The Outsider (33 page)

Possibly Dostoevsky
’
s knowledge of
’
Moments of timelessness
’
came only in the strange insights before his epileptic seizures: this is how he describes one in
The Idiot:

The next moment, something seemed to explode in front of him; a wonderful inner light illumined his soul. This lasted perhaps half a second, yet he distinctly remembered hearing the beginning of a cry, the strange dreadful wail that escaped him without his volition.
...
Then he was unconscious
...
²⁶

The moment of
‘
inner light
’
is Nietzsche
’
s moment of
‘
pure Will, free of the perplexities of intellect.
...
’
His willingness to die to express the absolute supremacy of the Will is the supreme act of renunciation. St. John of the Cross writes of it:

And therefore, the soul that sets its affections upon created beings
...
will in no way be able to attain union with the
infinite being
of
God: for
that which
is not can have no
communion with that which is.
[
Ascent of Mount Carmel,
IV, 4
]

Without religion, without even belief in God, Kirilov has achieved the saint
’
s vision. His perfect non-attachment has made him into a visionary. He lives all the time in the insight that Meursault achieved only on the eve of his execution:
‘
I had been happy and I was happy still.
’

Dostoevsky did not stop to argue or explain his point; he dramatized it and now the novel is drawing towards its close; everything is moving faster. In the last hundred pages, he rises to a pitch of prophetic intensity that cannot be paralleled elsewhere in literature. Netchaev has arranged for the same night the murder of Shatov, the firing of the town and the murder of Stavrogin
’
s imbecile wife and her drunken brother. Shatov is to meet five
‘
comrades
’
on Stavrogin
’
s estate to hand over the printing-press. Before he sets out, his wife arrives, in the last stages of pregnancy (she had deserted him three years before, only a fortnight after their marriage, to go and live with Stavrogin). In a wild state of excitement, Shatov rushes off to borrow money and find a midwife. Then he looks on as the baby is born, and the revelation stirs him profoundly. He mutters: There were two, and now there
’
s a third human being, a new spirit, whole and complete ... a new thought and a new love ... it makes me feel afraid. There
’
s nothing bigger in the
world
‘
²⁷
Then a comrade arrives to fetch him away. Shatov
asks him, as they walk through the dark,
‘
Erckel, have you ever been happy?
’

The murder that follows is perhaps the most terrible single episode in Dostoevsky; after the birth-scene, it is almost unbearable to read. But it is not the end of Netchaev
’
s work. After he has seen the body consigned to a pond, he goes to call on Kirilov. The moment has arrived for Kirilov to kill himself for the
‘
European Revolutionary Alliance
’
. But first, there is
a
slight formality. Kirilov is to write a suicide note, confessing to having murdered Shatov. Again the scene reaches a dramatic tension that cannot be paralleled in modern literature, apart from the murder scene in
Crime and Punishment.
At first, Netchaev is convinced that Kirilov won
’
t do it; he encourages him to talk about his reasons for committing suicide; his cunning is
rewarded, and finally Kirilov shoots himself through the head. Netchaev hurries off, a handkerchief bound around his hand where Kirilov had tried to bite off the top of his finger, and catches an early train out of the town. He leaves behind him a blazing town, three murdered bodies and a suicide; and the death-toll is not yet complete. That is the last we see of
‘
the tiger cub
’
. He is not important; he is only the Iago of the story, He is no Outsider. The most important figure in the book lies dead in a shuttered room, the revolver still in his hand, to be found by Shatov
’
s wife the next morning when she goes to his room seeking her husband.

The nightmare is almost over. Dostoevsky
’
s last great study in the Outsider will bring it to a close.

THE GREAT SYNTHESIS.
...

The brothers karamazov
is Dostoevsky
’
s biggest attack on the Outsider theme.

We have seen Dostoevsky beginning with a portrait of the Barbusse-type Outsider—the spineless beetle-man, the underground man who cannot escape his loathing for human stupidity—and applying the formula The Outsider
’
s Salvation lies in extremes
’
, until he has created Raskolnikov, Myshkin, Stavrogin, all Outsiders who know who they are and where they are going. Extremes of crime or extremes of asceticism, murder or renunciation, both have the same effect. Both free the Outsider from his fundamental indecision, so that the problem is carried to a higher stage.

In
The Brothers Karamazov,
all that Dostoevsky had learned from his earlier experiments with Outsiders is summarized. We have, at once, the beetle-man, Raskolnikov, Myshkin combined in this, the great synthesis. They are the three brothers Karamazov—Mitya, Ivan, Alyosha—the body, the intellect, the emotions. And since Dostoevsky himself was the intellectual Outsider, it is Ivan who claims the centre of the stage in his biggest novel. In Ivan the question of the
‘
evil principle
’
is attacked from
within.

The plot of the novel is simple; Mitya and his vile, sensualist father are rivals for the love of the same girl. When the father is murdered by Mitya
’
s bastard half-brother Smerdyakov, the evidence against Mitya is overwhelming, and he is convicted and sent to Siberia (Smerdyakov in the meantime having committed suicide).

