, would suddenly reveal a profound attraction to the complex essence of the biblical spirit.”*°

Let me turn to the text of Dostoevsky’s last novel. First of all, smallscale references to the Jews are more numerous here than in Dostoevsky’s

earlier works (I have counted ten separate instances in the text of The Brothers Karamazov). Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, referring to his early years in Odessa, speaks of having met “a lot of Yids, Yidkins, Yidels, and Yidelkins” (Zhidami, zhidkami, zhidishkami i zhideniatamt) and later being received not only by Yids but “also by Jews” (i u evreev byl priniat). Grushenka is at one point likened to a Jewish woman because of her financial savvy (prozvali ee suchshei zhidovkoi). To raise money to get to Chermashnia, Dmitri sells his watch to a Jewish watchmaker; a Jewish band plays in

Mokroe; Dmitri links his enemies to the Jews by suggesting that Grushenka’s Polish suitor would use lawyers, “Pollacks and Yidkins” (poliachkov da zhidkov; Ps, 14:21, 311, 453). The discussion of the blood libel occurs in part 4, book 11, chapter 3, and was written right after Dostoevsky’s trip to Moscow in May 1880. How Q17

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paradoxical that upon his return from Moscow, where he articulated in the Pushkin speech his innermost aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical ideals, Dostoevsky writes the blood libel scene. Petr Berlin called this juxtaposition “a pendulum’s swinging from proclaiming great Christian ideas to practical considerations that have nothing to do with such ideas.”*° The day described in book 11 is a big day for Alyosha Karamazov; he zigzags through the town of Skotoprigonevsk making visits: from Captain Snegiryov and Ilyusha to Grushenka to the Khokhlakovs. The chapter where he talks with Liza is called “Besenok” (“A Little Demon”); let us also recall that in chapter 4 of book 5 Ivan calls Alyosha a “little demon” after Alyosha has recommended that a sadistic general be executed for sending a pack of hounds after a little boy. The conversation about the blood libel is set in motion when Liza asks Alyosha the controversial question: “Alyosha, is it true that at Easter [in Russian the same word, paskha, is used for both Easter and Passover], Yids [zhidy] steal children and kill them?” “T don’t know.”

“There’s a book here in which I read about some trial, and a Yid who took a four-year-old child and cut off the fingers from both his little hands, and then crucified him on the wall, hammered nails into him, and crucified him,

and afterwards at the trial he said that the child died quickly, within four hours. That was ‘quickly’! He said the child moaned, kept on moaning and he stood admiring it. That’s nice!” “Nicer” “Nice. I sometimes imagine that it was I who crucified him. He would hang there moaning and I would sit opposite him eating pineapple compote. I am awfully fond of pineapple compote. Do you like it?” Alyosha looked at her in silence. Her pale, sallow face was suddenly contorted, her eyes burned. “You know, when I read about that child, all night I was shaking with tears. I kept thinking of how the little thing cried and moaned (a child of four un-

derstands, you know) and all the while the thought of pineapple compote haunted me. In the morning I wrote a letter to a certain person, begging him

to come and see me. He came and I told him all about the child and the pineapple compote, all about it, all, and said, ‘it was nice.’ Then he got up and

went away. He was only here five minutes. Did he despise me? Did he despise me? Tell me, tell me, Alyosha, did he despise me or not?” She sat up on the sofa, her eyes sparkling. (BK, 552-53; Ps, 15:24; emphasis in the original)

The “certain” person to whom Liza refers is of course Ivan Karamazov, the same Ivan who would refuse the Kingdom of God if it had to come at the price of one child’s suffering. Alyosha leaves soon thereafter, carrying Liza’s letter to his brother Ivan. After he is gone, Liza “unbolted the door, opened it a little, put her finger in the crack and slammed the door with all her might, pinching her finger. Ten seconds later, releasing her finger, she walked softly, slowly to her chair. She sat up straight in it and looked intently at her black218

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ened little finger and at the blood that oozed from under the nail” (BK, 554). After this episode, Alyosha visits Dmitri in jail and then runs into Ivan; Alyosha’s encounter with Ivan results in an unfortunate conversation and an

argument between them (book 11, chapters 4 and 5). First of all, Liza speaks of two alleged crimes. In addition to ritual murder (the charge that Jews allegedly use the blood of Christian babies to make matzos), she also refers to profanation of the host (here crucifixion of a Christian child). From the twelfth century onward (the William of Norwich affair), the Jews of Europe had been accused of these crimes by their persecutors in order to justify anti-Jewish violence and restrictive measures.*' Both accusations had had a history in Russia—consider the Velizh affair of 1823.° Dostoevsky knew enough about the subject to be able to make an educated and unbiased judgment.** He was acquainted with such important scholarly defenses of the Jews as D. A. Khvol’son’s monograph About Some Medieval Accusations against the Jews (1861), a condensed version of which was put out in 1879 at the height of the Kutaisi affair.“ At the same time, Dostoevsky also had access to several notoriously antiSemitic books, such as Iakov Brafman’s The Book of Kahal (1869), as well as the report of 1844, “An Inquiry into the Killing of the Christian Infants by the Jews,” commonly attributed to Vladimir Dal’ and The Question of the Use, by Jewish Sect Members, of Christian Blood (1876), by Ippolit Liutostanskii.*° Furthermore, Dostoevsky followed closely the Kutaisi affair of ‘1879 (a trial of a group of Georgian Jews falsely accused of a ritual murder of a Georgian Christian peasant girl in the village of Sachkheri) and made horrifying remarks on the subject. “How disgusting that the Yids of Kutaisi [kutaisskikh zhidov| were acquitted,” he wrote to O. A. Novikova in 1879. “Here they are undoubtedly guilty.”*° The Kutaisi affair, as Grossman was first to demonstrate, enters into the fictional space of The Brothers Karamazov in the blood libel episode.*’ Let me also suggest that typologically speaking, both ritual murder and profanation of the host are attractive notions tor Dostoevsky’s poetics; their perpetrators are accused of violating God’s image, committing acts of bezobrazie (both dehumanization and deasthetization), reenacting crucifixion to mock it.*° Typologically speaking, there is a congruency between Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov’s spitting on an icon, or having sexual intercourse with a holy fool, and an act of crucifying a child and watching him die, as presented in Liza’s description.

Commenting on the discussion of the blood libel in The Brothers Karamazov, Maxim Gorky wrote in 1913: When a [fourteen-year-old] girl tells about a “Yid who took a four-year-old child and cut off the fingers from both his little hands, and then crucified him .. . ,”

the reader knows that the girl has been slandered: she did not say, she could not say such a repugnant vile thing. And likewise, when responding to this slandered girl’s question: “Is it true that at Easter Yids steal children and kill

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them?” the righteous Alyosha says, “I don’t know,” the reader understands that Alyosha could not respond this way; Alyosha could not “not know”; he does not believe “the notorious legend,” organically he cannot believe it, although he is a Karamazov.”

Students of Dostoevsky disagree about the believability of Alyosha’s ambivalent reply to Liza’s horrific anti-Semitic anecdote. Ingold has shown that the inherent ambivalence of Alyosha’s reply yields several interpretations: “I do not have any knowledge of the subject”; “I am not sure whether it is true or not”; “I do not rule out that it is true.”“? One should also consider the place of the blood libel (krovavyi navet) in the popular imagination of the Russian population in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Morson “|does] not detect any failure of artistry in “‘[A] Little Demon.’” Rosenshield also believes that the “I don’t know” response is “more credible and artistically motivated” than any other variant: “if Russians themselves are guilty of inflicting similar cruelties on their own children |compare Ivan’s account of violence toward children, of which Liza’s letter to Ivan reminds one] can Alyosha . . . disbelieve that Jews are at least potentially capable of

similar abominations?”*’ I think this is quite true, but I add one caveat: Alyosha can well imagine sadists and villains 4 la Marquis de Sade among both Jews and Gentiles, but it seems unlikely that Father Zosima’s disciple would give credence to charges of ritual murder and profanation of the host as religious accusations against the entire Jewish people. (“Alyosha, is it true,” asks Liza, “that at Easter | Passover] Yids steal children and kill them?”)

In terms of the novel as a whole, what might have been Dostoevsky’s artistic motivation for including this scene? Can one identify other episodes that elucidate the meaning of Liza’s invocation of anti-Semitic charges and of Alyosha’s vague reply? An episode that comes to mind in this connection occurs in part 2 of the novel, when Alyosha first meets the mal’chiki (boys), including Kolya Krasotkin and Ilyusha Snegiryov. In book 4, chapter 3 (“A Meeting with the Schoolboys”), Alyosha leaves his drunk father and goes over to the Khokhla-

kovs. On the way to their house, Alyosha encounters a colorful group of boys throwing stones at each other—actually six attacking one, Ilyusha Snegiryov. Alyosha intercedes: “What are you doing! Aren’t you ashamed! Six against one! Why, you'll lall him.” One of the boys, dressed in a red shirt, explains that Ilyusha “began first.” “He is a beast, he stabbed Krasotkin in class the other day with a penknife, and there was blood.” Alyosha learns that the boys tease Ilyusha Snegiryov, using the nickname mochalka (wisp of tow). Alyosha asks the boys why they “hate him [Ilyusha] so.” They warn him to “watch out,” as Ilyusha “will stab you in a minute as he did Krasotkin.” Alyosha then attempts to reason with Ilyusha, who throws a stone at him. Here is Dostoevsky’s account of what follows:

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The boy waited in silent defiance, certain that now Alyosha would attack him. But seeing that even now he would not, his rage was like a wild little animal's. He flew at Alyosha and before Alyosha had time to move, he seized his left hand and bit his middle finger. He fixed his teeth on it. Alyosha cried out with

pain and pulled his finger away with all his might. The child let go and retreated. Alyosha’s finger had been badly bitten to the bone, close to the nail. It began to bleed. Alyosha took out his handkerchief and bound it tightly around his injured finger. (BK, 177-79)

Despite his pain and bleeding, Alyosha continues to communicate with the “wild little animal” (zverenok), asking him, “So what have I done? How have I wronged your” (BK, 179). In the next chapter Alyosha calls on the Khokhlakovs at their house— for the first time in the novel. He arrives with a bleeding finger, and Liza reacts hysterically to the sight of his injury. The word “blood” is invoked several times. Madame Khokhlakova: “Good heavens, what a wound, how

awful!” Liza: “He might have bled to death, mother! How did you do it? Water, water! You must wash it first of all, simply hold it in cold water to stop the pain, and keep it there, keep it there” (BK, 181). Later, Katerina Ivanovna arranges with Alyosha to deliver a sum of money to the Snegiryovs. Here the reader finds out from her the story of Dmitri’s drunken attack on Ilyusha’s father, retired Captain Snegiryov. Katerina Ivanovna feels terribly ashamed of Dmitri’s abusive behavior: “Dmitri did a very ugly thing. There is a certain tavern here in town and in it he met the discharged officer, that captain, whom your father used to employ. Dmitri somehow lost his temper with this man, grabbed him by the beard and dragged him out into the street in that insulting fashion. And I am told that the captain’s son, a little boy who is at the school here, ran beside them crying and begging for his father, appealing to everyone to defend him. But everyone laughed” (BK, 190-91). And then comes a curious development. Alyosha visits the Snegiryovs, and in his presence Ilyusha admits to having bitten Alyosha’s finger. Captain Snegiryov, speaking hysterically, weaves the motif of the bloody finger into his words: “What! Did he bite your finger? . . . Was it your finger he bit? . . . And did you think I'd punish him before you for your satisfaction? Would

you like it done at once, sir? .. . | am sorry about your finger, sir. But instead of beating Ilyusha, would you like me to chop off my fingers with this knife here before your eyes to satisfy your anger? I should think four fingers would be enough to satisfy your thirst for vengeance. You won’t ask tor the fifth one too?” (BK, 196-97). It finally dawns on Alyosha that the boy attacked him to avenge the violent humiliation his brother Dmitri had inflicted on the boy’s father. During a walk that Alyosha and Captain Snegiryov take together, the cap-

