Dostoevsky
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This submission to Zosima does not mean that Alyosha is detached from the questions posed by the modern world. Indeed, Dostoevsky brings Alyosha into immediate relation with the social-political situation by describing him as “an early lover of humanity,” as “a youth of our last epoch” (14: 17) passionately seeking truth and justice and ready to sacrifice himself for these ideals on the spot. These phrases unmistakably associate Alyosha with the discontent and moral idealism of the generation of the 1870s; and he is clearly intended, at least in this initial volume, to offer an alternative form of “action” and “sacrifice” to that prevalent among the radical youth. For if Alyosha, we are told, “had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and Socialist (for Socialism is not merely the labor question or that of the fourth estate, it is the question of atheism in its contemporary incarnation, the question of the Tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to bring down Heaven on earth)” (14: 25). The same ideals and feelings that had led Alyosha to Zosima might have led him to atheism and Socialism since both offer divergent paths leading to the same goal of the transformation of earthly life into a society closer to the Kingdom of God; but the first would be guided by Christ, while the second is deprived of the moral compass that he provides.
It is also in relation to Alyosha that the main theme of the novel—the conflict between reason and faith—receives its first exemplification. When the narrator touches on Alyosha’s belief in miracles, he immediately explains that this did not prevent him from being “more of a realist than anyone” (14: 24). Alyosha’s “realism” does not counteract his faith because the latter is defined as an inner state or disposition anterior to (or at least independent of) anything external, visible, tangible, empirical. Alyosha’s faith thus colors and conditions all his apprehension of the empirical world; it is not the evidence from the world that inspires or discourages faith. Alyosha’s spiritual crisis will be caused by the decay of Zosima’s body, a crisis that is only one instance of Dostoevsky’s major theme—that true faith must be detached from anything external, any search for, or reliance on, a confirmation or justification of what should be a pure inner affirmation of the emotive will.
Dostoevsky plays endless variations on this irreconcilable opposition between faith, on the one hand, and the empirical and rational on the other—an opposition initially dramatized in a brief dialogue between Alyosha and his father. Feodor Pavlovich’s jeering words foreshadow Ivan’s soaring speculations, and they link the two in more than merely a father-son relation; but what will be noble and elevated in Ivan becomes vulgarly cynical in the corrupt old scoundrel. Agreeing to let Alyosha enter the monastery, the half-drunken Feodor explains the reason: “You’ll pray for us sinners; . . . I’ve always been thinking who would pray for me, and whether there’s anyone in the world to do it.” But this implicit admission of moral awareness and of a faith in an afterlife is immediately canceled by a scoffing inability to imagine the physical paraphernalia of hell. If there are hooks in hell that will drag Feodor down, where did they come from? Were they attached to a ceiling? “If there’s no ceiling there can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all breaks down, which is unlikely again, for then there would be none to drag me down to Hell, and if they don’t drag me down what justice is there in the world? Il faudrait les inventer, those hooks, on purpose for me alone” (14: 23–24). This is the debased and niggling form of “realism”—a parody of Russian Voltairianism—in which Ivan’s “Euclidean understanding” becomes manifest in his father, in Mme Khokhlakova, in Smerdyakov, and finally in the hallucinatory devil, whom Ivan will accuse of representing “the nastiest and stupidest” of his blasphemous thoughts and feelings.
The action begins in Book 2 with the gathering of the Karamazovs in the monastery, and the threads of the main plot and subplots are skillfully exposed as the father and son shout furious insults at each other. The reader is also brought into the secluded world of the monastery, which Dostoevsky had never depicted before, and he contrasts the dignity and serenity of its inhabitants with the various types of egoistic self-concern exhibited by the secular characters. The grouping and succession of chapters is a part of Dostoevsky’s technique of conveying thematic motifs without direct authorial intervention. And so, after “the old buffoon” (Feodor plays his role to the hilt) has begun his sacrilegious antics in the cell of Zosima, the narrative shifts to the profoundly moving faith of the peasants assembled to receive the elder’s spiritual counsel and blessing. The chapter ends on a comforting note of Christian love and solidarity operating among the Russian people.
