(Modem Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom (Ed.) - Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov-Chelsea House Publishers (1988)

Modem Critical Interpretations
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
The Orestcia Evelina Man and Superman

Beowulf The Marriage of Heaven Pygmalion
The General Prologue to and Hell St. Joan
The Canterbury Talcs Songs of Innocence and The Playboy of the
The Pardoner’s Talc Experience Western World
The Knight’s Talc Jane Eyre The Importance of Being
The Divine Comedy Wuthcring Heights Earnest
Exodus Don Juan Mrs. Dalloway
Genesis The Rime of the Ancient To the Lighthouse
The Gospels Mariner My Antonia
The Iliad Bleak House An American Tragedy
The Book of Job David Copperfield Murder in the Catnedral
Volpone Hard Times The Waste Land
Doctor Faustus A Tale of Two Cities Absalom, Absalom!
The Revelation of St. Middlemarch Light in August
John the Divine The Mill on the Floss Sanctuary
The Song of Songs Jude the Obscure The Sound and the Fury
Oedipus Rex The Mayor of The Great Gatsby
The Acncid Casterbridge A Farewell to Arms
The Duchess of Maifi The Return of the Native The Sun Also Rises
Antony and Cleopatra Tess of the D’Urbcrvillcs Arrowsmith
As You Like It The Odes of Keats Lolita
Coriolanus Frankenstein The Iceman Cometh
Hamlet Vanity Fair Long Day’s Journey Into
Henry IV. Part I Barchcstcr Towers Night
Henry IV, Part II The Prelude The Grapes of Wrath
Henry V The Red Badge of Miss Lonelyhcarts
Julius Caesar Courage The Glass Menagerie
King Lear The Scarlet Letter A Streetcar Named
Macbeth The Ambassadors Desire
Measure for Measure Daisy Miller, The Turn Their Eyes Were
The Merchant of Venice of the Screw, and Watching God
A Midsummer Night’s Other Talcs Native Son
Dream The Portrait of a Lady Waiting for Godot
Much Ado About Billy Budd, Benito Ccr- Herzog
Nothing cno, Bartlcby the Scriv All My Sons
Othello ener, and Other Talcs Death of a Salesman
Richard II Moby-Dick Gravity’s Rainbow
Richard III The Talcs of Poe All the King’s Men
The Sonnets Walden The Left Hand of
Taming of the Shrew Adventures of Darkness
The Tempest Huckleberry Finn The Brothers Karamazov
Twelfth Night The Life of Frederick Crime and Punishment
The Winter s Talc Douglass Madame Bovary
Emma Heart of Darkness The Interpretation of
Mansfield Park Lord Jim Drcams
Pride and Prejudice Nostromo The Castle
The Life of Samuel A Passage to India The Metamorphosis
Johnson Dubliners The Trial
Moll Flanders A Portrait of the Artist as Man’s Fate
Robinson Crusoe a Young Man The Magic Mountain
Tom Jones Ulysses Montaigne’s Essays
The Beggar’s Opera Kim Remembrance of Things
Gray’s Elegy The Rainbow Past
Paradise Lost Sons and Lovers The Red and the Black
The Rape of the Lock Women in Love Anna Karenina
Tristram Shandy 1984 War and Peace
Gulliver’s Travels Major Barbara
These and other titles in preparation

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Chelsea House Publishers 0 1988

NEW YORK 0 NEW HAVEN 0 PHILADELPHIA
© 1988 by Chelsea House Publishers,
a division of Chelsea House Educational Communications, Inc.,
95 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
345 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511
5068B West Chester Pike, Edgemont, PA 19028
Introduction © 1988 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
without the written permission of the publisher.
Printed and bound in the United States of America
10 987654321
» The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The brothers Karamazov.
(Modem critical interpretations)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881. Brat'ia
Karamazovy. I. Bloom, Harold. IL Series.
PG3325.B73F96 1988 891.73'3 87-15785
ISBN 1-55546-065-8 (alk. paper)
Contents
Editor’s Note I vii

Introduction I 1
Harold Bloom
Justice and Punishment I 7
Richard Peace
How Sons Become Fathers / 39
Michael Holquist
The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel / 53
Robert L. Belknap
Verbal Pollution in The Brothers Karamazov I 85
Gary Saul Morson
The Self’s Negativity I 97
Maire Jaanus Kurrick
The Wound and the Lamentation: Ivan’s Rebellion / 119
Robert Louis Jackson
On The Brothers Karamazov / 135
John Jones
Alyosha and the Hagiographie Hero / 151
Valentina A. Vetlovskaya
Chronology / 169
Contributors I 173
Bibliography I 175
Acknowledgments / 181
Index / 183
Editor’s Note
This book gathers together a representative selection of the best mod

ern critical interpretations, available in English, of Dostoevsky’s final
and major novel, The Brothers Karamazov. The critical essays are re
printed here in the chronological sequence of their original publication.
I am grateful to Neil Bermel and Henry Finder for their assistance to
me in editing this volume.
My introduction centers upon the novel’s elements that constitute
Dostoevsky’s personal apocalypse. Richard Peace begins the chrono
logical sequence of criticism with a consideration of the different
visions of hell that obsessively haunt The Brothers Karamazov's protag
onists. In Michael Holquist’s overview, the paradigm of Freud’s Totem
and Taboo is used in order to interpret the relations between old
Karamazov and his sons.
Robert L. Belknap emphasizes how the rhetoric of Ivan and his
Grand Inquisitor might mislead unwary readers. Smerdyakov becomes
the center in Gary Saul Morson’s explication of what he calls “verbal
pollution” in the novel, while Maire Jaanus Kurrick investigates as
pects of the self’s negativity as represented by Dostoevsky.
Ivan is the focus for Robert Louis Jackson, while John Jones pro
vides a lively overview of “shared guilt” in The Brothers Karamazov.
Valentina A. Vetlovskaya concludes this volume with an analysis of
Alyosha, the spiritual hero so far as Dostoevsky himself was concerned.
vii
Introduction
For a critic who cannot read Russian, The Brothers Karamazov needs
considerable mediation, more perhaps than War and Peace or Fathers and
Sons. Much of this mediation is provided by Victor Terras in his
admirable commentary A Karamazov Companion, to which I am in
debted here.
Dostoevsky’s final novel, ’ completed only two months before his
death when he was nine months short of sixty. The Brothers Karamazov
was intended as Dostoevsky’s apocalypse. Its genre might best be
called Scripture, rather than novel or tragedy, saga or chronicle.
Dostoevsky’s scope is from Genesis to Revelation, with the Book of
Job and the Gospel of John as the centers. Old Karamazov is a kind of
Adam, dreadfully vital and vitalistically dreadful. His four sons resist
allegorical reduction, but William Blake would have interpreted them
as being his Four Zoas or living principles of fallen man, with Ivan as
Urizen, Dmitri as Luvah, Alyosha as Los, and the bastard Smerdyakov
as a very debased Tharmas. On the model of this rather Hermetic
mythology, Ivan is excessively dominated by the anxieties of the
skeptical and analytic intellect, while Dmitri is culpable for “reasoning
from the loins in the unreal forms of Beulah’s night’’ and so is a victim
of his own overly sensual affective nature. The image of imaginative
and spiritual salvation, Alyosha, is thus seen as the true Christian
visionary, while the natural—all too natural—Smerdyakov represents
the drives or instincts, turned murderously against the father and
against the self.
That there may be affinities between English Blake and Great
Russian Dostoevsky is itself surprising and ought not to be magnified,
since the differences between the two seers are far more serious than
any parallels in mythic projection. Despite his extraordinary powers of
characterization and representation, the Dostoevsky of Karamazov is
1
2 / INTRODUCTION
essentially an obscurantist, and Blake would have judged him to have

been a greatly exalted version of his own Smerdyakov. Tolstoy enter
tained outrageous moralizations about the proper modes and uses for
literature, but, compared to the author of The Brothers Karamazov,
Tolstoy will seem an enlightened rationalist to a Western reader at the
present time. Perhaps that is only to say that Dostoevsky is less
universal than Tolstoy in spirit, less the Russian Homer and more the
Russian Dante.
The Brothers Karamazov is frequently an outrageous narrative and
evidently has strong parodistic elements. Its narrator is faceless; John
Jones calls him “a crowd in trousers.” His story is told with a sly
artlessness, which suits a novel whose burden is that we are all sinful,
for even holy Russia swarms with sin, with the universal desire,
conscious and unconscious, to murder the father. Old Karamazov is a
monster, but an heroic vitalist, fierce in his drive for women and for
drink. Dostoevsky evidently did not much care for Ivan either, and no
one could care for Smerdyakov. Yet all the Karamazovs bum with
psychic energy; all are true sons of that terrible but exuberant father.
Freud’s essay ‘‘Dostoyevski and Parricide” (1928) should be supple
mented by his Totem and Taboo, because the violent tyrant-father
murdered by his sons in the Primal History Scene is akin to old
Karamazov, who also wishes to appropriate all the women for himself.
Old Karamazov is actually just fifty-five, though ancient in de
bauchery. He could be judged a Falstaffian figure, not as Shakespeare
wrote Falstaff, but as moralizing critics too frequently view the fat
knight, forgetting his supreme wit, his joy in play, and his masterful
insights into reality. If Falstaff had continued the decline we observe in
King Henry IV, Part 2, then he might have achieved the rancid vitality
of the father of the Karamazovs. Fyodor Pavlovich’s peculiar vice
however is non-Falstaffian. Falstaff after all is not a father, despite his
longing to make Hal his son. Old Karamazov is primarily a father, the
parody indeed of a bad father, almost the Freudian primitive father of
Totem and Taboo. Still, this buffoon and insane sensualist is a fool in a
complex way, almost a Shakespearean fool, seeing through all impos
tures, his own included. Fyodor Pavlovich lies to keep in practice, but
his lies generally work to expose more truth. He lives to considerable
purpose, doubtless despite himself. The largest purpose, in one of
Dostoevsky’s terrible ironies, is to be the inevitable victim of patricide,
of his four sons’ revenge for their abused mothers.
The image of the father, for the reactionary Dostoevsky, is ulti-
Introduction / 3
mately also the image of the Czar and of God. Why then did Dostoevsky
risk the ghastly Fyodor Pavlovich as his testament’s vision of the
father? I can only surmise that Dostoevsky’s motivation was Jobean. If
Old Karamazov is to be our universal father, then by identifying with
Dmitri, or Ivan, or Alyosha (no one identifies with Smerdyakov!), we
assume their Jobean situation. If your faith can survive the torment of
seeing the image of paternal authority in Karamazov, then you are as
justified as Job. Reversing Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Dostoevsky
persuades us that if we haven’t had a bad enough father, then it is
necessary to invent one. Old Karamazov is an ancestor-demon rather
than an ancestor-god, a darkness visible rather than a luminous shadow.
You do not moum his murder, but as a reader you certainly miss him
when he is gone. Nor can you hate him, the way you despise the
hideous Rakitin. I admire John Jones’s emphasis:
The old man’s complicity in his own murder gets carried by

the book’s master metaphor. His house stinks. His life stinks.
Yet his mystic complicity never quite hardens into the judg
ment that he deserves to die. His nature is too broad to
allow that.
By “broad” Jones means simply just too alive to deserve to die,

which is what I myself would judge. So rammed with life is old
Karamazov that his murder is a sin against life, life depraved and
corrupt, yet fierce life, life refusing death. Even Dmitri falls short of
his father’s force of desire. Strangely like Blake again, Dostoevsky
proclaims that everything that lives is holy, though he does not share
Blake’s conviction that nothing or no one is holier than anything or
anyone else.
In his Notebooks, Dostoevsky insisted that “we are all, to the last
man, Fyodor Pavloviches,” because in a new, original form “we are all
nihilists.” A reader, but for the intercessions of his superego, might
like to find himself in Falstaff, but hardly in Fyodor Pavlovich. Yet the
honest reader should, and does, and no one wants to be murdered. As
an apocalypse, The Brothers Karamazov forces identification upon one.
The father in each male among us is compelled to some uncomfort
able recognition in Old Karamazov; the son in each can choose among
the three attractive brothers (Zosima is hardly a possibility). It cannot
be said that Dostoevsky does as well with women; Grushenka and
Katerina Ivanovna may divide male fantasy between them, but that is
4 / Introduction
all. As a portrayer of women, Dostoevsky does not match Tolstoy, let

alone Shakespeare.
Much of the permanent fascination of The Brothers Karamazov
invests itself in the extraordinary differences between Dmitri and Ivan,
and in Ivan’s two phantasmagorias, his “poem” of the Grand Inquisi
tor and his mad confrontation with the Devil. Dmitri, though he
yields us no phantasmagorias, is more endless to meditation than his
half-brother, Ivan. Dostoevsky evidently saw Dmitri as the archetypal
Great Russian: undisciplined, human—all too human, lustful, capable
of all extremes, but a man of deep feeling and compassion, and an
intuitive genius, a poet of action, an authentic comedian of the spirit,
and potentially a Christian. Ivan is his father’s son in a darker sense;
turned inward, his ravening intellect destroys a sense of other selves,
and his perpetually augmenting inner self threatens every value that
Dostoevsky seeks to rescue. If Dmitri is the exemplary Russian, then
Ivan is the Western intellectual consciousness uneasily inhabiting the
Russian soul, with murderous consequences that work themselves
through in his parody, Smerdyakov.
The legend of the Grand Inquisitor has achieved a fame that
transcends The Brothers Karamazov as a whole, hardly a result Dostoevsky
could have endured, partly because Ivan’s parable tells us nothing
about Dmitri, who is the authentic center of the novel, and partly
because, out of context, Ivan’s prose poem can be mistaken for
Dostoevsky’s, which is The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan’s legend is one
that Dostoevsky rejects, and yet Ivan also, like old Karamazov, is
Dostoevsky, even if Dmitri is more of Dostoevsky. The Grand Inquis
itor stamps out human freedom because humans are too weak to
endure their own freedom. If Dostoevsky really intended Zosima to be
his answer to the Inquisitor, then he erred badly. Zosima, to an
American ear anyway, is a muddle, and his interpretation of the Book
of Job is the weakest failure in the history of theodicy. What is least
acceptable about the Book of Job, its tacked-on conclusion in which
God gives Job a perfect new set of sons and daughters, every bit as
good as the old, is saluted by Zosima as the height of holy wisdom. It
is difficult to answer the Grand Inquisitor with such sublime idiocy.
But then the Grand Inquisitor speaks a sublime idiocy, despite the
grand reputation that the legend has garnered as an excerpt. Dostoevsky
is careful to distance himself and us, with the highest irony, from
Ivan’s dubious rhetoric. The Inquisitor rants on for too long, and just
does not frighten us enough; he is more Gothic than we can accept,
Introduction / 5
just as Ivan’s devil is too much a confused projection of Ivan. To be

effective, the legend of the Inquisitor should have been composed and
told by Dmitri, but then The Brothers Karamazov would have been a
different and even stronger novel.
Freud, for polemical and tendentious reasons, overrated The Broth
ers Karamazov, ranking it first among all novels ever written, close to
Shakespeare in eminence, and finding the rather lui id legend of the
Grand Inquisitor to be a peak of world literature. That latter judgment
is clearly mistaken; the status of the novel, among all novels whatso
ever, is perhaps a touch problematic. The book’s enormous gusto is
unquestionable; the Karamazov family, father and sons, sometimes
seems less an image of life, a mimesis, and more a super-mimesis, an
evocation of a more abundant life than representation ought to be able
to portray. There cannot be a more intense consciousness than that of
Dmitri in a novel; only a few figures elsewhere can match him.
Doubtless he speaks for what Dostoevsky could not repress in himself:
“If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him under
ground.” If you wish to read “God” there as the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses and Jesus, you are justified; you
follow Dostoevsky’s intention. I am willing to read “God,” here and
elsewhere, as the desire for the transcendental and extraordinary, or
Dmitri’s and Dostoevsky’s desire for the completion of what was
already transcendental and extraordinary in themselves.
Justice and Punishment
Richard Peace
A striking feature of The Brothers Karamazov, and one which marks it

off from Dostoevsky’s other novels, is the extent to which the charac
ters are obsessed by hell; each, it seems, has his own ideas on the
subject. The hell of old Karamazov has a ceiling and devils with hooks.
Grushenka’s hell is a burning lake from which an old woman might be
saved by an onion. In the name of “harmony,” Ivan renounces hell
altogether, yet hints that his “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” owes
something to the medieval poem “The Holy Virgin’s Journey through
Hell”: he seems unduly interested in the concept of hell it describes.
Dmitri, riding to Mokroye, is told by his cabman that hell is only for
the rich and the important, but finds a hell of interrogation there which
is consciously likened to Ivan’s medieval poem (cf. bk. 9, chaps. 3, 4,
and 5: “The Journey of the Soul through Hell”). Nor, indeed, can Ivan
escape hell himself. Before his brother’s trial he is tormented by the
devil, who mocks him with a made-to-measure hell, ordered on liberal
lines, with reforms extending to the introduction of the metric system
and an enlightened view of punishments. This by no means exhausts
the references to hell in the novel, but most important of all is Zosima’s
conception of hell; the last section of his teachings: “About Hell and
Hell fire, A Mystical Discourse” constitutes the longest treatise on this
subject in the novel. The prominence of hell in The Brothers Karamazov
is not fortuitous: it is a symptom of that theological debate which is
From Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels. © 1971 by Cambridge

