Dostoevsky (181 page)

¹⁰
PSS
, 26: 487.

¹¹
LN
15 (Moscow, 1934), 145.

¹²
For a brief but cogent introduction to Leontiyev’s ideas, see Andrzej Walicki,
A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism
, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford, 1979), 300–308.

¹³
Konstantin Leontiyev,
Sobranie sochinenii
, 9 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1912), 8: 188–189, 199.

¹⁴
Ibid., 203, 207.

¹⁵
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 210; August 16, 1880.

¹⁶
Ibid., 205; August 10, 1880.

¹⁷
Ibid.

¹⁸
Ibid., 206–207; August 11, 1880.

¹⁹
Ibid., 216–218; October 15, 1880.

²⁰
Ibid.

²¹
DVS
, 2: 360.

²²
Ibid.

²³
Ibid., 363.

²⁴
Ibid.

²⁵
Letopis
, 3: 478.

²⁶
Ibid., 493.

²⁷
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 227–228; November 8, 1880.

The Brothers Karamazov
(
Brat’ya Karamazovy
) achieves a classic expression of the great theme that had preoccupied Dostoevsky since
Notes from Underground
: the conflict between reason and Christian faith. The controlled and measured grandeur of the novel spontaneously evokes comparison with the greatest creations of Western literature.
The Divine Comedy
,
Paradise Lost
,
King Lear
,
Faust
—these are the titles that come to mind as one tries to measure the stature of
The Brothers Karamazov
, for these too grapple with the never-ending and never-to-be-ended argument aroused by the “accursed questions” of mankind’s destiny. By enlarging the scale of his habitual poetics of subjectivity and dramatic conflict, Dostoevsky imparts a monumental power of self-expression to his characters that rivals Dante’s sinners and saints, Shakespeare’s titanic heroes and villains, and Milton’s gods and archangels. Dostoevsky’s personages seem to dwarf their surroundings with the same superhuman majesty as the figures of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

The characters of
The Brothers Karamazov
are not only contemporary social types, they are linked with vast, age-old cultural-historical forces and moral-spiritual conflicts. The internal struggle in Ivan Karamazov’s psyche, for example, is expressed through the legends and mystery plays of the Middle Ages in Europe, the autos-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition, the eschatological myth of the returning Christ, and the New Testament narrative of Christ’s temptations by Satan. Dimitry is surrounded with the atmosphere of Schiller’s Hellenism and the struggle between the Olympian gods and the dark, bestial forces that had subjugated humankind before their coming. Zosima is the direct inheritor of the thousand-year-old rituals and traditions of the Eastern Church and a representative of the recently revived institution of
starchestvo
, both of which are evoked so solemnly in the early chapters. Alyosha is situated in this same religious context, and his crisis of doubt, which, like those of King Lear and Hamlet, calls into question the entire order of the universe, is resolved only by a cosmic intuition of the secret harmony linking the earth with the starry heavens and other worlds.

Feodor Pavlovich’s anecdotes about Diderot and Catherine the Great, as well as his quotations from Voltaire, tinge his grossness and cynicism with a distinct
eighteenth-century flavor. He is also placed much farther back in time when he takes pride in possessing “the countenance of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period” (14: 22). Dostoevsky always associated these later years of the declining Roman Empire with rampant licentiousness and moral breakdown, and in 1861 he wrote that this period was the world “to which our divine redeemer descended. And you understand much more clearly the meaning of the word redeemer” (19: 137). Nor should one forget the rich network of biblical and literary allusions and parallels that interweave with the action throughout the book.
¹
This symbolic amplification thickens and enriches the texture of the work, and gives its conflicts the range and resonance we are accustomed to finding in poetic tragedy rather than in the more quotidian precincts of the novel.

All these factors contribute to the impression of classic grandeur made by the book, but most important of all is the weight and dignity of its theme. With
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky takes up the subject of the breakdown of the Russian family that had begun to preoccupy him in the early 1870s and had furnished the starting point for
A Raw Youth
. But if that novel had shown him anything, it was that he could not confine this subject to a social-psychological level. For Dostoevsky, the breakdown of the family was only the symptom of a deeper, underlying malaise: the loss of firmly rooted moral values among educated Russians stemming from their loss of faith in Christ and God. The morality deriving from these values had once again become accepted—but not their linkage to the supernatural presuppositions of the Christian faith, which for Dostoevsky offered their only secure support. Concurrently, therefore, there is also, for the first time, the extensive presentation of another world of true faith, love, and hope in the monastery, as well as in the evolution of the relations between Dimitry and Grushenka and among the children.

The conflict between reason and faith—faith now being understood as the irrational core of the Christian commitment—was thus, as Dostoevsky saw it, posed more centrally in current Russian culture than in the 1860s. And its new prominence gave him his long-cherished opportunity to place this conflict, grasped at its highest moral-philosophical level, at the center of a major work. In his last novel, he thus brought all the resources of his sensibility, his intelligence, his culture, and his art to cope with this new version of radical ideas—just as he had done earlier with Chernyshevsky’s materialism and Utilitarianism in
Notes from Underground
, with Pisarev’s Nihilism in
Crime and Punishment
, and with the revolutionary amorality of the Bakunin-Nechaev ideology in
Demons
.