The tonality of reverence is then replaced by amusing satirical comedy. Zosima turns from the suffering peasantry to the spoiled and wealthy Mme Khokhlakova and her cripped daughter Liza. This giddy lady is Dostoevsky’s diverting portrait of an affluent society matron with intellectual pretensions, who swings like a weather vane in response to every fashionable ideological gust. Perhaps because she is in no position to cause any harm, she is treated with affectionate condescension. The tone is given by Zosima’s reply when she protests her overflowing “love for humanity” and her occasional dreams of becoming a sister of mercy. “Sometimes, unawares,” he observes, “you may do a good deed in reality” (14: 52). Not only do the self-indulgent lucubrations of Mme Khokhlakova provide an obvious antithesis to the devotion of the peasants, the exchange between Zosima and the burbling lady also prefigures one of the book’s deepest motifs.
For her chatterings anticipate, in a seriocomic version, Ivan Karamazov’s doubts concerning God and immortality, and Zosima’s response condenses the essence of what will soon be dramatized more seriously and powerfully. Mme Khokhlakova has picked up at second hand some of the fashionable atheism of the period, and wonders whether faith does not simply come from terror. What if, she asks with charming illogic, she discovers when she dies that “there’s nothing but burdocks growing on my grave” (as Turgenev had written in Fathers and Children)? “How, how,” she asks despairingly, “is one to prove it?” To which Zosima replies that no proof is possible, but “If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then . . . no doubt can possibly enter your soul” (14: 52). The difference between such Christian love and a “rational love for humanity,” which leaves the emotive roots of egoism untouched, is stressed in Zosima’s story of the doctor who confessed—as Ivan will—that “the more I detest men individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity” (14: 53).
No other novelist can rival Dostoevsky’s ability to develop his themes, and reveal the moral-psychological sensibility of his characters, through discussions of seemingly abstract ideas. When Zosima returns to the fractious Karamazov assemblage, a discussion arises out of Ivan’s article on Church jurisdiction, already referred to, which enlarges on the hints already given about his character. Ivan had argued that the Christian Church should aspire to transform and absorb the state into itself, and should not be satisfied with a limited area of power; but this does not mean that the Church should assume the prerogatives of a state, as in Roman Catholicism, which claims temporal power over humanity. Rather, the law of Christian love that rules in the Church should penetrate every area of secular existence, and the principles governing the relations among people would be based not on external force, but on the free and voluntary operation of the Christian moral conscience. Such a world would truly be the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, the total triumph of religious faith over secular reason, and Ivan’s eloquent exposition of this goal indicates how deeply he responds to this Christian ideal in its loftiest form.
Ivan’s emotive receptivity to this Orthodox-Slavophil Christian ideal is only one aspect of his character; another—equally rigorous and uncompromising—is exhibited by his public declaration that the Christian law of love could not be detached from the Christian faith and that, without a belief in God and immortality, “the moral law of nature must i
mmediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even extending unto crime, must become not only lawful but recognized as the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome of [this] position” (14: 64). Only Christian faith supports the application of the law of love in the world; otherwise, there is nothing to oppose selfishness and the depredations of vainglory. Ivan refuses to stop at any halfway house here, anymore than he had done on the issue of church and state, and his own inner conflict is mirrored by the absolute incompatibility between these alternatives. His rationalism prevents him from believing in Christ and immortality, but his moral sensibility will make it impossible for him to accept the appalling consequences that logically flow from such a lack of faith.
