Dostoevsky's allusions to dramatists help us to understand Dmitry's
curious nature. Shakespeare was to Dostoevsky not merely a writer but "a prophet sent by God to proclaim to us the mystery of man and of the human soul"; and much of that mystery was for Dostoevsky contained in Hamlet, to which there are many allusions in The Brothers. One of the most important of these occurs at the climax of the prosecutor's summary at the trial of Dmitry, where he contrasts "Hamlets" to "Karamazovs." The immediate usage is ironic; but in the "echo" of this contrast which is sounded in the courtroom discussions, it becomes clear that Dostoevsky was contrasting intellectualized "liberal" Europe with spontaneous, earthy Russia. For the former, life itself is problematic and all questions are "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought"; for the latter there is a passionate love of life that lives for and fathoms each immediate experience. Dmitry is related to Demeter, the goddess of the earth; he is the pochvennik incarnate, a lover of the immediate and spontaneous. Dmitry and the peasants in the audience "stand firm" not only against the half-lies of witnesses and judges but against the whole artificial, casuistic procedure of human trial itself.
Dmitry's vibrance and honesty at the trial is not just a reflection of his "broad Russian nature" but also of the half-hidden influence on Dostoevsky of the dramatist who made perhaps the greatest impact on him of any single literary figure: Friedrich Schiller.29 The Brothers is saturated with borrowings and citations from Schiller-particularly from those hymns to human freedom and perfectibility: The Robbers and the "Ode to Joy." For his last and loftiest work, Dostoevsky returns, involuntarily perhaps, to this influence of early youth and subsequent source of inspiration "for my finest dreams." Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is essentially a projection of the inquisitor in Don Carlos; and just as the inquisitor's opposite in Carlos is the spontaneous brotherhood of Posa and Don Carlos, so the brothers Karamazov as a whole provide the alternative to the closed world of Dostoevsky's Inquisitor. The Karamazov alternative to both Hamlet and the Grand Inquisitor unfolds in terms of an aesthetic theory which Schiller propounded as his alternative to the arid rationalism of the French Revolution but which he himself was never able to incorporate fully into any of his own dramas.
In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind of 1794-5 Schiller contended that both the rational and sensual faculties were necessary attributes of the fully developed man; but that they were incomplete and even conflicting forms of good. In seeking to harmonize them one cannot use any abstract philosophic formulas which would automatically lead to a one-sided dominance by rationalism. One must rather undergo an
aesthetic education (Erziehung) through developing the instinct for play (Spieltrieb). Children, who make up their rules of play as they go along and spontaneously reconcile their conflicts without formal regulations and imposed rules, provide the key to harmony for the perplexed adult world. Man was born not to repress but to fulfill his sensual self through play which is the fruit of love, "the ladder on which man climbs to the likeness of
God."30
Dmitry's love of life and his exuberant spontaneity (as well as his numerous citations from Schiller) all suggest that he is a kind of incarnation of this spirit of play. He startles people with sudden outbursts of laughter. The play instinct gives him a special attraction to beauty, which is "not just a terrible, but a mysterious thing. There God and the devil strive for mastery, and the battleground is the heart of men."
The battleground is also inside the Karamazovs; and the passionate Dmitry alone transcends and thus resolves the dialectic between the feeling faith of Alyosha and the rational brilliance of Ivan, between one brother visited by God and another visited by the devil. Dmitry teaches the Karamazovs to "love life more than the meaning of life." Love of life is part of the love of all created things. Man was for Schiller the supreme participant in an endless festival of creation; and Dostoevsky seems to be beckoning us to join it. The sin of social Utopias is that they cut off the spontaneity of this creative process; they "deny not God, but the meaning of his creation." Dostoevsky seems to be saying that even if man cannot believe in God he must love and rejoice in the created universe. Man must enjoy "the game for the sake of the game," as Dostoevsky explained his own passionate love of gambling. As distinct from the ordered and rational habits of ants,
man is a frivolous, improbable creature, and like a chess player, loves only the process of attaining goals, not the goal itself.
In defiance of Bazarov's contention that "two times two is four and the rest is nonsense," Dostoevsky's man from the underground even suggests that "the formula two times two is five is not without its attractions."31
Dmitry is resigned to his fate not by any exercise of logic but by a dream of a cold and hungry baby and a sudden, supra-rational desire "to do something for them all, so that the babe shall weep no more." Dostoevsky heavily underlined these lines in the original sketch for this chapter. Dmitry's "something" is to accept imprisonment and even blame. Though he did not commit the crime, he recognizes that "we are all responsible for all" and gladly goes with the convicts-and with God:
If they drive God from the earth, then we shall shelter him underneath the earth! . . . singing from the bowels of the earth our tragic hymn to God, in whom there is joy! All hail to God and his joy!
Dmitry's own "Ode to Joy" reaches a feverish, Schilleresque climax in his cry:
. . . There is so much of strength in me that I shall overcome all things, all sufferings, just in order to say with every breath: I am! In a thousand agonies-I am! I writhe on the rack-but am! I sit in prison, but still I exist; I see the sun, and-even when I don't-I know that it is. And to know that the sun is-is already the whole of life.
