Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov 1555460658

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Editor's Note......Page 8
Harold Bloom. Introduction......Page 10
Richard Peace. Justice and Punishment......Page 16
Michael Holquist. How Sons Become Fathers......Page 48
Robert L. Belknap. The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel......Page 62
Gary Saul Morson. Verbal Pollution in The Brothers Karamazov......Page 94
Maire Jaanus Kurrick. The Self’s Negativity......Page 106
Robert Louis Jackson. The Wound and the Lamentation: Ivan’s Rebellion......Page 128
John Jones. On The Brothers Karamazov......Page 144
Valentina A. Vetlovskaya. Alyosha and the Hagiographic Hero......Page 160
Chronology......Page 178
Contributors......Page 182
Bibliography......Page 184
Acknowledgments......Page 190
Index......Page 192

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Modem Critical Interpretations

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

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Modem Critical Interpretations

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s

The Brothers Karamazov Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

Chelsea House Publishers 0 1988 NEW YORK 0 NEW HAVEN 0 PHILADELPHIA

© 1988 by Chelsea House Publishers, a division of Chelsea House Educational Communications, Inc., 95 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 345 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511 5068B West Chester Pike, Edgemont, PA 19028 Introduction © 1988 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Printed and bound in the United States of America 10

987654321

» The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The brothers Karamazov. (Modem critical interpretations) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881. Brat'ia Karamazovy. I. Bloom, Harold. IL Series. PG3325.B73F96 1988 891.73'3 87-15785 ISBN 1-55546-065-8 (alk. paper)

Contents

Editor’s Note I vii Introduction I 1 Harold Bloom

Justice and Punishment I 7 Richard Peace How Sons Become Fathers / 39 Michael Holquist

The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel / 53 Robert L. Belknap Verbal Pollution in The Brothers Karamazov I 85 Gary Saul Morson The Self’s Negativity I 97 Maire Jaanus Kurrick

The Wound and the Lamentation: Ivan’s Rebellion / 119 Robert Louis Jackson On The Brothers Karamazov / 135 John Jones Alyosha and the Hagiographie Hero / 151 Valentina A. Vetlovskaya

Chronology / 169 Contributors I 173

Bibliography I 175 Acknowledgments / 181 Index / 183

Editor’s Note

This book gathers together a representative selection of the best mod­ ern critical interpretations, available in English, of Dostoevsky’s final and major novel, The Brothers Karamazov. The critical essays are re­ printed here in the chronological sequence of their original publication. I am grateful to Neil Bermel and Henry Finder for their assistance to me in editing this volume. My introduction centers upon the novel’s elements that constitute Dostoevsky’s personal apocalypse. Richard Peace begins the chrono­ logical sequence of criticism with a consideration of the different visions of hell that obsessively haunt The Brothers Karamazov's protag­ onists. In Michael Holquist’s overview, the paradigm of Freud’s Totem and Taboo is used in order to interpret the relations between old Karamazov and his sons. Robert L. Belknap emphasizes how the rhetoric of Ivan and his Grand Inquisitor might mislead unwary readers. Smerdyakov becomes the center in Gary Saul Morson’s explication of what he calls “verbal pollution” in the novel, while Maire Jaanus Kurrick investigates as­ pects of the self’s negativity as represented by Dostoevsky. Ivan is the focus for Robert Louis Jackson, while John Jones pro­ vides a lively overview of “shared guilt” in The Brothers Karamazov. Valentina A. Vetlovskaya concludes this volume with an analysis of Alyosha, the spiritual hero so far as Dostoevsky himself was concerned.

vii

Introduction

For a critic who cannot read Russian, The Brothers Karamazov needs considerable mediation, more perhaps than War and Peace or Fathers and Sons. Much of this mediation is provided by Victor Terras in his admirable commentary A Karamazov Companion, to which I am in­ debted here. Dostoevsky’s final novel, ’ completed only two months before his death when he was nine months short of sixty. The Brothers Karamazov was intended as Dostoevsky’s apocalypse. Its genre might best be called Scripture, rather than novel or tragedy, saga or chronicle. Dostoevsky’s scope is from Genesis to Revelation, with the Book of Job and the Gospel of John as the centers. Old Karamazov is a kind of Adam, dreadfully vital and vitalistically dreadful. His four sons resist allegorical reduction, but William Blake would have interpreted them as being his Four Zoas or living principles of fallen man, with Ivan as Urizen, Dmitri as Luvah, Alyosha as Los, and the bastard Smerdyakov as a very debased Tharmas. On the model of this rather Hermetic mythology, Ivan is excessively dominated by the anxieties of the skeptical and analytic intellect, while Dmitri is culpable for “reasoning from the loins in the unreal forms of Beulah’s night’’ and so is a victim of his own overly sensual affective nature. The image of imaginative and spiritual salvation, Alyosha, is thus seen as the true Christian visionary, while the natural—all too natural—Smerdyakov represents the drives or instincts, turned murderously against the father and against the self. That there may be affinities between English Blake and Great Russian Dostoevsky is itself surprising and ought not to be magnified, since the differences between the two seers are far more serious than any parallels in mythic projection. Despite his extraordinary powers of characterization and representation, the Dostoevsky of Karamazov is 1

2 / INTRODUCTION

essentially an obscurantist, and Blake would have judged him to have been a greatly exalted version of his own Smerdyakov. Tolstoy enter­ tained outrageous moralizations about the proper modes and uses for literature, but, compared to the author of The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy will seem an enlightened rationalist to a Western reader at the present time. Perhaps that is only to say that Dostoevsky is less universal than Tolstoy in spirit, less the Russian Homer and more the Russian Dante. The Brothers Karamazov is frequently an outrageous narrative and evidently has strong parodistic elements. Its narrator is faceless; John Jones calls him “a crowd in trousers.” His story is told with a sly artlessness, which suits a novel whose burden is that we are all sinful, for even holy Russia swarms with sin, with the universal desire, conscious and unconscious, to murder the father. Old Karamazov is a monster, but an heroic vitalist, fierce in his drive for women and for drink. Dostoevsky evidently did not much care for Ivan either, and no one could care for Smerdyakov. Yet all the Karamazovs bum with psychic energy; all are true sons of that terrible but exuberant father. Freud’s essay ‘‘Dostoyevski and Parricide” (1928) should be supple­ mented by his Totem and Taboo, because the violent tyrant-father murdered by his sons in the Primal History Scene is akin to old Karamazov, who also wishes to appropriate all the women for himself. Old Karamazov is actually just fifty-five, though ancient in de­ bauchery. He could be judged a Falstaffian figure, not as Shakespeare wrote Falstaff, but as moralizing critics too frequently view the fat knight, forgetting his supreme wit, his joy in play, and his masterful insights into reality. If Falstaff had continued the decline we observe in King Henry IV, Part 2, then he might have achieved the rancid vitality of the father of the Karamazovs. Fyodor Pavlovich’s peculiar vice however is non-Falstaffian. Falstaff after all is not a father, despite his longing to make Hal his son. Old Karamazov is primarily a father, the parody indeed of a bad father, almost the Freudian primitive father of Totem and Taboo. Still, this buffoon and insane sensualist is a fool in a complex way, almost a Shakespearean fool, seeing through all impos­ tures, his own included. Fyodor Pavlovich lies to keep in practice, but his lies generally work to expose more truth. He lives to considerable purpose, doubtless despite himself. The largest purpose, in one of Dostoevsky’s terrible ironies, is to be the inevitable victim of patricide, of his four sons’ revenge for their abused mothers. The image of the father, for the reactionary Dostoevsky, is ulti-

Introduction / 3

mately also the image of the Czar and of God. Why then did Dostoevsky risk the ghastly Fyodor Pavlovich as his testament’s vision of the father? I can only surmise that Dostoevsky’s motivation was Jobean. If Old Karamazov is to be our universal father, then by identifying with Dmitri, or Ivan, or Alyosha (no one identifies with Smerdyakov!), we assume their Jobean situation. If your faith can survive the torment of seeing the image of paternal authority in Karamazov, then you are as justified as Job. Reversing Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Dostoevsky persuades us that if we haven’t had a bad enough father, then it is necessary to invent one. Old Karamazov is an ancestor-demon rather than an ancestor-god, a darkness visible rather than a luminous shadow. You do not moum his murder, but as a reader you certainly miss him when he is gone. Nor can you hate him, the way you despise the hideous Rakitin. I admire John Jones’s emphasis:

The old man’s complicity in his own murder gets carried by the book’s master metaphor. His house stinks. His life stinks. Yet his mystic complicity never quite hardens into the judg­ ment that he deserves to die. His nature is too broad to allow that. By “broad” Jones means simply just too alive to deserve to die, which is what I myself would judge. So rammed with life is old Karamazov that his murder is a sin against life, life depraved and corrupt, yet fierce life, life refusing death. Even Dmitri falls short of his father’s force of desire. Strangely like Blake again, Dostoevsky proclaims that everything that lives is holy, though he does not share Blake’s conviction that nothing or no one is holier than anything or anyone else. In his Notebooks, Dostoevsky insisted that “we are all, to the last man, Fyodor Pavloviches,” because in a new, original form “we are all nihilists.” A reader, but for the intercessions of his superego, might like to find himself in Falstaff, but hardly in Fyodor Pavlovich. Yet the honest reader should, and does, and no one wants to be murdered. As an apocalypse, The Brothers Karamazov forces identification upon one. The father in each male among us is compelled to some uncomfort­ able recognition in Old Karamazov; the son in each can choose among the three attractive brothers (Zosima is hardly a possibility). It cannot be said that Dostoevsky does as well with women; Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna may divide male fantasy between them, but that is

4 / Introduction

all. As a portrayer of women, Dostoevsky does not match Tolstoy, let alone Shakespeare. Much of the permanent fascination of The Brothers Karamazov invests itself in the extraordinary differences between Dmitri and Ivan, and in Ivan’s two phantasmagorias, his “poem” of the Grand Inquisi­ tor and his mad confrontation with the Devil. Dmitri, though he yields us no phantasmagorias, is more endless to meditation than his half-brother, Ivan. Dostoevsky evidently saw Dmitri as the archetypal Great Russian: undisciplined, human—all too human, lustful, capable of all extremes, but a man of deep feeling and compassion, and an intuitive genius, a poet of action, an authentic comedian of the spirit, and potentially a Christian. Ivan is his father’s son in a darker sense; turned inward, his ravening intellect destroys a sense of other selves, and his perpetually augmenting inner self threatens every value that Dostoevsky seeks to rescue. If Dmitri is the exemplary Russian, then Ivan is the Western intellectual consciousness uneasily inhabiting the Russian soul, with murderous consequences that work themselves through in his parody, Smerdyakov. The legend of the Grand Inquisitor has achieved a fame that transcends The Brothers Karamazov as a whole, hardly a result Dostoevsky could have endured, partly because Ivan’s parable tells us nothing about Dmitri, who is the authentic center of the novel, and partly because, out of context, Ivan’s prose poem can be mistaken for Dostoevsky’s, which is The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan’s legend is one that Dostoevsky rejects, and yet Ivan also, like old Karamazov, is Dostoevsky, even if Dmitri is more of Dostoevsky. The Grand Inquis­ itor stamps out human freedom because humans are too weak to endure their own freedom. If Dostoevsky really intended Zosima to be his answer to the Inquisitor, then he erred badly. Zosima, to an American ear anyway, is a muddle, and his interpretation of the Book of Job is the weakest failure in the history of theodicy. What is least acceptable about the Book of Job, its tacked-on conclusion in which God gives Job a perfect new set of sons and daughters, every bit as good as the old, is saluted by Zosima as the height of holy wisdom. It is difficult to answer the Grand Inquisitor with such sublime idiocy. But then the Grand Inquisitor speaks a sublime idiocy, despite the grand reputation that the legend has garnered as an excerpt. Dostoevsky is careful to distance himself and us, with the highest irony, from Ivan’s dubious rhetoric. The Inquisitor rants on for too long, and just does not frighten us enough; he is more Gothic than we can accept,

Introduction / 5

just as Ivan’s devil is too much a confused projection of Ivan. To be effective, the legend of the Inquisitor should have been composed and told by Dmitri, but then The Brothers Karamazov would have been a different and even stronger novel. Freud, for polemical and tendentious reasons, overrated The Broth­ ers Karamazov, ranking it first among all novels ever written, close to Shakespeare in eminence, and finding the rather lui id legend of the Grand Inquisitor to be a peak of world literature. That latter judgment is clearly mistaken; the status of the novel, among all novels whatso­ ever, is perhaps a touch problematic. The book’s enormous gusto is unquestionable; the Karamazov family, father and sons, sometimes seems less an image of life, a mimesis, and more a super-mimesis, an evocation of a more abundant life than representation ought to be able to portray. There cannot be a more intense consciousness than that of Dmitri in a novel; only a few figures elsewhere can match him. Doubtless he speaks for what Dostoevsky could not repress in himself: “If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him under­ ground.” If you wish to read “God” there as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses and Jesus, you are justified; you follow Dostoevsky’s intention. I am willing to read “God,” here and elsewhere, as the desire for the transcendental and extraordinary, or Dmitri’s and Dostoevsky’s desire for the completion of what was already transcendental and extraordinary in themselves.

Justice and Punishment Richard Peace

A striking feature of The Brothers Karamazov, and one which marks it off from Dostoevsky’s other novels, is the extent to which the charac­ ters are obsessed by hell; each, it seems, has his own ideas on the subject. The hell of old Karamazov has a ceiling and devils with hooks. Grushenka’s hell is a burning lake from which an old woman might be saved by an onion. In the name of “harmony,” Ivan renounces hell altogether, yet hints that his “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” owes something to the medieval poem “The Holy Virgin’s Journey through Hell”: he seems unduly interested in the concept of hell it describes. Dmitri, riding to Mokroye, is told by his cabman that hell is only for the rich and the important, but finds a hell of interrogation there which is consciously likened to Ivan’s medieval poem (cf. bk. 9, chaps. 3, 4, and 5: “The Journey of the Soul through Hell”). Nor, indeed, can Ivan escape hell himself. Before his brother’s trial he is tormented by the devil, who mocks him with a made-to-measure hell, ordered on liberal lines, with reforms extending to the introduction of the metric system and an enlightened view of punishments. This by no means exhausts the references to hell in the novel, but most important of all is Zosima’s conception of hell; the last section of his teachings: “About Hell and Hell fire, A Mystical Discourse” constitutes the longest treatise on this subject in the novel. The prominence of hell in The Brothers Karamazov is not fortuitous: it is a symptom of that theological debate which is From Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels. © 1971 by Cambridge University Press.

7

8 / Richard Peace

carried on throughout the whole novel; a debate which has as its principal concern the question of punishment. The first fruits of this theological debate are to be seen in the argument which develops, early on in Zosima’s cell, around the ques­ tion of ecclesiastical courts. The subject may seem appropriate, in as much as the Karamazovs have met to compose their differences before a small gathering of monks headed by the elder, but the discussion arises not so much from the occasion, as from an article written a short time before by Ivan. This article is the seed from which the great preoccupation with punishment springs; it has the same germinal sig­ nificance for The Brothers Karamazov as Raskolnikov's article has for Crime and Punishment. In that novel the centre of interest had been focussed on the crime and the motives for the crime; a preoccupation which had emanated from the very subject matter of Raskolnikov’s article. In The Brothers Karamazov, on the other hand, Ivan’s article on ecclesiastical courts raises another but related issue: the nature ofjustice and the punishment of the criminal; it points the direction which the novel itself must take, and it sets a new emphasis: not Crime but Punishment. Before going on to discuss the ideas of this article, it would be as well to look at the way in which they are presented. Ivan, as we have seen, is a divided man, and it is not clear whether he is for or against the propositions he is advancing in his article; this leads Father Iosif, the librarian of the monastery, to call it: “an idea with two ends.” There are no direct quotations from the article, but its contents are related, first by Iosif, and then by Ivan himself. Ivan as the expounder of his own article is concerned to establish what was actually written, rather than to join in disputation. This produces the curious effect of Ivan presenting the points of his own argument as if he were an uncommitted third person, a mere narrator; while the disputation itself is carried on by two other voices representing, as it were, his own divided self. These are, on the one hand Miusov, the cultured free-thinking “Westerner,” and on the other Father Paisiy, the scholarly monk. The clash of contrary opinions is presented through them, and this frees Ivan from any obligation to be other than the cool expounder of the ideas of his article; it also releases Zosima from the burden of minor disputation, so that, when he does enter the discussion, his words have particular emphasis and importance. Ivan’s article appears to make two points: the first of which serves as a premise for the second. His first concern is to synthesise the two

Justice and Punishment / 9

apparently diverse principles of Church and State; and this, he argues, could be achieved in two ways. Thus it is possible for the Church itself to become a State which is the Roman solution to the prob­ lem; for whereas the Roman Church appeared to conquer the Old Roman Empire, in reality it was the old Roman Empire which took over the Church. This idea we have already met before in the mouth of Myshkin, and in The Brothers Karamazov it has the ap­ proval of Zosima himself; for when he enters the argument he sup­ ports the words of Ivan: “In Rome a State has been proclaimed instead of a Church for a thousand years at least” (bk. 2, chap. 5). It is an idea which, in the future course of the novel, will take on flesh. The other solution to this problem of synthesis is that the State itself become the Church: that the civil element become completely absorbed into the body of the Church. This is what Zosima himself believes in, and he proclaims it will happen: “It will be! It will be!”—an expression of fervent faith which serves as the title for the chapter in which this whole discussion takes place. Ivan’s arguments on Church and State, however, are an introduc­ tion for his main theme: the diverse elements of Church and State in the sphere of justice (i.e., ecclesiastical courts versus civil courts). Justice as conceived by the State, Ivan argues, is a purely mechanical process; the cutting off of an infected limb. The justice prescribed by the Church, on the other hand, is entirely different; it is not physical, but spiritual: “If everything became the Church, then the guilty and dis­ obedient would be excommunicated by the Church, and no heads would be cut off,” Ivan continued. “Where, I ask you, would the excommunicated man go? For in this situa­ tion, he would not only have to go away from men as he does now, but from Christ too; for, by his crime, he would have rebelled not merely against men but against Christ’s Church as well.” (bk. 2, chap. 5)

If there were only ecclesiastical courts, argues Ivan, even the nature of crime itself would change. When Zosima enters the discussion it is to corroborate much of what Ivan has said:

10 / Richard Peace

“It is like this,” began the elder, “sending people to penal servitude in Siberia (and formerly this was accompanied by beating) does not correct them, and most important of all it does not really frighten any criminal. Not only does the number of crimes not decrease—it grows yearly. You must agree about that. It is obvious, therefore, that society is not in the least protected by this; for although a harmful limb is mechanically cut off, and put far away—out of sight, out of mind—nevertheless another criminal immediately springs up in his place; perhaps two—more, even. If there is any­ thing which, even today, protects society and corrects the criminal himself, turning him into a different person, it is but one thing—the law of Christ revealing itself in the awareness of the individual conscience. Only by recognising one's guilt as a son of Christ’s society, that is the Church, does one recognise one’s guilt in respect of society itself: that is in respect of the Church. Therefore the criminal of today is capable of recognising his guilt only in respect of the Church, not in respect of the State.” (bk. 2, chap. 5)

But in his teaching on the Church’s attitude to punishment, Zosima is not in full agreement with Ivan. He stresses, not excommunication, but the suffering of the individual conscience. This, he claims, is real punishment: “The only real punishment, the only one which deters and which reconciles, and it consists in the awareness of one’s own conscience” (bk. 2, chap. 5). For all that there appears, on the surface, to be a large measure of agreement between the ideas here expressed by Ivan and those of Zosima himself, the elder is not taken in by them; and in the next chapter (“Why does such a Man Live?”) he tells Ivan plainly that he has not yet decided the question of faith. In acknowledgement of the truth of this observation Ivan comes up to the elder for his blessing. Ivan is, indeed, a divided man, and in the next stage of his theological debate he reveals the other side of his thought. This is the occasion of his “confession” to Alesha at the inn—the proclamation of his “rebellion.” At first he talks generally about Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria; the plight of the Swiss “savage,” Richard (i.e., the theme of the condemned man); and the Nekrasov poem about a peasant beating

Justice and Punishment /Il

a horse. But, in order to strengthen the case for his “rebellion,” Ivan says that he will restrict his argument to documented acts of cruelty committed against children. There is the banker Kroneberg who sadis­ tically birched his seven-year-old daughter; there are the parents who locked up their five-year-old daughter at night in a privy, and made her eat excrement. Both these incidents were taken from contemporary newspaper accounts; the third took place at the beginning of the nine­ teenth century, and concerns a child hunted by dogs. What is significant in Ivan’s evidence is that all the incidents he quotes—from the Turkish reprisals in Bulgaria to the boy hunted for wounding a dog—all without exception illustrate the grotesque cruelty of human punishments: all are examples of human justice at its most vile. Nor can these incidents be dismissed as rough justice operated without reference to the law; for the case of Richard illustrates the workings of a sophisticated legal system of the civilised West, whereas the Kroneberg affair provides an additional commentary on the Rus­ sian judiciary: the Kronebergs are brought to trial, and their actions are vindicated by a Russian court. Ivan, however, does not stop here: on this evidence of human notions of punishments he goes on to pass judgement on divine justice itself; he cannot see how any form of ultimate harmony can compen­ sate for the sufferings which human beings inflict on each other: Oh, Alesha, I am not blaspheming. I do understand what a cataclysm of the universe there must be when everything in heaven and under the earth will fuse into one voice of praise, and everything that lives and has lived will cry out: “Thou art just, Oh Lord, for Thy ways have been revealed!” When the mother embraces the torturer, who had her son tom to pieces by dogs; and all three, in tears, cry out loud: “Thou art just, Oh Lord”—then, of course, the crown of knowl­ edge will have been gained, and everything will be ex­ plained. But here is the rub; this is just what I cannot accept, and whilst I am on earth I hasten to take my own measures. You see, Alesha, when I live to see this moment, or am resurrected to see it, perhaps it really will happen that I myself will cry out with all the rest: “Thou art just, Oh Lord!” But I do not want to cry out, and whilst there is still time, I hasten to guard myself against it. I therefore re­ nounce higher harmony completely. It is not worth one

12 / Richard Peace

little tear of one suffering child; a child such as the one who beat her breast with her little fist, and, with her tears unre­ deemed, prayed in her stinking privy to “Good, kind God.” (bk. 5, chap. 4)

The argument in Zosima’s cell on civil justice versus ecclesiastical justice has now developed into a debate on human justice versus divine; and, when Alesha tries to solve Ivan’s dilemma by bringing in the figure of Christ, Ivan counters with his own "anti-christ”—The Grand Inquisitor. Here again the references go back to the debate in Zosima’s cell. Father Paisiy had commented on the notion of Church turned into State: “This is Rome and its dream. It is the Devil’s third temptation of Christ,” and now the Grand Inquisitor proudly acknowl­ edges this in his own words to Christ:

It is exactly eight centuries ago that we took from him, that which you had angrily refused: that last gift which he of­ fered you, showing you all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and pro­ claimed ourselves merely kings of the earth. (bk. 5, chap. 5)

Yet the figure chosen by Ivan to represent the “Church turned State” is, significantly, not the pope—it is the Grand Inquisitor: the dispenser of terrible punishments and crude mechanical justice. We can now see how closely Ivan’s “confession” is related to the earlier discussion of his article. Ivan’s arguments in Zosima’s cell had had as their premise the desirability of the State becoming the Church; they had culminated in an examination of the true nature of punish­ ment. Now, however, it is as though Ivan is picking up Zosima’s theory of ideal punishment, and countering it by concrete examples of punishments as they exist. The reality of human “justice” is so bar­ baric, he appears to argue, that it negates any possibility of an ideal higher justice; there is no divine harmony which is capable of reconcil­ ing man’s injustice to man, and so, in the absence of eternal harmony, man is thrown back on a purely temporal solution: the ecclesiastical justice of the Grand Inquisitor—the enforced “harmony” of the Church turned State. Thus Ivan’s argument is the very reverse of the argument in the cell; the movement is not from ideal theocracy to ideal justice, but from concrete justice of an appalling nature to an equally appalling

Justice and Punishment / 13

concrete theocracy—that very solution to the problem of synthesis which had been so vigorously rejected in the argument in the cell. The convictions which Ivan appeared to share with Zosima have been stood on their head, and the assertion that Ivan's article was “an idea with two ends” is now seen to be true. But Ivan’s equivocation goes deeper than this; for if his “rebel­ lion” inheres in his refutation of divine justice, the attack, as we have seen, is hardly direct. Ivan is no Voltaire moralising on the senseless tragedy of the Lisbon Earthquake—indeed it is remarkable that the evidence on which he indicts divine justice does not contain even a single “act of God”—nor yet is he a second Ippolit railing against the dark force behind the world. Ivan says he wishes to restrict his evi­ dence to the sufferings of children, but even so he does not, like Ippolit, rebel against the existence of disease which can torment chil­ dren just as cruelly as birches, can kill them just as mercilessly as a pack of hounds. This omission seems particularly remarkable in view of the fact that Dostoevsky had the death of his own child Aleksey so much on his mind when he was writing the novel. Indeed it is striking that the author not only does not turn the dying Ilyusha into a second Ippolit, but actually presents a refutation in the figure of Markel, the dying boy who is Zosima’s brother and inspiration. Ivan’s evidence is obsessively centred on man, and his rebellion is that of a humanist: “I do not want harmony. I do not want it out of love for humanity.” Nevertheless, he himself admits that he does not fully reject God: “It is not God that I don’t accept: it is the world he has created.” This is true; for his evidence indicts not God, but man. Ivan as a humanist is a very disillusioned one: the Devil seems to have more reality for him than does God. Thus after his description of the Turkish atrocities he says: “I think that if the Devil does not exist, and has therefore been created by man, then man has created him in his own image and likeness” (bk. 5, chap. 4). Ivan acknowledges that a ; beast lurks in every man. Even in his saintly brother Alesha there is a * devil thirsting to mete out punishment, and capital punishment at that (a practice that the Russian State had in theory abandoned). Ivan gets Alesha to agree that the general who hunted down the little boy should be shot:

“Shoot him,” Alesha uttered quietly, raising his eyes towards his brother with a pale contorted smile. “Bravo!” yelled Ivan in something like rapture. “Well, if

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you say so, then . . . and you a monk! So that’s the little devil that sits in your heart, Alesha Karamazov!” (bk. 5, chap. 4)

By centring his rejection of universal harmony so firmly on man, Ivan, far from limiting the scope of his argument, is in fact widening it; for all this evidence of the devil in man is just as relevant for harmony of another kind: socialist utopia—the Crystal Palace. The argument in the cell had ended with Miusov implying that the Chris­ tianity of the monks was really socialism, and Ivan, in his “confession” to Alesha seems to acknowledge a degree of interchangeability be­ tween the two ideologies, when he mentions the topics discussed in taverns by Russian youths:

[They talk] About universal problems, how could it be otherwise? Does God exist? Is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God will talk about socialism and anarchism, about remaking the whole of humanity in accor­ dance with some new order. So it turns out to be the same old devil in disguise, the same old problems, only the other way round. (bk. 5, chap. 3)

As “harmony” might therefore be seen in purely human terms, Ivan’s criticism is all the more valid for being restricted to man in dishar­ mony with man; and, as if to show the wider implications of his point, he invites Alesha to assume the role of architect of universal harmony:

“Imagine that it is you yourself who are erecting the edifice of human destiny, with the aim of finally making people happy, of giving them, in the end, peace and rest. But in order to do this (there would be no other way) you would have, of necessity, to torture just one insignificant little being, let us say that little child who beat her breast with her tiny fist; let us say you had to found this edifice on her unavenged tears. Would you agree to be the architect on these conditions? Tell me, speak the truth!” “No, I would not agree,” said Alesha quietly. (bk. 5, chap. 4)

Alesha’s reply expresses a moral principle which runs through the whole of Dostoevsky’s mature work. In Crime and Punishment,

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Raskolnikov had discovered that he could not found human happiness on the destruction of another human being; and at the end of his life, in the famous Pushkin Speech, Dostoevsky himself will make much the same point, when he maintains that the reason for Tatyana’s final rejection of Yevgeniy Onegin (in Pushkin’s novel of the same name) is that she realises the impossibility of founding happiness on the unhap­ piness of another. Ivan, therefore, is applying the same humanistic yardstick, by which Raskolnikov was measured, to the architect of universal harmony himself—both Raskolnikov and God are found wanting. Such a conclusion is obviously absurd; it can only mean that the laws of man are not the laws of God. The rationalistic mind of Ivan grasps at a mathematical analogy. In 1833 the Russian mathematician Lobachevsky had challenged Euclidian geometry, and had proved that parallel lines can meet in infinity. The difference between human justice and divine justice is therefore seen by Ivan as the difference between a lower Euclidian truth and a higher Lobachevskian truth. Yet even so he cannot be reconciled: Let me explain myself. I am convinced, like a child, that suffering will be healed, will be as though it never was, that human contradictions in all their offensively comic aspects will disappear, like a pitiable mirage, like some disgusting invention of a puny human mind, a Euclidian mind as insignificant as an atom. I am convinced that finally, at the end of the world, at the moment of eternal harmony, some­ thing so precious will occur, and be made manifest, that it will satisfy all hearts, will suffice to assuage all indignation, will be enough to redeem all human crimes and all human blood shed by human beings themselves. It will suffice not only for forgiveness to be possible, but for everything that has happened to man to be justified, I grant this ... I grant that all this will be so, and that it will be made manifest, but this is the very thing I can not accept, do not wish to accept. Even though parallel lines meet, and I myself see them, and I myself say they have met, nevertheless I shall not accept it. This is my fundamental point, Alesha, this is my thesis. (bk. 5, chap. 3)

Ivan is no underground man for whom twice two can equal five, nor is he a Shatov/Stavrogin refusing to desert the image of Christ for

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the reality of mere truth. Ivan’s position is the very reverse of this: he cannot renounce common, everyday logic for the sake of some higher revelation; and yet this logic is obviously not sufficient: Oh, my mind, this pitiable, earthly, Euclidian mind of mine tells me only that there is suffering, and that no one is to blame; that everything, in a quite simple and straightfor­ ward manner, is the result of something else; that every­ thing flows and finds its level. But this after all is mere Euclidian nonsense. I do know all this, but what I cannot do is to agree to live by it. What difference does it make to me that no one is to blame, and that I know this? I need retribution otherwise I shall kill myself, and retribution, not in eternity, at some time or other and some place, but here on earth, so that I myself can see it. (bk. 5, chap. 4)

The ideas of Ivan’s “Rebellion” are not allowed to stand unchal­ lenged; a positive refutation is advanced through the figure of Zosima. The gulf between human truth and divine truth, which so perplexes Ivan, is bridged for Zosima by revelation: by the message preached in the Book of Job:

But what is great is that here is a mystery—that the transient face of the earth and eternal truth have here come into contact together; the process of eternal justice fulfils itself before earthly justice. Here the Creator, as in the first days of creation, bringing every day to its culmination with words of praise: “that which I have created is good,” looks at Job, and is again proud of his creation. And Job praising God serves not only Him, but will serve the whole of His cre­ ation from generation unto generation and for all eternity. For he was preordained for this. (bk. 6, chap. 2(b))

God’s world, which Ivan specifically rejects, is accepted whole­ heartedly by Zosima, who in his short autobiography describes how he once spent a night on the bank of one of the great Russian rivers in the company of a simple peasant lad: We fell to talking about the beauty of God’s world and about its great mystery. Every blade of grass, every little

Justice and Punishment / 17

beetle, every ant, every golden bee, everything so amazingly knows its own course, even though it has no mind: it witnesses God’s mystery and is itself continually fulfilling it. And I saw the heart of the dear youth was filled with enthusiasm; he confessed to me that he loved the forest and the forest birds. He was a bird-catcher; he understood all their calls and could bring to him any bird he wanted. “I know of nothing better than to be in a forest,” he said, “everything is good.” “That is true,” I replied. “Everything is good and wonderful, because everything is the truth.” And I said to him, “Look at a horse, a great animal which is close to man, or at an ox which feeds man, and works for him, an animal that is bowed down and pensive. Look at their faces: what gentleness! what attachment to man who frequently beats them mercilessly! What lack of malice there is in their faces! What trust and what beauty! It is touching, even, to realise that they are without sin; for everything is perfect; everything, apart from man, is sinless, and Christ was with them even before he was with us.” “But surely,” asks the boy, “how can it be that Christ is with them?” “How can it be otherwise,” I tell him, “for the word is for all, for all creation and all creatures. Every little leaf strives towards the word, sings praises to God, weeps to Christ unknown to itself, fulfils this by the mystery of its sinless existence.” (bk. 6, chap. 2[bj)

Zosima has here made explicit many of the ideas tentatively broached by Myshkin in The Idiot; it is obvious that it is the beauty of God’s world which convinces the elder of its justice; for him, as for Myshkin, aesthetic criteria have become identified with ethical criteria; and for both, happiness is an essential element in this quietest philosophy. Thus Zosima says: “people are created for happiness, and he who is completely happy certainly deserves to say to himself: ‘I have fulfilled God’s commandment on this earth’ ” (bk. 2, chap. 4). In The Devils Kirillov, too, is capable of achieving this state of happiness, and of concluding, like the peasant lad here, that “every­ thing is good.” Kirillov is obsessed by a leaf, and in The Brothers Karamazov there is another nihilist who is susceptible to the beauty of God’s world as epitomised in the miracle of the leaf; for, in spite of his

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dark thoughts, Ivan Karamazov, as we have seen, tells Alesha that he loves “the sticky little leaves of spring”; it is this half of his brother, the aesthetic half, which Alesha claims will ultimately save him. Yet in his present state of doubt and torment, Ivan’s aesthetic susceptibilities only inhibit his progress towards salvation. He is alien­ ated from his namesake, St John the Merciful, because of his revulsion at all those hideously ugly aspects of human suffering which the saint so readily embraced. If only human suffering could be presented more aesthetically, Ivan might be prepared to make some effort towards compassion:

One can love one’s neighbour in the abstract, and some­ times even from a distance, but almost never from close at hand. If everything were as it is on the stage, in a ballet, where beggars, when they appear, enter in silk rags and tom lace, and beg for alms in a graceful dance, one could then admire them; admire them, but all the same, not love them. (bk. 5, chap. 4)

But Ivan’s objections have already been anticipated earlier in the novel. Zosima has already told Mrs Khokhlakova (“A Lady of Little Faith”) that there is a love for humanity which is more concerned with theatri­ cal effect; this he calls “imagined love” (lyubov’ mechtatel’naya). More­ over the theatricality of Khokhlakova’s professed love seems to owe much to the example of St John the Merciful; for she claims that she is even prepared to kiss the putrefying wounds of her fellow human beings. But such love on the part of Khokhlakova is only in the imagination, whereas the love of St John the Merciful found concrete expression in action, and it is “active love,” which Zosima preaches, not only as his positive answer to the doubts of Khokhlakova, but ultimately to those of Ivan as well. Yet if Ivan begins his “Rebellion” with the legend of St John the Merciful, he ends it with another legend—“The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” Here we have another “saintly” figure who also claims to love humanity, but like Ivan himself he can only do so from a distance, and through devices worthy of the theatre; for the reality behind this professed love for humanity is nothing other than contempt. The living refutation of what the Grand Inquisitor represents can be seen in Zosima himself. Both are old men on the verge of death; both are monks and ascetics; but whereas the Grand Inquisitor embod­ ies the legend of the Church turned State, Zosima is the prophet of the

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State turned Church (“It Will Be, It Will Be”). The Grand Inquisitor rules by “mystery, miracle and authority,” but for Zosima mystery is not an instrument of rule, it is nature; it is life itself. Miracles too, he teaches, only stem from faith: they cannot inspire it. Moreover author­ ity for Zosima is spiritual authority—the voluntary submission of a novice to his elder—it is not the physically imposed will of a despotic “benefactor”; for the mainspring of Zosima’s authority is not pride but humility. On the central question of punishment the attitude of the State/Church is diametrically opposed to that of the Church/State. The Grand Inquisitor solves the problem of crime by eliminating the criminal with incarceration, torture and fire—this is the external and purely mechanical form ofjustice deplored by Zosima in the discussion in the cell. To the autos-da-fé of the Grand Inquisitor are opposed the open confessions of Zosima; for he points to the individual conscience as the only true instrument of punishment. The Grand Inquisitor is but a figment of Ivan’s mind, a mind which is essentially mathematical and “Euclidian,” and the logic of his “Rebellion” is that a minus cancels out a plus; that the negative evidence of human suffering is stronger than the most positive sign of human happiness. Zosima’s non-Euclidian logic is the very reverse of this: for him a plus is always stronger than a minus; so in justifying the ways of God to man he emphasises the beauty and goodness of the created world. But if Zosima expounds the positive side of life, the existence of the negative side, dwelt on in Ivan’s rebellion, still demands explana­ tion. This is supplied by another figment of Ivan’s imagination—the devil himself. He, according to his own words, is “the indispensable minus sign.” Indeed, everything about this devil is negative. In the first place he does not really exist; he is merely the hallucination of a fevered brain. His arguments, too, are inconclusive and are ultimately as insubstantial as he is himself. Negative, too, is his method of argument, which is mocking and destructive; he taunts Ivan not merely with his very own arguments, but jeers at his competence even to reason at all. Still more insulting is the fact that this devil is a distorted image of Ivan himself—the ironic proof of his own contention that man has invented the devil in his own likeness. Because of this, the devil’s mockery of Ivan is far-reaching and fundamental: it is an attack on the whole of his personality, but the chief target is nevertheless Ivan’s rationalistic mind. He accuses Ivan of being concerned only with the mind, and in

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words which parody Ivan’s own mathematical reasoning he hints at the limitations of human rationality:

You see, I too, like you yourself, am a prey to the fantastic, and therefore I love this earthly realism of yours. Here, with you, everything is delineated, here there are formulae, here there is geometry. But with us everything is vague indeter­ minate equations. (bk. 11, chap. 9)

The jibe here is at Ivan’s perplexity over the “two truths,’’ and the devil drives home his attack by mocking Ivan’s love of parable; for just as Ivan had told Alesha the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,’’ the devil now recounts another legend to Ivan. This concerns a learned atheist who refuted the possibility of an after-life. When he died he found himself confronted by just such an after-life, and grew very annoyed; for, he said: “This contradicts my beliefs.’’ Accordingly he was condemned to walk in the darkness a whole quadrillion kilometres before the gates of paradise could be opened for him. But he lay down and refused to walk, for again the principles of a rational, free-thinking liberal had been insulted: “I do not wish to go. I will not go on principle.” He lay there until in the end he decided it would be better to walk his quadrillion kilometres. Then the gates of heaven were opened and he was allowed in; and he had not been inside more than two seconds, before he exclaimed that these two seconds were not only worth a quadrillion kilometres, but a quadrillion of quadrillion kilometres, even, indeed, a quadrillion kilometres to the power of a quadrillion. Ivan recognises this as his own “legend”—it is a story which he had made up as a schoolboy in Moscow. But it is his own “legend” in a more direct sense; for the intellectual, who here tries so stubbornly to reject the after-life, has much in common with that other intellectual who, on principle, returns the ticket to eternal harmony. Indeed, the story is a moral tale directed at Ivan; it is a devil’s parable on the dangers of intellectual arrogance and on the inability of the intellect to reconcile the “two truths.” But the devil himself is caught in that very same gulf which separates the “two truths”; he, too, is in the position of the man condemned to walk a quadrillion kilometres: I know in the end I shall be reconciled. I shall come to the end of my quadrillion, and I shall learn the secret. But until

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this happens I sulk and grudgingly carry out my appointed job of ruining thousands so that one shall be saved. How many souls, for instance have had to be ruined, how many honourable reputations discredited, in order to gain the righ­ teous Job alone, over whom I was so cruelly duped in times of yore! No, until the secret is revealed, there exist for me two truths: one of that world, their truth, one that for the time being is completely unknown to me; and another truth, my truth, and 1 do not know yet which is the better. (bk. 11, chap. 9)

The enigma of “the two truths” is thus exemplified in the devil himself, who through the workings of his own mysterious destiny is that “indispensable minus,” the ultimate product of which is a plus. The figure the devil points to as a positive achievement is Job, and here he is in agreement with Zosima; for he too sees in the story of Job a reconciliation of “the two truths”—“the process of eternal justice fulfilling itself before earthly justice.” Yet as the devil here confesses, the devil himself is ultimately as perplexed as is Ivan. There is, indeed, nothing he can tell Ivan, and Ivan reacts to his words in annoyance:

Everything that in my own nature is stupid, everything that I have passed through long ago, thrashed out in my mind, then thrown away like carrion, this you offer to me, to me of all people, as if it were something new. (bk. 11, chap. 9)

The devil cannot resolve Ivan’s doubts; he can only exacerbate them; for the devil is only Ivan himself, or rather one part of him—he is Ivan’s intellect mirroring itself in destructive self-mockery. At the same time, however, the devil is also a manifestation of a non-rational function of Ivan’s mind—conscience; for this hallucination is symptomatic of a growing inner awareness of his own complicity in the death of his father. That this instrument of conscience should be a mirror mocking his intellect is only just, since the guilt of Ivan is the guilt of the intellect. It is fitting too that its outward form should be seen to resemble that of the devil; for, as we have seen in the last chapter, the crime of Ivan is in essence theological parricide. The culmination of Ivan’s hallucination clearly reveals the true nature of his crime. The devil contends that, to gain its ends, nihilism need destroy only one thing: the idea of God in the minds of men. He

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then goes on to taunt Ivan with the concept of “man/god,” and with his own theory that everything is permitted. Ivan, in a rage, throws a glass at his tormentor, but he cannot be disposed of so easily; he only disappears on the arrival of Alesha. Now, from Ivan’s rambling words, Alesha ultimately comes to realise the true nature of Ivan’s hallucinations: He began to understand Ivan’s illness: “the torments of a proud decision, a profound conscience.’’ God, in whom he did not believe, and God’s truth were conquering a heart which did not want to submit. (bk. 11, chap. 10)

Ivan’s decision is that he will publicly confess his guilt at the trial. This is the final stage in the acknowledgement of his guilt, and even there the devil reappears to haunt him. The mental suffering experienced by Ivan is his punishment; he is being punished in the only possible way that a man may be punished, according to Zosima; he is tormented by the consciousness of his own guilt. From the very first, from their meeting in Zosima’s cell, the elder had sensed the troubled mind of Ivan, and when Zosima had offered him his blessing, Ivan acknowledged the justice of the elder’s penetrat­ ing insight, by going up to him himself and kissing his hand. But if this little scene had caused a stir of surprise among the onlookers in the cell, an even greater sensation is created shortly afterwards, when Zosima bows down low before the eldest brother Dmitri. The key to these two enigmatic acts is to be found in the chapter immediately preceding them—the discussion on the nature of punishment. Ivan, as we have just seen, is to undergo spiritual punishment. Zosima, there­ fore, offers him his blessing. But the punishment which lies in store for Dmitri is to be both spiritual and temporal; he is to suffer not only from the consciousness of his own guilt, but is also to be cut off like an infected limb by the mechanical justice of the State, even though legally he should not be held responsible for the crime. Zosima makes his obeisance to Dmitri because he senses that Dmitri will undergo both forms of punishment of which he himself had been speaking shortly before. The following day, on the eve of his death, he offers an explanation of his action: “I bowed down yesterday to the great suffering that awaits him in the future.’’ This in itself, of course, is not absolutely explicit, but it must be taken in conjunction with the highly significant terminology in which Zosima had chosen to couch his disquisition on punishment. The word here used for