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tain illustrates his son’s profound empathy for him: “He suddenly fell on me, threw both his little arms around my neck and held me tight. . . . “Father,’ he kept crying, ‘dear father, how he insulted you!’ And I cried too. We sat shaking in each other’s arms. ‘Ilyusha,’ I said to him, “Ilyusha darling.’ No one saw us then. God alone saw us... . No, sir, I won’t beat my boy for your satisfaction” (BK, 203-4). The sequence of episodes from Alyosha’s meeting of the boys to his visit with the Snegiryovs is punctuated by references to blood, stabbing, wounds, and violence to children. One of the boys wears a red shirt, and the color red is even hinted at in Ilyusha’s last name, Snegiryov, from snegir’ (bullfinch), a bird with a red puffy chest. But most significantly, the motif of a finger—bitten, bleeding, cut off—receives much billing in the scenes that I discussed earlier.” I would suggest that a strong linkage exists between the early sequence of episodes where Alyosha serves as a structural conduit between Ilyusha Snegiryov and Liza Khokhlakova, and the later, problematic scene where Liza tells Alyosha of an old Jewish

man who allegedly cut off a little boy’s fingers and crucified him.* In the memory and imagination of Dostoevsky’s readers, Liza’s discussion of the alleged ritual crimes falls on fertile soil. What remains is to explain the meaning of the suggestive linkage between the story of father and son Snegiryov and Liza’s account of popular anti-Semitic accusations. The story of Dmitri Karamazov’s violence against Captain Snegiryov, paralleled as it is by the boys’ baiting and taunting Ilyusha at school, repre-

sents a classic model of scapegoating and persecution. Victimization is based on the victims’ difference and defenselessness. As René Girard has persuasively argued in The Scapegoat, persecution is grounded in the oppressor’s own crisis.“* Dmitri attacks the miserable Captain Snegiryov because old Karamazov employs him as a solicitor, and Dmitri takes out on the captain his own parricidal urges. The boys bait and taunt Ilyusha at school because he is his father’s son, the son of the “wisp of tow,” puny but proud. And what is typical of the dynamics of persecution, Ilyusha’s tormentors (the boys) blame their victim for his own victimization, blaming the victim instead of blaming the victimizer.” While the early episodes involving father and son Snegiryov suggest a paradigm of persecution, Liza’s invocation of the alleged ritual crimes—a gratuitous reference only at first glance—introduces the theme of anti-Semitism and popular anti-Judaic prejudices. But this would not be Dostoevsky’s novel, especially one where the “Russian boys” were meant to be the main heroes, if the ending did not offer a unifying perspective on both persecuting behavior and the Jewish question. In part 4 of the novel, book 10 is entitled “The Boys,” and it chronologically precedes the chapter where Liza invokes the blood libel. In book 10, the reader learns that Ilyusha Snegiryov has become a center of gravity of a group of schoolboys, while Alyosha Karamazov serves as the boys’ mentor and spiritual leader. Book 10 ends with a doctor’s pronouncing Ilyusha’s 22,2

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medical verdict, upon which his father “mutters in a wild whisper,” with trembling lips and his arms thrown up: “‘I don’t want a good boy! I don’t want another boy!’ .. . ‘If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my tongue ...’” Apparently intrigued by Captain Snegiryov’s remark, Kolya Krasotkin asks Alyosha, “What was that he said about Jerusalem? ... What did he mean by that?” “It’s from the Bible,” Alyosha explains. “‘If I forget you Jerusalem,’ that is, if I forget all that is most precious to me, if I let anything take its place, then may...” “J understand!” says Kolya, whereupon book 10 ends (BK, 532).

Captain Snegiryov quotes from Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon...” This is the psalm’s second half: How can we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither; let my tongue stick to my plate if I cease to think of you, it I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour. Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall; how they cried, “Strip her, stir her

, to her foundations!”

Fair Babylon, you predator, a blessing on him who repays you in kind

what you have inflicted on us; | a blessing on him who seizes your babies and dashed them against the rocks!*°

In his classic essay on Anton Chekhov’s “Rothschild’s Fiddle,” Robert Louis Jackson argued that Chekhov employed biblical poetry—the poetry that

appealed both to the story’s Russian coffinmaker and to the Jewish musician—and thereby suggested a path of Russian-Jewish (and Christian-Judaic) reconciliation. In his reply to Kolya Krasotkin’s question, Alyosha Karama-

zov chooses a moderate explanation of the psalm: “‘If I forget you, Jerusalem,’ that is, if I forget all that is most precious to me, if I let anything take its place, then may .. .” Alyosha’s explanation draws on the letter and spirit of the first part of Psalm 137. At the same time, Ilyusha’s father might have had something more extreme in mind when he quoted from this psalm. The ancient Jewish psalmist ends on a stark note of revenge, the victim’s revenge

for the suffering and persecution that the Jews have endured by their captors. In offending and humiliating Captain Snegiryov, Dmitri emblematically pulls out his beard, a particularly harmful act against a religious person,

for whom the beard represents the beards of the patriarchs. If one thinks 22.3

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of Ilyusha’s actions—stabbing a classmate, attacking and biting Alyosha— they strike one as acts of revenge in keeping with the psalm’s last lines. In light of the psalm’s conclusion, Ilyusha’s actions may allegorize an impending revenge of those trampled upon and falsely accused against their oppressors and murderers. One would profit from recalling that Dostoevsky’s novel came out right on the eve of the wave of massive anti-Jewish violence of 1881 to 1882 that changed the course of Jewish-Russian history.

Entering the narrative space of The Brothers Karamazov in two prominent sequences, the Jewish-Judaic theme hovers over the conclusion of the novel and augments the novel’s message. Dmitri, of course, has already been sentenced, and the narrative of parricide comes to an end. Ilyusha’s funeral crowns the ending of the novel. Alyosha Karamazov, whose first name in its diminutive form suggestively rhymes with that of Hyusha, makes a remarkable speech: Let us make a compact, here, at Ilyusha’s stone, that we will never forget Ilyusha and one another. And whatever happens to us later in life, even if we don’t meet for twenty years, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones. Do you remember, by the bridge? Afterwards we all grew so fond of him. He was a fine boy, a kindhearted, brave boy. He felt for his father and resented the cruel insult done to him and stood up for him. ... Perhaps we may grow wicked later on, may be unable to refrain from evil, may laugh at men’s tears, at those people who say as Kolya did just now: “I want to suffer for all men.” We may even jeer spitefully at such people. But however bad we may become—which God forbid—yet, when we recall how we buried Ilyusha, how we loved him in his last days [we] will not dare to laugh inwardly at having been kind and good at this moment! (BK, 727-28)

Alyosha talks specifically about the dynamics of persecution and Ilyusha’s courage in view of his baiting and taunting by the boys: “Let us remember his face and his clothes and his poor little boot, his coffin and his unhappy father. Let us remember how boldly he stood up for him against the whole school.” And then Kolya Krasotkin elevates the discourse to an even loftier note: “‘Karamazov,” cried Kolya. “Can it be true as they teach us in church, that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see

each other again, all, Ilyusha, too?” This is an opportune moment for Alyosha, and he seizes upon it: “‘Certain we shall all rise again... ,’ Alyosha answered, half laughing, half ecstatic” (BK, 729). In Jewry and the Christian Question, Solov’ev pointed out that “the final goal for Christians and Jews is the same: universal theocracy, realization of the divine law in the world of humans, the embodiment of the celestial in the earthly.”*” Reading the conclusion of The Brothers Karamazov in light of Dostoevsky’s prior writings, but also in light of Solov’ev’s views of the Russian-Jewish and Christian-Judaic relations, one is reminded of an224

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other funeral scene by Dostoevsky.* Consider “The Funeral of “The Universal Man’” and “An Isolated Case,” two sections from chapter 3 of The Diary of a Writer for March 1877. Published in the same installment, they follow immediately after Dostoevsky’s three sections of The Writer's Diary devoted to the Jewish question and Dostoevsky’s polemics with A.-U. Kovner and with T. V. Braude, a St. Petersburg physician.” Dostoevsky writes of the funeral of Dr. Hindenburg. He had learned about Dr. Hindenburg from Sof’ia E. Lur’e, a Jewish woman from Minsk whom he met in St. Petersburg in April 1876 and with whom he corresponded in 1876 and 1877.°° In fact, Dostoevsky included Lur’e’s letter of February 13, 1877, in the text of “The Funeral of ‘The Universal Man’” (Ps, 25:89—90). Dr. Hindenburg was an obstetrician, a German, and a Protestant, whose lifelong goal was helping the poor regardless of their ethnic or religious background. He died in poverty.”' In Dr. Hindenburg’s mission, Dostoevsky sees an answer to his own “pros and contras”: “The poor newborn little Jew squirms before him on the bed; a Christian takes the little Jew |evreichick] into his arms and wraps him in a shirt off his own shoulders. Gentlemen, this is the solution of the Jewish question!” And here is Dostoevsky’s description of Dr. Hindenburg’s funeral: Although this man who served everyone is an isolated case, he united the en-

tire town over his coffin. These Russian peasant women and poor Jewish women |[russkie baby i bednye evreiki| kissed his feet in the coffin together, together they bunched up near him, together they wept. .. . The whole town

sees him off, the bells of all churches toll, prayers are being sung in all tongues. The pastor speaks with tears in his eyes over the open grave. The rabbi stands nearby, waiting for the pastor to finish, then takes over and gives his speech and sheds the same tears. And in this moment this very same “Jewish question” is nearly resolved! Indeed, the pastor and the rabbi have joined together in common love, they have nearly embraced each other over the grave in full view of Christians and Jews. (Ps, 25:91, 92; emphasis in the original)

Striking an intonation similar to the one resounding through the conclusion of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky here elevated “common love” to a spiritual note the Jews and the Christians share, or could share, as communities that thirstily await the Messiah—in his first or second coming. In the Pushkin speech, created some three years later while Dostoevsky was already working on The Brothers Karamazov, he called on his compatriots “to strive to introduce a final reconciliation into European contradictions . . . for the Russian soul to embrace .. . all of our brothers” (Ps, 26:148).

Why did Dostoevsky not make Captain Snegiryov a Jew? Why did he choose instead to sketch a model of persecution and scapegoating (the Snegiryov episodes) and to link it to the history of anti-Semitism and popular

anti-Judaic beliefs (Liza’s discussion of the blood libel)P One cannot, of 29.5

Maxim D. Shrayer course, answer this question without a measure of speculation. The fact remains, inspiring and appealing Jewish characters are glaringly absent from Dostoevsky’s fiction.*’ Creating profound Jewish characters became the task of the Russian writers who came after Dostoevsky, first Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Korolenko, then the neorealists—Leonid Andreyev, Ivan Bunin, Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Kuprin, and others. Some of these Russian writers were less philo-Semitic than others in their private lives, but in their works they consistently tried to ease the great burden of Russian guilt by drawing moving portraits of the Jews and decrying their compatriots’ antiSemitism. Among the generations of Russian writers that succeeded Dostoevsky in the 1880s and the 1900s, many believed that Russian-Jewish (and Christian-Judaic) reconciliation required an admission of Russian and Christian guilt. Following in Dostoevsky’s footsteps, today’s Russian writers continue to struggle with themselves as they create Jewish characters. It would serve these Russian writers well to reread not only The Brothers Karamazov but also the works of Vladimir Solov’ ev, who obtained his universalist inspiration from Dostoevsky’s art. “The Jews have always treated us in accordance to the Jewish faith,” Solov’ev wrote in 1884, “on the contrary, we, the Chris-

tians, have yet to learn to treat the Jews in the Christian fashion.”™

Notes An early version of this essay was presented at the symposium “Focus on The Brothers Karamazov” at Yale University on October 3, 1999. I am most grateful to the organizer, Robert Louis Jackson, for encouraging me to undertake this study, giving me an opportunity to participate in the symposium, and commenting on several drafts of this essay. A later version was delivered as “The Judaic Question in Dostoevskii’s The Brothers Karamazov,” at “Dostojewskij und Deutschland,” the eleventh symposium of the International Dostoevsky Society at Baden-Baden, on October 5, 2001. I thank the organizers, Horst-Jiirgen Gerigk and Rolf-Dieter Kluge, for including me in the program. This essay was originally published as “Dosteovskii, the Jewish Question, and The Brothers Karamazov,” in Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (summer 2002): 273-91, and I thank Slavic Review’s associate editor, Jane T. Hegdes, for her superb editorial work. My research assistant, Peter Rahaghi, has helped in the final preparation of the manuscript. Boston College has kindly provided funding for my research and for travel to Germany. F inally, I would like to thank my wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, for drawing my attention to an

interview that helped me formulate my ideas and for reading and patiently commenting on a version of this essay.

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“The Jewish Question and The Brothers Karamazov” copyright © 2002

by Maxim D. Shrayer. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The epigraphs are taken from A. Z. Shteinberg, “Dostoevskii i evreistvo,” Versty 3 (1928): 99 [translation mine]; and Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden Baden, trans. Roger and Angela Keys (London, 1987), 116. 1. All citations from Dostoevsky’s Russian texts are from F. M. Dostoevsldi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols. (Leningrad, 1972-90), hereafter cited parenthetically in text as Ps with volume and page number. Brat’ia Karamazovy appears in volumes 14 and 15. I use a modi-

fied version of Constance Garnett’s English translation of The Brothers Karamazov (New York, 1957), hereatter cited as BK with page number. All other translations from the Russian are my own; they do not attempt to capture the artistry of the original but rather seek to be literal insofar as possible. A number of scholars have written about Jewish topics in Dostoevsky’s life and art. The following are works that will not be acknowledged elsewhere in this essay: D. V. Grishin, “Byl li Dostoevskii antisemitom?” Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 114 (1974): 73-88; Robert Louis Jackson, “A Footnote to Selo Stepancikovo,” Ricerche Slavistiche 17-19 (1970-72): 247-57; Robert Louis Jackson, “The Bathhouse Scene in Notes from the House of the Dead,” Literature, Culture, and Society in the Modern Age: In Honor of Joseph Frank, special issue of Stanford Slavic Studies 4, no. 1 (1991): 260-68; Walter Kaufman, “Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky,” Existentialism, Religion, and Death: Thirteen Essays (New York, 1976), 15-27; Joshua Kunitz, Russian Literature and the Jew (New York, 1929), 51-54; E. Levin, “Vladimir Solov’ev protiv antisemitizma,” Evrei v SSSR 19 (January 1979): 418-38; M. Schwartz, “Dostoievsky and Judaism,” Jewish Review 4 (April-June 1933): 57-63. 2. Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov was a forgery created in Paris by an anonymous author probably employed by the Okhrana, the Russian secret police. The first Russian public edition was put out by S. A. Nilus in 1905 and was followed by a second edition in 1911. The Protocols gained their worldwide notoriety in the late 1910s and early 1920s. 3. David I. Goldstein, Dostoyevski and the Jews (Austin, 1981), 131 (originally published as Dostoievski et les juifs |Paris, 1976]); see also Leonid Grossman, Ispoved’ odnogo evreia (Moscow, 1924), 65-66. 4. See F. M. Dostoevskii, Evreiskii vopros (Moscow, 1995), 3-13; see also Ps, 25:75-93. Of the six sections in Diary of a Writer for March 1877

where Dostoevsky discusses the Jewish question, the publishers of this compilation have included only disgracefully edited versions of sections | (“Evreiskii vopros”), 2 (“Pro i contra”), and 3 (“Status in statu: Sorok vekov bytiia”).