Zosima, the experienced reader of souls, sees through to the anguish of Ivan’s spiritual condition, and the dialogue between them highlights both the genuineness and the agonizing uncertainty of Ivan’s plight. When Zosima accuses him of believing neither in immortality nor in what he had written in defense of the supremacy of the Church, Ivan acknowledges the accusation, but adds, “I wasn’t altogether joking.” Zosima pierces to the quick by warning Ivan that he is playing with the martyrdom of his own indecision and despair. Completely discomfited, Ivan fully exposes himself by asking Zosima “strangely, looking at the elder with [an] inexplicable smile,” whether the question of God “can be answered by him in the affirmative.” Zosima’s response may be taken as an expression of Dostoevsky’s own attitude toward the whole generation of young Russians whom Ivan was meant to represent:
If it can’t be decided in the affirmative, it will never be decided in the negative. You know that is the peculiarity of your heart, and all its suffering is due to it. But thank the Creator who has given you a lofty heart capable of such suffering, “of thinking and seeking higher things, for our dwelling is in the heavens.” God grant that your heart will attain the answer on earth, and may God bless your path. (14: 65–66)
Ivan now reverently kisses the elder’s hand.
The presentation of Dimitry in Book 2 is less directly revelatory, but the outlines of his character come through nonetheless. For all his rowdiness and dissipation, there is a longing in him for “seemliness.” He is the only “educated” character who kisses Zosima’s hand as a matter of course, and he is capable, even in the midst of the furious altercation with his father, of sincerely acknowledging guilt. “Father, I don’t justify my action,” he says of his assault on the pathetic Captain Snegiryov. “Yes, I confess it publicly, I behaved like a brute to the captain, and I regret it now, and I’m disgusted with myself for that brutal rage” (14: 67). Whipped up, however, by his father’s falsely pathetic taunts and reproaches about Katerina and Grushenka, Dimitry’s rage becomes uncontrollable. “Tell me,” he thunders to the assembled audience, “can he be allowed to go on defiling the earth?” (14: 69). It is immediately after this suggestion of parricide that Zosima—having noted both the terrible violence of Dimitry’s nature and his displays of conscience—bows down at his feet.
Alyosha is scarcely developed in this section and, after the opening page, remains in the background until a later stage. As Robin Feuer Miller has remarked, he functions as what Henry James called a ficelle, that is, a string tying together the action of the other characters as he goes from one to the other.4 Book 2 is thematically rounded out by the one chapter devoted to Alyosha and his negative counterpart, the envious and self-serving Rakitin, a young novice in the monastery who has secretly and painlessly converted to atheism, science, and positivism. Rakitin is “a young man bent on a career,” ready to sell his soul—in which he does not believe—for material success and social advancement (14: 71). If Ivan represents the aspect of Populist youth that Dostoevsky saw as genuinely inspired by Christian ideals, Rakitin indicates how easily these ideals, when divorced from even a modicum of feeling for their original source, can be converted into a mask for meanness and mendacity.
Setting himself up as Ivan’s intellectual opponent, Rakitin declares that “humanity will find in itself the power to live for virtue even without believing in immortality. It will find in it love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity.” But Rakitin is incapable of imagining that anyone can truly “live for virtue” or act except from the most shamelessly selfish motives (14: 71). Dostoevsky uses Rakitin’s disabused perspective as a foil to contrast the gross materialism of his “progressive” point of view with the actual human and moral complexity of the situation in which his characters have become embroiled.
Books 3 and 4 consist externally of a round of visits that Alyosha makes to various personages. This device allows Dostoevsky to develop more fully such characters as Grushenka, Katerina, and Snegiryov, who have been seen so far only in the distorted and partial images provided by the furious exchanges between Dimitry and his father. With Alyosha as the pivot of these sections, Dostoevsky frames the multiplicity of events, with their abundant displays of human folly, passion, and suffering, within the overarching shadow of the monastery and the impending death of Zosima.
