The Karamazov Brothers Read online

  Even before events turned against him, Dmitry had already taken refuge in something akin to madness. In every conflict he resorts to the irrational, the confrontational, the violent solution. If thou canst nat undo the knotte, cut hym.9 By nature trusting and honourable (above all, honourable), he is congenitally incapable of ‘give and take’. He forever gets hopelessly entangled in one web or another: he cannot extricate himself but has to panic, he cannot panic but has to be violent, he cannot love but has to rage, excandescentia furibunda, everything pointing to a deep-seated personality defect and perhaps ultimately to sexual inadequacy.

  His passion for the voluptuous Grushenka bears all the marks of madness, and he is an easy prey to her whims and caprices. Full of impotent rage, and with the desperate threat to kill his father, whom he perceives to be his sexual—and financial—rival and arch-enemy, still fresh on his lips, it is inevitable that Dmitry should contemplate suicide. But, as with Hamlet, it is only speculation. He lives to continue his crazed pursuit of Grushenka.

  To compound his tragedy, he becomes the innocent victim of a plot by his putative half-brother, the scheming bastard Smerdyakov, and from then on his fate is sealed. When Dmitry, full of desires he cannot satisfy and emotions he cannot express, tries to articulate his feelings using the coachman Andrei as a sounding-board, his words tumble forth in an incoherent torrent, voicing what Dr Johnson would have called his ‘confused noise within’. He is full of irrepressible inner turmoil. And yet, ‘though he is a physical and ungovernable man, he has the vision of some harmony and beauty which he may attain through his body. He cannot deny the body, neither can he find rest in it, and he gropes blindly after the secret and mystery of repose.’10 His philosophy is instinctive. He continually needs to reassure himself that he is not a thief; a scoundrel—yes, but he is not a thief! Perhaps in this lies the clue to his whole character. While ready to admit to one defect, he hastens to point out that it is not the ultimate on the scale of debasement, that there is another, lower level, and come what may he would never sink to that. And this is reassuring. There is something solid in him, there is a principle he would never betray. Robin Hood for example would never admit to being a scoundrel. A thief—yes, but never a scoundrel! And that is equally reassuring. Neither Dmitry nor Robin Hood would say: ‘I’m a scoundrel and a thief!’ That would put them both on a lower level of humanity. We may conjecture, however, that the careerist seminarian Rakitin could say such a thing. Rakitin is an instance of evil-in-the-making, waiting in the wings, desperately eager to stand in the limelight but almost certain to be doomed to remain life’s perpetual understudy.

  The third son Alyosha, the declared principal hero, is perhaps the least convincing and interesting of all the characters in the novel. But then his turn was due to come later in the major novel to which Dostoevsky alludes in his prologue ‘From the author’, but which never saw the light of day, for Dostoevsky died three months after completing The Karamazov Brothers.

  In ‘From the author’ Dostoevsky refers to Alyosha as being ‘odd and eccentric’. Odd and eccentric, because when dealing with essential matters of faith, unlike the vast majority of mankind, he is incapable of compromise and accommodation, no half measures for him, he has to act on the principle of all or nothing:

  Alyosha did not see how he could possibly continue to live as before. It is written, ‘If thou wilt be perfect, give away all that thou hast and come and follow me.’ Alyosha said to himself, ‘I cannot give two roubles instead of “all”, or substitute “go to church” for “follow me”.’ (Bk. 1, Ch. 5, ‘Startsy’)

  Dmitry Merezhkovsky quotes a popular Indian Buddhist legend in his discussion of The Karamazov Brothers.