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5. Ronald Hingley, Dostoevsky: His Life and Works (New York, 1978), 174-75.

6. I am paraphrasing Vladimir Nabokov’s formulation about Chichikov in Dead Souls: “Chichikov himself is merely the ill-paid representative of the Devil, a traveling salesman from Hades, ‘our Mr. Chichikov as the Satan & Co. firm may be imagined calling their easy-going, healthy looking but inwardly shivering and rotting agent.” Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York, 1961), 73.

7. Alrkadii] Gornfel’d, “Dostoevskii, Fedor Mikhailovich,” in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 7 (St. Petersburg, n.d. [1906]), 311.

8. On the word zhid in Russian language and culture, see Henrik Birnbaum, “Some Problems with the Etymology and the Semantics of Slavic Zid ‘Jew,’” Slavica Hierosolymitana: Slavic Studies of the Hebrew University, vol. 8 (1985): 1-11; and John D. Klier, “Zhid: Biography of a Russian Epithet,” Slavonic and East European Review 60, no. 1 (1982): 1-15. 9. It is, for instance, difficult to “make sense” of Dostoevsky’s flippant use of the noun zhid in his essay “Po povodu vystavki” (“On the Occasion of an Exhibition”), from The Diary of a Writer for 1878; see Ps, 21:71. 10. Gornfel’d, “Dostoevskii, Fedor Mikhailovich,” 311; after a version

of this essay had been delivered at the 2001 Dostoevsky symposium in Baden-Baden, Horst-Jiirgen Gerigk kindly sent me the manuscript of a Russian translation of a long and fascinating paper by the Japanese Slavist Kennosuke Nakamura, “Dostoevskii i evreiskii vopros: Zametki” (“Dostoevskii and the Jewish question: Observations”), translated from the Japanese into Russian by Aleksei Potapov. The original version appeared in the Japanese-language collection Nationalism in Contemporary Russian Culture, ed. Haruko Yasuoka (Tokyo, 1998). Nakamura’s paper makes an important contribution to the study of Dostoevsky’s attitudes toward the Jews, and I can only regret that I did not learn about it earlier and that it is not available in English. 11. Joseph Frank, foreword to Goldstein, Dostoyevski and the Jews, xiv. In the final installment of his monumental Dostoevsky biography, which has come out since the original publication of this essay, Joseph Frank has devoted a chapter to Dostoevsky’s writings on the Jewish question; see Frank, “The Jewish Question,” Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 301-19. Committing several pages to Dostoevsky’s riveting exchange with AvraamUria Kovner, Frank takes a less apologetic stance toward Dostoevsky’s discursive anti-Semitism. Suggesting a model of “oscillation between advocacy and attack” (316), Frank asks himself and his readers if one might “view Dostoevsky as inwardly caught between the Christian-philanthropic ideals ... and a need to find a scapegoat for the disappointments, frustrations, and social-economic upheavals that had plunged Russian life into turmoil since 228

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the liberation of the serfs” (319). I wonder, however, if Frank does not underplay (willy-nilly?) the religious nature of Dostoevsky’s Judeophobia. Consider this comment by Frank: “Nonetheless, [Dostoevsky] did not consider himself to be anti-Semitic out of religious animosity or unreasoning prejudice” (303). 12. Felix Dreizin, “Dostoevsky’s ‘Kike,’” in The Russian Soul and the Jew: Essays in Literary Ethnocentrism, ed. David Guaspari (Lantham, Md., 1990), 1138.

13. Felix Philipp Ingold’s work (Dostojewskij und das Judentum |Frank-

furt am Main, 1981]) strikes me as the most balanced in its reasoning and the least befuddled by overarching theories. See also Gary Rosenshield, “Isai Fomich Bumshtein: The Representation of the Jew in Dostoevsky’s Major Fiction,” Russian Review 43, no. 3 (July 1984): 261-76; Rosenshield, “Dostoevskii’s “The Funeral of the Universal Man’ and ‘An Isolated Case’ and Chekhov’s ‘Rothschild’s Fiddle’: The Jewish Question,” Russian Review 56, no. 4 (October 1997): 487-504; and Michael Katz, “Once More on the Subject of Dostoevsky and the Jews,” in People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity, ed. Jeftery Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Madison, 1996), 231-44. 14. P. Torop, “Dostoevskii: Logika evreiskogo voprosa,” Sbornik statei k 70-lettiu prof. Iu. M. Lotmana (Tartu, 1992), 310. 15. Katz, “Once More,” 242. On the idea of “two Dostoevskiis,” see D. S. Merezhkovskii, “Prorok russkoi revoliutsii: K iublieiu Dostoevskogo,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii D. S. Merezhkovskogo, vol. 11 (St. Petersburg— Moscow, 1911); D. S. Merezhkovskii, L. Tolstoi i Dostoevskii: Zhizn’, tvorchestvo i religiia, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii D. S. Merezhkovskogo, vol. 7 (St. Petersburg—Moscow, 1912); and Dlavid] Zaslavskii, “Dostoevskii 0 evreiakh (K stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia),” Evreiskii vestnik 1 (1 April 1922): 6-10. 16. Leonid Grossman, Ispoved’ odnogo evreia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1924). Grossman’s book is available in English translation; see Confession of

a Jew (a more accurate translation of Grossman’s Russian title would be Confession of One Jew), trans. Ranne Moab (New York, 1975); the Russian text was recently reprinted: Ispoved’ odnogo evreiia (Moscow, 1999). Aleksandr Melikhov’s novel Ispoved’ evreia (Confession of a Jew) adapts its title from Grossman’s book; Melikhov’s novel was published in Novyi mir in

1993 and then in book form in 1994; see Aleksandr Melikhov, Ispoved’ evreia (St. Petersburg, 1994). Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Leto v Badene (1982) also takes its inspiration from Grossman’s Confessions of a Jew; it was recently brought into public view by Susan Sontag’s “Loving Dostoevsky,” New Yorker, 1 October 2001, 98-105. Tsypkin’s novel is available in English translation: Swmmer in Baden-Baden, trans. Roger and Angela Keys (London, 1987; New York, 2001); it was reprinted in Moscow in 1999 and 2003. Peter Scotto’s essay explores Jewish questions in Grossman’s influential study 229

Maxim D. Shrayer

“Lermontov and the Cultures of the East”; see “Censorship, Reading, and Interpretation: A Case Study from the Soviet Union,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 109, no.1 (1994): 61-70. 17. See, in particular, Leonid Grossman, “Dostoevskii I iudaizm,” Ispoved’ odnogo evreia (Moscow, 1924), 165-81. 18. Gary Saul Morson, “Dostoevsky’s Anti-Semitism and the Critics: A Review Article,” Slavic and East European Journal 27, no. 3 (1983): 312. Morson reworked this article for publication in a collection of essays by Jewish scholars; see Gary Saul Morson, “Apologetics and Negative Apologetics; Or, Dialogues of a Jewish Slavist,” in People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity, ed. Jeffery Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Madison, 1996), 78-97.

19. Morson, “Dostoevsky’s Anti-Semitism,” 310. 20. V. S. Solov’ev, “Russkii natsional’nyi ideal,” Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, 1883-1897 (St. Petersburg, n.d.), 383.

21. Maude McLeod and David Isay, “‘I Did Not Join the Hebrew Faith—I Returned,’” New York Times Magazine, 29 September 1999, 116; emphasis in the original. I thank my wife, Karen E. Lasser, for drawing my attention to this interview.

22. For a useful account of the history of Judeoizers in Russia, see “Zhidovstvuiushchie” in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 7, ed. L. Katsnel’son

and D. G. Gintsburg (St. Petersburg, n.d. [1906]), 582-88. Small Judaic communities of Russian peasants had survived into the post-World War II Soviet period and were persecuted by the Soviet authorities. For instance,

see an account by the then members of the Helsinki Group, including Vlasimir Slepak and Anatoly Sharansky, of a visit to the selo (village) of Tinka, in the Talovaia district of the Voronezh province, in June 1975: “Soobshchenie o Sele Tinka,” Gruppa Sodeistviia vypolneniiu Khel’sinskikh soglashenti v SSSR. Dokumenty, Vol’noe slovo, vol. 25-26 (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 108-10. 23. See V. S. Solov’ev, “Tri rechi v pamiat’ Dostoevskogo,” in Filosoftia iskusstoa 1 literaturnaia kritika, ed. R. Gal’tseva and I. Rodnianskaia (Moscow, 1991), 250-51. See Marina Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev: The

Art of Integral Vision (New Haven, 1997), 28-34. 24. Solov’ev, “Russkii natsional’nyi ideal,” 382-83. 25. V. S. Solov’ev, Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros (Moscow, 1884), 9; see also 6. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt discusses Solov’ev’s writings on Jews and Judaism in “Vladimir Solov’ev on Spiritual Nationhood, Russia and the Jews,” Russian Review 56, no. 2 (April 1997): 157-77. 26. Shteinberg, “Dostoevskii i evreistvo,” 103. 27. See Nathan Rosen’s passionate review of David I. Goldstein’s Dostoyevuski and the Jews, Dostoevsky Studies 3 (1982): 200-3. 28. Merezhkovskii, “Prorok russkoi revoliutsii,” 195-96. 2.30

The Jewish Question and The Brothers Karamazov , 29. Grossman, Ispoved’ odnogo evreia, 167. 30. P. A. Berlin, “Dostoevskii i evrei,” Novyi zhurnal 83 (1966): 266. 31. See Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (Philadelphia, 1943), 109-55; see also “Krov’,” in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 9, ed. A. Garkavi and L. Katsnel’son (St. Petersburg, n.d. [1906]), 866-69; and John Doyle Klier, “The Occult Element in Russian Judeophobia,” Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855-1881 (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), 417-49. 32. See “Velizhskoe delo,” in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 5, ed. A. Garkavi and L. Katsnel’son (St. Petersburg, n.d. [1906]), 398-406.

33. On the subject of ritual murder in Dostoevsky, see Goldstein, Dostoyevski and the Jews, 95-98, 122-26, 155-59. 34. D. A. Khvol’son, O nekotorykh obvineniiakh protiv evreev: Is-

toricheskoe issledovanie po istochnikam (St. Petersburg, 1861); D. A. Khvol’son, Upotrebliaiut li evrei khristianskuiu krov’? (St. Petersburg, 1879).

35. Iakov Brafman, Kniga Kagala: Materialy dlia izucheniia evreiskogo byta (Vilna, 1869); Iu. Gessen et al., eds., Zapiska o ritual’nykh ubtistvakh (pripisvyaemaia V. I. Daliu) i ee istochniki (St. Petersburg, 1914). The report, attributed to V. I. Dal’, was originally published as Rozyskanie o ubienii evreiami khristianskikh mladentsev i wpotreblenii krovi ikh (St. Petersburg, 1844). See John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855-1881 (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), 419; on the other two figures associated with the authorship of the 1844 Dal’ report, see 495 n. 6. A leading Dostoevsky scholar, Boris Tikhomirov, has kindly shared with me his recent discovery, shedding new light on the possible source of Liza’s information. Made in connection with the forthcoming description of Dostoevsky’s personal library (reconstruction), Tikhomirov’s finding will appear in Nauchnoe opisanie biblioteki F M. Dostoevskogo (rekonstrucktsiia) ed.

N. F. Budanova (St. Peterburg, forthcoming 2003). Tikhomirov suggests that the book that Liza refers to is Ippolit Liutostanskii’s Vopros ob upotreblenii evreiami-sektatorami khristianskoi krovi dlia religioznykh tselei, v sviai s voprosom ob otnoshenii evreistva k khristianstvu voobshche (The Question of the Use, by Jewish Sect Members, of Christian Blood for Religious Purposes, in Connection to the Question of the Jews’ Attitudes to Christianity as a Whole), 1st ed. (Moscow, 1876). I. Liutostanskii, a former Polish Catholic priest defrocked in 1867 and subsequently ordained as a Russian Orthodox priest, based his book on the dissertation he had written and defended while studying at an Orthodox seminary (about Liutostanskii and his career, see his own Pokaiannoe pis’mo Ippolita Liutostanskogo | Kiev, 1911)). Tikhomirov traces Liza’s reference to Dostoevsky’s notebook for 1876-77, where the following entry is found: “‘Moskovskie Vedomosti.’ No. 296. Kniga ob upotreblenii evreiami khristianskoi krovi. Tsena 2 rub. Po Sadovoi u Korableva” (Dostoevsky, Ps, 24:296). Dostoevsky refers to an advertise231]

Maxim D. Shrayer | ment printed in No. 296 of the newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti, announcing the publication and sale of Liutostanskii’s book, but not the name of its author. The nature of Dostoevsky’s notebook entry points to his intention to purchase the book, although we do not know for a fact whether he did indeed purchase it. Since Liza specifically refers to “odna kniga” (one/a book), Tikhomirov's hypothesis seems more substantiated than the well-known contention that Liza refers to materials in the review Grazhdanin in 1878 (see Dostoevsky, Ps, 15:588). I take this opportunity to thank Boris Tikhomirov

for his contribution.