Justice and Punishment ! 23

“punishment” is not nakazaniye (the word which figures in the title Crime and Punishment), it is kara [punishment, retribution] and when this word next occurs in the novel, it is during the trial of Dmitri: The majority of the men positively wished for the punish­ ment [feara] of the offender, except perhaps the lawyers, who were concerned, not with the moral side of the case, but only with, as it were, its contemporary legal significance. (bk. 12, chap. 1)

The thirst of the men for the kara of Dmitri is, of course, only one aspect of the polemical way in which Dostoevsky presents the trial: the lawyers are not concerned with the moral aspects of the case; the eloquence of the public prosecutor is motivated by considerations of personal prestige; and even the defence counsel is given the comic name Fetyukovich (fetyuk = a ninny). In fact the presentation of Dmitri’s trial is such that it might be taken as an illustration of Zosima’s pronouncements on human justice:

Remember particularly that you can be the judge of no man. For there can be no judge of a criminal on earth, until that very judge himself recognises that he himself is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that, perhaps, he himself is most of all to blame for the crime of the man standing before him. When he has realised this then he can become a judge. However absurd this may seem, it is never­ theless the truth. (bk. 6, chap. 3[hJ)

The human conception ofjustice is such a travesty of the word, that all that Dmitri can expect from the outcome of his trial is kara, even though the summing up of Fetyukovich contains a plea for justice of another kind, a kind that could even be accepted by Zosima himself:

Is it for me, unworthy as I am, to remind you that Russian justice is not punishment [kara] only, but the saving of a fallen man? Let other nanons have the letter of the law and punishment [kara] but let us have the spirit of the law, its sense: the saving and regeneration of those who have fallen. (bk. 12, chap. 13)

The word “kara,” therefore, seems to be particularly associated with Dmitri. He is “Karamazov”—“punishment-daubed” (the second

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element of his surname, “maz" suggests mazat’—“to daub,” “to smear”). It is, of course, a name which he shares in common with his brothers and his father; they too, in their different ways, undergo punishment, but it is in Dmitri that the full implications of kara are worked out. Dmitri is condemned by the State to a purely “external” form of punishment for a crime he has not committed, but he also suffers his own “inner” spiritual punishment for a guilt of which he has suddenly become acutely aware. It is because of this inner torment that he can accept the outward manifestations of punishment as, in some sense, just: I accept the torment of my accusation and my public shame. I want to suffer and by suffering I shall cleanse myself. Perhaps I shall succeed in cleansing myself, gentlemen, what do you think? But hear me, however, for the last time. I am not guilty of the blood of my father. I accept punishment not because I have killed him, but because I wished to kill him, and even, perhaps, was capable of killing him. (bk. 9, chap. 9)

The realisation of the true nature of his guilt comes to him through a poignant dream. He is driving through slush on a cold November day, and he passes a bumed-out village with its peasants, hungry and suffering, lined up beside the road. The whole of their plight seems summed up in the crying of a cold and hungry child in the arms of its mother. Dmitri keeps asking stupid and obvious ques­ tions about the plight of the “bairn” (ditye), as his peasant driver calls it; questions which seem to emphasise Dmitri’s lack of comprehension of the problems of human suffering, as well as his own impotence before them: He inwardly felt that although he was stupidly asking ques­ tions that had no sense, these were questions which he absolutely must ask: they were the questions which had to be asked. He felt, moreover, a kind of tenderness welling up in his heart, the like of which he had never experienced before. He felt that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do something for everybody, to do something so that the bairn would not cry any more, so that the black, dried-up mother of the bairn would not cry any more, so that there would be no more tears at all for anybody from that moment on. And

Justice and Punishment ! 25

he wanted this to happen at once; he wanted to do this immediately without delay and in spite of everything, with all his Karamazov impulsiveness. (bk. 9, chap. 8)

Thus for Dmitri, as for Ivan, the terrible enigma of the existence of evil is epitomised in the suffering of a child. Moreover Dmitri’s dream, like Ivan’s hallucination, reveals him to himself; it is a turningpoint in his life. From now on Dmitri is a different man. On awaken­ ing, he immediately feels gratitude for the unknown person who had thoughtfully provided him with a pillow while he slept, and in spite of the dream’s poignancy, he nevertheless thinks of it as a good dream. Indeed it reveals to him a truth, a truth preached by Zosima, and therefore a central message of the novel: “everyone is to blame.” Gentlemen, we are all cruel; we are all monsters; we all force others to weep, mothers and the children at their breasts. But of all, let it be decided now, of all I am the worst abomination. So be it. Every day of my life I have prom­ ised, beating my breast, to mend my ways, and every day I have gone on doing the same vile things. I understand now that what is necessary for such people as me is a blow, a blow of fate. (bk. 9, chap. 9)

The dream confronts Dmitri with the far-reaching implications of his own actions; for his crime is a crime against the father yet the haunting image of his guilt is here portrayed as the suffering mother and her child, and this is why he feels himself to be “the worst abomination of all.” This greater complexity of guilt has already been illustrated in the novel; Dmitri in assaulting the father, Snegirev, is responsible for the tears of the son, Ilyusha. But Oedipal crime is a boomerang which returns to strike the hand which aimed it. The tragedy of Oedipus inheres not in the murder of a father but in the inevitable sufferings of the son and his mother as a result of this murder, and so the suffering child in Dmitri’s dream is also a symbol for himself; his perplexed questions on the plight of the child are a dream-projection of his own perplexity over “the blow of fate” which has suddenly struck him down. Here, indeed, is a Dmitri far removed from the declaimer of the “Hymn to Joy,” and this contrast is empha­ sised in the dream by his questions on why the peasants are not singing

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joyful songs. Nevertheless the dream ends on a hopeful note for he hears the voice of Grushenka telling him that she is with him and will not desert him. The dream, therefore, is an expression of Dmitri’s parricidal guilt, and it is significant that it reproduces elements of his “plunge into the abyss beneath his feet”—that mad ride to Mokroye. On that occasion the evidence of Dmitri’s parricidal guilt had appeared overwhelming, and it seems only natural that he should have asked his coachman Andrey whether he thought he would go to hell. The reply was reassuring: hell, according to Andrey, is only for important people, whereas: “We all think of you, sir, as a little child. That is how we consider you.” But a kind of hell does await Dmitri in Mokroye. This is made clear both by the chapter-heading, “The Journey of a Soul through Hell” (a reference to the medieval poem which so fascinates Ivan) and is implicit in the very name of the place itself. Mokroye means “wet” and it is thus connected with the idea of “the lake” as a symbol for hell (the lake figures prominently in the medieval poem and in Grushenka’s story of the old woman and the onion; moreover Dmitri himself lives not far from Lake Street). It is after the three infernal “ordeals” of the preliminary investiga­ tion that Dmitri has his revealing dream, and in it are reproduced the fast ride, the questions to the coachman, and above all the figure of the child—the child whose plight Dmitri cannot understand; for in spite of the assurances of Andrey, the child has suffered an ordeal of fire. It is this image of the child which haunts Dmitri and will influence the whole of his future life: Why did I dream of the “bairn” then at such a critical moment? “Why is the bairn poor?” It was a prophecy for me at such a moment! I shall go to Siberia for the “bairn”; because everybody is to blame for everybody else, for all “bairns”; because there are little children and big children. All people are “bairns.” I shall go for them all, because it is necessary for someone to go for all. (bk. 11, chap. 4)

The plight of the child demands sacrifice; Dmitri is going to accept suffering for all. In this he is a Christ-figure, and it is therefore not surprising that it is Christ’s prophecy of his own death and resur­ rection (St John 12:24) which serves as an epigraph for the whole novel, and is applied more particularly to the fate of Dmitri. Thus

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Zosima quotes this passage of Scripture to Alesha in explaining the reason for his obeisance to Dmitri. The quotation occurs again in Zosima’s testament, where it is a turning point in the account of his relations with “the mysterious visitor”; a story which is a parable about the terrible power of conscience, and as such sheds light on the inner torments of both Dmitri and Ivan. But the quotation is particularly striking for its imagery: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a com of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” These are the terms in which Christ expresses the prophecy of his own resurrection; but they could well be those of a pre-Christian dying-god­ cult of an agricultural people—the cult of Ceres and Demeter, with whom, as we have seen, Dmitri himself is closely identified. In Christ’s prophecy an ancient pre-Christian assertion of renewal is fused with a new Christian message of resurrection, and it is significant that this particular passage of Scripture should be a favourite quotation of Zosima; for the Christian teachings of this saintly man are firmly wedded to a cult of the earth: If all should desert you, and drive you out by force, then, when you remain alone, fall on the earth and kiss it; water it with your tears, and the earth will yield fruit from your tears, even though no one has seen you or heard you in your loneliness. (bk. 6, chap. 3[h])

This expression, through agricultural symbolism, of the miracle of hope springing out of despair can be compared in general terms with the verse from St John, but its pagan emphasis is more obvious. It is, moreover, reminiscent of certain ideas of Marya Lebyadkin in The Devils; heretical ideas which she, too, learned in a convent. Zosima’s mystical teaching on “other worlds” is also presented in terms of this earth and its cultivation:

God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth and cultivated his garden, and everything came up which could come up. But that which grew only fives and is kept alive by the sense of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If this feeling grows weak or is destroyed within you, then that which has grown up within you dies. Then you will become indifferent to life, will even hate it. (bk. 6, chap. 3(g))

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When the time comes for him to leave the earth for the mystery of the “other worlds,” he is faithful to his own teachings:

He suddenly felt a kind of violent pain in his chest. He turned white and firmly pressed his hands to his heart. At this, everyone got up from his place and rushed towards him; but although he was suffering he nevertheless looked at them smiling, and gently sank from the armchair to the floor, and knelt down. Then he bent down with his face lowered towards the earth, spread out his arms, and, as though in joyous ecstasy, kissing the earth and praying (as he himself had taught), quietly and joyfully he gave up his ghost to God. (bk. 6, chap. 3)

In view of Zosima’s cult of the earth, the obeisance to Dmitri during which he actually touches the earth with his forehead, seems to take on added significance: he is bowing down to one whose name links him with Demeter and who, like Zosima himself, will be regen­ erated by a cult of the earth; for there is perhaps yet another reason for Zosima’s obeisance—in the wild young officer, he recognises a former self. It is old Karamazov who first intimates to the reader that Zosima might not be all he seems; that there is something of the Lermontovian guards officer about him, and that moreover he is prey to the Karamazov vice of sensuality. The old man’s words are, in fact, little more than drunken nonsense; he himself finally admits that he has confused Zosima with someone else. But in Dostoevsky, idle gossip is seldom entirely gratuitous; a doubt has been sown in the mind of the reader, and the early life of Zosima, as he himself relates it, gives some substance to Karamazov’s empty words. Zosima has, in fact, been a guards officer, whose behaviour was not unlike that of Lermontov’s heroes, nor, indeed, that of Dmitri Karamazov himself; for Zosima, too, has been cruel, he too has been a monster, he too has had a shock which has pulled him up and brought him to the realisation that “we are all to blame”—the very experience which the future holds for Dmitri. The relationship between the two men is not simply that of sinner and saint, each in himself represents the sinner turned saint, but at different stages of this development. Dmitri had wished to begin his “Confession of an Ardent Heart in Verse,” by proclaiming “The Hymn to Joy,” instead he had quoted

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Das Eleusische Fest and identified himself with man’s abject state before he had linked himself in an eternal bond with the earth. Zosima in the exhortations of his testament shows no such equivocation over joy. Joy at the whole of creation will come to those who venerate the earth: Love falling down on the earth and kissing it. Kiss the earth, and love ceaselessly, tirelessly. Love everyone; love every­ thing; search for this rapture, this frenzy. Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love these tears of yours. Be not ashamed of this access of emotion, but treasure it; for it is a gift of God, a great gift, and it is not given to many, only to the chosen. (bk. 6, chap. 3[hJ)

If Dmitri has not yet found his bond with the earth, he is never­ theless at one with Zosima in his striving for joy. Alesha is suddenly struck by the comparison:

“He who loves people, loves their joy,’’ this is what the late elder used to repeat constantly. This was one of his most important ideas . . . “Without joy it is impossible to live,” is what Mitya says ... Yes Mitya. (bk. 7, chap. 4)

These thoughts come to Alesha during the funeral rites performed over the body of the dead elder, and if Zosima is a crucial figure for an understanding of both Ivan and Dmitri, how much more is this true for his own novice Aleksey. The funeral itself reveals to Alesha the truth of Zosima’s favourite biblical quotation, that fruit springs from the com of wheat that has perished, the miracle of hope born out of despair. This experience is a miracle in the sense in which the elder himself understands the word; for unlike the Grand Inquisitor, Zosima sees miracles not as phenomena inspiring faith, but as phenomena springing from faith. During his lifetime, the credulous had ascribed miracles to Zosima himself, but by his death he disabuses them. Instead of the miraculous happenings which everyone expects, there takes place merely an unpleasant natural phenomenon—with unseemly haste the body begins to smell. This is a test of his followers’ faith, not a strengthening of it, and for no one is this more true than for Alesha. He is quite shaken by the event; it is not so much that he himself expected a miracle, but that what has taken place is the very reverse of a miracle—it is unjust. This

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yardstick of “justice” shows how deeply the words of Ivan have affected his thinking, and now in the depths of doubt and despair he echoes the words of Ivan, in which he expresses his rejection of God’s world. Yet Alesha’s faith returns; a miracle does after all occur, but one which is nevertheless presented in terms of ordinary everyday exis­ tence; for it is typical of Dostoevsky’s treatment of the supernatural that this miracle should take the form of a dream—Alesha is present at Christ’s first miracle: the turning of the water into wine at Cana in Galilee. This, the dream of the miracle, is the miracle itself; for in the heart of Alesha the very same process is at work—water becomes wine; despair is turned into joy; the dead husk of Zosima’s rotting body yields a marvellous new fruit; the funeral rites merge into the celebrations of the wedding feast; and at this wedding feast Zosima himself is present and alive, just as Alesha has always known him. He has been resurrected to this miracle of joy, because like Grushenka’s old woman he has given an onion, and now he is drinking the new wine, the wine of a new and great happiness. The dream unites in one great reassuring synthesis the positive elements in all that Alesha has experienced since the death of his elder; the desire for a miracle; the story of Grushenka; and the holy text read over the body of the beloved monk. The real miracle here is the renewal of faith, and now, true to the elder’s precepts, Alesha goes outside to embrace yet a further mystery: Alesha stood, looked, and suddenly, as though his legs were cut from under him, threw himself on the earth. He did not know why he embraced it, he did not try to account for the fact that he so irresistibly felt like kissing it, kissing the whole of it. But he kissed the earth weeping, sobbing, covering it with his tears, and in ecstasy he swore to love it, to love it for all eternity. “Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love these tears of yours” rang out in his soul. What was he crying about? Oh, in his rapture, he was even crying about those very stars which were shining to him out of the abyss, and “he was not ashamed of this access of emotion.” It was as though threads from all these countless worlds of God had come together all at once in his soul, and his soul trembled “in contact with other worlds.” He wanted to forgive everyone for everything and

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to beg forgiveness, oh, not for himself but for everyone and everything. “Others will ask forgiveness for me” rang out again in his soul. But with every moment he felt clearly, almost tangibly, that something firm and unshakeable, like that heavenly dome above him, was entering into his soul; something almost in the form of an idea was being enthroned in his mind and was there for the whole of his life, for all eternity. He fell on the earth a callow youth: he arose a warrior, doughty for the rest of his life. He realised this; he felt it suddenly at the moment of his ecstasy, and never, never, throughout the whole of his life could Alesha forget that moment. “Someone visited my soul at that moment,” he said later with firm belief in his words. (bk. 7, chap. 4)

The frequent quotations within this passage show how closely Alesha is following the ideas of his spiritual father. Yet the elder is not merely a father; Zosima himself recognises in Alesha the spiritual reincarnation of his own brother; and brotherhood, the brotherhood of all men, is one of Zosima’s most cherished concepts. Besides The Book of Job, his favourite reading includes the story of Joseph; a story which points to the possibility of reconciliation between brothers, in spite of all that has passed between them. But the larger brotherhood of all men is just as possible if men will only act as brothers:

In order to refashion the world anew, it is necessary for people psychologically to tum to a new road. Until you do indeed make yourself the brother of everyone, no brother­ hood will be achieved. (bk. 6, chap. 2[d])

Brotherhood, of course, is a concept present in the very title of the novel itself, and it is as central to the work as is the theme of father­ hood. The subplot with Snegirev, so illustrative of that theme, is at the same time a vehicle for Alesha’s attempts to follow the teachings of Zosima on universal brotherhood. Snegirev is reluctant to accept money for the injury he has sustained at the hands of Dmitri, but Alesha represents Katerina Ivanovna’s offer of 200 roubles as “a sister coming to a brother with help. ” Indeed, for Alesha, the whole fate of universal brotherhood seems to hang on whether Snegirev will accept the money or not:

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Otherwise it would mean that everyone has to be the enemy of everyone else on this earth, but there is also on this earth such a thing as brotherhood. (bk. 4, chap. 7)

But the “active love” demanded by universal brotherhood must overcome many difficult obstacles, as Alesha finds out, not merely in his relations with Snegirev, but in his dealings with his own blood brothers. Indeed, from the lips of one of these, Ivan, he hears the classic rejection of brotherhood: “Am I my brother’s keeper.’’ Yet the way has been shown to him by Zosima, who has himself learned the truth of brotherhood by bitter experience. As a young impetuous officer he had struck his servant Afanasiy; and the fact that the servant had accepted the blow without retaliation or complaint precipitated a crisis in his master’s life. The young officer realised for the first time how badly he behaved to his fellow men; and in order to proclaim the brotherhood of all men, he joined another brotherhood, the brother­ hood of a monastery. When next he meets Afanasiy there is a new bond between them: “there took place between us a great human union.” In the Karamazov household, however, there is a figure who embodies the very antithesis of Zosima’s relationship with Afanasiy and his revelation that his servant is his brother: that figure is Smerdyakov—the brother turned into a servant. Zosima, who has such a strong connection with all the other brothers, hardly seems to touch Smerdyakov at any point, yet the logic of Dostoevsky’s novels is such that the saint and the sinner, the Christian and the heretic, are never far apart. If Smerdyakov does provide an antithesis for Zosima, he also stands as some sort of dark commentary. In The Brothers Karamazov Smerdyakov is the figure identified with heresy, the character who is given the attributes of the Castrates; but the ascetic, celibate Zosima is himself not without a taint of heresy. The idea is first mooted by the elder Karamazov, who pre­ tends to be offended by the monks’ “heretical practice” of confessing aloud (by “the monks,” of course, he means only Zosima): It is indeed a scandal! No, Holy Fathers, with you one might even get caught up in the heresy of the Flagellants. I shall write to the Synod about this on the first occasion, and I shall take my son Aleksey home. (bk. 2, chap. 8)

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This outburst is comic but, like Karamazov’s ramblings on Zosima as a Lermontovian hero, such nonsense is not without its grain of truth: the old man is merely giving his own typically exaggerated version of something he has heard; for within the monastery itself there is much criticism of Zosima on this very point. Indeed, the very “Orthodoxy” of the function of elders is called into doubt by several of the monks. The condemnation of Zosima’s teachings comes to a head after his death, when the sudden decomposition of his body seems to lend validity to the denunciations of his critics. They remember that he taught that Efe was a great joy and not a vale of tears; that he did not believe literally in hell-fire; that he did not strictly observe the fasts; that he allowed himself to be adored as something holy; that he abused the mystery of the confessional. The scene reaches its final culmination when Zosima’s arch enemy Ferapont enters the room where the body is resting, and sets about exorcising the devil, as though the smell were the stench of ungodliness. All this, again, is comic, but there is a fundamental element in Zosima’s teaching which is never presented in a comic light, but which is certainly heretical—this is Zosima’s cult of the earth. This teaching seems to be something pre-Christian; as we have seen it links Zosima, as does his teaching on joy, with the pagan Dmitri Karamazov, but also it looks back more explicitly to the heretical ideas which Marya Lebyadkin (in The Devils) had picked up in a convent. Its literary antecedents, therefore, link it to the Russian sects. In The Idiot Myshkin had been impressed by religious ideas on the soil, which he heard from the lips of an Old Believer, and in that novel Dostoevsky had made his saint the spiritual brother of the “Castrate” heretic, Rogozhin. In The Brothers Karamazov, on the other hand, these two figures of saint and heretic are poles which never touch, but the name Smerdyakov [stinker] seems nevertheless to sug­ gest that into his portrait of the bastard brother, Dostoevsky has distilled all the negative aspects of his saint, all that odour of corrup­ tion which the monk Ferapont tried to exorcise as the stench of ungodliness. The figure of Zosima is thus central to the whole novel; he is a father-figure in apposition to the elder Karamazov, yet at the same time he is also a kind of brother-figure for all his sons: he is the spiritual hub around which all the characters revolve. The future of Zosima’s ideas lies with Alesha, but their imple­ menting is far from easy. In his dealings with Snegirev, for example,

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Alesha’s patience can be sorely tried, yet, as always the teachings of the elder come to his aid. On the subject of Snegirev, he tells Lise Khokhlakova: “Do you know, Lise, my elder once said: people must be looked after exactly as though they were children, and some as though they were sick in hospital” (bk. 5, chap. 1). Lise greets this idea with enthusiasm, and cries: “Let us look after people as though they were sick.” It is not difficult to see why she is so enthusiastic; for this precept has more direct relevance for her than for Snegirev. She is, indeed, one of the most difficult people with whom Alesha has to deal, and in her own person she combines both the child and the invalid. She therefore becomes a symbolic goal of Alesha’s “active love,” and in spite of all the obstacles she places in its path, this love is unfaltering, and Alesha’s intention of marrying her is unchanged. As a cripple, Lise obviously invites love and consideration, yet she is spoilt and wayward, and she has a strong desire to subject other people to the suffering of which she herself is a victim. Her relation­ ships with those around her, notably her mother and Alesha, are all tormented relationships. She even strikes a servant, then later begs her forgiveness; but this incident scarcely seems to have the same regen­ erative effect that Zosima experienced in a similar situation. The most frank expression of her desire to see others suffer and enjoy it occurs in a conversation with Alesha towards the end of the novel. She recounts the story she has read of a four-year-old boy who has first had his fingers cut off, and then been crucified: I sometimes think that I myself crucified him. There he is hanging and groaning, and I sit down beside him and eat stewed pineapple. I love stewed pineapple very much. Do you? (bk. 11, chap. 3)

This love of torment which she expresses so vividly here is itself designed to torment Alesha, whom she is torturing, not merely with this loathsome self-revelation, but also with hints of a relationship between herself and Ivan. At the end of this chapter this sadism is turned in on herself: as soon as Alesha has left she purposely traps her finger in the door. It is not merely that Alesha looks after people as though they were children: he treats children as though they were adults, and this is the secret of his success with them. He becomes the elder brother of all the children in the novel. Yet he is not the only Karamazov for whom

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children are important. We have seen that for Ivan children are the embodiment of innocence, and that he purposely restricts his argu­ ments on eternal harmony to the suffering of children. We have also seen that Dmitri, who has been likened to a child by the cabman Andrey, decides to take on suffering for the sake of a child. Neverthe­ less, children are not all they seem. The crippled adolescent Lise Khokhlakova is perverse and tiresome: she seems bent on destroying Ivan’s myth of the innocence of children. For not only does she offer herself to Ivan; she also reveals to him the same sadistic reverie of the crucifixion of a child with which she had tormented Alesha: the crimes committed against children by children, it seems, might almost be more terrible and bizarre than those perpetrated by adults. The subplot of “the boys” begins with Ilyusha, whose sufferings, as we have seen, serve as a commentary for the actions of Dmitri, but this subplot grows in importance as the novel progresses, and it is responsible for some of the least satisfactory passages in the work. The chapters “At Ilyusha’s Bedside” and “Little Ilyusha’s Funeral” are nawkish; they seem merely to be catering for a nineteenth-century taste for bizarre sentimentality—for stewed pineapple and crucified children. Nevertheless, both these chapters are related to central themes in the novel. After the incident with his father, Ilyusha turns from being one of the injured into being one who injures: he gives a stray dog, Zhuchka, a piece of bread with a pin in it. Here as in the main plot the actions of Dmitri have prepared the ground for Smerdyakov; for it is the bastard son who teaches Ilyusha to do this. After this incident no one, it appears, has been able to find the dog, but in fact Kolya Krasotkin has found Zhuchka alive and well, has taught him a variety of tricks and renamed him Perezvon. Kolya not only refuses to have anything to do with Ilyusha after the incident with Zhuchka, but purposely hides the fact that he has found the dog; his aim is to punish Ilyusha by developing in him the consciousness of his own guilt. He hopes to intensify the effect by producing the dog as an unexpected gift at the bedside of the dying boy. The consciousness of one’s own guilt is, of course, the only form of punishment which Zosima will recognise as such, but Krasotkin, who is a natural leader for the children, has here abused his moral influence: he has caused Ilyusha too much suffering over Zhuchka. Indeed his behaviour is reminiscent of the way in which Lebedev torments his friend General Ivolgin in The Idiot over the matter of the stolen money; but here the effect is not comic—it is tragic.

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And if Krasotkin, who suspected nothing of the sort, had only known what a fatally tormenting effect such a moment could have on the health of the sick boy, then not for anything would he have ventured to play such a trick. Perhaps in the whole room there was only Alesha who understood this. (bk. 10, chap. 5)

Here then, through the actions of a child, is a perverse commentary on one of Zosima’s most cherished ideas. Later in the same chapter (“At Ilyusha’s Bedside”) Krasotkin provides another commentary, not this time on punishment, but on guilt. The boy relates how he had induced a twenty-year-old errandlad to drive a cart over a goose’s neck, and how when the two had been apprehended and brought before a magistrate, the town lad had pointed to Kolya as the chief culprit:

“It wasn’t me,” he said. “It was him who set me on to it,” and he points to me. I reply quite calmly, that I had not set him on to it at all, but I had only given expression to a basic idea, and had spoken only in theory. (bk. 10, chap. 5)

The character of Kolya is presented as that of any embryo nihilist, and the incident with the goose is another expression of the guilt of the theorist who provides the intellectual inspiration for a crime: it is a minor illustration of the guilt of Ivan. “The Funeral of Little Ilyusha” again has implications for the wider framework of the novel itself. This is the final chapter and it ends on a note of hope for Alesha and the children of the novel. The innocence of children once more seems vindicated. Ilyusha has died and his saint­ liness seems confirmed by the fact that his body does not smell. Alesha asserts in his funeral speech that all the children will be better for having known him; the memory of his last days will fortify them even when they become men; for such is the edifying power of a memory like this:

You must realise that there is nothing better, more power­ ful, more wholesome and beneficial for the life that lies ahead than a pleasant memory; particularly one from child­ hood, from the parental home. People tell you a great deal about your education, but just such a beautiful and holy

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memory as this, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the very best education there is. (Epilogue, chap. 3)

Aleksey Karamazov whose own parental home was so lacking in edifying memories is only too conscious of the sins of the fathers which are visited on the children, but nevertheless, the Fathers and Children theme is positively re-emphasised at the end of the novel; there is hope that the sons will succeed where the fathers failed. Alesha, whose own spiritual regeneration began with a funeral, is sending his young disciples out into the world fortified by the uplifting experience of another funeral; and this ending, from the point of view of the author’s own biography, is psychologically convincing; for the spiritual crisis which gave birth to that great affirmation of life which is the novel itself—that crisis was the death of a child: the death of the author’s baby son Aleksey.

How Sons Become Fathers Michael Holquist

Freud first told the story in Totem and Taboo (1912-13) but came back to it many times, each variant further extending its implications. In what follows, we will use successive versions of the legend as bio­ graphical templates for examining the careers of the different brothers. The simplest account is the first. It was inspired by Darwin and such anthropologists as Robertson Smith and is Freud’s attempt to make the dynamics of the Oedipus complex into the engine of history. At the beginning of time there was a primal horde, composed of a despotic father who held absolute sway over his sons and the females of the tribe. One day (eines Tages, a German fairytale formula) the sons, angered by their father’s control of the women, rose up, killed the father and ate him. But “the tumultuous mob of brothers were filled with the same contradictory feelings which we can see in . . . our children . . . and . . . our neurotic patients. They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him, too. After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. A sense of guilt made its appearance, which in this instance coincided with the remorse of the whole group.” In order to propitiate the dead father, who “became stronger than the living one had been . . . they revoked this deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for their father; and From Dostoevsky and the Novel. © 1977 by Princeton University Press. 39

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they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free. They thus created out of their filial sense the two fundamental taboos [against murder and incest] . . . which corre­ spond to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex.” This story has two parts, each of which is characterized by differ­ ent meanings for son and father. In the first, the sons are helpless, the father all powerful; in the second, the sons became fathers, but not of the sort against whom they were forced to rebel. The new father tries to be different from the old parent, to be better in the sense that he permits more freedom to his own sons, thus eradicating some of the worst effects of the either/or condition of the son/father dichotomy that obtained in the primal condition. A complete biographical model may be adduced from the legend by focusing on the progression of a son who has gone through both stages, one who kills the father and then eradicates the need for his own murder by liberating the children he sires from the oppression he himself knew as a boy. The Brothers Karamazov is built on just this biographical paradigm, although only Alyosha fully completes its movement, with all the other characters in the novel sorting themselves out according to how many steps and implications of the master plot they actually articulate. As we move from the most distorted versions of the primal horde myth, in Smerdyakov and Ivan, to its most fully realized expression in Alyosha, we shall also move from the simple account of the legend outlined above to some of its later and more far-reaching versions. In order to read the novel this way, we begin by assuming the Karamazov family as we first encounter it to be in something very like the initial condition of the primal horde. That is what all the talk about “Karamazov-ism” means. Rakitin says to Alyosha, “Your house stinks of crime ... in your family sensuality has reached a point where it becomes a devouring fever. So these three sensualists are now con­ stantly watching each other—with a knife stuck in the leg of their boots.” (“A Seminarist-Careerist”). Old Fyodor Pavlovich is the complete tribal despot, depriving his sons of power, money, and women, better to prosecute his own lusts:

“So far as I’m concerned” he went on, becoming animated all at once, as though growing sober for a minute as soon as he got on to his favorite topic, “so far as I’m concerned—oh my children, you, my little sucking pigs—so far as I’m concerned there has never been an ugly woman in all my life

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... for me ugly women don’t exist. . . . What’s so wonder­ ful is that so long as there are peasants and gentlemen in the world—and there always will be—there will also be such lovely little scullery maids and their masters—and that’s all one needs for one’s happiness!” (“Over the Cognac”)

The sons all feel their dependence on him, that is what in the end the Karamazovism in themselves they all admit but despise comes down to, but Fyodor Pavlovich has a different way of exercising his power over each of them. The first reason each son has for hating him is grounded in his treatment of their various mothers. While Dmitry has one mother, Ivan and Alyosha another, and Smerdyakov still another, they have all been treated the same way by Fyodor Pavlovich. Primitive patriarch that he is, he begins by stealing them from their families or by raping them; he then soon abandons them in pursuit of yet other women. He gets Dmitry’s mother, Adelaida Miusova, to elope with him; she discovers he has taken her dowry, does not love her, and after bitter quarrels she runs off with another man to die in a St. Petersburg attic, “leaving the three-year old Mitya to be taken care of by her husband. Karamazov at once turned his house into a regular harem.” Sophia Ivanovna, the mother of Ivan and Alyosha, lasts longer but fares worse. Fyodor Pavlovich also gets her to elope with him: “her air of innocence made a deep impression on the voluptuary . . . ‘those sweet, innocent eyes cut my heart like a knife at the time,’ he used to say, sniggering loathesomely.” After eight years of living in the harem she dies, half demented. “After her death, almost exactly the same thing happened to the two boys as to their eldest brother Mitya: they were completely forgotten and abandoned by their father” (“Sec­ ond Marriage and Other Children”). Stinking Lizaveta is raped by the old man as she lies sleeping in a bush and her son, whose mother’s name Fyodor Pavlovich assigns to him, is condemned to bastardy. He more than any other of the sons dramatizes the effects of their father’s rule over them; thus he is quite literally his father’s servant, a bastard and an epileptic. It goes without saying that it is he who actually accomplishes the act of which all the other sons merely dream when he murders the old man. Thus each of the sons has in his mother a reason for hating his father. But the old man goes out of his way as well to show the power he has over his children in a manner calculated to dramatize the

42 / Michael Holquist

particular helplessness of every one of them, thus engendering the unique rage of each. Smerdyakov he openly insults, constantly re­ minding him of his status as bastard and servant. Ivan he affronts intellectually by the banalities he constantly reduces the philosopher’s arguments to; emotionally—as the great oppressor of children—he offends, since for Ivan as he makes clear in the prologue to his Legend, the worst crimes are those against innocent children. Alyosha, the novice, is attacked through his devotion to the church: Fyodor Pavlovich twice vows to take his youngest son out of the monastery, to reclaim him from the surrogate father he has found in Zosima. Not only does the elder Karamazov boast to Alyosha how badly his mother was treated; he adds that he took her favorite icon away, but not before spitting on it. Alyosha, the gentle one, when he hears this story “flushed, his eyes glowed, his lips quivered . . . just as had his mother when she appeared to be on the point of killing Fyodor Pavlovich” (“Over the Cognac”). Dmitry’s case fits the Freudian paradigm most neatly, as the father’s power is dramatized in the property and the woman he denies the son: “ ‘She [Grushenka] won’t, she won’t, she won’t, she won’t marry him for anything in the world!’ the old man cried, starting with joy” (“The Sensualists”). Thus Fyodor Pavlovich acts out in a particular way the general role assigned him in the primal horde legend: he has “prevented his sons from satisfying their directly sexual impulsions; he forced them into abstinence and consequently into the emotional ties wittrhim and with one another which could arise out of those of their impulsions that were inhibited in their sexual aim. He forced them, so to speak, into group psychology. His sexual jealousy and intolerance became in the last resort the causes of group psychology” (Freud, Group Psychol­ ogy and the Analysis of the Ego). The situation as the novel opens is, then, one in which the father tyrannizes over four sons who all labor under the weight of their Karatnazovscina, which in their case is both a dominant character trait and a political condition. The indignities they share together at the hands of their father force them into a primary group, “a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.” They begin with this bond of oppression, which is why they all can be so intimate with each other immediately, even though they have been isolated from each other. They come from completely different backgrounds, and have not actually talked together until that point where the novel

How Sons Become Fathers I 43

begins. All the brothers will seek to find different ways out of the dilemma, thus creating four versions of the Freudian master biogra­ phy, each of which is defined by how well or poorly it charts a complete movement from group to individual, son to father.;

Smerdyakov represents the most truncated version of the biogra­ phy. He remains trapped in its opening steps, cannot get beyond the climax constituted by his own act of patricide. As a very small child he already conceives the world in the opposed terms of group/leader; in his case in terms of the church, precisely one of the two groups Freud proposes as exemplary: “As a boy he was fond of hanging cats and burying them with ceremony. He used to dress up in a sheet, to represent a kind of surplice, and chant and swing something over the dead cat, as though it were a censer’’ (“Smerdyakov’’). When his father treats him as an animal (Balaam’s ass), Smerdyakov looks for a new leader and seems to have found him with the return of Ivan to the household. “Smerdyakov had often been allowed to wait at table before. . . . But since the arrival in our town of Ivan he had begun to appear at dinner almost every day.” He gets into arguments, and, as Fyodor Pavlovich points out to Ivan, “He’s doing it all for your benefit. He wants you to praise him” (“The Argument”). He murders his father less out of a desire for his own revenge than as a desire to be the good servant of another master, his half-brother Ivan. When he discovers that Ivan is unwilling to grant his approval to the deed, Smerdyakov, abandoned by one master, one father, in whose pre­ sumed service he had killed his other father, commits suicide. He is trapped in group psychology because he lacks the means to break out of adolescence: that very quality of passion, of sexuality, that impels all the other brothers. He is always described as a “eunuch” or “castrate.” Thus, since he cannot become a father, he is condemned always to be the helpless son. And when Ivan, the father he has chosen, rejects him, it is a metaphysical bastardy (all is not permitted) more unbearable than that which defined his relationship to the first parent. He commits suicide not out of fear of capture, but from the despair of a twiceabandoned orphan. Ivan, Smerdyakov’s alter ego in the technical sense of that term, also fails to advance beyond the status of oppressed son. He, too, hates the father: “I detest him so much. If it had only been him, I’d have left

44 / Michael Holquist

long ago” (‘‘The Brothers Get Acquainted”), and he, too, finds him­ self in the frustrated sexuality of the horde’s initial state, loving Katerina, one of his elder brother’s women. Thus he has the passion denied Smerdyakov, but the “children” he sires do not yet suffice to achieve for him the status of father: the eunuch patricide, he rejects; the Grand Inquisitor, he invents; and the devil, he dreams. He brings about the death of the old despot, but cannot enact the further steps of Freud’s normative biography: the reasons why we see in his legend; the conse­ quences we see in his nightmare. The confrontation between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor is as much a disquisition on parenthood as it is an exercise in theology. Ivan is obsessed with other examples of his own condition as oppressed child. He collects anecdotes telling of particularly brutal crimes against children; as a prologue to his legend, as his rationale for it, he recounts some of these to Alyosha, adding, “I’m not talking of the sufferings of grown-up people ... let them go to hell, but these little ones, these little ones . . . there are lots of questions, but I’ve only taken the children.” It is the suffering of children that leads Ivan to hand back his ticket to God, the reason for his “Rebellion” that gives the Proem chapter its title. We see here, not for the first or last time, an equation between the psychopolitics governing the relations of Fyodor Pavlovich to his sons, on the one hand, and that of God the father to his human children, on the other. The filial oppression that sparks rebellion against old Karamazov is transformed into a metaphysical cause for revolt against God. The Legend pits two theories of parenthood against each other. Christ appears in the story not in his Second Coming, “No, he only wanted to visit his children for a moment”; his only act, other than his final kiss, is to resurrect a seven-year-old girl, a metaphor for the view that fathers must deliver children from the killing effects of paternal oppression. “You want to go into the world . . . with some promise of freedom,” says the Inquisitor, who understands what is at issue very well. He holds the opposite view. It is clear that the miracle and mystery he invokes are mere subfunctions of the third element in the triad that defines him, authority. He, like that patriarch of the other legend, the leader of the primal horde, wants to insure that children remain children; he forces them into group psychology; “the- abso­ lutely essential thing is that they should [worship] all together.1” He goes on to say of even those who rebel against the authority for which he stands,

How Sons Become Fathers / 45

they are little children rioting in class and driving out their teacher. But . . . they will pay dearly for it.” His system is grounded in a static dichotomy between group and leader, children and father: “There will be thousands of millions of happy infants and one hundred thousand sufferers who have taken on themselves the curse of knowledge of good and evil. This is the vicious circle in which Ivan finds himself; it is why he cannot himself move from the one condition (son) to that of the other (father). He is incomplete; he is trapped in the initial stages of the normal progression Alyosha’s career will completely articulate, a point that is made when Alyosha criticizes the incompleteness of his broth­ er’s story. Ivan has let his Inquisitor have the last word, “Tomorrow I shall burn you. Dixil" But under Alyosha’s questions he adds, “I feel that in defending my theory I must appear to you as an author who resents your criticism. Let’s drop it.” But Alyosha asks, “How does your poem end?” forcing Ivan to add the detail of Christ’s kiss, an unexpected ending (“the old man gave a start”) as much for Ivan as it is for his Inquisitor, which is underscored when Alyosha kisses him as they part, a true act of plagiarism, not a technical imitatio Christi so much as an endorsement of the parental principle for which Ivan’s Christ stands in. Ivan’s incomplete biography is dramatized as well in the en­ counter with the spectre he fathers, the devil. The devil longs for an end to the responsibility of his own freedom, wants to be one of the eternal children for whom the Grand Inquisitor would be *** natural parent: “My fondest dream is to be reincarnated, irrevocably— and for good, as a 200-pound merchant’s wife and to believe in every­ thing she believes. My ideal is to go into a church and offer a candle from a pure heart.” Like the underground man, he cannot find a story to live as his own biography: “I am the X in an indetermi­ nate equation. I am a sort of phantom of life [prizrak zizni] who has lost all his ends and beginnings, and who has finally even forgotten what his name is.” Which is exactly what happens to Ivan, whose end is an indeterminate “brain fever.” He cannot get beyond the dilemma of desiring his father’s death: “Who doesn’t wish his father dead . . . They all wish their fathers dead. One reptile devours another” (“A Sudden Catastrophe”). Thus his story ends in confusion: “shouting something incoherent, he went on screaming while he

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was being carried out.” Like his devil he “has lost all his ends and beginnings.” Now it has often been said that the shape that stands over against Ivan’s ideas and the incomplete biographical progression they dictate is to be found in the chapters on “The Russian Monk” that follow closely on the Grand Inquisitor section of the novel. Dostoevsky, in some of his attempts to explain away the power of the Grand Inquisi­ tor, assumed this position as well. And at first glance there would appear to be much to support such a view, especially if we maintain our biographical prejudice, since it is here that we get the most distilled version of “the life of a great sinner” in the Vita of Zosima. The elder’s life appears to be told according to confessional narrative norms: not only does he experience a conversion, but so in the same story does his brother Markel and his friend, the mysterious visitor Michael^Jdis biography is laid out according to the strictest norms of hagiography. There are two sections; the first called “Biographical Data” tells how he went astray as a young man, becomes a dissipated soldier (“they behaved badly, and I worst of all”), but then experiences a mysterious grace: I felt as though my heart had been transfixed by a sharp needle. I stood there as though I had lost my reason, and the sun was shining, the leaves were rejoicing and reflecting the sunlight, and the birds—the birds were praising the Lord ... I covered my face with both hands, flung myself onto the bed and burst out sobbing. He conflates hagiographie tradition with literary cliches when next morning he nobly refuses to answer his opponent’s fire in a duel. But the chronology of his life—as it always does in a true confession— effectively ends at this point. He has found the end—as both conclu­ sion and telos—of his development, in contrast to Ivan, whose biography lacks an end. The second part of Zosima’s biography is not told chronologically then, but consists in the “Discourses and Sermons of the Father Zosima,” much as Augustine’s life ends with his con­ version, and what follows is a discourse on time and the book of Genesis. But to oppose Zosima’s biographical scheme to that of Ivan’s would be to fall into the trap that leads so many critics to identify Stepan Trofimovich’s conversion rather than Stavrogin’s suicide as the sonclusion of The Possessed. The story of the novel does not cease with

How Sons Become Fathers / 47

the story of Zosima. Even more, there are elements in the plot that contains Zosima’s life which suggest that it is included not as a defini­ tive example of biography, but rather as yet another model of life history that must be superseded. I have in mind first of all those demurrers on the part of the novel’s narrator as to the close fit between Alyosha’s written account of Zosima’s life, on the one hand, and that life as it was actually lived, on the other. At the beginning of Alyosha’s manuscript the narrator warns: This account of Zosima’s life was written down from mem­ ory ... a short time after the elder’s death. But whether it was all the conversation on that evening or whether he added to it from his notes of his former talks with his teacher I cannot say for certain. Besides, the elder’s speech in his account seems to go on without interruption, just as though, in addressing his friends, he had been telling his life in the form of a story, while from other accounts of it there can be no doubt that it all happened somewhat differently. . . . Moreover there can be no question of an uninterrupted narrative on the part of the elder. . . . Nevertheless I have preferred to confine myself to the elder’s story according to Alexei Karamazov’s manuscript.