University Press.
7
8 / Richard Peace
carried on throughout the whole novel; a debate which has as its

principal concern the question of punishment.
The first fruits of this theological debate are to be seen in the
argument which develops, early on in Zosima’s cell, around the ques
tion of ecclesiastical courts. The subject may seem appropriate, in as
much as the Karamazovs have met to compose their differences before
a small gathering of monks headed by the elder, but the discussion
arises not so much from the occasion, as from an article written a short
time before by Ivan. This article is the seed from which the great
preoccupation with punishment springs; it has the same germinal sig
nificance for The Brothers Karamazov as Raskolnikov's article has for
Crime and Punishment. In that novel the centre of interest had been
focussed on the crime and the motives for the crime; a preoccupation
which had emanated from the very subject matter of Raskolnikov’s
article. In The Brothers Karamazov, on the other hand, Ivan’s article on
ecclesiastical courts raises another but related issue: the nature ofjustice
and the punishment of the criminal; it points the direction which the
novel itself must take, and it sets a new emphasis: not Crime but
Punishment.
Before going on to discuss the ideas of this article, it would be as
well to look at the way in which they are presented. Ivan, as we have
seen, is a divided man, and it is not clear whether he is for or against
the propositions he is advancing in his article; this leads Father Iosif,
the librarian of the monastery, to call it: “an idea with two ends.”
There are no direct quotations from the article, but its contents are
related, first by Iosif, and then by Ivan himself. Ivan as the expounder
of his own article is concerned to establish what was actually written,
rather than to join in disputation. This produces the curious effect of
Ivan presenting the points of his own argument as if he were an
uncommitted third person, a mere narrator; while the disputation itself is
carried on by two other voices representing, as it were, his own divided
self. These are, on the one hand Miusov, the cultured free-thinking
“Westerner,” and on the other Father Paisiy, the scholarly monk. The
clash of contrary opinions is presented through them, and this frees
Ivan from any obligation to be other than the cool expounder of the
ideas of his article; it also releases Zosima from the burden of minor
disputation, so that, when he does enter the discussion, his words have
particular emphasis and importance.
Ivan’s article appears to make two points: the first of which serves
as a premise for the second. His first concern is to synthesise the two
Justice and Punishment / 9
apparently diverse principles of Church and State; and this, he argues,

could be achieved in two ways. Thus it is possible for the Church
itself to become a State which is the Roman solution to the prob
lem; for whereas the Roman Church appeared to conquer the Old
Roman Empire, in reality it was the old Roman Empire which took
over the Church. This idea we have already met before in the
mouth of Myshkin, and in The Brothers Karamazov it has the ap
proval of Zosima himself; for when he enters the argument he sup
ports the words of Ivan: “In Rome a State has been proclaimed
instead of a Church for a thousand years at least” (bk. 2, chap. 5).
It is an idea which, in the future course of the novel, will take
on flesh.
The other solution to this problem of synthesis is that the State
itself become the Church: that the civil element become completely
absorbed into the body of the Church. This is what Zosima himself
believes in, and he proclaims it will happen: “It will be! It will be!”—an
expression of fervent faith which serves as the title for the chapter in
which this whole discussion takes place.
Ivan’s arguments on Church and State, however, are an introduc
tion for his main theme: the diverse elements of Church and State in
the sphere of justice (i.e., ecclesiastical courts versus civil courts).
Justice as conceived by the State, Ivan argues, is a purely mechanical
process; the cutting off of an infected limb. The justice prescribed by
the Church, on the other hand, is entirely different; it is not physical,
but spiritual:
“If everything became the Church, then the guilty and dis
obedient would be excommunicated by the Church, and no
heads would be cut off,” Ivan continued. “Where, I ask
you, would the excommunicated man go? For in this situa
tion, he would not only have to go away from men as he
does now, but from Christ too; for, by his crime, he would
have rebelled not merely against men but against Christ’s
Church as well.”
(bk. 2, chap. 5)
If there were only ecclesiastical courts, argues Ivan, even the nature of
crime itself would change.
When Zosima enters the discussion it is to corroborate much of
what Ivan has said:
10 / Richard Peace
“It is like this,” began the elder, “sending people to penal

servitude in Siberia (and formerly this was accompanied by
beating) does not correct them, and most important of all it
does not really frighten any criminal. Not only does the
number of crimes not decrease—it grows yearly. You must
agree about that. It is obvious, therefore, that society is not
in the least protected by this; for although a harmful limb is
mechanically cut off, and put far away—out of sight, out of
mind—nevertheless another criminal immediately springs
up in his place; perhaps two—more, even. If there is any
thing which, even today, protects society and corrects the
criminal himself, turning him into a different person, it is
but one thing—the law of Christ revealing itself in the
awareness of the individual conscience. Only by recognising
one's guilt as a son of Christ’s society, that is the Church,
does one recognise one’s guilt in respect of society itself: that
is in respect of the Church. Therefore the criminal of today
is capable of recognising his guilt only in respect of the
Church, not in respect of the State.”
(bk. 2, chap. 5)
But in his teaching on the Church’s attitude to punishment, Zosima is

not in full agreement with Ivan. He stresses, not excommunication,
but the suffering of the individual conscience. This, he claims, is real
punishment: “The only real punishment, the only one which deters
and which reconciles, and it consists in the awareness of one’s own
conscience” (bk. 2, chap. 5).
For all that there appears, on the surface, to be a large measure of
agreement between the ideas here expressed by Ivan and those of
Zosima himself, the elder is not taken in by them; and in the next
chapter (“Why does such a Man Live?”) he tells Ivan plainly that
he has not yet decided the question of faith. In acknowledgement
of the truth of this observation Ivan comes up to the elder for his
blessing.
Ivan is, indeed, a divided man, and in the next stage of his
theological debate he reveals the other side of his thought. This is the
occasion of his “confession” to Alesha at the inn—the proclamation of
his “rebellion.” At first he talks generally about Turkish atrocities in
Bulgaria; the plight of the Swiss “savage,” Richard (i.e., the theme of
the condemned man); and the Nekrasov poem about a peasant beating
Justice and Punishment /Il
a horse. But, in order to strengthen the case for his “rebellion,” Ivan
says that he will restrict his argument to documented acts of cruelty
committed against children. There is the banker Kroneberg who sadis
tically birched his seven-year-old daughter; there are the parents who
locked up their five-year-old daughter at night in a privy, and made
her eat excrement. Both these incidents were taken from contemporary
newspaper accounts; the third took place at the beginning of the nine
teenth century, and concerns a child hunted by dogs.
What is significant in Ivan’s evidence is that all the incidents he
quotes—from the Turkish reprisals in Bulgaria to the boy hunted for
wounding a dog—all without exception illustrate the grotesque cruelty
of human punishments: all are examples of human justice at its most
vile. Nor can these incidents be dismissed as rough justice operated
without reference to the law; for the case of Richard illustrates the
workings of a sophisticated legal system of the civilised West, whereas
the Kroneberg affair provides an additional commentary on the Rus
sian judiciary: the Kronebergs are brought to trial, and their actions are
vindicated by a Russian court.
Ivan, however, does not stop here: on this evidence of human
notions of punishments he goes on to pass judgement on divine justice
itself; he cannot see how any form of ultimate harmony can compen
sate for the sufferings which human beings inflict on each other:
Oh, Alesha, I am not blaspheming. I do understand what a

cataclysm of the universe there must be when everything in
heaven and under the earth will fuse into one voice of praise,
and everything that lives and has lived will cry out: “Thou
art just, Oh Lord, for Thy ways have been revealed!” When
the mother embraces the torturer, who had her son tom to
pieces by dogs; and all three, in tears, cry out loud: “Thou
art just, Oh Lord”—then, of course, the crown of knowl
edge will have been gained, and everything will be ex
plained. But here is the rub; this is just what I cannot accept,
and whilst I am on earth I hasten to take my own measures.
You see, Alesha, when I live to see this moment, or am
resurrected to see it, perhaps it really will happen that I
myself will cry out with all the rest: “Thou art just, Oh
Lord!” But I do not want to cry out, and whilst there is still
time, I hasten to guard myself against it. I therefore re
nounce higher harmony completely. It is not worth one
12 / Richard Peace
little tear of one suffering child; a child such as the one who
beat her breast with her little fist, and, with her tears unre
deemed, prayed in her stinking privy to “Good, kind God.”
(bk. 5, chap. 4)
The argument in Zosima’s cell on civil justice versus ecclesiastical

justice has now developed into a debate on human justice versus
divine; and, when Alesha tries to solve Ivan’s dilemma by bringing in
the figure of Christ, Ivan counters with his own "anti-christ”—The
Grand Inquisitor. Here again the references go back to the debate in
Zosima’s cell. Father Paisiy had commented on the notion of Church
turned into State: “This is Rome and its dream. It is the Devil’s third
temptation of Christ,” and now the Grand Inquisitor proudly acknowl
edges this in his own words to Christ:
It is exactly eight centuries ago that we took from him, that
which you had angrily refused: that last gift which he of
fered you, showing you all the kingdoms of the earth. We
took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and pro
claimed ourselves merely kings of the earth.
(bk. 5, chap. 5)
Yet the figure chosen by Ivan to represent the “Church turned

State” is, significantly, not the pope—it is the Grand Inquisitor: the
dispenser of terrible punishments and crude mechanical justice.
We can now see how closely Ivan’s “confession” is related to the
earlier discussion of his article. Ivan’s arguments in Zosima’s cell had
had as their premise the desirability of the State becoming the Church;
they had culminated in an examination of the true nature of punish
ment. Now, however, it is as though Ivan is picking up Zosima’s
theory of ideal punishment, and countering it by concrete examples of
punishments as they exist. The reality of human “justice” is so bar
baric, he appears to argue, that it negates any possibility of an ideal
higher justice; there is no divine harmony which is capable of reconcil
ing man’s injustice to man, and so, in the absence of eternal harmony,
man is thrown back on a purely temporal solution: the ecclesiastical
justice of the Grand Inquisitor—the enforced “harmony” of the Church
turned State.
Thus Ivan’s argument is the very reverse of the argument in the
cell; the movement is not from ideal theocracy to ideal justice, but
from concrete justice of an appalling nature to an equally appalling
concrete theocracy—that very solution to the problem of synthesis

which had been so vigorously rejected in the argument in the cell. The
convictions which Ivan appeared to share with Zosima have been
stood on their head, and the assertion that Ivan's article was “an idea
with two ends” is now seen to be true.
But Ivan’s equivocation goes deeper than this; for if his “rebel
lion” inheres in his refutation of divine justice, the attack, as we have
seen, is hardly direct. Ivan is no Voltaire moralising on the senseless
tragedy of the Lisbon Earthquake—indeed it is remarkable that the
evidence on which he indicts divine justice does not contain even a
single “act of God”—nor yet is he a second Ippolit railing against the
dark force behind the world. Ivan says he wishes to restrict his evi
dence to the sufferings of children, but even so he does not, like
Ippolit, rebel against the existence of disease which can torment chil
dren just as cruelly as birches, can kill them just as mercilessly as a
pack of hounds. This omission seems particularly remarkable in view
of the fact that Dostoevsky had the death of his own child Aleksey so
much on his mind when he was writing the novel. Indeed it is striking
that the author not only does not turn the dying Ilyusha into a second
Ippolit, but actually presents a refutation in the figure of Markel, the
dying boy who is Zosima’s brother and inspiration.
Ivan’s evidence is obsessively centred on man, and his rebellion is
that of a humanist: “I do not want harmony. I do not want it out of
love for humanity.” Nevertheless, he himself admits that he does not
fully reject God: “It is not God that I don’t accept: it is the world he has
created.” This is true; for his evidence indicts not God, but man. Ivan as
a humanist is a very disillusioned one: the Devil seems to have more
reality for him than does God. Thus after his description of the
Turkish atrocities he says: “I think that if the Devil does not exist, and
has therefore been created by man, then man has created him in his
own image and likeness” (bk. 5, chap. 4). Ivan acknowledges that a
; beast lurks in every man. Even in his saintly brother Alesha there is a
* devil thirsting to mete out punishment, and capital punishment at that
(a practice that the Russian State had in theory abandoned). Ivan gets
Alesha to agree that the general who hunted down the little boy should
be shot:
“Shoot him,” Alesha uttered quietly, raising his eyes

towards his brother with a pale contorted smile.
“Bravo!” yelled Ivan in something like rapture. “Well, if
14 / Richard Peace
you say so, then . . . and you a monk! So that’s the little
devil that sits in your heart, Alesha Karamazov!”
(bk. 5, chap. 4)
By centring his rejection of universal harmony so firmly on man,

Ivan, far from limiting the scope of his argument, is in fact widening
it; for all this evidence of the devil in man is just as relevant for
harmony of another kind: socialist utopia—the Crystal Palace. The
argument in the cell had ended with Miusov implying that the Chris
tianity of the monks was really socialism, and Ivan, in his “confession”
to Alesha seems to acknowledge a degree of interchangeability be
tween the two ideologies, when he mentions the topics discussed in
taverns by Russian youths:
[They talk] About universal problems, how could it be
otherwise? Does God exist? Is there immortality? And those
who do not believe in God will talk about socialism and
anarchism, about remaking the whole of humanity in accor
dance with some new order. So it turns out to be the same
old devil in disguise, the same old problems, only the other
way round.
(bk. 5, chap. 3)
As “harmony” might therefore be seen in purely human terms, Ivan’s

criticism is all the more valid for being restricted to man in dishar
mony with man; and, as if to show the wider implications of his point,
he invites Alesha to assume the role of architect of universal harmony:
“Imagine that it is you yourself who are erecting the
edifice of human destiny, with the aim of finally making
people happy, of giving them, in the end, peace and rest.
But in order to do this (there would be no other way) you
would have, of necessity, to torture just one insignificant
little being, let us say that little child who beat her breast
with her tiny fist; let us say you had to found this edifice on
her unavenged tears. Would you agree to be the architect on
these conditions? Tell me, speak the truth!”
“No, I would not agree,” said Alesha quietly.
(bk. 5, chap. 4)
Alesha’s reply expresses a moral principle which runs through the

whole of Dostoevsky’s mature work. In Crime and Punishment,
Raskolnikov had discovered that he could not found human happiness

on the destruction of another human being; and at the end of his life, in
the famous Pushkin Speech, Dostoevsky himself will make much the
same point, when he maintains that the reason for Tatyana’s final
rejection of Yevgeniy Onegin (in Pushkin’s novel of the same name) is
that she realises the impossibility of founding happiness on the unhap
piness of another. Ivan, therefore, is applying the same humanistic
yardstick, by which Raskolnikov was measured, to the architect of
universal harmony himself—both Raskolnikov and God are found
wanting.
Such a conclusion is obviously absurd; it can only mean that the
laws of man are not the laws of God. The rationalistic mind of Ivan
grasps at a mathematical analogy. In 1833 the Russian mathematician
Lobachevsky had challenged Euclidian geometry, and had proved that
parallel lines can meet in infinity. The difference between human
justice and divine justice is therefore seen by Ivan as the difference
between a lower Euclidian truth and a higher Lobachevskian truth. Yet
even so he cannot be reconciled:
Let me explain myself. I am convinced, like a child, that
suffering will be healed, will be as though it never was, that
human contradictions in all their offensively comic aspects
will disappear, like a pitiable mirage, like some disgusting
invention of a puny human mind, a Euclidian mind as
insignificant as an atom. I am convinced that finally, at the
end of the world, at the moment of eternal harmony, some
thing so precious will occur, and be made manifest, that it
will satisfy all hearts, will suffice to assuage all indignation,
will be enough to redeem all human crimes and all human
blood shed by human beings themselves. It will suffice not
only for forgiveness to be possible, but for everything that
has happened to man to be justified, I grant this ... I grant
that all this will be so, and that it will be made manifest, but
this is the very thing I can not accept, do not wish to accept.
Even though parallel lines meet, and I myself see them, and
I myself say they have met, nevertheless I shall not accept it.
This is my fundamental point, Alesha, this is my thesis.
(bk. 5, chap. 3)
Ivan is no underground man for whom twice two can equal five,
nor is he a Shatov/Stavrogin refusing to desert the image of Christ for
16 I Richard Peace
the reality of mere truth. Ivan’s position is the very reverse of this: he
cannot renounce common, everyday logic for the sake of some higher
revelation; and yet this logic is obviously not sufficient:
Oh, my mind, this pitiable, earthly, Euclidian mind of mine
tells me only that there is suffering, and that no one is to
blame; that everything, in a quite simple and straightfor
ward manner, is the result of something else; that every
thing flows and finds its level. But this after all is mere
Euclidian nonsense. I do know all this, but what I cannot do
is to agree to live by it. What difference does it make to me
that no one is to blame, and that I know this? I need
retribution otherwise I shall kill myself, and retribution, not
in eternity, at some time or other and some place, but here
on earth, so that I myself can see it.
(bk. 5, chap. 4)
The ideas of Ivan’s “Rebellion” are not allowed to stand unchal

lenged; a positive refutation is advanced through the figure of Zosima.
The gulf between human truth and divine truth, which so perplexes
Ivan, is bridged for Zosima by revelation: by the message preached in
the Book of Job:
But what is great is that here is a mystery—that the transient
face of the earth and eternal truth have here come into
contact together; the process of eternal justice fulfils itself
before earthly justice. Here the Creator, as in the first days
of creation, bringing every day to its culmination with words
of praise: “that which I have created is good,” looks at Job,
and is again proud of his creation. And Job praising God
serves not only Him, but will serve the whole of His cre
ation from generation unto generation and for all eternity.
For he was preordained for this.
(bk. 6, chap. 2(b))
God’s world, which Ivan specifically rejects, is accepted whole

heartedly by Zosima, who in his short autobiography describes how
he once spent a night on the bank of one of the great Russian rivers in
the company of a simple peasant lad:
We fell to talking about the beauty of God’s world and

about its great mystery. Every blade of grass, every little
beetle, every ant, every golden bee, everything so amazingly

knows its own course, even though it has no mind: it
witnesses God’s mystery and is itself continually fulfilling it.
And I saw the heart of the dear youth was filled with
enthusiasm; he confessed to me that he loved the forest and
the forest birds. He was a bird-catcher; he understood all
their calls and could bring to him any bird he wanted. “I
know of nothing better than to be in a forest,” he said,
“everything is good.” “That is true,” I replied. “Everything
is good and wonderful, because everything is the truth.”
And I said to him, “Look at a horse, a great animal which is
close to man, or at an ox which feeds man, and works for
him, an animal that is bowed down and pensive. Look at
their faces: what gentleness! what attachment to man who
frequently beats them mercilessly! What lack of malice there
is in their faces! What trust and what beauty! It is touching,
even, to realise that they are without sin; for everything is
perfect; everything, apart from man, is sinless, and Christ
was with them even before he was with us.” “But surely,”
asks the boy, “how can it be that Christ is with them?”
“How can it be otherwise,” I tell him, “for the word is for
all, for all creation and all creatures. Every little leaf strives
towards the word, sings praises to God, weeps to Christ
unknown to itself, fulfils this by the mystery of its sinless
existence.”
(bk. 6, chap. 2[bj)
Zosima has here made explicit many of the ideas tentatively broached
by Myshkin in The Idiot; it is obvious that it is the beauty of God’s
world which convinces the elder of its justice; for him, as for Myshkin,
aesthetic criteria have become identified with ethical criteria; and for
both, happiness is an essential element in this quietest philosophy.
Thus Zosima says: “people are created for happiness, and he who is
completely happy certainly deserves to say to himself: ‘I have fulfilled
God’s commandment on this earth’ ” (bk. 2, chap. 4).
In The Devils Kirillov, too, is capable of achieving this state of
happiness, and of concluding, like the peasant lad here, that “every
thing is good.” Kirillov is obsessed by a leaf, and in The Brothers
Karamazov there is another nihilist who is susceptible to the beauty of
God’s world as epitomised in the miracle of the leaf; for, in spite of his
18 / Richard Peace
dark thoughts, Ivan Karamazov, as we have seen, tells Alesha that he