36. “Kutaisskoe delo,” in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, Evreiskaia entsik-

lopediia, vol. 9, ed. A. Garkavi and L. Katsnel’son (St. Petersburg, n.d. [1906]), 863-65. For Dostoevsky’s remarks, see Ps, 30-1:59. 37. Grossman’s research is discussed in Goldstein, Dostoyevski and the Jews, 157-58, 217 n. 33.

38. Robert Louis Jackson elucidated the centrality of the obrazbezobrazie opposition in Dostoevsky’s poetics and aesthetics; see, in particular, his The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton, 1981), 304-18. J investigated the problem of linguistic dehumanization in “Metamorphoses of bezobrazie in Dostoevskij’s The Brothers Karamazov: Maksimov-

Von Sohn-Karamazov,” Russian Literature 37 (1995): 93-108. 39. M. Gor’kii, “Eshche o ‘karamazovshchine,’” in F M. Dostoevskii v russkoi kritike, ed. A. Dmitriieva (Moscow, 1956), 396. 40. See Ingold, Dostojewskij und das Judentum, 88-95. 41. Morson, “Dostoevsky’s Anti-Semitism,” 310; Rosenshield, “Isai Fomich Bumshtein,” 275. In a brief passage occurring in the context of an

extensive analysis of The Brothers Karamazov, Frank points out that Alyosha’s reply is “verisimilar, given the intellectual limitations of his background; and the fact that [Alyosha] does not simply affirm the truth [sic] of this charge may be considered a small concession to decency” (Dostoevsky, 669-70). Frank does state, without equivocation, that Dostoevsky’s introduction of the topic of blood libel “leaves a permanent stain on his reputation” (669-70). 42. Another refraction of the finger motif is the account of the birth of the servant Grigory’s son who is born with six fingers; I am grateful to Horst-Jiirgen Gerigk for pointing this out. 43. One could also argue that toward the end of the novel, the motif

of blood has gained further prominence: the bloody murder of old Karamazov, the servant Grigory’s bloody wound, the blood on Dmitri’s hands and clothes, and so on. 44, See René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, 1986), esp. chap. 2, “Stereotypes of Persecution.” Originally published as Le bouc émissaire (Paris, 1982). : 45. Berlin spoke about this process in “Dostoevskii i evrei.”

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46. Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia, 1988/5748 [the Jewish year]), 1272. 47. Solov’ev, Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros, 28. 48. Gary Rosenshield points to a connection between “The Funeral of ‘The Universal Man’” and The Brothers Karamazov in his article, “Dostoevskii’s “The Funeral of the Universal Man,” esp. 488, 492-94, 501. 49. In “Leskov and Dostoevsky, Parable and Icon,” a section of her recent book, Rewriting the Jew, Gabriella Safran offered interesting comments on Dostoevsky’s “Funeral of “The Universal Man’” and “The Jewish - Question”; see Safran, Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford, 2000), 1385-46. 50. See S. A. Ipatova, ed., “Neizdannye pis’ma k Dostoevskomu [Letter of S. E. Lur’e],” Dostoevuskii: Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. 12 (St. Petersburg, 1996), 205-26. Of S. E. Lur’e’s letters to Dostoevsky, nine letters and an envelope of the tenth have survived (they are at Institut russkoi literatury [Institute of Russian Literature], Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka, St. Petersburg); Dostoevsky is known to have written ten letters to Lur’e, of which three have survived and been published (see Ps, 29:81, 146, 150). See also Frank, Dostoevsky, 223-24, 316-17. The subject of Sof’ia Lur’e’s relationship with Dostoevsky awaits its investigators. 51. My main source of information about Hindenburg is Sof’ia Lur’e’s letter to Dostoevsky of February 13, 1877. A recent publication of Lur’e’s

letters to Dostoevsky mentions an obituary, published in the Germanlanguage Sankt-Petersbourger Herold, February 1877; see S. A. Ipatova, ed., “Neizdannye pis’ma k Dostoevskomu.” 52. A catalog of principal Jewish characters in Dostoevsky’s fiction in-

cludes Isai Fomich Bumshtein in Notes from the House of the Dead, Akhilles (Achilles) in Crime and Punishment, and Liamshin in The Possessed. In the early 1840s, Dostoevsky worked on a play to be titled Zhid Iankel’ Iankel’ the Yid), inspired by Nikolay Gogol’s Taras Bul’ba. 53. I discuss the careers of three major representatives of Russian village prose, Viktor Astaf’ev, Valentin Rasputin, and Vasilii Belov, in connection with their writings about the Jews, in “Anti-Semitism and the Decline of Russian Village Prose,” Partisan Review 3 (2000): 474-85. 54. Solovev, Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros, 3.

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Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone:

“The Whole Picture” | This is rapture, the ecstasy of faith, forgiving all and embracing all. Let us strongly embrace, kiss

one another, and start anew as brothers... . In-

, deed I know that there is nothing higher than this thought of embracing. —From Dostoevsky’s notebook, April 1876 (Ps, 9.4:202)

Ivan Fyodorovich [Karamazov] is profound. He’s not one of your contemporary atheists, demonstrating in his lack of faith merely the narrowness of his worldview and the dullness of his own dull-witted abilities. . . . The scoun-

drels ridiculed me for an ignorant and a retrograde faith in God. These blockheads never dreamed of such a powerful negation of God as that put in the Inquisitor and in the preceding chapter, to which the whole novel serves

as an answer. But I do not believe in God like a fool, a fanatic. And they wished to teach me, and laughed over my backwardness. But their stupid natures did not even dream of such a powerful negation as I have lived through.

It is for them to teach me.

Here we have a remarkable statement by an author in his notebook about his creation. He is immensely proud of the profundity and power of his hero’s “negation of God”; indeed, he identifies his own spiritual trials with his hero’s experience. At the same time he informs us that “the whole novel serves as an answer” to that negation of God. Critical interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov, whatever else it does, must ultimately be concerned with the question of how and in what way the “whole novel,” as Dostoevsky puts it, seeks to “answer” Ivan’s negation. Seeks—because where we are involved with Dostoevsky versus Dostoevsky—and that is almost always the case in his major novels—there is not likely to be an answer, or voice, that definitively drowns out the other contending voices.” As in a symphony or chorus, however, there are domi-

, nants and directions, and a sense of the whole picture. That whole picture constitutes a point of view. The novel, in its artistic unity, it might be said, knows where it is going. 234

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In any case, one of the answers to Ivan’s “negation of God” is Alyosha: his life, his experience, his moral-spiritual drama. To each of the KaramaZOv sons is granted a speech, a discourse, or a declamation that is emblematic of his ache. Alyosha’s speech at the very end of the novel certainly embodies much that is dear to Dostoevsky. This speech is by no means the answer that the “whole novel” gives. Yet as Dostoevsky himself remarks in the preface to The Brothers Karamazov, one devoted to “my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov”: “it sometimes happens that precisely [an odd hero like Alyosha] .. . bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.” Alyosha Karamazov’s “speech at the stone,” that is, his speech at the spot the boy Ilyusha wanted himself buried, a place of sacred memory for Ilyusha, his school friends, and Alyosha, was certainly designed by Dostoevsky to contain the “heart of the whole.” This speech appears at the very

end of The Brothers Karamazov, at the conclusion of chapter 3 of the novel’s epilogue; indeed, it may be said to constitute the end of the novel: for we must bear in mind that the speech flows into the novel’s last passage, one that consists of some thirty lines, given over to intermingling voices (among them Aloshya’s own voice), responding to and recapitulating the great themes of Alyosha’s speech: remembrance, reconciliation, and the idea of universal brotherhood in heaven and on earth. Thus the novel is framed, literally and thematically, by what we might call the Alyosha motif: Dostoevsky’s remarks on his hero in the novel’s preface or prologue (“From the Author”) and his hero’s own remarks at the end of the epilogue. What lies in between, of course, is the whole novel, or what Dostoevsky termed the “flooding wind” of the epoch. Ivan Karamazov’s “rebellion,” certainly the eye of the storm in The Brothers Karamazov, serves as a useful point of departure for a discussion of Alyosha’s speech. Ivan’s speech comes at the end of a long and discouraging discourse on human nature, in general, and on the horrendous pain and suffering inflicted upon children, in particular. This peroration contains Ivan’s indictment of God’s world and, by implication, a negation of God himself: for in the clever design of Ivan, an evil God, one who tolerates the intolerable, one who trades salvation in the coin of the tears and suftering of children, is no God at all. In Dostoevsky’s notebook for The Brothers Karamazov we find the lines: “The Inquisitor: God as a merchant” (Ps,

15:230); and indeed, scorching is the metaphor of commerce that Ivan awakens in his discussion of religious redemption. Both Ivan’s denunciatory peroration and Alyosha’s hortatory speech to the boys revolve around the suffering and death of a child: in the first case, a child torn to pieces by dogs in front of his mother; in the second, a boy, lyusha, humiliated, wounded unto death by people and circumstances. 235

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The suffering and death of a child, however, in both discourses inspires radically different conclusions on the part of the speakers. Ivan takes his case to heaven, while Alyosha brings his case down to earth. Ivan seeks to split Alyosha off from the elder Zosima and his faith; Alyosha finds in the

drama and death of Ilyusha a meeting ground for union and communion among the boys and himself. Ivan returns his “ticket” to world harmony. In juxtaposing aspects of the two speeches, particularly their openings, I wish to foreground elements that define Dostoevsky’s own critique of his great protagonist of rebellion, Ivan Karamazov, a critique that does not exclude, paradoxically, a deep empathy with his hero’s anguish. The elucidation of some of these details will constitute a background to a close examination of Alyosha’s speech and of the significance of the great chorus of

voices that concludes The Brothers Karamazov. | Everybody remembers Ivan Karamazov’s “rebellion,” or lamentation,

in which, after a moment of silence, he launches into an impassioned, rhythmic declamation on the suffering of children in general and the suffering in particular of a child torn to pieces by dogs in front of his mother. Keeping his eyes and those of Alyosha on the disfigured child, an image paralyzing to mind and spirit, Ivan feverishly and methodically builds his case

against an order that he can neither “understand” nor live with: one in which there is suffering, but no guilty ones. Ivan wants retribution but insists that hell will not correct the situation of the tormented children. He has no patience with the divine plan of redemption. Starting out by characterizing himself as a “bedbug” who understands nothing, Ivan ends by rejecting God’s world. “I'd rather remain with my unrequited suffering and unquenched indignation even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission” (BK, 245). Ivan, separating justice from God’s truth, returns his admission ticket to divine harmony. As we know, Alyosha’s mentor, the elder Zosima, in the tradition of the ancient Russian church clergy, perceives in excessive lamentation the danger of rebellion and religious despair.* The lamentation feeds only upon its feeling of despair. “Lamentations are simply the need to constantly irritate the wound.” “Do not console yourself, but weep,” Zosima tells a keening mother, but he advises her to think of her child in heaven, a child, he emphasizes, who “looks down on you from there and sees you, and rejoices in your tears” (BK, 50). This theme of anticipated resurrection will be echoed at the very end of The Brothers Karamazov where the strains of quiet grief dissolve into the great joyous chorus of brotherhood and resurrection. Ivan’s solo of indignation and rebellion is, effectively, drowned out. Drowned out, but not forgotten. For in various ways, especially at the beginning of Alyosha’s speech at the stone, we are reminded of Ivan’s “rebellion.” 236