And as the manuscript comes to an end, the narrator points to the confessional aspect of the Vita: “I repeat, [the manuscript] is incom­ plete and fragmentary, the biographical data, for instance, covers only the elder’s early years,” or, in other words, only those years up to Zosima’s conversion. Two things should be noted about the narrator’s reservations: first, that the life is suspiciously coherent, told; second, that it is nevertheless not complete. It is shaped along the lines of a traditional biography, “literary” in the sense of that word invoked by the under­ ground man, but only up to a certain point. It is precisely Zosima’s death that raises questions about the Life: the traditional ending of the Vita is reversed. The saint’s corpse not only fails to smell of the obligatory roses; it raises a stench that forces the shocked monks to open all the windows. This conclusion of the fife is in contradiction with the canonical norm of the Life. Dostoevsky is at pains to point out that the stinking corpse is not to be read as a judgment on how Zosima lived his life. But it is a judgment on how that life was told. The reason why the confessional biographical model is so spectacularly

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flouted, and why it is breached precisely at the end, is that Dostoevsky is abandoning it as a possible paradigm for the life of his hero Alyosha, whose progression will not be that from sinner to saint, but from group member to individual, son to father. Before we go on to Alyosha, however, a few words should be said on the subject of Dmitry’s relationship to the normative biogra­ phy we have been charting. He comes as close to living through all the functions of the primal son’s narrative as anyone except Alyosha. He, like Ivan and Smerdyakov, desires the death of his father, openly threatens him with murder, and challenges that other father, Captain Snegiryov, to a duel. But the rebellious son almost becomes the loving father himself after his arrest. As he lies dozing during the interview at the Mokroye tavern, he dreams of poverty-stricken mothers and a starving, freezing baby, the image of which causes him to ask, “Why are they so black with misfortune, why don’t they feed the baby?” (“The Evidence of the Witnesses”). Thus, just after learning of his father’s death, Mitya dreams of assuming a kind of paternal responsi­ bility and one, moreover, that is set off from Ivan’s concern for children. The starving baby is called “ditë,” a peasant dialect word that marks the difference between it as an object of compassion and the more proper “child” (rebënok) whose fate obsesses Ivan. The dream is as well contrasted to Ivan’s nightmare in its effect: Dmitry’s “heart blazed up and rushed forward to the light, and he longed to live.” In the end, however, it is not given him to experience full parenthood in the sense that word takes on in the course of the novel: his dite is still a dream as he plans to escape to America. He is not yet ready to take on responsibility of this sort, one that includes responsibility for the death of his own father. As Alyosha tells him, “you are not ready and such a cross is not for you . . . such a cross is too much for you” (“For a Moment a Lie Becomes the Truth”). Zosima has bowed down to Dmitry and not to any of the other brothers because it is Mitya who will actually be judged for the crime of which they are all guilty: patricide. But Alyosha has won the right to judge whether or not his brother is “ready,” because he is at a further point in that biographical progres­ sion which structures the whole novel, a point he knows Mitya has not reached. Alyosha treats his brother like a son, because Alyosha has become a father. In the “scientific myth” we have been using as a narrative guide, it is assumed that after the murder of the despotic father, the sons,

How Sons Become Fathers I 49

the persons who were united in this group of brothers, gradually came toward a revival of the old state of things at a new level. ... It was then, perhaps, that some individual, in the exigency of his longing, may have been moved to free himself from the group and take over the father’s part [which is how Alyosha in the end relates to Mitya]. He who did this was the first epic poet; and the advance was achieved in his imagination. This poet disguised the truth with lies in accor­ dance with his longing. He invented the heroic myth. . . . Just as the father had been the boy’s first ideal, so in the hero who aspires to the father’s place the poet now created the first ego ideal. The transition to the hero was probably afforded by the youngest son. (Group Psychology)

This, then, is the achievement of the youngest Karamazov: he creates a heroic myth or, more precisely, recreates a myth, since he is, as Ivan has accused him of being, a plagiarist. The liberating story Alyosha comes to tell is, of course, the life of Christ, not as a theologi­ cal consolation (or not merely as such) but as a—literally—viable model of biography, a narrative that rationalizes, mediates the transition from son to father. Alyosha has been made to suffer by his father. Moreover, he is implicated in the other brothers’ desire for their father’s death, a point made most unambiguously when Ivan asks what should be done with a general who turned his Borzoi hounds on a naked little peasant boy, clearly a metaphoric recasting of the relations between Fyodor Pavlovich and his sons: “Shoot him!” Alyosha said softly, raising his eyes to his brother with a pale, twisted smile (“Rebellion”). But Alyosha is less completely an orphan than his brothers. Like the youngest son of Freud’s legend, he has been spared the worst of his father’s excesses, not by a protective mother, but because he has another father, in fact a pater seraphicus, in Zosima. The elder is a much more complicated figure than is often assumed, and in many ways presides over his followers as does the primal despot: “An elder is a man who takes your soul and will into his soul and will . . . you renounce your will and yield it to him in complete submission and complete abnega­ tion. . . . Thus, the elders are in certain cases endowed with boundless authority” (“Elders”). He has, in other words, precisely the kind of power sought by Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor; but Zosima, like Ivan’s

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Christ, believes fathers should use their power to liberate sons so that they in their turn may become fathers: “This is not the place for you in future ... as soon as [I die] leave the monastery.” In other words, cease being a mere brother, part of a group; become an individual, a father—which is what (after the death of both his own fathers) Alyosha does. His children are not the phantoms of Ivan’s nightmare, nor even the spectral “dite' of Mitya’s dream. They are, rather, the band of boys who play so large a role in the novel. These boys have frequently offended the sensibility of sophisti­ cated readers: as one has recently written, “It is a doubtful proposition that one can achieve the Kingdom of God on earth by converting mankind into boy-scouts, and that is why those chapters of The Brothers Karamazov [dealing with Kolya Krasotkin and the others] read like an unintended parody” (Czeslaw Milosz, “Dostoevsky and Swedenborg,” Slavic Review 34 [1975]). But if we assume a non­ transcendent significance in Alyosha’s Christology, he and the boys rather seem to be a happy parody of the Karamazov family, thus a narrative inversion of the political structure built into the two legends of the Grand Inquisitor and of the primal horde. That is, Alyosha’s imitatio need not be read as necessarily grounded in Christian theology. Ideas about God, if Freud is correct, are rooted in ideas about fathers: “at long last the decision was made to concede all power to one God only. . . . Only then was the grandeur of the primeval father restored; the emotions belonging to him could now be restored” (Moses and Monotheism). There is a psychological truth about fathers and sons contained in Christianity, particularly as it is present in The Brothers Karamazov, that seems to get back to a meaning in Christ’s biography that loses nothing if it is stripped of the privilege that religions tradi­ tionally claim. Perhaps that is why Alyosha admits “I don’t think I even believe in God” (“The Engagement”) or what Dostoevsky meant in his famous letter to N. D. Fonvizina (March 1854): “If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with the truth.” That is, even without the claim of transcendent truth, Christ has a primary significance for Dostoevsky, one that he spent his whole career meditating, but that finally becomes clear in his last novel. Christ is important not for the narrative scheme he usually is invoked to justify—the confession or Saint’s life, which is explicitly rejected in The Brothers Karamazov. To read the whole novel as articulating this pattern leads to the un-demystified contortions into which critics as

How Sons Become Fathers / 51

different as Girard or Berdyaev get. De-mystification, on the other hand, need not inevitably result in the biographical pattern of a lapsed Hegelianism that Lukacs sees the novel—and, as we have seen, Dostoevsky’s previous heroes—condemned to, since the Christ story, conceived as the most schematic map of the mediatable distance be­ tween son and father, does not require the assumption of absolute ego. The movement is not between disjunctive states in the same essential self, the either/or of radical Romantic identity, but rather between different functions within an unchanging structure of relationships. Thus, when Alyosha at the end of the novel speaks of resurrec­ tion, we need not take this to mean the same thing as is meant in Christian soteriology. It points to a model for how sons may become fathers; it makes of Christ a hero story. Alyosha, like the son in Freud’s legend who becomes a poet, achieves that poet’s goal: The myth, then, is the step by which the individual emerges from group psychology. The first myth was certainly the psychological, the hero myth. . . . The poet who had taken this step and had in this way set himself free from the group in his imagination, is nevertheless able ... to find his way back to it in reality. For he goes and relates to the group his hero’s deeds which he has invented. At bottom the hero is no one but himself. Thus he lowers himself to the level of reality, and raises his hearers to the level of the imagination.

Thus Alyosha, after leaving the family presided over by his father and the group presided over by bis elder, becomes such an individual by means of the mediating Christ story, his example (the hero is no one but himself) and words (“I will find a place in my heart for you all and I beg you to find a place for me in yours”) convey to the new family he fathers on the last page of the novel. By doing so he changes the significance that attached to his name. He has given his father’s name a new meaning, his own meaning, which is why the last sen­ tences of the book round off his biography: “Hurrah for Karamazov!”

The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel Robert L. Belknap

This paper treats the ways in which Dostoevsky’s social and ideologi­ cal intentions interacted with certain of his sources in the genesis of Ivan Karamazov and Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor. These intentions have eluded some of the best literary minds that have written about Dostoevsky—at least these minds differ so sharply that they cannot all be right. Let me quote two statements bearing on Dostoevsky’s inten­ tion. The first is from D. H. Lawrence’s introduction to a separate edition of the Grand Inquisitor chapter, translated by S. S. Koteliansky:

If there is any question: who is the Grand Inquisitor? surely we must say it is Ivan himself. And Ivan is the thinking mind of the human being in rebellion, thinking the whole thing out to the bitter end. As such he is, of course, identical with the Russian Revolutionary of the thinking type. He is also, of course, Dostoevsky himself in his thoughtful as apart from his passional and inspirational self. Dostoevsky half-hated Ivan. Yet after all, Ivan is the greatest of the three brothers, pivotal. The passionate Dmitri and the inspired Alyosha are, at last, only offsets to Ivan. And we cannot doubt that the Grand Inquisitor speaks Dostoevsky’s own final opinion about Jesus. The opinion is baldly, this: Jesus, you are inadequate. Men must correct From Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800-1914, edited by William Mills Todd III. © 1978 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

Stanford University Press, 1978. 53

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you. And Jesus gives the kiss of acquiescence to the Inquisi­ tor, as Alyosha does to Ivan. Lawrence had not read Bakhtin’s remarks about the polyphonic novel, but he knew better than to assume that a character is a spokes­ man for the author. He offered three reasons for identifying Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor with Dostoevsky: Ivan’s greatness, his pivotal position in the novel, and the kiss of acquiescence the Inquisitor receives. Ivan’s greatness generates a rhetorical and a genetic argument. First, one may ask why an author would select such an attractive mouthpiece for ideas he hopes to crush. Second, one can deny the possibility of creating a truly great character without real sympathy at some level. Lawrence argues this explicitly with respect to Tolstoy. These are persuasive arguments, but many readers take the dia­ metrically opposite view of Dostoevsky’s intent, though they may agree that Ivan is identical with the Russian revolutionary of the thinking type. The most concise and authoritative statement of their position comes from Dostoevsky’s own letter to his editor Liubimov on May 10, 1879.

[Ivan’s] convictions are precisely what I accept as the synthesis of Russian anarchism in our day, the denial not of God, but of the meaning of his creation. All socialism had its origins and beginnings in the denial of the meaning of historical actuality [deistvitel’nosti], and progressed to a program of destruction and anarchism. The original anarchists were in many cases men of sincere convictions. My hero takes up a topic I consider irrefutable [neotrazimuiu]—the senselessness of the suffering of children—and deduces from that the absurdness [absurd, not nelepost’] of all historical actuality. I don’t know whether I managed it well, but I know that the figure of my character is in the highest degree real [real’noe]. (In The Possessed there were a multitude of figures whom I was attacked for as fantastic, and then, can you believe it, they all were justified by actuality, so they must have been imagined correctly.) All that is said by my character in the text I sent you is based on actuality. All the stories about children happened, were printed in the papers, and I can show where; nothing was invented by me. ... As for my character’s blasphemy,

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it will be triumphantly confuted [oprovergnuto] in [June] issue, on which I am working now with trembling and veneration, considering my task (the of anarchism) a patriotic exploit. Wish me success, Nikolai Alekseevich.

the next fear and crushing my dear

Although Dostoevsky’s statement carries more authority than Law­ rence’s, the mere existence of Lawrence’s presents a curious disjunc­ tion. Either Lawrence’s article is correct, and Dostoevsky was consciously or unconsciously lying, or Dostoevsky’s letter is correct, and Dostoevsky was a rhetorical incompetent. If rhetoric is language that makes the reader feel, judge, or act in accord with the author’s intent, its success can be measured like that of the most primitive communication sys­ tem, in which the sender, whether a telegrapher or an author, encodes a message into a form that can be transmitted through a channel, anything from a telegraph wire to a line of letters folded into a book. The receiver decodes the message, and the measure of success is the degree to which the reconstituted message coincides with the sender’s. Lawrence’s letter is a fair example of one major Une in Dostoevsky criticism. In fact, an enormous number of readers have sided with the Grand Inquisitor, and many, like V. V. Rozanov, who do not side with him have stated that Dostoevsky did. To accept Lawrence’s arguments, however, one must reject the testimony of Dostoevsky’s letter. The letter, of course, is a good example of a somewhat suspect literary form, one that has been stud­ ied little, although cultivated by many masters of European prose—the letter requesting the extension of a deadline. Anti-anarchism would have appealed to Liubimov and his chief, Katkov, whose journal, The Russian Messenger, was well to the right of center. Still, Dostoevsky’s letter summarizes a position he had taken often in his journalism, and it cannot be summarily dismissed. Instead it may provide additional insights on close inspection. Except for one rather puzzling sentence about the sincerity of the anarchists, the passage quoted falls into three parts, only the last of which promises to confute Ivan’s argument. The first part traces Ivan’s anarchism to the senselessness of the suffering of children, by way of the concept of the absurd that was to become so fashionable three generations later. Between this statement about the text’s ideology and the statement of his intention to refute it, Dostoevsky claims absolute fidelity to his sources. Thus, where Lawrence moves directly from the

56 / Robert L. Belknap

author’s text to his intention, Dostoevsky disconcertingly moves from the text through the sources on his way to the opposite intention. In calling Ivan’s convictions the “synthesis” of contemporary an­ archism, Dostoevsky is already preparing his reader for the middle part of the passage, where the phrases “all socialism had its origins” and “the original anarchists were in many cases” actually imply that Ivan is the highest artistic achievement under the realist aesthetic of his day—a literary type, an accurate representation of an identifiable segment of society. The ambitiousness of this claim explains the modest beginning of a following sentence, “I don’t know whether I managed it well,” which at first glance conflicts with Dostoevsky’s fear that he had done Ivan too well. Of course, the word “well” means two different things here. I use it to mean “persuasively,” “appealingly,” “powerfully,” as Lawrence would, whereas Dostoevsky is using it to mean “typically. ” He offers two different kinds of evidence to support his claim to typicality. The reference to The Possessed expresses pride in the subsequent confir­ mation of a reality that did not exist at the time he wrote, whereas the sentences around it claim that every detail about Ivan is based on prior reality. The implicit paradox is real and important, but for all his love of paradox, Dostoevsky did not invent it. He merely voiced the standard doctrine of the prosaists of his day, that artists were artists precisely because they could perceive reality more sharply and subtly than other men, and could select and assemble details whose firm basis in reality explained their crystallization into accurate types, even if the author himself did not realize their implication. This paradoxical depen­ dence of special, even prophetic, insight on photographic fidelity to reality rests on a metonymic faith in the capacity of the parts of a reality to generate a representation of the whole. Dostoevsky’s claim that his fidelity to reality has produced an accurate ideological type justifies Ivan’s attractiveness and also draws attention to Ivan’s sources. Ivan, as Dostoevsky and Lawrence agree, has his origins in the reality of Russian radicalism. Belinsky’s letters to Botkin and Gogol, and Herzen’s From the Other Shore provided Dostoevsky with much of Ivan’s language and ideology. Indeed, these sources offer a simple answer to Lawrence’s question about producing a great character without personal sympathy. A writer like Lawrence tends to equate greatness with eloquence, and others [like A. Rammelmeyer] have already shown that a substantial part of Ivan’s eloquence is borrowed from these authors. More important, however, Dostoevsky had adored Belinsky, had participated in the Petrashevsky circle, and

The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel ! 57

had talked with Herzen and possibly Bakunin enough to feel their magnetism, sometimes simultaneously with his doubts about their doctrines. At the Petrashevsky interrogations Dostoevsky said that he read Belinsky’s letter to Gogol for its language, not its ideas. He was desperate for excuses, of course, but Maikov’s memories suggest that his testimony might by coincidence have been true. For Dostoevsky in the seventies, Herzen and Belinsky might be wrong, but they were noble in their eloquence, in their willingness to sacrifice their happi­ ness, and in that sincerity of conviction whose relevance seemed puz­ zling at first in the letter to Liubimov. Dostoevsky’s fidelity to this aspect of his sources could have made Ivan Karamazov more attractive in his desperate love than seems fitting or strategic if Dostoevsky’s letter expressed his real intent. This conservation of rhetorical power and moral persuasiveness alters the model of the primitive communication system in a novel of this sort. Dostoevsky is in part the sender, but he also is a channel through which the qualities of his sources are transmitted intact. Jakobson, Lotman, and many others have discussed the limitations and complications of this sender-channel-receiver model. We realize, for example, along with the fact that the sender does not generate the message ex nihilo, that the codes of the sender and the receiver may not coincide, and that data outside the text may enter the interpretation. Dostoevsky’s letter to Liubimov introduces the crucial question for this paper, the interdependence of the sender and the channel. Whether we think of the input into the system as a body of information Dostoevsky had gathered from his reading, his conversation, and his other experiences, or as a body of intentions generated out of these experiences, we must consider the central element in his experience in 1879—The Brothers Karamazov. We do not have the traditional, straight­ forward communication diagram of sender----- ►message in channel ---- ► receiver, but rather this: Sources

Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov

us

Sources As it comes into being, the message in the channel is a constant source of feedback to the sender, just as the sound of one’s own voice crucially affects the way one speaks. The letter to Liubimov begins with a description of Dostoevsky’s fidelity to his prior experience and ends with his reaction to The Brothers Karamazov as it was emerging—

58 / Robert L. Belknap

fear and trembling, or negative feedback. Here the sources, the inten­ tion, and the emerging text shape each other. Physicists are hard put to it to solve a three-body problem where the bodies are mathematical points and the only influence is gravitational. I do not aspire to such a solution here, but to an indication of the kind of interaction among these three entities in Dostoevsky’s mind. II This formulation of our task suggests an obvious way to test the authenticity of Dostoevsky’s fear and trembling. If Ivan’s greatness is an accidental side effect of Dostoevsky’s fidelity to his sources, we should find in the text a series of efforts to destroy one of the most eloquent and convincing arguments in all literature, an argument whose starting point Dostoevsky himself had called irrefutable. Indeed, it has been said that Ivan’s fate in the novel is designed to show what happens to an atheist and a socialist. He is desperately unhappy; he is rejected in love; and he becomes diseased in the part of him on which he depends excessively, the brain. His suffering and his incapacity at the end of the novel are taken as Dostoevsky’s vision of the just punishment of unbelief. A more sophisticated way of refuting Ivan’s position involves not what happens to him but what he does and is. Valentina Vetlovskaia has catalogued enough unpleasant actions and features of Ivan’s to make a convincing case that Dostoevsky intended to discredit Ivan’s argument by discrediting its spokesman. Her study underlines the problem this novel presents. She shows Dostoevsky using one of the classical rhetorical techniques, the argumentum ad hominem, and leaves us with the evidence of Lawrence and scores of other able readers that the technique did not work. I should like to look at one of Vetlovskaia’s points more closely, Dostoevsky’s effort to discredit Ivan by associat­ ing him with devils. As long as men have talked about sin, they have acknowledged its attractiveness, but in the Middle Ages evil, unlike sin, was presented an unattractive, and its embodiment, devils, tended to be represented as repulsive, filthy, stinking, vicious, and subhuman. Dostoevsky needed such devils if he intended to discredit Ivan by association with them, but the literature of his day offered a very different figure; as early as Milton, but insistently since Blake, Byron, and Baudelaire, various elements of the diabolic had had a good press. The Grand Inquisitor’s

The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel / 59

devil is not a stupid and disgusting torturer, but a dire and fearsome spirit whose very name is taboo. This romantic fascination with the diabolic had weakened a literary resource Dostoevsky needed, the old devil who could provoke instant hostility. Indeed, within a few years of the creation of the Grand Inquisitor, Swinburne, Strindberg, Raspisardi, and Lautréamont had written major glorifications of the diabolic in four different languages. To counteract this loss of prefabricated repulsiveness, Dostoevsky has to train his readers to associate scorn or revulsion with the word “devil.” Except for the biblical demons in The Possessed, devils play little part in Dostoevsky’s works. Demonic figures like Murin in “The Landlady” are not connected with any particular supernatural being. But in The Brothers Karamazov a multitude of devils appear. Old Fyodor Karamazov introduces these creatures early in the novel, set­ ting the stamp of his own savage weirdness on them:

You see, it’s impossible, I think, that the devils should forget to drag me down with hooks when I die. Well, then I think: Hooks? And where do they get them? Made of what? Iron? Forged where? Is there a factory of some sort they’ve got there? Now, over there in the monastery, the monks probably believe that in hell, for example, there’s a ceiling; but I’m willing to believe in hell, only without a ceiling. It works out sort of neater, more enlightened, more Lutheran, that is. . . . Well, if there’s no ceiling, therefore there can’t be any hooks, and if there’s no hooks and all that’s cast aside, that means—implausibly again—who’ll drag me in with hooks, because if they don’t drag me, then what will hap­ pen, where’s there any justice in the world?

With or without hooks these devils could not be made grand or attractive. Even where a larger spirit is involved, Fyodor’s presence makes him the mocker of mankind:

“Does God exist or not? For the last time.” “And for the last time, no.” “Then who is laughing at mankind, Ivan?” “The Devil, probably,” grinned Ivan. “And the Devil exists?” “No, the Devil too doesn’t.” Such talk of the Devil as a mocker and of devils as torturers shapes our

60 / Robert L. Belknap

response to the devil who is the Grand Inquisitor’s mentor. Sometimes the torture is explicit and the devils implicit, as in the story of the Virgin’s descent into hell; sometimes the reverse, as with the devils Ferapont encounters. And sometimes both the torture and the devils are explicit, as with the devils Ferapont, Lize, and even Alyosha vanquish with a cross. Ferapont and Lize share the devils’ love of pain. Ferapont sees one hiding behind the door from me, a full-sized one, too, a yard and a half or more tall; its tail was thick and brown and long, and the tip of the tail had slipped into the crack of the door; and I’m nobody’s fool, so I suddenly slammed the door to, and caught its tail. And it got to squealing and started thrashing around; I took and put the sign of the cross on it, three times I crossed it. And then it died, like a spider that had been crushed. Ferapont savors the agonized extinction of this devil just as he takes physical delight in the idea of heroic fasting, and the nastiness of his twisted sensuality becomes linked with that of his imagined victim. Ivan picks up this vision of the demonic and reinforces it, in the most moving linkage of the Devil with evil that we find, his adaptation of Voltaire’s remark, in response to his own catalogue of the sufferings of children: “If the Devil does not exist, and man in fact created him, then he created him in his own image and likeness.” Dostoevsky drew these various devils in large part from his readings in old Russian literature, and their antiquity reduces their rhetorical usefulness. Their association with the devil the Grand Inquisitor quotes remains largely verbal. The most elaborate picture of an unlovely devil has different sources, and a far more intimate relation to Ivan. This is the devil who appears in Ivan’s nightmare at the moment of Smerdyakov’s suicide. Consider the following passage: Ivan felt that he was unwell, but from some dread of telling himself quite clearly that he was sick, he turned from the light and tried to go to sleep. His sleep was heavy and fitful; he was incessantly waking up, tossing restlessly on the bed, and again dozing off for a minute. Waking up one time, Ivan thought he would not get to sleep any more. He wanted to get up. His head was leaden;

The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel ! 61

in his arms and legs there was some sort of dull pain. With an effort, he sat up on the bed leaning with his back on the corner of the room. He sat sometimes with no thought at all, sometimes there awakened in his head a turbulent and hazy consciousness that he felt bad. He would sit, would say “I feel bad,” and again would senselessly focus his eyes on the opposite comer of the room. Suddenly it seemed to him as if something was stirring there. He gazed there. Just so, something was effortfully crawling out of the corner crack, shifted clumsily, and began to grow. It was some sort of likeness of a human. . . . Ivan rubbed his eyes, and then opened them again; there was no monster there any longer.

This apparition of a very personal demon to a sick man comes from a novel called Likho (The Evil Spirit) by Dmitry Vasilievich Averkiev (1836-1905), who had been a writer for Dostoevsky’s journals in the 1860s. This passage appeared in issue no. 5 of the weekly Ogonek five months before Dostoevsky published Ivan’s scene with the devil. Dostoevsky tended to read as many journals as he could, and had made a note to himself to look at that issue. Ivan Karamazov’s devil appears in much the same way. The passage that follows contains extensive ellipses, but no change of order. Ivan [Karamazov] was sitting on the couch and feeling his head spinning. He felt that he was sick and feeble. He was about to doze off, but got up restlessly and paced the room to keep off the sleep. At moments he imagined that he must be delirious. But it wasn’t his sickness that preoccupied him most: when he sat down again, he began to glance around occasionally, as if he was looking for something. It hap­ pened several times. Finally, his gaze was fixed on one point. ... He sat a long time in his place, firmly supporting his head on both hands and still glancing obliquely at the same point as before, at the couch by the opposite wall. Evidently something was disturbing him, some object, dis­ tracting, bothering. . . . He knew that he was unwell, but detested being sick at that time with revulsion. ... So he was sitting now, almost conscious of being delirious . . . and fixedly staring at some

62 / Robert L. Belknap

object by the other wall on the couch. Suddenly, someone was sitting there.

Both passages begin with a presentation of sickness and go on to describe restless sleep, weakness and pain, and then a confusion of mind to which Dostoevsky gives the label delirium. Finally, both Ivans fix their gaze more and more firmly on a single spot, where an apparition occurs. Averkiev’s Ivan expresses his incredulity with a gesture, and the creature disappears. Ivan Karamazov’s hallucination remains for the entire chapter, and so does Ivan’s incredulity. Dostoevsky’s passage is longer, but except for the fear to admit sick­ ness, the parallel elements appear in the same order, as if the Averkiev passage served as a framework. Dostoevsky, however, has elaborated a very different hallucination: he has retained none of the medieval qualities that Averkiev’s creature shares with the devils Fyodor, Lize, Ferapont, and Grushenka describe. Dostoevsky no longer needs the little, subhuman medieval devils, but instead a being close enough to Ivan to debase Ivan’s arguments, his rhetoric, and, most of all, that “dire and fearsome spirit of self-annihilation and nonbeing” with whom the Grand Inquisitor had so romantically associated himself. Indeed, as Ivan says repeatedly in this chapter, this devil is Ivan. This ideological need works together with the interplay of sources to explain why Dostoevsky preserves so much of Averkiev’s appari­ tion scene but so little of his apparition. Averkiev was writing a historical novel and, like Dostoevsky, had plainly been reading folk­ lore and nineteenth-century editions of the Russian saints’ lives, which contain many demonic creatures. He would certainly have been brought up on Faust and E. T. A. Hoffman, and very probably would have encountered the Nordic tradition of the personal fetish that normally appeared just before one’s own death. He had apparently learned what Freud learned from reading Hoffman, that the sense of the uncanny comes from the reintrusion of long-abandoned beliefs. But Averkiev’s background and his technique plainly mark another, more important source for his apparition scene. He had learned from his old associate Dostoevsky, most specifically from the appearance of a hideous arthro­ pod to the dying radical Ippolit in The Idiot and the first appearance of Svidrigailov in the room of the delirious Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Svidrigailov not only is mistaken for a hallucination; he has hallucinations—of the three victims of his unpunishable murders, his servant, his wife, and the little girl he raped. Averkiev’s apparition

scene combines rhe­ torically appealing elements shared by four of Dostoevsky’s favorite sources, the lives of the saints, Goethe, Hoffman, and Dostoevsky himself. When Ivan Karamazov, like Svidrigailov, blunders feverish­ ly and beneficently through a storm on his way to his final hallucina­ tion, Dostoevsky is returning in his last great novel to the pattern of his first one to describe the ultimate collision between the rational intellect and the moral imperative. Like Svidrigailov and Raskolni­ kov, Ivan is conscious of blood guilt which the law cannot touch without his confession; his dreams, like theirs, reflect his victim, in this case his father, that shrewd, insolent, sophistical, insinuating, provincial mocker and hanger-on who resembles Ivan’s devil and, to Ivan’s distress, Ivan himself. In short, Ivan Karamazov’s embodiment of evil diverges from Averkiev’s because Averkiev’s sources fitted Dostoevsky’s literary taste and ideological purpose better than Aver­ kiev’s text. In fact, the interesting question is not why Dostoevsky abandoned Averkiev’s hallucination as a source; but why he adhered so faithfully to the order of details in a second-rate novel when he had a multi­ tude of sources in better literature. Here, Dostoevsky was really using the same technique he used when he presented the despicable devils of antiquity: the desophistication of a figure whose current identity offered ideological complications. This technique was cer­ tainly not Dostoevsky’s invention; it seems to come from the same source as the devil’s tawdry gentility. Likhachev has pointed out that medieval devils can be cruel and dirty, but that this poshlost’ can appear only in an age of social mobility and collapsing structures. Mephistopheles has this quality at times, with Martha, for example; but here, as in Averkiev, the richness of déjà lu goes deeper, to a source that Goethe and Dostoevsky both quoted extensively in their texts, the Book of Job. Many scholars believe the Book of Job was written at the high point of Hebrew culture, very likely in the reign of David, when the urban sophisticates toyed like pastoral poets with the figure from their folklore of a God whose sons presented them­ selves subserviently before him. One of those sons was a hangeron who spoke to God when spoken to, but a tempter at the same time, challenging goodness with cynicism—“Doth Job fear God for

naught?”—and prompting the most spectacular display of innocent suffering in literature before Ivan’s catalogue of tortured children. The letter to Liubimov explains why Dostoevsky would want to use the Book of Job as a source for the most notable character traits of Ivan’s devil, as well as for the technique of desophistication, which led him to such other sources as the Russian saints’ lives and Averkiev’s historical novel. Ivan’s argument rests on the senselessness of the world, according to that letter, and the task of the novel is to confute Ivan’s argument: to justify the ways of God to man. The Book of Job is the oldest and the greatest theodicy Dostoevsky knew. It begins with the argument Dostoevsky considered unanswerable, the meaninglessness of innocent suffering. Job’s children are de­ stroyed, and the full authority of the biblical narrator declares Job innocent before his suffering begins. Bildad the Shuhite and his friends have the scholarly clear-sightedness that Ivan has, and like Ivan they enunciate the tempter’s argument with the most insistent eloquence the rhetoric of their time afforded. In the Book of Job as it stands (some scholars think its sources ended differently), these massively elaborated arguments are destroyed by a theophany. In Dostoevsky’s most immediate source for the encounter between Christ and the Inquisitor, Le Christ au Vatican by Cabantous, Christ is launched like a rocket into the empyrean before the eyes of an evil, astonished pope.12 But Dostoevsky’s ideology excluded miracles or theophanies to justify or prove God. As Lia Mikhailovna Rozenblium has so clearly shown, Dostoevsky had very little of the mystic about him.18 In his notebooks he specifically rejected mysticism as a trait for Alyosha.1* Dostoevsky could draw his tawdry, subservient devil from the Book of Job, but in an antimystical age, with a nonmystical mind, he could not invoke the voice of God out of the whirlwind to refute the position argued by the devil and those asso­ ciated with him. hi

Perhaps because some of his sources were too eloquent and others conflicted with his ideology on miracles, Dostoevsky resorted to a series of rhetorical maneuvers to carry out the confutation he had promised Liubimov. One such maneuver deflates the Grand Inquisi­ tor with a simplicity so transparent as to be invisible. Ivan Karamazov says at the start of the legend that it belongs to a literary genre in which the Son of God can visit earth. The Grand Inquisitor sees Him resurrect a little girl, asks Him, “Is this Thou,

Thou?” and then adds that he does not want an answer (IX, 314). Ivan comments that it would not matter for the account if the Grand Inquisitor was mistaken or delirious, so long as he spoke out. In any case, the Inquisitor addresses Christ as a being who has the power to save or doom mankind, to defy gravity, to turn stones into bread, to rule the kingdoms of the earth or else provide for the salvation of an elect. He also says that men are too feeble to obey the command­ ments of Christ, that in their disobedience they will suffer pangs of guilt, as well as practical misfortunes on earth, and will inevitably earn misfortunes in the hereafter (IX, 322) : "Your great prophet in his vision and his allegory says he saw all the members of the first resurrection, and that there were twelve thousand of them from each of the Twelve Tribes.... But remember that there were only a few thousand of them in all—and gods at that—but the remainder? And what are the remaining feeble people to blame for, that they could not endure what the mighty could?” By resort to miracle, mystery, and authority, the Inquisitor’s church has imposed certain of Christ’s laws on mankind and has concealed those laws demanding a moral heroism of which mankind is inca­ pable. The Inquisitor says that disobedience to laws suppressed by the church cannot earn damnation for these unknowing sinners: We shall tell them that every sin shall be redeemed if it has been com­ mitted with our permission. .. . There will be thousands of millions of happy children and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Quietly they will die, quietly will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave will find only death. But we will preserve the secret, and for their own happiness we will entice them with a heavenly and eternal reward. For if there were something in the other world, it is surely not for such as they. They say and prophesy that Thou wilt come and triumph anew, wilt come with Thy elect, with Thy proud and mighty, but we shall say that those have only saved themselves, while we saved all. . . . And we who have taken their sins upon us for their happiness, we shall stand before Thee and shall say, "Judge us if Thou canst and darest.” (IX, 326)

This intercession between man and Christ resembles Christ’s inter­ cession between man and God more than it resembles the Virgin’s intercession between man and Christ in the medieval story Ivan tells about the Virgin’s visit to hell. The Grand Inquisitor feels he is sub­ stituting his own punishment for that which divine justice would otherwise certainly inflict on mankind. Certainly he has incurred great sin—not only the suppression of Christ’s truth, but the taking of all the lives in the autos da fé. The Grand Inquisitor believes he

is doing great good on earth, preventing war and famine and despair, but his supreme exploit is more romantic than anything in Herzen: he has sacrificed the happiness of his immortal soul to save mankind from damnation. Dostoevsky deflates this magnificent gesture with a very simple one. Christ says nothing, but kisses the Grand Inquisitor. The kiss is obviously a blessing; it burns in the Inquisitor’s heart as holy things do in this novel. And if Christ can bless the Grand Inquisitor, who has imprisoned Him, concealed His word, and killed hundreds of His followers, then obviously none of the lesser sinners are cut off from Christ’s salvation. The Grand Inquisitor is unable to sacrifice his immortal soul, because Christ still can pardon him, and he has no reason to do so, because mankind need not be damned. In a later chapter, indeed, Zosima reduces damnation to eternal regret at hav­ ing failed to love actively during the one life that a soul is given in all eternity. Here, in a single kiss, the most absolute and most ap­ pealing part of the Grand Inquisitor’s exploit becomes an empty, unnecessary gesture. He has simply miscalculated the dimensions of God’s mercy. He believes that he believes in God and Christ, but actually he believes in a more Euclidean, less merciful being. Only one commentator on this passage has asked, “What are these sins of people taken on oneself? .. . It’s really just godlessness; that’s the whole secret. Your Inquisitor doesn’t believe in God; that’s his whole secret!” (IX, 328.) Alyosha Karamazov says this before he hears about the kiss, and Ivan’s answer raises several of the same questions as the kiss: “Even though it were! You’ve guessed at last. And really it is so, the whole secret is just in this, but really isn’t this suffering?” Ivan accepts Alyosha’s deflation of the Grand Inquisitor before offering his own. From Dostoevsky’s point of view this will­ ingness to see a magnificent construct vitiated makes sense, if the Liubimov letter expresses his real intention. From Ivan’s point of view the Grand Inquisitor might seem to deserve better. But the legend is not offered as a simple exposition of Ivan’s belief. Ivan has said, “You’re my kid brother; you’re not the one I want to debauch and shift from your position; I’d maybe like to heal myself through you” (IX, 296). Ivan’s ambivalence makes his destruction of his own argument psychologically reasonable; but this affectionate, hesitant candor helps to make him so attractive that among all the commen­ tators on this passage, only Alyosha with his own kiss caught

The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel / 67

the ideological irony embodied in the kiss of Christ. The rhetorical failure is almost absolute. Dostoevsky continues this argument in the teachings of Father Zosima, and there gives an answer to the problem of evil as telling in its way as Job’s theophany. Zosima doubts the reality of hell as Fyodor envisions it, with or without hooks. He agrees with the Grand Inquisi­ tor that the teachings of Christ will fill men with guilt at their failure to live up to them, but he sings a virtual hymn of rejoicing at this guilt. Indeed, he takes one of the central doctrines of the materialists whom Dostoevsky claimed to be opposing, and turns this doctrine to his account. I mean the doctrine of universal causal connections, the belief that all things in the world are interconnected, that no event occurs without its causes in this world, that if we knew enough we would see the world as a seamless web of causes and effects. As Zosima puts it, “The world is like an ocean, and if you push at one place, it gives at the opposite end of the world.” In Zosima’s doctrine of evil this universal causal linkage is central. He holds that every one of us at some time in his life has acted out of spite or failed to act with full goodness. If this is true, and if the world is really one, then every one of us is implicated in every sparrow’s fall. Ivan had asked, “Why does God permit innocent suffering?” Instead of answering that ques­ tion, Zosima turns it on the questioner and asks, “Why do you cause innocent suffering?” In a totally determined world each of us has had a part in every evil thing that happens. In this sense, Zosima proclaims, all men are guilty of all things; but unlike those who try to escape guilt, he rejoices in it as his bond with the whole of being. In short, Zosima offers a rhetorical answer to the problem of children’s suffering, which Dostoevsky in his letter had considered unanswerable. Zosima does not justify such suffering; he simply calls on the reader to share the blame. But even this did not seem to satisfy Dostoevsky. He had still another resource for the destruction of Ivan, the reductio ad absurdum, the carrying of Ivan’s nature and doctrines to the logical conclusion that would discredit them. This involves the introduction into the novel of a body of characters whose analogy to Ivan is made distinct, and whose ridiculousness is made more distinct.

IV

Several characters in The Brothers Karamazov have closely marked doctrinal, personal, and even verbal ties with Ivan Karamazov. In

68 / Robert L. Belknap

(“The Origins of Alésa Karamazov”] I showed how such characters could be seen as repositories for elements in a character’s sources which were not needed for that character, but which some conscious or unconscious fidelity to his sources led Dostoevsky to preserve in the novel. In this section and the next, I will try to show how this collection of genetically related characters evolved into an instrument of Dostoevsky’s polemic with the righteousness of Schiller, Herzen, and Belinsky as manifested in the attractive traits of Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor. Rakitin, the seminarian on the make, is probably the most repul­ sive character in The Brothers Karamazov, though his full loathsomeness does not emerge until the chapters after the legend of the Grand Inquisitor. In his first appearance only his eyes and his exaggerated humility hint at something distasteful: “A young fellow, apparently about twenty-two, in a layman’s frock coat, a seminarian and future theologian, for some reason the protégé of the monastery and its members. He was rather tall, with a fresh face, broad cheek-bones, and shrewd, alert, narrow brown eyes. His face expressed utter respectful­ ness, decent but without any evident fawning.” The narrator hints that Rakitin has some thoughts of a different sort, but a Russian reader would only begin to recognize Rakitin when he speaks:

“You’re hurrying to the father superior’s. I know; he has a spread. Since that time he received the archpriest and General Pakhatov, remember it, there hasn’t been a spread like that. I’ll not be there, but go ahead, serve the sauces. But tell me one thing, Aleksei: What means this dream? That’s what I wanted to ask you.” “What dream?” “Why prostrating himself before your brother Dmitry. And he gave his forehead a real bump, too.” “You mean about Father Zosima?” “Yes, about Father Zosima.” “His forehead?” “Oh, I expressed myself disrespectfully! Well, all right, it was disrespectful. So what’s the meaning of this dream?” “I don’t know what it means, Misha.” “Just as I expected—he wouldn’t explain it to you. There’s nothing mysterious in this, of course; I guess it’s just the usual ‘benignorance’ [blagogluposti]. But the trick was done

The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel / 69

on purpose. And now all the dévots in town will get talking and spread it through the district: ‘What can be the meaning of this dream?’ I think the old boy really is sharp-eyed: he sniffed crime. Your house stinks with it.” “What crime?” Rakitin plainly wanted to express something. “It’s going to happen in your fine family, this crime. It’ll be between your dear brothers and your Daddy with his bit of a fortune. So Father Zosima banged his forehead just in case. Later, if anything happens, ‘—oh, the holy elder fore­ told and prophesied it,’ though what’s prophetic about bang­ ing his forehead on the floor?” From this first speech any of Dostoevsky’s original readers would have recognized Rakitin as a type, a certain kind of theological student, the quick, shrewd, observant son of a Russian priest, whose lively language and cynical insight into the establishment led to power, position, and sometimes wealth in the world centered about the radical journals of the time. The invented word blagogluposti (“benignorance”) has been connected with Shchedrin, but Dostoevsky certainly intended it to suggest a far more plebeian type like Dobroliubov. The quick, facile logic, the materialistic or social explanation of the religious, the special awareness of monetary and sexual concerns, the expectation of the criminal, the use of diminutives and words like “stinks,” “sniffed,” and “dévots,” and the short, hard sentences all call to mind the articles in The Contemporary and, after it closed, the Fatherland Notes and other journals of the Russian radicals. In short, the style of this first dialogue has already implied a tie between Rakitin and Ivan that later would be made explicit. Both were setting out on careers in journalism, but Ivan was starting with the simplicity, sincerity, and intelligence of Belinsky, whereas Rakitin’s style already reflected the nasty polemics of the writers in the sixties, whom Dostoevsky looked on as living parodies of Belinsky. Though in the early part of the novel Rakitin is nothing worse than an ill-natured and somewhat sophomoric gossip, in the pages following the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, he is quickly established as a vicious parody of Ivan. Finding Alyosha crushed by the unjust mockery of Zosima’s stinking corpse, he adopts the double role of tormentor and tempter as Ivan, the Grand Inquisitor, and the Devil had done, but instead of being tortured himself, he is complacent:

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“Can you really [be in this state] simply because your old boy made a stench? Can you really have seriously believed he’d start throwing miracles? . . . Why, what the hell, why nowadays a thirteen-year-old schoolboy doesn’t believe that. Still, what the hell—so it’s your God you’re mad at now, you’ve mutinied; they passed him by for a promotion, and didn’t give him a medal on honors day. Oh, you people.” . . . “I’m not mutinying against my God; I simply ‘don’t accept His world!’ ” Alyosha’s quotation from Ivan’s “mutiny” makes explicit the parallel. Rakitin has replaced Ivan as the tormentor and tempter of Alyosha. Ivan tormented Alyosha with stories of cruelty, and tempted him to the “absurdity” of advocating vengeance. The Inquisitor tortured Christ with the woes of humanity and dared Christ to destroy him; and the Devil, the chief torturer, tempted Christ in the wilderness. All these tortures are vicarious, and the temptations are toward altruism. Rakitin offers a debased version of these trials: he exacerbates Alyosha’s per­ sonal hurt, and he tempts him with food and drink and sex, the cheap materialist’s equivalent for the earthly bread offered by the Grand Inquisitor, the Devil, and the Russian radicals. Having established the parallel with Ivan, Dostoevsky proceeds to destroy Rakitin. He uses Rakitin’s own denials to suggest the things denied. In two sentences he indicates not only what two people think of Rakitin, but also the petty vengefulness of his reactions: “Your dear brother Ivan once upon a time proclaimed me a ‘talentless liberal bumpkin. ’ And you too one fine time couldn’t stand it and gave me to understand that I was ‘dishonorable.’ All right! Now, I’ll have a look at your talent and honor.” In the next chapter Rakitin’s destruction continues, as we leam that he brought Alyosha to Grushenka not on a whim, but because she had offered him 25 pieces of silver to do so. The reference to Judas is made explicit, and we are able to say initially that Dostoevsky’s invention took the form of a systematic distortion of the Judas story in a simple direction. Alyosha and Rakitin eat together, not a religious feast, but a snack that breaks the dietary rules of the monastery. Like Christ Alyosha realizes his tempter’s intent, and tells him to carry it out, but a seduction not a crucifixion is involved, and this fails instead of succeeding. The reduction of the sum from 30 to 25 pieces of silver is thus consistent with Dostoevsky’s lightening of all the other elements in his fictionalized version.