  Once to tempt Buddha, the Evil Spirit, in the guise of a vulture, pursued a dove; the dove hid in the Buddha’s bosom, and he wished to protect it, but the Spirit said, ‘By what right do you take away my prey? One of us must die, either it by my talons or I of hunger. Why are you sorry for him and not for me? If you are merciful and wish none to perish cut me a piece of flesh from your own body of the same size as the dove.’ Then he showed him two scales of a balance. The dove settled on one. Buddha cut a piece of flesh from his own body and laid it on the other scale. But it remained motionless. He threw in another piece, and another one, and hacked his whole body, so that the blood poured out and the bones showed, but the scale still did not sink. Then with a final effort he went to it and threw himself into it, and it sank, and the scale with the dove rose. We can only save others by giving, not a part of ourselves, but the whole.11

  Whether it is Alyosha in the service of God and the people, or Dmitry and his father in bondage to their own sensuality, or Ivan to his intellectuality, they are all ‘odd and eccentric’, they all in their different ways demonstrate the congenital Karamazov inability of doing things by halves, a trait which by his own admission belonged to Dostoevsky himself.

  From November 1878, when Dostoevsky began to submit his novel in instalments, mostly book by book, to the periodical Russky vestnik, he referred to at least three books in turn as being ‘the most important’. The first to be singled out was Book Five, ‘Pros and Cons’, containing the chapters ‘Rebellion’ and ‘The Grand Inquisitor’; the next was Book Six, ‘A Russian Monk’; in Book Seven ‘Cana of Galilee’ was ‘the most significant chapter in the whole book, perhaps in the novel’;12 in a letter to his editor of 8 December 1879, he referred to Book Nine, ‘Judicial Investigation’, as being one of the most important ones.13 One can only surmise what his final classification might have been on completion of the whole, but it is possible to imagine that the palm would have gone to ‘A Russian Monk’. This extended interpolation is on the whole an oasis of peace and calm, a welcome antidote to the piling up of horror upon horror of such a chapter as ‘Rebellion’, or the crescendo of ideological onslaught in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. A strong narrative line is maintained with quite significant dramatic climaxes, but the characters are not presented as militant, rather as suppliant and suffering. Whereas in the rest of the novel everything is ‘agitated, feverish, intense, screwed up above the normal pitch … always trembling on the verge of insanity and sometimes, indeed, [ready] to plunge over into the very middle of it’,14 ‘A Russian Monk’ is pervaded by optimism and serene faith in the goodness of people and their ability to reach harmony not only amongst themselves, but with the whole of nature. In the futuristically entitled subsection (g), ‘Concerning prayer, love and contact with other worlds’, we are told:

  love man even in his state of sin, for this is already a likeness of divine love and is the highest love on this earth. Love all of God’s creation, love the whole, and love each grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love every kind of thing. If you love every kind of thing, then everywhere God’s mystery will reveal itself to you. (Bk. 6, Ch. 3)

  This is the enigmatic Starets Zosima, speaking in his most pantheistic vein. For him too there are no half measures, and his commitment to the service of God and man is total. His love and care for mankind is born of a deep insight and understanding of human nature. Dostoevsky identifies with Zosima’s teachings, conceding merely that, had he been speaking in his own name, he would have differed only in ‘form and language’ rather than substance.15 But in his forgiving, tolerant, understanding attitudes Zosima sails dangerously close to the humanist point of view, ‘heretically’ betraying a liberal philosophy of someone who would be prepared to consider relaxing the canon law and compromising on doctrinal principles, eventually even tending towards the ‘crucified philanthropist’ view of Christ.

  From the start, Zosima is established as an authoritative, highly individualistic, and yet tolerant arbiter, a case in point being his compassionate treatment of the peasant woman who has confessed to murdering her husband. It is surely this episode that may serve to illustrate the view that ‘Dostoevsky’s sympathy for the criminal was boundless’,16 rather than the episode cited by Freud in whic
h Zosima prostrates himself at Dmitry’s feet during the meeting at the monastery, for it is Dmitry-the-martyr-to-be, not Dmitry-the-murderer-to-be whom Zosima goes out of his way to venerate. Zosima’s spirit continues to pervade the novel to the very end, asserting itself not only in the substance of Alyosha’s concluding speech but in the very choice of venue for its delivery, an unconsecrated stone, a traditional symbol of paganism, rather than in the precincts of a church.