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Let us note, first, the formal similarities between these two speeches. The main body of Ivan’s peroration, from his words to Alyosha, “Listen to me,” through his return of his ticket of admission to world harmony—‘T just most respectfully return to him the ticket”—consists of eighty-two lines in the canonical Russian text. Alyosha’s speech—from his words, “Gentlemen, I should like to have a word with you” through “Let us never forget him, and may his memory be eternal and good in our hearts now and unto ages of ages!” is eighty-three lines. “In art, as in life too,” Anton P. Chekhov once wrote in a letter, “there is nothing accidental.” Both Alyosha and Ivan address an audience: in Ivan’s case, Alyosha; in Alyosha’s, boys gathered around him. Alyosha, like Christ with his disciples at the Last Supper, addresses “about twelve” boys whom he seeks to prepare spiritually for their future lives and tasks. In the course of his speech, Ivan twice calls upon Alyosha to pay heed—“Listen to me”—and twice addresses him rhetorically—“Oh, Alyosha,” “Do you see, Alyosha.” We say: “Ivan addresses Alyosha,” yet in a sense everything about his bitter declamation revolves around himself. The theme of the suffering of children, in addition, becomes a basis for disunion with Alyosha and with the world. In contrast, Alyosha, both in the form of his speech and in its content, not only addresses his audience directly but also interacts with it. His voice, instead of separating itself from his audience, identifies with it, seeks to establish common ground with it, to find a basis for unity in the present and future, in the shared recollection of Ilyusha’s suffering and sacrifice. The suffering of the child is ultimately a basis for union and harmony, both in an immediate and in a higher sense. We have only to look at the pronouns used by Ivan and Alyosha to get a clear view of the ethical divide separating the two brothers and their ditferent directions. Ivan’s speech is punctuated throughout by “IT”: “I took children only so as to make it more obvious”; “I’ve purposely narrowed down my theme”; “Iam a bedbug, I confess in all humility that I can understand nothing”; “Of course, I know, and of course I cannot consent to live by it!”; “I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself” (BK, 243-44), and so on. The pronoun “J” and the Russian words for “my” and “me,” along with Russian verbs used in the first person (with the pronoun “I” being understood) appear sixty-three times in a text of eighty-one lines! Dostoevsky certainly shares Ivan’s concern for the suffering of children. At the same time, he reminds us by the drumbeat of “I’s” that Ivan effectively has barricaded himself from his own compassion. On the psychological and ideological plane, the unbearable pain and indignation expressed in and by his hysterical lamentation have turned compassion into its opposite. The questions Ivan raises are serious ones, but here in his despair, 237

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compassion is disfigured. “Ivan loves nobody,” Fyodor asserts, intuitively grasping Ivan’s troubled state of mind. (BK, 175).° Ivan’s endless “T’s” are signposts on a road that leads not to love and compassion, but to crime, mystery, the half-conscious sanctioning of murder. The pronoun “we” and its variants appear only once in Ivan’s discourse, and then in the scornful expression: “We can’t afford to pay so much for admission.” Alyosha, in contrast, in a speech of almost identical length, uses the plural “we” and its variants (“us,” “our”), thirty-seven times. Here,

too, the detail is telltale: it points to the inner, ethical orientation of the speaker, his relationship to Ilyusha and to his audience: “Gentlemen, we shall be parting soon”; “Let us agree here, by Ilyusha’s stone, that we will never forget. . .”; “No matter how wicked we may be . . . as soon as we re-

member...” (BK, 774—75), and so on. |

Alyosha’s repeated use of the plural “you” also deserves mention: “Gentlemen, I should like to have a word with you.” “T” in the twenty or so times it is used in Alyosha’s speech always interacts with “you.” This “I” is not Ivan’s commanding invitation to a monologue—“Listen to me!”; this is

not (to borrow the words from Vyacheslav I. Ivanov) the distancing formula—“Thou art recognized by me as existing”—but the integrating principle: “I experience thy existence as my own.” Ivan begins his speech like an old-fashioned nineteenth-century actor preparing for his monologue. With a studied theatrical gesture, he sets the stage for his declamation: “Ivan was silent for a moment, his face suddenly became very sad.” There is something profoundly self-conscious, if not postured, about this stance; it lacks spontaneity. Ivan, indeed, comes ready to “speak”: “Why are you testing me>” Alyosha exclaims. “Will you finally tell me?” “Of course I'll tell you, that’s just what I’ve been leading up to. You are dear to me,” Ivan replies, “I don’t want to let you slip, and I won’t give you up to your Zosima” (BK, 243). Ivan’s silence, his sad face, is as much a theatrical device as a reflection of mental disorder. His suffering child, his “little pictures” of suffering

children do not come from personal contact or experience with children but from scattered news accounts; they are those of an “observer.” Whatever the significance of the arguments that follow his silence, his sad face at this moment is a studied prelude which, like Smerdyakov’s fall down the stairs, will take on the character of a real, self-induced paroxysm, a hysteri-

calThelamentation. | beginning of Alyosha’s dialogue with his twelve disciples (the model of Christ’s speech to his disciples is plain) contrasts sharply with the contrived beginning of Ivan’s monologue. A very different mood or atmo-

, sphere prevails at the outset of Alyosha’s speech at the stone, even though these remarks, too, turn on the recollection of a deceased child—Ilyusha, a child whom Alyosha knew well and whom he had sought to assist. There is 238

Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone

nothing funereal, dark, or oppressive, however, about this moment or about Alyosha’s speech. The speech, too, takes place in the open air and not in the

half closed-off surroundings of a tavern booth, as in the case of Ivan’s lamentation.

Of great significance is the setting and prompting of Alyosha’s address. Alyosha and the boys are returning from the service that had been held for Ilyusha. On the path from the church, they pass the great stone where Ilyusha and his father, Captain Snegiryov, had met after the father’s humiliation by Dmitri (Ilyusha’s father gives a vivid account to Alyosha of this meeting by the stone); here at the stone is where Ilyusha’s father originally wanted to bury him; here is where Ilyusha himself had wanted to be buried. The boys and Alyosha come upon this gravestone, one marked by earthly and religious meaning. And suddenly Smurov exclaimed [voskliknul]: “Here's Ilyusha’s stone, the one they wanted to bury him under!”

They all silently stopped at the big stone. Alyosha looked and the whole picture of what Snegiryov had once told him about Ilyushechka, crying and embracing his father, exclaiming: “Papa, papa, how he humiliated you!” rose at once in his memory. Something shook, as it were, in his soul. With a serious and important look he gazed around at all those dear, bright faces of the schoolboys, Ilyusha’s comrades, and suddenly said to them: “Gentlemen, I should like to have a word with you, here, on this very spot.” The boys gathered around him and turned to him at once with attentive, expectant eyes. (BK, 774)

Dostoevsky’s careful work on this opening scene is apparent. In contrast to Ivan’s planned speech and contrived opening, everything here is spontaneous, beginning with Smurov’s “exclamation” at the sight of the intended gravestone of Ilyusha. Smurov’s exclamation, that is, his exclamation of surprise at the sight of the stone, is itself an important signal in Dostoevsky’s vocabulary of signs: it evokes the image of the tomb as a place of transcendence. Smurov’s exclamation sets the stage for a speech in which motifs from the Last Supper will echo, a speech that itself will end on a note of “memory eternal.” Indeed, a straight line leads from Smurov’s exclamation at the sight of the stone (the incentive for Alyosha’s speech) to the exclamation that signals, literally and figuratively, the ending of the novel as we know it: an ending that has as its dominant aspect the triumphant theme of love, reconciliation, and universal brotherhood extending from earth to heaven: “And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya cried once more ecstatically, and once more all the boys joined in his exclamation [vosklitsanie|. (BK, 776)

The choral “voice of praise” that Ivan anticipates in the “trembling of the universe” at the end of time is precisely the “exclamation” that Ivan will 239

Robert Louis Jackson | have none of: “Ia ne khochu togda vosklitsat’” (“I do not want to exclaim”), he declares earlier in his “rebellion” (BK, 244, 245). On the symbolic plane of the novel’s action, the excited exclamations at the very end of the novel, the joyous chorus of boys’ voices, anticipate the hallelujah of the heavenly choir at the end of time. To return to the beginning of Alyosha’s speech: he and the boys come upon the stone as they are walking along the path. Alyosha’s reactions to

seeing the stone, like Smurov’s, are spontaneous: the “whole picture” of Snegiryov and Ilyusha arises in his memory. “Something shook, as it were, in his soul.” He looks at the boys and “suddenly” speaks to them. “Suddenly,” here, is not the theatrical “suddenly” that preludes Ivan’s speech: “Ivan was silent for a moment, his face suddenly became very sad.” Alyosha’s impulse to speak is devoid of artificial gesture or melodrama. Alyosha’s “suddenly” is prompted by a fresh memory, a recollection arising from his own feeling

and experience. |

“Something shook, as it were, in his soul.” The word “shook”—sotri-

aslos’—is the same word Ivan uses to describe the “shaking of the universe’—sotriasenie vselennoi—when all in heaven and under the earth merge in one “voice of praise.” Alyosha’s moment of deep feeling echoes eternal truth. The reverent moment of silence of the boys and of Alyosha on coming across Ilyusha’s “stone”—-again in contrast to that staged moment of silence that precedes Ivan’s own recollection of the image of the suffering child—is one that everybody shares: “They all silently stopped at the big stone.”

The speech that follows this moment of silence is not something Alyosha has been preparing for, as in the case of Ivan. The boys gather naturally around the stone, around the memory of Ilyusha. Alyosha’s speech, his effort to unite the boys in solemn recollection, emerges organically out of that moment of silence, reverence, and respect for the child. Both Ivan’s and Alyosha’s speeches have at their center a “picture” of a suffering child. Ivan’s child, one of his “little pictures,” is drawn from a newspaper account of a landowner who baits his dogs with a child in front

of the mother. Ivan holds this little picture, figuratively speaking, before Alyosha’s eyes, as he, Ivan, rejects the idea of the suffering child as a basis for “solidarity in sin” (BK, 244). Alyosha speaks concretely about a real person, a child, whom he has

known. His “whole picture” comes directly from life, from direct contact with Ilyusha; it includes the boys who had played a fatal role in Ilyusha’s life. Alyosha’s compassion is direct, comprehensible. Iyusha’s suffering and sacrifice are presented as grounds for the moral and spiritual unity of the boys. In contrast to Ivan’s parody of the notion of “solidarity in sin,” Alyosha advances the idea of the suffering child as a basis for solidarity in love. 240

Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone

Dostoevsky’s accent on the “whole picture” is an important one; this is not just a picture focused on a horrendous moment of cruelty and injus-

tice or on the victim or perpetrator alone, but one focused on the entire tragedy, one encompassing the actions and behavior of a whole community of people. Most important, however, the whole picture encompasses not only evil but also the potential for good and the momentary expression of good in human nature. Here is the whole picture. Not without reason does Dmitri, indirectly culpable in Ilyusha’s tragedy and directly culpable in the tragedy of his father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, say early in the novel, in reference to his ethical conflicts: “God knows my heart, he sees all my despair. He sees the whole picture” (BK, 121). That is what Dostoevsky ultimately insists upon: the whole picture. Alyosha begins his talk “with a serious and important look”: “with a serious and important look he gazed around at all these dear, bright faces of the schoolboys”—he addresses them not with a “sad look,” not with an imperative “Listen to me,” and not with a torrential wail of words, a lamentation that feeds on its own anguish. Rather, he begins his speech with the respectful address, “Gentlemen” (Gospoda) and with the expressed wish “to say... a word” (skazat’... odno slovo). Alyosha makes his presence felt, first of all, through eye contact: the most direct way of reaching a human being, a person’s humanity (BK, 774). What is involved in a person’s relation to Christ, Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook, is direct attraction, “the image of Christ from which comes all teaching” (Ps, 11:92). In turn, it is Alyosha who arouses the attention of the boys around him. At the outset, there is a bonding exchange of glances between Alyosha and the boys, one that establishes a community. To Alyosha’s “serious and important look” the boys respond with “expectant glances” concentrating (ustremili) on him their attentive, expectant eyes. The appearance of the Russian word ustremit’—literally, to “direct” or “fasten one’s gaze upon”—is not accidental; it links Alyosha with Christ in the chapter “The Grand Inquisitor” (bk. 5, chap. 5). “This could be one of the best passages in the poem, I mean, why it is exactly that [the people] recognize him as Christ,” Ivan says of the moment Christ appears on the square before the cathedral. “The people are drawn to him by an invincible force [literally, “the people strive toward him (stremitsia k nemu) with an invincible force”], they flock to him, surround him, follow him” (BK, 249). An interchange of looks between Alyosha and the boys occurs several times in the course of Alyosha’s speech: “I look at your kind, dear faces”; “the boys looked tenderly and attentively at the orator”; “Each face that is looking at me now, at this moment, I will remember”; “How can I forget Kartashov . . . looking at me with his with his nice, kind happy eyes?” (BK, 774, 775) These interchanges of glances, more than any words, speak of the

spiritual bond between Alyosha and the boys. Indeed, glances seal that 241

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bond. Alyosha and the boys will not so much remember words, later on, as they will recall images, “pictures,” the “whole picture” of their relationship

to Ilyusha, to Alyosha, and the occasion of their gathering. , Alyosha’s whole picture, his opening recollection of Snegiryov’s recollection of Ilyusha at the stone, leads directly into the main, or outer, theme

of his speech: the importance of remembering, the importance of the purified and purifying image of recollection as a way of maintaining or reconstituting, when necessary, moral and spiritual health. “Russian children,” Dostoevsky wrote in the January 1876 issue of his Diary of a Writer, “are brought up to behold repulsive pictures such as a peasant whipping a helpless, overburdened horse across the eyes” (Ps, 22:26). To counteract these terrible impressions, to root them out and plant new ones, Dostoevsky recommends “a series of pure, holy, beautiful pictures [that] would have a strong impact upon souls thirsting for beautiful impressions” (Ps, 22:24). Scarcely noticed by the reader of Raskolnikov’s monstrous dream of a peasant beating his horse is his recollection in the prelude to the dream of his earliest and positive childhood memories, pictures that include the family church with its green cupola and its ancient icons. Dostoevsky’s inclusion of this detail was not an accident: the possibility of Raskolnikov’s redemption, in Dostoevsky’s view, is rooted partly in the existence of such early pure memories, recollections that lie at the base ot his consciousness. The real meaning, or inner core of Alyosha’s speech, of course, is embodied not so much in words, as in the embodied gospel Word. Like Christ’s speech at the Last Supper, “Whither I go, ye cannot come; so now I say to you” (John 13:33), Alyosha’s talk opens on a note of separation: “Gentlemen, we shall be parting soon.” But it is a separation like that facing Christ and his disciples, which will be overcome, ultimately, through memory. “But these things have I told you”—here the utterance of Christ—“that when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them. ... Remember the word that I said unto you” (John: 16:4; 15:20 AV). Alyosha’s separation from the boys will be overcome, first of all, in a merging, a coming together, a joining of voices—such merging as we see at the end of Alyosha’s speech and at the end of the novel. That joining of voices is heralded at the outset of Alyosha’s speech by the Russian verb soglasimsia—“let us agree”—a verb that consists of the preposition “with” and of a root that is found in the Russian golos, or “voice.” “And so we shall part, gentlemen. Let us agree here, by Ilyusha’s stone, that we will never forget—first, Ilyushechka, and second, one another.” The expression “one another” or “each other” in Russian, drug o druge, consists of two words, each meaning “friend,” each word separated by a preposition, thus accenting, in Alyosha’s context, the idea of remembering friends.