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Elsewhere in the novel the same depreciation of currency takes place when Smerdyakov kills his father and then hangs himself after returning the 30 pieces of paper—hundred-ruble notes—for which he has committed the crime. Another piece of nonfiction probably enters the picture here. Dostoevsky had received a letter asking for “30 rubles in silver,’’ a normal phrase in a period when a silver ruble would purchase far more than the inflated paper ruble. The letter came from a relative he disliked, and is dated five months before the appearance of the book “Alyosha” in The Russian Messenger. I would suggest the following chain of associations. The 30 silver rubles for the disliked relative suggested the 30 pieces of silver for Judas. This essentially literary association aroused a feeling of distaste in Dostoevsky, the same feeling he had for the radical journalists of his day. That complex of radicals, relatives, revulsion, and Judas—an ideological, a personal, an emotional, and a literary stimulus—suggested a rhetorical device to Dostoevsky, the use of the familiar Judas figure as a means of stimulat­ ing in the reader a prefabricated revulsion for Rakitin. This use of the name of Judas was a commonplace, of course. In Russian literature Dostoevsky could have found it from Avvakum in the seventeenth century to his contemporary Saltykov-Shchedrin, whose most famous villain is nicknamed little Judas. But the letter is the most plausible core about which this particular complex of biblical, political, and rhetorical sources crystallized. The connection with Ivan’s promising career in journalism leads to more elaborate patterns of association for Rakitin, who plans to marry a rich idiot, grow richer as a radical journalist, and build himself a stone house on the Liteinii avenue in St. Petersburg. When he takes the witness stand at Dmitry’s trial, he is asked: “Are you that same Mr. Rakitin whose brochure published by the episcopal authorities I re­ cently read with such pleasure, The Life of the Elder Father Zosima, who rests in the bosom of the Lord, full of profound and religious thoughts, with a superb and devout dedication to his Eminence? . . . With the sponsorship of his Eminence, your invaluable brochure has circulated and done considerable good.” Rakitin is embarrassed and claims that he never expected publication, obviously afraid that such a background will affect his reputation in radical circles. That is all. The subject is dropped. It has been pointed out that Dostoevsky’s readers would consider this passage realistic not only because the Russian radicals tended to emerge from the theological seminaries—one of the few places they

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could obtain a free education, places by their nature conducive to revolt—but because one of them, Grigory Zakharevich Eliseev, had indeed enriched himself as a radical journalist and owned a large stone house on the Liteinii avenue. Eliseev’s first book was called The Biography of the Saintly Grigorii, Herman, and Varsonofi of Kazan and Sviiazhsk. The dedication read as follows: Your exaltedly eminent Lordship, benevolent Father and Archpastor! From your archpastoral benediction I started upon these labors, with your unceasing attention continued them, and to you I now offer this small item of my making. Your exaltedly eminent Lordship! Accept with your habitual condescension my meager offering, and with your conde­ scension the unworthiness of the laborer will take heart for the great work. Your exalted Eminence, benevolent Father and Archpastor’s humblest servant, student in the Kazan Theological Academy, Grigory Eliseev.

Since a major Russian author, Leskov, had called attention to this passage eight years before The Brothers Karamazov in a major work called An Enigmatic Man (chap. 38), Dostoevsky could count on most of his readers to catch the reference, but he was plainly not using the example of Eliseev’s sycophancy merely to discredit Rakitin. A direct transcription of his source would have been much more damning than the sharply abbreviated version he does offer. Rather he seems to be using Eliseev’s life simply as source material, to provide the kind of data that will anchor his fiction in reality and give it that treasured capacity to fit even subsequently revealed fact which Dostoevsky claimed in the Liubimov letter. The episode is in The Brothers Karamazov because it happened and because Rakitin’s character demanded it. It is brief because the trial was already threatening to overbalance the novel, and because the mere discomfiture was enough. In this case what started as a source became a resource, a literary reference that would identify Rakitin as a caricature of a radical, in contrast to Ivan, the apotheosis of the radical. A similar discovery of a real-life caricature of a Russian radical led Dostoevsky to build into Rakitin parodies of one of the greatest parodists of his time, Dmitry Minaev. Here the polemic cuts both ways. The reference to Minaev’s parodies would have been clear to contemporary readers, and Dostoevsky was essentially using this rec­ ognition to say both that Rakitin was a Minaev, and that Minaev was a

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Rakitin. Since he had already linked Rakitin with Ivan, he was creating a careerist parody for the independence and ambition with which Ivan was arranging his career. Eliseev and Minaev, in Dostoevsky’s mind, were to Belinsky and Herzen as Rakitin was to Ivan. Like any respectable Russian radical of his day, including Ivan, who had written a work on the geological revolution, Rakitin was much involved with the natural sciences, especially with the materialist claim that science could explain everything. Mitya Karamazov reports on Rakitin’s beliefs: You see, there in the nerves, in the head, that is, there in the brain these nerves—to hell with them!—there are these little tails; those nerves have little tails, now as soon as they wiggle there, that is, you see, I look at something with my eyes, like this, and they wiggle, these little tails, and as they wiggle there appears an image and it doesn’t appear immedi­ ately but a certain instant passes, a second, and something like a moment, that is, not a moment, damn the moment, but an image, that is, an object, or an event, now then, damn it, that’s why I observe, and then 1 think—because of the tails.

With the care he frequently displays, Dostoevsky footnoted this pas­ sage with references to Claude Bernard, the French neurologist, mate­ rialist, and proponent of the scientific method of discovery who had been made a literary symbol in a book Dostoevsky had parodied fifteen years earlier, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Dostoevsky had apparently mocked Chernyshevsky so viciously in his “Crocodile” (1865) that Dostoevsky later denied the allusion. Here I would suggest that the articles on physiology and neurology in many contemporary journals provide more than adequate sources for Rakitin’s teachings as Mitya recounts them. One element, however, is missing. The articles in the journals were sometimes pedantic, sometimes superficial, often arrogant, but they were not stupid. Dostoevsky’s ideological enemies were his intellectual equals, and he knew it. Can we find a source for the sarcastic scorn Mitya heaps on Rakitin in this passage? Dostoevsky’s correspondence may provide a clue, for he received letters from readers of every persuasion and every level of intelligence. Let me cite a letter that can serve as an example of a genre. It came late in December 1876 from a Kharkhov businessman named Ballin, whose letterhead proclaims that he was a dealer in

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sewing machines, materials, aids, incidentals for writing, educational games, scales, and disinfectant substances. S. V. Belov, who is proba­ bly the greatest storehouse of Dostoevskiana alive, informs me that these dealerships were the cover for an illegal printing press. Dostoevsky would have had no way of knowing the level of his correspondent’s commitment to radical causes, but he would have felt some evidence of it in his passionate and fuzzy materialism. Ballin begins with praise for Dostoevsky’s short story “The Gentle Creature,” and goes on to admit that he has not read the second half, adding “Oh well, you don’t get everything read.” Of all Dostoevsky’s works “The Gentle Creature” depends most on the climactic realization presented on the very last page. Without that it is a totally different work of art. Dostoevsky could only have responded to this opening with annoy­ ance. The letter goes on to elucidate certain of Ballin’s theories about consciousness: Concerning spiritualism, I am fully convinced of the real­ ness of ideas. Thought and feeling I cannot conceive other­ wise than as an aggregate of organized molecules appearing in our brain as a result of external influences, and these external influences I consider to be the external expression of the life around us. I cannot conceive an individual otherwise than humanly, and therefore accept as individuals also such beings as the earthly sphere and the sun. By consciousness I mean a complicated interaction of the parts of the individu­ alized substance in various places and at various times. Understanding consciousness in this way, it appears incon­ trovertible to me that consciousness develops proportionally with the cooperation of the mass. Hence I deduce a vicious conclusion—that the consciousness of the sun, for example, must exceed human consciousness by a million times, the more so because the individual psychic activity is in specific relation to the size of the surface of the individual and the surface of the sun is also very great. It’s plain that in saying the consciousness of the sun, I have in mind something altogether uncomprehended by me, and not a human con­ sciousness made great. This portentous and disconnected fabric of fashionable phrases would have become linked in Dostoevsky’s mind with the materialism that

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underlies it, and with the self-satisfaction at the beginning of the letter, to form a real-life parody of the radical style and doctrine. For Dostoevsky, Rakitin is related to Ivan in much the same way as the Eliseevs and Minaevs and Ballins are related to Herzen and Belinsky. The greedy, vicious, foolish epigones become the sources for Rakitin, just as the great figures become the sources for Ivan.

V The finest parody of Ivan and his Inquisitor is Kolya Krasotkin, the thirteen-year-old schoolboy who can strike terror into the hearts of his mother, his teachers, and his classmates. Like Ivan, Kolya is very intelligent, is incessantly tortured by self-consciousness, quotes Vol­ taire, and has a breadth of reading that astonishes those around him. But his intelligence is a schoolboy’s smartness, amusing to watch, and his self-doubt and self-consciousness involve his appearance and his wits, not his moral position. He quotes Voltaire but does not under­ stand him, and his reading is in trivial school compendiums. When Ivan meets Alyosha, he says he wants to see him very much: “I want to get acquainted with you once and for all, and to get you to know me. . . . I’ve finally learned to respect you; it’s plain this man stands firm. ... I love these firm ones, whatever they may stand on, even if they’re little galoots like you.” The intensity of the affec­ tion overrides the patronizing words, and Alyosha responds in kind: “You’re just the same sort of young man as all the other 23-year-olds, the same young, youthful, fresh, and wondrous boy, a weanling, and to sum it up, a boy. Tell me, did I hurt your feelings badly?” When Kolya summons Alyosha, he also “very, very much wanted to get acquainted.” Later he says, “I’m glad to know you, Karamazov. I’ve wanted to know you for a long time. ... I learned long ago to respect you as a rare being. ... I have heard that you are a mystic and were in the monastery. I know you are a mystic, but—that didn’t stop me. Contact with reality will cure you.” Kolya here constitutes the realiza­ tion of Ivan’s metaphors. He is a real, not a figurative, boy, and at the simplest level he believes the patronizing words he is using. At the same time, his respect and affection for Alyosha emerge in close parallel to Ivan’s. One puzzling moment in the novel is Kolya’s long account of the goose, a lame story of a piece of boyish cruelty. He had asked a stupid

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peasant whether a cartwheel would decapitate a goose that was pecking under it. Watching from the side where the goose was pecking, Kolya winked at the right moment, and the peasant made the cart move, cutting the goose’s neck in two. “You did that on purpose,” people cry. “No, not on purpose,” Kolya answers; but the stupid peasant says, “It wasn’t me, that’s the one who got me to do it.” Kolya’s answer has the hauteur of his intellectual superiority: “I hadn’t taught him at all; I had simply expressed the basic idea and only spoke hypothetically.” This guiltily rationalized account seems overly ex­ panded in the novel, until it takes its place with Ivan’s struggle to avoid admitting that his basic idea has seduced Smerdyakov into kill­ ing, and with Smerdyakov’s teaching of little Ilyusha to torture dogs by feeding them bread with pins in it. The vicarious assaults on the animals remind readers of Ivan’s place in the murder, and rob him of much of the sympathy that might attach to him as a misunderstood manipulator. Kolya’s behavior trivializes the ideas of the Grand Inquisitor and the Devil, as well as those Ivan expresses himself. Kolya trains the dog Zhuchka to play dead and resurrect itself, and then stages the reappearance of the dog as a miracle for Ilyusha. He exploits the mysterious secret about the founding of Troy, and crushes the boy who divulges it. He performs an exploit that is the modem child’s equivalent of Christ’s second temptation in the wilderness, casting himself between the tracks of an oncoming train. And he uses author­ ity, deception, and force for the good of the little group of schoolboys, whom he treats as the Grand Inquisitor treats all humanity. The Inquisitor said: Oh we shall finally persuade them not to be proud; . . . we shall show them that though they are feeble, though they are only pitiable children, childish happiness is the sweetest of all. They will grow timid and will start to look up to us and press against us in fear, like fledglings to their mother. They will feel wonder and terror at us. . . . Yes, we will make them work, but in the hours free from work, we will arrange their life like children’s play . . . and they will worship us as their benefactors.

Kolya realizes some of these metaphors. He actually arranges childish games and commands the obedience of the boys “like a god.” He even says:

The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel I 77

And, generally, I love the small fry. I have two fledglings on my hands at home right now; even today they delayed me. So [the boys] stopped beating Ilyusha, and I took him under my protection. I can see that he’s a proud boy. I tell you that; he’s proud, but in the end he has entrusted him­ self to me like a slave, fulfills my slightest commands, obeys me like a god, and tries to imitate me. ... So now you too, Karamazov, have gotten together with all these fledglings? Everything here echoes Ivan and cheapens Ivan. The pride of sinful humanity becomes the stubbornness of a pathetic child. The children or fledglings shrink, from the whole of humanity whom the Inquisitor loves and serves, to a couple of groups of children who reinforce Kolya’s ego. The Inquisitor’s godlike dominion becomes a child’s bossiness. And Kolya’s resurrection of the dog becomes a comment on Ivan’s dreams of resurrecting the dead and all the talk of miracles, because we can see the effect of this miracle: “If the unsuspecting Krasotkin had understood how torturingly and murder­ ously such a moment could influence the health of the sick boy, he would not have thought of playing a trick like the one he played.” The word “murderously” here removes Kolya from the world of real mockery and makes him an involuntary killer in his blind superiority. Radicalism in Dostoevsky’s day was almost a club, and member­ ship required certain attitudes. Various novels and journalistic pieces, friendly, hostile, and ambivalent, ranging from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons to Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, had canonized the list: materialism, scientism, positivism, atheism, socialism, international­ ism, realism, feminism, and in the 1870s populism, all coupled with hostility to sentiment, tradition, prejudice, manners, the aesthetic, the establishment, and the government. Except for feminism and interna­ tionalism Kolya manages to take every pose demanded of a radical. In the chapter “A Schoolboy,” he begins: “They’re scum . . . doctors and the whole medical filth, speaking in general, and, of course, in detail. I reject medicine. It’s a useless establishment.” This remark might not seem scientistic, but in the tradition of Russian radicalism the deliverers of medical care received none of the honor accorded to the investiga­ tors of medical truth. Kolya goes on to attack Alyosha and the boys for sentimentalizing

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in their visits to Ilyusha, and later, after an “impressive silence,” he makes an excursion into scientism and utopian political positivism: “I love to observe realism, Smurov. Have you observed how dogs meet and sniff each other? They obey some com­ mon law of nature there.” “Yes, it’s sort of funny.” “No, it’s not funny. You’re wrong about that. In nature there’s nothing funny, however, it might seem to a man with his prejudices. . . . That’s a thought of Rakitin’s, a remarkable thought. I’m a socialist, Smurov.” “And what’s a socialist?” . . . “That’s if all are equal and own common property, and there are no marriages, and religion and all the laws are the way each person wants, and, well, and so on. You’re still young for that; it’s early for you. It’s chilly, though.” . . . “Have you noticed, Smurov, the way in the middle of winter, if it’s fifteen or even eighteen degrees, it doesn’t seem so cold as now, for example, at the beginning of winter. . . . With people everything’s a matter of habit, even in governmental and political relationships.”

Kolya then pauses to tease a benign peasant he passes, concluding, “I love to talk with the people, and am always prepared to give it its due. . . . With the people, you have to know how to talk.” The picture of the young radical pontificating to a devotedly receptive follower had become ironic at least as early as Fathers and Sons and savage in Leskov’s An Enigmatic Man. The catalogue of shibboleths recurs two chapters later in another setting, also as old as Turgenev, with the young man patronizingly enlightening the older about radical doctrine. The indoctrination of Alyosha also starts with the statement that medicine is villainy. After an interruption by con­ cerns involving Ilyusha, Kolya expounds on his schoolboy cynicism toward history, which parodies Ivan’s sense of the meaninglessness of history as described by Dostoevsky to Liubimov. Kolya says: I don’t ascribe much importance to all those old wives’ tales, and in general haven’t too much respect for world his­ tory. . . . It’s the study of the series of human stupidities, and that’s all. I respect only mathematics and natural sci­ ence. . . . Again, these classical languages . . . classical lan­

The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel ! 79

guages, if you want my opinion about them, are a police measure. . . . They’re introduced because they’re tiresome and because they dull our capacities. ... It was pointless, so how could it be made more pointless? And that’s when they thought up the classical languages.

At this point, one boy in the group shouts out, “And he’s the top student in Latin.” In enunciating one of the standard doctrines of the practical and scientistic radicals, Kolya displays his disinterestedness. This rejection of what he labels “baseness” (podlost’) offers a child’s equivalent of the nobility with which the Grand Inquisitor rejects the salvation he has the ability to earn, or with which Ivan returns his ticket. The gesture is the same, and the love for the oppressed is the same, but the schoolboy’s showing off infects the reader’s recollection of the Inquisitor’s magnificent self-sacrifice. Dostoevsky’s central quarrel with the radicals may well have involved their attitude toward religion. Kolya follows his splendid thirteen-year-old statement that contact with reality would cure Alyosha’s mysticism with this definition of mysticism: “Well, God and all.” He elaborates his ideas about God, which turn out to be a travesty of Ivan’s ambivalent abstention from denial. “I don’t have anything against God. Of course, God is only a hypothesis—but—I admit that He is necessary for order—for the order of the world and so on—and if He did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him,” added Kolya, starting to blush. . . . “Even without believing in God, it’s possible to love mankind. . . . I’ve read Candide, in Russian translation. . . . I’m a socialist, Karamazov, an in­ corrigible socialist. . . . The Christian faith has served only the rich and noble, to hold the lower class in slavery, isn’t that true? ... I am not against Christ. That was a really humane person, and if He had lived in our time, He would have joined the revolutionists right away and maybe played a prominent role—that’s certain, even.”

The talk about hypotheses, the order of things, the necessity for God, and the possibility of love without God all plainly reminds the reader of Ivan. The talk about socialism, the sins of Christianity, and Christ’s need to join the revolutionists recalls the Grand Inquisitor. Ivan has observed, “Everything that in Europe is a hypothesis is

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immediately an axiom for the Russian boy.” His frequent use of the word “boy” (mal’chik) prepares the reader for the repetition of these doctrines by a real boy, culminating in the word-for-word repetition of Voltaire’s aphorism about the invention of God. But this aphorism is the highest reach of Kolya’s sophistication, whereas for Ivan it is the starting point for two passionate statements about a single vision of humanity. We have already noted the first: “I think that if the Devil does not exist, and man in fact created him, then he created him in his own image and likeness.” The second is so powerful that it needed Kolya’s parody: And indeed, man did invent God. It would be nothing strange and nothing wondrous for God to really exist, but the wondrous thing is that such a thought, the thought of the necessity of God, could creep into the head of such a savage and evil animal as man; it is so holy, so touching, so wise, and does such honor to man.

Through this entire catalogue of shibboleths, Ivan’s doctrines become associated with the conceit and embarrassed self-consciousness that are Kolya’s most visible traits. The rhetorical function of Kolya’s conceit is curiously related to the best-known source for Kolya. George Chulkov has shown that many of Kolya’s doctrines coincide closely with statements made by Belinsky. And we know that in the early seventies Dostoevsky found conceit to be a central feature of Belinsky’s character. Arkady Dolinin has summed up Dostoevsky’s attitude toward Belinsky at that time by using a series of quotations from Dostoevsky’s letters:

“Belinsky, that most rotten, dull, and shameful phenome­ non of Russian life.” “A stinkbug, Belinsky was just an impotent and feeble little talent.” “Belinsky cursed Russia and knowingly brought upon her so much woe.” “In Belinsky there was so much petty conceit, viciousness, impatience, exacerbation, baseness, but most of all conceit. It never occurred to him that he himself was disgusting. He was pleased with himself in the highest degree, and that was already a stinking, shameful, personal stupidity.” “He re­ lated to Gogol’s characters superficially to the point of mean­ inglessness. . . . He scolded Pushkin when Pushkin casts off his false pose. . . . He rejected the end of Eugene Onegin. ...”

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“He didn’t even understand his own people. He didn’t even understand Turgenev.” Perhaps here, in this vision of Belinsky, is a source for some of the conceit in Kolya, for some of the littleness and incomprehension. Of course, the nastiness that is such a conspicuous part of these letters has disappeared. Kolya can be cruel, arrogant, conceited, but there is no stinking, shameful talentlessness in him. These qualities seem to sur­ vive in two places. One is Kolya’s vision of himself: “Tell me, Karamazov,” he asks, “do you despise me terribly?” And the other repository for these unpleasant qualities is Rakitin, who embodies them superbly. Dolinin argues, however, that Dostoevsky’s view of Belinsky and his political attitude as a whole underwent a revolution in 1876, and that by the time The Brothers Karamazov began to emerge, he was expressing some of the old ardor he had felt for the Belinsky who had honored and befriended him in 1846. He refers to him as “the most honorable and noble Belinsky,” and echoes Apollon Grigor’ev’s claim that “if he had lived longer, Belinsky would necessarily have joined the Slavophiles.” The chronological lines may not be so neat as Dolinin makes them, but the ambivalence is certainly there. If the vile and nasty traits Dostoevsky saw in Belinsky went to make Rakitin, we should look in a novel of the 1870s for some expression of the magnifi­ cent eloquence and true self-sacrifice Dostoevsky also attributed to him. Here the most obvious repository is Ivan himself. Indeed, an excellent critic of Dostoevsky, Alfred Rammelmeyer, considers Belinsky a chief source for the Grand Inquisitor, documenting his case primarily with Belinsky’s letters to Botkin, which Pypin had published not long before the writing of The Brothers Karamazov. If Kolya and Ivan both derive from Belinsky, one from the noble vision and one from the little, conceited vision, with Rakitin as the repository for all the vilest traits, at first glance it might seem that Chulkov had oversimplified the pattem, and that Kolya resembles Belinsky because Ivan does and Kolya is a parody of Ivan. On the basis of the notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov, I would suggest another pattern of development. For years Dostoevsky had been working on two projects, the life of a great sinner and a book about children. Earlier he had planned two other great novels, “Atheism” and the Russian Candide. The great sinner, whose life was to be traced from childhood, was to fall into radicalism and eventually to be saved. This

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career coincides not with Ivan’s, not with Alyosha’s, both of which have been connected with the plan, but with Kolya’s. If this formula­ tion is right, in the mid-1870s the plans for the Russian Candide, for “Atheism,” for the life of the great sinner, and for the novel about children all became focused on the figure of little Kolya Krasotkin. The earliest surviving notes we have for The Brothers Karamazov relate to him. The figure of Ivan the radical emerges only later. Ivan then, like Rakitin, would have come into existence as a repository for traits Dostoevsky could not incorporate into a child when he merged the heroes of these four unwritten novels into a single youthful figure. Once the character of Ivan had been spun off, it assumed the residual loveliness of Belinsky and of Aleksandr Herzen. Indeed, it might perhaps be argued that the ideological revolution in Dostoevsky’s thinking which Dolinin dates to the mid-1870s was the result and not the cause of the emergence of Ivan from the mass of materials that were to become the novel. About the figure of Ivan would gather the noble doubts, the mighty pity, the love of life, of humanity, of family that were later to make him so dangerous to the ideological intentions Dostoevsky described in his letter to Liubimov. In this case, I would suggest that the child is father of the man. VI We no longer need Dostoevsky’s letter to Liubimov or any other statement as evidence in our evaluation of Lawrence’s argument that Dostoevsky agreed with Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor. We have been looking at what Dostoevsky did, not what he said. We have ascribed his eloquence not to his sincerity but to his borrowings. We have ascribed the kiss of Christ not to acquiescence but to ideological irony. We have ascribed the pivotal position of Ivan in part to the parodic figures clustering around him. And we have offered the rhetorical energy Dostoevsky expended on the deprecation of Ivan as evidence of his good faith in promising to confute Ivan’s doctrines. In this final section we must return to the disjunction we started with and ask why Dostoevsky’s rhetoric failed to convince Lawrence and many others. Lawrence, of course, was writing an introduction to a dubious enterprise, a separate edition to the legend of the Grand Inquisitor. The isolation of the passage could explain Lawrence’s mis­ reading, but not the widespread prevalence of his view. One could say that many readers read badly or read with preestablished conclusions

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because certain early errors have been immortalized. But major writers should have a rhetoric that will preclude such errors about the central issues of a work. The final explanation for the failure of Dostoevsky’s rhetoric to communicate his intent may involve a technical truth he had mastered early in his career. There are a number of connections between The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. Let us consider the passage in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov has just committed the double murder and stands poised for his getaway. He opens the door and listens at the head of the stairs. Someone goes out of the building. He is about to leave when he hears someone entering the building, and he grows convinced that the person is coming to visit his victims. At the last minute he slips back and silently bolts the door, then listens, holding his breath, while this visitor and another discuss how to get in. And at some point in these three pages, the reader suddenly realizes that he too is holding his breath. The descriptions of Raskolnikov have been contagious, and without willing it or even knowing it at first, the reader has concentrated his entire poised attentiveness and desire on the escape of this murderer. In short, Dostoevsky manipulates the reader into the experience of having just committed a murder. He uses this device many times in Crime and Punishment. It is not original with him, for it is a common trick in the picaresque to involve the reader’s attention in the escape of a first person narrator he deplores. Stanley Fish suggests, for example, that in Paradise Lost, Milton in­ spires sympathy with Satan as a way of letting the reader experience Adam’s fall, then destroys this sympathy step by step, until all the fallen angels turn to snakes; according to this interpretation, Blake’s belief that Milton favored Satan rests on the beginning not the whole work (Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost). Dostoevsky abandons this technique in the novels after Crime and Punishment; he never again shows us the mind of a murderer from the inside. But in The Brothers Karamazov he does take us inside the mind of a vicarious criminal, Ivan, whose “all is lawful” stimulates or liberates Smerdyakov’s murderous proclivities. By carrying his reader through a genuine experience of what it means to be a Russian radical—a compassionate, noble, generous, tortured, loving one—Dostoevsky implicates the reader in the feelings of guilt, self-consciousness, stupidity, and even savagery to which he makes radicalism lead Ivan, Kolya, Rakitin, and several other charac­ ters. The epigraph of the novel comes from the Gospel according to

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St. John: “Except a corn of wheat fall upon the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” The seed here is the grace of God, which John says will bear fruit only if it dies. By this reckoning the Grand Inquisitor's effort to isolate mankind from evil is actually making grace sterile by not letting it die. Dostoevsky prefers to tempt his readers, as Rakitin and Ivan tempted Alyosha and as the Devil tempted Christ. He tries to carry his readers through a death of grace as dangerous as Zosima’s in his youth, or Alyosha’s when his faith is shaken, hoping he can bring them out beyond as fertile disseminators of grace. Dostoevsky thus is engaging not in communication but in manipulation. Instead of the semiotic model we struggled with, we need a cybernetic one. This use of the novel for the propagation of active grace entails the danger that the process may stop at the first step, and the less grave but more likely danger that readers may interpret the author’s intention as stopping at the first step. Dostoevsky took this risk, and a substantial, but I think decreasing, number of his readers have justified his fear and trembling.

Verbal Pollution in The Brothers Karamazov Gary Saul Morson "I am a lie, and the father of lies. ” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov

Ivan is a riddle, says Alyosha, characteristically overlooking his still more puzzling brother, Smerdyakov. Smerdyakov outwits all the nov­ el’s intellectuals and detectives; and critics have been no more success­ ful in clarifying his motives or the complex symbolism of his behavior. If he robs and kills his father for money, why does he return it? Why does he kill himself and, more important, why the day before the trial? Is he aware in advance that the conspiracy will also destroy Ivan? Smerdyakov moves the plot of Karamazov and stands at the center of its theodicy, but he has eluded systematic explanation. This riddler is himself his most important unanswered riddle. This paper argues that the mystery surrounding Smerdyakov re­ sults not only from his own strategy, but from Dostoevsky’s as well. Karamazov is about the inadequacy of explanatory systems to em­ brace the moral universe, and Smerdyakov embodies anomaly to all possible systems. The novel’s drama lies not only in its characters’ encounter with crime, but in their systems’ encounter with anomaly, with the exceptions they cannot, but must, account for. Ivan exhausts his catalogue of theodicies with his “collection of facts” which defy explanation, facts which, indeed, can only be understood by not at­ tempting to generalize their pain. “ ‘I understand nothing,’ Ivan went

From PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3 (1978). © 1978 by North-Holland Publishing Co.

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on as though in delirium. T don’t want to understand anything now. I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I try to understand anything, I shall be false to the fact and I have determined to stick to the fact’ ” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 4). Ivan refers to the clear language of mathematics only to show it fares no better in a “non-Euclidian” universe, and the devil’s encyclopedia of cosmologies only points to the arbitrariness of choosing any one of them. Ivan does not refute the Christian myth, he refutes mythopoesis itself. So Dmitri argues that all aesthetics stands mute before the paradoxical “beauty of Sodom.” “God sets us nothing but riddles,” he declares. “Here all shores meet and all contradictions exist side by side” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 3). That is where we find Smerdyakov: parallel Unes converge and all shores meet where he stands. Smerdyakov personifies anomaly, he is “x in an indeterminate equation,” the incomprehensible fact which “is only too necessary on earth.” This failed librarian embodies the failure of all classification, and his confusion of writing systems—recall that he records French in Cyrillic letters—becomes symbolic mockery of all semiosis. We find him at the boundaries he defies; he is the eternally liminal, and his power is the power of margins. My analysis centers on the margin. I employ Mary Douglas’s vocabulary in defining evil in Karamazov as anomaly, and in identify­ ing the power to defile with the defiance of categories we use to comprehend the universe. In the symbolic system of the novel, the oppositions pollution/purity, dirt/order, chaos/form are homologous. “Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter,” and “our pollution behavior is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications” (M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo). We redeem a chaotic universe by ordering it, and it follows that we fear whatever challenges our systems. The liminal is the monstrous, and transitional states threaten precisely because they are “betwixt and between” our categories. Beyond the map of well-marked social and natural places, and around its indeterminate internal boundaries—like the disputed one between Miusov’s property and the monastery—lies a realm of transgression and contradiction, of monstrous births and confusions of nature, which we must avoid—both literally and figuratively—like the plague. Boundaries are therefore of vital importance in the novel, and

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danger threatens those who leave mapped and gridded places for interstitial space. System fears its margins, and seeks not to admit the inadmissible. Power therefore belongs to the gatekeepers; trust must be placed in those who mediate. To Douglas, the cook is also a symbolic gatekeeper, who selects the clean and transforms the raw into the assimilable. And from this it follows that he is in a strategic position to do harm—to pollute and poison—if he chooses. Smerdyakov is both cook and gatekeeper, and his role in the novel is the false mediator. He is first mentioned as an unreliable messenger: I am late to Father Zossima’s cell, Dmitri explains, because “the valet Smerdyakov (...) told me twice over that the appointment was for one” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 6). Indeed, the plot of the novel turns on Smerdyakov’s abuse of his role as guard: he betrays the secret of the signals to Dmitri, confides his broken confidence in Ivan, and murders the master he is supposed to protect. Similarly, his abuse of his role of cook becomes the catalyst of the novel’s story of “The Boys”; Ilyusha’s fate depends on Smerdyakov’s lesson on how to pollute food (putting a pin in a piece of bread). One wonders what he puts in his soup. He himself is constantly described in terms of dirt, putridity, and defile­ ment; during his second interview with Ivan, “cockroaches swarmed in amazing numbers, so that there was a continual rustling from them.” No wonder he is fastidious about what he eats. The cook stinks. The name Smerdyakov, of course, means “the stinker.” His prototype is Iago—the narrator of Karamazov discusses Othello—and what he owes the earlier villain is his reputation for honesty, the trust which places him in the position to poison. But Smerdyakov not only guards the margins, he is defined (or, rather, remains undefined) by them. As his mother slept in porches and passageways, he is found at gates, fences, crossroads, and thresh­ olds. He is conceived in a fetid passage, a place whose stench he will transmit: his father violates his mother as he “passed through the ‘backway,’ which led between the back gardens of the houses, with hurdles on either side. This way leads out onto the bridge over the long, stinking pool which we were accustomed to call a river” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 2). Illegitimate and an orphan, he bears a fictitious sur­ name and a questionable patronymic; and it is possible that his first name, Paul, is a mocking reminder of another kind of problematic identity and invention of name. Indeed, even Smerdyakov’s illegiti­ mate paternity is double. While rumor points to Fyodor Pavlovich, it may have been the escaped convict Karp who raped Stinking Lizaveta.

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Significantly, Smerdyakov is a changeling as well as a foundling, and this ambiguous status once again doubles his identity. He is bom on the very night of the burial of Grigory’s child, and Marfa Petrovna confuses his cry with that of the dead baby. Their adoption of him once again multiplies his parentage. The child he replaces, it is crucial to note, is monstrous. He is bom with six fingers and his father demands that “the dragon” (as he calls his son) remain unbaptized, outside the Christian community. “A confusion of nature has taken place,” he explains; the line between the human and the nonhuman has been threatened by the monstrous birth. It is at this point that Grigory begins reading that prototypical theodicy, the Book of Job. Smerdyakov’s mother also defies all social categories. A fool-inChrist, she is. an embodied paradox and cannot be judged by ordinary social conventions. She lives on charity but herself gives alms to the wealthy ladies of the town who are, the narrator says, “pleased to take it.” She even seems to lie outside the opposition male/female (though a grown woman, she is allowed to dress only in a smock) and, perhaps, human/animal. Recall that Fyodor Pavlovich rapes her to prove that someone “could possibly look upon such an animal as a woman” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 2). So her son is both ageless and sexless. Returning from Moscow, “He suddenly somehow aged in an extraor­ dinary way. Completely out of keeping with his age, he grew wrin­ kled, yellow, and began to resemble a castrate” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 6). Like his changeling brother, Smerdyakov seems to lie somewhere between the human and the nonhuman. “Our little lost one has sent us this,” Grigory says to his wife, “who has come from the devil’s son and a holy innocent” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 2). Something beyond ordinary generation seems to be involved in his birth, the novel’s counter-nativity. A holy virgin has been raped by “the father of lies,” and if some rumors assume that someone must have helped Lizaveta climb over the fence to give birth, “others hinted at something more uncanny” to explain the impossible feat. In addition to demonic im­ pregnation, Grigory also suggests a spontaneous vegetative mutation. “You are not a human being,” he tells the child he calls a “monster” to his face. “You grew from the mildew in the bathhouse. That’s what you are” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 6). Here, again, Smerdyakov is linked to the rot and stench he transmits. Fyodor Pavlovich’s reference to him as Balaam’s ass, the animal that speaks, also places him on the margins of the human. The biblical reference, of course, also suggests Smerdyakov’s abil-

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ity to manipulate language. When Balaam’s ass speaks, one pays atten­ tion not only to what he says, but to language itself. In fact, Smerdyakov’s most effective pollution is verbal pollution. Literally and figuratively, his first crime is the betrayal of signs. He pursues language and logic to their margins where they generate absurdity and paradox; and so he confuses the distinctions on which thought itself depends. This is the intent of his unanswerable riddle about the source of light on the first day of Creation before the creation of the sun on the fourth. Like the devil’s complaints about rheumatism and profes­ sions of agnosticism, Smerdyakov’s riddles join the incongruous and the contradictory. His speech acts therefore resemble taboo acts, which also mix what should remain distinct. A riddle is a linguistic changeling. And paradox is a linguistic double. Smerdyakov is one of Dostoevsky’s gallery of paradoxicalists; for the paradox, like Smerdyakov himself, is duplicitous. In particular, Smerdyakov is the master of the genre of the “rhetorical paradox,” the praise of something essentially unpraisable. Erasmus’s Praise of Folly is simply the best known exam­ ple of the genre. Beginning in antiquity, the rhetorical paradox in­ cludes encomia to flies, fleas, gnats and nuts; drunkenness and incontinence; imprisonment and exile; bastardy and the codpiece. In Dostoevsky’s own Diary of a Writer, the diarist’s friend “the paradoxicalist” praises war and hypocrisy. So Smerdyakov defends apostasy (in “The Con­ troversy”) and does it with the biblical citations and jesuitical preci­ sion that are conventional for this mock scholarly genre. As in all paradox, the point of Smerdyakov’s argument is not the ostensible point. His reasoning is not so much a defence of apostasy as an attack on reasoning. Here logic is used to mock logic, distinctions to foil the process of making distinctions. Paradox is logic’s parody. As in Smerdyakov’s ceremonial burial of cats he has hanged, forms faithfully but inappropriately fulfilled call attention to their own arti­ fice. The absurdity forces thought to consider itself; therefore, the rhetorical paradox ultimately reduces to the self-referential one. Smerdyakov is a direct descendant of that mythical Epiminides of Crete who swore that all Cretans were liars. Smerdyakov’s paradox, as Fyodor Pavlovich observes, is formu­ lated for Ivan’s benefit; and, indeed, Ivan is also a master of the genre. In Father Zossima’s cell, Miusov becomes entangled in the contradic­ tions of Ivan’s reported assertion that crime, even to cannibalism, is the only “honorable” course of action for an atheist. “From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric and paradoxical

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friend Ivan Fyodorovich’s theories” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 6). If Smerdyakov argues the holiness of apostasy, then Ivan’s Inquisitor legend defends the Christianity of the Anti-Christ: Ivan is quite liter­ ally the devil’s advocate. Almost as soon as Ivan finishes his legend, he realizes that Smerdyakov was on his mind as he recited it. Though he is not consciously aware of it, Smerdyakov’s paradox was not so much a request for approval as the challenge to a verbal duel, and the Inquisi­ tor legend, like the dialogue with Smerdyakov that follows it, is in fact Ivan’s unwitting acceptance of the challenge. The duel is literally a matter of life and death. One must understand the different motives behind Ivan’s and Smerdyakov’s paradoxes to comprehend Smerdyakov’s strategy for winning the duel. Ivan formulates his paradoxes from despair, in hopeless quest of their resolution. His paradoxes are a plea for the world to make sense, Smerdyakov’s an attempt to render it senseless. For Ivan, the point of the paradox is not reason’s self-cancellation, but its equivocation. It is statement that avoids statement, because he refuses to “accept” what he would have to say. In paradox is protec­ tion, in casuistry camouflage. The paradoxicalist eludes commitment to any single position; all of his diction is contra-diction. “Your poem is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of Him—as you meant it to be” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 5), says Alyosha, and he is almost right: it is both. Similarly, Ivan’s article on church courts pleases both the ecclesiastics and the atheists until “finally some sagacious persons opined that the article was nothing but an impudent satirical burlesque” (part 1, bk. 1, chap. 3). Or, more accurately, a paradox. The key point about paradox is that its statements do not refer to their ostensible referents, but only to their opposites in the same argument. There are no positions, only juxtapositions. That is why their sentences cannot be removed from context: to do so would be to replace a contradiction with an unambiguous statement. Now Smerdyakov’s strategy is to do just that. He himself sets paradoxes well enough to know that one cannot escape from their tautological circles from within. So he falsifies Ivan’s position. Ivan wishes and does not wish to kill his father; he wants him dead but he also wants to protect him. Smerdyakov simply acts on one half of the contradiction and takes the other as concealment. He turns contradiction into con­ spiracy, and so equivocation becomes action and silence consent. In other words, Smerdyakov responds to Ivan’s unspoken paradoxes with

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one of his own: that not to act is to act, and only to act (i.e., to get up and “beat Smerdyakov’’) would be not to act. It is often said that the murder scene is left out of Karamazov, but in a sense this is not so. It takes place immediately after the discussion with Smerdyakov when Ivan is standing on the staircase just listening to his father. “That ‘action’ all of his life afterwards he called ‘infamous,’ and at the bottom of his heart, he thought of it as the basest action of his life” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 7). The quotations around “action” are the mark of paradox. The paradoxical sentence becomes a death sentence: in Karamazov, the murder weapon is speech. Or, rather, meta-speech. Ivan’s paradoxes, like those of Fyodor Pavlovich and Smerdyakov, derive from his manipulation of what Gregory Bateson has called metacommunicative statements, statements of the type: “This is only fiction,” “take this as a joke,” “I am only teasing.” This kind of statement tells us how to understand the statements that follow; it frames them with a set of conventions which remove them from ordinary discourse as surely as the nonreferential “truth” of a novel differs from the truth of journal­ ism. Ivan constantly uses this language about language to avoid state­ ment altogether, to lead his audience into the labyrinths of the subjunctive. He tells Alyosha that his argument in “Over the Brandy” was simply a “tease” but he calls that very explanation “nonsense” as well. Like Miusov, Alyosha must continually ask Ivan if he is joking; and Ivan more than once responds (in words and forced laughter) that he was, perhaps, jesting when he said he was jesting. His meta-statements, in other words, are themselves preceded by meta-meta-statements: he frames the frame. This is, of course, the same elusive strategy the devil will later use on him: “I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns, and I have my motive in it. It’s the new method” (part 4, bk. 11, chap. 9). If Fyodor Pavlovich’s paradox is the Liar (I always lie, he tells Father Zossima, I am lying now), then Ivan’s is the Jester. The plot of Karamazov turns on one of Ivan’s metacommunicative statements: “I only wish.” I will always protect my father’s life, he tells Alyosha, but “in my wishes I reserve myself full latitude” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 9). What he overlooks is that Smerdyakov refuses to understand metacommunicative language of any kind. For him, all statements are in the indicative. He tells his father that he dislikes Gogol because the Dikanka stories are “all untrue” and he rejects poetry, he explains, because “whoever talks in rhyme?” And as he equates fiction with lies, so he turns wishes into commands. But Smerdyakov is well enough able to manipulate metacom-