After the trial Dmitry's joy is dampened with illness and second thoughts; but he is cured and his faith in life restored through the sudden irrational desire of the once-proud Katya to accompany him in suffering and exile. "For a Moment the Lie Becomes Truth" is the title of this section. Two times two has, for a moment, become five, for the underground man has suddenly discovered the sun and decided to reach for it with an act of implausible moral heroism. Katya helps win Dmitry-and through him the Karamazovs-back to life.
". . . Now let what might have been come true for one minute. . . . You loved another woman, and I love another man, and yet I shall love you forever, and you will love me; do you know? Do you hear? . . ."
"I shall love you, . . . Katya," Mitya began, drawing a deep breath at each word, ". . . All my life! So it will be, so it will be forever. . . ."
But how does this Schilleresque play of instinct and pantheistic love of life acquire any specific link with Christianity? Perhaps in substituting Christ for Posa and Carlos as the ideological adversary of the Grand Inquisitor Dostoevsky is saying that Christ alone can fulfill their romantic longing for some new brotherhood of freedom and nobility. Yet there is no conversion of Dmitry; and in the Schilleresque moment of irrational truth between Katya and Dmitry, Alyosha, the man of faith, "stood speechless and confounded; he had never expected what he was seeing." Alyosha's teacher, and the major Christ figure in the novel, the monk Zosima, had already bowed down before Dmitry as if to say that God himself has need of such men.
Zosima does, of course, bear a Christian message. He is a composite of the most holy traditions of Russian monasticism: he bears the name of the co-founder of Solovetsk and the attributes both of Tikhon Zadonsky and Father Ambrose of Optyna Pustyn. But he does not bring salvation in the conventional monastic way. Old Karamazov says that Zosima is in reality a
sensualist; and the lecherous old man is proven partly right by the smell of corruption that emanated from Zosima's body after death and destroyed his claim to sainthood. The one key conversion that Zosima effects, that of Alyosha, takes place after the latter, too, has experienced his "breath of corruption" by visiting Grushenka ("the juicy pear"). His conversion over the putrefying body of Zosima is completely devoid of the miracle and authority which the I
nquisitor glorified. Like the murder, which it parallels, Alyosha's conversion occurs at night in a manner that is not clinically disclosed. It takes place amidst tears and under an open sky and leads immediately not to a state of beatified withdrawal but to f ailing on the ground and embracing the earth and then to Alyosha's decision to leave the monastery and go out into the world.
We do not know what the future of Alyosha-let alone Dmitry and Ivan-might have been, for in The Brothers we have only the first part of a projected longer work of which he was to be the ultimate hero. The name is again significant, for it is the diminutive of Alexis, calling to mind the idealized figure of Alexis Mikhailovich and the popular folk hero, Alexis the man of God. Yet The Brothers stands complete in itself; and within it there comes at the end a beautiful subplot which ties together dramatically and ideologically the Schilleresque themes and Christian elements in Dostoev-
sky's cosmology.
The story of "the boys" gives us our only image of Alyosha in action after his conversion. For the most part it is pure Schiller. The setting is boys at play, free of all restraining influences, rejoicing in their spontaneity of expression, their sense of daring, their playful rejection of all that impedes the game of life. Then, into this scene comes something that Schiller and the romantics had viewed as foreign to "the aesthetic education of man": uncaused and irreversible suffering. The very exuberance of children makes their capacity to wound one another's spirit terrifyingly great; and the slow death of the frail little boy Iliusha is clearly related to the mockery of his
playmates.
The seemingly disconnected story is related to the novel as a whole in a number of important ways. The principal ringleader of the gang, Kolya Krasotkin, is an echo of Ivan: a detached intellectual who attempts to repress emotion and dreams up the crime which others act upon. Just as Ivan's hypothesis that "all things are permissible" provides the basis for a patricide which others commit and are punished for, so Kolya rigs up the trap which causes a peasant inadvertently to kill a goose and be punished for it. Dostoevsky tells us that there was no trace of corruption about little Iliusha's body (in contrast to that of Zosima) after death. In his death Iliusha atones, as it were, for the crime of the Karamazovs by embracing his own
father and nobly defending him from the taunts of the doctor, who mocks his poverty. Even more important, over his grave Kolya and the other boys suddenly feel reconciled to the world and to one another. Alyosha, who has been with them as friend and observer, is able to build on this moment of friendship and harmony; and we suddenly find him solving with Kolya the problem he was never able to solve with Ivan:
"We shall remember his face and his clothes and his poor little boots, and his coffin and his unhappy sinful father, and how boldly he stood up for him alone against the whole class."
"We will, we will remember," cried the boys. "He was brave, he was good!"
"Ah, how I loved him!" exclaimed Kolya.
"Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don't be afraid of life! . . ."
Love and bravery, the qualities of adventure, are more important than morality, let alone logic, in the festival of life. The boys suddenly find themselves with a new faith in life, a life that must go on for Iliusha's sake.