242 ,

Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone

The first appeal of Alyosha is for so-glas, a joining of voices: one may go one’s separate way in life, but one can and must, first of all, before taking leave of one another, voluntarily agree, concur, coordinate voices, sing in unison, live in spiritual reconciliation, in a condition of free concord involving everybody. One can and must agree—the act is a free one—not to forget Ilyusha and “each other.” The act of remembering, of calling upon each other to remember— reiterated throughout Alyosha’s speech by a variety of Russian words signifying remembering—is itself an act of consecration, of bringing together, of re-creating a moment of spiritual unity and harmony: “All the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united (vsem soobshcha, soedinennymi) by such good and kind feelings as made us too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are” (BK, 774).

The moment of spiritual unity and harmony Alyosha refers to is that moment when everyone reveals himself or herself as he or she is at heart. The potential for good, Dostoevsky believed, lies in each of us. Thus, he writes in “The Golden Age in the Pocket” in the January 1876 issue of his Diary of a Writer: “Do you know that really every one of you, if you only wanted to, could at once make everybody happy in this hall, and captivate them all? And this power exists in every one of you, but it is so deeply hidden that long ago it came to seem impossible. Yet can it be, can it be, that the golden age exists only on porcelain teacups?” (Ps, 22:13). Alyosha has no illusions that he or the boys will live an idyllic existence. He knows that there will be serious lapses and setbacks. His focus, unlike Ivan’s in his speech, is not on the past but on the future. He knows that evil existed in the past (the whole story of Ilyusha), that it exists in the present, and that it will exist in the future. What he accents is the need to avoid “great evil” (velikoe zlo), that is, catastrophe, exactly the kind of evil that is at the center of The Brothers Karamazov. Alyosha concedes that the boys, perhaps, do not now fully understand what he is saying to them, but he suggests that some day they will remember and that at that time they will agree with his words spoken now: “Perhaps you will not understand what I am going to say to you. . . but still you will remember and someday agree with my words” (BK, 774). Alyosha, like Dostoevsky, lays great stress on the importance of the primary “good memory” or impressions, that which is preserved from childhood.’ What Alyosha seeks is for the boys, figuratively speaking, to create an icon out of the deceased Ilyusha, that is, a fully formed ethical and spiritual memory associated with Ilyusha. Such a memory, Alyosha insists, may have a saving effect on a person’s whole life. We may do wicked things later on in life, Alyosha remarks,

243

Robert Louis Jackson , And yet, no matter how wicked we may be—and God preserve us from that—as soon as we remember how we buried Ilyusha, how we loved him in his last days, and how we've been talking just now, so much as friends, so together, by this stone, the most cruel and jeering man among us, if we should become so, still will not dare laugh within himself at how kind and good he was at this present moment! Moreover, perhaps just this memory alone will keep him from great evil, and he will think better of it and say “Yes, I was kind, brave, and honest then.” Let him laugh to himself, it’s no matter, a man often laughs at what is kind and good. (BK, 774-75)

This passage involves remarkable gymnastics in time: Now, in the present— “at this present moment”—Alyosha calls upon the boys to contemplate a moment in the future when they will remember the past, that is, the nowpresent at which moment they are burying Ilyusha and loving him. On the basis of that future recollection of the past, they will not dare in the future to laugh within themselves at how kind and good they were in the past, that is, “at this present moment” when they are all together, loving Ilyusha, and contemplating a future conjured up by Alyosha. The categories of past, present, and future merge in Alyosha’s exhortation to the boys much as they do in the dream journey to a star of Dostoevsky’s ridiculous man in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (1877). For the boys in The Brothers Karamazov, as for the hero of Dostoevsky’s story, the journey that Alyosha conducts them through, one that takes them back and forth through time, has therapeutic value. Alyosha seeks not only to impress on the boys’ minds the importance for the future of their present friendship

and good feelings but also, as it were, to inoculate them against a future fraught with great danger, inoculate them with a created memory, the memory of Ilyusha, inoculate them with the iconographic features of beautiful and sacred memory itself. Alyosha not only calls upon his disciples to remember the binding image of Ilyusha and the image of concord surrounding him but also vows that he himself will not forget any of them. “I give you my word, gentlemen,” he says toward the end of his discourse, “I give you my word (Ja slovo vam daiu) that for my part I will never forget any one of you.” “I give you my word”: Alyosha does not merely give his word that he will not forget the boys; like Christ, he gives them the gospel Word. “And the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1 AV). It is not Alyosha’s mere words that will ultimately be instrumental in the lives of the boys (though these words convey his message) but the embodied Word, the image, the memory of communion, love itself. In the words of John that impressed Dostoevsky so much: “God is love” (I John 1:4-8 AV).

| Ivan’s speech moves deliriously toward a rejection of harmony: his lacerating emotions implode and leave him in a state of moral-psychological collapse. Alyosha’s speech, too, grows in intensity; it moves, however, toward 244

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a passionate affirmation of harmony, brotherhood, and love, one that soon leads to an explosion of emotion in his audience, lifting them into a state of — moral and spiritual exaltation. The voices of Alyosha and the boys merge and interact with one another at the end of Alyosha’s speech; they call out to each other in ecstatic affirmations of love for Ilyusha and Alyosha. The charged atmosphere resembles almost that of a religious revivalist meeting in which preacher and congregation alternate in an ever intensifying dialogue of rapture and ecstasy. Here is a slightly condensed version of the dialogue: “Let us never forget him, and may his memory be eternal and good in our hearts now and unto ages of ages!”—says Alyosha. “Yes, yes, eternal, eternal,” all the boys cried in their ringing voices, with deep feeling in their faces. “Let us remember his face, and his clothes, and his poor boots...” “We will, we will remember!” the boys cried again .. . “Ah, how I loved him!” exclaimed Kolya.

“Ah, children, ah, dear friends, do not be afraid of life! How good life is when you do something good and rightful!” “Yes, yes,” the boys repeated ecstatically. “Karamazov, we love you!”—a voice . . . exclaimed irrepressibly. “We love you, we love you,” everyone joined in. Many had tears shining in their eyes. “Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya proclaimed ecstatically. “And memory eternal for the dead boy!—Alyosha added again, with feel-

meg... “Memory eternal!” the boys joined in. (BK, 775-76)

Alyosha’s repeated, almost desperate appeals—desperate, for after the tragedy of the Karamazov family, all hope can only take on a desperate form; Alyo-

sha’s insistent appeals not to forget Ilyusha, not to forget the burial, not to forget brotherly feelings, not to forget the purity of the moment (the tragic results of forgetting are clear enough in Ilyusha’s case, as they are in the lives of the abandoned Karamazov boys); Alyosha’s appeals to remember Ilyusha and the present moment, to love one another, to walk hand in hand, to love life; all these appeals, finally, pass almost imperceptibly and involuntarily into a premonition of immortality: “‘Karamazov!’ cried Kolya, ‘can it really be true as religion says, that we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyushechka® ‘Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been,’ Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy. “Ah, how good that will be!’—cried Kolya” (BK, 776).

The elder Zosima’s picture at the beginning of the novel of the child in heaven—the resurrected child of a peasant woman joyfully pointing to his mother on earth—now is echoed at the end of the novel in the prefiguration of joyous reunion in heaven. 945

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The harmonious family on earth, in the final chorus of The Brothers Karamazov, is a premonition of the harmonious family in heaven. Ivan, as we know, indignantly refuses to take part in that chorus or concert, that moment when the universe will be shaken, when all in heaven and under the earth will merge in one voice of praise, when all that lives and has lived will exclaim: “Just art Thou, O Lord, for thy ways are revealed” (BK, 244). Ivan refuses to participate in this glorious moment out of respect for the unexpiated tears of children and out of a general feeling of indignation. Yet we might also surmise that Ivan, the archetypal soloist, refuses to sing in the chorus just because it is a chorus. Alyosha, as his interaction with the boys attests, is not a soloist. He interacts emotionally and spiritually with his audience through a dialogue of words and glances. His voice, at the end, merges with the chorus of the boys’ voices. “In order to transform the world anew,” the “mysterious visitor” tells the elder Zosima, “it is necessary that people themselves psychically turn onto another path” (BK, 303). In the upheaval (sotriasenie) that takes place in Alyosha’s soul—“Something shook, as it were, in his soul”—and in the idea of an upheaval or “shaking of the universe” (sotriasenie vselennoi) that Ivan anticipates at the end of time, we are momentarily made aware of that final psychic change of which the “secret visitor” speaks. Alyosha’s talk has a tremendous impact on his youthful audience. He himself tries to temper the boys’ ecstatic mood, to lead them back to earth, back to the memorial dinner and pancakes that are soon to follow: “Well, and now let’s end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don’t be disturbed that we’ll be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient, eternal thing, and there’s good in that, too,” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let’s go! And we go like this now, hand in hand.” (BK, 776)

Kolya and the boys, and along with them, Alyosha, are carried forward on a wave of extraordinary jubilation, indeed, exalted ethical-religious emotion. The presence of the eighteenth-century German poet, dramatist, and thinker Friedrich von Schiller—specifically, his “Ode to Joy” (An die Freude, 1785)—is unmistakable in this final episode.® Schiller, that youthful love of Dostoevsky; Schiller, the champion of brotherhood and of the loftiest ideals of humanity; Schiller, who Dostoevsky said belonged more to Russia than

to Europe; Schiller, whom the divided Dmitri Karamazov invokes in his moments of ecstasy and despair (BK, 107-8; Schiller, whose poem “Resignation” forms a subtext to Ivan’s rebellion; Schiller, of whom it has been said that he missed his vocation as a religious preacher—this same Schiller asserts his magic power at the end of The Brothers Karamazov, as he does in other parts of the novel. There is an overexcited, euphoric, precisely exclamatory quality to the

final choral scene, one that goes far beyond the lofty but spiritually con246

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tained affirmations of those silent iconographic representations of medieval Russian spirituality, “O Tebe raduetsia” (“All Creation Rejoiceth in Thee”). Here at the end of The Brothers Karamazov is a scene that borders on the kind of romantic Schilleresque Briiderschaft, or sentimental brotherliness, that Dostoevsky, at other moments in his earlier works, knew how to parody mercilessly in heroes who had lost contact with Russian reality. Yet this was Clearly not that kind of a moment for Dostoevsky. In this period, Dostoevsky himself, as we know, fondly recollected the beneficent power that Schiller (for example, in his play “The Robbers”) had exercised on him in his youth (Ps, 30:1-212). The final choral moment in the novel is a complex one: it joins an authentic note of spiritual-religious fervor with a romantic exuberance—precisely the kind of synthesis that lies at the basis of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—two works that merge in the final swelling chorus of the last movement of the Ninth: Freude schéner Gotterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium, Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmiliche, dein Heiligtum. Deine Zauber binden wieder, Was die Mode streng geteilt; Alle Menschen werden Briider, Wo dein sanfter Fliigel weilt. Seid umschlungen Millionen! Dieser Kuss den Ganzen Welt! Briider—iiberm Sternenzelt Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.”°

Joy, O beauteous spark divine, Daughter of Elysium, Fire-drunk we enter now, Heavenly one, your sacred shrine. Your magic power joins again

What fashion sternly did divide; All mankind shall be as brothers Where your gentle wings abide. Take now this embrace, you millions! This kiss—for the whole world wide! Brothers—above the starry heavens There must a loving Father dwell.