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municative language if he chooses. Recall that the well-wrought casu­ istry of “The Controversy” is based on the equation of the unspoken wish to apostasy with apostasy itself. If Ivan reframes his statements with jest, Smerdyakov uses the significant silence. The key moments of the conversation in which the murder is plotted are its long pauses, when Smerdyakov implies that everything spoken is in code. What is said, he conveys with a wink, is what is left unsaid. “ ‘I put you off with a secondary reason,’ he seemed to suggest, ‘simply to stay some­ thing.’ ” Now it is Ivan who must demand direct statement: “Damn you! Speak out what you want!” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 6). Smerdyakov’s proverb—“it’s always worthwhile speaking to a clever man”—is sim­ ply the uttered meta-statement that conclusively affirms silent conspiracy. But even this statement is reframed in the three interviews with Ivan that follow the murder. The meta-statement, too, was in code, Smerdyakov explains, and meant the opposite of the approval of Ivan’s departure that it pretended to be. In turn, this explanation is itself reframed in a later interview. Smerdyakov simply outmaneuvers Ivan in their verbal duels: he is a better maker of meta-communicative statements. Ivan comes to Smerdyakov to decipher the code of their previous conversation, but he does not immediately realize that Smerdyakov’s decoding is itself encoded. This conversation, too, is punctuated with significant silences and retroactively reframed by a final statement about what they will not say (and, implicitly, have not said), a statement that is structurally equivalent to “it’s always worth­ while speaking to a clever man.” “If you don’t speak of that, I shall say nothing to that conversation of ours at the gate” (part 4, bk. 11, chap. 6), Smerdyakov concludes the first interview. Ivan must return for a second interview to decode the first, and a third to decode the second. He is trapped in a process of infinite semiosis, and his only possible escape from the prison house of language is to abandon language for action. The problem, however, is that the action he must take—a public confession—is also verbal. And Smerdyakov’s suicide effectively makes that action impossible. The court assumes that Ivan decides to confess because Smerdyakov’s suicide makes a lie undetectable: and that, in­ deed, is why Smerdyakov kills himself. Like Ivan’s madness, the op­ portunity to lie makes the audience reframe his confession as a noble fabrication to save his brother. Smerdyakov’s suicide note uses a sim­ ilar device to seal Dmitri’s fate. The mock-Christian note—“I destroy myself of my own will and inclination so as to blame no one” (part 4,

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bk. 12, chap. 8)—lies, characteristically for Smerdyakov, by what it does not say, by its silence about his murderous guilt. The prosecutor can plausibly reason that Smerdyakov could not have committed the murder, because there is no reason to conceal the truth in a suicide note. But that is precisely how Smerdyakov does conceal the truth. Knowing that convention frames suicide notes as true, he realizes that they are strategically a perfect place to lie. In short, both the self­ destruction and the note function as metacommunication which effec­ tively frames the true statements of his brothers as lies. Furthermore, Smerdyakov’s suicide not only has a linguistic func­ tion, it is itself the analogue to his favorite linguistic paradox of self-reference. I am suggesting that his self-destruction re-enacts the self-cancellation of language in paradox. By extension, Smerdyakov’s epilepsy (as symbolic suicide) and his father’s self-mockery also mirror their linguistic self-reference; so, indeed, does the novel’s motif of self-laceration. It is also worth noting that all of the novel’s examples of archetypical crimes repeat the circular structure of the self-referential paradox, are quite literally vicious circles. Ivan’s example is cannibal­ ism, in which man eats man. Parricide, the destruction of the source of one’s own life, may be described as a tautology of generation; the same argument applies to the Inquisitor’s threat of deicide. As the characters describe themselves and each other as lies, riddles, and paradoxes, so their fate enacts the logic of these very forms. If Smerdyakov’s para­ dox is reflected in suicide, Ivan begets a double—and a double who puns, inverts proverbs, and denies his own existence. As in his paradoxes, Ivan argues with himself, and, again as in paradox, contradiction leads to self-reference. “Can one observe oneself that one is going mad?” (part 4, bk. 11, chap. 5), he asks Alyosha. Like his methods, Smerdyakov’s motives can be explained by the logic of margins. The anomaly to all classifications, he takes revenge by destroying the systems that exclude him. Most obviously he de­ stroys his family, and, symbolically, family itself. He ruins his broth­ ers because they do not acknowledge him as a brother. Perhaps the most important scene for understanding his motives—and how even Alyosha contributes to the tragedy—is his encounter with Alyosha in “Smerdyakov with a Guitar.” “Will Brother Dmitri be back soon?” asks Alyosha. And he means “my brother Dmitri,” thus implicitly denying his fraternity with Smerdyakov. Smerdyakov (who calls his brother Dmitri Fyodorovich) responds with murderous irony that he is not his brother’s keeper. The reference to the first fratricide does more

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than point to the archetypical nature of his crime. It also obliquely reminds Alyosha that while the biblical phrase is conventionally used in an extended sense to refer to one’s fellow man, in this case Dmitri really is Smerdyakov’s brother. As Fyodor Pavlovich forgets who Ivan’s mother is, Alyosha overlooks who Smerdyakov’s father is. Smerdyakov’s revenge is for his epithets: because he is not called “Brother Pavel,” but “the valet Smerdyakov” or (as he poisonously recalls Ivan’s phrase) “the stinking lackey.” The drama of the novel is already implicit in its title: how many “brothers” are there? In destroying Ivan, Smerdyakov destroys the personification of system. Indeed, his plot against his brother constitutes parricide as well as fratricide, since Ivan is his spiritual father. I am suggesting that Smerdyakov plots the destruction of his brother with as much care and foresight as he plans the death of his father. Ivan learns too late—and most critics have not learned at all—that he has underestimated Smerdyakov. “You are not a fool,” declares an amazed Ivan at the end of their last interview; and Smerdyakov responds in triumph, “It was your pride made you think I was a fool” (part 4, bk. 11, chap. 8). Smerdyakov pretends to be stupid, just as he feigns cowardice and honesty: because each of these reputations gives credence to his lies. Even the well-informed narrator, who is “ashamed of keeping my readers’ attention so long occupied with these menials” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 2), underestimates the murderer. On this point, at least, it is the defense attorney from Petersburg who is right: “I especially found in him no trace of the timidity on which the prosecutor so insisted. There was absolutely no simplicity about him either. I found in him, on the contrary, an extreme mistrustfulness concealed under a mask of na­ ivete, and an intelligence of considerable range” (part 4, bk. 12, chap. 12). Smerdyakov’s silence echoes another: Christ’s refusal to answer the Inquisitor. There is, I think, a significance to these silences that goes beyond this narrative, and applies to the limitations of narrative itself. The wisdom that Christ and Smerdyakov share is the inade­ quacy of story to embrace the moral universe. Ivan seeks to account for (tell the story that will explain) evil, but evil is unaccountable. Narrative can only reach the place where narrative fails, and at its best points to the realm of the unspeakable. The Inquisitor constructs his story to provoke Christ’s speech; and so all narrative (Karamazov im­ plies) is a provocation of the unspeakable. Itself language, narrative is a challenge to language. Karamazov—like so much of Russian literature—is

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ultimately literature about literature’s failure. What narrative cannot speak about, it must pass over in silence. And that is what Karamazov does. Its real story is what it cannot tell. That, I think, is the meaning of the puzzling author’s foreword, which insists that the text we have is only a preface to an unwritten second volume, which is (would be) the real story. Karamazov takes narrative to its limits, and what lies beyond is the non-narratable. Its text speaks to the silence, and in it the silence speaks.

The Self's Negativity Maire Jaanus Kurrick

A negative tragic recognition is forced upon Ivan in and after his third dialogue with Smerdyakov. He has first of all to absorb the shock of the permeability and openness of individual consciousnesses to each other. He has to learn that while we speak, an unconscious speech accompanies the conscious one, and that the former can dominate and negate the latter. The self is not like a fortress, autonomously closed in itself and for itself. Only in silence could we achieve such an auton­ omy. But speech communicates. It is heard and absorbed. It is the way individuals become intertwined in each others’ consciousnesses. Speech, furthermore, is also not autonomous, not logically in and for itself. It also is permeable, open to the unconscious which seeps through it. Speech is inherently dialogic or double, invigorated or infected by the unconscious will. Smerdyakov only makes plain what he had under­ stood, what part of Ivan’s speech he had listened to, when he is convinced that Ivan truly did not know what he, Smerdyakov, was going to do or what he had done. Then, against Ivan’s conscious denial of knowing, Smerdyakov elaborates the unconscious speech and will of which he made himself the agent and servant. Smerdyakov is proXoundly_disappointed and disgusted that so “clever”a man as Ivan knows really SO little ahout the reality and cleverness of unconscious speech. Following this comes Ivan’s self-dialogue, his shocking and only partial avowal of the cowardly, drab, accommodating, limited, conFrom Literature and Negation. © 1979 by Columbia University Press. 97

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scious, and pettily critical “devil” he has been. Ivan’s devil is a purely subjective devil. He knows nothing about God; he knows only Ivan. What is so dazzling about this devil compared to Goethe’s Mephis­ topheles, who was also subjective, is that he has lost all the transcen­ dental, sublime aspects of subjectivity. He is no longer the grand No issuing from a transcendental ego to match its sublime Yes. He is merely the ordinary Ivan, who Ivan does not want to be, and his least glamorous doubts and negations. He is so thoroughly reduced, subjec­ tivized, and secularized that he cannot any longer understand his ori­ gins, the story of fallen angels and other such anecdotes about him. These origins have for him the meaning of a dead and now merely puzzling and senseless myth which had best be forgotten. The only devil to whom he refers and feels any relationship to is Mephistopheles, precisely because the latter was also the representative of a subjective dimension in Faust, but he refers to Mephistopheles only in order to negate thoroughly his identity with him. Mephistopheles is his antithe­ sis. Thus he signifies the death and end of all grandiose, transcendental rebellion—the end of the transcendental No, of all negative aspirations and defiance. He is the aspersion cast on Ivan’s own “root”—his nonacceptance of the world. He points to Ivan’s negative idealism as mere sham, misplaced effort, romantic dreaming. He is the selfs negation of all its own grander, more single-minded, and goal-oriented negations. He is negation reduced to mere negativism, to petty resis­ tance. In his denials he represents not so much- the reduced-power of negation as its dispersal in triviality, stupidity, and egotism. He is the possibility of Ivan at fifty, without his grand illusions and theatrical rebellions, a gentleman in reduced circumstances, faith­ less, domesticated, but still philosophizing. He is stupid, trivial, base, contemptible because he is so realistic and nonaspiring. He is so ac­ commodating because he knows Ivan thoroughly and knows that he recognizes no intellectual equals. But it is precisely by his mere animal cunning and cleverness that he undermines Ivan and overcomes his disdainful intelligence. He torments Ivan with the very opposite of the noble intellect by proving, undeniably, that the base intellect is a match for it, a formidable power in its own way. Intellectually he is the caricature of Ivan’s mind. He holds up the mirror of the base mind that avoids, escapes, and survives by committing no absurd, senseless, noble deeds. Ivan’s devil is “a clever man”—too clever and base to be theoretically consequent. He loves fife too much; he is too earthly and sensuous to deceive himself by theory. He can theorize but, given his

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debased existential attachments, he can also trivialize his theorizing. He is too sensuous to be a consequent nihilist. He has proposed not that the world be annihilated as Mephistopheles did, but that he be. Yet he is easily swayed from this extreme and willing to play his part of negator in the world’s comedy for the sake of the pleasure of occasion­ ally living, taking on human shape, suffering, going to the baths, catching a cold, getting rheumatism. He reduces the transcendental Goethean drama of negation and affirmation to mere farce and comedy. It is a “tragedy” in the hands of men and ideologues, one that they blindly insist on perpetuating. He plays his intellectual part as a critic, creating contradictions and opposi­ tions to keep the intellectual game going, but his real interests lie elsewhere, in the concrete, bodily life of men. He is amazed by the concreteness and substantiality of their real bodily pains and pleasures. His measuring rod for all things is existence. Life is not unarrestable Goethean striving, but suffering. That’s given. But it is a suffering in existence. “But what about me? I suffer, but still, I don’t live. I am x in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name.” His aspiration, in so far as he has any, is precisely the opposite of Goethean infinite striving: he strives for the finite, the limited, the circumscribed—for all that man with his body represents. He tempts Ivan, too, to be purely human, stupid, and real. He tempts him cynically to forget his overreaching, his dreams of a new godless man, and his fictional impulses, in which he reorganizes the real and projects new possibilities and conditions of existence. He tries to show him that existence as it is in its most banal form is something that one can be content with. He tempts Ivan with contentment and with the reconciUation with trivial existence. The devil knows thoroughly the incongruity in Ivan’s existence—the discrepancy between Ivan’s exis­ tential love for life and his dreams of an existence for men other than this one that he loves—and he exploits it to the hilt. As a very clever man he knows what is out of tune and nonadapted in Ivan’s thoughts, feelings, and conduct, and he knows that it is banal, brute existence that Ivan always ignores. Thus he brings it to the foreground, holding Ivan’s attention by what his whole conscious being denies and rejects. In appearance the devil is comic compared to other devils, who were awe-inspiring and admirable, and his procedure is comic. He knows what every brilliant comedian knows and Ivan does not: that the intellect can be caricatured because its values are arbitrary and not

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based on reality. Everything that has no final authenticity can be caricatured; for the devil, that is everything. The persistence of Ivan’s refusal to accept banal existence as the foreground, with intellectual activity playing merely a part in the background, is dramatized in the dialogue as Ivan’s acceptance or nonacceptance of the devil as a reality. Ivan’s denial of the devil’s reality isjiis demal of a part of himself. He cannot maintain this position with any kind of logical consistency because obviously the devil knows him and his thoughts, but knows and sees them in a way that is different from the way Ivan consciously knows and sees his thought. Yet the devil also knows more than his thought or knows how to extend it further into banality and stupidity. He knows that thought oscillates between the extremes of the trivial and the exalted, the base and the noble, and that Ivan has had in his thought processes to repress a whole series of less ripe, powerful, or convincing notions, which now the devil takes delight in retrieving as inalienably a part of thought itself. If the devil is real, and Ivan in desperation-tries to so, h^ knowledge of heP ind other world, which is merely paltry and anecdotal, contradicts-this. He knows no more about it than the common man. His “transcendental” conceptions echo precisely the changes in the human moral vision of sin and redemption. If the devil had at least some connection to the ive grand_archrebe.L Satan, a context, albeit spiritually merely a negative and demonic-one. But this devil denies his connection to the grandeur of past evil and rebel­ lion. He cannot be sublimated. And thus all that Ivan had struggled to be and thought that he was is reduced to petty, egotistic, and meaning­ less evil. The reduction of the-demonic is what Ivan-finds so painful and unacceptable, even as his mind forces him to recognize it. Ivan’s confused efforts to perceive the devil on a real objective level, and yet to deny this devil and this dreadful and drab demonic subjectivity, lead him into the logical trap of acknowledging together with the objectivity of evil the entire transcendental enterprise pinned on faith. “Confess that you have faith even to the ten-thousandth of a grain,” says the devil. Ivan violently denies that he has any such-faith, seeking to escape his own trap. But this makes his only alternative accepting this part of his subjectivity. And this for him is so terrible, so equally nonacceptable, that he confesses both now and to Alyosha later that he should like to believe in the devil; he would prefer to. For Alyosha this is sufficient to be the beginning of a sign of conversion; for Ivan it is the beginning of madness. His madness lies in having to

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deny what he knows is himself. If subjectivity is all there is, his rebellion is reduced to confounded self-negation. Ivan’s grandiose refusal of faith is reduced by the devil to a refusal that hangs merely on common sense. He describes how he was with Christ at the cross and how he longed to be borne aloft on the bosom of Christ together with the thief who believed. But like the nonbe­ liever, the other thief, he remained where he was, fastened down by common sense.

But common sense—oh, a most unhappy trait in my character— kept me in due bounds and I let the moment pass! For what would have happened, I reflected, what would have hap­ pened after my hosannah? Everything on earth would have been extinguished at once and no events could have occurred. And so, solely from a sense of duty and my social position, I was forced to suppress the good moment and to stick to my nasty task. Atheism and disbelief need no elaborate intellection—the immense strain of reason that Ivan had put into them. Atheism has always existed and it is merely the consequence of the inertia, the stop, the “this is ridiculous,” by which common sense prompts us to stay where we are and think before we act. Common sense—our inability for spontaneous self-abandon—“let[s] the moment pass.” Faust had been able to seize every moment because he lacked this unhappy trait, because he was not concretely human but ideal. This devil, unlike all others, has the desire but not the ability for exaltation. Reason is but the rationalization of common sense; it issues from common sense to justify the arrest of emotion and action. Reason quite reasonably dem­ onstrates the absurdity of Goethe’s Faust and its hosannic conclusion. This conclusion signifies the end of everything, an apocalypse, and this is absurd and untrue because obviously everything has gone on and must go on. The devil undermines Ivan’s faith in the freedom of his intellect. The old Socratic daimon, which said no and prevented Socra­ tes from doing various things, was not reason but merely his common sense, telling him to think before he acted. Reason is but the inhibition of feeling and movement. It stops them and then proceeds to justify the arrest, sometimes elaborating them into grand negations and necessity. This devil, unlike all others, does not feel free, but determined. Ivan’s “Geological Cataclysm,” so the devil demonstrates, was noth-

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ing but a rather paltry and noncommonsensical revision of Goethe’s Faust in existential terms. Everyone will know that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely like a God. His pride will teach him that it’s useless for him to repine at life’s being a mo­ ment. . . . Love will be sufficient only for a moment of life, but the very consciousness of its momentariness will inten­ sify its fire. Ivan’s vision stands in the shadow of Goethe’s, sharing in its fire, ethicality, and idealism. That there is a reversal between existence and the beyond is merely superficial compared to all the optimistic baggage Ivan retains from Goethe. Ivan wanted to swindle, to commit a crime. But why, the devil asks him, does he have to justify a desire by moral and logical constructs? Why can he not swindle honestly out of irratio­ nal emotion or for the sake of common sense? To Smerdyakov it had made good common sense on all grounds that he wanted to murder his father. Emotionally he hated him; he was disgusting and useless and troublesome and he had the money that Ivan needed. Later at the trial, Ivan utters the irrational truth: “Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?” But he goes to the trial, unable to let the moment pass, unable to stop himself by common sense. It is the sheer irrationality of his conscience, which he knows or condemns reasonably—out of common sense—as being no more than a habit, a reflex acquired by a practice of seven thousand years to which he cannot reconcile himself. He breaks into madness not because he cannot rationally accept the fact of irrational, unconscious emotions, but because he cannot rationally accept acting on an irrational impulse, and thereby confirming the existence of an unconscious conscience. The devil’s appearance signifies the destruction of Ivan’s intellect. The intellect is simultaneously enlarged and reduced. It acquires a dubious, shadowy, shabby side, an origin in base impulses. Ivan in­ dicts his own intelligence as his Grand Inquisitor had Christ. He devalues it as banal, reactive, derivative, and unoriginal. If we cannot affirm and rely on the intellect, what then? Then we are tottering at the boundary of our mind, of our very being, toward madness and inco­ herence. The devil scene is Ivan’s masochistic attack on his own grandest affirmations and negations, and the reversal of Goethe’s Faust, with its ultimate triumph of affirmation, into the option of a reduced finite affirmation on the one hand, and an endless struggle of self­

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deception, self-evasion, and self-justification on the other. We can continue to negate until we grow mad and stupid or make the limited affirmation, the confirmation of another, that is possible. Ivan is the author of “The Grand Inquisitor,’’ which Dostoevsky called “so powerful a rejection of God” as has never yet been con­ ceived, and he was himself worried whether he could contradict the chapter. The Grand Inquisitor is Christ’s antagonist, believing the devil’s interpretation of mankind. His conscience obeys his intelli­ gence, which received its illumination from the devil. The devil is for him the eternal intellect who revealed his comprehension of the human condition by the three questions he posed to Christ. It is the devil who understands man, and not Christ. “From those questions alone, from the miracle of their statement, we can see that we have here to do not with the fleeting human intelligence, but with the absolute and eter­ nal.” Men need material security; they put the self-preservation of their bodies foremost. They deeply desire immortality and fear a life aimed toward death which strikes them as meaningless and purposeless. They also crave authority and fear choice, disorder, and anarchy. They cannot fully believe without palpable proof or the presence provided by concrete, sensuous experience. Christ’s demands demonstrate that he misinterpreted human nature, that he did not love man, and that he was mad. Christ condemned man to suffering by elevating him and giving him freedom. But man is by nature a slave to his own cravings and weaknesses. He is weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. There is madness in the Christ-ideal, which the Grand Inquisitor refuses to serve in order to reduce men’s suffering. “I awakened and would not serve madness.” The answering kiss of Christ “glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.” The Grand Inquisitor adheres to the truth of the intellect revealed by the devil. He succumbs to the cunning of intellect, its power to maintain itself against all other truths. Ivan’s “Geological Cataclysm” is the optimistic parallel to that work, written by a Grand Inquisitor who joyously affirms that from the negation ofGod alone, man’s transformation into another, higher creature will follow. J‘Geplogical Cataclysm” is a Feuerbaçhûn -work but, as the devil points out, the hitch in it is that men are inveterately stupid, and self-deluding as in fact the Grand Inqiijsifor hid said, that this vision of the new man is, therefore, Ivan’s alone, giving only Ivan license to do anything he please. In Ivan’s nightmare the devil is not at all, as is the Grand Inquisi­ tor, a negator of Christ. “Before time was, by some decree which I

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could never make out, I was predestined ‘to deny’ and yet I am genuinely goodhearted and not at all inclined to negation.” When he negates, it is against his will and inclination. He cannot really negate because there is nothing he is sure of. Negation is for him a mystery; it presupposes certitude, and he is not certain of anything. He is an agnostic, he doesn’t know whether God exists or not. He dreams only of what he does not have: a human body, of‘‘becoming incarnate once for all and irrevocably in the form of some merchant’s wife weighing two hundred fifty pounds, and of believing all she believes.” He longs simply to be human, bodily and real, on any terms. The devil lacks the transcendental intellect that the Grand Inquisitor gave him credit for having. He is the Grand Inquisitor’s definition of the human, only suffering from a lack of realism. He is a skeptical kind of Enlighten­ ment intellectual, perpetually ironizing and banalizing his own thoughts; he is a Descartes split permanently and irrevocably from his body. He is the destruction of Ivan’s intellectual beauty and pride, its leveling, trivialization, and reduction. He is Ivan’s life-force, his existential will to persist, his “longing for life” and his will “to go on living in spite of “logic,” now made apparent as a contradiction to Ivan’s intellectual aspirations and negations. The devil’s intellect represents the one that is more coherent and in tune with Ivan’s primitive, crude, unbridled, earthy love for life. The devil is Ivan as his father. The devil is, above all, irrational negation. Ivan has erred in thinking that his grand repu­ diations were rational. This is the other half of the grandiose devil we have imagined, the negativism, the stubborn resistance to meaning, the trivial, the insig­ nificant, and the shabby that Goethe had largely excluded from his vision of Mephistopheles. He is not intentional evil, but unintentional, ignorant, and undesigned evil, the evil that comes about uncon­ sciously, as Ivan’s evil does. His is the evil of the functionary, of the servant and sponger who does what he is told in order to be accepted, or who does what he thinks others want him to do in order to be amicable; he is accommodating so as to be able to remain comfortable and unperturbed. In that sense, he is even a debasement of Smerdyakov, who at least believed temporarily that his action was a truth. This devil knows no truth, nor does he believe it exists. He only knows existence is, and that this is what he lacks. He is less than a will to murder; he is the inertness of the self itself, its death, its sense of life as comedy and farce.

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We understand that comedy; I, for instance, simply and directly demand that I be annihilated. No, live, I am told, for there’d be nothing without you. ... So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational because I am commanded to.

He is the death impulse pure and simple made to serve, against his will, other and complex purposes that he cannot comprehend. He has an obscure part in maintaining the diversity and plurality of this world. But he does not understand why this diversity and contradiction are necessary. He is the negation that comprehends neither its relation to death nor life. He is a wish for death too weak to refuse life, weak out of inertia, not desire. He tempts Ivan not into disbelief but belief. Thus he becomes the utter perversion of the satanic idea. His vision of paradise, of course, is utterly banal, conventional, and inert. It is like his dream of being human, two hundred fifty pounds of inactivity and utter lack of striving. He wants to prove to Ivan that what he claimed was “his root”—to refuse, not to accept the world as it is—is meaning­ less and absurd. Further, the perfection of rebellion, never to be reconciled to what is, cannot logically be maintained. The radical secularization of God’s attributes that Feuerbach urged, attributes which were to be reabsorbed and rediscovered in man, have in Dostoevsky a counterpart in the radical secularization of the devil, who has also to be reappropriated as the stupid, inert, and contradic­ tory self, the self incapable of otherness or the absolute, the self as Thanatos. Both God and the devil, however, have too vast a subjective significance to be readily appropriated. Dostoevsky portrays the shock of consciousness suffering under this excess and remainder, this need to absorb into the self what was thought to be objective and may still be so. Consciousness staggers as its definition of autonomous self­ recognizing and self-recognizable selfhood is broken. How can the question “What am I?” be answered when the self is evidently another, an unconscious, something permeable and open both to itself and the other, doubly double, always speaking toward an inaccessible un­ known both within and without? The negativity of the self becomes truly formidable when the essential pluralizing moment within the self breaks it into irremediable extremes with opposite characteristics. Dostoevsky no doubt demanded to read Hegel, declaring “My whole future is bound up with this,” because Hegel’s vision of coexis-

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tence also entailed the vision of the self as another, the problem of recognition, and self-multiplication. All the Karamazovs suffer and exhibit the force of fickle, fragmented selfhood. They are all the actors of the volatile, free, spontaneous spurts of energy in the self. Like Dimitri, they do not know which of their impulses possess true reality. Their prankish and theatrical self-presentation is an assertion of the self regardless of the other and regardless, too, of the self. Their freedom is a freedom from and not for anything. They are all driven naysayers. They are, to begin with, psychologically free of any social bonds, so that Dostoevsky can reveal how they might not be free a? brothers. If and when they do become bound in their fantastic self-inventiveness, it is only by the limitations and possibilities and effects of each upon the other. Ivan is the last to recognize any bonds to himself and the last to recognize another as part of himself. Dostoevsky knew that the recognition of coexistence had to be based on something other than either sympathetic imagination, the powers of identification, or conscious intellectual recognition. It had to be based on a necessity other than consciousness or imagination. He found this necessity in living speech, that act of selfhood which inher­ ently declares “I am the other,” a need to speak, to recognize and be recognized. Only speech entails the actuality of the other, even when the actuality of that other is denied in the very act of speaking. That actuality then reappears in the self as its own negated speech, as it does in Ivan when he has to come to accept his ties to Smerdyakov, his father, and the devil. In the time of negation, in the slowness of impeded perception that is negation, he comes to acknowledge his cowardly, arrogant participation in the murder of his father and also in Smerdyakov’s suicide. Negation in his nightmare functions as the agent of retarda­ tion, allowing him to glimpse the discrepancy between the simplicity of consciousness and the unsolvable complexity of an unconscious that accompanies it. What is important for Dostoevsky, however, is not primarily the mystery of the unconscious, but the extent to which it is clearer, more “intellectual,” more dialogic than it had ever been be­ fore. Dostoevsky is concerned with the extent to which the con­ sciously negated points to a new definition of selfhood, to that which destroys Ivan’s notions of identity. Dostoevsky searches for a basis, a ground from which individualism can be criticized and overcome. He establishes that the recognition of the other can occur only when consciousness breaks.

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Until the idea of coexistence is felt as a reality, the master-slave reality in which the Grand Inquisitor believes cannot be overcome. It is a division that the conscious intellect inevitably sees in reality. Zosima’s conversion occurs at the moment when the question of the validity of the master-slave relationship forces itself upon him. His ethical and affective denial of any basis in reality for the relationship produces in him instantaneous bliss. Zosima discovers that he has the power to say “I am and I love.” “I am love” is the core of Christ’s meaning, the meaning of his kiss, and the answer to the Grand Inquisitor’s “I am intellect.” Zosima’s conversion consists of four stages. First, he spontane­ ously discovers that he has done wrong: “What a crime!” The reality of conscience erupts in him inexplicably, suddenly. Suddenly he feels “something vile and shameful” and he knows that his feeling has to do with the fact that he beat his servant, Afanasy, the night before. Sud­ denly the servant who had been to him no more than an object becomes a full subject, a living real human being whom it is a crime to beat, to treat like an object. The miracle of conscience is that it makes others into subjects. Suddenly they acquire the same reality we have for ourselves. Conscience is the birth in the self of the other as a subject, the moment of the transformation of the other as object into subject. After Zosima spontaneously discovers that he is wrong, the model of what is right is provided for him by his brother. Suddenly he remem­ bers the words of his brother Markel and his example of love. This memory completes Zosima’s ethical awareness:

Yes, am I worth it? flashed through my mind. After all what am I worth, that another man, a fellow creature, made in the likeness and image of God, should serve me? For the first time in my life this question forced itself upon me.

Full ethical awareness means that the other cannot be my servant or I a master. From this follows Zosima’s act of going to his servant and asking for his forgiveness. Since the servant seems not to understand these words, Zosima feels impelled to reinforce them by a gesture: “I dropped at his feet and bowed my head to the ground.” This bow becomes the great symbol of the overcoming of the master-slave dialectic in the novel, and it is repeated in various ways—inadequately, half-heartedly, or with conviction and joy—by others. Zosima, who had never thought ethically about his relationship to others, who had lived merely by social codes and conventions, such as those that told

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him to fight a duel and kill a man for his honor, comes for the first time and independently to question what this relationship to the other could and should be. He becomes an ethical man who acquires a sense of the absolute value of another man, another who cannot be beaten without this beating being felt to be a crime. He gives birth to the reality of the other in a deep unconscious conscience and then feels compelled to communicate this new feeling in a deed and an action. He resigns his singular, individual “human self” not, as in Kierkegaard, for a new “theological self” with God, but for a self of coexistence; only after that experience do the truth and reality of Christ come flooding back to him. The way to Christ is via the detour of coexis­ tence, the recognition of the self and the other, the self as love (“I am and I am love”), via the bow that overcomes the Grand Inquisitor’s master-slave reality. There is no other way to Christ or God in Dostoevsky. The leap of faith can only occur after the recognition of the other. “Active love” alone expels doubt; the only way to God is the existential way of coexistence. Finally, after this act, Zosima feels ecstasy, bliss. He is in paradise.

We don’t understand that life is a paradise, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep. . . . there was such bliss in my heart as I had never known before in my life. It is by this sense of bliss that never again leaves him that he truly triumphs over the Grand Inquisitor, who is forever unhappy, suffer­ ing, morose, and tragic. Zosima is converted not by dogma or by a sudden vision of Christ, but by having a new vision of man. He gives birth in himself to a man and then he gives birth in himself to Christ. Coexistence—the transformation of his servant and slave into a man—is established here by conscience and love and not, as in Hegel by reason. Faith is not reason, or paradoxy as in Kierkegaard, but active love. Faith follows from a spontaneous awakening to the other. Zosima says, “I am two,” “I am this vibration and resonance with another.” As soon as one commits the act of love and recognizes the quality and freedom of the other in oneself, one believes in Christ, because then one has acted out the truth of His vision of humanity. We rediscover the eternal model of love only when we discover our own ability to say, “I am and I am love.” This is the certitude of selfhood that Zosima opposes to the Grand Inquisitor’s individualism, to his “I am

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I,” “I am intellect,” “I am autonomous reason.” Zosima opposes the conscience of the heart to the rational conscience of the Grand Inquisitor and of Ivan, each of whom tries to adhere ethically to what merely his consciousness tells him. Behind Zosima’s conversion, and unimaginable without it, is the “unconscious” example of his brother. It is not Zosima but his brother who first had the vision of servantless brotherhood. It is his example, which Zosima had consciously denied and ignored, that now erupts as if from his unconscious into a vital, meaningful memory. This mem­ ory of a living example, and not the model of Christ, is crucial in his conversion. Zosima preaches his faith in the importance of the example because it is the concrete, living demonstration men need to persist in their faith and to believe that men can live together rather than in solitude: “Sometimes even if he has to do it alone, and his conduct seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men’s souls out of their solitude, and spur them to some act of brotherly love even if he seems crazy, so that the great idea may not die.” The memory of the model is what, for example, Dimitri lacks at the moment when he bows to Katerina. He bows to her need; he discovers an ethical impulse in himself that strikes him as utterly inexplicable and absurd. The impulse comes neither to a full-fledged ethical awareness in him at that moment nor is there the memory of a model to reinforce and make flower the impulse. The model has to take us by surprise—it has to seem to erupt from the unconscious. But actually we are not dealing here with the real unconscious but with an unconscious mem­ ory. Dostoevsky, unlike George Eliot, does relegate the unknown to the self, but the unknown is not yet the truly hidden unconscious. He is trying to say that the “thou” of the “I” is born as if in a dream, out of some other, deeper level of selfhood than consciousness (in Zosima’s unconscious memory, in Ivan’s unacknowledged dimension of speech and self-dialogue) but that this dimension still has the characteristics of consciousness. It can be objectified, it is like what is known, and not yet radically different from and opposed to the known. If for Zosima there had been no crucial living model, this very absence may have prevented his conversion. The conscious model tends to become a law; the unconscious model, when it becomes activated, strikes us as a free choice in the self. Love cannot be compelled; it has to be freely chosen. Love is the free choice of nonautonomy, a free rejection of the intellec­ tual vision that posits autonomous egos. Love is the awareness of the other, a conscience that testifies to them but that does not judge them.

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The Grand Inquisitor’s vision of man believes in inequality and by institutionalizing it, it perpetuates the separateness of men. Zosima’s vision hopes to overcome this separateness by presupposing looser ego boundaries and the possibility of men’s discovery of each other. His vision presupposes the need for communion and dialogue. Speech, confession, is for him the sign that the intellect itself is entwined in love, exhibiting itself as the need to speak and to be heard. The devil’s vision criticizes and points to the madness in both visions. He ac­ knowledges his aesthetic and affective attraction to Zosima’s ideal, but states that in practice common sense and reason bar him from that bliss. He sees that in man there is an unfortunate and inexplicable tendency not to leap or an inability to leap out of consciousness, a tendency which turns into full-fledged atheism. He proves that when a man does leap, not to God, but to the side of another, the moral dimension of the leap is highly dubious. It may be a leap not only out of habit, but pride in being admired, both for the boldness of one’s sins and for the generosity of renouncing oneself for one’s brother. The seeming “ethical” aspect of Ivan’s resolution may be nothing but a darker extension of his egotism. The overcoming of separateness here may be merely a sham way of perpetuating and exhibiting the domina­ tion of one by the other. One makes the given situation serve the aims of the self and turns others into functionaries and applauders of the self. Ivan tortures himself with his need to be suspicious of any ethical, outflowing impulse. The devil is not allowed to comment on the figure of the suffering, noble Grand Inquisitor at all, but he comments on him indirectly by elaborating on the “Geological Cataclysm” and making evident its strength (the authority of the use of power and the domination of the exceptional over the nonexceptional) and its weak­ ness (its need to justify the domination ethically, which in fact weakens the case for domination). For domination is just an irrational, inherent impulse, a kind of will to power that defies ethical justification because it simply is. So the devil argues for the existence of a different type of man, one who is readily an atheist and master, or even a murderer, even as he undermines his very argument by also proving the utter commonness of Ivan both as an intellectual and as a sensuous man. He is only a potential atheist, master, and murderer in the grand style because he doesn’t have the power to maintain his own visions or the courage to commit any final acts in thought or practice. Ivan is a master who begot a lackey and servant without even knowing it. And

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when he is forced to acknowledge the servant by the servant himself, he does so with disbelief and disgust. He who recognizes the other because he is forced to do so by the other has not recognized him. Everything here is the reverse of Zosima’s recognition of his servant, a discovery, a creation, ending in bliss. Ivan doubts, he revises, he undoes himself, and secretly he suspects himself of commonness, desire for faith, and stupidity. He is afraid he has had grand visions of the elect, the masters, to counterbalance the fact that in his soul he feels himself to be a lackey, a brother only to fools like his father and Smerdyakov. (And more like the former precisely because he could never kill himself.) Thus the devil’s argu­ ment on the whole maintains a distinction between men as types but forces Ivan to acknowledge his general negative likeness to a certain thoroughly negative type. He breaks Ivan’s sense of autonomy, but not the autonomy of the type. The situation remains the same: those who can love love those who cannot love in return. There are those who escape madness by giving birth in themselves to the other, and those who never can. At the trial Ivan is on the stand to test the possibility of breaking the type, but he ends in incoherence and a fit of screaming, having testified once again to his desire for faith and his nonpossession of it. “I would give a quadrillion quadrillions for two seconds ofjoy,” he cries, but he is still the man lying on the road in protest. Ivan’s dialogic impulse opens up the self in a new dialogic way, but when he speaks to other men it is a monologue he presents, the content of which is his dialogue with himself. He can speak, but he no longer listens or communicates. His monologue is mad and incomprehensible to others, but he cannot control his madness and is dragged out of court as a disrupter. The most he can do is to present himself as he is to other men, to represent to them his self-recognition in an undisguised way. He is the old hero in a novel with new heroes—a Don Quixote who has corrected his self-deception and deluded self-objectifications to the point where he destroys himself. In his anxiety to be accurate, to establish the true nature of his consciousness, he has undermined all the possible bases of truth and accuracy and the very possibility of coher­ ent speech. Speech is negation and identification, self-objectification and self­ loss in the objectification. Ivan’s speech becomes sheer negation and self-loss. Negation, which was in Hegel and Goethe part of the force of reason, demonstrates now its unreasonable and wild activity in

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consciousness, turning the idea of the unity and wholeness of the self into mere delusion. Consciousness appears but as a proliferation of symbols or negation, conscious statements that have to be retracted, until the self is consumed in the activity of making negations and retracting them. Ivan’s tragedy is the impossibility of making a definite and final negation, one that could define him without destroying him. His tragedy is being caught in a mad, irrational paradoxy of negations. Consciousness here loses itself in and through its conscious negations. Symbols of negations become the self’s exasperating ex-centricity. The logos of the novel’s irony and dialogue, in so far as it concerned the self, passes now beyond self-recognition into a tragic, boundless unknown, a realm where self-recognition depends on the recognition of the other and by the other, or the recognition of an intention not to recognize the other in the self. But the self as an entity that cannot and does not wish to recognize itself as an ex-centricity, as a need for recognizing or being recognized by another, is so purely negative a notion of selfhood that it has to be refused. Yet it is the logical counterpart of the idea that the self is this recognition by and of another. Ivan’s speech does not share his being but declares it. He speaks to himself; still, does he not speak to be heard? Does not every utterance presuppose another who listens? And has he not by the very fact of speaking given “an onion,” though he would no doubt withdraw it as does the old woman in the tale? Or perhaps his kind of speech cannot be counted as an onion to begin with? For Alyosha it can. It is the sign of a pre-form of conscience. It is no more than that because Ivan testifies to a crime for which he feels no guilt. The feeling “What a crime!” which initiated Zosima’s conversion is absent in him. Yet he “gives” the testimony, something extra that he does not have to give. And behind it stands his traumatic recognition of himself as a model for Smerdyakov, whom he continues to hate, of Dimitri in his inno­ cence and need, whom he also hates, and, above all, of himself as the son of a father who can only be hated. His recognition is of those whom he cannot recognize. He hates himself for doing a stupid thing for stupid and dead people. “Why, why is everything so stupid?” is all he is able to feel and think at the trial. It is still a rational perception, but one which registers the total absence of the rational. The percep­ tion of reason’s absence is one moment away from its ceasing to be, its nonexistence. His choice and commitment to the end is to a reason that has ceased to be.

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In Ivan, European rational subjectivity and its effort to constitute the ego, to liberate it from the superego and to establish a rational, critical self, unfettered by inherited social and historical patterns, quickly comes to grief. The Hegelian notion of a consciousness modeled on the autonomy of the intellect proves to be weak, powerless, and poten­ tially, the source of immense evil. In Anna Karenina’s case, conscious­ ness chose rationally to will nothing rather than not to will. In Ivan’s case, rational negation is no longer possible. The immense remainder— all that consciousness could not encompass—is no longer one that can be rationally absorbed into another synthesis, not even into a negative one. The negativity of the self, its power to sever and disassociate and thereby to proliferate and produce opposites and contradictory polarities, turns into an activity that can no longer be ordered into a rational process. The remainder becomes too vast for synthesis because con­ sciousness turns out to be too deep, too continuous with an uncon­ scious opposite. This madness of negativity, this double splitting that cannot be healed, is also felt in the form. This failure of the newly emergent ego to establish itself as a synthesis gives back to the novel the tragic dimension of art which the Platonic dialogue form had lost in its alliance with the logos. To shore up the weakness of the emergent ego, Alyosha forms an alliance between the self and others. In his vision, that is the only way for subjectivity to avoid madness and despair. Alyosha’s very manner of being in the world is as if based on an unconscious acknowledgment that the self is a reflection, given or received from another from the beginning. It bears from its inception, to borrow Lacan’s formulation, the marks of another, and seeks throughout life confirmation in the recognition of the other. There are marvelous moments in Dostoevsky where the self comes upon its recognition by another, such as the moment when Dimitri discovers that someone has put a pillow under his head while he was asleep. “Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?” he exclaims in joy. The great moment of bliss is always that of being recognized by the other or recognizing the other, and not as in Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy the solitary moment of self-recognition. In Dostoevsky these moments of the recognition of coexistence have a constitutive effect on the consciousness. The philosophic sense of wonder and mystery aroused by such moments has the power to convert the ego from self-absorption to an openness toward others. The heroes correct not merely a blindness in the self toward itself, but

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their whole orientation to others. They feel suddenly and completely estranged from themselves as they were, from their former autono­ mous egos in which they were closed off within themselves from others, those with whom they could only engage in a power struggle of domination and servitude, a struggle such as Katerina and Dimitri carry on throughout the novel. Instead of negating their particularity for a more open and spacious (but egotistic) generality, as occurs in the Hegelian system, they raise the struggle to another level altogether. For them the alienation in the self is not a self-alienation, a subjective otherness, but the concrete alienation from the actuality of the men who coexist with them. For them the recognition of the other ceases to be, as it always is for Katerina, a humiliation and displacement of the self, a self-loss. No doubt there is as much madness and illusion in their sense of unity, wholeness, and continuity with others as there is in the autono­ mous ego’s sense of its unity and wholeness. Both are based, in different ways, on the denial of difference, variety, multiplicity, frag­ mentation, and dispersal. At least this is why Alyosha appears to Lisa, and often to readers, as unreal, insubstantial, and unconvincing. “Alyosha, why is it I don’t respect you?” asks Lisa. “I am very fond of you, but I don’t respect you. If I respected you, I wouldn’t talk to you without shame, would I?” Lisa disrespects him for his lack of borders, of determinate intellectual and moral judgments, of an autonomy that would prevent her saying everything to him and flowing into him. Alyosha has looser ego boundaries because he is not an “I am” but an “I am the other”; he is more like a mirror who reflects others, one in whom others find merely themselves, rather than his own “I.” Alyosha has no self against which the other can struggle. It is as if he disappears, merely to listen, and the others go on speaking shamelessly because they are left free, undominated, unrepelled, and unabsorbed. Lisa cannot respect Alyosha because his “I am the other” means also “I am not myself,” and if there is no self, there can be no self-pride, and therefore no respect from another. Here, in another sense, subjectivity is lost, for the self s becoming is absorbed and delayed in the becoming of others who fail to become, and who fail to become partly because they do not know how to become outside of a system of egos strug­ gling for domination and servitude. What meaning can an asubjective subjectivity have? What can be its goal? Its single meaning is affective. Its “truth” lies in the sense of joy with which it overcomes fear and despair. Nonetheless, some men

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consciously choose despair over joy, precisely because by that they salvage an ego, critical and detached from others, which strikes them as the truth. The major problem, however, with an ego like Ivan’s is that it cannot recognize others as emotional wholes but only as part­ objects. Alyosha in his openness recognizes others as complete per­ sons, but runs into the same problem that Ivan runs into with himself, the incomplete and interminable aspect of the consciousness in the other. Thus madness and inexplicable rejections and repulsions also enter into all of Alyosha’s relations with others. What ultimately helps to organize the potentially explosive mad­ ness in the novel is Dostoevsky’s parallelism of the new myths of subjectivity with the past myths of God. The religious fictions play the part of objective correlatives that partly illuminate and guide the signif­ icance of the purely existential experiences of coexistence even as they obscure and conceal them. Fundamentally, the book is an existential denial of the immanence of transcendence. Yet, subjectivity can by faith in coexistence leap the barrier and rediscover in itself a certain continuity with the old myths. The myths of selfhood come to be haunted by the old myths, even when the self, as is true in Ivan’s case, wishes fundamentally to repudiate their existence. Ivan comes to ap­ prehend that to repudiate their existence is to repudiate one’s own existence. His dilemma is precisely that he does not wish to and therefore cannot resee and reconstitute the old myth of the devil. But if the shabby devil that he sees is all there is, then, he is shabby too and all is stupid. There is an imbalance in the book between the negative and positive characters’ relationship to the past. Alyosha is at the marriage feast in Cana although he does not dare look on the face of Christ, but Ivan sits with his devil. Hell is nothing but “the suffering of no longer being able to love,” as Zosima said. Only to the positive heroes is objectivity given via the objectivity of the other. Only for these heroes do the old myths contribute to the self s stabilization in its objectifications. They are reintroduced boldly by Fyodor Karamazov near the beginning. “Speak, all the same, is there a God, or not? Only, be serious. I want you to be serious now.” “No, there is no God.” “Alyoshka, is there a God?” “There is.” “Ivan, and is there immortality of some sort, just a little, just a tiny bit?”