loves “the sticky little leaves of spring”; it is this half of his brother,
the aesthetic half, which Alesha claims will ultimately save him.
Yet in his present state of doubt and torment, Ivan’s aesthetic
susceptibilities only inhibit his progress towards salvation. He is alien
ated from his namesake, St John the Merciful, because of his revulsion
at all those hideously ugly aspects of human suffering which the saint
so readily embraced. If only human suffering could be presented more
aesthetically, Ivan might be prepared to make some effort towards
compassion:
One can love one’s neighbour in the abstract, and some
times even from a distance, but almost never from close at
hand. If everything were as it is on the stage, in a ballet,
where beggars, when they appear, enter in silk rags and tom
lace, and beg for alms in a graceful dance, one could then
admire them; admire them, but all the same, not love them.
(bk. 5, chap. 4)
But Ivan’s objections have already been anticipated earlier in the novel.
Zosima has already told Mrs Khokhlakova (“A Lady of Little Faith”)
that there is a love for humanity which is more concerned with theatri
cal effect; this he calls “imagined love” (lyubov’ mechtatel’naya). More
over the theatricality of Khokhlakova’s professed love seems to owe
much to the example of St John the Merciful; for she claims that she is
even prepared to kiss the putrefying wounds of her fellow human
beings. But such love on the part of Khokhlakova is only in the
imagination, whereas the love of St John the Merciful found concrete
expression in action, and it is “active love,” which Zosima preaches,
not only as his positive answer to the doubts of Khokhlakova, but
ultimately to those of Ivan as well.
Yet if Ivan begins his “Rebellion” with the legend of St John the
Merciful, he ends it with another legend—“The Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor.” Here we have another “saintly” figure who also claims to
love humanity, but like Ivan himself he can only do so from a distance,
and through devices worthy of the theatre; for the reality behind this
professed love for humanity is nothing other than contempt.
The living refutation of what the Grand Inquisitor represents can
be seen in Zosima himself. Both are old men on the verge of death;
both are monks and ascetics; but whereas the Grand Inquisitor embod
ies the legend of the Church turned State, Zosima is the prophet of the
State turned Church (“It Will Be, It Will Be”). The Grand Inquisitor
rules by “mystery, miracle and authority,” but for Zosima mystery is
not an instrument of rule, it is nature; it is life itself. Miracles too, he
teaches, only stem from faith: they cannot inspire it. Moreover author
ity for Zosima is spiritual authority—the voluntary submission of a
novice to his elder—it is not the physically imposed will of a despotic
“benefactor”; for the mainspring of Zosima’s authority is not pride but
humility. On the central question of punishment the attitude of the
State/Church is diametrically opposed to that of the Church/State.
The Grand Inquisitor solves the problem of crime by eliminating the
criminal with incarceration, torture and fire—this is the external and
purely mechanical form ofjustice deplored by Zosima in the discussion
in the cell. To the autos-da-fé of the Grand Inquisitor are opposed the
open confessions of Zosima; for he points to the individual conscience
as the only true instrument of punishment.
The Grand Inquisitor is but a figment of Ivan’s mind, a mind
which is essentially mathematical and “Euclidian,” and the logic of his
“Rebellion” is that a minus cancels out a plus; that the negative
evidence of human suffering is stronger than the most positive sign of
human happiness. Zosima’s non-Euclidian logic is the very reverse of
this: for him a plus is always stronger than a minus; so in justifying the
ways of God to man he emphasises the beauty and goodness of the
created world.
But if Zosima expounds the positive side of life, the existence of
the negative side, dwelt on in Ivan’s rebellion, still demands explana
tion. This is supplied by another figment of Ivan’s imagination—the
devil himself. He, according to his own words, is “the indispensable
minus sign.” Indeed, everything about this devil is negative. In the
first place he does not really exist; he is merely the hallucination of a
fevered brain. His arguments, too, are inconclusive and are ultimately
as insubstantial as he is himself. Negative, too, is his method of
argument, which is mocking and destructive; he taunts Ivan not merely
with his very own arguments, but jeers at his competence even to
reason at all. Still more insulting is the fact that this devil is a distorted
image of Ivan himself—the ironic proof of his own contention that
man has invented the devil in his own likeness. Because of this, the
devil’s mockery of Ivan is far-reaching and fundamental: it is an attack
on the whole of his personality, but the chief target is nevertheless
Ivan’s rationalistic mind.
He accuses Ivan of being concerned only with the mind, and in
20 / Richard Peace
words which parody Ivan’s own mathematical reasoning he hints at

the limitations of human rationality:
You see, I too, like you yourself, am a prey to the fantastic,

and therefore I love this earthly realism of yours. Here, with
you, everything is delineated, here there are formulae, here
there is geometry. But with us everything is vague indeter
minate equations.
(bk. 11, chap. 9)
The jibe here is at Ivan’s perplexity over the “two truths,’’ and the
devil drives home his attack by mocking Ivan’s love of parable; for just
as Ivan had told Alesha the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,’’ the devil
now recounts another legend to Ivan.
This concerns a learned atheist who refuted the possibility of an
after-life. When he died he found himself confronted by just such an
after-life, and grew very annoyed; for, he said: “This contradicts my
beliefs.’’ Accordingly he was condemned to walk in the darkness a
whole quadrillion kilometres before the gates of paradise could be opened
for him. But he lay down and refused to walk, for again the principles of a
rational, free-thinking liberal had been insulted: “I do not wish to go. I will
not go on principle.” He lay there until in the end he decided it would be
better to walk his quadrillion kilometres. Then the gates of heaven were
opened and he was allowed in; and he had not been inside more than two
seconds, before he exclaimed that these two seconds were not only worth
a quadrillion kilometres, but a quadrillion of quadrillion kilometres,
even, indeed, a quadrillion kilometres to the power of a quadrillion.
Ivan recognises this as his own “legend”—it is a story which he
had made up as a schoolboy in Moscow. But it is his own “legend” in
a more direct sense; for the intellectual, who here tries so stubbornly to
reject the after-life, has much in common with that other intellectual
who, on principle, returns the ticket to eternal harmony. Indeed, the
story is a moral tale directed at Ivan; it is a devil’s parable on the
dangers of intellectual arrogance and on the inability of the intellect to
reconcile the “two truths.”
But the devil himself is caught in that very same gulf which
separates the “two truths”; he, too, is in the position of the man
condemned to walk a quadrillion kilometres:
I know in the end I shall be reconciled. I shall come to the
end of my quadrillion, and I shall learn the secret. But until
this happens I sulk and grudgingly carry out my appointed

job of ruining thousands so that one shall be saved. How
many souls, for instance have had to be ruined, how many
honourable reputations discredited, in order to gain the righ
teous Job alone, over whom I was so cruelly duped in times
of yore! No, until the secret is revealed, there exist for me
two truths: one of that world, their truth, one that for the
time being is completely unknown to me; and another truth,
my truth, and 1 do not know yet which is the better.
(bk. 11, chap. 9)
The enigma of “the two truths” is thus exemplified in the devil

himself, who through the workings of his own mysterious destiny is
that “indispensable minus,” the ultimate product of which is a plus.
The figure the devil points to as a positive achievement is Job, and here
he is in agreement with Zosima; for he too sees in the story of Job a
reconciliation of “the two truths”—“the process of eternal justice
fulfilling itself before earthly justice.” Yet as the devil here confesses, the
devil himself is ultimately as perplexed as is Ivan. There is, indeed,
nothing he can tell Ivan, and Ivan reacts to his words in annoyance:
Everything that in my own nature is stupid, everything that
I have passed through long ago, thrashed out in my mind,
then thrown away like carrion, this you offer to me, to me
of all people, as if it were something new.
(bk. 11, chap. 9)
The devil cannot resolve Ivan’s doubts; he can only exacerbate them;
for the devil is only Ivan himself, or rather one part of him—he is
Ivan’s intellect mirroring itself in destructive self-mockery.
At the same time, however, the devil is also a manifestation of a
non-rational function of Ivan’s mind—conscience; for this hallucination
is symptomatic of a growing inner awareness of his own complicity in
the death of his father. That this instrument of conscience should be a
mirror mocking his intellect is only just, since the guilt of Ivan is the
guilt of the intellect. It is fitting too that its outward form should be
seen to resemble that of the devil; for, as we have seen in the last
chapter, the crime of Ivan is in essence theological parricide.
The culmination of Ivan’s hallucination clearly reveals the true
nature of his crime. The devil contends that, to gain its ends, nihilism
need destroy only one thing: the idea of God in the minds of men. He
22 / Richard Peace
then goes on to taunt Ivan with the concept of “man/god,” and with
his own theory that everything is permitted. Ivan, in a rage, throws a
glass at his tormentor, but he cannot be disposed of so easily; he only
disappears on the arrival of Alesha. Now, from Ivan’s rambling words,
Alesha ultimately comes to realise the true nature of Ivan’s hallucinations:
He began to understand Ivan’s illness: “the torments of a
proud decision, a profound conscience.’’ God, in whom he
did not believe, and God’s truth were conquering a heart
which did not want to submit.
(bk. 11, chap. 10)
Ivan’s decision is that he will publicly confess his guilt at the trial. This
is the final stage in the acknowledgement of his guilt, and even there
the devil reappears to haunt him. The mental suffering experienced by
Ivan is his punishment; he is being punished in the only possible way
that a man may be punished, according to Zosima; he is tormented by
the consciousness of his own guilt.
From the very first, from their meeting in Zosima’s cell, the elder
had sensed the troubled mind of Ivan, and when Zosima had offered
him his blessing, Ivan acknowledged the justice of the elder’s penetrat
ing insight, by going up to him himself and kissing his hand. But if
this little scene had caused a stir of surprise among the onlookers in the
cell, an even greater sensation is created shortly afterwards, when
Zosima bows down low before the eldest brother Dmitri. The key to
these two enigmatic acts is to be found in the chapter immediately
preceding them—the discussion on the nature of punishment. Ivan, as
we have just seen, is to undergo spiritual punishment. Zosima, there
fore, offers him his blessing. But the punishment which lies in store
for Dmitri is to be both spiritual and temporal; he is to suffer not only
from the consciousness of his own guilt, but is also to be cut off like an
infected limb by the mechanical justice of the State, even though
legally he should not be held responsible for the crime.
Zosima makes his obeisance to Dmitri because he senses that
Dmitri will undergo both forms of punishment of which he himself
had been speaking shortly before. The following day, on the eve of his
death, he offers an explanation of his action: “I bowed down yesterday
to the great suffering that awaits him in the future.’’ This in itself, of
course, is not absolutely explicit, but it must be taken in conjunction
with the highly significant terminology in which Zosima had chosen
to couch his disquisition on punishment. The word here used for
Justice and Punishment ! 23
“punishment” is not nakazaniye (the word which figures in the title

Crime and Punishment), it is kara [punishment, retribution] and when
this word next occurs in the novel, it is during the trial of Dmitri:
The majority of the men positively wished for the punish
ment [feara] of the offender, except perhaps the lawyers,
who were concerned, not with the moral side of the case, but
only with, as it were, its contemporary legal significance.
(bk. 12, chap. 1)
The thirst of the men for the kara of Dmitri is, of course, only one
aspect of the polemical way in which Dostoevsky presents the trial: the
lawyers are not concerned with the moral aspects of the case; the
eloquence of the public prosecutor is motivated by considerations of
personal prestige; and even the defence counsel is given the comic
name Fetyukovich (fetyuk = a ninny). In fact the presentation of
Dmitri’s trial is such that it might be taken as an illustration of
Zosima’s pronouncements on human justice:
Remember particularly that you can be the judge of no man.
For there can be no judge of a criminal on earth, until that
very judge himself recognises that he himself is just such a
criminal as the man standing before him, and that, perhaps,
he himself is most of all to blame for the crime of the man
standing before him. When he has realised this then he can
become a judge. However absurd this may seem, it is never
theless the truth.
(bk. 6, chap. 3[hJ)
The human conception ofjustice is such a travesty of the word, that all
that Dmitri can expect from the outcome of his trial is kara, even
though the summing up of Fetyukovich contains a plea for justice of
another kind, a kind that could even be accepted by Zosima himself:
Is it for me, unworthy as I am, to remind you that Russian
justice is not punishment [kara] only, but the saving of a
fallen man? Let other nanons have the letter of the law and
punishment [kara] but let us have the spirit of the law, its
sense: the saving and regeneration of those who have fallen.
(bk. 12, chap. 13)
The word “kara,” therefore, seems to be particularly associated

with Dmitri. He is “Karamazov”—“punishment-daubed” (the second
24 / Richard Peace
element of his surname, “maz" suggests mazat’—“to daub,” “to smear”).

It is, of course, a name which he shares in common with his brothers
and his father; they too, in their different ways, undergo punishment,
but it is in Dmitri that the full implications of kara are worked out.
Dmitri is condemned by the State to a purely “external” form of
punishment for a crime he has not committed, but he also suffers his
own “inner” spiritual punishment for a guilt of which he has suddenly
become acutely aware. It is because of this inner torment that he can
accept the outward manifestations of punishment as, in some sense,
just:
I accept the torment of my accusation and my public shame.
I want to suffer and by suffering I shall cleanse myself.
Perhaps I shall succeed in cleansing myself, gentlemen, what
do you think? But hear me, however, for the last time. I am
not guilty of the blood of my father. I accept punishment
not because I have killed him, but because I wished to kill
him, and even, perhaps, was capable of killing him.
(bk. 9, chap. 9)
The realisation of the true nature of his guilt comes to him

through a poignant dream. He is driving through slush on a cold
November day, and he passes a bumed-out village with its peasants,
hungry and suffering, lined up beside the road. The whole of their
plight seems summed up in the crying of a cold and hungry child in
the arms of its mother. Dmitri keeps asking stupid and obvious ques
tions about the plight of the “bairn” (ditye), as his peasant driver calls
it; questions which seem to emphasise Dmitri’s lack of comprehension
of the problems of human suffering, as well as his own impotence
before them:
He inwardly felt that although he was stupidly asking ques

tions that had no sense, these were questions which he
absolutely must ask: they were the questions which had to
be asked. He felt, moreover, a kind of tenderness welling up
in his heart, the like of which he had never experienced
before. He felt that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do
something for everybody, to do something so that the bairn
would not cry any more, so that the black, dried-up mother
of the bairn would not cry any more, so that there would be
no more tears at all for anybody from that moment on. And
he wanted this to happen at once; he wanted to do this

immediately without delay and in spite of everything, with
all his Karamazov impulsiveness.
(bk. 9, chap. 8)
Thus for Dmitri, as for Ivan, the terrible enigma of the existence
of evil is epitomised in the suffering of a child. Moreover Dmitri’s
dream, like Ivan’s hallucination, reveals him to himself; it is a turning-
point in his life. From now on Dmitri is a different man. On awaken
ing, he immediately feels gratitude for the unknown person who had
thoughtfully provided him with a pillow while he slept, and in spite of
the dream’s poignancy, he nevertheless thinks of it as a good dream.
Indeed it reveals to him a truth, a truth preached by Zosima, and
therefore a central message of the novel: “everyone is to blame.”
Gentlemen, we are all cruel; we are all monsters; we all force

others to weep, mothers and the children at their breasts.
But of all, let it be decided now, of all I am the worst
abomination. So be it. Every day of my life I have prom
ised, beating my breast, to mend my ways, and every day I
have gone on doing the same vile things. I understand now
that what is necessary for such people as me is a blow, a blow
of fate.
(bk. 9, chap. 9)
The dream confronts Dmitri with the far-reaching implications of

his own actions; for his crime is a crime against the father yet the
haunting image of his guilt is here portrayed as the suffering mother
and her child, and this is why he feels himself to be “the worst
abomination of all.” This greater complexity of guilt has already been
illustrated in the novel; Dmitri in assaulting the father, Snegirev, is
responsible for the tears of the son, Ilyusha. But Oedipal crime is a
boomerang which returns to strike the hand which aimed it. The
tragedy of Oedipus inheres not in the murder of a father but in the
inevitable sufferings of the son and his mother as a result of this
murder, and so the suffering child in Dmitri’s dream is also a symbol
for himself; his perplexed questions on the plight of the child are a
dream-projection of his own perplexity over “the blow of fate” which
has suddenly struck him down. Here, indeed, is a Dmitri far removed
from the declaimer of the “Hymn to Joy,” and this contrast is empha
sised in the dream by his questions on why the peasants are not singing
26 / Richard Peace
joyful songs. Nevertheless the dream ends on a hopeful note for he

hears the voice of Grushenka telling him that she is with him and will
not desert him.
The dream, therefore, is an expression of Dmitri’s parricidal guilt,
and it is significant that it reproduces elements of his “plunge into the
abyss beneath his feet”—that mad ride to Mokroye. On that occasion
the evidence of Dmitri’s parricidal guilt had appeared overwhelming,
and it seems only natural that he should have asked his coachman
Andrey whether he thought he would go to hell. The reply was
reassuring: hell, according to Andrey, is only for important people,
whereas: “We all think of you, sir, as a little child. That is how we
consider you.” But a kind of hell does await Dmitri in Mokroye. This
is made clear both by the chapter-heading, “The Journey of a Soul
through Hell” (a reference to the medieval poem which so fascinates
Ivan) and is implicit in the very name of the place itself. Mokroye
means “wet” and it is thus connected with the idea of “the lake” as a
symbol for hell (the lake figures prominently in the medieval poem
and in Grushenka’s story of the old woman and the onion; moreover
Dmitri himself lives not far from Lake Street).
It is after the three infernal “ordeals” of the preliminary investiga
tion that Dmitri has his revealing dream, and in it are reproduced the
fast ride, the questions to the coachman, and above all the figure of the
child—the child whose plight Dmitri cannot understand; for in spite of
the assurances of Andrey, the child has suffered an ordeal of fire. It is
this image of the child which haunts Dmitri and will influence the
whole of his future life:
Why did I dream of the “bairn” then at such a critical
moment? “Why is the bairn poor?” It was a prophecy for me
at such a moment! I shall go to Siberia for the “bairn”;
because everybody is to blame for everybody else, for all
“bairns”; because there are little children and big children.
All people are “bairns.” I shall go for them all, because it is
necessary for someone to go for all.
(bk. 11, chap. 4)
The plight of the child demands sacrifice; Dmitri is going to

accept suffering for all. In this he is a Christ-figure, and it is therefore
not surprising that it is Christ’s prophecy of his own death and resur
rection (St John 12:24) which serves as an epigraph for the whole
novel, and is applied more particularly to the fate of Dmitri. Thus
Zosima quotes this passage of Scripture to Alesha in explaining the

reason for his obeisance to Dmitri. The quotation occurs again in
Zosima’s testament, where it is a turning point in the account of his
relations with “the mysterious visitor”; a story which is a parable
about the terrible power of conscience, and as such sheds light on the
inner torments of both Dmitri and Ivan.
But the quotation is particularly striking for its imagery: “Verily,
verily, I say unto you, Except a com of wheat fall into the ground and
die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” These
are the terms in which Christ expresses the prophecy of his own
resurrection; but they could well be those of a pre-Christian dying-god
cult of an agricultural people—the cult of Ceres and Demeter, with
whom, as we have seen, Dmitri himself is closely identified.
In Christ’s prophecy an ancient pre-Christian assertion of renewal
is fused with a new Christian message of resurrection, and it is
significant that this particular passage of Scripture should be a favourite
quotation of Zosima; for the Christian teachings of this saintly man are
firmly wedded to a cult of the earth:
If all should desert you, and drive you out by force, then, when
you remain alone, fall on the earth and kiss it; water it with
your tears, and the earth will yield fruit from your tears, even
though no one has seen you or heard you in your loneliness.
(bk. 6, chap. 3[h])
This expression, through agricultural symbolism, of the miracle of

hope springing out of despair can be compared in general terms with
the verse from St John, but its pagan emphasis is more obvious. It is,
moreover, reminiscent of certain ideas of Marya Lebyadkin in The
Devils; heretical ideas which she, too, learned in a convent.
Zosima’s mystical teaching on “other worlds” is also presented in
terms of this earth and its cultivation:
God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this
earth and cultivated his garden, and everything came up
which could come up. But that which grew only fives and is
kept alive by the sense of its contact with other mysterious
worlds. If this feeling grows weak or is destroyed within
you, then that which has grown up within you dies. Then
you will become indifferent to life, will even hate it.
(bk. 6, chap. 3(g))
28 / Richard Peace
When the time comes for him to leave the earth for the mystery of the
“other worlds,” he is faithful to his own teachings:
He suddenly felt a kind of violent pain in his chest. He
turned white and firmly pressed his hands to his heart. At
this, everyone got up from his place and rushed towards
him; but although he was suffering he nevertheless looked at
them smiling, and gently sank from the armchair to the
floor, and knelt down. Then he bent down with his face
lowered towards the earth, spread out his arms, and, as
though in joyous ecstasy, kissing the earth and praying (as
he himself had taught), quietly and joyfully he gave up his
ghost to God.
(bk. 6, chap. 3)
In view of Zosima’s cult of the earth, the obeisance to Dmitri