This opposition between reason and faith is dramatized with incomparable force and sublimity in Books 5 and 6, the famous ideological center of
The
Brothers Karamazov
. It contains Ivan’s revolt against a Judeo-Chrisitan God in the name of an anguished pity for a suffering humanity, and the indictment of Christ himself in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor for having imposed a burden of free will on humankind too heavy for it to bear. In reply, there is Zosima’s preachment of the necessity for a faith in God and immortality as the sole guarantee for the active love for one’s fellow man demanded by Christ. Here this conflict is expressed in overt religious terms and in relation to the age-old problem of theodicy, which, ever since the book of Job, has furnished the inspiration for so much of the religious problematic in the Western tradition. But it is not enough to focus attention solely on these magnificent set pieces. For the same theme of reason and faith appears in all the multiplicity of action in the book, and its specifically religious form serves as a symbolic center from which it radiates analogically through all the situations in which the major characters are involved.

Dostoevsky rather incautiously spoke of the utterances of Zosima in Book 6 as having been designed specifically to answer the accusations of Ivan against God, but he did so partly to pacify the fears of Pobedonostsev that the reply would not be as powerful as the attack. Later, however, in an entry in his notebook set down
after
the work had been completed, he wrote that “the whole book” was a reply to the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (27: 48). This remark indicates much more accurately the linkages that exist among the various parts and levels—a linkage based on the analogy between the dominant situation reflected in Ivan’s poem and the conflicts of all but the most accessory and secondary characters.

For an intellectual like Ivan, his anguish at the sufferings of humankind opposes any surrender to the Christian hope—a hope justified by nothing but what Kierkegaard called a “leap of faith” in the radiant image of Christ the Godman. Similarly, all the other major characters are confronted with the same necessity to make a leap of faith in something or someone beyond themselves, to transcend the bounds of personal egoism in an act of spiritual self-surrender. For these characters, this conflict is not presented in terms of a specific religious choice but rather in relation to their own dominating drives and impulses, their own particular forms of egoism. They too are called upon to accomplish an act of self-transcendence, an act “irrational” in the sense that it denies or overcomes immediate ego-centered self-interest. The identification between “reason” (which on the moral level amounted to Utilitarianism) and egocentrism was deeply rooted in the radical Russian thought of the period, and this convergence enables Dostoevsky to present all these conflicts as part of one pervasive and interweaving pattern. Indeed, the continuing power of the novel derives from its superb depiction of the moral-psychological struggle of each of the main characters to heed the voice of his or her own conscience, a struggle that will always remain
humanly valid and artistically persuasive whether or not one accepts the theological premises without which, as Dostoevsky believed, moral conscience would simply cease to exist.

Such a pattern, indeed, may be found not only in the thematic involvements of the book but even in the organization of the plot action. The central plot is carefully constructed so as to lead, with irresistible logic, to the conclusion of Dimitry’s guilt; the accumulated mass of circumstantial evidence pointing to him as the murderer is literally overwhelming. The fact remains, however, that he is innocent of the crime (though implicated in it by his parricidal impulses), and the reader is thus constantly confronted with the discrepancy between what reason might conclude and the intangible mystery of the human personality, capable even at the very last moment of conquering the drives of hatred and loathing. The entire arrangement of the plot action thus compels the reader to participate in the experience of discovering the limitations of reason. Only those among the characters who are willing to believe
against
all the evidence—only those whose love for Dimitry and whose faith, deriving from this love, are stronger than the concatenation of facts—only they are able to pierce through to the reality of moral-spiritual, as well as legal, truth in its most literal sense, and this motif illustrates why Dostoevsky could legitimately maintain that “the whole book” is a reply to the “Euclidean understanding” that created the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.

The Brothers Karamazov
begins with a preface labeled “From the Author,” and some question has arisen as to whether this “author” is Dostoevsky himself or the fictional narrator of his story. This question raises the more general issue of his fictional narrator as such, who determines the perspective from which a good deal of the novel will be read. In fact, two narrators are provided: one who comes to the foreground and is indirectly characterized as a resident of the town personally acquainted with the Karamazov story, another who allows the characters to express themselves in lengthy monologues or in dramatic confrontations with hardly any commentary. Dostoevsky was well aware of this problem of narrative perspective, and the solution he adopts here is similar to his earlier choice for
Demons
. There we find the same two types of narration, one expository and the other dramatic; but while the expository narrator in that novel participated in the dramatic action, in
The Brothers Karamazov
he is totally detached from the events. Since these took place thirteen years earlier, he serves only as a historian or chronicler, but one who indicates some personal acquaintance with the events at the time they occurred. Although he may disappear as a presence in the dramatic scenes, he is nonetheless important otherwise and exhibits a distinct physiognomy.

The Russian scholar V. E. Vetlovskaya writes that Dostoevsky deliberately blurred the lines between himself as author and his fictional narrator because this indistinction allowed him to express his own opinions in a veiled and seemingly naïve fashion.
²
He was writing what she calls a “philosophical-publicistic” work, which advanced a definite tendency and advocated a specific moral-religious point of view—and one to which, as he well knew, many of his readers would be opposed. He thus tried to defuse negative reactions by creating a figure that evokes a “modernized” version of the tone and attitude typical of the pious narrators of the hagiographical lives of Russian saints. His language constantly plays on associations that would recall such saints’ lives to the reader, and other attributes of the narrator’s style, such as syntactical inversions that would be felt as archaisms, can also be traced to such an intent. The fumbling, tentative quality of his assertions, his uncertainty about details, his moralistic judgments and evaluations, his emotional involvement in the lives of the characters, his lack of literary sophistication, and the heavy-handedness of his expository technique—all can be seen as an up-to-date version of the pious, reverent, hesitant, hagiographical style of the Russian religious tradition. Such a narrator would be apt to produce a sense of trust in the reader by his very awkwardness and simplicity, and his constant appeal to the opinion of the community also imparts a chorus-like quality to the testimony that he offers. Dostoevsky thus uses him to insinuate his own point of view without arousing an instantly hostile response.
³