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“There is no immortality either.” “None at all?” “None at all.” “There’s absolute nothingness then. Perhaps there is just something? Anything is better than nothing!” “Absolute nothingness.” “Alyoshka, is there immortality?” “There is.” “God and immortality?” “God and immortality. In God is immortality.” “Hmmm! It’s more likely Ivan’s right. Good Lord! to think what faith, what force of all kinds, man has lavished for nothing, on that dream, and for how many thousand years. Who is it laughing at man? Ivan! For the last time, once for all, is there a God or not? I ask for the last time!” “And for the last time there is not.” “Who is laughing at mankind, Ivan?” “It must be the devil,” said Ivan Fyodorovich, smiling. “And the devil? Does he exist?” “No, there’s no devil either.” “It’s a pity. Damn it all, what wouldn’t I do to the man who first invented God! Hanging on a bitter aspen tree would be too good for him.” The method is to raise a question and to demonstrate that any question inherently carries the possibility both of an answer of yes and no, which is in fact no answer at all, but a demonstration of the ineluctable presence of dualities, oppositions, and polar extremes. It is the ever-repeated return of a maddening doubt and uncertainty. It is axiomatic for the classical novel that what is represented in the characters is repeated in the structure. The reason structural repeti­ tion acquires a dimension in Dostoevsky and Dickens different from that which it had in Austen, Eliot, and Tolstoy is that the self has acquired another dimension. In the latter artists, the fundamental ratio­ nality of self-development and self-recognition allowed the artists to construct an artistic base of rational patterns of repetition guided pre­ eminently by the need to make a world formally palpable and sensu­ ous. Even when these artistic reinforcements of the world of the work included irony, ironic reversal, or the multiplication of the point of view, they were free of anxiety and compulsion. But in Dostoevsky

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and Dickens the need to repeat grows less artistic and rational and more psychological, becoming a need to repeat fundamentally because what has been represented has not yet been understood or recognized and needs to be repeated because it demands to be recognized. The repetitions, made in ironic composure in Austen, which pro­ duced an orderly, layered series of new revelations and possibilities which could be absorbed in spite and because of the negative shock of disjunction, turn now into an ironic anxiety over the impossibility of either adequate representation or recognition. Instead of the orderly temporal ironic layering of Austen or even the additional spatial multi­ plication of irony in various points of view in George Eliot, there is a sense of inadequacy and madness. The self-dissociation and doubling, signifying the chronic intrapsychic conflict, is repeated in the doubling of the characters by parody, caricature, and repetition, and in the structure as the repetition of one small community in another. The radical parody and doubling leave no image sacrosanct. “Negatively,” the repetitions point to deep and unresolvable doubt. “Positively,” the repetition points to a kind of negative, parodistic union of all opposites, where everyone doubled into their extremes do interact with everyone else on some level. But here, simultaneously, repetition becomes the correlate of the self’s radical ex-centricity, its tragic and infuriating unknowableness, the very absence of the subjec­ tivity on which the novel based itself. In its new repetition-compulsion and anxiety, the technique that guaranteed the novel’s form shows itself as unresolved and nonconcludable, as tragic and self-negating. Technique, which was the guar­ antee of final clarity and control, comes itself to be invaded by an intention not to be understood, a demonic element of displacement, echoing that of the displaced and dispersed self. As in a dream, we reach the impasse of conscious negation, and perceive another speech, more terrible and more uncontrollable, of unconscious negation. The self’s negativity struggling with an unnegatable (because un­ known) unconscious in the self, repeated in technique, signifies at once the limit and end of the novel’s form as it has been and its return to tragedy. This return was made possible largely by the rediscovery of dialogue as an irrational manifestation and experience in life rather than a purely rational and controllable one. The breakthrough to free and open dialogue also breaks the rational dialectical model. What is char­ acteristic of this new dialecticism is its tendency toward dispersal, its inability to be synthesized by reason or faith. Alyosha makes Ivan his

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hope. But what of Smerdyakov? Where is conscience to be found in his doubly conscienceless act toward the other in murder and toward himself in suicide? The all-consuming, maddening doubt which splits and dissociates everything into opposites, the doubt which is nothing but a figure for Dostoevsky’s own doubt and ambivalence and which Dostoevsky would like to eliminate from the question of the existence of conscience in man, cannot be eliminated. The release of the mind’s immense and productive capacity for negativity, its interacting con­ scious and unconscious negations, is no longer amenable to synthesis. Irony is the novel’s formal demonstration of its awareness of negativity. The irony is immense and extreme and there is no logos in the present to contain it. There is no answer in the present generation of the Karamazovs. Dostoevsky manages only to gather the present together by looking toward the logos of the past and by projecting a logos into the future: other fathers for other generations of sons. Dostoevsky’s novel conforms to Lukacs’ idea of the novel’s form as being capable only of the “affirmation of dissonance.” Dissonance in Dostoevsky is the form, the only and tragic one available in a world, not merely split, but dispersed, and forsaken by God. If there is a truth or a consolation in this new, open dialogue, it has nothing to do with reason or unreason, but with feeling. The truth lies, if anywhere, in the sudden, unconscious pleasure and pain that this dialogue some­ times brings.

The Wound and the Lamentation: Ivan’s Rebellion Robert Louis Jackson “I hear the message clear, but am offaith devoid. ” Goethe, Faust

At the conclusion of the chapter entitled “Rebellion” in part 2, book 5, of The Brothers Karamazov, the reader encounters one of the most dramatic perorations in Dostoevsky’s work, and indeed in all of world literature: a monologue, or prose-poem, in which Ivan protests the suffering of children and concludes by returning his “entrance ticket” to universal harmony. Ivan’s passionate outcry, as far as pure content is concerned, is in large part a reiteration of ideas already advanced in the main body of the chapter “Rebellion” and in the preceding chapter, “The Brothers Get Acquainted.” But this final poetic synthesis of his thought has a structure, set of imagery, and dynamic of its own that deserve particular attention. Ivan’s confession in “Rebellion” over the impossibility of loving man at close quarters and his grueling stories about the suffering of children build up an almost intolerable tension of thought and emo­ tion. In these scenes, Dostoevsky reminds us, Ivan speaks “as though in madness,” “as though in a delirium.” The suffering that Ivan imposes on Alyosha by making him mentally witness scenes of brutal­ ization of children (“I’ll stop if you wish,” he offers; but Alyosha replies, “No, I too want to bear with the agony”) also acts as a terrible self-laceration. In this context, Ivan’s final monologue emerges as From The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes. © 1981 by Princeton Univer­ sity Press.

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something of a poetic catharsis, which releases pent-up emotion and at the same time gives his tortured thought the final form of a dialectic of permanent rebellion. Personal anguish escalates into the pathos of universal suffering. In this prose-poem, suffering consciousness—the very rhythms of unassuaged grief—become the essence of Ivan’s pro­ test. A kind of Dionysian impulse triumphs in this strange heretical passion—it is precisely the Apollonian structuring principle that is denied—and Ivan and the reader are lifted on a wave of stupendous, almost orgiastic lamentation. The choice of the word “lamentation” to describe Ivan’s prose­ poem is not arbitrary. The problem of the lamentation (prichitanie)—an old Russian chant or song over the dead—is raised as a psychological and philosophical phenomenon early in the novel in the chapter “Women with Faith.” This chapter is crucial background to any consideration of the rebellion of Ivan. “There’s something from afar off,” Zosima observes as a peasant woman approaches him bearing news of the death of her fourth and last child:

“From afar off, little Father, from afar off, from three hun­ dred versts from here. From afar off, Father, from afar off,” the woman pronounced in a singsong voice, swaying her head rhythmically from side to side and resting her cheek in her hand. She spoke as though chanting a dirge. (bk. 2, chap. 3)

At this point the narrator pauses to comment on the form and content of the lamentation:

There is a silent and much-suffering grief among the people; it passes within and is silent. But there is also a heart­ rending grief: it bursts out in tears and from that moment passes into lamentations. . . . Such lamentations appease one only insofar as they even further exacerbate and lacerate the heart. Such grief, however, does not desire consolation; it feeds only upon its feeling of despair. Lamentations are only a need perpetually to reopen a wound. (bk. 2, chap. 3)

The grief of the lamentation, the narrator stresses, does not desire consolation. Its spiritual or ideological concomitant is doubt in God or even nonbelief. It is not surprising, then, that the early Russian Orthodox Church detected dangerous, even rebellious elements in the

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popular folk lamentation. In the introduction to his collection of folk lamentations in 1872, E. V. Barsov posited a pagan world view at the core of the ancient poetry of lamentation: That is why, without doubt the ancient Russian church took action against such folk lamentations. . . . Church preachers spoke out against them. In the old collections of church writings ... we frequently encounter the injunction—“Oh, do not weep too much over the dead.’’ In explaining the wailings over coffin and grave as coming from a lack of faith in the immortality of the soul, . . . preachers tried to stop them by awakening faith in the resurrection of the dead. “There is much rebellion in your grief for the dead.” Father Zosima, psychologically more astute perhaps than the old church fathers, takes a more conciliatory view toward the wailing of the mothers. “And do not console yourself,” he advises, “and there is no need to be consoled, do not console yourself, but weep.” Yet he does not let the matter rest there. He is as cognizant as the church fathers of the implications of excessive grief, of the rebellion latent in the lamentation. Like the early church fathers, he seeks to cope with this danger by arousing faith in the resurrection of the dead. Thus, though advising mothers not to console themselves and to weep, he stipulates:

However, each time that you weep, remember without fail that your little son is united with the angels of God and is looking at you from up there and sees you, and rejoices over your tears, and points them out to God. And this great maternal sorrow will be with you for a long time, but finally it will turn into a quiet joy, and your bitter tears will only be the tears of a quiet emotion and spiritual cleansing, saving you from sins. (bk. 2, chap. 3)

Tragic emotion should lead to spiritual catharsis. Yet one thing is clear: for Zosima only the idea of immortality stands between tears and despair, suffering and rebellion. Such is Zosima’s statement on the mystery of suffering. It is an anticipation of his more expressive and detailed treatment of the prob­ lem of suffering and death in “The Russian Monk.” The lamentation of the mothers, in all its explosive potential, is a forerunner—both in

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its rhythms and spiritual content—of the wails of despair in Ivan’s prose-poem at the end of “Rebellion.” In his prefatory remarks to his legend of the Grand Inquisitor Ivan characteristically identifies the pathos of his legend with that of the Mother of God in the medieval Russian legend, “The Wanderings of Our Lady through Hell.” “Shocked and weeping” at the sight of so much suffering in hell, the Madonna prostrates herself before the throne of God and begs mercy for all in hell. “My poem,” Ivan remarks, “would have been that kind if it had appeared at that time,” that is, in an age of faith. But it belongs to another, later period. Ivan does not implore God the Father to be merciful, but rebels against him, against the stern Pantokrator. Ivan’s rebellion takes on the charac­ ter of an unending lamentation, in the narrator’s words, the kind that “does not desire consolation,” that “feeds only upon its feeling of despair,” that strives again and again to “reopen a wound.” The center of Ivan’s lamentation, literally and figuratively, is a wound, an image paralyzing to mind and spirit: it is the mutilation, the physical as well as psychological disfiguration, of children. Zosima envisages the departed child rejoicing in his resurrected state over his mother’s tears and pointing them out to God. This representation of mother and child is permeated with Christian symbolism and is, in its own way, a religious painting. In his state of beatific happiness the child finds his mother’s tears absurd. The message or moral of this iconographie representation is that immortality renders inconsolable grief meaningless. Ivan, on the other hand, is unable to conjure up visions of angelic children gamboling about the throne of God the Father and rejoicing at the tears of their grief-stricken mothers on earth. Ivan has other visions the contemplation of which lead him neither to quiet emotion, nor to spiritual catharsis, nor to a feeling of absolution for his sins. For Ivan, who essentially takes on the suffering of the mothers, it is the tears of the suffering children that render God’s world absurd and meaningless; and in his despairing rebellion, in his lamentation, he points out these tears, as it were, to God. II Ivan’s so-called long tirade in the second part of “The Brothers Get Acquainted” may be considered a prose rehearsal for the final poetic monologue. In this tirade Ivan attempts to explain to Alyosha “as quickly as possible” his “essence, that is, what I believe in and what I

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hope for.” He is prepared, so he says, to accept God simply and to believe in the meaning of life and eternal harmony. Yet in the final analysis, he does not accept “this world of God.” He is convinced, it is true, that

suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the insult­ ing comedy of human contradictions will disappear . . . that, ultimately, in the world finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the assuagement of all indignation, for the expiation of all crimes of people, of all the blood they have shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with man. (bk. 5, chap. 3)

All this, Ivan concedes, may come to pass, “but I do not accept it and I do not want to accept it! Granted that even parallel lines will meet: I will see them and say that they meet, but I will still not accept it. That is my essence, Alyosha, that is my thesis.” The long tirade presents us with the paradox of Ivan’s essence: his willingness to recognize Christian theological reality (at least for the sake of argument), yet his refusal to accept it. But we do not learn why he rejects the evidences of his understanding. The inner dynamic of his paradox is disclosed in the body of the chapter “Rebellion” and, most graphically, in the final dramatic peroration. There is a qualitative leap here from narrative exposition—starkly vivid accounts of cruelty to children—to the tortured rhythms of prose-poetry. It is as though the emotional pressure built up by harrowing anecdote and personal con­ fession now finds release or resolution in the language and rhythm of poetry. Dostoevsky signals the shift to this final phase of Ivan’s rebel­ lion by means of a dramatic pause in Ivan’s rapid-flowing discourse: “Ivan fell silent for a moment, his face suddenly became very sad.” After this pause he begins: Listen to me: I selected only children to make things clearer. Of the other tears of humanity with which the whole earth is soaked from crust to core—I’ll not say anything, I have deliberately narrowed my theme. (bk. 5, chap. 4)

The abstract, almost academic character of the first and final phrases

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contrasts sharply with the charged image at the center: the earth bathed in the rain of tears of suffering humanity. This image of the earth soaked from crust to core with the tears of humanity harks back to the peasant mothers lamenting the deaths of their children. It also looks forward to the moment of Alyosha’s mystical union with the earth, when he flings himself down upon the earth, driven by a desire to kiss it. But “he kissed it weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and madly swore to love it, love it forever. ‘Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears of yours’—rang in his soul.” The image of the earth watered by tears in this scene is marked by the spirit of reconciliation and universal forgiveness. The earth is watered with tears of joy, and the result of this mystic union with the earth is a sense of renewal. Alyosha “fell to the earth a weak youth, but arose a firm fighter for the rest of his life.” Ivan’s tears—the tears of humanity—are bitter tears of suffering. They do not augur a harvest of reconciliation and forgiveness. Ivan will have none of the mystical transmutation of tears into the waters of eternal life, of suffering into salvation. The various images that appear in Ivan’s peroration are, like his stories, lacerations. Ivan’s conception of himself as a bedbug, for instance, accurately conveys the hostile, underground character of his pose of humility: “I am a bedbug, and I confess with all humility that I cannot understand anything, why everything is arranged as it is.” The whole movement of Ivan’s monologue—viewed as antitheodicy—is a steady ascent from earth to heaven, from bedbug to God. The ascent is steep and ends in a reversal of roles: the humiliation of God, the representation of Him as a scurrilous merchandizer of souls, and the transformation of the bedbug, Ivan, into a Christ figure. What Ivan cannot understand—narrowing his “theme” to its core—is the doctrine of original sin as it applies to children. “People have eaten of the apple and learned to know good and evil, and became ‘as gods’,” Ivan observes to Alyosha. “But children have eaten nothing and so far are not guilty of anything.” Ivan repeats his thought again in his final peroration, but with a significant change. “People themselves, so it goes, are guilty: they were given paradise, they wanted freedom and they stole fire from the heavens, themselves knowing that they would become unhappy, therefore there is no reason to pity them.” The allusion to Greek myth at this point is perhaps significant: the figure of the eternally suffering, ever freshly wounded Prometheus

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reflects Ivan’s own choice of permanent suffering in the name of a higher justice. The tense, spasmodic character of the opening lines of Ivan’s monologue prelude a storm of emotion. This emotion breaks out into the barely controlled rhythms of the fourth line. Ivan no longer merely poses the problem here; he responds to it broadly and passionately and in a deeply personal manner. An exclamatory, rhetorical “Oh” opens the floodgates of new movement:

Oh, with my pitiful, earthly Euclidian mind all I know is that there is suffering and that there are none guilty, that one thing follows from another directly and simply, that every­ thing flows and comes into equilibrium—but really that’s only Euclidian nonsense, really I know that, but the point is that I can’t consent to live by it! What do I care that none are guilty and that one thing follows another directly and sim­ ply and that I know this—I must have retribution or I will destroy myself. (bk. 5, chap. 4)

This passage in Russian, with its curious rocking, singsong rhythms, its repetitions and alliterations, establishes the sound pattern of Ivan’s lamentation. It is remarkable in the way its formal structure expresses its ideas and tensions. The notion that everything flows and comes into equilibrium is expressed in the extraordinary balance of syntactical units or phrases in the passage. Yet it is one thing to be presented with a formal equilibrium or balance of elements, and it is another thing to accept it. The opposition between “Euclidian mind” and “Euclidian nonsense” perfectly ex­ presses the insupportable contradiction rending Ivan: reason, which he will not relinquish, exposes a cruel mechanism in which people suffer, no one is guilty, and everything balances out. But this abstract balanc­ ing of things, or justice, is completely unacceptable to Ivan’s moral sense. In spite of all equilibrium, he wants to know “why everything is arranged as it is.” In fact, Ivan sees only suffering and finds no justice or equilibrium. He himself seeks the moral satisfaction of real, Old Testament justice, or retribution. But expressing his need for retribu­ tion, Ivan reveals his deep sense of guilt and responsibility: if he does not find retribution, he will destroy himself, that is, take upon him the guilt and, through self-annihilation, reestablish the missing equilib-

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num. The motif of the pseudo-Christ, important throughout the mono­ logue, emerges clearly here. It is paradoxical in character: it not only attests to an extraordinary degree of moral sensibility but to an ego­ tism. “I did not suffer,” Ivan declares, “in order with my misdeeds and sufferings to manure some kind of future harmony.” It is apparent, however, that retributive punishment, though in­ stinctively demanded for the satisfaction of a sense of moral outrage, hardly disposes of the problems raised by human suffering. It has no meaning to those who have unjustly suffered. “What can hell correct,” Ivan asks toward the end of his lamentation, “when these [children] already have been tormented?” But the notion of retribution, as Ivan develops it, is only partially exhausted by the idea of punishment. The moment of retribution is also a moment of revelation, of fulfillment of divine prophecy. The destruction of the wicked coincides with the exaltation of the good and the final triumph of God’s justice. This is the day of judgment when, as Ivan puts it, “all will suddenly learn why everything has been as it is,” “when the crown of knowledge will be attained and all will be explained.” The notion of retributive justice is for Ivan, then, a bridge or transition to the central problem and phenomenon of divine reconciliation and harmony. At the outset Ivan insists that he be on earth at the moment of revelation so that he may see it himself:

I have believed, I want to see it myself, and if I am already dead at that hour, then let them resurrect me, because if it all takes place without me, then it will be too insulting. I did not suffer in order with my misdeeds and sufferings to manure some kind of future harmony. I want to see with my own eyes how the hind lies down alongside the lion, and how the slaughtered creature rises and embraces his slaughterer. (bk. 5, chap. 4)

The initial image in Ivan’s lamentation—the rain of tears soaking the earth—was a first indication of Ivan’s bitter and mocking attitude toward the concept of the universal harvest. His bitterness and cyni­ cism is even more manifest in the second, as it were, agricultural image of his lamentation: the representation of suffering as “manure” for some future harmony. Ivan’s notion of the absurd and cruel character of redemption in the divine plan could not, it would seem, be more

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forcibly presented. The deliberate crudeness of the metaphor perfectly conveys his lacerating and cruel thought. At the outset of his peroration Ivan deviates from his theme—the suffering of children—and places the emphasis upon his own need for retribution, his desire for resurrection, and his unwillingness to let his sufferings be manure for a future harmony in which he has no part. But he quickly returns to his theme:

Listen: if everyone must suffer in order with suffering to buy eternal harmony, then what have children got to do with all this, tell me please? It is quite incomprehensible why they have had to suffer, and why they have had to buy harmony with sufferings. Why did they also have to become material and manure for some future harmony? Solidarity in sin among people I understand, I understand solidarity also in retribution, but with children, however, there can be no such solidarity in sin; and if it is true that they must, indeed, stand in solidarity with their fathers and all the misdeeds of their fathers, then, of course, this truth is not of this world and is incomprehensible to me. (bk. 5, chap. 4)

The metaphor of Ivan’s suffering as manure for future harmony now develops into something more ugly and ominous: children as “material and manure” for some future harmony. And in a dramatic period marked by the repeated and ironical use of the word “solidarity,” Ivan links the repellent notion of suffering as material and manure with the idea of solidarity of men and children in sin. At the same time, Ivan compares the dynamics of salvation to a commercial transaction. In Dostoevsky’s notebook to The Brothers Karamazov, we find the fines, “The Inquisitor: ‘God as a merchant. I love humanity more than you’.” We do not need any prompting from Dostoevsky’s notebooks, however, to realize that the god against whom Ivan rebels is conceived as a supreme merchant or pawnbroker, traf­ ficking in the sufferings of mankind and selling “tickets” to heaven at exorbitant rates of interest. Ivan pursues the metaphor with a ven­ geance. In his conception, man must “buy” (kupit’, pokupat') eternal harmony with suffering, but at an unfavorable exchange rate: harmony is “not worth” even the tiny tears of a tortured child, not worth it because the tears remain “unexpiated” (neiskuplennye). “And if the

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sufferings of children go to make up the sum of suffering which are necessary for the purchase of the truth,” then “all this truth is not worth such a price.” “We simply cannot afford to pay so much for admission.” Ivan will “respectfully” return his ticket. In the ironic subtext of Ivan’s rebellious lamentation, Jesus the Redeemer (the only being, Ivan hints, who might have the “right to forgive”) stands opposed to God the merchant. Jesus does not appear in Ivan’s lamentation, but his omission is deliberate. Jesus has not yet arrived in the cruel Old Testament world that Ivan posits. He is only an hypothesis in Ivan’s legend of the Grand Inquisitor, as he is in the long tirade where Ivan allows that “in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious [might] come to pass that it would suffice for all hearts, for the assuaging of all resent­ ments, for the expiation of all the crimes of humanity . . . that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with men.” In “Rebellion” and in “Grand Inquisitor” Ivan posits a world that is utterly loveless, freighted down with intolerable suffering and evil. On the one hand, men are utterly undeserving of salvation: “After all, they are vile and not deserving of love and have gotten their reward, ” Ivan says of the adults who have eaten the apple. On the other hand, a world where such terrible things occur makes a mockery of any concept of a meaningful, God-made world. Ivan’s question, “Is there in the whole world a being who could forgive and who would have the right to forgive?” turns not on whether a Redeemer exists, but on whether such a being has the right to forgive, can forgive. The real question is whether the idea of Christ, precious and beyond all com­ prehension, is relevant at all to the fundamental reality of human existence, to man in all his vileness. “Christian love is a kind of impossible miracle on earth,” Ivan insists. In Dostoevsky’s manuscript of The Raw Youth Versilov gives the most extreme formulation to this skepticism: “Without a doubt Christ could not love us, such as we are. He suffered us. He forgave us, but certainly despised us; I at any rate cannot conceive His countenance otherwise.” Man, in Ivan’s view, is unworthy of the Redeemer. He deserves the Grand Inquisitor. The full force of Ivan’s rebellion is expressed in a final, thricerepeated image: a general turns an offending eight-year-old boy over to his hunting dogs to be tom to pieces before the eyes of his mother. Ivan visualizes the moment of universal “hosanna,” the supreme mo-

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ment when the crown of knowledge is achieved in the most emotion­ ally charged passage in his lamentation:

Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! Now I understand what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends into one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: “Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.” When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, “Thou art just, O Lord!”, then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be achieved and all will be made clear. But there’s the rub: it is precisely that which I can’t accept. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, “Thou art just, O Lord!”, but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to put myself on guard, and therefore I renounce the higher harmony altogether. (bk. 5, chap. 4)

Ivan’s renunciation of harmony is conveyed not so much verbally as visually, in his mental image of the mother embracing the torturer who has tom apart her child with dogs. It is this composite image, or tableau, in which the scenes of murder and reconciliation are juxta­ posed, that Ivan forever keeps before his eye and the eye of the reader. It is this wound or laceration that lies at the center of his great lamentation. Thus, in the novel Ivan’s anti-utopian tableau, with its triumph of suffering over harmony, is opposed to Zosima’s Christian utopian tableau (the resurrected child rejoicing in the mother’s tears and point­ ing them out to God), with its triumph of harmony over suffering. Both pictures are constructed out of contradictory emotional elements. But in Ivan’s picture the contradiction is, as it were, malignant: the jarring elements constitute a permanent laceration; the idea of a recon­ ciliation between the general and the mother is perceived, literally and figuratively, as both impossible and repulsive. In Zosima’s picture, on the other hand, the jarring elements (the tears of the mother and the laughter of the child) are resolved in the triumphant miracle of resur­

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rection. In Ivan’s picture the owner of the dogs, the general, is a satanic figure; the mother, in effect, embraces the devil. In Zosima’s picture, the satanic figure is replaced by an unseen but ever-present and solicitous God. The images of suffering and harmony in Ivan’s picture are organi­ cally incompatible with one another. The whole essence of Ivan’s rebellion lies in his inability to relate the idea of divine justice and harmony to the reality of injustice, suffering, and death. Ivan’s com­ posite picture, or montage, conveys his sense of a meaningless and absurd universe. The “real images and forms” of his dream of para­ dise, the ridiculous man insisted, were full of harmony and beauty: “I saw, I saw, and the living image filled my soul forever.” Ivan, too, sees, but the images and forms of his vision of harmony are inharmonious and grotesque and constitute a savage blow at the credibility of the dream of harmony. Here, there is no form or beauty—obraz-, there is only shapelessness—bezobrazie. With Ivan’s repellent picture of the mother embracing the general (in the background is the child being tom to pieces by the general’s dogs) at the conclusion of “Rebellion,” the reader comes full circle to the beginning of that chapter. There Ivan depicts John the Merciful embracing a frozen and hungry beggar and breathing into “a mouth putrid and loathsome from some awful disease.” The significance of both these scenes, at the beginning and end of “Rebellion,” is clear; as Ivan puts it, “Christian love”—love at close quarters, love for the visible face of man—“is an impossible miracle on earth”: “For any one to love a man he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face love is gone.” John’s act of compassion, then, is not a triumph of love, in Ivan’s view, but an act of self-laceration. It is of the same moralpsychological order as the mother’s embrace of the murderer of her child. Ivan removes the act of John from the realm of ethical inspira­ tion to the subterranean realm of abnormal psychology. The action of Ivan’s namesake, John, is possible in Ivan’s view only if we wish to enjoy ugliness. The opening picture of John the Merciful embracing the loath­ some beggar thus anticipates the final discordant picture of reconcilia­ tion in Ivan’s lamentation—the mock scene of universal harmony. Both acts involve a self-renunciation that is instantly perceived by the reader, or viewer, as self-disfiguration. The mother, like John, em­ braces that which is loathsome and putrid. In both scenes “parallel

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lines” meet. But what may be mathematically or theologically possible is disclosed as morally and aesthetically unacceptable. In his two illus­ trations Ivan reveals that he will have none of the perverse wonders of non-Euclidian Christian moral geometry. His refusal to accept the meeting point, that is, Christian reconciliation and harmony, is pre­ sented as an instinctive inability to countenance a marriage of beauty and the beast, in short, to contemplate any violation of the ideal of beauty. The mother and child, of course, are for Ivan the symbol of the inviolable moral-spiritual absolute.

Ill

Ivan’s rebellious lamentation grows more feverish as it approaches its climax. Harmony is not worth even a tear of the tormented child who prays to “sweet little God” with her unexpiated tears. “It is not worth a single little tear because these tears remain unexpiated. They must be expiated, otherwise there can be no harmony. But how, how,” asks Ivan, “are you going to expiate them? Is it really possible? Will that indeed happen through the fact that they will be avenged?” The need for expiation again raises the question of retribution. But whereas at the beginning of his lamentation Ivan insists on his subjective need for retribution, here he emphasizes the objectively meaningless character of retribution. Hell for the torturers, he notes, will in no way help those who have already been tortured. In the sophistic style of his father Ivan rounds off his argument with the rhetorical question: “And what kind of harmony can there be if there is hell? I want to forgive and embrace, I do not want people to suffer any more.” The circular character of Ivan’s argumentation here is typical of his thought. Like the Underground Man, Ivan is lacking in “foundations.” In point of fact, Ivan does not want to forgive and embrace. He does not believe that the mother has the right to forgive the torturer. She may forgive him for her own sufferings perhaps, but not for the suffering of the tortured child—“even if the child were to forgive him for them!” At this point Ivan asks the central question of his monologue: “Is there in the whole world a being who could forgive and would have the right to forgive?” Earlier in his long tirade he acknowledges that something so precious could appear that might expiate the villainies of men and forgive, even justify, all that had happened to people. But it is

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precisely this that he does not want to accept. “I do not want har­ mony, out of love for humanity I do not want it,” he exclaims at the end of his monologue:

I would rather remain with my unavenged sufferings. I would really rather remain with my unavenged suffering and my unsatisfied indignation even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is put on harmony; we simply cannot afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to give back my ticket of admission. And indeed if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that’s what I’m doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, I’m only most respectfully returning Him the ticket. (bk. 5, chap. 4)

Ivan, as Camus has noted, “rejects here the basic interdependence, introduced by Christianity, between suffering and divine truth,” an interdependence symbolically witnessed in the Passion of Christ. Even if salvation—reconciliation and eternal harmony—constitutes the di­ vine truth, Ivan rejects it in advance: the price is too high. In rejecting the interdependence of suffering and Christian truth, however, and in opposing justice to this truth, Ivan in fact establishes an interdependence between hopeless suffering and a new terrible truth: the reality of a tragic universe, an unjust cosmic order, or disorder, in which humanity at large is hopelessly condemned to pain and suffering. Psychologically, Ivan’s choice of endless suffering is embodied in his rebellious lamentation. It can be compared to the Underground Man’s revolt against the laws of nature or the “stone wall”: it is neither victory nor reconciliation, but, figuratively speak­ ing, a permanent, despairing beating of the head against the wall. In Ivan’s rebellion the groans of the “man with toothache” in Notes from the Underground are raised to the plane of a despairing lamentation over a meaningless and cruel universe. On the moral plane, however, Ivan’s rebellion—taking on the form of an imitation of Christ—paradoxically introduces meaning into the universe and reaffirms the necessity of the Redeemer. “Is there in the whole world a being who could forgive and would have the right to forgive?” asks Ivan. He does not answer this question directly, but he knows that this right is acquired only through suffering and sacri­ fice. Konstantin Mochulsky has called attention to the element of “imposture” in Ivan’s rebellion: “A diabolic deceit is hidden in this

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imposture. The atheist appeals to the noble human sentiments of compassion, magnanimity, love, but on his lips this is pure rhetoric.” Yet it seems there is more than diabolic deceit and conceit here. The very nature of Ivan’s imposture is deeply ambivalent. What he sets out to deny, he affirms in spite of himself by his unconscious wish to imitate Christ. The imitation of Christ by its very nature is redemptive. In his conversation with Alyosha, Ivan in jest recalls the “old sinner in the eighteenth century,” Voltaire, “who delivered himself of the statement that if there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him, ‘S’il n’existait pas Dieu il faudrait l’inventer.’ ” Ivan’s usurpation of the role of Christ is, of course, such an invention, but one that attests to a deep, albeit unconscious identity with Christ. Ivan rebels against God’s world; he rebels out of despair. But in its inner content, this rebellion bears witness to man’s continual need to redis­ cover his humanity in himself, to sacrifice himself for others, in short, to imitate Christ. The path of Ivan’s own moral and spiritual redemp­ tion must take him from usurpation to imitation of Christ in deed as well as word. But that path leads him first of all through the fires of negation and denial.

On The Brothers Karamazov John Jones

In the Crime and Punishment notebooks there is a reference to Mrs Svidrigailov’s bad breath. Dostoevsky adds that this is to be mentioned “in passing and only once.” The novel relates that “she always kept a clove or something in her mouth,” and that is all. The explicit bad breath has to wait fifteen years, for a different woman, for the right book, for Karamazov the novel of evil smells. The same crazed visionary woman who saw through the Tartar kara and substituted the Russian for black, demands “And why make such a fuss about my breath?” She continues, “The dead smell even worse,” which is visionary in another sense, anticipating the events following the death of the elder Zossima and the chapter “Odour of Corruption.” She is Mrs Snegirev—a surname Dostoevsky hasn’t used since his first novel, Poor People, the poem of lodging-house smells: “in a way it’s stuffy, that’s not to say there’s a bad smell but, if one may so express it, a slightly decaying, a sort of sharpish-sweetish smell.” Karamazov would never linger over a smell, would never describe; its smells are as unqualified as its narrator who is its vanished author. Even to call its smells evil, as I did just now, invites the objection that smell is the master metaphor of the novel and that the novel is by no means wholly evil. The prosecuting lawyer unites Karamazov breadth and Karamazov Russianness in terms of smell when he says Dmitry standing there in the dock carries on him “the very smell” of Russia’s From Dostoevsky. © 1983 by John Jones. Clarendon Press, 1983.

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past; and that is the truth, and Russia is not evil and nor is Dmitry. He does many bad, smelly things. But he doesn’t kill his father. We instantly distinguish the smell of his misdeeds from the psychophysical taint which foreruns the murder and which makes neighbours of Karamazov and the Oresteia. “If you ask me, the old man’s a sharp one: he smells crime. Your house stinks of it.” Suddenly, the whole novel seems to be tugging at the sleeve of myth. “Stinks” here is a breath-of-mortal-corruption verb smerdet. Throughout the novel it stands in a sensitive relation to the ordinary Russian vonyat. The epileptic lackey Smerdyakov who commits the murder is so called after his mother Stinking Lizaveta, a homeless pauper in “our town.” There’s evidence that old Karamazov is Smerdyakov’s father. Time and place suggest so, and we know he’d sleep with anybody rather than nobody. As he himself remarks, “for me ugly women do not exist.” So the lackey is probably a parricide. And “lackey” brings to mind the archaic word smerd, which in a neutral context one might translate “churl.” I don’t recall Dostoevsky using it elsewhere in millions of words of fiction and journalism and letters and notebooks and verse, but it occurs three times in Karamazov, and the stink association for eye and ear can scarcely be doubted. Thus the Americans (we know what Dostoevsky, and Dmitry through Dostoevsky, thought of America) are called smerdi, where a happy rendering might be “shits.” Dmitry also calls Rakitin a smerd. Rakitin is the only out and out detestable character in the novel, exhausting even Alyosha’s charity and patience. “Dishonourable” is his verdict, and when one of his schoolboy friends talking trendy, obviously second-hand rubbish draws from him the quite uncharacteristically sharp question “What fool have you got yourself mixed up with?” the fool turns out to be Rakitin. A dangerous, poisonous fool, a shallow-shrewd fool, the kind of worldly novice monk who is likely to end up a millionaire. He degrades everything he touches. He stands alone in the novel because of the way he needles all three Karamazov brothers, trying to mock the faith out of Alyosha, to inflame Ivan’s un-Russian paper-person tendencies, to exploit Dmitry and his terrible, spectacular troubles with a view to getting his own journalistic career off the ground. He laughs at the idea of the soul and talks physiology, and it’s even possible he has been messing about with the unintellectual brother’s mind, for Dmitry keeps talking about “realism” which isn’t the sort of abstract word one would expect him to use, and nor is it very clear what he means. But no

On The Brothers Karamazov ! 137

matter. It doesn’t touch his instinctive devoutness, and the voice of the eldest Karamazov brother remains unmistakably his own: “It’s no longer a dream now! It’s realism, gentlemen, the realism of actual life! I am the wolf and you are the hunters, and you are hunting the wolf down.” Though a smerd, Rakitin is not Smerdyakov, not the murderer. But then Smerdyakov is only a surrogate murderer. And then again, it is too clearcut to say Smerdyakov is Ivan’s deputy and leave it at that. The circumstance of Ivan being out of the way on the fatal night was not a plot, still less was Smerdyakov told to kill the old man. Karamazov is a novel of nudges. Fainter, finer than nudges: animal intuition gives the feel and the smell—the book’s master metaphor—better than hu­ man bien entendu. And it would be falsely neat to place the murder solely between the scented lackey and the second brother, his probable half-brother. Dmitry is altogether capable of killing his father, except with cool deliberation. In fact he knocks him down and sets about kicking his face in before Ivan and Alyosha can drag him away; and on the night of the murder, hesitating outside his father’s window, brass pestle in hand, overwhelmed with hatred and revulsion—whether an angel kissed him or some stranger wept tears of intercession at that moment or his dead mother offered God a prayer, Dmitry never knew. “But the devil was vanquished.” This is one of those wonderful effects built up by accumulation and variation, at the time itself, under interrogation, and during the trial. Karamazov’s harvest is breadth, the horrors of holy Russia, a solidarity in sin and retribution which encompasses the murdered evildoer. “Why does such a man live?” demands Dmitry, and that is the title of the chapter in which he asks the question, and the chapter titles of this novel are uniquely active as to local stress and overall configuration. The old man’s complicity in his own murder gets carried by the book’s master metaphor. His house stinks. His life stinks. Yet his mystic complicity never quite hardens into the judg­ ment that he deserves to die. His nature is too broad to allow that. Unlike Rakitin, old Karamazov is not through and through de­ testable. “For me ugly women do not exist.” At the heart of his evil ways I find an element of heroic dedication to the senses which I won’t call redeeming or even attractive but—broad. He is capable of uttering “bitter reproaches” over a badly cooked dinner even as he trembles with desire for Grushenka, waiting for her to come to him. When his

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first wife runs off he decides to go after her, and the fact that he has decided to go makes him feel “fully entitled” to settle down where he is to a terrific drinking bout. One contemptible episode happened long ago so, he says, he isn’t ashamed to recount it. He describes himself as “in the prime of life” and “a feeble old man” in the same conversation. When Dmitry has beaten him up he chooses a red handkerchief as a bandage and not a white one because he doesn’t want to look like a hospital case. He admires his wounds in the mirror with indomitable French bravura—a link with what James called “the moral enormous” in Victor Hugo, a writer revered and overrated by Dostoevsky. To Zossima he says, “You know, blessed father, you’d better not encourage me to be my natural self—don’t risk it!” We see the point as old Karamazov pictures the monks “looking at each other and eating cabbage soup” and says Alyosha “is here being saved” (monastery as salvation shop) and suggests that a soldier who has let himself be flayed alive by Tartars rather than renounce his faith should have his skin sent to some monastery— “I can imagine the crowds that would flock there and the money the monastery would make”—and com­ plains that God has given us only twenty-four hours in a day which is “scarcely time to have a good sleep, let alone repent of our sins” and wonders what all the fuss is about death: “In my opinion a man falls asleep and doesn’t wake up, and that’s all there is to it.” And yet when, in this uncontainable comic onslaught, Smerdyakov argues that the soldier-martyr who was flayed alive would not have sinned if he had renounced the name of Christ, and old Karamazov retorts, “You’re talking nonsense, my lad, and for that you’ll go straight to Hell and be roasted there like mutton,” hypocrisy is not the only word for it. The man for whom death is the big sleep says, “I daresay it will be easier going to the next world if you know for certain what it’s like there.” Stranger still, the dab hand at blaspheming who raises his arms solemnly over Zossima and pronounces “Blessed is the womb that bare thee and the paps that gave thee suck—the paps especially!”—stranger still, he does not blaspheme when he makes the sign of the cross over Alyosha and dismisses Ivan with the immemorial Russian “Christ be with you.” It’s a broader affair than our sense that humour is the only thing when Mrs Virginsky hastens childbirth by shocking her patients with pistol-shot atheistical sallies. Father and sons gain breadth from each other, without which the Russianness of “Christ be with you” would be folk-costume, and the solidarity of sin and suffering just a thought. I am saying that the greatest marvel of

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Karamazov is its spatializing the latent temporal energies of the “Life of a Great Sinner” project, its spreading them in a fierce black smear across the family. The novel presents the classic Dostoevsky no-home; the wreckage of this household is utter. Nevertheless the binding animal awareness we have encountered between Ivan and Smerdyakov affects them all, even Alyosha. Standing in the hall he can tell by the tone of his father’s high-pitched laugh in the room beyond that he is “still far from drunk.” The book swarms with such details. They are great levellers, weakening, even destroying, seniority and juniority and affirming the one broad life, the Karamazov tapestry, the realm of space. When, apropos their womanizing tussle, the father says he was better looking than the son when he was his age, it feels like an unfair thrust against Dmitry. As if to make amends old Karamazov calls Ivan “my dear old man” (otets ti moy rodnoy, literally “father mine”), a telltale image. If there must be generations then make them reversible. It’s pertinent to the size, haze, and smelly incestuous suggestion of Karamozov, that it both is and is not another generation-gap novel. Likewise it is and is not another crime-and-punishment novel. In the notebooks Dmitry first appears as Ilinsky, and Ilinsky is the reallife name of the convict in The House of the Dead who was doing time for a murder—a parricide—which it later transpires he never commit­ ted. This “later” may be the germ of the fictional Karamazov “now” which never arrives, the doings of the great-sinner hero “at this very moment.” Of course it is Alyosha who has been cast as great sinner and Dmitry as the man wrongly convicted of parricide, but that is how the spatializing or spreading of themes across the family actually works. The House of the Dead’s “later” is a stop-press device, abrupt and intrusive. Karamazov’s “now” is a crime-and-punishment epilogue, but an epilogue magnified and exalted into the real story, and one which Dostoevsky refrains from writing. It could be argued that the epilogue of Crime and Punishment too is the real story, and that the real story is gestured at, not written. This argument turns on the novel’s sovereign concern being acceptance of suffering by the murderer (true confession, that is, as opposed to owning up to the crime), and his reunion with the human family. There’s no denying that these things only happen in the epilogue. But luckily the upshot is that the epilogue is a mistake which nevertheless does not prevent Crime and Punishment being the most powerful state­ ment of alienation through evildoing in world literature since Macbeth. And when he comes to write The Possessed it’s as if Dostoevsky had

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learnt the lesson of that epilogue, for the “tomorrow” of Stepan Verkhovcnsky’s “Tomorrow we shall all set off!” never comes, and this most precious conviction of the novelist is entrusted to the flickering twilight of “futile” Stepan’s dreamlike deathbed chatter: “Oh, let us forgive, let us forgive, first and last let us forgive all and always. Let us hope that we too shall be forgiven. Yes, because each and every one of us have wronged one another. We are all guilty!” A case if ever there was one of Dostoevsky creeping up on the blind side of his dearest values. And in Karamazov this shared guilt— what Ivan calls solidarity—is entrusted to dream itself. Dmitry is no dreamer, but, exhausted by the party he gives for Grushenka, a skandal as intense though not so drawn-out as the Possessed fete, “a revel to end all revels,” and then driven further into the ground by interrogation, he falls asleep and dreams a dream, a black dream, a kara/chemi dream about “black cottages” and peasants “black with black misfortune,” and about a starving baby. Later, he insists that he is being sent to Siberia “for that baby.” But at the time, when he wakes from his dream: “in a strange voice with a new light as of joy in his face” Dmitry addresses his tormentors, “I have had a good dream, gentlemen.” The most amaz­ ing, the strangest “strange” in all Dostoevsky. Look no further for the gap that separates him from all the others except Tolstoy. What is good about this black dream? It transpires that the new light in Dmitry’s face is no false dawn; when he talks about going to Siberia for the starving baby he says, “Alyosha, during these last two months I have become aware of a new man in me—a new man has arisen in me!” Voskreseniel Regeneration and Resurrection! He thwarts any inclination we may have to take the baby literally, that is to count it among the helpless little ones of Ivan’s “Rebellion” tirade who do not grow up into our adult solidarity of sin and retribution. “All of us are ‘babbies,’ ” Dmitry says, clinging to the peasant word he heard in his dream; and “all are responsible for all.” As to the unrelieved and unexplained suffering of the dream itself, Dmitry finds himself demanding why people are poor and the steppe barren—questions huger even than Russia—and realizing he can nei­ ther answer nor help asking them. And, still inside his dream, he wants to do something so there shall be no more pain, no more tears; to do something now, at once, decisively, regardless of all obstacles, “with all the rash energy of the Karamazovs.” And then he hears Grushenka’s voice and wakes up.