during which he actually touches the earth with his forehead, seems to
take on added significance: he is bowing down to one whose name
links him with Demeter and who, like Zosima himself, will be regen
erated by a cult of the earth; for there is perhaps yet another reason for
Zosima’s obeisance—in the wild young officer, he recognises a former
self.
It is old Karamazov who first intimates to the reader that Zosima
might not be all he seems; that there is something of the Lermontovian
guards officer about him, and that moreover he is prey to the Karamazov
vice of sensuality. The old man’s words are, in fact, little more than
drunken nonsense; he himself finally admits that he has confused
Zosima with someone else. But in Dostoevsky, idle gossip is seldom
entirely gratuitous; a doubt has been sown in the mind of the reader,
and the early life of Zosima, as he himself relates it, gives some
substance to Karamazov’s empty words. Zosima has, in fact, been a
guards officer, whose behaviour was not unlike that of Lermontov’s
heroes, nor, indeed, that of Dmitri Karamazov himself; for Zosima,
too, has been cruel, he too has been a monster, he too has had a shock
which has pulled him up and brought him to the realisation that “we
are all to blame”—the very experience which the future holds for
Dmitri. The relationship between the two men is not simply that of
sinner and saint, each in himself represents the sinner turned saint, but
at different stages of this development.
Dmitri had wished to begin his “Confession of an Ardent Heart in
Verse,” by proclaiming “The Hymn to Joy,” instead he had quoted
Das Eleusische Fest and identified himself with man’s abject state before
he had linked himself in an eternal bond with the earth. Zosima in the
exhortations of his testament shows no such equivocation over joy.
Joy at the whole of creation will come to those who venerate the earth:
Love falling down on the earth and kissing it. Kiss the earth,
and love ceaselessly, tirelessly. Love everyone; love every
thing; search for this rapture, this frenzy. Water the earth
with the tears of your joy and love these tears of yours. Be
not ashamed of this access of emotion, but treasure it; for it
is a gift of God, a great gift, and it is not given to many,
only to the chosen.
(bk. 6, chap. 3[hJ)
If Dmitri has not yet found his bond with the earth, he is never
theless at one with Zosima in his striving for joy. Alesha is suddenly
struck by the comparison:
“He who loves people, loves their joy,’’ this is what the late
elder used to repeat constantly. This was one of his most
important ideas . . . “Without joy it is impossible to live,”
is what Mitya says ... Yes Mitya.
(bk. 7, chap. 4)
These thoughts come to Alesha during the funeral rites performed

over the body of the dead elder, and if Zosima is a crucial figure for an
understanding of both Ivan and Dmitri, how much more is this true
for his own novice Aleksey. The funeral itself reveals to Alesha the
truth of Zosima’s favourite biblical quotation, that fruit springs from
the com of wheat that has perished, the miracle of hope born out of
despair. This experience is a miracle in the sense in which the elder
himself understands the word; for unlike the Grand Inquisitor, Zosima
sees miracles not as phenomena inspiring faith, but as phenomena
springing from faith. During his lifetime, the credulous had ascribed
miracles to Zosima himself, but by his death he disabuses them.
Instead of the miraculous happenings which everyone expects, there
takes place merely an unpleasant natural phenomenon—with unseemly
haste the body begins to smell.
This is a test of his followers’ faith, not a strengthening of it, and
for no one is this more true than for Alesha. He is quite shaken by the
event; it is not so much that he himself expected a miracle, but that what
has taken place is the very reverse of a miracle—it is unjust. This
30 / Richard Peace
yardstick of “justice” shows how deeply the words of Ivan have

affected his thinking, and now in the depths of doubt and despair he
echoes the words of Ivan, in which he expresses his rejection of God’s
world.
Yet Alesha’s faith returns; a miracle does after all occur, but one
which is nevertheless presented in terms of ordinary everyday exis
tence; for it is typical of Dostoevsky’s treatment of the supernatural
that this miracle should take the form of a dream—Alesha is present at
Christ’s first miracle: the turning of the water into wine at Cana in
Galilee. This, the dream of the miracle, is the miracle itself; for in the
heart of Alesha the very same process is at work—water becomes
wine; despair is turned into joy; the dead husk of Zosima’s rotting
body yields a marvellous new fruit; the funeral rites merge into the
celebrations of the wedding feast; and at this wedding feast Zosima
himself is present and alive, just as Alesha has always known him. He
has been resurrected to this miracle of joy, because like Grushenka’s
old woman he has given an onion, and now he is drinking the new
wine, the wine of a new and great happiness. The dream unites in one
great reassuring synthesis the positive elements in all that Alesha has
experienced since the death of his elder; the desire for a miracle; the
story of Grushenka; and the holy text read over the body of the
beloved monk.
The real miracle here is the renewal of faith, and now, true to the
elder’s precepts, Alesha goes outside to embrace yet a further mystery:
Alesha stood, looked, and suddenly, as though his legs were

cut from under him, threw himself on the earth.
He did not know why he embraced it, he did not try to
account for the fact that he so irresistibly felt like kissing it,
kissing the whole of it. But he kissed the earth weeping,
sobbing, covering it with his tears, and in ecstasy he swore
to love it, to love it for all eternity. “Water the earth with
the tears of your joy and love these tears of yours” rang out
in his soul. What was he crying about? Oh, in his rapture,
he was even crying about those very stars which were
shining to him out of the abyss, and “he was not ashamed of
this access of emotion.” It was as though threads from all
these countless worlds of God had come together all at once
in his soul, and his soul trembled “in contact with other
worlds.” He wanted to forgive everyone for everything and
to beg forgiveness, oh, not for himself but for everyone and
everything. “Others will ask forgiveness for me” rang out
again in his soul. But with every moment he felt clearly,
almost tangibly, that something firm and unshakeable, like
that heavenly dome above him, was entering into his soul;
something almost in the form of an idea was being enthroned
in his mind and was there for the whole of his life, for all
eternity. He fell on the earth a callow youth: he arose a
warrior, doughty for the rest of his life. He realised this; he
felt it suddenly at the moment of his ecstasy, and never,
never, throughout the whole of his life could Alesha forget
that moment. “Someone visited my soul at that moment,”
he said later with firm belief in his words.
(bk. 7, chap. 4)
The frequent quotations within this passage show how closely Alesha
is following the ideas of his spiritual father. Yet the elder is not merely
a father; Zosima himself recognises in Alesha the spiritual reincarnation
of his own brother; and brotherhood, the brotherhood of all men, is
one of Zosima’s most cherished concepts. Besides The Book of Job,
his favourite reading includes the story of Joseph; a story which points
to the possibility of reconciliation between brothers, in spite of all that
has passed between them. But the larger brotherhood of all men is just
as possible if men will only act as brothers:
In order to refashion the world anew, it is necessary for
people psychologically to tum to a new road. Until you do
indeed make yourself the brother of everyone, no brother
hood will be achieved.
(bk. 6, chap. 2[d])
Brotherhood, of course, is a concept present in the very title of the

novel itself, and it is as central to the work as is the theme of father
hood. The subplot with Snegirev, so illustrative of that theme, is at
the same time a vehicle for Alesha’s attempts to follow the teachings of
Zosima on universal brotherhood. Snegirev is reluctant to accept money
for the injury he has sustained at the hands of Dmitri, but Alesha
represents Katerina Ivanovna’s offer of 200 roubles as “a sister coming
to a brother with help. ” Indeed, for Alesha, the whole fate of universal
brotherhood seems to hang on whether Snegirev will accept the money
or not:
32 / Richard Peace
Otherwise it would mean that everyone has to be the enemy

of everyone else on this earth, but there is also on this earth
such a thing as brotherhood.
(bk. 4, chap. 7)
But the “active love” demanded by universal brotherhood must

overcome many difficult obstacles, as Alesha finds out, not merely in
his relations with Snegirev, but in his dealings with his own blood
brothers. Indeed, from the lips of one of these, Ivan, he hears the
classic rejection of brotherhood: “Am I my brother’s keeper.’’ Yet
the way has been shown to him by Zosima, who has himself learned the
truth of brotherhood by bitter experience. As a young impetuous
officer he had struck his servant Afanasiy; and the fact that the servant
had accepted the blow without retaliation or complaint precipitated a
crisis in his master’s life. The young officer realised for the first time
how badly he behaved to his fellow men; and in order to proclaim the
brotherhood of all men, he joined another brotherhood, the brother
hood of a monastery. When next he meets Afanasiy there is a new
bond between them: “there took place between us a great human union.”
In the Karamazov household, however, there is a figure who
embodies the very antithesis of Zosima’s relationship with Afanasiy
and his revelation that his servant is his brother: that figure is
Smerdyakov—the brother turned into a servant. Zosima, who has
such a strong connection with all the other brothers, hardly seems to
touch Smerdyakov at any point, yet the logic of Dostoevsky’s novels
is such that the saint and the sinner, the Christian and the heretic, are
never far apart. If Smerdyakov does provide an antithesis for Zosima,
he also stands as some sort of dark commentary.
In The Brothers Karamazov Smerdyakov is the figure identified
with heresy, the character who is given the attributes of the Castrates;
but the ascetic, celibate Zosima is himself not without a taint of
heresy. The idea is first mooted by the elder Karamazov, who pre
tends to be offended by the monks’ “heretical practice” of confessing
aloud (by “the monks,” of course, he means only Zosima):
It is indeed a scandal! No, Holy Fathers, with you one

might even get caught up in the heresy of the Flagellants.
I shall write to the Synod about this on the first occasion,
and I shall take my son Aleksey home.
(bk. 2, chap. 8)
This outburst is comic but, like Karamazov’s ramblings on Zosima as

a Lermontovian hero, such nonsense is not without its grain of truth: the
old man is merely giving his own typically exaggerated version of
something he has heard; for within the monastery itself there is much
criticism of Zosima on this very point. Indeed, the very “Orthodoxy”
of the function of elders is called into doubt by several of the monks.
The condemnation of Zosima’s teachings comes to a head after his
death, when the sudden decomposition of his body seems to lend
validity to the denunciations of his critics. They remember that he
taught that Efe was a great joy and not a vale of tears; that he did not
believe literally in hell-fire; that he did not strictly observe the fasts;
that he allowed himself to be adored as something holy; that he abused
the mystery of the confessional. The scene reaches its final culmination
when Zosima’s arch enemy Ferapont enters the room where the body
is resting, and sets about exorcising the devil, as though the smell were
the stench of ungodliness.
All this, again, is comic, but there is a fundamental element in
Zosima’s teaching which is never presented in a comic light, but which
is certainly heretical—this is Zosima’s cult of the earth. This teaching
seems to be something pre-Christian; as we have seen it links Zosima,
as does his teaching on joy, with the pagan Dmitri Karamazov, but
also it looks back more explicitly to the heretical ideas which Marya
Lebyadkin (in The Devils) had picked up in a convent. Its literary
antecedents, therefore, link it to the Russian sects.
In The Idiot Myshkin had been impressed by religious ideas on the
soil, which he heard from the lips of an Old Believer, and in that
novel Dostoevsky had made his saint the spiritual brother of the
“Castrate” heretic, Rogozhin. In The Brothers Karamazov, on the other
hand, these two figures of saint and heretic are poles which never
touch, but the name Smerdyakov [stinker] seems nevertheless to sug
gest that into his portrait of the bastard brother, Dostoevsky has
distilled all the negative aspects of his saint, all that odour of corrup
tion which the monk Ferapont tried to exorcise as the stench of
ungodliness.
The figure of Zosima is thus central to the whole novel; he is a
father-figure in apposition to the elder Karamazov, yet at the same
time he is also a kind of brother-figure for all his sons: he is the
spiritual hub around which all the characters revolve.
The future of Zosima’s ideas lies with Alesha, but their imple
menting is far from easy. In his dealings with Snegirev, for example,
34 / Richard Peace
Alesha’s patience can be sorely tried, yet, as always the teachings of the
elder come to his aid. On the subject of Snegirev, he tells Lise
Khokhlakova: “Do you know, Lise, my elder once said: people must be
looked after exactly as though they were children, and some as though
they were sick in hospital” (bk. 5, chap. 1). Lise greets this idea with
enthusiasm, and cries: “Let us look after people as though they were
sick.” It is not difficult to see why she is so enthusiastic; for this
precept has more direct relevance for her than for Snegirev. She is,
indeed, one of the most difficult people with whom Alesha has to deal,
and in her own person she combines both the child and the invalid.
She therefore becomes a symbolic goal of Alesha’s “active love,” and
in spite of all the obstacles she places in its path, this love is unfaltering,
and Alesha’s intention of marrying her is unchanged.
As a cripple, Lise obviously invites love and consideration, yet she
is spoilt and wayward, and she has a strong desire to subject other
people to the suffering of which she herself is a victim. Her relation
ships with those around her, notably her mother and Alesha, are all
tormented relationships. She even strikes a servant, then later begs her
forgiveness; but this incident scarcely seems to have the same regen
erative effect that Zosima experienced in a similar situation.
The most frank expression of her desire to see others suffer and
enjoy it occurs in a conversation with Alesha towards the end of the
novel. She recounts the story she has read of a four-year-old boy who
has first had his fingers cut off, and then been crucified:
I sometimes think that I myself crucified him. There he is
hanging and groaning, and I sit down beside him and eat
stewed pineapple. I love stewed pineapple very much. Do
you?
(bk. 11, chap. 3)
This love of torment which she expresses so vividly here is itself

designed to torment Alesha, whom she is torturing, not merely with
this loathsome self-revelation, but also with hints of a relationship
between herself and Ivan. At the end of this chapter this sadism is
turned in on herself: as soon as Alesha has left she purposely traps her
finger in the door.
It is not merely that Alesha looks after people as though they were
children: he treats children as though they were adults, and this is the
secret of his success with them. He becomes the elder brother of all the
children in the novel. Yet he is not the only Karamazov for whom
children are important. We have seen that for Ivan children are the
embodiment of innocence, and that he purposely restricts his argu
ments on eternal harmony to the suffering of children. We have also
seen that Dmitri, who has been likened to a child by the cabman
Andrey, decides to take on suffering for the sake of a child. Neverthe
less, children are not all they seem. The crippled adolescent Lise
Khokhlakova is perverse and tiresome: she seems bent on destroying
Ivan’s myth of the innocence of children. For not only does she offer
herself to Ivan; she also reveals to him the same sadistic reverie of the
crucifixion of a child with which she had tormented Alesha: the crimes
committed against children by children, it seems, might almost be
more terrible and bizarre than those perpetrated by adults.
The subplot of “the boys” begins with Ilyusha, whose sufferings,
as we have seen, serve as a commentary for the actions of Dmitri, but
this subplot grows in importance as the novel progresses, and it is
responsible for some of the least satisfactory passages in the work. The
chapters “At Ilyusha’s Bedside” and “Little Ilyusha’s Funeral” are
nawkish; they seem merely to be catering for a nineteenth-century
taste for bizarre sentimentality—for stewed pineapple and crucified
children. Nevertheless, both these chapters are related to central themes
in the novel.
After the incident with his father, Ilyusha turns from being one of
the injured into being one who injures: he gives a stray dog, Zhuchka,
a piece of bread with a pin in it. Here as in the main plot the actions of
Dmitri have prepared the ground for Smerdyakov; for it is the bastard
son who teaches Ilyusha to do this. After this incident no one, it
appears, has been able to find the dog, but in fact Kolya Krasotkin has
found Zhuchka alive and well, has taught him a variety of tricks and
renamed him Perezvon. Kolya not only refuses to have anything to do with
Ilyusha after the incident with Zhuchka, but purposely hides the fact that
he has found the dog; his aim is to punish Ilyusha by developing in him
the consciousness of his own guilt. He hopes to intensify the effect by
producing the dog as an unexpected gift at the bedside of the dying boy.
The consciousness of one’s own guilt is, of course, the only form
of punishment which Zosima will recognise as such, but Krasotkin,
who is a natural leader for the children, has here abused his moral
influence: he has caused Ilyusha too much suffering over Zhuchka.
Indeed his behaviour is reminiscent of the way in which Lebedev
torments his friend General Ivolgin in The Idiot over the matter of the
stolen money; but here the effect is not comic—it is tragic.
36 / Richard Peace
And if Krasotkin, who suspected nothing of the sort, had

only known what a fatally tormenting effect such a moment
could have on the health of the sick boy, then not for
anything would he have ventured to play such a trick.
Perhaps in the whole room there was only Alesha who
understood this.
(bk. 10, chap. 5)
Here then, through the actions of a child, is a perverse commentary on

one of Zosima’s most cherished ideas.
Later in the same chapter (“At Ilyusha’s Bedside”) Krasotkin
provides another commentary, not this time on punishment, but on
guilt. The boy relates how he had induced a twenty-year-old errand-
lad to drive a cart over a goose’s neck, and how when the two had
been apprehended and brought before a magistrate, the town lad had
pointed to Kolya as the chief culprit:
“It wasn’t me,” he said. “It was him who set me on to it,”
and he points to me. I reply quite calmly, that I had not set
him on to it at all, but I had only given expression to a basic
idea, and had spoken only in theory.
(bk. 10, chap. 5)
The character of Kolya is presented as that of any embryo nihilist, and

the incident with the goose is another expression of the guilt of the
theorist who provides the intellectual inspiration for a crime: it is a
minor illustration of the guilt of Ivan.
“The Funeral of Little Ilyusha” again has implications for the
wider framework of the novel itself. This is the final chapter and it ends on
a note of hope for Alesha and the children of the novel. The innocence of
children once more seems vindicated. Ilyusha has died and his saint
liness seems confirmed by the fact that his body does not smell. Alesha
asserts in his funeral speech that all the children will be better for having
known him; the memory of his last days will fortify them even when
they become men; for such is the edifying power of a memory like this:
You must realise that there is nothing better, more power

ful, more wholesome and beneficial for the life that lies
ahead than a pleasant memory; particularly one from child
hood, from the parental home. People tell you a great deal
about your education, but just such a beautiful and holy
memory as this, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the

very best education there is.
(Epilogue, chap. 3)
Aleksey Karamazov whose own parental home was so lacking in