We are first introduced to the history of Smerdyakov, who may, according to rumor, be the illegitimate son of Feodor. His mother was “stinking Lizaveta,” who roamed the town as a “holy fool” and was treated kindly in accordance with Russian religious tradition. She gave birth to Smerdyakov in the garden of the Karamazov dwelling, and her choice of this locale was taken as an indirect suggestion of Feodor’s paternity. The question of how Lizaveta managed, in her condition, to climb over the “high, strong fence” (14: 92) to get into the garden is referred to twice in the crucial scene on the night of the murder of Feodor, and although it is shrugged off by the narrator, the suggestion of an “uncanny” dimension nonetheless imparts a symbolic overtone to this detail.
This question, along with naturalistic details of the Karamazov dwelling, accompanies the presentation of Feodor’s relation with his servant Grigory, who is intensely religious in a fanatic and semiliterate peasant fashion; and this attachment offers the first dramatic analogue for the central thematic conflict between reason and faith. Dostoevsky’s aim is to suggest the moral-psychological difficulty of a totally amoral reason to sustain itself, not only on the level of Ivan’s sophisticated ratiocinations, but even on the lowest and most primitive plane of the subconscious psyche. “Corrupt and often cruel in his lust, like some noxious insect, Feodor Pavlovich was sometimes, in moments of drunkenness, overcome by superstitious terror and a moral convulsion which almost, so to speak, physically shook his soul.” In such moments, “he could not have explained the extraordinary craving for someone faithful and devoted, which sometimes unaccountably came upon him all in a moment” (14: 86). The old scoundrel, relying on the solace of Grigory’s slavishly faithful presence, makes an irrational leap of faith in his loyalty and devotion. The relation between the two mimics, in a semiparodistic fashion, the challenge that all the characters are called upon to confront.
These sections are followed by Alyosha’s encounter with Dimitry in three memorable chapters of feverish monologue. Dostoevsky here poetically elevates both sides of Dimitry’s personality—an unbridled nature and dissolute life with a lurking sense of guilt at having given free rein to his sensuality and his rages—to a mythical stature. The snatches of poetry that he quotes from Nekrasov, Goethe, and Schiller interweave with his feverish narrative and constantly expand and amplify its range. The irresistible drive of his passions, as well as the deep disgust at his own degradation, now rise above the purely private and the personal; they become the struggle of humankind from the earliest ages to sublimate and purify its animal lusts and instincts. Dimitry sees himself in the guise of “the naked troglodyte” of Schiller’s “The Eleusinian Feast,” who appears, in the eyes of the Olympian goddess Ceres, as living in a state of hideous savagery:
From the fields and from the vineyards
Came no fruit to deck the feasts,
Only flesh of blood-stained victims
And wher’er the grieving goddess
Turns her melancholy gaze,
Sunk in vilest degradation
Man his loathsomeness displays. (14: 98)
The forces at work in him are those of natural man, who can all too easily become a slave to his instincts and his passions. But Dimitry has an obscure sense of nature as God’s handiwork, which cannot be totally evil, and he feels in his own uncontrollable exuberance some of the overflowing joy that Schiller called “the soul of all creation.” Even though Dimitry is incapable of curbing his elemental sensuality, unlike his shameless father, who glories in his depravity, Dimitry longs for some alteration within his own nature that will enable him to attain self-respect. His longing and his dilemma are summed up by Schiller again:
Would he purge his soul from vileness
And attain to light and worth,
He must turn and cling forever
To his ancient mother Earth.
29. A page from the manuscript of The Brothers Karamazov
“But the difficulty is,” Dimitry exclaims piteously, “how am I to cling forever to Mother Earth. . . . I don’t cleave to her bosom. . . . I go on and I don’t know whether I’m going to shame or to light and joy.” Varying the imagery as the passage continues, and turning from Schiller’s Hellenism to Christianity and the Bible, Dimitry rises to heights of inspired eloquence in the famous passage on humankind’s disquieting capacity to harbor both the ideal of the Madonna and the ideal of Sodom in its breast. “Beauty is a terrible thing. . . . Here all the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. . . . The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man” (14: 100).