These and other verses from “Ode to Joy,” constituting almost a religious hymn, a spiritual dithyramb, celebrate the theme of friendship, familial harmony, good will on earth, and the existence of a loving F ather. “Joy” itself, a kind of universal law, is the enabling element that brings peo247

| Robert Louis Jackson ple together. In Schiller’s ode there is no “I,” only “we.” The stanzas themselves, divided into two parts (a speaker and chorus), joyfully interact with one another. The utopian spirit and themes of Schiller’s poem, memorialized in the chorale movement of Beethoven’s Ninth,!! find expression, too,

in the chorus of voices that concludes The Brothers Karamazov. And Beethoven’s own verses, introducing Schiller’s “Ode to Joy’—“O friends, not these sounds! / Rather let us intone more pleasant ones, and more full of joy!” (O Freunde, nicht diese Tone! / Sondern lasst uns angenehmere anstimmen / Und freudenvollere!)—seem the unspoken words of Dostoevsky as we are lifted, at the end of The Brothers Karamazov, on a great wave of joyful enthusiasm, faith in friendship, and universal love.” Despite the distance that separates Dostoevsky from his youthful Romantic enthusiasm for the Schiller,'’ he responds with sympathy, indeed, with empathy, to the intoxicated peals of his chorus. He attaches enormous

importance to this closing episode. He has created a scene and sense of moral and spiritual exultation to which every reader must yield, as he yields to the stupendous choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth with its exalted idealism: yields, regardless of how with his rational mind he assesses such grandiose, such Dionysian, such “fire-drunk” affirmation. This is a thrilling moment that cannot be gainsaid, regardless of the tragedies of utopian ideology and spirit in the two hundred years that begin with the French Revolution and end with the demise of Lenin’s and Stalin’s revolution in Russia. It is noteworthy that Dostoevsky initially was of two minds as to how to approach the boys’ exuberant idealism in the final lines of the novel. It is clear from the notebook variant to this final scene (as well as from Alyosha’s good-humored effort to bring the boys down to earth and back to the pancakes of the memorial dinner) that Dostoevsky, quite like the elder Zosima (BK, 56-58), viewed with apprehension this kind of dreamy love and ideal-

istic enthusiasm. In lines that do not appear in the final text but are to be found in a discarded variant, Alyosha responds with the following words to the boys’ enthusiastic approval of his thought that life is good “when you do something good and rightful!” Only remember, that the good is not suddenly made. What happens suddenly, perhaps, may be eloquent and beautiful, but never will be so grand and exalted as that which is done patiently, with effort, with conviction. (Ps, 15:377)

The passage is important not only for its note of caution and sobriety but also for the juxtaposition of two pairs of words: “eloquent and beautiful” (krasivo i prekrasno) with their accent on the aesthetic, and “grand and exalted” (veliko i vozvyshenno) with their accent on the sublime. “Ecstasy,” “ecstatic,” “exclaimed,” “exclamation,” “cry out,” “shout out” are words that are repeated in the final lines of the novel; the word “sublime” (vozvyshennyi), however, with its deep spiritual connotations, appears only in the variant. 248

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Noteworthy in this connection is another change that Dostoevsky made in the text of the final lines of the novel. Kolya’s boisterously cheerful “Ah, how good that will be’—in response to Alyosha’s assurance that “we shall rise” and meet in heaven—was originally followed by these words: —Yes, yes!—responded several voices. But those who remained silent bore such a solemn and intense expression that, perhaps, those who were silent had even deeper and stronger feelings than those who cried out (Ps, 15:377)

Dostoevsky’s point is clear: Those who were silent were closer to the sublime vision. The mystery of resurrection is most deeply apprehended, Dostoevsky suggests, not in exultant shouts but in reverent silence. “An uttered word is silver, but an unuttered one is golden” Dostoevsky wrote in his Diary of a Writer (Ps, 21:88). Dostoevsky, however, eliminated those important qualifying words about silence and the silent ones; he chose not to undercut the euphoric and ecstatic mood of the final choral voices; he chose not to divide the congregation of boys into noisy screamers and silent worshipers. It was enough, as we have already noted, for Dostoevsky to have Alyosha warmly and gently make an attempt to bring the boys down to earth. “Can it really be true as religion says, that we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life?” asks Kolya. What Dostoevsky wished, but chose

not to indicate at this point, was that religion in its most reverent and sublime moments does not “say,” as Kolya Krassotkin puts it, but silently knows. Such a knowledge of the sublime was expressed in the moment of silence when the boys first came upon the stone where Ilyusha wished to be

buried. “Well, and now let’s end our speeches and go to the memorial dinner,”

Alyosha says at the novel’s conclusion. Indeed, we have been treated to speeches and exclamations in the final lines of the novel. Left out is the idea, stressed by Alyosha in the variant passages of the novel, of the importance of “conviction,” “effort,” and “patience” in the attainment of the good. Left out, one might be ready to conclude, is reality. But what is “reality” for Dostoevsky? Reality for him is “the whole picture.” The answer to Ivan Karamazov’s “rebellion” and to the deep skepticism, indeed, the apostasy of the Grand Inquisitor, was the “whole novel.” Reality and realism to him are all available meaning; that meaning includes

not only material reality, social and economic history but also hopes and moral strivings, aesthetic and spiritual beauty; it includes ideals of the loftiest kind. “There is no reason to be ashamed of your idealism,” Dostoevsky wrote in his Diary of a Writer in 1876. “Idealism, in essence, is just as real as realism, and will never disappear from the world” (Ps, 23:70). In what is perhaps philosophically the most important line in all his work, Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook in 1864, “Man strives on earth toward an ideal that is 249

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contrary to his nature.” Otherwise, Dostoevsky believed, life on earth would be senseless (Ps, 20:175). How are we to explain, then, the contradiction between the exuber-

ance of the ending of the novel and the soberness that we find in Dostoevsky’s notebook variant, in the teachings of the elder Zosima, and finally in the tragic events of the novel itself? The conclusion to The Brothers Karamazov, as we know it, is not only an end but a moment of transition to an-

other, still-unwritten second part of the novel, a novel in which the main characters of the first novel were to plunge again into a new drama of human effort and error. Was there to be an ultimate return at the end of the second volume, after new trials and tribulations, to a more restrained and sober, more quietly elevated spirit of affirmation? What is certain is that the ending of the first volume of The Brothers Karamazov novel forms a bridge

to something new and unknown. ,

What is certain, too, is that the speech of Alyosha, and the chorus of voices at the end of the novel (heard in all its purity and joy), form a momentous and symbolic moment: pregnant—as in the case of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” and Beethoven’s choral finale to his Ninth Symphony—with the highest moral, social, and spiritual ideals and premonitions: a moment providing a sustaining “memory” in the years ahead.

Notes :

1. F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh, 30 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90), 27:48 [hereafter cited as Ps with volume and page numbers; all English translation of works from this source, other than The Brothers Karamazov, are mine]. The remarks appear in Dostoevsky’s notebook dated 1881. 2. It is almost superfluous, here, to mention Milhail Bakhtin’s groundbreaking contribution to this theme in a study on Dostoevsky first published in Russian in 1929 and later, in an expanded version, in 1963. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevusky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, intro. Wayne C. Booth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 3 [hereafter cited parenthetically in text as BK, with page number]. I use this translation for the English version of Dostoevsky’s Russian text. I have in places altered the translation for purposes of analysis. 4. See my discussion of this issue in Robert Louis Jackson, The Art of

Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 319-22; see also Liza Knapp’s important discussion of this 250

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theme in her essay in the present volume, “Mothers and Sons in The Brothers Karamazov: Our Ladies of Skotoprigonevsk.” 5. “V iskusstve, kak i v zhizni, nichego sluchainogo ne byvaet.” See An-

ton Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols. [Works, vols. 1-18; Letters, vols. 1-12] (Moscow: Nauka, 1974-83), Pis’ma, 12: 108.

6. Ivan is an “advocate for children, and no matter how he presents himself as without feeling later on, yet there is compassion and the most heartfelt, tender love for children in him,” Dostoevsky wrote to N. A. Liubimov in a letter of May 25, 1879. Cf. Ps, 30:2-46. Compassion and love most certainly are in Ivan, but in a state of psychological disiguration. Dostoevsky elucidated upon this condition in the December 1876 issue of Diary of a Writer: “The consciousness of one’s absolute powerlessness or capacity to bring at least some assistance or relief to suffering humanity, accompanied at the same time by one’s absolute conviction in this suffering of humanity, can even transform love for humanity in your heart into hatred for it” (Ps, 24:49; emphasis in the original). 7. Vyacheslav [I.] Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky, trans. [from the German] Norman Cameron, ed. Protessor S. Konovalov (Oxford), foreword by Sir Maurice Bowra (New York, 1952; reprint, with introduction by Robert Louis Jackson (Yale), Wolfeboro, New Hampshire: Longwood Academic, 1989), 27. This work was first published in 1932 in German translation. The original Russian manuscript has been lost. Ivanov, however, supervised both German and English translations. 8. On the importance Dostoevsky gives to “beautiful impressions” in the education of children, see my discussion in Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966; reprint, Pittsburgh, 1978), 13235. Diane Oenning Thompson, in her study The Brothers Karamazov and

the Poetics of Memory (Cambridge, Eng: Cambridge University Press, 1991), notes Alyosha’s recollection of his mother praying before the icon of the Mother of God: “This memory has become an icon for Alyosha, a venerated image that can be invoked through repeated recollection” (82). So, too, Alyosha in his speech to the boys will create, figuratively speaking, an icon out of the deceased Ilyusha to evoke an ethical memory of the past. In her discussion of the final scene in the epilogue to The Brothers Karamazov, Robin Feuer Miller rightly refers to the entire scene of Alyosha and the boys at Ilyusha’s stone as a “haunting icon.” Cf. Miller, The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 132. 9. As Victor Amend noted: “If Schiller’s ‘Hymn to Joy’ is not given mention at the end of the novel, it is nevertheless in the spirit of the poem

that the novel ends.” He also calls attention to the parallel between the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Dostoevsky’s ending of

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The Brothers Karamazov. See Victor Amend, “Theme and Form in The Brothers Karamazov,” Modern Fiction Studies 4 [autumn 1958]: 251-52. For discussions of Schiller and The Brothers Karamazov, see Alexandra H. Lyngstad, Dostoevsky and Schiller (The Hague and Paris: Mouton and Co., 1975), 49-109; Ralph E. Matlaw, The Brothers Karamazov: Novelistic Technique (‘S-Gravenhage: Mouton and Co., 1957), 10-15; Dmitri Chizhevski, “Schiller und die “Briider Karamazov, ” [sic] Zeitschrift fiir Slavische Philologie 6 (1929), 1-44. See also Christiane Schulz, Aspekte der Schillerschen

Kunsttheorie im Literaturkonzept Dostoevskijs (Miinchen: Otto Sagner, 1992), for discussions that bear on Schiller’s impact on The Brothers Karamazov, among other works of Dostoevsky. 10. For the quoted stanzas as well as for the entire poem, see Schiller, “An die Freude,” Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, 56 vols. (Weimar: Her-

man Béhlaus Nachfolger, 1943-2001). Gedichte. Vol. 2. Part 1: 185-87. English translation mine. 11. Beethoven selected only half of the eighteen sections of Schiller’s poem and arranged the stanzas according to his own poetic design.

12. The two lines of Beethoven that introduce his selection of

Schiller’s verses are to be found in all scores of the choral finale of the Ninth

Symphony. Intriguing parallels may be drawn between Beethoven’s final chorale movement and Dostoevsky’s extremely brief yet important chorus of voices at the end of the novel. In these episodes both composer and novelist return to their earlier Romantic infatuation with Schiller: in both cases

the utopian emphases on triumphant brotherhood, harmony, and a sure faith in a loving God constitute a seeming break with the dominant ethos of

the earlier sections of their respective works. For a discussion of Beethoven’s use of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the chorale movement of the Ninth

Symphony, see Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Schirmer Books, 199), pp. 404-12. Citing Beethoven’s words, “O friends, not these sounds!” etc., Solomon suggests that “Beethoven is here setting aside the past, with its memories of strife, tragedy, and loss; he is not repudiating his own music, but rather the states that it symbolizes: ‘tragedy,’ ‘satiric drama’, ‘beauty of an order too sublime for a world of action’— Tovey’s shorthand . . . to describe the central ideas of the first three movements of the symphony. In place of these he sets his joyous affirmation, with its discovery (again Tovey) of ‘a theme on which the mind could rest as a final solution of typical human doubts and difficulties.’ In the sketches for the bass recitative, Beethoven made even more explicit this reading of his scenario, writing, “No, this—reminds us of despair. Today is a day of celebration,

let it be celebrated with song and [dance]’.” Remarking on Beethoven’s “ideological solution” in the chorale to the war between faith and skepticism in his, Beethoven’s, earlier works, Solomon maintains that the Ninth “succeeds here where all [Beethoven’s] other avowedly ideological music

252 ,

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failed, by compelling its message to emerge from powerful opposing forces— from the tragic, frenzied, and probing modalities of its earlier movements” (ibid., pp. 407-8). Whatever one might have to say of Dostoevsky’s view of a “final solu-

tion of typical human doubts and difficulties” (he believed in a Christian solution, though not on earth, but his novelistic mind could not rest harmoniously on this solution; he could only speak of a permanent striving on earth for such a solution) one can surely say that on the purely dramatic plane of the novel the concluding chorus of voices in The Brothers Karamazov is a moment of exhilarating catharsis, one that emerges—to borrow the words of Maynard Solomon—out of the tragic and probing modalities of the novel, and with an Aristotelian force of necessity. The Schiller theme, finally—here we have in mind not merely Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” but the full range of Dostoevsky’s direct and indirect allusions to Schiller’s thought and works in The Brothers Karamazov—is central to the philosophical pro and contra of the novel as a whole: it finds embodiment and echoes in the memory, thoughts, and conflicts of Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. We cannot speak, then, of the utopian note struck at the conclusion of the novel in isolation from the dynamics of the work as a whole. 13. It is noteworthy that Schiller himself in later years distanced himself from “Ode to Joy.” He omitted the poem from the first collection of his poems in 1800, though in 1803 he included it, with alterations, in the second volume of this collection. Left out entirely were the last stanza and chorus of the poem, verses that brought to an excited and rhetorical climax (one entirely in the exclamatory spirit of the last lines of The Brothers Karamazov) the social, moral and religious themes of the poem. “The dead shall also live!” (Auch die Toden soll leben!) exclaims the poet, promising heavenly forgiveness to all sinners and the disappearance of hell. See Schillers Werke Nationalausgabe. Op. cit., vol. 1:172. In his letter to Christian Gottfried Korner, October 21, 1800, Schiller insisted that his “Ode to Joy” was a “bad poem” (ein schlechtes Gedicht), one that “marks a stage of development (eine Stufe der Bildung) that I have had entirely to leave behind me in order to bring forth something appropriate (etwas Ordentliches). But because [the poem] responded to the bad taste of the time, it has had the honor of becoming a kind of popular poem (Volksgedicht).” Ibid., vol. 30: 206. Schiller’s words, “a stage of development,” might be applied equally, though with qualifications, to Dostoevsky’s youthful Romantic idealism. Dostoevsky certainly projected the elevated idealism and expectations of Alyosha’s twelve disciples as an outlook that would face severe tests in life and doubtlessly undergo spiritual evolution. 14. For a discussion of Dostoevsky’s concept of realism, see the chapter, “Reality and its Representation in Art,” in Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art, op. cit. pp. 71-91. 2.53

William Mills Todd II

The Brothers Karamazov Tomorrow

NEARLY A CENTURY and a quarter after the novel’s first installments began to appear in The Russian Herald, we have learned to read The Brothers Karamazov very differently from its first reviewers.