edifying memories is only too conscious of the sins of the fathers
which are visited on the children, but nevertheless, the Fathers and
Children theme is positively re-emphasised at the end of the novel;
there is hope that the sons will succeed where the fathers failed.
Alesha, whose own spiritual regeneration began with a funeral, is
sending his young disciples out into the world fortified by the uplifting
experience of another funeral; and this ending, from the point of view of
the author’s own biography, is psychologically convincing; for the
spiritual crisis which gave birth to that great affirmation of life which
is the novel itself—that crisis was the death of a child: the death of the
author’s baby son Aleksey.
How Sons Become Fathers
Michael Holquist
Freud first told the story in Totem and Taboo (1912-13) but came back
to it many times, each variant further extending its implications. In
what follows, we will use successive versions of the legend as bio
graphical templates for examining the careers of the different brothers.
The simplest account is the first. It was inspired by Darwin and
such anthropologists as Robertson Smith and is Freud’s attempt to
make the dynamics of the Oedipus complex into the engine of history.
At the beginning of time there was a primal horde, composed of a
despotic father who held absolute sway over his sons and the females
of the tribe. One day (eines Tages, a German fairytale formula) the
sons, angered by their father’s control of the women, rose up, killed
the father and ate him. But “the tumultuous mob of brothers were
filled with the same contradictory feelings which we can see in . . . our
children . . . and . . . our neurotic patients. They hated their father,
who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power
and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him, too. After
they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect
their wish to identify with him, the affection which had all this time
been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. A sense of guilt made
its appearance, which in this instance coincided with the remorse of the
whole group.” In order to propitiate the dead father, who “became
stronger than the living one had been . . . they revoked this deed by
forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for their father; and
From Dostoevsky and the Novel. © 1977 by Princeton University Press.
39
4() / Michael Holquist
they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who
had now been set free. They thus created out of their filial sense the
two fundamental taboos [against murder and incest] . . . which corre
spond to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex.”
This story has two parts, each of which is characterized by differ
ent meanings for son and father. In the first, the sons are helpless, the
father all powerful; in the second, the sons became fathers, but not of
the sort against whom they were forced to rebel. The new father tries
to be different from the old parent, to be better in the sense that he
permits more freedom to his own sons, thus eradicating some of the
worst effects of the either/or condition of the son/father dichotomy
that obtained in the primal condition. A complete biographical model
may be adduced from the legend by focusing on the progression of a
son who has gone through both stages, one who kills the father and
then eradicates the need for his own murder by liberating the children
he sires from the oppression he himself knew as a boy.
The Brothers Karamazov is built on just this biographical paradigm,
although only Alyosha fully completes its movement, with all the
other characters in the novel sorting themselves out according to how
many steps and implications of the master plot they actually articulate.
As we move from the most distorted versions of the primal horde
myth, in Smerdyakov and Ivan, to its most fully realized expression in
Alyosha, we shall also move from the simple account of the legend
outlined above to some of its later and more far-reaching versions.
In order to read the novel this way, we begin by assuming the
Karamazov family as we first encounter it to be in something very like
the initial condition of the primal horde. That is what all the talk about
“Karamazov-ism” means. Rakitin says to Alyosha, “Your house stinks
of crime ... in your family sensuality has reached a point where it
becomes a devouring fever. So these three sensualists are now con
stantly watching each other—with a knife stuck in the leg of their
boots.” (“A Seminarist-Careerist”). Old Fyodor Pavlovich is the
complete tribal despot, depriving his sons of power, money, and
women, better to prosecute his own lusts:
“So far as I’m concerned” he went on, becoming animated

all at once, as though growing sober for a minute as soon as
he got on to his favorite topic, “so far as I’m concerned—oh
my children, you, my little sucking pigs—so far as I’m
concerned there has never been an ugly woman in all my life
... for me ugly women don’t exist. . . . What’s so wonder

ful is that so long as there are peasants and gentlemen in the
world—and there always will be—there will also be such
lovely little scullery maids and their masters—and that’s all
one needs for one’s happiness!”
(“Over the Cognac”)
The sons all feel their dependence on him, that is what in the end
the Karamazovism in themselves they all admit but despise comes
down to, but Fyodor Pavlovich has a different way of exercising his
power over each of them. The first reason each son has for hating him
is grounded in his treatment of their various mothers. While Dmitry
has one mother, Ivan and Alyosha another, and Smerdyakov still
another, they have all been treated the same way by Fyodor Pavlovich.
Primitive patriarch that he is, he begins by stealing them from their
families or by raping them; he then soon abandons them in pursuit of
yet other women. He gets Dmitry’s mother, Adelaida Miusova, to
elope with him; she discovers he has taken her dowry, does not love
her, and after bitter quarrels she runs off with another man to die in a
St. Petersburg attic, “leaving the three-year old Mitya to be taken care
of by her husband. Karamazov at once turned his house into a regular
harem.” Sophia Ivanovna, the mother of Ivan and Alyosha, lasts
longer but fares worse. Fyodor Pavlovich also gets her to elope with
him: “her air of innocence made a deep impression on the voluptuary
. . . ‘those sweet, innocent eyes cut my heart like a knife at the time,’
he used to say, sniggering loathesomely.” After eight years of living in
the harem she dies, half demented. “After her death, almost exactly the
same thing happened to the two boys as to their eldest brother Mitya:
they were completely forgotten and abandoned by their father” (“Sec
ond Marriage and Other Children”). Stinking Lizaveta is raped by the
old man as she lies sleeping in a bush and her son, whose mother’s
name Fyodor Pavlovich assigns to him, is condemned to bastardy. He
more than any other of the sons dramatizes the effects of their father’s
rule over them; thus he is quite literally his father’s servant, a bastard
and an epileptic. It goes without saying that it is he who actually
accomplishes the act of which all the other sons merely dream when he
murders the old man.
Thus each of the sons has in his mother a reason for hating his
father. But the old man goes out of his way as well to show the power
he has over his children in a manner calculated to dramatize the
42 / Michael Holquist
particular helplessness of every one of them, thus engendering the

unique rage of each. Smerdyakov he openly insults, constantly re
minding him of his status as bastard and servant. Ivan he affronts
intellectually by the banalities he constantly reduces the philosopher’s
arguments to; emotionally—as the great oppressor of children—he
offends, since for Ivan as he makes clear in the prologue to his Legend,
the worst crimes are those against innocent children. Alyosha, the
novice, is attacked through his devotion to the church: Fyodor Pavlovich
twice vows to take his youngest son out of the monastery, to reclaim
him from the surrogate father he has found in Zosima. Not only does
the elder Karamazov boast to Alyosha how badly his mother was
treated; he adds that he took her favorite icon away, but not before
spitting on it. Alyosha, the gentle one, when he hears this story
“flushed, his eyes glowed, his lips quivered . . . just as had his mother
when she appeared to be on the point of killing Fyodor Pavlovich”
(“Over the Cognac”). Dmitry’s case fits the Freudian paradigm most
neatly, as the father’s power is dramatized in the property and the
woman he denies the son: “ ‘She [Grushenka] won’t, she won’t, she
won’t, she won’t marry him for anything in the world!’ the old man
cried, starting with joy” (“The Sensualists”).
Thus Fyodor Pavlovich acts out in a particular way the general
role assigned him in the primal horde legend: he has “prevented his
sons from satisfying their directly sexual impulsions; he forced them
into abstinence and consequently into the emotional ties wittrhim and
with one another which could arise out of those of their impulsions
that were inhibited in their sexual aim. He forced them, so to speak,
into group psychology. His sexual jealousy and intolerance became in
the last resort the causes of group psychology” (Freud, Group Psychol
ogy and the Analysis of the Ego). The situation as the novel opens is,
then, one in which the father tyrannizes over four sons who all labor
under the weight of their Karatnazovscina, which in their case is both
a dominant character trait and a political condition. The indignities
they share together at the hands of their father force them into a
primary group, “a number of individuals who have put one and the
same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently
identified themselves with one another in their ego.” They begin with
this bond of oppression, which is why they all can be so intimate with
each other immediately, even though they have been isolated from
each other. They come from completely different backgrounds, and
have not actually talked together until that point where the novel
How Sons Become Fathers I 43
begins. All the brothers will seek to find different ways out of the
dilemma, thus creating four versions of the Freudian master biogra
phy, each of which is defined by how well or poorly it charts a
complete movement from group to individual, son to father.;
Smerdyakov represents the most truncated version of the biogra

phy. He remains trapped in its opening steps, cannot get beyond the
climax constituted by his own act of patricide. As a very small child he
already conceives the world in the opposed terms of group/leader; in
his case in terms of the church, precisely one of the two groups Freud
proposes as exemplary: “As a boy he was fond of hanging cats and
burying them with ceremony. He used to dress up in a sheet, to
represent a kind of surplice, and chant and swing something over the
dead cat, as though it were a censer’’ (“Smerdyakov’’). When his father
treats him as an animal (Balaam’s ass), Smerdyakov looks for a new
leader and seems to have found him with the return of Ivan to the
household. “Smerdyakov had often been allowed to wait at table
before. . . . But since the arrival in our town of Ivan he had begun to
appear at dinner almost every day.” He gets into arguments, and, as
Fyodor Pavlovich points out to Ivan, “He’s doing it all for your
benefit. He wants you to praise him” (“The Argument”). He murders
his father less out of a desire for his own revenge than as a desire to be
the good servant of another master, his half-brother Ivan. When he
discovers that Ivan is unwilling to grant his approval to the deed,
Smerdyakov, abandoned by one master, one father, in whose pre
sumed service he had killed his other father, commits suicide. He is
trapped in group psychology because he lacks the means to break out
of adolescence: that very quality of passion, of sexuality, that impels all
the other brothers. He is always described as a “eunuch” or “castrate.”
Thus, since he cannot become a father, he is condemned always to be
the helpless son. And when Ivan, the father he has chosen, rejects him,
it is a metaphysical bastardy (all is not permitted) more unbearable than
that which defined his relationship to the first parent. He commits
suicide not out of fear of capture, but from the despair of a twice-
abandoned orphan.
Ivan, Smerdyakov’s alter ego in the technical sense of that term,
also fails to advance beyond the status of oppressed son. He, too, hates
the father: “I detest him so much. If it had only been him, I’d have left
long ago” (‘‘The Brothers Get Acquainted”), and he, too, finds him
self in the frustrated sexuality of the horde’s initial state, loving Katerina,
one of his elder brother’s women. Thus he has the passion denied
Smerdyakov, but the “children” he sires do not yet suffice to achieve
for him the status of father: the eunuch patricide, he rejects; the Grand
Inquisitor, he invents; and the devil, he dreams. He brings about the
death of the old despot, but cannot enact the further steps of Freud’s
normative biography: the reasons why we see in his legend; the conse
quences we see in his nightmare.
The confrontation between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor is as
much a disquisition on parenthood as it is an exercise in theology. Ivan
is obsessed with other examples of his own condition as oppressed
child. He collects anecdotes telling of particularly brutal crimes against
children; as a prologue to his legend, as his rationale for it, he recounts
some of these to Alyosha, adding, “I’m not talking of the sufferings of
grown-up people ... let them go to hell, but these little ones, these
little ones . . . there are lots of questions, but I’ve only taken the
children.” It is the suffering of children that leads Ivan to hand back his
ticket to God, the reason for his “Rebellion” that gives the Proem
chapter its title. We see here, not for the first or last time, an equation
between the psychopolitics governing the relations of Fyodor Pavlovich
to his sons, on the one hand, and that of God the father to his human
children, on the other. The filial oppression that sparks rebellion against
old Karamazov is transformed into a metaphysical cause for revolt
against God.
The Legend pits two theories of parenthood against each other.
Christ appears in the story not in his Second Coming, “No, he only
wanted to visit his children for a moment”; his only act, other than his
final kiss, is to resurrect a seven-year-old girl, a metaphor for the view
that fathers must deliver children from the killing effects of paternal
oppression. “You want to go into the world . . . with some promise
of freedom,” says the Inquisitor, who understands what is at issue very
well. He holds the opposite view. It is clear that the miracle and
mystery he invokes are mere subfunctions of the third element in the
triad that defines him, authority. He, like that patriarch of the other
legend, the leader of the primal horde, wants to insure that children
remain children; he forces them into group psychology; “the- abso
lutely essential thing is that they should [worship] all together.1” He goes
on to say of even those who rebel against the authority for which he
stands,
they are little children rioting in class and driving out their
teacher. But . . . they will pay dearly for it.” His system is
grounded in a static dichotomy between group and leader,
children and father: “There will be thousands of millions of
happy infants and one hundred thousand sufferers who have
taken on themselves the curse of knowledge of good and
evil.
This is the vicious circle in which Ivan finds himself; it is why he

cannot himself move from the one condition (son) to that of the other
(father). He is incomplete; he is trapped in the initial stages of the
normal progression Alyosha’s career will completely articulate, a point
that is made when Alyosha criticizes the incompleteness of his broth
er’s story. Ivan has let his Inquisitor have the last word, “Tomorrow I
shall burn you. Dixil" But under Alyosha’s questions he adds, “I feel
that in defending my theory I must appear to you as an author who
resents your criticism. Let’s drop it.” But Alyosha asks, “How does
your poem end?” forcing Ivan to add the detail of Christ’s kiss, an
unexpected ending (“the old man gave a start”) as much for Ivan as it is
for his Inquisitor, which is underscored when Alyosha kisses him as
they part, a true act of plagiarism, not a technical imitatio Christi so
much as an endorsement of the parental principle for which Ivan’s
Christ stands in.
Ivan’s incomplete biography is dramatized as well in the en
counter with the spectre he fathers, the devil. The devil longs for
an end to the responsibility of his own freedom, wants to be one
of the eternal children for whom the Grand Inquisitor would be ***
natural parent: “My fondest dream is to be reincarnated, irrevocably—
and for good, as a 200-pound merchant’s wife and to believe in every
thing she believes. My ideal is to go into a church and offer a candle
from a pure heart.” Like the underground man, he cannot find a
story to live as his own biography: “I am the X in an indetermi
nate equation. I am a sort of phantom of life [prizrak zizni] who has
lost all his ends and beginnings, and who has finally even forgotten
what his name is.” Which is exactly what happens to Ivan, whose
end is an indeterminate “brain fever.” He cannot get beyond the
dilemma of desiring his father’s death: “Who doesn’t wish his father
dead . . . They all wish their fathers dead. One reptile devours
another” (“A Sudden Catastrophe”). Thus his story ends in confusion:
“shouting something incoherent, he went on screaming while he
was being carried out.” Like his devil he “has lost all his ends and
beginnings.”
Now it has often been said that the shape that stands over against
Ivan’s ideas and the incomplete biographical progression they dictate is
to be found in the chapters on “The Russian Monk” that follow
closely on the Grand Inquisitor section of the novel. Dostoevsky, in
some of his attempts to explain away the power of the Grand Inquisi
tor, assumed this position as well. And at first glance there would
appear to be much to support such a view, especially if we maintain
our biographical prejudice, since it is here that we get the most distilled
version of “the life of a great sinner” in the Vita of Zosima. The elder’s
life appears to be told according to confessional narrative norms: not
only does he experience a conversion, but so in the same story does his
brother Markel and his friend, the mysterious visitor Michael^Jdis
biography is laid out according to the strictest norms of hagiography.
There are two sections; the first called “Biographical Data” tells how he
went astray as a young man, becomes a dissipated soldier (“they
behaved badly, and I worst of all”), but then experiences a mysterious
grace:
I felt as though my heart had been transfixed by a sharp
needle. I stood there as though I had lost my reason, and the
sun was shining, the leaves were rejoicing and reflecting the
sunlight, and the birds—the birds were praising the Lord
... I covered my face with both hands, flung myself onto
the bed and burst out sobbing.
He conflates hagiographie tradition with literary cliches when next
morning he nobly refuses to answer his opponent’s fire in a duel. But
the chronology of his life—as it always does in a true confession—
effectively ends at this point. He has found the end—as both conclu
sion and telos—of his development, in contrast to Ivan, whose biography
lacks an end. The second part of Zosima’s biography is not told
chronologically then, but consists in the “Discourses and Sermons
of the Father Zosima,” much as Augustine’s life ends with his con
version, and what follows is a discourse on time and the book of
Genesis.
But to oppose Zosima’s biographical scheme to that of Ivan’s
would be to fall into the trap that leads so many critics to identify
Stepan Trofimovich’s conversion rather than Stavrogin’s suicide as the
sonclusion of The Possessed. The story of the novel does not cease with
the story of Zosima. Even more, there are elements in the plot that
contains Zosima’s life which suggest that it is included not as a defini
tive example of biography, but rather as yet another model of life
history that must be superseded. I have in mind first of all those
demurrers on the part of the novel’s narrator as to the close fit between
Alyosha’s written account of Zosima’s life, on the one hand, and that
life as it was actually lived, on the other. At the beginning of Alyosha’s
manuscript the narrator warns:
This account of Zosima’s life was written down from mem
ory ... a short time after the elder’s death. But whether it
was all the conversation on that evening or whether he
added to it from his notes of his former talks with his
teacher I cannot say for certain. Besides, the elder’s speech in
his account seems to go on without interruption, just as
though, in addressing his friends, he had been telling his life in
the form of a story, while from other accounts of it there can
be no doubt that it all happened somewhat differently. . . .
Moreover there can be no question of an uninterrupted
narrative on the part of the elder. . . . Nevertheless I have
preferred to confine myself to the elder’s story according to
Alexei Karamazov’s manuscript.
And as the manuscript comes to an end, the narrator points to the
confessional aspect of the Vita: “I repeat, [the manuscript] is incom
plete and fragmentary, the biographical data, for instance, covers only
the elder’s early years,” or, in other words, only those years up to
Zosima’s conversion.
Two things should be noted about the narrator’s reservations:
first, that the life is suspiciously coherent, told; second, that it is
nevertheless not complete. It is shaped along the lines of a traditional
biography, “literary” in the sense of that word invoked by the under
ground man, but only up to a certain point. It is precisely Zosima’s
death that raises questions about the Life: the traditional ending of the
Vita is reversed. The saint’s corpse not only fails to smell of the
obligatory roses; it raises a stench that forces the shocked monks to
open all the windows. This conclusion of the fife is in contradiction
with the canonical norm of the Life. Dostoevsky is at pains to point out
that the stinking corpse is not to be read as a judgment on how Zosima
lived his life. But it is a judgment on how that life was told. The
reason why the confessional biographical model is so spectacularly
flouted, and why it is breached precisely at the end, is that Dostoevsky

is abandoning it as a possible paradigm for the life of his hero Alyosha,
whose progression will not be that from sinner to saint, but from
group member to individual, son to father.
Before we go on to Alyosha, however, a few words should be
said on the subject of Dmitry’s relationship to the normative biogra
phy we have been charting. He comes as close to living through all the
functions of the primal son’s narrative as anyone except Alyosha. He,
like Ivan and Smerdyakov, desires the death of his father, openly
threatens him with murder, and challenges that other father, Captain
Snegiryov, to a duel. But the rebellious son almost becomes the loving
father himself after his arrest. As he lies dozing during the interview at
the Mokroye tavern, he dreams of poverty-stricken mothers and a
starving, freezing baby, the image of which causes him to ask, “Why
are they so black with misfortune, why don’t they feed the baby?”
(“The Evidence of the Witnesses”). Thus, just after learning of his
father’s death, Mitya dreams of assuming a kind of paternal responsi
bility and one, moreover, that is set off from Ivan’s concern for
children. The starving baby is called “ditë,” a peasant dialect word that
marks the difference between it as an object of compassion and the
more proper “child” (rebënok) whose fate obsesses Ivan. The dream is
as well contrasted to Ivan’s nightmare in its effect: Dmitry’s “heart
blazed up and rushed forward to the light, and he longed to live.” In
the end, however, it is not given him to experience full parenthood in
the sense that word takes on in the course of the novel: his dite is still a
dream as he plans to escape to America. He is not yet ready to take on
responsibility of this sort, one that includes responsibility for the death
of his own father. As Alyosha tells him, “you are not ready and such a
cross is not for you . . . such a cross is too much for you” (“For a
Moment a Lie Becomes the Truth”). Zosima has bowed down to
Dmitry and not to any of the other brothers because it is Mitya who
will actually be judged for the crime of which they are all guilty:
patricide.
But Alyosha has won the right to judge whether or not his brother
is “ready,” because he is at a further point in that biographical progres
sion which structures the whole novel, a point he knows Mitya has not
reached. Alyosha treats his brother like a son, because Alyosha has
become a father. In the “scientific myth” we have been using as a
narrative guide, it is assumed that after the murder of the despotic
father, the sons,
How Sons Become Fathers I 49
the persons who were united in this group of brothers,