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And next, an unsurpassable stroke. Dmitry is suddenly struck by the fact that somebody must have put a pillow under his head while he was asleep, because it was not there before.

“Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?” he cried with a sort of ecstatic feeling of gratitude and with tears in his voice.

However, “It was never discovered who that kind man was.” The effect would not be what it is if Dmitry had found himself a bed to rest on. He didn’t. He “lay down on a large chest covered with a rug and fell asleep at once.” The chest transfigures the small, very ordinary kindness of the pillow. But it wouldn’t do the same for another writer. When I remarked that beds in Dostoevsky are not for repose I wasn’t noting a quirk but looking through a peephole upon a world without easy unwatchful relationships, without fresh air and good humour and simple domestic and social routines, a world barred to habit itself unless obsessive. That is why figures like Lieutenant Smekalov sitting at the window with his long pipe are visitants and prodigies. Fresh air! The “fume-laden hut” where Dmitry nearly gets suffocated is at Chermashnya, the name of the Dostoevsky property, whereas the actual black fire-ravaged place is unmistakably the setting of Dmitry’s “good dream”—the supreme example of a floating hulk of fact swept helplessly into the tiderace of the novelist’s invention. So the hut with the last malfunctioning stove in Dostoevsky borrows the name of the family property, and of course reemphasises Karamazov's master metaphor of smell; while the historical, terrestrial Chermashnya houses Dmitry’s dream. As to the pillow and never finding out who that kind man was, we are face to face with the power of absence and elsewhere and ignorance in relation to the sheer stuff of this “thingy” novel. A pillow is a pillow. Dmitry waking with his head on it feels intimations of newness, of a new man being bom in him as he tells Alyosha afterwards. Hence the “new light” in his face—which brings us back to the author’s foreward to his readers, and the difficulty of presenting these deep-lying Dostoevsky devices as not frivolous. At one level nothing comes of this “new fight,” and at another everything. The Karamazov “now” which never arrives has to rub along with our ultimate refusal to doubt that we have the “real” novel in our hands. The apocalyptic naturalism stressed by “regeneration/resurrection” in the closing words of The House of the Dead and Crime and Punish-

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ment, and by “salvation” lurking in the place Spasov across the water in The Possessed, engrosses Karamazov totally. It works backwards as well as forwards in its figuring of timelessness, and interrogation and court proceedings are its perfect vehicle. We learn that the local doctor Herzenstube, a devout, pedantic old bachelor, kept a kindly eye on Dmitry when he was a child, motherless and neglected by his father. He gave him nuts, the simplest of treats, and taught him to name the Trinity in German—Dmitry tended to get stuck over Gott der Heilige Geist, but never mind. “He was taken away,” Herzenstube tells the court, “and I did not see him again.” “And now twenty-three years later I am sitting one morn­ ing in my study, my hair already white, and suddenly a young man looking the picture of health walks in. I would never have recognized him, but he raised his finger and said, laughing, ‘Gott der l/ater, Gott der Sohn und Gott der Heilige Geist! I’ve just arrived and have come to thank you for the pound of nuts, for no one ever bought me a pound of nuts, and you were the only one to do it.’ And then I remembered the happy time of my youth and the poor boy with no boots in the yard, and my heart turned over, and I said: ‘You are a grateful young man, for you have remembered all your life the pound of nuts I gave you in your childhood.’ And I embraced him and blessed him. And I wept. He laughed, but he wept too—for a Russian often laughs when he ought to be weeping. But he wept, and I saw it. And now, alas!” “And I am weeping now, German, I am weeping now too, you good, good man!” Dmitry shouted suddenly from his seat.

A magical reprise, grateful, sane, “lawful as eating” Shakespeare might say, amid the tawdriness and hysteria of the courtroom and the nauseating fluency of the lawyers’ speeches. And all the more wonder­ ful for Dmitry’s bawled interjection from the dock, giving us the whole man—that “rash energy of the Karamazovs”—in a shout: no posturing but terrific self-projection. This is broad-brush Dostoevsky at his most commanding. But it is close work too, as comparison of notebooks and novel shows. The notebooks have already hit upon the comic and touching idea that old Herzenstube, after decades away from Germany, standing here giving evidence, shall forget the Russian word for nut. He fumbles. The defending lawyer, sensing an advan-

On The Brothers Karamazov / 143

tage, tries to prompt him. Herzenstube still fumbles. “Yes it grows on a tree’’ he says in the notebooks. Karamazov adds “and they gather it and give it to everyone,’’ tilting the funny old doctor’s discourse, but ever so slightly, towards the visionary strangeness of a world better than ours. Nuts and the Trinity—a sudden reaching across in a novel which succeeds in being locally immense. And a reaching back. The reader may or may not remember Dmitry mentioning Schiller’s “an die Freude” to Alyosha six hundred pages ago and saying he doesn’t understand German, he just knows the words; and he—the reader— faced with the Trinity now, may or may not ask himself which of us knows more than the words, in German or in any other language, for Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. . . .

The conjuring of human beings as animals is even more powerful in Karamazov than in Crime and Punishment and The Possessed. Also of human beings as spiritual animals. The novel has an epigraph taken from St John which focuses on the original fateful accident of concep­ tion, fertility, new life, in relation to death: Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a com of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

And this invites comparison with The Possessed's epigraph, again from the New Testament, where the mad Gadarene stampede and self­ destruction are what the novel achieves, and where the healed man at Christ’s feet is what it doesn’t: but no matter, because it doesn’t attempt to; the coat of the parable gets cut according to the cloth of Dostoevsky’s available creative energies. Karamazov's relation to its epigraph is different, but with the family likeness that runs through all the major works. According to St John it has been wrong of me to speak of the novel’s pattern as a bad-luck one, and with no more than an eye to the epigraph we must allow that it has been pre-judging the issue to do so. Men like me need a sudden blow, says Dmitry. He is less concerned about its human injustice than the mystic legalism (or divine justice) of going to Siberia for the starving baby in his black-but-good dream, which means becoming worthy to suffer, which means the death of the old self and the birth of the new. Which means, or rather is poised to mean,

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bringing forth much fruit—the end to which the epigraph directs us. Dostoevsky does not suggest what the hero, a man made new, did after the end of The House of the Dead, when his fetters were knocked off. Or what the new life held in store for Raskolnikov, penitent at last and accepting suffering in Crime and Punishment's epilogue. And we have no idea whether the dead Stepan Verkhovensky got to Spasov. And now, and finally, there is no afterwards in which Dmitry Karamazov demonstrates (“By their fruits ye shall know them”) that it was no bad-luck pattern which brought him to judgement, but fateful accident theologized: we sneeze as the fit takes us, and every sneeze is numbered. In The Possessed, when Shatov envisages a new start for the new baby and for himself and his wife, one gets no premonition of a miraculously healed man (Dostoevsky’s Russia); rather, of three thwarted human futures, sane futures in a mad world; but the sanity is of and within nature: “let us work hard,” says Shatov, displaying the novel­ ist’s uncanny touch. But when in Karamazov “some kind man” places a pillow under Dmitry’s head while he lies asleep on a chest, the fruit of the spirit, thing and deed, is inescapably present and evident. The kind man disappears and is never found, never identified. Dmitry awakes and weeps inwardly to see the pillow: “his whole soul was shaken with tears.” The fruit of the spirit is watered by the spiritual animal’s tears of gratitude. “To recognize our friends is a god,” Euripides says. Dmitry greets his unknown benefactor; and the entire relationship between Karamazov and its epigraph is one of mutual awareness, and therefore of simultaneity, and of co-presence which may or may not be physical, may be a pillow or compassion. This is not a roundabout way of saying the epigraph gets realized in the novel. I am arguing that outcome and hereafter, so insistent in the healed man of the Possessed parable, have disappeared, and that the spatializing of a pointedly temporal theme, already remarked by me of this novel qua generation­ gap story, extends beyond the Karamazovs, father and sons and two dead mothers, to crime, investigation, trial, conviction, sentence, where what seems intractably sequential is reprocessed and re-reprocessed through interrogation, the evidence of witnesses, the lawyers’ recon­ structive speeches—all agents of space and then-and-now simultaneity. The cumulation which distinguishes Karamazov throughout is, in imag­ inative substance, a widening of vision not a passing of days, a learning of what is there and not what happens next. Excitements, very genuine and sequential excitements, like Smerdyakov’s account of how he did

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it, are held in the amber of retrospect. And it is no contradiction to speak of mounting tension at the trial, because a book takes time to read. This temporal mounting accompanies the temporal experience of turning the pages. Inside those pages there is the lateral spread from claustrophobic courtroom to the naked little boy in a bathtub and the young man returning to recite the Trinity in German to Doctor Herzenstube and the not quite so young man restrained perhaps by his dead mother’s prayers from killing his father. Dmitry’s wrongful conviction is not a climax but an irony smeared across the whole enormous episode at its close by a voice from the dispersing crowd which pronounces “our dear old peasants” (the jury) “have stood up for themselves.” Karamazov is a book without climaxes. Nothing could be less like the unrelenting drive of Crime and Punishment towards murder and then towards the climb up the spiral staircase to admit to murder. But, like Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s last novel has an epilogue—as well as an epigraph like The Possessed. It may be asked what there is left to say, to consign to an epilogue, if Karamazov is truly a story without climaxes and it outcome and aftermath have disappeared. Certainly no regeneration/resurrection (voskresenie). We have seen what there is to see of the death of the old Dmitry and the birth of the new. He first mentioned this change in the im­ mediate aftermath of his black-but-good dream, long before he was tried and convicted; but the reader feels it from the start, as does Father Zossima who prostrates himself before a man instinct with great and creative suffering. Thus, though Dmitry was not to know, it’s misleading to talk about a change since what we have here is the abiding mutual awareness of Dostoevsky’s novel and Jesus’ hard gospel saying reported by John. One supposes Dmitry will go on behaving badly, perhaps worse than badly sometimes. But he, the old Dmitry, dies daily, and it hurts. “God knows my heart. He sees my despair. He sees it all.” He talks a lot about God, and never pro­ fanely. And the same is true of Grushenka who matches Dmitry’s heavy direct passion with a feather-brained, let’s call it trigger-happy, pious flair. She crosses herself “devoutly” when she hears the news of Father Zossima’s death, then remembers she is sitting on Alyosha’s knee and jumps off. Next things next. There’s birth around as well as death, and birth hurts too, though Grushenka, unlike Dmitry, does not go in for simple shouts of pain. She’s a very different spiritual animal.

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The disappearance of outcome and aftermath is the “now” which never arrives, the “real” novel which never gets written, as experi­ enced from inside Karamazov. Dmitry must be called the hero of our book. Alyosha is the hero of the “real” one: the author tells his readers so. This means—again of course from inside Karamazov—that death and birth in the spirit are themes articulated through Dmitry, and the blow which sends a man sprawling, the blow “men like me need,” is explicitly his portion; while the mutualities of novel and com-ofwheat epigraph appear at their most tender and tentative in Alyosha. And as to Alyosha, no reader feels cheated unless he is determined to. Tentativeness, imaged by Grushenka perching herself on the novice monk’s knee, is sufficiency of knowledge within Karamazov; whether she ever got the cassock off his back or seriously tried be­ longs to the “now” whose positive and gratifying role is never to come. In the central chapters of the novel Zossima dies, the master metaphor of smell is literalized, and Alyosha’s young life is assailed by nature in the everyday form of mortal corruption. Dmitry wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. “God knows my heart”; his immediate striding access to the Maker of that heart strikes me as the most wonderful and elusive achievement in all Dostoevsky. Alyosha’s faith, though ardent, is not sure like that, and despite his loving gentle open ways and sweet sleep and innocent dreams and gifts with children and live habit of prayer—stupendous feats too—he is to be feared for. This is tentative­ ness apprehended as danger. A smell infects him with Ivan’s “rebel­ lion” and reduces him to wanting to believe. Eros awaits. (Perhaps Eros should await: there is no “real” novel and this is not a real question in the one we have.) Also he is the pretty boy around the place, inside and outside the monastery, and some will think they catch a hint, the merest head-toss, of sulky flirting. With the impression of Grushenka clear and warm upon him, though unaroused by her, he returns to the monastery and finds a window open and a monk reading the New Testament over Zossima’s coffin. “So the smell must have become stronger,” he thinks. He kneels to pray and, exhausted, falls into a doze. Dmitry goes to sleep on a chest and dreams of starving peasants. “Why are people poor?” is his dream-question. And, “Why don’t they embrace and kiss one another? Why don’t they sing joyful songs?” He longs to put all of it right. Life should be something else. As Alyosha dozes on his knees, life becomes something else—

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somewhere else. The monk is reading of Jesus’ first miracle when he turned water into wine for the wedding guests at Cana. Half asleep, Alyosha thinks how poor they must have been, those people there, not to have enough wine even for a wedding. So, yet again, the image of the party. In The Possessed, and exquisitely comic it is in the telling, we have a political meeting disguised as a birthday party. At the centre of Karamazov is a wedding party portrayed as a party but transfigured by a miracle. Both novels have epigraphs in search of true community, one from the startingpoint of false community (the Gadarene “herd”) and the other of no community (“it abideth alone”). False community and no community go back to the beginning in Dostoevsky—to office and lodging-house and seamstress’s lonely room. True community gets its first festive apocalyptic twist in the house with the lights and music outside which Mr Golyadkin stands in the rain trying to look at all its windows at once. The warm dry house is the somewhere else where life is some­ thing else. But of course The Double's party is no less dubious than “our hero’s” invitation to it. Karamazov doesn’t ask whether the wine really flowed from outside nature at Cana, or whether, beyond the iconic wedding feast, Christianity is true and the God-man invites us all to the party of eternal life. One knows what Dostoevsky believed, but that is irrelevant. One also knows that the greatness of his novel permits none but a hooligan to receive the somewhere and something else of Alyosha’s dozing apprehension at the level of the land of nod and drinks on the house. The dubiousness in and around Mr Golyadkin has evolved into the huge spiritual tentativeness of Alyosha’s destiny. Like Dmitry, and with all the passion of a Karamazov, he grasps his apocalyptic visita­ tion as the opposite of tentative, as decisive. He senses a new world unfold before him, and the reader remembers Stepan Verkhovensky taking to the open road and hears again something very like the voice of Joseph Conrad: The vault of heaven stretched boundlessly wide above him, full of soft, shining stars. From the zenith to the horizon the Milky Way ran in two pale streams. The fresh, motionless, serene night enfolded the earth. . . . The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth came into contact with the mystery of the stars.

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Nobody could be remoter from Alyosha in personal timbre and cir­ cumstances than Stepan Verkhovensky. And yet the same man made them both, imagining one as parasite, the other as monk—monks are parasites according to old Karamazov—one launched upon quintessentially comic and inconclusive journeying, “futile” by Mrs Stavrogin’s cruel verdict, and the other contemplating the words of Father Zossima “who had bidden him ‘sojourn in the world.’ ” The Cana chapter reads free, shy, very rare. No novelist’s thumb in the balance. And when Alyosha believes “something firm and unshakable as that vault of heaven had entered his soul,” whereas the overall feel of Alyosha in Karamazov is tentative, the conclusion should be that the novel is bigger than he is, not that his experience in the cell with the corpse and gospel reading and open window was false or shallow. He can only speak for himself, and his destiny is not only for himself, it does not cleave to him as if it were the clothes he stands up in. The fulfilment of Alyosha’s destiny is spread in the broad and spatial way of Karamazov across the “now” which never arrives; and the “tomorrow we shall all set off” of Stepan’s death across the lake from Spasov, which was an ever-receding horizon in The Possessed, a novel of movement, becomes in Karamazov, that novel of sojourn (for Zossima chose his word carefully), the envelope which surrounds but has no part in the action, and within which the actors position themselves, perforce temporarily, and therefore perch, singly like the young man at prayer and the girl on the same young man’s knee; or collectively like the blood-relations in the smelly tottering house of wrath and lust, and like the wider community of Cattlepen, a place of rotten wood and broken roads and jerry-building and miserable dank back-alleys, including “moral ones.” Taking the two novels at a single glance, life as shanty town in Karamazov complements life as gold rush in The Possessed. Sojourner at the start, Alyosha is equipped with pillow and mat­ tress which his father (what a father!) exhorts him to bring home (and what a home!) from the monastery. At the end, in the novel’s epi­ logue, he is still travelling light and going nowhere except in the context of his spiritual destiny and Zossima’s admonition. Ilyusha Snegirev has died, and good with children as always Alyosha attends the funeral and burial with Ilyusha’s school friends. There will be a funeral feast afterwards. Kolya Krasotkin, a pre­ cocious child, remarks the incongruity of eating pancakes while you

On The Brothers Karamazov ! 149

mourn. Kolya has been infected by Rakitin, the novel’s one smerd and turner of life’s wine into water. “Don’t let it worry you that we shall be eating pancakes. It’s an old, age-old custom and there’s something nice about that,” Alyosha laughed. Life goes on. Alyosha lays pancakes alongside death very much as Doctor Herzenstube laid nuts alongside the Trinity at Dmitry’s trial. Both of them do justice to the breadth of Karamazov. Alyosha has just been assuring Kolya and his friends of the truth of the Resurrection, the theological voskresenie, so he is no less doctrinally embroiled than was the good doctor. But Herzenstube’s Trinity, inside Karamazov, is a business of knowing the German words—which in no way detracts from the sublime encounter of healer and little boy who becomes the young man newly returned, the picture of health, who becomes the accused person roaring to everybody in court that he is weeping now. And the epilogue’s Resurrection is the language of ardent youth, again sublime and in no way a snug orthodoxy. However, youth also throws a brick at a flock of sparrows, there being no boy to throw stones at, because he is dead. And others are not young, and neither are they ardent on the one hand or, on the other, nature’s stone-throwers.

“Yes, yes, let’s go back to Mummy,” Snegirev suddenly recollected again. “They’ll make up his little bed, they’ll make up his bed!” he added as though afraid they would really make up the bed, and he jumped up and ran home again.

The Snegirev hovel is the last no-home in Dostoevsky, and the griev­ ing half-crazed father’s fear for his child’s bed, following Dmitry’s chest with a rug on it and Alyosha’s portable mattress and pillow, is the final dislocation of the idea of repose.

Alyosha and the Hagiographic Hero Valentina A. Vetlovskaya

“The main narrative is the second,” explains the narrator of The Brothers Karamazov in his introductory remarks, “—it is the action of my hero in our day, at the very present time. The first novel takes place thirteen years ago, and it is hardly even a novel, but only a period in my hero’s early youth. I cannot do without this first novel, because much in the second would be unintelligible without it.” Clearly Dostoevsky conceived of his work in the form of two novels, of which the second (not known to us) is the main one. It follows that without this second novel much in the first cannot be entirely comprehensible. It is essential, therefore, that we seek out and consider elements which might provide some clue to the overall struc­ ture of the two novels. In this way the balance of parts in our presenta­ tion will not be upset, and we shall avoid making secondary things primary and primary ones secondary. We may note at the outset that Dostoevsky wrote his introductory remarks in 1878, that is, when beginning his work on The Brothers Karamazov. The idea of a continuation of the novel, then, was not an afterthought, the result of work already accomplished; rather, it pre­ ceded the writing of the part of the work we know. The elements of the work’s overall structure, then, its foundation, must certainly be in place in the work as we know it—indeed, they must even be partially visible. Otherwise the reader would not have been informed in the From Twentieth Century Views: Dostoevsky, edited by Robert Louis Jackson. © 1977 by Nauka, Leningrad, USSR. 151

152 / Valentina A. Vetlovskaya

introduction that the two novels have the “essential unity of the whole”; in fact, there would be no question at all of any essential unity. The introductory remarks provide some indication of the sense of the whole. The opening phrase of the introduction speaks of a biogra­ phy: “In beginning the biography of my hero, Aleksey Fyodorovich Karamazov,” etc. The narrator continues: “I have two novels and only one biography.” What is important here, first, is that the narrator­ author conceives of the whole as a biography, and, second, that Aleksey Fyodorovich Karamazov is the center of this biography. The preemi­ nence of precisely this hero is emphasized throughout the entire story, in spite of the fact that the first novel is called The Brothers Karamazov. The first line of the novel, closely related to the introduction, reads as follows: “Aleksey Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of. . . a landowner ... in our district.” The main hero is singled out. Further, the introductory story of Alyosha appears in a special chapter entitled, “The Third Son, Alyosha.” By contrast, the more laconic and dry accounts of Dmitry and Ivan appear in chapters that seem to diminish rather than accentuate the importance of these heroes: “He Gets Rid of His Eldest Son,” “The Second Marriage and the Second Family” (here Fyodor Pavlovich is in the foreground). We may recall at this point that the word used for “biography,” zhizneopisanie, signifies “vita.” The narrator of The Brothers Karamazov emerges—not obtrusively, but clearly enough—as the narrator of a vita with his “main” hero, Alyosha, as hero-saint. The point deserves special emphasis. In this connection I. P. Eryomin has written about the life of Theodosius of Pechersk: From his first appearance in Nestor’s Chronicle, Theodosius of Pechersk is presented to the reader in the “seraphic” image of the ideally positive Christian hero-saint. And he continues in the same basic image through the entire vita, accompanied by prayerfully reverential epithets. . . . Even in early youth, he is “one of God’s elect,” an “earthly angel” and a “heavenly human being.” “Drawn to God’s love,” even in childhood he reveals virtues not usually pos­ sessed by an ordinary person in such a totality; he performs acts that go beyond all norms of everyday human conduct: these acts—his spiritual exploits—evoke pious consternation

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in some people, in others, “unreasoning ones,” reproaches and even derision. The basic motifs and, in part, the tone of the preliminary charac­ terization of Alyosha remind the reader of the typical hagiographical tale. Thus, Alyosha has been living in the monastery “for the past year, . . . and seemed willing to be cloistered there for the rest of his life.” “He was ... an early lover of humanity,” the narrator further explains, “and that he adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul, struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of love.” The narrator will return to this motif again. The opposition of the “darkness of earthly malice” and the “fight of love,” and of (earthly) darkness and (heavenly) light in general, is a metaphor common to the vita narrative, and one that goes back to the evangelists’ texts. (This opposition is consistently pursued up to the end of the novel.) Like the typical hero of a hagiographie narrative, even in early youth Alyosha feels the urge to depart from the vain world, because earthy passions are alien to him. The complex relations between the ideal hero of the vita and the surrounding world make this hero strange to ordinary people and ordinary perception. This is the way Alyosha is presented to the reader. The narrator speaks right away of a strangeness, a certain eccentricity in him, but at the same time explains that these qualities do not, nevertheless, signify isolation: “On the contrary, it happens some­ times that such a person [the eccentric—V.V.], I dare say, carries within himself the very heart of the universal, and the rest of the men of his epoch have for some reason been temporarily torn from it.” As a result Alyosha is both set off against other people (this is typical for the hero of a vita), and closely linked to them, because it is impossible to go far from the “heart,” impossible to entirely break off from it. Such a twist is unusual for a vita. The desire for seclusion, the unchildlike pensiveness and concen­ tration of the young Alyosha, his alienation from the playfulness and joyfulness typical of children, pointed out by the narrator, develop the same idea of the hero’s “strangeness” and “eccentricity.” Such a devel­ opment is also typical of the vita narrative. But the “gift for arousing a special love for oneself,” confirmed many times subsequently, is a sign

154 / Valentina A. Vetlovskaya

of that side of Alyosha’s character that, despite any strangeness (or. perhaps, because of that strangeness), makes him dear to all people. “He never tried to show off among his schoolfellows” is the slightly altered expression of the motif of humility, the absence of pride typical of the hero of the vita. This motif is reiterated in the report that Alyosha “never resented an insult. It would happen that an hour after the offence he would address the offender or answer some question with as trustful and candid an expression as though nothing had happened between them” (part 1, bk. 1, chap. 4). The absence of pride, along with the complete indifference to worldly goods (money, for example, both his own and that of others) is emphasized by the words: “Another feature characteristic of him— and very much so—was that he never worried about whose means he was living on. In this respect he was the complete opposite of his older brother Ivan Fyodorovich.” With regard to this lack of the vain and sensitive pride with which his older brother is endowed, the narrator considers it necessary to note again the strangeness, the “apparent” holy-foolery of his “main” and “beloved” hero. (It is important that this holy-foolery comes not from indifference or incivility in relation to others, but, on the contrary, from an extreme and perhaps naïve trustfulness and sympathy toward people.) Alyosha’s “wild fanatical modesty and chastity” also belongs to the obligatory attributes of the hero of the vita—another feature that makes him strange from an ordinary point of view and that, for example, makes “all his schoolfellows from the bottom class to the top want to mock at him” and to look upon him “with compassion” (part 1, bk. 1, chap. 4). In general, the motifs that are enumerated here exhaust the pre­ liminary characterization of Alyosha. They are all marked and coordi­ nated with the usual representation of the hero of the vita, who, even in childhood, exhibits the uncommon characteristics of the future great ascetic and saint. Other motifs, too, are heard, in a very muffled form, but never­ theless from the beginning—motifs that contrast with those just intro­ duced and that are apparently intended to point not just to the future great ascetic, but also to the future (perhaps also great) sinner. Rather than analyzing them, however, let us merely say that the motives that compel Alyosha to elect the monastery as the lot most congenial to him also make this choice rather flimsy. The hero aspires to “truth” and to “great deeds” and wants to achieve these things as hastily as

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possible but, starting from this same aspiration, others go the opposite road. Alyosha “was convinced of the existence of God and immortal­ ity” (part 1, bk. 1, chap. 5), but after some time he could be “con­ vinced” by something else (after all, he is only beginning to live). Alyosha encounters an extraordinary elder in the monastery and falls in love with him (part 1, bk. 1, chaps. 4 and 5), but this encounter is fortuitous. Moreover, too strong a feeling of love for the elder alone is not such an unconditionally good thing as it might at first appear. These and similar considerations all arise in the reader’s mind not at once, but only later, when the motifs of Alyosha’s preliminary charac­ terization begin to recur. Acquiring additional hints and associations, they take on an ambiguous character, leading the reader to contemplate the idea of turns for the worse in the fate of the main hero. For example, the teachings of the elder make it clear that belief in God, which inspires the young hero, acquires the force of conviction only when it is the result of “the experience of active love” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 4). This “active” love is “a harsh and dreadful thing,” it is “labor and fortitude, and thus for some people, perhaps, a whole science.” Such a love the elder contrasts with “contemplative” love, which “is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 4). With the exception of the moment of self-admiration (which is in no way connected with Alyosha), everything in the characterization of “contemplative” love corresponds to the feeling with which Alyosha enters on the “monastic road.” The hero is not yet ready for an “active” love, for the “harsh and dreadful,” for “labor and fortitude.” There­ fore his choice, despite the fact that it is natural for this essentially saintly hero, has as yet the most hasty and preliminary character. It perhaps serves as a premonitory allusion to the future, but it is not very important in the present, for the hero begins directly from that with which he should have ended. As a result the image of the main hero of the “biography” is presented as mobile, capable of further change, and lacking that sche­ matic straightforwardness and fixity of form which burdens the typical hero of a vita. Let us stress that this changeability and mobility is indicated not so much in spite of the hagiographie canon, as within its boundaries, thanks to the ambiguity, created by the narration, of certain motifs originating in that canon. It is precisely because Alyosha is not yet ready to serve God and the “truth,” as he then imagined it, that the elder sends his “quiet

156 / Valentina A. Vetlovskaya

boy” out of the monastery: “This is not your place for the time. 1 bless you for great service in the world. Yours will be a long pilgrimage . . . You will have to bear all before you come back. There will be much to do. But I don’t doubt you, and so I send you forth . . . Work, work unceasingly” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 7). The fact that Alyosha is really still too young, unstable, and unconfirmed in his (still naïve) beliefs, is corroborated yet again by his reaction to the elder’s words. “Alyosha started, when the elder said, *. . . leave the monastery. Go away for good.’ ” The hero is perplexed, confused, frightened. “But how could he be left without him [the elder—V.V.]? How could he live without seeing and hearing him? Where should he go? He had told him not to weep, and to leave the monastery. Good God! It was long since Alyosha had known such anguish” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 7). The above-cited motifs (on the one hand, the hero’s uncommon­ ness even in early youth, his decision to go into a monastery; on the other, his lack of inner preparation for this exploit, his dispatch into the world for such preparation) signify that in this case we are dealing with the organic combination in one character of the two usual types of hagiographie hero. The first type is the hero who senses, almost from infancy, his lofty calling, and subsequently follows it without swerving (like Theodosius of Pechersk or Sergius of Radonezh). The second type is the hero who turns to God and gives himself up to the same asceticism after many trials, mistakes and errors (Ephraim Sirin). Alyosha’s dispatch from the monastery does confront him with this set of trials, for in relation to the hero of the vita, the world can only appear in its tempting aspect. After the presentation of the main hero, a motif arises that links his name with that of Aleksey the Man of God. This motif is at first heard obliquely. The hero of the vita, widely known in its time, is only recalled to the reader’s mind. The occasion for this reminder is the elder’s conversation with one of the devout women, who is wasting away with grief over her dead boy. To the elder’s question as to what her son was called, the mother answers: “Aleksey, Father.” “A sweet name. After Aleksey, the Man of God?” “Of God, Father, of God, Aleksey the Man of God!” “What a saint he was! I will remember him, mother.” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 3)

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Since the name of the main hero has already been mentioned and he himself has been presented to the reader in a hagiographie halo, the reminder of Aleksey the Man of God brings to mind certain details of the “biography” that support the idea of Alyosha’s closeness to the hagiographie hero mentioned here. Aleksey the Man of God was born in Rome; his parents were rich and distinguished Romans: “Under the emperors Arcadius and Honorius, at the end of the fourth century, there lived in Rome a distinguished man by the name of Euphimian, and his wife Aglaida.” In the version of the life found in the Lives of the Saints by Dimitrius of Rostov, we read: “There was in ancient Rome a pious man by the name of Euphimian, at the time of the pious emperors Arcadius and Honorius, great among the nobles and exceedingly wealthy.” In the Prologue version of the life of Aleksey the Man of God we read: “He was from ancient Rome, the son of Euphimian the patrician, his mother was Aglaida.” Clearly it is not by chance that it is precisely in the chapter, “The Third Son, Alyosha,” that the portrait of Fyodor Pavlovich is given, which ends with the words: “He was fond indeed of making fun of his own face, though, I believe, he was well satisfied with it. He used particularly to point to his nose, which was not very large, but very delicate and conspicuously aquiline. ‘A regular Roman nose,’ he used to say, ‘with my goitre I’ve quite the countenance of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period’ ” (part 1, bk. 1, chap. 4). To be sure, the evident resemblance between Fyodor Pavlovich and the father of the ancient hero of the vita, who was by habit quite pious, is confined to this casual remark. Of course, this remark is important in general as well: it likens the present to the past, gives the “particular” a broad significance, because the “confusion,” decay, and “fall” of present-day Russian life is related here to the “fall” of ancient Rome. If the analogy is continued, how­ ever, then a rebirth out of this “fall,” like the rebirth of ancient (pagan) Rome, must appear on the paths of Christianity. Moreover, because Rome was unable to deal with this problem in its own time, since, as Ivan explains, “Rome . . . retained too much of pagan civiliza­ tion and culture” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 5), then clearly the problem stands now before the “fallen” and also decaying Russia. All this is in accordance with Slavophile ideas and the Slavophile conception of the history of the West and Russia, with which Dostoevsky sympathized.

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If one believes the testimony of Vladimir Solovyov, these themes should have been strongly heard in the second novel. In the first novel they are only hinted at, and they are not the themes that are important for us now. We are interested in Alyosha and his connections with the hero of the ancient vita. It is likely that Fyodor Pavlovich’s claim to resemblance to the ancient Roman is, in this respect, a significant detail. One would think that one of Alyosha’s recollections, which origi­ nated in his infancy, has the same significance—a circumstance over which the narrator lingers with a degree of conscientiousness that is strange, it would seem, for such a trifle, and to which he subsequently returns. Alyosha “remembered one still summer evening ... ; in a corner of the room the holy image, before it a lighted lamp, and on her knees before the image his mother, sobbing hysterically with cries and moans, snatching him up in both arms, squeezing him close till it hurt, and praying for him to the Mother of God, holding him out in both arms to the image as though to put him under the Mother’s protec­ tion” (part 1, bk. 1, chap. 4). The mother’s prayer for her son, presented here as Alyosha’s most vivid recollection, is clearly a modification of a motif in the life of Aleksey the Man of God, in which the prayer originates either from the mother alone, as here (and as, for example, in the redaction of Dimitrius of Rostov), or from both parents (as in the edition in Dostoevsky’s library), and where it precedes the miraculous birth of the future saint. Thus in both cases the hero’s later career is linked with an anticipatory parental supplication, anguish over the son and tears. Also important is the fact that the prayer of Alyosha’s pious mother appeals precisely to the Mother of God and to her protection. In various redactions of this vita the saint, for whose sake God has been implored, leaving home, gives himself up to an ascetic life on the porch (or in the vestibule) of the temple of the Mother of God. After a certain time the Mother of God orders her servant to bring Aleksey into this temple, “for his prayer rises to God, and like a crown on the royal head, so does the Holy Spirit rest upon him.” In the sacred poem about Aleksey, which Dostoevsky knew as well as he knew the vita, the Mother of God also sends the saint back to his former home, to his father, mother, and spouse. In the novel, the sending of Alyosha from the monastery back into the world and also back to his relatives corresponds to this sending of the saint back to his relatives—by God’s will (in the vita),

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or by the command of the Mother of God (in the sacred poem). Alyosha is sent back into the world by his spiritual father, Father Zosima. It is subsequently pointed out by Ivan that this is a “divine” elder, a “Pater Seraphicus,” and consequently his will is the will of God. Not by chance, the Mother of God is also linked to the elder from the very beginning; among the few trifling, briefly noted objects in his elder’s cell, the icon of the Mother of God is singled out and emphasized twice: “The cell was not very large and had a faded look. It contained nothing but the necessary furniture, of course and poor quality. There were two pots of flowers in the window, and a number of icons in the corner—among them, one of the Mother of God, of enormous dimensions and painted, apparently, long before the schism. Before it a lamp was burning. Near it were two other icons in shining settings, and, next to them, carved cherubims, china eggs, a Catholic cross of ivory, and a Mater Dolorosa embracing it” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 2). Clearly, the combination of the Orthodox and Catholic images of the Mother of God in the elder’s cell, like the fact that the elder is at once a Russian ascetic and a Pater Seraphicus, is accorded particular significance here. After all, the life of Aleksey the Man of God is a very ancient vita. The events described in it date back to the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries, i.e., to the time when the division of the Christian church had not yet occurred. This life is familiar to Orthodox and Catholics alike. The Mother of God, at whose temple the saintly youth appears, is, as it were, at once the Orthodox Mother of God and the Catholic Mater Dolorosa. Father Zosima, who sends Alyosha into the world, to his relatives, being at once a Russian Orthodox ascetic and a Pater Seraphicus, reduplicates this same motif. Dostoevsky, though not overly concerned with formal matters (the precise reproduction of the sequence of hagiographical motifs and their literal transmission), nonetheless has adhered to the hagio­ graphie outline in the most important points of Alyosha’s story. The elder, for example, sends Alyosha back not only to his father and brothers (Alyosha himself recalls his deceased mother and upon arrival seeks out her grave), but also to his (here, it is true, future) bride. The complexity of Alyosha’s relations with Liza Khokhlakova is noted from the very beginning: Alyosha’s attachment to Liza counter­ vails his lofty goals.

160 I Valentina A. Vetlovskaya

“Why do you make fun of him [Alyosha—V.V.] like that, naughty girl?” the elder says to her. Liza suddenly and quite unexpectedly blushed. Her eyes flashed and her face became quite serious. She began speaking quickly and ner­ vously in a warm and resentful voice: “Why has he forgotten everything, then? . . . No, now he’s saving his soul! Why have you put that long gown on him? If he runs he’ll fall.” And suddenly she hid her face in her hands and went off into terrible, uncontrollable . . . laughter. The elder listened to her with a smile, and blessed her tenderly. . . . “I will certainly send him,” the elder decided. (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 4)

Let us note that it is hardly by chance that Alyosha’s future bride and spouse is called Liza. In the Russian versions of the life of Aleksey the Man of God, the name of the bride and spouse of the saint is not mentioned, but several variants of the sacred poem speak either of Katerina or of Lizaveta: The father permitted him to wed A princess renowned and promised to him, Lizaveta by name.

In the elder’s conversation with the devout women, where the name of Aleksey the Man of God is heard for the first time, the name of Lizaveta is heard as well:

“Is that your little girl?” “My little girl, Father, Lizaveta.” “May the Lord bless you both, you and your babe Liza­ veta ...” He blessed them all and bowed low to them. (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 3)

The chapter “A Lady of Little Faith” (following “Devout Peasant Women”) involves four characters: elders (Alyosha’s spiritual father, Father Zosima; Liza’s mother, Mme. Khokhlakova) and minors (Alyosha, Liza). In view of the consistency of motifs, Alyosha’s link with Aleksey the Man of God and Liza’s with Lizaveta, the bride and spouse of the saint in the Russian sacred poem, can be assumed, while the elder’s firm intention to send Alyosha to Liza after her mother’s

Alyosha and the Hagiographie Hero / 161

words and her own takes on the character of a betrothal. Subsequently this betrothal is confirmed. Alyosha says to Liza: “I shall be leaving the monastery altogether in a few days. If I go into the world, I must marry. I know that. He [the elder, Dostoevsky’s emphasis—V.V.] told me to marry, too. Whom could I marry better than you—and who would have me except you? I have been thinking it over” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 1). Aleksey the Man of God, the hero of the hagiographie narrative and of the sacred poem, is mentioned a few more times later in the novel. Thus, ordering his monks and devotees to read the sacred writings to the people, the elder also speaks of the Lives of the Saints and advises them to choose therefrom, at least “the life of Aleksey, the Man of God” (part 2, bk. 6, chap. 1). Later, in the scene at Grushenka’s, in response to Alyosha’s request that he not grow angry and condemn others, Rakitin, in irritation, replies directly: “You were so primed up with your elder’s teaching last night that now you have to let it off on me, Alyoshenka, Man of God!” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 3). The seminar­ ian Rakitin could not casually call Alyosha by the name of the saint. The diminutive form used by Rakitin, entirely alien to the vita, is known, however, to the sacred poem, in which it is, of course, uttered in a different spirit: He [the father of the saint—V.V.] calls the holy men to his house And gives a name to the baby, He gave him a sacred little name,— Lekseyushko, little Man of God.