But not entirely. The essays in this volume work their way through the novel, from the author’s opening challenge to Alyosha’s concluding speech. In doing so, they parallel the initial reviews, which followed the course of the novel’s serialization in 1879 and 1880. Like the first reviews, these essays draw on a wide variety of contexts to illuminate the unfolding novel: Dostoevsky’s prior fiction and journalism, the writing of Dostoevsky’s con-

temporaries, and the state of Russian culture.’ But these new studies explore some topics, such as sexuality, that were not widely discussed in the literary criticism of the 1870s; they can draw upon fields of scholarship, such as cognitive psychology, as yet unfounded in Dostoevsky’s time. And unlike the first reviews, which were largely shaped by realist aesthetics and social interests, these take the novel’s religious and spiritual dimension very

seriously. Hindsight is, of course, invaluable. The Orthodox revival, in which this novel was a significant early landmark, was only commencing as the novel appeared, and we have access to much that the reviewers lacked, including Dostoevsky’s own correspondence about pivotal moments in The

Brothers Karamazov, books 5 (“Pro and Contra”) and 6 (“The Russian Monk’). That modern academic readers should approach the text from ditfferent viewpoints and for different purposes than the newspaper critics of the 1870s is, of course, not surprising. They are not providing consumer advice for potential readers of an unknown fiction so much as helping readers of a universally esteemed canonical text understand its intricate textual patterns and contextual linkings. They are not encountering a partly published text for the first time but have, in all likelihood, often read and taught it. Hindsight and canonical approval enable and compel scholars to find the coher-

ence and creative energy that an unfriendly contemporary reviewer found lacking in Dostoevsky’s “weird and flaccid” novel.” Robert Louis Jackson asserts a hermeneutical principle that has become axiomatic for most modern 254

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readers, including the contributors to this volume: “[T]he novel in its artistic unity knows where it is going.” We know where it is going because for us, unlike for the reviewers, it has already gone there. And, when the way seems unclear, canonicity compels us to doubt ourselves and not the text, to engage our fullest powers of interpretation and our fullest scholarly resources for contextualization. Just as a completed novel provides us the opportunity for learned and imaginative interpretation and canonical status provides the motive, a century of literary theory offers the means. While the essays in this volume are not obsessed with theory—indeed, the few references are typically critical ones—and while they are written by scholars of varying backgrounds and interests, nevertheless most, if not all, show the impact of those twentiethcentury approaches (e.g., New Criticism, text-immanent criticism, readerresponse theory, Bakhtinian discourse analysis, semiotics), which taught us to read closely for textual patterns and, as Horst-Jiirgen Gerigk puts it in his essay, to take things for signs. The essays in this volume propose readings dazzling for their attentiveness to details (the “open” door, Dmitri’s ladonka, Grushenka’s onion), relatively peripheral characters (Grigory, Richard, Captain Snegiryov, Kalganov) and heretofore overlooked incidents, passages, or fragments of dialogue. They give Smerdyakov his rightful status as a major and troublingly enigmatic character. They refer to all the members of the Holy Trinity, including the often neglected Holy Spirit. Eschewing radically deconstructive, psychoanalytic, or sociological methods, the authors of these essays have generally used those modern approaches which were most directly linked with the traditions of philosophical aesthetics and Christian thought that were familiar to Dostoevsky and the most literate of his reviewers. In this sense, the essays embody on a critical and analytic level the search for coherence, meaning, and harmony that animated the novel’s characters, early reviewers, and—judging from his letters as well as from the novel’s inner intentionality (Zweckmdssigkeit ohne Zweck )—its author. But the search for meaning and harmony, for resolution, joins in these essays with a lively sense of the novel’s complexity. At various moments, the essayists treat the novel in terms of a wide range of genres (poetry, narrative, parody, confession, detective fiction) and an even wider variety of discourses (medical, scientific, sexual, judicial, philosophical, and theological). They discuss the novel’s religious thematics in terms of patristic thought, Sophian theology, Judaic tradition, folk belief, and everyday Orthodox practice. Nor do they dismiss disquieting aspects of Dostoevsky’s thought— xenophobia, anti-Semitism—by drawing the traditionally apologetic distinction between Dostoevsky the thinker and Dostoevsky the novelist. Most important, the essays neglect none of the searingly brutal detail from which this harmony was to be constructed: the suffering of innocents, destructive relationships, ineffectual institutions, and disquieting paradoxes. 255

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Among these paradoxes, two stand out in particular for their rigorous treatment in this volume: Alyosha’s reluctance to reject the blood libel of the Jews that Lisa raises as a question (Maxim Shrayer, “The Jewish Question and The Brothers Karamazov’) and the destructiveness of Mikhail’s confession to his family and his community (Caryl Emerson, “Zosima’s ‘Mysterious Visitor’”). Morally right decisions can, indeed, be selfish. Dostoevsky’s early readers, such as Turgenev and Mikhailovsky, recognized the pain his

novels occasion, for their characters and for their audience. Here Robin Feuer Miller (“The Brothers Karamazov Today”) and Deborah A. Martinsen (“Shame’s Rhetoric”) return to this aesthetic and moral problem with new insights and arguments. Not the least of the novel’s many paradoxes is Dostoevsky’s decision to write it, given the failures of storytelling that it encompasses. Dmitri’s anguished protest—“Outwardly it’s true, but inwardly it’s a lie!”*—-could apply

to most of the stories these characters tell, from the opening tales in the monastery to the lawyers’ legal fictions at the end. Other stories are baldfaced lies. And when the stories are true, they are incompletely so and gen-

erally designed to wound other characters. Or, as with Zosima’s biblical narratives, the stories may seem hopelessly remote from the present-centered

life of the characters, too distant in the past, or too remote from a harmonious future. To write a story about failed stories as an instrument for the “propagation of active grace”* required an act of faith no less resolute than those the characters of the novel are compelled to consider as its plot unfolds. Dostoevsky’s prescience as a “historian of the future” is confirmed by the interpretive faith—and achievement—of these essays. With their help, by the very fact of their having been written, we see that the novel knew where it was going, even as it goes there anew for each new generation of critics and readers. The novel’s continuing openness to fresh critical, historical, and comparative illumination guarantees its future.

Notes 1. For more information on this process of contextualization, see William Mills Todd III, “Contexts of Criticism: Reviewing The Brothers Karamazov in 1879,” in Literature, Culture, and Society in the Modern Age:

In Honor of Joseph Frank, Part I, ed. Edward J. Brown et al., Stanford Slavic Studies 4:1 (1991): 293-310. 2. Anonymous review of Bratia Karamazovy, by Fedor Dostoevskii, Syn otechestva, no. 281, 7 December 1879. 3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 72.

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4. Robert L. Belknap, The Genesis of “The Brothers Karamazov”: The

Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Making a Text (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 157. 5. Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoeusky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (Pittsburgh: Physsardt, 1978), 123.

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Contributors

Robert Bird received his doctorate in Russian literature at Yale University and is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. He has written on Russian modernist literature and thought, especially Viacheslav I. Ivanov, Pavel Florensky, and Sergei Bulgakov, and also has translated Russian philosophical writings, including Ivanov’s Selected Essays. Forthcoming is a study entitled The Russian Prospero: The Creative Universe of Viacheslav Ivanov. He is working on hermeneutic trends in Russian religious philosophy.

Tatyana Buzina, born in Moscow, pursued her undergraduate studies at Moscow State University (Lomonosov) and received her doctorate at Yale University. She is preparing for publication a study entitled Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Fate and Freedom. She has also published articles on Dostoevsky and Russian folklore and on twentieth-century Russian poetry. She serves as the resident director of the Trinity College program in Moscow. Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She has published widely on Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, on Mikhail Bakhtin and literary criticism, and on Russian opera and vocal music. Susanne Fusso is a professor of Russian language and literature at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Designing Dead Souls: An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol and articles on Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, A Raw Youth,

and The Brothers Karamazov. Her most recent publication is Essays on Karolina Pavlova, coedited with Alexander Lehrman. She is working on a book on Dostoevsky and sexuality.

Horst-Jiirgen Gerigk, born in Berlin in 1937, is a professor of Russian and comparative literature at the University of Heidelberg. Among his various books on literature and theory are Unterwegs zur Interpretation, Die Russen in Amerika: Dostojewskij, Tolstoj, Turgenjew und Tschechow in ihrer Bedeu-

tung fur die Literatur der USA, and Lesen und Interpretieren. He is a 259

Contributors

founder and the current president of the International Dostoevsky Society as well as the coeditor of Dostoevsky Studies and the editor of several series, among them Schriften zu Psychopathologie, Kunst und Literatur and Neues Forum fiir Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft. Vladimir Golstein has been an associate professor of Russian literature at Yale University since 1993. Among his publications are Lermontov’s Narratives of Heroism and various essays on Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. He is completing a book on generational conflicts in Russian literature and culture. Kate Holland, born in Great Britain, is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her dissertation is entitled “The Novelistic as Aesthetic and Ethical Mode in the Works of Dostoevsky: 1873-1881.” She has published articles on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Her research interests include the bildungsroman in Russia and connections between the poetics of the novel and the poetics of journalism.

Robert Louis Jackson, B. E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, has written widely on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and other writers. He is the author of Dostoeusky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art and Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions.

Lee D. Johnson, born in Great Britain, is a doctoral candidate in Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University. His dissertation is entitled “The Ethics of Deification: Theosis as a Mode of Discourse in The Brothers Karamazov.” He is a visiting assistant professor of Russian at Bard College. His academic interests include religious discourse in the works of Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Orthodox and heterodox Church history, and Russian and Soviet film studies.

Liza Knapp, an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics and edited Dostoevusky’s The Idiot: A Critical Companion. She has published articles on Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, and Tsvetaeva. She is a coeditor of the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Anna Karenina. Marina Kostalevsky, born in Moscow, is an associate professor of Russian at Bard College. She is the author of Dostoevsky and Soloviev: The Art of Integral Vision and various articles on Russian literature, philosophy, and music.

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Deborah A. Martinsen is an assistant to the director of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University and an adjunct associate professor of Russian and comparative literature. She is the author of Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure and is researching shame in Russian literature and culture. She is the executive secretary of the North American Dostoevsky Society, the treasurer of the International Dostoevsky Society, and a corresponding member of the Russian Dostoevsky Society. Robin Feuer Miller, Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities, teaches Russian and comparative literature at Brandeis University. She served there as the dean of arts and sciences for six years. Author of Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader and The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel, she has written on other nineteenth-century Russian and European writers and is the editor of Critical Essays on Dostoevsky. Her most recent work includes two coedited volumes, Kathryn B. Feuer’s Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace (with Donna Tussing Orwin) and The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel (with Malcolm V. Jones). Gary Saul Morson is Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities

and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has won best book of the year awards from the American Comparative Literature Association (for Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time) and from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (for Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics).

Donna Orwin, a Canadian, teaches Russian literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Tolstoy’s Art and Thought 1847-1880 and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy and Tolstoy Studies Journal.

Maxim D. Shrayer, born in Moscow in 1967, is a professor of Russian and English at Boston College. He is the author of The World of Nabokov’s Stories, Nabokov: temy i variatsii, and Russian Poet/Soviet Jew as well as three

collections of Russian verse. Shrayer is the editor of The Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of a Dual Identity.

William Mills Todd III is Harvard College Professor and Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He has written The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin, and many articles on nineteenth-century Russian literature.

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