gradually came toward a revival of the old state of things at
a new level. ... It was then, perhaps, that some individual,
in the exigency of his longing, may have been moved to free
himself from the group and take over the father’s part [which
is how Alyosha in the end relates to Mitya]. He who did this
was the first epic poet; and the advance was achieved in his
imagination. This poet disguised the truth with lies in accor
dance with his longing. He invented the heroic myth. . . .
Just as the father had been the boy’s first ideal, so in the hero
who aspires to the father’s place the poet now created the
first ego ideal. The transition to the hero was probably
afforded by the youngest son.
(Group Psychology)
This, then, is the achievement of the youngest Karamazov: he

creates a heroic myth or, more precisely, recreates a myth, since he is,
as Ivan has accused him of being, a plagiarist. The liberating story
Alyosha comes to tell is, of course, the life of Christ, not as a theologi
cal consolation (or not merely as such) but as a—literally—viable model
of biography, a narrative that rationalizes, mediates the transition from
son to father.
Alyosha has been made to suffer by his father. Moreover, he is
implicated in the other brothers’ desire for their father’s death, a point
made most unambiguously when Ivan asks what should be done with a
general who turned his Borzoi hounds on a naked little peasant boy,
clearly a metaphoric recasting of the relations between Fyodor Pavlovich
and his sons: “Shoot him!” Alyosha said softly, raising his eyes to his
brother with a pale, twisted smile (“Rebellion”). But Alyosha is less
completely an orphan than his brothers. Like the youngest son of
Freud’s legend, he has been spared the worst of his father’s excesses,
not by a protective mother, but because he has another father, in fact a
pater seraphicus, in Zosima. The elder is a much more complicated
figure than is often assumed, and in many ways presides over his
followers as does the primal despot: “An elder is a man who takes
your soul and will into his soul and will . . . you renounce your will
and yield it to him in complete submission and complete abnega
tion. . . . Thus, the elders are in certain cases endowed with boundless
authority” (“Elders”). He has, in other words, precisely the kind of
power sought by Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor; but Zosima, like Ivan’s
Christ, believes fathers should use their power to liberate sons so that
they in their turn may become fathers: “This is not the place for you in
future ... as soon as [I die] leave the monastery.” In other words,
cease being a mere brother, part of a group; become an individual, a
father—which is what (after the death of both his own fathers) Alyosha
does. His children are not the phantoms of Ivan’s nightmare, nor even
the spectral “dite' of Mitya’s dream. They are, rather, the band of
boys who play so large a role in the novel.
These boys have frequently offended the sensibility of sophisti
cated readers: as one has recently written, “It is a doubtful proposition
that one can achieve the Kingdom of God on earth by converting
mankind into boy-scouts, and that is why those chapters of The
Brothers Karamazov [dealing with Kolya Krasotkin and the others] read
like an unintended parody” (Czeslaw Milosz, “Dostoevsky and
Swedenborg,” Slavic Review 34 [1975]). But if we assume a non
transcendent significance in Alyosha’s Christology, he and the boys
rather seem to be a happy parody of the Karamazov family, thus a
narrative inversion of the political structure built into the two legends
of the Grand Inquisitor and of the primal horde. That is, Alyosha’s
imitatio need not be read as necessarily grounded in Christian theology.
Ideas about God, if Freud is correct, are rooted in ideas about fathers:
“at long last the decision was made to concede all power to one God
only. . . . Only then was the grandeur of the primeval father restored;
the emotions belonging to him could now be restored” (Moses and
Monotheism). There is a psychological truth about fathers and sons
contained in Christianity, particularly as it is present in The Brothers
Karamazov, that seems to get back to a meaning in Christ’s biography
that loses nothing if it is stripped of the privilege that religions tradi
tionally claim. Perhaps that is why Alyosha admits “I don’t think I
even believe in God” (“The Engagement”) or what Dostoevsky meant
in his famous letter to N. D. Fonvizina (March 1854): “If anyone
could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth
really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not
with the truth.” That is, even without the claim of transcendent truth,
Christ has a primary significance for Dostoevsky, one that he spent his
whole career meditating, but that finally becomes clear in his last novel.
Christ is important not for the narrative scheme he usually is invoked
to justify—the confession or Saint’s life, which is explicitly rejected in
The Brothers Karamazov. To read the whole novel as articulating this
pattern leads to the un-demystified contortions into which critics as
different as Girard or Berdyaev get. De-mystification, on the other

hand, need not inevitably result in the biographical pattern of a lapsed
Hegelianism that Lukacs sees the novel—and, as we have seen,
Dostoevsky’s previous heroes—condemned to, since the Christ story,
conceived as the most schematic map of the mediatable distance be
tween son and father, does not require the assumption of absolute ego.
The movement is not between disjunctive states in the same essential
self, the either/or of radical Romantic identity, but rather between
different functions within an unchanging structure of relationships.
Thus, when Alyosha at the end of the novel speaks of resurrec
tion, we need not take this to mean the same thing as is meant in
Christian soteriology. It points to a model for how sons may become
fathers; it makes of Christ a hero story. Alyosha, like the son in
Freud’s legend who becomes a poet, achieves that poet’s goal:
The myth, then, is the step by which the individual emerges
from group psychology. The first myth was certainly the
psychological, the hero myth. . . . The poet who had taken
this step and had in this way set himself free from the group
in his imagination, is nevertheless able ... to find his way
back to it in reality. For he goes and relates to the group his
hero’s deeds which he has invented. At bottom the hero is
no one but himself. Thus he lowers himself to the level of
reality, and raises his hearers to the level of the imagination.
Thus Alyosha, after leaving the family presided over by his father
and the group presided over by bis elder, becomes such an individual
by means of the mediating Christ story, his example (the hero is no
one but himself) and words (“I will find a place in my heart for you all
and I beg you to find a place for me in yours”) convey to the new
family he fathers on the last page of the novel. By doing so he changes
the significance that attached to his name. He has given his father’s
name a new meaning, his own meaning, which is why the last sen
tences of the book round off his biography: “Hurrah for Karamazov!”
The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel
Robert L. Belknap
This paper treats the ways in which Dostoevsky’s social and ideologi
cal intentions interacted with certain of his sources in the genesis of
Ivan Karamazov and Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor. These intentions have
eluded some of the best literary minds that have written about
Dostoevsky—at least these minds differ so sharply that they cannot all
be right. Let me quote two statements bearing on Dostoevsky’s inten
tion. The first is from D. H. Lawrence’s introduction to a separate
edition of the Grand Inquisitor chapter, translated by S. S. Koteliansky:
If there is any question: who is the Grand Inquisitor? surely
we must say it is Ivan himself. And Ivan is the thinking
mind of the human being in rebellion, thinking the whole
thing out to the bitter end. As such he is, of course, identical
with the Russian Revolutionary of the thinking type. He is
also, of course, Dostoevsky himself in his thoughtful as
apart from his passional and inspirational self. Dostoevsky
half-hated Ivan. Yet after all, Ivan is the greatest of the three
brothers, pivotal. The passionate Dmitri and the inspired
Alyosha are, at last, only offsets to Ivan.
And we cannot doubt that the Grand Inquisitor speaks
Dostoevsky’s own final opinion about Jesus. The opinion is
baldly, this: Jesus, you are inadequate. Men must correct
From Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800-1914, edited by William Mills
Todd III. © 1978 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Stanford University Press, 1978.
53
54 / Robert L. Belknap
you. And Jesus gives the kiss of acquiescence to the Inquisi

tor, as Alyosha does to Ivan.
Lawrence had not read Bakhtin’s remarks about the polyphonic

novel, but he knew better than to assume that a character is a spokes
man for the author. He offered three reasons for identifying Ivan and
the Grand Inquisitor with Dostoevsky: Ivan’s greatness, his pivotal
position in the novel, and the kiss of acquiescence the Inquisitor
receives. Ivan’s greatness generates a rhetorical and a genetic argument.
First, one may ask why an author would select such an attractive
mouthpiece for ideas he hopes to crush. Second, one can deny the
possibility of creating a truly great character without real sympathy at
some level. Lawrence argues this explicitly with respect to Tolstoy.
These are persuasive arguments, but many readers take the dia
metrically opposite view of Dostoevsky’s intent, though they may
agree that Ivan is identical with the Russian revolutionary of the
thinking type. The most concise and authoritative statement of their
position comes from Dostoevsky’s own letter to his editor Liubimov
on May 10, 1879.
[Ivan’s] convictions are precisely what I accept as the synthesis

of Russian anarchism in our day, the denial not of God, but
of the meaning of his creation. All socialism had its origins
and beginnings in the denial of the meaning of historical
actuality [deistvitel’nosti], and progressed to a program of
destruction and anarchism. The original anarchists were in
many cases men of sincere convictions. My hero takes up a
topic I consider irrefutable [neotrazimuiu]—the senselessness
of the suffering of children—and deduces from that the
absurdness [absurd, not nelepost’] of all historical actuality. I
don’t know whether I managed it well, but I know that the
figure of my character is in the highest degree real [real’noe].
(In The Possessed there were a multitude of figures whom I
was attacked for as fantastic, and then, can you believe it,
they all were justified by actuality, so they must have been
imagined correctly.)
All that is said by my character in the text I sent you is
based on actuality. All the stories about children happened,
were printed in the papers, and I can show where; nothing
was invented by me. ... As for my character’s blasphemy,
it will be triumphantly confuted [oprovergnuto] in the next

[June] issue, on which I am working now with fear and
trembling and veneration, considering my task (the crushing
of anarchism) a patriotic exploit. Wish me success, my dear
Nikolai Alekseevich.
Although Dostoevsky’s statement carries more authority than Law

rence’s, the mere existence of Lawrence’s presents a curious disjunc
tion. Either Lawrence’s article is correct, and Dostoevsky was consciously
or unconsciously lying, or Dostoevsky’s letter is correct, and Dostoevsky
was a rhetorical incompetent. If rhetoric is language that makes the
reader feel, judge, or act in accord with the author’s intent, its success
can be measured like that of the most primitive communication sys
tem, in which the sender, whether a telegrapher or an author, encodes
a message into a form that can be transmitted through a channel,
anything from a telegraph wire to a line of letters folded into a book.
The receiver decodes the message, and the measure of success is the
degree to which the reconstituted message coincides with the sender’s.
Lawrence’s letter is a fair example of one major Une in Dostoevsky
criticism. In fact, an enormous number of readers have sided with the
Grand Inquisitor, and many, like V. V. Rozanov, who do not side
with him have stated that Dostoevsky did.
To accept Lawrence’s arguments, however, one must reject the
testimony of Dostoevsky’s letter. The letter, of course, is a good
example of a somewhat suspect literary form, one that has been stud
ied little, although cultivated by many masters of European prose—the
letter requesting the extension of a deadline. Anti-anarchism would
have appealed to Liubimov and his chief, Katkov, whose journal, The
Russian Messenger, was well to the right of center. Still, Dostoevsky’s
letter summarizes a position he had taken often in his journalism, and
it cannot be summarily dismissed. Instead it may provide additional
insights on close inspection.
Except for one rather puzzling sentence about the sincerity of the
anarchists, the passage quoted falls into three parts, only the last of
which promises to confute Ivan’s argument. The first part traces Ivan’s
anarchism to the senselessness of the suffering of children, by way of
the concept of the absurd that was to become so fashionable three
generations later. Between this statement about the text’s ideology and
the statement of his intention to refute it, Dostoevsky claims absolute
fidelity to his sources. Thus, where Lawrence moves directly from the
author’s text to his intention, Dostoevsky disconcertingly moves from

the text through the sources on his way to the opposite intention.
In calling Ivan’s convictions the “synthesis” of contemporary an
archism, Dostoevsky is already preparing his reader for the middle part
of the passage, where the phrases “all socialism had its origins” and
“the original anarchists were in many cases” actually imply that Ivan is
the highest artistic achievement under the realist aesthetic of his day—a
literary type, an accurate representation of an identifiable segment of
society. The ambitiousness of this claim explains the modest beginning
of a following sentence, “I don’t know whether I managed it well,”
which at first glance conflicts with Dostoevsky’s fear that he had done
Ivan too well. Of course, the word “well” means two different things
here. I use it to mean “persuasively,” “appealingly,” “powerfully,” as
Lawrence would, whereas Dostoevsky is using it to mean “typically. ” He
offers two different kinds of evidence to support his claim to typicality.
The reference to The Possessed expresses pride in the subsequent confir
mation of a reality that did not exist at the time he wrote, whereas the
sentences around it claim that every detail about Ivan is based on prior
reality. The implicit paradox is real and important, but for all his love
of paradox, Dostoevsky did not invent it. He merely voiced the
standard doctrine of the prosaists of his day, that artists were artists
precisely because they could perceive reality more sharply and subtly
than other men, and could select and assemble details whose firm basis
in reality explained their crystallization into accurate types, even if the
author himself did not realize their implication. This paradoxical depen
dence of special, even prophetic, insight on photographic fidelity to
reality rests on a metonymic faith in the capacity of the parts of a reality
to generate a representation of the whole.
Dostoevsky’s claim that his fidelity to reality has produced an
accurate ideological type justifies Ivan’s attractiveness and also draws
attention to Ivan’s sources. Ivan, as Dostoevsky and Lawrence agree,
has his origins in the reality of Russian radicalism. Belinsky’s letters to
Botkin and Gogol, and Herzen’s From the Other Shore provided
Dostoevsky with much of Ivan’s language and ideology. Indeed, these
sources offer a simple answer to Lawrence’s question about producing
a great character without personal sympathy. A writer like Lawrence
tends to equate greatness with eloquence, and others [like A. Rammel-
meyer] have already shown that a substantial part of Ivan’s eloquence
is borrowed from these authors. More important, however, Dostoevsky
had adored Belinsky, had participated in the Petrashevsky circle, and
The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel ! 57
had talked with Herzen and possibly Bakunin enough to feel their
magnetism, sometimes simultaneously with his doubts about their
doctrines. At the Petrashevsky interrogations Dostoevsky said that he
read Belinsky’s letter to Gogol for its language, not its ideas. He was
desperate for excuses, of course, but Maikov’s memories suggest that
his testimony might by coincidence have been true. For Dostoevsky in
the seventies, Herzen and Belinsky might be wrong, but they were
noble in their eloquence, in their willingness to sacrifice their happi
ness, and in that sincerity of conviction whose relevance seemed puz
zling at first in the letter to Liubimov. Dostoevsky’s fidelity to this
aspect of his sources could have made Ivan Karamazov more attractive
in his desperate love than seems fitting or strategic if Dostoevsky’s
letter expressed his real intent.
This conservation of rhetorical power and moral persuasiveness
alters the model of the primitive communication system in a novel of
this sort. Dostoevsky is in part the sender, but he also is a channel
through which the qualities of his sources are transmitted intact.
Jakobson, Lotman, and many others have discussed the limitations and
complications of this sender-channel-receiver model. We realize, for
example, along with the fact that the sender does not generate the
message ex nihilo, that the codes of the sender and the receiver may
not coincide, and that data outside the text may enter the interpretation.
Dostoevsky’s letter to Liubimov introduces the crucial question for
this paper, the interdependence of the sender and the channel. Whether
we think of the input into the system as a body of information
Dostoevsky had gathered from his reading, his conversation, and his
other experiences, or as a body of intentions generated out of these
experiences, we must consider the central element in his experience in
1879—The Brothers Karamazov. We do not have the traditional, straight
forward communication diagram of sender----- ►message in channel
---- ► receiver, but rather this:
Sources
Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov us
Sources
As it comes into being, the message in the channel is a constant
source of feedback to the sender, just as the sound of one’s own voice
crucially affects the way one speaks. The letter to Liubimov begins
with a description of Dostoevsky’s fidelity to his prior experience and
ends with his reaction to The Brothers Karamazov as it was emerging—
fear and trembling, or negative feedback. Here the sources, the inten
tion, and the emerging text shape each other. Physicists are hard put to
it to solve a three-body problem where the bodies are mathematical
points and the only influence is gravitational. I do not aspire to such a
solution here, but to an indication of the kind of interaction among
these three entities in Dostoevsky’s mind.
II
This formulation of our task suggests an obvious way to test the
authenticity of Dostoevsky’s fear and trembling. If Ivan’s greatness is
an accidental side effect of Dostoevsky’s fidelity to his sources, we
should find in the text a series of efforts to destroy one of the most
eloquent and convincing arguments in all literature, an argument whose
starting point Dostoevsky himself had called irrefutable. Indeed, it has
been said that Ivan’s fate in the novel is designed to show what
happens to an atheist and a socialist. He is desperately unhappy; he is
rejected in love; and he becomes diseased in the part of him on which
he depends excessively, the brain. His suffering and his incapacity at
the end of the novel are taken as Dostoevsky’s vision of the just
punishment of unbelief.
A more sophisticated way of refuting Ivan’s position involves not
what happens to him but what he does and is. Valentina Vetlovskaia
has catalogued enough unpleasant actions and features of Ivan’s to
make a convincing case that Dostoevsky intended to discredit Ivan’s
argument by discrediting its spokesman. Her study underlines the
problem this novel presents. She shows Dostoevsky using one of the
classical rhetorical techniques, the argumentum ad hominem, and leaves
us with the evidence of Lawrence and scores of other able readers that
the technique did not work. I should like to look at one of Vetlovskaia’s
points more closely, Dostoevsky’s effort to discredit Ivan by associat
ing him with devils.
As long as men have talked about sin, they have acknowledged its
attractiveness, but in the Middle Ages evil, unlike sin, was presented
an unattractive, and its embodiment, devils, tended to be represented
as repulsive, filthy, stinking, vicious, and subhuman. Dostoevsky needed
such devils if he intended to discredit Ivan by association with them,
but the literature of his day offered a very different figure; as early as
Milton, but insistently since Blake, Byron, and Baudelaire, various
elements of the diabolic had had a good press. The Grand Inquisitor’s
devil is not a stupid and disgusting torturer, but a dire and fearsome
spirit whose very name is taboo. This romantic fascination with the
diabolic had weakened a literary resource Dostoevsky needed, the old
devil who could provoke instant hostility. Indeed, within a few years
of the creation of the Grand Inquisitor, Swinburne, Strindberg,
Raspisardi, and Lautréamont had written major glorifications of the
diabolic in four different languages.
To counteract this loss of prefabricated repulsiveness, Dostoevsky
has to train his readers to associate scorn or revulsion with the word
“devil.” Except for the biblical demons in The Possessed, devils play
little part in Dostoevsky’s works. Demonic figures like Murin in “The
Landlady” are not connected with any particular supernatural being.
But in The Brothers Karamazov a multitude of devils appear. Old
Fyodor Karamazov introduces these creatures early in the novel, set
ting the stamp of his own savage weirdness on them:
You see, it’s impossible, I think, that the devils should
forget to drag me down with hooks when I die. Well, then I
think: Hooks? And where do they get them? Made of what?
Iron? Forged where? Is there a factory of some sort they’ve
got there? Now, over there in the monastery, the monks
probably believe that in hell, for example, there’s a ceiling;
but I’m willing to believe in hell, only without a ceiling. It
works out sort of neater, more enlightened, more Lutheran,
that is. . . . Well, if there’s no ceiling, therefore there can’t
be any hooks, and if there’s no hooks and all that’s cast
aside, that means—implausibly again—who’ll drag me in with
hooks, because if they don’t drag me, then what will hap
pen, where’s there any justice in the world?
With or without hooks these devils could not be made grand or
attractive. Even where a larger spirit is involved, Fyodor’s presence
makes him the mocker of mankind:
“Does God exist or not? For the last time.”
“And for the last time, no.”
“Then who is laughing at mankind, Ivan?”
“The Devil, probably,” grinned Ivan.
“And the Devil exists?”
“No, the Devil too doesn’t.”
Such talk of the Devil as a mocker and of devils as torturers shapes our
response to the devil who is the Grand Inquisitor’s mentor. Sometimes