The epithet “prince,” which Grushenka accords to Alyosha in the same scene, comes either from the vita, where this word is encoun­ tered extremely rarely, to be sure, or (what is much more likely) from the sacred poem, where it arises quite naturally against the background of the usual folk appellations, and is to be found pretty much everywhere. Later Mitya once again connects his younger brother with Aleksey the Man of God: “Damn ethics. I am done for, Aleksey, I am, you Man of God! I love you more than anyone. It makes my heart yearn to look at you” (part 4, bk. 11, chap. 4). Thus a motif (Alyosha-Aleksey the Man of God) that is introduced at first tentatively and as though in passing, is heard at the end of the novel in full force. As for the significance of this chain of motifs in the system of the entire novel, let us first of all emphasize the fact that, in connecting his hero with Aleksey the Man of God, Dostoevsky selects the central

162 / Valentina A. Vetlovskaya

figure of the most popular vita. “One may say without exaggeration.” writes V.P. Adrianova-Perets in her study devoted specifically to this vita, “that not one of the ascetics of the Russian land provoked such interest, aroused such sympathy for his life, as did Aleksey the Man of God.” In particular, the scholar sees the reason for such popularity in the fact that this vita absorbed many beloved motifs of Russian hagiog­ raphy (such motifs are also heard in The Brothers Karamazov, and several of them are enumerated above).

Combined ably into a single artistic story . . . they were associated in the consciousness of the Russian reader with a large number of familiar images and ideas, and thus they favored the popularity and the durability of this vita, which gave an impetus to further treatments both in literature and in popular poetry, in Russia as well. The sacred poem about Aleksey which Dostoevsky had in mind as well as the vita is just such a popular poetic reworking. The basic features of the vita of Aleksey the Man of God and of the sacred poem about him are Aleksey’s departure from home to perform the exploits customary for the hero of a vita, and his life in his parents’ home upon his return. It is precisely from the time when the saint, unrecognized, lodges in his parents’ home, that a grave tempta­ tion begins: the saint is faced not with a rejection of the world in order to save himself and, perhaps, others, but with a sojourn in the world for those same goals. In accordance with the spirit and meaning of the vita and the poem about Saint Aleksey, Alyosha Karamazov’s rapprochement with the world and his relations at first turns out to be a trial for him. The narrative is constructed so that after the scene in the monastery, which serves as the starting point of the action, Alyosha is sent on errands by first one, then another character; he listens to others’ stories, usually filled with perturbation and grief, that cast doubt on the affirmation of God’s endless love, charity, and beneficence. The tempting character of these encounters, commissions, and confessions is conveyed through various motifs. Among these motifs, the indication of Alyosha’s suffering (in contrast to his joyful sojourn in the monastery and his communion with the elder) is one of the most constant and important ones. “This request [of Katerina Ivanovna—V.V.] and the necessity of going had at once aroused an uneasy feeling in his heart, and this feeling had grown

Alyosha and the Hagiographie Hero ! 163

more and more painful all the morning” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 3). So begins Alyosha’s ascetic life in the world and his “ordeals.” On the way to Katerina Ivanovna, Alyosha’s brother Mitya stops him:

“I might have sent anyone, but I wanted to send an angel. ...” “Did you really mean to send me?” cried Alyosha with a distressed expression. (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 3)

Alyosha’s suffering, which reveals the gravity of others’ appeals and commissions for this “quiet boy,” is contrasted with the joy of those who, voluntarily or not, tempt Alyosha: “ ‘Oh, gods,’ exclaims, again, Mitya, T thank you for sending him to me by the back way, and he came to me like the golden fish to the silly old fishermen in the fable!’ ” (part 1, bk. 3 chap. 3). “ ‘Here he is! Here he is!’ yelled Fyodor Pavlovich, highly delighted at seeing Alyosha. ‘Join us. Sit down. Coffee is a lenten dish, but it’s hot and good. I don’t offer you brandy, you’re keeping the fast. But would you like some? No; I’d better give you some of our famous liqueur. . . . Now we’ve a treat for you, in your own line, too. It’ll make you laugh. Balaam’s ass has begun talking to us here’ ” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 6). “Alyosha left his father’s house,” the narrator further recounts, “feeling even more exhausted and dejected in spirit than when he had entered it. . . . He felt something bordering upon despair, which he had never known till then” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 10). The world into which Alyosha is sent by the elder disturbs and torments the young hero. Why, why, had he gone forth? Why had he sent him “into the world”? thinks Alyosha, returning to the monastery the very first day of his “travels.” Here was peace. Here was holiness. But there was confusion, there was darkness in which one lost one’s way and went astray at once. (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 11)

The day after this sorrowful return Father Paisy, again seeing Alyosha off “into the world,” pronounces unexpected parting words: “Remember, young man, unceasingly . . . that worldly science, which has become a great power, has . . . analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred of old” (part 2,

164 / Valentina A. Vetlovskaya

bk. 4, chap. 1). Hastening to “protect the young soul entrusted to him,” Father Paisy speaks words that are of the utmost importance for an understanding of subsequent events: “You are young,” he addresses Alyosha, “and the temptations of the world are great and beyond your strength to endure” (part 2, bk. 4, chap. 1). Alyosha’s meeting with his father, then with the schoolchildren, then the “lacerations,” of which the gravest is the last (the confession of Captain Snegiryov, in which the theme of the innocently suffering child is heard), continues the grave series of “temptations” of Alyosha. The gloomy impressions from his first days of acquaintance with the world, even before the conversation with his brother Ivan, behind whom stands “worldly science,” make Alyosha let slip a phrase ex­ pressing something that was “already undoubtedly tormenting him”: “And perhaps I don’t even believe in God” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 1). Alyosha’s sudden confession, on the one hand, and Father Paisy’s warning, on the other, uttered on the same day as the brothers’ meeting in the tavern, both have a very direct relation to that meeting. Ivan’s tempting speech, which comes along with the other temptations but is stronger than they are, is addressed to the hero, who is already disturbed by the world’s “darkness.” Here the suffering child, familiar to the reader and to Alyosha through the captain’s confession, arises once more on the lips of the “learned” Ivan, now as a kind of “em­ blem” and basic argument of “worldly science,” which has left “noth­ ing ... of all that was sacred of old.” Having told Alyosha about the general and the persecuted child Ivan asks:

“Well—what did he deserve? To be shot? To be shot for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!” “To be shot,” murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan with a pale, twisted smile. “Bravo!” cried Ivan, delighted. “If even you say so.” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 4)

The delight of the atheist Ivan, in accordance with the author’s concep­ tion, must not only indicate temptation, as did earlier the delight of Mitya or Fyodor Pavlovich, but also compromise Alyosha’s words in the eyes of the reader: this delight signifies that here Alyosha proves to be too close to his older brother. Ivan continues thus: “You’re a pretty monk! So there is a little devil sitting in your heart, Alyosha Karamazov!” In the author’s opinion, the reader must guess that if even the atheist

Alyosha and the Hagiographie Hero / 165

Ivan perceives no sanctity in Alyosha’s reaction (“Shoot him!”), and begins to speak of a “devil,” then it must be that there is no such sanctity. Fulfilling others’ requests, listening to others (above all his brother Ivan), Alyosha gives way to temptation. The “darkness” of the world does not remain alien to this hero’s heart, and not only because he is too young, but also because Alyosha, as he himself explains more than once, is a Karamazov. Notwithstanding his strangeness, Alyosha is the same sort of man as everyone else (in contrast to the vita and the poem, in the novel this motif is carried out quite definitely). The very deep affinity of the “angel” Alyosha for the other “sinners” presumes, for the young and inexperienced hero, the possibility of committing the same errors as the others. “Yes, yes, it is he, it is Pater Seraphicus, he will save me—from him and forever!” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 5)—races helplessly through Alyosha’s mind when he hurries to the monastery after the conversation with Ivan. The death of Father Zosima and everything that follows it is a trial that makes Alyosha’s heart overflow with suffering, and provokes his reproaches and indignation. Speaking of these events, the narrator distinguishes two circumstances that “exerted a very strong influence on the heart and soul of the main . . . hero of the story” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 1). The first is Ivan’s pernicious influence on Alyosha. “Oh, it was not that something of the fundamental, elemental, so to speak, faith of his soul had been shaken. . . . Yet a vague but tormenting and evil impression left by his conversation with Ivan the day before, suddenly revived again now in his soul and seemed forcing its way to the surface of his consciousness” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 2). Outraged by the injustice of Heaven in relation to the deceased elder, Alyosha repeats Ivan’s words: “I am not rebelling against my God; I simply ‘don’t accept His world.’ ” The blasphemy of these words on the lips of the young ascetic is obvious. “This is a jolly fine chance and mustn’t be missed.” Rakitin immediately decides (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 2). The second circumstance that the narrator emphasizes (both justifying and condemning Alyosha) is that Alyosha loved his spiritual father, Father Zosima, too much: “The fact is that all the love that lay concealed in his pure young heart for everyone and everything had, for the past year, been concentrated—and perhaps wrongly so—on one being, now deceased. It is true that that being had for so long been accepted by him as his ideal, that all his young strength and energy could not but

166 / Valentina A. Vetlovskaya

turn towards that ideal, even to the forgetting at the moment of everyone and everything” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 2). These explanations by the narrator are extremely important. Growing indignant and grumbling, Alyosha, like Ivan, demands “supreme justice,” which, in the young hero’s opinion, has been “violated.” Instead of the glory and triumph of the deceased righteous man, whom he loved with an exceptional love, Alyosha sees this righteous man “degraded and dishonored” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 2). The narrator insistently strives to show that Alyosha’s error (his grum­ bling and indignation) is rooted in the exceptional nature of his love, which—in its own way, of course, but essentially the same as with Ivan—destroys the living connection between things. Alyosha invol­ untarily forgets that his elder belongs entirely to the world, “sinful” and “stinking” in its sins, and thus bears the guilt for its ugliness along with everyone else. According to the logic of the narration it emerges that the elder bears this guilt to an even greater degree than do others; remitting others’ sins, he takes them upon his own soul and, conse­ quently, answers for them, for it is clearly only under such a condition that he has the right to forgive others. The idea of the connection between each person and everyone else, and the responsibility of each for everyone, repeated many times by the elder himself during his life, underlies the artistic narrative here as well. But it is precisely this idea that Alyosha has forgotten in his grief. If Alyosha had loved the elder more “correctly,” that is, not with an exceptional love but in the same way that he loved others, he would not have found grounds in the righteous man’s “shame” for the condemnation of “God’s world.” Everything in this world is con­ nected. And just as there are none who are completely righteous, so there are none who are completely sinful. For this reason the scene of Alyosha and Grushenka, coming after the scene of the young hero’s bitter suffering, harmoniously complements the story about the righ­ teous man’s “shame.” Here the sinful woman unexpectedly reveals a degree of love, reverence for sanctity, and compassion for her dispir­ ited brother that, considering her “incorrect” view of things, would not be supposed of her. Thanks to this, Grushenka is able to encourage Alyosha: the loftiness of her soul, made manifest “at that moment,” is the essential link in the chain of phenomena that, according to the author’s conception, makes their entire relationship not frightfully incongruous but comforting and harmonious. Alyosha’s dream (“Cana of Galilee”) naturally concludes these

Alyosha and the Hagiographie Hero / 167

scenes. The boundlessness of God’s love for all people and the joy of those who are united by this love are manifested here to the young ascetic as if before his very eyes. The link of everyone with each other, salutary and joyful when God is among people (a circumstance which must be construed in a broad sense), staggers Alyosha’s soul with ecstasy. The idea of the primordial beauty and purity of “God’s world,” and of the responsibility of all people for the fact that they make this beautiful world vicious, is what the author tries to emphasize in “Cana of Galilee.” It is just this idea that Alyosha suddenly grasps, “for the rest of his life and forever and ever”: “What was he weeping over? Oh! in his rapture he was weeping even over those stars, which were shining to him from the abyss of space . . . He longed to forgive everyone and for everything, and to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for him­ self, but for all men, for all and for everything. ‘And others are praying for me too,’ echoed again in his soul. . . . He had fallen on the earth a weak boy, but he rose up a resolute champion, and he knew and felt it suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 4). Thus the young ascetic’s passionate and exceptional love for his spiritual father yields, at this important moment, to a just as passionate love for the world and for all people without exception. “He who loves everyone alike in compassion and indifferently,” reasons Isaak Sirin, mentioned and quoted in The Brothers Karamazov, “has achieved perfection.” Alyosha (not intellectually, but emotionally) finds a way out of suffering in the joyful acceptance of “God’s world,” and in union with everything and everyone. This loving union with people, the intimate inclusion of them all (including the most sinful) in his soul eliminates the contradiction between love of God and love of people— the basic contradiction overcome by the hero of the ancient vita, Aleksey the Man of God. For such an unqualified love, the possibility of which is indicated by the moment of Alyosha’s ecstasy, is itself, in the author’s conception, divine love. “ ‘Someone visited my soul in that hour,’ Alyosha would say afterwards, with firm faith in his words” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 4). “ ‘Brothers,’ the elder used to teach, ‘have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. . . . Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love’ ” (part 2, bk. 6, chap. 3)

168 / Valentina A. Vetlovskaya

If the moment of Alyosha’s ecstasy is prolonged (as the words of the elder prophesy) or if this moment really acquires the greatest significance in the hero’s life (as the narrator foretells), the world will cease to play its tempting role for the young ascetic. When this world is revealed to the hero in the beauty and harmony of all its relations, and not in an ugly conglomeration of absurdities, when it evokes an ecstatic rapture, then there is no place for the condemnation of its creator. Dostoevsky clearly tries to carry out this idea. True, it is possible that the moment of Alyosha’s ecstasy before “God’s world” is only an anticipation. It is possible that subsequently Alyosha will turn from the “correct road” once more. All this is possible. But if Alyosha does turn from this road, then it would certainly be in order for him to enter onto it later, once and for all. It is precisely this outcome that the logic of the artistic narrative demands. A person who joyfully takes into his soul the entire world (“both the whole, and every grain of sand”) without exception, accepting all people in spite of their “stinking sin,” loving it all with an equally deep love, in other words, a person who comprehends the beauty and blessing of God’s creation and along with it the beauty and blessing of the creator, is, of course, a “man of God.” The world and God are harmoniously reconciled in the soul of this hero. So Alyosha emerges (or must emerge) from the grave trial to which the “divine” elder sends him. And thus Dostoevsky interprets the central figure and the central confrontation of the vita of Aleksey the Man of God against a new background. In the continuation of the novel about Alyosha this interpretation would, it is likely, appear more clearly, but even now it is sufficiently obvious.

Chronology

1821

1837 1838 1839

1843

1844

1845

1846

1847

1848

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky bom October 30 in a Moscow hospital for the poor, where his father was a resident surgeon. Death of Dostoevsky’s mother. Dostoevsky enters military engineering school in St. Petersburg. In the wake of increasingly harsh and abusive treatment, Dostoevsky believes, the serfs on Dostoevsky’s father’s estate castrate and murder their master. Recent evidence, however, casts doubt on the circumstances of his father’s death. Dostoevsky finishes engineering course; joins engineering department of the War Ministry. Resigns from his post. Publishes his translation of Eugenie Grandet. Finishes his first novel, Poor Folk, which wins the acclaim of radical critic Belinsky. Poor Folk published in St. Petersburg Miscellany. The Double published in Notes from the Fatherland two weeks later. “A Novel in Nine Letters” published in The Contempo­ rary. Dostoevsky frequents meetings of the Petrashevsky circle, a clandestine society of progressive thinkers. Pub­ lishes pamphlets in the St. Petersburg Chronicle and the St. Petersburg News. Publication of A Strange Wife, A Faint Heart, “The Stories of a Veteran,” Hie Christmas Tree and the Wedding, White Nights, The Jealous Husband, and The Landlady, all in Notes from the Fatherland. The latter work draws harsh criticism from Belinsky. 169

170 ! Chronology

1849

1854

1856 1857 1858 1859

1860

1861

1862 1863

1864

1865 1866

1867 1868 1869 1870 1871-72 1873-74

Dostoevsky arrested for his role in the Petrashevsky cir­ cle, and imprisoned in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress. Sentenced to death, but at the last minute the sentence is commuted to four years of forced labor in Siberia. Sent to Omsk, where he remains until 1854. Dostoevsky enlists in the army as a private and is sent to Semipalatinsk, near the Mongolian border. Promoted to lieutenant. Marries Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, a widow. A Little Hero published anonymously in Notes from the Fatherland. Released from army; leaves Semipalatinsk for Tver. Is permitted to return to St. Petersburg. “Uncle’s Dream” published in The Russian Word; A Friend of the Family published in Notes from the Fatherland. Introduction and first chapter to Notes from the House of the Dead are published. Work meets opposition from the cen­ sor at The Russian Word. Notes from the House of the Dead in its entirety and The Insulted and the Injured are published in Time, a journal recently started by Dostoevsky’s brother Mikhail. First trip abroad. “An Unpleasant Predicament” published in Time. “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” published in Time. Time is suppressed. Second trip abroad. Publishes magazine Epoch with brother Mikhail. Notes from Underground published in Epoch. Death of Dostoevsky’s wife and, within a few months, his brother. Epoch ceases publication. Third trip abroad. Crime and Punishment serialized in The Russian Herald. Anna Grigorievna Snitkina comes to work for Dostoevsky as a stenographer. The Gambler published. Marries Snitkina. The couple goes abroad to live for the next four years. The Idiot serialized in The Russian Herald. A daughter, Sofia, is bom, but dies two months later. Daughter Lyubov’ bom in Dresden. The Eternal Husband published in Dawn. Returns to St. Petersburg. Son Fyodor bom. The Possessed serialized in The Russian Herald. Editor of The Citizen. Diary of a Writer begins publication.

Chronology / 171

1875 1876 1877

1878

1879-80 1881

Son Alexey (Alyosha) bom. A Raw Youth serialized in Notes from the Fatherland. “A Gentle Spirit” published in Diary of a Writer. “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” published in Diary of a Writer. Death of son Alyosha. Dostoevsky visits Optina monas­ tery with Vladimir Solovyov; they meet Starets Amvrozy. The Brothers Karamazov serialized in The Russian Herald. Dostoevsky dies on January 28.

Contributors

Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale Univer­ sity, is the author of The Anxiety of Influence, Poetry and Repression, and many other volumes of literary criticism. His forthcoming study, Freud: Transference and Authority, attempts a full-scale reading of all of Freud’s major writings. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, he is general editor of five series of literary criticism published by Chelsea House. During 1987-88, he served as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Po­ etry at Harvard University.

Richard A. Peace is Professor of Russian at Bristol University. He is the author of Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels, Chekhov: A Study of the Four Major Plays, and The Enigma of Gogol.

Michael Holquist is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of Dostoevsky and the Novel and co-author of a biography of Bakhtin.

Robert L. Belknap is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University and the author of The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov. Gary Saul Morson is Associate Professor of Russian at Northwest­ ern University and the author of The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Tradition of Literary Utopia.

Maire Jaanus Kurrick teaches English at Barnard College. She is the author of Literature and Negation. Robert Louis Jackson is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Yale University. His books include The Art of Dostoevsky : Deliriums and Nocturnes, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form, and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in Russian Literature. 173

174 / Contributors

John Jones, who has lectured as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, is a Fellow of New College. His books include The Egotis­ tical Sublime, John Keats’s Dream of Truth, Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, and Dostoevsky. Valentina A. Vetlovskaya is a senior research fellow at the Push­ kin Institute of Russian Literature in Leningrad.

Bibliography

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Acknowledgments

“Justice and Punishment” (originally entitled “Justice and Punishment: The Broth­ ers Karamazov") by Richard Peace from Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels by Richard Peace, © 1971 by Cambridge University Press. Re­ printed by permission of Cambridge University Press. “How Sons Become Fathers” by Michael Holquist from Dostoevsky and the Novel by Michael Holquist, © 1977 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. “The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel” by Robert L. Belknap from Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800-1914, edited by William Mills Todd 111, © 1978 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Uni­ versity. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Stanford University Press. “Verbal Pollution in The Brothers Karamazov" by Gary Saul Morson from PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3 (1978), © 1978 by NorthHolland Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of North-Holland Publishing Company. “The Self’s Negativity” (originally entitled “The Novel and Self’s Negativity”) by Maire Jaanus Kurrick from Literature and Negation by Maire Jaanus Kurrick, © 1979 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of Columbia University Press.

“The Wound and the Lamentation: Ivan’s Rebellion” by Robert Louis Jackson from The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes by Robert Louis Jackson, © 1981 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. “On The Brothers Karamazov" by John Jones from Dostoevsky by John Jones, © 1983 by John Jones. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press.

“Alyosha and the Hagiographie Hero” by Valentina A. Vetlovskaya from Twenti­ eth Century Views: Dostoevsky, edited by Robert Louis Jackson and translated by Nancy Pollack and Susanne Fusso, © 1977 by Nauka, Leningrad, USSR.

181

182 / Acknowledgments

Reprinted by permission of VAAP (All-Union Association of Authors’ Rights). This essay originally appeared in Poetika Romana “Brat’ia Karamazovy” (Leningrad: Nauka, 1977), pp. 163-83.

Index

141-42; as communication system, 57-58; and Crime and Punishment, 83; Dostoevsky’s attitude toward, 1; epigraph of, 143-44, 146, 147; epilogue of, 145, 148, 149; and failure of literature, 94-95; and Freud’s primal horde myth, 40-43; Grand Inquisitor legend in, 4-5; how many “brothers” in, 94; humans as spiritual animals in, 143, 144, 145; murder scene/ night in, 91, 137; as narrative, 2; as novel of crime and punish­ ment, 139; as novel of generation gap, 139; as novel of nudges, 137; as novel of smells, 135, 137, 141, 146; as novel without climaxes, 145; “now” which never arrives in, 139, 146, 148; and The Possessed, 143, 147, 148; spreading of themes in, 138-39, 144—45; as two novels, 95, 151-52, 158

Adrianova-Perets, V. P., 162 Afanasiy, 32, 107 Agricultural symbolism: and Alyosha, 30-31, 124; and Ivan’s rebellion, 126-27; in Zosima’s teaching, 27-29 Aleksey the Man of God, 156-59, 160, 161-62, 167, 168 Andrey (coachman), 26, 35 “Atheism” (planned Dostoevsky novel), 81-82 Austen, Jane, 113, 116, 117 Averkiev, Dmitry Vasilievich, Likho, 60-61, 62, 63, 64 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 54 Bakunin, Mikhail, 56-57 Ballin (Kharkov businessman), 73-75 Barsov, E. V., 121 Bateson, Gregory, 91 Belinsky, V. G., 56-57, 68, 69, 73, 75, 80-81, 82 Belov, S. V., 74 Berdyaev, Nikolay, 51 Bernard, Claude, 73 Bible, the. See Job, Book of; St. John Blake, William, 1-2, 3; on Milton and Satan, 83 Brothers Karamazov, The, 1, 5; Alyosha’s preeminence in, 152; apocalyptic naturalism in,

Camus, Albert, on Ivan, 132 Cana feast and miracle, 30, 115, 147, 148, 166-67 Candide, Dostoevsky plans version of, 81-82 Ceres and Demeter, cult of, 27 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay, What Is to Be Done?, 73, 77 183

184 ! Index

Children: Alyosha’s treatment of, 34; and Dmitri, 25, 26, 35; and Ilyusha’s funeral, 36-37; Ivan on cruelties toward, 11, 13, 35, 44, 54, 122; and Lise, 34, 35 Christ: Dmitri as, 26-27; Dostoevsky on, 50; and father-son relation, 50-51; and Grand Inquisitor, 45, 49-50, 65, 66, 82, 94, 103, 107; and Ivan on human unworthiness, 128; Ivan as imitating, 124, 126, 132-33; Kolya on, 79; as model for Alyosha, 49, 50; and recognition of other, 108 Christianity: and fathers and sons, 50; and Russian-Rome anal­ ogy, 157 Chulkov, George, 80, 81 Church and state: and Grand Inquisitor, 12-13, 18; and justice/punishment, 9-10; and Zosima, 18-19 Conrad, Joseph, 147 Conscience: of Grand Inquisitor, 103; of heart vs. reason, 109; of Ivan, 21, 22, 102; and Ivan’s speech, 112; and “mysterious visitor,” 27; and other as subject, 107; and Smerdyakov, 118; Zosima on, 10, 19, 22 Consciousness: Ballin on, 74—75; and conscience, 109; Dmitri as, 5; and Ivan’s monologue, 111-12; openness of, 97; as rational subjectivity (Hegelian), 113, 114; as recognition of coexistence, 113-14; and secular­ ization of devil and God, 105; and selfhood, 106 Crime and Punishment, 14—15; and Averkiev, 62; and Brothers Karamazov, 83; epilogue of, 139, 144, 145; Raskolnikov’s article in, 8; and regeneration/ resurrection, 141—42; and Mrs. Svidrigailov’s bad breath, 135

Crystal Palace, the, 14

Darwin, Charles, 39 Demeter, 27, 28 Descartes, René, 104 Devil(s): Dostoevsky’s treatment of, 58-64; and Grand Inquisitor, 110; Ivan on, 13, 59, 60, 80, 116; Ivan’s confronta­ tion with, 4, 19-22, 45, 61-64, 97-98, 111; Ivan’s dilemma over, 115; Ivan’s relation to, 98- 103, 104, 105; and negation, 98, 101, 103-5 Devils, The, 17, 27 Diary of a Writer, The, 89 Dickens, Charles, 116 Dimitrius of Rostov, Lives of the Saints, 157 Dolinin, Arkady, 80, 81, 82 Dostoevsky, Aleksey (son of Fyodor), 13, 37 Dostoevsky, Fyodor: and Blake, 1-2; and Dmitri, 4; and Hugo, 138; and Ivan, 2, 4, 53, 54—57, 58, 67; on Pushkin, 15; and sacrifice of individual happiness, 15 14“Dostoyevski and Parricide” (Freud), 2 Double, The, 147 Douglas, Mary, 86-87 Eliot, George, 109, 113, 116, 117 Eliseev, Grigory Zakharevich, 72, 73, 75 Enigmatic Man, An (Leskov), 72, 78 Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, 89 Eryomin, I. P., 152 Euripides, 144 Evil: as anomaly, 86; of Ivan, 104; problem of, 67; as unaccount­ able, 94. See also Job, Book of

Index ! 185

Faith; of Alyosha vs. Dmitri, 146; Ivan’s denial of, 100-101, 111; as love not reason, 108; and recognition of other, 108 Father, the: and Czar/God, 2-3, 50; in Freud’s primal horde myth, 39—40; and Oedpial crime, 25 Fathers and Sons (Turgenev), 77, 78 Faust (Goethe), 101-3, 104 Ferapont, Father, 33, 60, 62 Fetyukovich, 23 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 103, 105 Fish, Stanley, 83 Fonvizina, N. D., letter to, 50 Freedom: Christ’s offer of, 103; and devil of intellect, 101; vs. Grand Inquisitor authority, 4, 44, 45, 103 Freud, Sigmund: on Brothers Karamazov, 5, 42; “Dostoyevski and Parricide,” 2; on God, 50; primal-horde myth of, 2, 39-43, 49, 51; Totem and Taboo, 2, 39-40 Freudian master biography, 42-43; and Alyosha, 40, 42, 48-50, 51; and Dmitry, 42, 48; and Ivan, 40, 42, 43—46; and Smerdyakov, 40, 41, 42, 43 From the Other Shore (Herzen), 56

source for, 81; and Christ, 45, 49-50, 65, 66, 82, 94, 103, 107; and devil, 102-3, 104, 110; Dostoevsky’s letter on, 54-57; and grace, 84; and hell, 7; and Ivan on human unworthiness, 128; and Kolya, 76-77, 79; D. H. Lawrence on, 53-54, 55; master-slave reality in, 107, 108; misreading of, 55, 82-83, 84; and parenthood, 44-45; and punishment, 12, 19; and separateness, 110; and Smerdy­ akov, 90; and Zosima, 4, 18-19, 29, 49-50 Grigorev, Apollon, 81 Grigory, 88 Grushenka, 145; and Alyosha, 30, 145, 146, 161, 166; and devils, 62; in Dmitri’s dream, 26; and hell, 7; and male fantasy, 3; and Old Karamazov, 137; and Rakitin as Judas, 70 Guilt: of Dmitri, 24—27; of Ilyusha, 35; in intellectual inspiration for crime, 36, 76; of Ivan, 21-22, 36, 63; and Ivan’s rebellion, 125; Kolya Krasotkin on, 36; shared, 140; and Zosima on Christ, 67. See also Conscience; Sin

Girard, René, 51 God, 5; Alyosha on, 115, 164; and devil’s nihilism, 21-22; and father, 2-3, 50; Ivan on, 13, 15, 59, 80, 116, 124, 127-28; Kolya on, 79; and myths of subjectivity, 115; and Old Karamazov as father, 44 Goethe, J. W. von: and devil scene, 63, 98, 99; Faust, 101— 3, 104; and negation, 111 “Grand Inquisitor” legend, the, 4—5, 64—66; Alyosha’s com­ ment on, 66-67; Belinsky as

Hagiographie narrative: and Aloysha as hero, 153-61; and Zosima’s biography, 46 Hegel, G. W. F., 105-6, 111 Hell: in Brothers Karamazov, 7-8; and Ivan’s rebellion, 126, 131; and “Mokroye,” 26; Zosima on, 7, 67, 115 Herzen, Aleksandr, 56-57, 66, 68, 73, 75, 82 Herzenstube, 142—43, 145, 149 Hoffman, E. T. A., 62, 63 House of the Dead, The, 139, 141-42, 144

186 / Index

Hugo, Victor, 138 Idiot, The, 17, 33, 35, 62 Ilyusha Snegirev, 13, 35-37, 76, 77-78, 87, 148 Individualism, Dostoevsky’s criti­ cism of, 106, 108-9 Intellect: and Grand Inquisitor, 103; and Ivan vs. devil, 99100, 101, 102; Ivan dominated by, 1, 4, 20, 21. See also Reason and rationality Iosif, Father, 8 Ippolit (The Idiot), 13, 62

Jakobson, Roman, 57 James, Henry, 138 Job, Book of, 1; and devil, 21, 63-64; Grigory reads, 88; and Old Karamazov as father-image, 3; and Zosima, 4, 16 John the Merciful, Saint, 18, 130. See also St. John, The Gospel According to Jones, John, 2, 3 Justice: Alyosha on, 29-30, 166; church vs. state conception of, 9; of Dmitri’s going to Siberia, 143; eternal vs. earthly, 21; and Grand Inquisitor, 65-66; and Ivan’s rebellion, 11-12, 12-13, 16, 1530, 124-25, 126, 129, 130, 132; and sacrifice of individual happiness, 14-15; Zosima on, 16-17, 23 Karamazov, Adelaida Miusova (mother of Dmitri), 41 Karamazov, Aleksey (Alyosha, Alesha), 152; and Aleksey the Man of God, 156-59, 160, 161-62, 167, 168; and brotherhood, 31—32; and Cana miracle, 30, 115, 146—47, 148,

166-67; as Christian visonary, 1; destiny of, 147—48, 168; and devils, 60; and Dmitri, 48, 161, 163; faith of, 146; Freudian biography of, 40, 42, 48-50, 51; on God, 115, 164; and Grushenka, 145, 146, 161, 166; as hero, 146, 152; as hero-saint, 152-61; and Ilyusha (“Fathers and Children”), 36-37; Ivan compared with, 152, 154, 166; Ivan as hope of, 117-18; and Ivan’s rebellion, 13-14, 70, 119, 164-65; and Ivan’s speech, 112; and Kolya Krasotkin, 75; and Lise, 34, 35, 114, 159-61; and punish­ ment, 13-14; and Rakitin, 69-70, 136, 161, 165; and selfhood, 113, 114-15; as united with earth, 30-31, 124; world as suffering and temptation for, 162-65, 168; and Zosima, 29-31, 33-34, 42, 49, 148, 155, 156, 159, 165-66; and Zosima’s biography, 47—48 Karamazov, Dmitri: and Alyosha, 48, 152, 161, 163; and brotherhood, 109; as conscious­ ness, 5; on contradictions of world, 86; Dostoevsky as, 4; dream of, 24-26, 140-41, 143, 146; and earth, 28-29; faith of, 146; Freudian biography of, 42, 48; and “Grand Inquisitor,” 4, 5; guilt and punishment of, 22, 23-26, 143, 144, 145; as hero, 146; Herzens tube cares for, 142—43; Ilinsky as source for, 139; and Ivan, 4, 112; and Katerina, 109, 114; and night of murder, 137; Old Karamazov beaten by, 137, 139; pillow provided for while asleep, 25, 113, 141; and Rakitin, 73, 136-37; rebirth of, 140, 143, 145, 146; self unclear to, 106;

Index / 187

Karamazov (continued) sensual nature of, 1; and smell, 135-36; and Zosima, 22, 27, 28, 29, 33, 48, 145 Karamazov, Fyodor Pavlovich (Old Karamazov), 2-3, 137-39; as Adam, 1; brothers’ desire for death of, 41, 48, 49, 137; on devils, 59; and father of Aleksey the Man of God, 157-58; Lizaveta raped by, 41, 88; and old myths, 115—16; paradoxes of, 91; and primal horde myth, 2, 40—41, 42-43; and Smerdyakov, 41, 42, 43, 87, 136; on Zosima, 28, 32-33 Karamazov, Ivan: and Alyosha, 112, 117-18, 152, 154, 166; article on ecclestiastical courts by, 8-10, 12, 13, 90; and Belinsky, 81; characters tied to, 67-68; and coexistence with other, 110-11; on devil, 13, 59, 60, 80, 116; devil confronts, 4, 19-22, 45, 61-64, 97-98, 111; and devil myth, 115; devil’s relation to, 98-103, 104, 105; as divided (ambivalent), 8, 10, 18, 66, 79; and Dmitri, 4, 112; as Don Quixote, 111; Dostoevesky’s attitude toward, 2, 4, 53, 54—57; Dostoevsky’s discrediting of, 58, 67; Freudian biography of, 40, 42, 43-46; on God, 13, 15, 59, 80, 116; guilt of, 36; and hell, 7; and immortality, 115—16; as intellectdominated, 1, 4, 20, 21, 102; and Kolya Krasotkin, 75-82; and Lise, 35; and love, 18, 130, 166; and murder scene, 91; and Rakitin, 68-75, 136; and rational subjectivity, 113; and recognition of other, 115; self-doubts of, 110—11; and Smerdyakov’s paradoxes, 89—91; Smerdyakov as parody of, 4;

Smerdyakov’s relation to, 43, 76, 83, 97, 106, 112, 137, 139; speech of, 111, 112; trial appearance of, 111-12; and Zosima, 22. See also “Grand Inquisitor” legend Karamazov, Ivan, “rebellion” of, 10-14, 15-16, 18, 119^20, 122-33; and Alyosha, 13-14, 49, 70, 119, 164-65; and Freudian biography, 44; and God as merchant, 124, 127-28; and immortality of suffering chil­ dren, 122f as lamentation, 420-22, 132; logic of, 19; narrative-to-poetry leap in, 123^24; and unacceptability of reconciliation, 13QrOl; vs. Zosima on resurrection, 129^30 Karamazov, Sophia Ivanovna (mother of Ivan and Alyosha), 41 Karamazov Companion, A (Terras), 1 Karamazovism, 40-41, 42 Karenina, Anna, 113 Katerina Ivanovna: and Alyosha in world, 162-63; and Alyosha on brotherhood, 31; and Dmitri, 109, 114; and Ivan, 43—44; and male fantasy, 3 Khokhlakov, Lise (Liza), 34, 35, 60, 62, 114, 159-61 Khokhlakov, Mrs., 18, 160 Kierkegaard, Soren, 108 Kirillov (The Devils), 17 Koteliansky, S. S., 53 Krasotkin, Kolya, 35-36, 50, 75-82, 148-49 Lacan, Jacques, 113 “Landlady, The”, 59 Lawrence, D. H., on “Grand Inquisitor,” 53-54, 55, 82 Lebedev (The Idiot) 35 Lebyadkin, Marya (The Devils), 27, 33

188 / Index

Leskov, Nikolay, An Enigmatic Man, 72, 78 Likho (Averkiev), 60-61, 62, 63, 64 Liubimov, Nicolai Alekseevich, letter to, 54, 55, 57, 63-64, 66, 78, 82 Lives of the Saints (Dimitrius of Rostov), 157 Lizaveta, 41, 87-88, 136 Lobachevsky, Nikolay, 15 Logic or geometry, Euclidean and non-Euclidean: and Grand Inquisitor, 66; and Ivan’s rebellion, 15-16, 86, 123, 125, 130-31; of Zosima, 19. See also Intellect; Reason and rationality Love: active vs. contemplative, 155; of Alyosha, 34, 155, 166, 167-68; and devil on mortality, 102; as free choice, 109; and Ivan, 18, 130, 166; self as, 108; Zosima on, 18, 66, 155 Lukâcs, Gyorgy, 51, 118 Marfa Petrovna, 88 Markel (Zosima’s brother), 13, 46, 107 Mil ton, John, 58, 83 Minaev, Dmitry, 72-73, 75 Miracles: in Alesha’s dream, 30; at Cana, 30, 115, 147, 148, 166-67; and Grand Inquisitor’s authority, 44; and Kolya’s “resurrection” of dog, 76, 77; and Zosima, 19, 29 Miusov (Muisov), 8, 14, 89, 91 Mochulsky, Konstantin, 132 “Mokroye,” 26 Murin (“The Landlady”), 59 Myshkin (The Idiot), 9, 17, 33

Nihilism: devil on, 21; and Ivan, 17-18; and Kolya Krasotkin, 36; and Old Karamazov, 3

Notes from the Underground. See Underground Man

Oedipus complex, 39-40; and crime, 25. See also Freudian master biography Old Karamazov. See Karamazov, Fyodor Pavlovich Oresteia, The, 136 Paisiy, Father, 8, 12, 163-64 Parricide: in Freud’s primal horde myth, 39—40; and Ivan, 21; and Old Karamazov’s purpose, 2-3; and Smerdyakov’s plot, 94 Poor People (Dostoevsky), 135 Possessed, The: and Brothers Karamazov, 143, 144, 147, 148; conclusion of, 46; and Crime and Punishment, 139—40; demons in, 59; Dostoevsky on figures in, 54, 56; epigraph of, 143—44, 147; “salvation” in, 142 Praise of Folly, The (Erasmus), 89 Punishment, 7-8; of Dmitri, 22, 24; and Grand Inquisitor, 12, 19, 65-66; of Ilyusha, 35-36; of Ivan, 22, 58; and Ivan’s article, 9; and Ivan’s rebellion, 11, 12-13, 18, 125, 126; and “Karamazov,” 23-24; terms for, 22-23; Zosima on, 9-10, 19, 35. See also Justice

Radicalism, Russian, 77; and Ivan, 14, 53, 54, 56-57, 72, 83; and Kolya, 77—79; and Rakitin, 71-72 Rakitin, 136-37; and Alyosha, 69-70, 136, 161, 165; and Dostoevsky on Belinsky, 81; and Ivan, 68-75; on Karamazovism, 40; and Kolya, 149; and Old Karamazov, 3

Index / 189

Rammelmeyer, Alfred, 56, 81 Raskolnikov (Crime and Punish­ ment), 15, 62, 63, 144 Raw Youth, The, 128 Reason and rationality: devil on, 19-20; as inhibition, 101; Ivan’s commitment to, 112; and Ivan’s paradoxes, 90; in Ivan’s rebellion, 125; Smerdyakov’s mocking of, 89. See also Intellect; Logic or geometry, Euclidean and non-Euclidean Resurrection: and Alyosha, 51; of epilogue, 149; and Ivan’s rebellion, 126, 127, 129-30; and Kolya parodies, 76, 77; vs. lamentation, 121; and St. John 12:24, 27 Rogozhin (The Idiot), 33 Rome, ancient: Church taken over by, 9; and Russia, 157 Rozanov, V. V., 55 Rozenblium, Lia Mikhailovna, 64 St. John, The Gospel According to, epigraph from, 26-27, 29, 83-84, 143, 145, 146 Saltykov, Mikhail (pseud. Schedrin), 69, 71 Schiller, J. C. F. von, 68 Self(hood): and Alyosha, 113, 114—15; devil lacking in, 104; of Karamazovs, 106; as love, 108; myths of, 115; negativity of, 105; and novel form, 116—17; and recognition of other, 112; and religious myths, 115-16; and Smerdyakov, 93; speech as, 106; and unconscious, 106 Sergius of Radonezh, 156 Shatov (The Possessed), 15-16, 144 Sin: and Ivan’s rebellion, 124; Russia as swarming with, 2; solidarity or connectedness in, 67, 127, 137, 138, 140. See also Conscience; Evil; Guilt

Slavophiles: and Belinsky, 81; and Russia-Rome analogy, 157 Smekalov, Lieutenant, 141 Smerdyakov, 32, 33, 41, 87-88; and common sense, 102; conscience lacking in, 118; and devil, 104; and Dmitri, 35; as drives or instincts, 1; Freudian biography of, 40, 41, 42, 43; Ilyusha taught by, 35, 76, 87; Ivan as parody of, 4; Ivan’s relation to, 43, 76, 83, 90-91, 97, 106, 112, 137, 139; and Judas parallel, 71; and metacommunicative language, 91-93; motives of, 93-94; mystery of, 85, 86; and paradox, 89-91; on soldier­ martyr, 138; as “stinking,” 136; suicide of, 43, 92-93, 106; and unconscious speech, 97; as unsympathetic, 2, 3; verbal pollution of, 88-89 Smith, Robertson, 39 Snegirev, Captain, 25, 31-32, 33-34, 149, 164 Snegirev, Ilyusha, 13, 25, 35-37, 76, 77-78, 148 Socialism. See Radicalism, Russian Solovyov, Vladimir, 158 Stavrogin (The Possessed), 15-16, 46 Svidrigailov (Crime and Punish­ ment), 62, 63 Terras, Victor, A Karamazov Companion, 1 Theodosius of Pechersk, 152-53, 156 Tolstoy, Leo, 2, 4, 113, 116, 140; and D. H. Lawrence, 54 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 2, 39—40 Transcendent(al): devil as end of, 98; and Dostoevsky on God, 5; as immanent, 115 Trofimovich, Stepan (The Pos­ sessed), 46

190 / Index

Turgenev, Ivan, Fathers and Sons, 77, 78 “Two truths,” (human and divine), 16, 20-21 Unconscious, the: and Ivan’s conscience, 102; and novel’s return to tragedy, 117; and self, 109 Underground Man, the: devil compared with, 45; and Ivan, 15, 131, 132; and “literary,” 47 Verkhovensky, Stepan (The Possessed), 139-40, 144, 147, 148 Versilov (The Raw Youth), 128 Vetlovskaia, Valentina, 58 Voltaire: Ivan quotes, 60, 133; Kolya quotes, 75

What Is to Be Done? (Cherny­ shevsky), 73, 77

Zhuchka (dog), 35, 76 Zosima (elder), 33; and Alyosha, 29-31, 33-34, 42, 49, 148, 155, 156, 159, 165-66; biography of, 46-48; on Book of Job, 4, 16; and brotherhood, 31, 32; conversion of, 32, 46, 107-10, 112; and cult of the earth, 27-28, 29, 33; on damnation, 66; death and decomposition of, 28, 29-30, 33, 47, 69-70, 135, 146; and Dmitri, 22, 27, 28, 29, 33, 48, 145; and ecclesiasticalcourts discussion, 8, 9, 9-10; God’s ways justified by, 17, 1619, 67; and Grand Inquisitor, 4, 18-19, 29, 49-50; and hell, 7, 67, 115; and heresy, 32-33; and Ivan, 22; on justice, 16-17, 23; on lamentations, 121; on love, 18, 66, 155; and Old Karamazov, 28, 32-33; Rakitin’s “Life” of, 71; and reader’s identification, 3; and Smerdyakov, 32; and St. John 12:24, 26-27