Together with this story there are two parallel themes, connected with Ivan and Alyosha. Alyosha has Van Gogh
’
s temperament, but fortunately he has fairly early found orientation in religion; when the novel opens he is a novice in the local monastery (like Narziss in Hesse
’
s book). Alyosha
’
s story concerns his mental upheaval caused by the death of Father Zossima, the Abbot (or Elder) whom he idolizes; it ends with
Alyosha going into the world (like Goldmund and Joseph Knecht) to look for his salvation.

Ivan
’
s story is almost static; it lies in his position as an intellectual Outsider, a man who thinks too much to enjoy living. There is something of Raskolnikov
’
s ruthlessness about Ivan. And his bastard half-brother worships him and apes him; a constant reminder that he is not all intellect, but fifty per cent, flesh and crass stupidity. Nothing
happens
to Ivan. Dostoevsky uses him to pose the question: What happens when a man believes that life is unlivable? The answer appears when Ivan is visited by an embodiment of his unbelief, by the Devil.
The Brothers Karamazov
was never finished. We are not told whether Ivan found an answer or whether he went mad. Neither are we shown what happens to Alyosha when he goes
‘
into the world
’
. (This was to be the subject of a sequel that Dostoevsky never lived to write.) For all that, we have in
The Brothers Karamazov
a more conclusive attempt at solution of the Outsider
’
s problems then any we have yet considered.

Of the three
‘
stories
’
, Mitya
’
s tells us least. Dostoevsky was always a bad craftsman.
[Crime and Punishment
is his only complete
artistic
success; the other novels are as unshapely as pillow-cases stuffed with lumps of concrete.) The central
‘
plot
’
of the novel is no more than a background for the more important stories of the other two brothers, and in fact it has hardly any direct bearing on their stories at all. The idea that Ivan is
morally
responsible for his father
’
s death, having wished it, is completely irrelevant to his problems as an Outsider. (This particular view is made much of by the
‘
Christian
’
school of commentators, who always try to treat the novels as Just-so-stories with a moral on the last page.) If a moral can be drawn from Ivan, it is an Outsider
’
s moral: that the man who thinks too much is likely to go to exhausted extremes where the world becomes a shadowy paradigm of ideas. To keep sane he must continually come back to reality.

Alyosha is not such a fool. There is no danger of his leaving reality behind by overworking his brain. But he falls into the same pit as Van Gogh instead; he allows emotional problems, problems about human beings, to obscure fundamentally sane vision. That is his
‘
moral
’
.

And Mitya? Well, Mitya seems to be one of those characters who meant more to his creator than he does to us (like Shatov
in
Devils).
He embodies Dostoevsky
’
s obsession about shame; he strikes himself on the chest and calls himself an insect; he plunges from towering rages into ecstasies of self-abasement, and behaves generally with a complete lack of emotional discipline that is repugnant to a Western European. Certainly he is
‘
Russian
’
, and perhaps for that reason he fails to awaken the interest of the Western reader as Ivan and Alyosha do. His
‘
moral
’
seems doubtful, unless we can interpret his acceptance to prison-sentence as his recognition that he needs to discipline himself, and will
have
to discipline himself, or sink into utter degradation, in Siberia.

This of course is not to dismiss Mitya; for Mitya, in a sense, knows better than Ivan. Primarily, he is
‘
a man of motion
’
, like Nijinsky; and if he finds
‘
salvation
’
, that is, unity of his impulses and certainty of purpose, it must be through action. At the end of the novel, Mitya
’
s story too is only half-finished.

So none of the three stories
The Brothers Karamazov
is finished: which is to say that none of the Outsider
’
s problems is finally solved. Yet the analysis of these problems is on a scale we have not considered before. Here is Ivan, for instance, the thinker, so like Raskolnikov in many ways. Where his detestable father and his uncontrolled brother are concerned, he is ruthless.
‘
One reptile will devour the other—and serve them both right too.
’
He has no sentimentality. Yet he is obsessed by pity, pity for human misery, and with the intellectual question that, since human beings
are
such a wretched lot, what is there to do except call them beetles and acknowledge yourself one of them? Ivan
’
s instinct is like Nietzsche
’
s, towards great health. And, like Nietzsche, he is always aware of the Pro and Contra, Ultimate Yes and Ultimate No. The chapter called
‘
Pro and Contra
’
, in which Ivan analyses the problems at length, is an Outsider Scripture, a monumental piece of summarizing. Critics are agreed in regarding it as the apex of Dostoevsky
’
s creative edifice. We must now examine this at length.

Alyosha and Ivan are alone together for the first time. Immediately, without preamble, Ivan states his credo:

‘
...
if I lost faith in the order of things, if I were convinced that everything is a disorderly, damnable, devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man
’
s disillusion—still I should want to live...
’
²