the torture is explicit and the devils implicit, as in the story of the
Virgin’s descent into hell; sometimes the reverse, as with the devils
Ferapont encounters. And sometimes both the torture and the devils
are explicit, as with the devils Ferapont, Lize, and even Alyosha
vanquish with a cross. Ferapont and Lize share the devils’ love of pain.
Ferapont sees one hiding
behind the door from me, a full-sized one, too, a yard and
a half or more tall; its tail was thick and brown and long,
and the tip of the tail had slipped into the crack of the door; and
I’m nobody’s fool, so I suddenly slammed the door to,
and caught its tail. And it got to squealing and started
thrashing around; I took and put the sign of the cross on it,
three times I crossed it. And then it died, like a spider that
had been crushed.
Ferapont savors the agonized extinction of this devil just as he takes
physical delight in the idea of heroic fasting, and the nastiness of his
twisted sensuality becomes linked with that of his imagined victim.
Ivan picks up this vision of the demonic and reinforces it, in the most
moving linkage of the Devil with evil that we find, his adaptation of
Voltaire’s remark, in response to his own catalogue of the sufferings of
children: “If the Devil does not exist, and man in fact created him,
then he created him in his own image and likeness.” Dostoevsky drew
these various devils in large part from his readings in old Russian
literature, and their antiquity reduces their rhetorical usefulness. Their
association with the devil the Grand Inquisitor quotes remains largely
verbal.
The most elaborate picture of an unlovely devil has different
sources, and a far more intimate relation to Ivan. This is the devil who
appears in Ivan’s nightmare at the moment of Smerdyakov’s suicide.
Consider the following passage:
Ivan felt that he was unwell, but from some dread of telling
himself quite clearly that he was sick, he turned from the
light and tried to go to sleep. His sleep was heavy and fitful;
he was incessantly waking up, tossing restlessly on the bed,
and again dozing off for a minute.
Waking up one time, Ivan thought he would not get to
sleep any more. He wanted to get up. His head was leaden;
in his arms and legs there was some sort of dull pain. With
an effort, he sat up on the bed leaning with his back on the
corner of the room. He sat sometimes with no thought at
all, sometimes there awakened in his head a turbulent and
hazy consciousness that he felt bad. He would sit, would say
“I feel bad,” and again would senselessly focus his eyes on
the opposite comer of the room. Suddenly it seemed to him
as if something was stirring there. He gazed there. Just so,
something was effortfully crawling out of the corner crack,
shifted clumsily, and began to grow. It was some sort of
likeness of a human. . . . Ivan rubbed his eyes, and then
opened them again; there was no monster there any longer.
This apparition of a very personal demon to a sick man comes from a

novel called Likho (The Evil Spirit) by Dmitry Vasilievich Averkiev
(1836-1905), who had been a writer for Dostoevsky’s journals in the
1860s. This passage appeared in issue no. 5 of the weekly Ogonek five
months before Dostoevsky published Ivan’s scene with the devil.
Dostoevsky tended to read as many journals as he could, and had made
a note to himself to look at that issue.
Ivan Karamazov’s devil appears in much the same way. The
passage that follows contains extensive ellipses, but no change of
order.
Ivan [Karamazov] was sitting on the couch and feeling his

head spinning. He felt that he was sick and feeble. He was
about to doze off, but got up restlessly and paced the room
to keep off the sleep. At moments he imagined that he must
be delirious. But it wasn’t his sickness that preoccupied him
most: when he sat down again, he began to glance around
occasionally, as if he was looking for something. It hap
pened several times. Finally, his gaze was fixed on one
point. ... He sat a long time in his place, firmly supporting
his head on both hands and still glancing obliquely at the
same point as before, at the couch by the opposite wall.
Evidently something was disturbing him, some object, dis
tracting, bothering. . . .
He knew that he was unwell, but detested being sick at
that time with revulsion. ... So he was sitting now, almost
conscious of being delirious . . . and fixedly staring at some
object by the other wall on the couch. Suddenly, someone

was sitting there.
Both passages begin with a presentation of sickness and go on to

describe restless sleep, weakness and pain, and then a confusion of
mind to which Dostoevsky gives the label delirium. Finally, both
Ivans fix their gaze more and more firmly on a single spot, where an
apparition occurs. Averkiev’s Ivan expresses his incredulity with a
gesture, and the creature disappears. Ivan Karamazov’s hallucination
remains for the entire chapter, and so does Ivan’s incredulity.
Dostoevsky’s passage is longer, but except for the fear to admit sick
ness, the parallel elements appear in the same order, as if the Averkiev
passage served as a framework. Dostoevsky, however, has elaborated a
very different hallucination: he has retained none of the medieval
qualities that Averkiev’s creature shares with the devils Fyodor, Lize,
Ferapont, and Grushenka describe. Dostoevsky no longer needs the
little, subhuman medieval devils, but instead a being close enough to
Ivan to debase Ivan’s arguments, his rhetoric, and, most of all, that
“dire and fearsome spirit of self-annihilation and nonbeing” with whom
the Grand Inquisitor had so romantically associated himself. Indeed, as
Ivan says repeatedly in this chapter, this devil is Ivan.
This ideological need works together with the interplay of sources
to explain why Dostoevsky preserves so much of Averkiev’s appari
tion scene but so little of his apparition. Averkiev was writing a
historical novel and, like Dostoevsky, had plainly been reading folk
lore and nineteenth-century editions of the Russian saints’ lives, which
contain many demonic creatures. He would certainly have been brought
up on Faust and E. T. A. Hoffman, and very probably would have
encountered the Nordic tradition of the personal fetish that normally
appeared just before one’s own death. He had apparently learned what
Freud learned from reading Hoffman, that the sense of the uncanny
comes from the reintrusion of long-abandoned beliefs. But Averkiev’s
background and his technique plainly mark another, more important
source for his apparition scene. He had learned from his old associate
Dostoevsky, most specifically from the appearance of a hideous arthro
pod to the dying radical Ippolit in The Idiot and the first appearance of
Svidrigailov in the room of the delirious Raskolnikov in Crime and
Punishment. Svidrigailov not only is mistaken for a hallucination; he
has hallucinations—of the three victims of his unpunishable murders,
his servant, his wife, and the little girl he raped. Averkiev’s apparition
scene combines rhe
torically appealing elements shared by four of Dostoevsky’s favorite
sources, the lives of the saints, Goethe, Hoffman, and Dostoevsky
himself. When Ivan Karamazov, like Svidrigailov, blunders feverish
ly and beneficently through a storm on his way to his final hallucina
tion, Dostoevsky is returning in his last great novel to the pattern of
his first one to describe the ultimate collision between the rational
intellect and the moral imperative. Like Svidrigailov and Raskolni
kov, Ivan is conscious of blood guilt which the law cannot touch
without his confession; his dreams, like theirs, reflect his victim, in
this case his father, that shrewd, insolent, sophistical, insinuating,
provincial mocker and hanger-on who resembles Ivan’s devil and, to
Ivan’s distress, Ivan himself. In short, Ivan Karamazov’s embodiment
of evil diverges from Averkiev’s because Averkiev’s sources fitted
Dostoevsky’s literary taste and ideological purpose better than Aver
kiev’s text.
In fact, the interesting question is not why Dostoevsky abandoned
Averkiev’s hallucination as a source; but why he adhered so faithfully
to the order of details in a second-rate novel when he had a multi
tude of sources in better literature. Here, Dostoevsky was really
using the same technique he used when he presented the despicable
devils of antiquity: the desophistication of a figure whose current
identity offered ideological complications. This technique was cer
tainly not Dostoevsky’s invention; it seems to come from the same
source as the devil’s tawdry gentility. Likhachev has pointed out that
medieval devils can be cruel and dirty, but that this poshlost’ can
appear only in an age of social mobility and collapsing structures.
Mephistopheles has this quality at times, with Martha, for example;
but here, as in Averkiev, the richness of déjà lu goes deeper, to a
source that Goethe and Dostoevsky both quoted extensively in their
texts, the Book of Job. Many scholars believe the Book of Job was
written at the high point of Hebrew culture, very likely in the reign
of David, when the urban sophisticates toyed like pastoral poets with
the figure from their folklore of a God whose sons presented them
selves subserviently before him. One of those sons was a hanger-
on who spoke to God when spoken to, but a tempter at the same
time, challenging goodness with cynicism—“Doth Job fear God for
naught?”—and prompting the most spectacular display of innocent
suffering in literature before Ivan’s catalogue of tortured children.
The letter to Liubimov explains why Dostoevsky would want to
use the Book of Job as a source for the most notable character traits
of Ivan’s devil, as well as for the technique of desophistication,
which led him to such other sources as the Russian saints’ lives and
Averkiev’s historical novel. Ivan’s argument rests on the senselessness
of the world, according to that letter, and the task of the novel is to
confute Ivan’s argument: to justify the ways of God to man. The
Book of Job is the oldest and the greatest theodicy Dostoevsky knew.
It begins with the argument Dostoevsky considered unanswerable,
the meaninglessness of innocent suffering. Job’s children are de
stroyed, and the full authority of the biblical narrator declares Job
innocent before his suffering begins. Bildad the Shuhite and his
friends have the scholarly clear-sightedness that Ivan has, and like
Ivan they enunciate the tempter’s argument with the most insistent
eloquence the rhetoric of their time afforded. In the Book of Job as
it stands (some scholars think its sources ended differently), these
massively elaborated arguments are destroyed by a theophany. In
Dostoevsky’s most immediate source for the encounter between
Christ and the Inquisitor, Le Christ au Vatican by Cabantous, Christ
is launched like a rocket into the empyrean before the eyes of an
evil, astonished pope.12 But Dostoevsky’s ideology excluded miracles
or theophanies to justify or prove God. As Lia Mikhailovna Rozen-
blium has so clearly shown, Dostoevsky had very little of the mystic
about him.18 In his notebooks he specifically rejected mysticism as a
trait for Alyosha.1* Dostoevsky could draw his tawdry, subservient
devil from the Book of Job, but in an antimystical age, with a non-
mystical mind, he could not invoke the voice of God out of the
whirlwind to refute the position argued by the devil and those asso
ciated with him.
hi
Perhaps because some of his sources were too eloquent and others
conflicted with his ideology on miracles, Dostoevsky resorted to a
series of rhetorical maneuvers to carry out the confutation he had
promised Liubimov. One such maneuver deflates the Grand Inquisi
tor with a simplicity so transparent as to be invisible.
Ivan Karamazov says at the start of the legend that it belongs to
a literary genre in which the Son of God can visit earth. The Grand
Inquisitor sees Him resurrect a little girl, asks Him, “Is this Thou,
Thou?” and then adds that he does not want an answer (IX, 314).
Ivan comments that it would not matter for the account if the Grand
Inquisitor was mistaken or delirious, so long as he spoke out. In any
case, the Inquisitor addresses Christ as a being who has the power to
save or doom mankind, to defy gravity, to turn stones into bread, to
rule the kingdoms of the earth or else provide for the salvation of
an elect. He also says that men are too feeble to obey the command
ments of Christ, that in their disobedience they will suffer pangs of
guilt, as well as practical misfortunes on earth, and will inevitably
earn misfortunes in the hereafter (IX, 322) : "Your great prophet in
his vision and his allegory says he saw all the members of the first
resurrection, and that there were twelve thousand of them from each
of the Twelve Tribes.... But remember that there were only a few
thousand of them in all—and gods at that—but the remainder? And
what are the remaining feeble people to blame for, that they could
not endure what the mighty could?”
By resort to miracle, mystery, and authority, the Inquisitor’s church
has imposed certain of Christ’s laws on mankind and has concealed
those laws demanding a moral heroism of which mankind is inca
pable. The Inquisitor says that disobedience to laws suppressed by
the church cannot earn damnation for these unknowing sinners:
We shall tell them that every sin shall be redeemed if it has been com
mitted with our permission. .. . There will be thousands of millions of
happy children and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon
themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Quietly they will
die, quietly will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave will find only
death. But we will preserve the secret, and for their own happiness we
will entice them with a heavenly and eternal reward. For if there were
something in the other world, it is surely not for such as they. They say
and prophesy that Thou wilt come and triumph anew, wilt come with
Thy elect, with Thy proud and mighty, but we shall say that those have
only saved themselves, while we saved all. . . . And we who have taken
their sins upon us for their happiness, we shall stand before Thee and
shall say, "Judge us if Thou canst and darest.” (IX, 326)
This intercession between man and Christ resembles Christ’s inter
cession between man and God more than it resembles the Virgin’s
intercession between man and Christ in the medieval story Ivan tells
about the Virgin’s visit to hell. The Grand Inquisitor feels he is sub
stituting his own punishment for that which divine justice would
otherwise certainly inflict on mankind. Certainly he has incurred
great sin—not only the suppression of Christ’s truth, but the taking
of all the lives in the autos da fé. The Grand Inquisitor believes he
is doing great good on earth, preventing war and famine and despair,
but his supreme exploit is more romantic than anything in Herzen:
he has sacrificed the happiness of his immortal soul to save mankind
from damnation.
Dostoevsky deflates this magnificent gesture with a very simple
one. Christ says nothing, but kisses the Grand Inquisitor. The kiss is
obviously a blessing; it burns in the Inquisitor’s heart as holy things
do in this novel. And if Christ can bless the Grand Inquisitor, who
has imprisoned Him, concealed His word, and killed hundreds of
His followers, then obviously none of the lesser sinners are cut off
from Christ’s salvation. The Grand Inquisitor is unable to sacrifice
his immortal soul, because Christ still can pardon him, and he has no
reason to do so, because mankind need not be damned. In a later
chapter, indeed, Zosima reduces damnation to eternal regret at hav
ing failed to love actively during the one life that a soul is given in
all eternity. Here, in a single kiss, the most absolute and most ap
pealing part of the Grand Inquisitor’s exploit becomes an empty,
unnecessary gesture. He has simply miscalculated the dimensions of
God’s mercy. He believes that he believes in God and Christ, but
actually he believes in a more Euclidean, less merciful being.
Only one commentator on this passage has asked, “What are these
sins of people taken on oneself? .. . It’s really just godlessness; that’s
the whole secret. Your Inquisitor doesn’t believe in God; that’s his
whole secret!” (IX, 328.) Alyosha Karamazov says this before he
hears about the kiss, and Ivan’s answer raises several of the same
questions as the kiss: “Even though it were! You’ve guessed at last.
And really it is so, the whole secret is just in this, but really isn’t this
suffering?” Ivan accepts Alyosha’s deflation of the Grand Inquisitor
before offering his own. From Dostoevsky’s point of view this will
ingness to see a magnificent construct vitiated makes sense, if the
Liubimov letter expresses his real intention. From Ivan’s point of
view the Grand Inquisitor might seem to deserve better. But the
legend is not offered as a simple exposition of Ivan’s belief. Ivan has
said, “You’re my kid brother; you’re not the one I want to debauch
and shift from your position; I’d maybe like to heal myself through
you” (IX, 296). Ivan’s ambivalence makes his destruction of his own
argument psychologically reasonable; but this affectionate, hesitant
candor helps to make him so attractive that among all the commen
tators on this passage, only Alyosha with his own kiss caught
the ideological irony embodied in the kiss of Christ. The rhetorical

failure is almost absolute.
Dostoevsky continues this argument in the teachings of Father
Zosima, and there gives an answer to the problem of evil as telling in
its way as Job’s theophany. Zosima doubts the reality of hell as Fyodor
envisions it, with or without hooks. He agrees with the Grand Inquisi
tor that the teachings of Christ will fill men with guilt at their failure
to live up to them, but he sings a virtual hymn of rejoicing at this
guilt. Indeed, he takes one of the central doctrines of the materialists
whom Dostoevsky claimed to be opposing, and turns this doctrine to
his account. I mean the doctrine of universal causal connections, the
belief that all things in the world are interconnected, that no event
occurs without its causes in this world, that if we knew enough we
would see the world as a seamless web of causes and effects. As
Zosima puts it, “The world is like an ocean, and if you push at one
place, it gives at the opposite end of the world.” In Zosima’s doctrine
of evil this universal causal linkage is central. He holds that every one
of us at some time in his life has acted out of spite or failed to act with
full goodness. If this is true, and if the world is really one, then every
one of us is implicated in every sparrow’s fall. Ivan had asked, “Why
does God permit innocent suffering?” Instead of answering that ques
tion, Zosima turns it on the questioner and asks, “Why do you cause
innocent suffering?” In a totally determined world each of us has had a
part in every evil thing that happens. In this sense, Zosima proclaims,
all men are guilty of all things; but unlike those who try to escape
guilt, he rejoices in it as his bond with the whole of being.
In short, Zosima offers a rhetorical answer to the problem of
children’s suffering, which Dostoevsky in his letter had considered
unanswerable. Zosima does not justify such suffering; he simply calls
on the reader to share the blame. But even this did not seem to satisfy
Dostoevsky. He had still another resource for the destruction of Ivan,
the reductio ad absurdum, the carrying of Ivan’s nature and doctrines to
the logical conclusion that would discredit them. This involves the
introduction into the novel of a body of characters whose analogy to
Ivan is made distinct, and whose ridiculousness is made more distinct.
IV
Several characters in The Brothers Karamazov have closely marked
doctrinal, personal, and even verbal ties with Ivan Karamazov. In
(“The Origins of Alésa Karamazov”] I showed how such characters

could be seen as repositories for elements in a character’s sources which
were not needed for that character, but which some conscious or
unconscious fidelity to his sources led Dostoevsky to preserve in the
novel. In this section and the next, I will try to show how this
collection of genetically related characters evolved into an instrument
of Dostoevsky’s polemic with the righteousness of Schiller, Herzen,
and Belinsky as manifested in the attractive traits of Ivan and the
Grand Inquisitor.
Rakitin, the seminarian on the make, is probably the most repul
sive character in The Brothers Karamazov, though his full loathsomeness
does not emerge until the chapters after the legend of the Grand
Inquisitor. In his first appearance only his eyes and his exaggerated
humility hint at something distasteful: “A young fellow, apparently
about twenty-two, in a layman’s frock coat, a seminarian and future
theologian, for some reason the protégé of the monastery and its
members. He was rather tall, with a fresh face, broad cheek-bones, and
shrewd, alert, narrow brown eyes. His face expressed utter respectful
ness, decent but without any evident fawning.” The narrator hints that
Rakitin has some thoughts of a different sort, but a Russian reader
would only begin to recognize Rakitin when he speaks:
“You’re hurrying to the father superior’s. I know; he has