  It is illuminating to discover to what extent the author’s personal experience has been used and recreated in fictional narrative. There is something overpowering and elemental when he speaks of his abject poverty, let alone when he details the gruesome circumstances of his near execution—the Tsar’s calculatedly eleventh hour reprieve, when the 28-year-old Dostoevsky, together with two other prisoners, were already before the firing squad. But by the time Dostoevsky’s personal experiences have reached the pages of his creative compositions they are transformed and refashioned, and more often than not, presented in a tongue-in-cheek, farcical mode, every line breathing with authenticity. Only someone who had himself been driven to writing begging letters in deadly earnest could have been responsible for the creation of those two unforgettable Polish charlatans, the caricature officer and his jobbing tooth-pulling companion, who in a state of dire financial embarrassment hit upon the idea of writing jointly to Grushenka, starting with a request for a loan of two thousand roubles ‘for the shortest possible time’, and ending up by asking for just one rouble. Let us turn to one of Dostoevsky’s letters (to his friend Apollon Maykov). ‘I know that you have no money to spare [Dostoevsky’s italics]. I should never apply to you for help, only I am sinking—have almost completely gone under. In two or three weeks’ time I shall be without a farthing, and a drowning man will clutch at a straw. Apart from you I have no one, and if you do not help me, I shall perish wholly! My dear fellow, save me. I will repay you for ever with friendship and attachment. If you have nothing, borrow from someone for me. Forgive me for writing thus. I am slowly but surely going under.’17

  All the most sacred cows of Dostoevsky’s religious and political philosophy, as expressed in his polemical writings, become, in the hands of Dostoevsky the novelist, objects of ridicule and irreverent fun. The dissolute and grotesque landowner Fyoor Pavlovich Kalamazov, father of three sons born in wedlock and of the putative bastard son Smerdyakov, indulges in mock-philosophical discussions that range from the physical nature of hell to the state that Russia is in at the moment:

  Russia’s a pigsty. My boy, if only you knew how I hate Russia … not Russia, mind, but all these vices … come to think of it, Russia too. Tout cela c’est de la cochonnerie. (Bk. 3, Ch. 8, ‘Over a Glass of Brandy’)

  Dostoevsky was able to reach a far wider audience for the plight of his country by such oblique, apparently provocative statements from the pages of a novel than he could ever have done by ‘straight’ journalistic commentaries. To be able to love deeply one must be prepared to hate. However much of a Slavophile Dostoevsky was, it never clouded his artistic objectivity, and he remained alive to every social malaise and castigated mercilessly every endemic national and social ill. Dostoevsky’s achievement is that he is able to put words of hate into the mouths of basically hateful people without destroying the reader’s sympathy for them. The master’s touch is always evident in the choice of topic, the pace of the dialogue, the high degree of dramatic tension, with the result that the reader’s interest and attention never flags. One of the first reviewers of The Karamazov Brothers was quick to identify this: ‘Despite all the weirdness and incongruousness of the situations in which his characters are placed, despite the oddness of their behaviour and reasoning, [Dostoevsky’s characters] never cease to be living human beings. The reader may sometimes feel he has strayed into a lunatic asylum, but never into a museum of waxworks. No note ever rang false in Dostoevsky’s novels.’18 But then regarding the ‘oddness’ of Dostoevsky’s characters, it has been pointed out that perhaps they only seem ‘pathological’, whereas in reality they are ‘only visualized more clearly than any figures in imaginative literature’. Every man ‘seen distinctly enough is abnormal, for the normal is only a name for the undifferentiated, for a failure to see the inescapable nuance.’19 By this token the old reprobate Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, casually referred to as Aesop (see explanatory note to p. 176), is perhaps not as outlandish as first supposed, perhaps it is only that he has been subjected to greater scrutiny, his ‘warts’ exposed and magnified. And yet if he is merely ‘ordinary’, man seen at close quarters, there is something universally symbolic in his timeless ordinariness—the yellow leaf of decrepitude and the sticky bud of fecundity all on the same stalk.