"Hurrah for Karamazov," Kolya shouted ecstatically. "And may the dead boy's memory live for ever!" Alyosha added again with feeling.
Their last gathering by Iliusha's little stone recalls the Biblical parable about the stone that was rejected becoming the cornerstone of the new building and also the incident where Iliusha was stoned and humiliated. The scene seems to illustrate "the central message that Ivan and all other proud men of intellect have yet to digest: that "except ye . . . become as little children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." The "Hamlet question" about the meaning of life is not answered but transcended by a naive and animated leap of faith.
"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "is it really true what religion says that we shall all rise from the dead and live and see one another again, all of us and little Iliusha too?"
"Surely we shall rise, surely we shall see and gaily, gladly tell one another about everything that has happened," Alyosha answered, half laughing, half in enthusiasm.
The meaning of this reconciliation over the dead body of Iliusha is that of the passage from St. John which Dostoevsky placed at the beginning of The Brothers: "Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." New life comes out of death: old Karamazov's, Zosima's, and above all that of the innocent
little boy. The one essential miracle is that of resurrection: the recurring wonder of nature and the central miracle of Orthodox Christianity. One rediscovers God not by studying dogma but by believing in His creation. Christ's first miracle-turning water into wine at the marriage festival in Cana of Galilee-is the biblical text which leads to Alyosha's conversion; and his first impulse is to embrace the earth. Christianity is the religion not of the ascetics and puritans but of the "dark" Karamazovs who rejoice in God's creation and seek to enjoy it. It is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, not of the Old Testament, but of the romantic apostles of creative freedom; a religion of adventure. Its only dogma is that freely given love in the imitation of Christ will ultimately triumph over everything, for in the words of a Kempis "love pleads no excuse of impossibility."82
In his final Christian affirmation as in his focus on man's inner nature Dostoevsky was not typical of his age. The trend had been to move away from religion, whether toward the nihilism of the Stavrogins or toward the preoccupied agnosticism of the modern world. One then found a kind of consolation in quasi-religious social ideology, whether of a radical populist or a reactionary Pan-Slav nature. Dostoevsky was too deeply affected by these trends to attempt with any confidence a full reaffirmation of traditional Christianity. His faith is rather that of a realist in search of "the more real." There are, perhaps, two icons for this deeply personal and precarious faith. The first is the image of the Sistine Madonna, which he always kept over his writing desk as if in defiance of Bakunin and the revolutionaries who would have thrown it on the barricades at Dresden. (Dostoevsky himself caused a minor uproar in Dresden when he defied the guards in the museum to climb onto a chair for a closer look at the painting.)33 The Madonna depicted the source of all creation, the supreme mother, with the consummate technique of European art in which his own novels are steeped. This painting was a reminder of the "marvelous dead" that lay buried in the "strife and logic" of post-Christian Europe and which he hoped to resurrect through the rejuvenated Christian commitment of the Russian people and the prophetic power of his own art.
The second icon of Dostoevsky's anguished faith is a picture of hands. The Brothers is filled with hands and feet. They are the implements for doing things in this world, symbols of the "harsh and terrible thing" of love in action as opposed to love in dreams. "What have I come for?" asks Katya rhetorically in the last scene with Dmitry, "to embrace your feet, to press your hands like this, till it hurts." Hands have been a symbol of laceration throughout the novel. In the fable of the onion we are told of a peasant woman who lost her last chance for salvation from the fiery lake of hell by trying to beat off the hands of others who sought to grasp the onion
which the peasant woman once gave in charity and which God in his compassion had extended to her. The hands of innocent children beckon Ivan to rebellion against God, He tells Alyosha about the murderer who held out a pistol to a baby and waited to blow its brains out until the precise moment that the baby extended its little, trusting hand to touch it. Then he is driven to insanity by the image of a five-year-old girl tortured by her parents and left in an outhouse with her face smeared in excrement by a sadistic mother who sleeps calmly in the warm house while the little girl prays without any resentment to "dear kind God" and "beats her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and cold." Ivan rebels against God because of the need to avenge the tears of the little gir
l; and even Alyosha admits that he would be unwilling to accept any ideal harmony that tolerated the sight of "that baby beating its breast with its fist." Yet Dmitry is led to accept his fate by the dream in which "a little babe cried and cried, and held out its little fists blue from cold."
The final message of redemption occurs at the end of the story of "the boys," which is also the end of the novel. Just before, we are given a last pathetic image of the suffering of Iliusha's bereaved father. Last seen sobbing incoherently by his dying son "with his fists pressed against his head," he returns to dominate the early part of the funeral scene. He is all hands: grasping at the flowers from the bier, embracing the coffin, crumbling the bread and throwing it in the grave. In a masterly inversion of the scene in which Dmitry is forced to take off his boots and expose his ugly feet in court, Dostoevsky leaves Iliusha's father kissing the boots of his buried boy and asking, "Iliusha, dear little man, where are thy little feet?"
The Icon and the Axe Page 64