  Past and future fused into an eternal present. The … blind force of life, which arose we know not how. It brooded over the face of the waters. Taking the forms of life, high and low, birds of the air and creeping things obscene, terrible and beautiful, it rose through slime and lust and agony to man. Old Karamazov is life under the old Dispensation. He is a force and no more; he does not know himself for what he is. He contains within himself the germ of all potentialities, for he is chaos unresolved. He is loathsome and terrible and stormy for he is life itself.20

  Old Karamazov reflects on the past and projects into the future, aware of having transgressed and apprehensive of being called to account. He is chaotic, yet yearns for primary order, yearns for truth and justice. And when, almost halfway through the book, he finally departs the scene, it is as though the life and soul of the party has left the room, so that were it not for the never-ceasing flow of events from the author’s ‘horn of plenty’, the whole proceedings would be in danger of shuddering to a halt.

  But the narrative flow continues effortlessly, the whole attention now being focused on the drama enacted between the brothers. Dmitry—ex-army, hard-drinking, hard-playing womanizer and spendthrift, hopelessly in love with the local Jezebel, Grushenka—gets caught up in events which he cannot control or, even less, understand; Ivan—an embittered intellectual, unwittingly infects Smerdyakov with his ideas, who exploits them so successfully and ingeniously that, when it comes to the crunch, the all too clever Ivan is left totally outsmarted, bewildered, and horrified. The confrontational scenes between the two when Smerdyakov, having committed the perfect murder, but by now sick and disillusioned, reveals to his disbelieving listener the full devilish intricacy of his plot, are all variations on the alter ego theme. What guarantee is there that they have any other reality except as recurring nightmares in Ivan’s febrile imagination? Smerdyakov, like the Grand Inquisitor, and the shabby Devil in the check trousers, readily lends himself to interpretation as an embodied projection of Ivan’s own tortured personality, the very worst part of it, which seeks and gains the upper hand in a ruthless, one-to-one psychological combat.

  Like all great works of literature The Karamazov Brothers can be read in a variety of ways: for sheer enjoyment of the intricacies of its plot, the comedy, tragedy, the folly and wisdom of men’s ways, the train of human conflicts, intrigues, passions, joys, and disappointments on the one hand; and for the abstract debates, the philosophical speculations, the demonstration of the author’s skill and virtuosity in describing specialist fields (the church and the law in this case), on the other. It is probably Dostoevsky the psychologist (though he vigorously denied being one) rather than Dostoevsky the master story-teller, who has aroused the greater interest beyond his native Russia, though his commentators have often been frustrated by their inability to categorize and compartmentalize him neatly.

  More than any other novelist … Dostoevsky helped to weaken the formal restraints of imaginative literature and to break down the conventional discipline of fiction.21

  In Dostoevsky’s works there are peculiar passages as to which it is difficult to decide (cf. some of Goethe’s poems and Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings) whether they are Art or Science. At any rate they are neither pure Art nor pure Science. Here accuracy of
knowledge and the instinct of genius are mingled.22

  Dmitry Merezhkovsky, himself an outstanding novelist and poet, was the first to identify the peculiarly ‘scientific’ element in Dostoevsky’s art.

  What is called Dostoevsky’s psychology is … a huge laboratory of the most delicate and exact apparatus and contrivances for measuring, testing and weighing humanity. It is easy to imagine that to the uninitiated such a laboratory must seem something of a devil’s smithy.23

  Merezhkovsky has graphically analysed Dostoevsky’s special method of creating ideal laboratory conditions in which to observe the behaviour of characters, who conjure up their own alter egos and seek to identify themselves with ghosts and devils, which themselves turn out to be as neurotic as their hosts.

  In making scientific researches he surrounds in his machines and contrivances the phenomena of Nature with artificial and exceptional conditions. He observes how, under the influence of those conditions, the phenomenon undergoes changes. We might say that the essence of all scientific research consists precisely in deliberately ‘artificialising’ the surrounding conditions. Thus the chemist, increasing the pressure of atmospheres to a degree impossible under natural conditions, gradually compresses the air and changes it from gaseous to liquid. May we not call unreal, unnatural, supernatural, nay miraculous, that transparent liquid, dark blue as the clearest sky, evaporating, boiling and yet cold, inconceivably colder than ice? There is no such thing as liquid air at least in terrestrial nature as it comes within our scrutiny. It seems a miracle. We do not find it; yet it exists.24