a spread. Since that time he received the archpriest and
General Pakhatov, remember it, there hasn’t been a spread
like that. I’ll not be there, but go ahead, serve the sauces.
But tell me one thing, Aleksei: What means this dream?
That’s what I wanted to ask you.”
“What dream?”
“Why prostrating himself before your brother Dmitry.
And he gave his forehead a real bump, too.”
“You mean about Father Zosima?”
“Yes, about Father Zosima.”
“His forehead?”
“Oh, I expressed myself disrespectfully! Well, all right, it
was disrespectful. So what’s the meaning of this dream?”
“I don’t know what it means, Misha.”
“Just as I expected—he wouldn’t explain it to you. There’s
nothing mysterious in this, of course; I guess it’s just the
usual ‘benignorance’ [blagogluposti]. But the trick was done
on purpose. And now all the dévots in town will get talking
and spread it through the district: ‘What can be the meaning
of this dream?’ I think the old boy really is sharp-eyed: he
sniffed crime. Your house stinks with it.”
“What crime?”
Rakitin plainly wanted to express something.
“It’s going to happen in your fine family, this crime. It’ll
be between your dear brothers and your Daddy with his bit
of a fortune. So Father Zosima banged his forehead just in
case. Later, if anything happens, ‘—oh, the holy elder fore
told and prophesied it,’ though what’s prophetic about bang
ing his forehead on the floor?”
From this first speech any of Dostoevsky’s original readers would

have recognized Rakitin as a type, a certain kind of theological student,
the quick, shrewd, observant son of a Russian priest, whose lively
language and cynical insight into the establishment led to power,
position, and sometimes wealth in the world centered about the radical
journals of the time. The invented word blagogluposti (“benignorance”)
has been connected with Shchedrin, but Dostoevsky certainly intended
it to suggest a far more plebeian type like Dobroliubov. The quick,
facile logic, the materialistic or social explanation of the religious, the
special awareness of monetary and sexual concerns, the expectation of
the criminal, the use of diminutives and words like “stinks,” “sniffed,”
and “dévots,” and the short, hard sentences all call to mind the articles
in The Contemporary and, after it closed, the Fatherland Notes and other
journals of the Russian radicals. In short, the style of this first dialogue
has already implied a tie between Rakitin and Ivan that later would be
made explicit. Both were setting out on careers in journalism, but Ivan
was starting with the simplicity, sincerity, and intelligence of Belinsky,
whereas Rakitin’s style already reflected the nasty polemics of the
writers in the sixties, whom Dostoevsky looked on as living parodies
of Belinsky.
Though in the early part of the novel Rakitin is nothing worse
than an ill-natured and somewhat sophomoric gossip, in the pages
following the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, he is quickly established
as a vicious parody of Ivan. Finding Alyosha crushed by the unjust
mockery of Zosima’s stinking corpse, he adopts the double role of
tormentor and tempter as Ivan, the Grand Inquisitor, and the Devil
had done, but instead of being tortured himself, he is complacent:
“Can you really [be in this state] simply because your old
boy made a stench? Can you really have seriously believed
he’d start throwing miracles? . . . Why, what the hell, why
nowadays a thirteen-year-old schoolboy doesn’t believe that.
Still, what the hell—so it’s your God you’re mad at now,
you’ve mutinied; they passed him by for a promotion, and
didn’t give him a medal on honors day. Oh, you people.” . . .
“I’m not mutinying against my God; I simply ‘don’t
accept His world!’ ”
Alyosha’s quotation from Ivan’s “mutiny” makes explicit the parallel.

Rakitin has replaced Ivan as the tormentor and tempter of Alyosha. Ivan
tormented Alyosha with stories of cruelty, and tempted him to the
“absurdity” of advocating vengeance. The Inquisitor tortured Christ
with the woes of humanity and dared Christ to destroy him; and the
Devil, the chief torturer, tempted Christ in the wilderness. All these
tortures are vicarious, and the temptations are toward altruism. Rakitin
offers a debased version of these trials: he exacerbates Alyosha’s per
sonal hurt, and he tempts him with food and drink and sex, the cheap
materialist’s equivalent for the earthly bread offered by the Grand
Inquisitor, the Devil, and the Russian radicals.
Having established the parallel with Ivan, Dostoevsky proceeds to
destroy Rakitin. He uses Rakitin’s own denials to suggest the things
denied. In two sentences he indicates not only what two people think of
Rakitin, but also the petty vengefulness of his reactions: “Your dear
brother Ivan once upon a time proclaimed me a ‘talentless liberal
bumpkin. ’ And you too one fine time couldn’t stand it and gave me to
understand that I was ‘dishonorable.’ All right! Now, I’ll have a look
at your talent and honor.” In the next chapter Rakitin’s destruction
continues, as we leam that he brought Alyosha to Grushenka not on a
whim, but because she had offered him 25 pieces of silver to do so.
The reference to Judas is made explicit, and we are able to say initially
that Dostoevsky’s invention took the form of a systematic distortion of
the Judas story in a simple direction. Alyosha and Rakitin eat together,
not a religious feast, but a snack that breaks the dietary rules of the
monastery. Like Christ Alyosha realizes his tempter’s intent, and tells
him to carry it out, but a seduction not a crucifixion is involved, and
this fails instead of succeeding. The reduction of the sum from 30 to 25
pieces of silver is thus consistent with Dostoevsky’s lightening of all
the other elements in his fictionalized version.
Elsewhere in the novel the same depreciation of currency takes

place when Smerdyakov kills his father and then hangs himself after
returning the 30 pieces of paper—hundred-ruble notes—for which he
has committed the crime. Another piece of nonfiction probably enters
the picture here. Dostoevsky had received a letter asking for “30 rubles
in silver,’’ a normal phrase in a period when a silver ruble would
purchase far more than the inflated paper ruble. The letter came from a
relative he disliked, and is dated five months before the appearance of
the book “Alyosha” in The Russian Messenger. I would suggest the
following chain of associations. The 30 silver rubles for the disliked
relative suggested the 30 pieces of silver for Judas. This essentially
literary association aroused a feeling of distaste in Dostoevsky, the
same feeling he had for the radical journalists of his day. That complex
of radicals, relatives, revulsion, and Judas—an ideological, a personal,
an emotional, and a literary stimulus—suggested a rhetorical device to
Dostoevsky, the use of the familiar Judas figure as a means of stimulat
ing in the reader a prefabricated revulsion for Rakitin. This use of the
name of Judas was a commonplace, of course. In Russian literature
Dostoevsky could have found it from Avvakum in the seventeenth
century to his contemporary Saltykov-Shchedrin, whose most famous
villain is nicknamed little Judas. But the letter is the most plausible
core about which this particular complex of biblical, political, and
rhetorical sources crystallized.
The connection with Ivan’s promising career in journalism leads to
more elaborate patterns of association for Rakitin, who plans to marry
a rich idiot, grow richer as a radical journalist, and build himself a
stone house on the Liteinii avenue in St. Petersburg. When he takes the
witness stand at Dmitry’s trial, he is asked: “Are you that same Mr.
Rakitin whose brochure published by the episcopal authorities I re
cently read with such pleasure, The Life of the Elder Father Zosima, who
rests in the bosom of the Lord, full of profound and religious thoughts,
with a superb and devout dedication to his Eminence? . . . With the
sponsorship of his Eminence, your invaluable brochure has circulated
and done considerable good.” Rakitin is embarrassed and claims that
he never expected publication, obviously afraid that such a background
will affect his reputation in radical circles. That is all. The subject is
dropped.
It has been pointed out that Dostoevsky’s readers would consider
this passage realistic not only because the Russian radicals tended to
emerge from the theological seminaries—one of the few places they
could obtain a free education, places by their nature conducive to

revolt—but because one of them, Grigory Zakharevich Eliseev, had
indeed enriched himself as a radical journalist and owned a large stone
house on the Liteinii avenue. Eliseev’s first book was called The
Biography of the Saintly Grigorii, Herman, and Varsonofi of Kazan and
Sviiazhsk. The dedication read as follows:
Your exaltedly eminent Lordship, benevolent Father and
Archpastor! From your archpastoral benediction I started
upon these labors, with your unceasing attention continued
them, and to you I now offer this small item of my making.
Your exaltedly eminent Lordship! Accept with your habitual
condescension my meager offering, and with your conde
scension the unworthiness of the laborer will take heart for
the great work. Your exalted Eminence, benevolent Father
and Archpastor’s humblest servant, student in the Kazan
Theological Academy, Grigory Eliseev.
Since a major Russian author, Leskov, had called attention to this
passage eight years before The Brothers Karamazov in a major work
called An Enigmatic Man (chap. 38), Dostoevsky could count on most
of his readers to catch the reference, but he was plainly not using the
example of Eliseev’s sycophancy merely to discredit Rakitin. A direct
transcription of his source would have been much more damning than the
sharply abbreviated version he does offer. Rather he seems to be using
Eliseev’s life simply as source material, to provide the kind of data that
will anchor his fiction in reality and give it that treasured capacity to fit
even subsequently revealed fact which Dostoevsky claimed in the
Liubimov letter. The episode is in The Brothers Karamazov because it
happened and because Rakitin’s character demanded it. It is brief
because the trial was already threatening to overbalance the novel, and
because the mere discomfiture was enough. In this case what started as a
source became a resource, a literary reference that would identify
Rakitin as a caricature of a radical, in contrast to Ivan, the apotheosis of
the radical.
A similar discovery of a real-life caricature of a Russian radical led
Dostoevsky to build into Rakitin parodies of one of the greatest
parodists of his time, Dmitry Minaev. Here the polemic cuts both
ways. The reference to Minaev’s parodies would have been clear to
contemporary readers, and Dostoevsky was essentially using this rec
ognition to say both that Rakitin was a Minaev, and that Minaev was a
Rakitin. Since he had already linked Rakitin with Ivan, he was creating
a careerist parody for the independence and ambition with which Ivan
was arranging his career. Eliseev and Minaev, in Dostoevsky’s mind,
were to Belinsky and Herzen as Rakitin was to Ivan.
Like any respectable Russian radical of his day, including Ivan,
who had written a work on the geological revolution, Rakitin was
much involved with the natural sciences, especially with the materialist
claim that science could explain everything. Mitya Karamazov reports
on Rakitin’s beliefs:
You see, there in the nerves, in the head, that is, there in the
brain these nerves—to hell with them!—there are these little
tails; those nerves have little tails, now as soon as they
wiggle there, that is, you see, I look at something with my
eyes, like this, and they wiggle, these little tails, and as they
wiggle there appears an image and it doesn’t appear immedi
ately but a certain instant passes, a second, and something
like a moment, that is, not a moment, damn the moment,
but an image, that is, an object, or an event, now then,
damn it, that’s why I observe, and then 1 think—because of
the tails.
With the care he frequently displays, Dostoevsky footnoted this pas
sage with references to Claude Bernard, the French neurologist, mate
rialist, and proponent of the scientific method of discovery who had
been made a literary symbol in a book Dostoevsky had parodied
fifteen years earlier, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Dostoevsky
had apparently mocked Chernyshevsky so viciously in his “Crocodile”
(1865) that Dostoevsky later denied the allusion. Here I would suggest
that the articles on physiology and neurology in many contemporary
journals provide more than adequate sources for Rakitin’s teachings as
Mitya recounts them. One element, however, is missing. The articles
in the journals were sometimes pedantic, sometimes superficial, often
arrogant, but they were not stupid. Dostoevsky’s ideological enemies
were his intellectual equals, and he knew it.
Can we find a source for the sarcastic scorn Mitya heaps on
Rakitin in this passage? Dostoevsky’s correspondence may provide a
clue, for he received letters from readers of every persuasion and every
level of intelligence. Let me cite a letter that can serve as an example of
a genre. It came late in December 1876 from a Kharkhov businessman
named Ballin, whose letterhead proclaims that he was a dealer in
sewing machines, materials, aids, incidentals for writing, educational

games, scales, and disinfectant substances. S. V. Belov, who is proba
bly the greatest storehouse of Dostoevskiana alive, informs me that
these dealerships were the cover for an illegal printing press. Dostoevsky
would have had no way of knowing the level of his correspondent’s
commitment to radical causes, but he would have felt some evidence
of it in his passionate and fuzzy materialism. Ballin begins with praise
for Dostoevsky’s short story “The Gentle Creature,” and goes on to
admit that he has not read the second half, adding “Oh well, you
don’t get everything read.” Of all Dostoevsky’s works “The Gentle
Creature” depends most on the climactic realization presented on the
very last page. Without that it is a totally different work of art.
Dostoevsky could only have responded to this opening with annoy
ance. The letter goes on to elucidate certain of Ballin’s theories about
consciousness:
Concerning spiritualism, I am fully convinced of the real
ness of ideas. Thought and feeling I cannot conceive other
wise than as an aggregate of organized molecules appearing
in our brain as a result of external influences, and these
external influences I consider to be the external expression of
the life around us. I cannot conceive an individual otherwise
than humanly, and therefore accept as individuals also such
beings as the earthly sphere and the sun. By consciousness I
mean a complicated interaction of the parts of the individu
alized substance in various places and at various times.
Understanding consciousness in this way, it appears incon
trovertible to me that consciousness develops proportionally
with the cooperation of the mass. Hence I deduce a vicious
conclusion—that the consciousness of the sun, for example,
must exceed human consciousness by a million times, the
more so because the individual psychic activity is in specific
relation to the size of the surface of the individual and the
surface of the sun is also very great. It’s plain that in saying
the consciousness of the sun, I have in mind something
altogether uncomprehended by me, and not a human con
sciousness made great.
This portentous and disconnected fabric of fashionable phrases would
have become linked in Dostoevsky’s mind with the materialism that
underlies it, and with the self-satisfaction at the beginning of the letter,
to form a real-life parody of the radical style and doctrine.
For Dostoevsky, Rakitin is related to Ivan in much the same way
as the Eliseevs and Minaevs and Ballins are related to Herzen and
Belinsky. The greedy, vicious, foolish epigones become the sources for
Rakitin, just as the great figures become the sources for Ivan.
V
The finest parody of Ivan and his Inquisitor is Kolya Krasotkin,
the thirteen-year-old schoolboy who can strike terror into the hearts of
his mother, his teachers, and his classmates. Like Ivan, Kolya is very
intelligent, is incessantly tortured by self-consciousness, quotes Vol
taire, and has a breadth of reading that astonishes those around him.
But his intelligence is a schoolboy’s smartness, amusing to watch, and
his self-doubt and self-consciousness involve his appearance and his
wits, not his moral position. He quotes Voltaire but does not under
stand him, and his reading is in trivial school compendiums.
When Ivan meets Alyosha, he says he wants to see him very
much: “I want to get acquainted with you once and for all, and to get
you to know me. . . . I’ve finally learned to respect you; it’s plain this
man stands firm. ... I love these firm ones, whatever they may stand
on, even if they’re little galoots like you.” The intensity of the affec
tion overrides the patronizing words, and Alyosha responds in kind:
“You’re just the same sort of young man as all the other 23-year-olds,
the same young, youthful, fresh, and wondrous boy, a weanling, and
to sum it up, a boy. Tell me, did I hurt your feelings badly?” When
Kolya summons Alyosha, he also “very, very much wanted to get
acquainted.” Later he says, “I’m glad to know you, Karamazov. I’ve
wanted to know you for a long time. ... I learned long ago to respect
you as a rare being. ... I have heard that you are a mystic and were in
the monastery. I know you are a mystic, but—that didn’t stop me.
Contact with reality will cure you.” Kolya here constitutes the realiza
tion of Ivan’s metaphors. He is a real, not a figurative, boy, and at the
simplest level he believes the patronizing words he is using. At the
same time, his respect and affection for Alyosha emerge in close
parallel to Ivan’s.
One puzzling moment in the novel is Kolya’s long account of the
goose, a lame story of a piece of boyish cruelty. He had asked a stupid
peasant whether a cartwheel would decapitate a goose that was pecking

under it. Watching from the side where the goose was pecking, Kolya
winked at the right moment, and the peasant made the cart move,
cutting the goose’s neck in two. “You did that on purpose,” people
cry. “No, not on purpose,” Kolya answers; but the stupid peasant
says, “It wasn’t me, that’s the one who got me to do it.” Kolya’s
answer has the hauteur of his intellectual superiority: “I hadn’t taught
him at all; I had simply expressed the basic idea and only spoke
hypothetically.” This guiltily rationalized account seems overly ex
panded in the novel, until it takes its place with Ivan’s struggle to
avoid admitting that his basic idea has seduced Smerdyakov into kill
ing, and with Smerdyakov’s teaching of little Ilyusha to torture dogs
by feeding them bread with pins in it. The vicarious assaults on the
animals remind readers of Ivan’s place in the murder, and rob him of
much of the sympathy that might attach to him as a misunderstood
manipulator.
Kolya’s behavior trivializes the ideas of the Grand Inquisitor and
the Devil, as well as those Ivan expresses himself. Kolya trains the
dog Zhuchka to play dead and resurrect itself, and then stages the
reappearance of the dog as a miracle for Ilyusha. He exploits the
mysterious secret about the founding of Troy, and crushes the boy
who divulges it. He performs an exploit that is the modem child’s
equivalent of Christ’s second temptation in the wilderness, casting
himself between the tracks of an oncoming train. And he uses author
ity, deception, and force for the good of the little group of schoolboys,
whom he treats as the Grand Inquisitor treats all humanity. The
Inquisitor said:
Oh we shall finally persuade them not to be proud; . . . we
shall show them that though they are feeble, though they
are only pitiable children, childish happiness is the sweetest
of all. They will grow timid and will start to look up to us
and press against us in fear, like fledglings to their mother.
They will feel wonder and terror at us. . . . Yes, we will
make them work, but in the hours free from work, we
will arrange their life like children’s play . . . and they will
worship us as their benefactors.
Kolya realizes some of these metaphors. He actually arranges childish
games and commands the obedience of the boys “like a god.” He even
says:
The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel I 77
And, generally, I love the small fry. I have two fledglings

on my hands at home right now; even today they delayed
me. So [the boys] stopped beating Ilyusha, and I took him
under my protection. I can see that he’s a proud boy. I tell
you that; he’s proud, but in the end he has entrusted him
self to me like a slave, fulfills my slightest commands,
obeys me like a god, and tries to imitate me. ... So now
you too, Karamazov, have gotten together with all these
fledglings?
Everything here echoes Ivan and cheapens Ivan. The pride of

sinful humanity becomes the stubbornness of a pathetic child. The
children or fledglings shrink, from the whole of humanity whom the
Inquisitor loves and serves, to a couple of groups of children who
reinforce Kolya’s ego. The Inquisitor’s godlike dominion becomes a
child’s bossiness. And Kolya’s resurrection of the dog becomes a
comment on Ivan’s dreams of resurrecting the dead and all the talk of
miracles, because we can see the effect of this miracle: “If the
unsuspecting Krasotkin had understood how torturingly and murder
ously such a moment could influence the health of the sick boy, he
would not have thought of playing a trick like the one he played.”
The word “murderously” here removes Kolya from the world of
real mockery and makes him an involuntary killer in his blind
superiority.
Radicalism in Dostoevsky’s day was almost a club, and member
ship required certain attitudes. Various novels and journalistic pieces,
friendly, hostile, and ambivalent, ranging from Turgenev’s Fathers and
Sons to Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, had canonized the list:
materialism, scientism, positivism, atheism, socialism, international
ism, realism, feminism, and in the 1870s populism, all coupled with
hostility to sentiment, tradition, prejudice, manners, the aesthetic, the
establishment, and the government. Except for feminism and interna
tionalism Kolya manages to take every pose demanded of a radical. In
the chapter “A Schoolboy,” he begins: “They’re scum . . . doctors and
the whole medical filth, speaking in general, and, of course, in detail. I
reject medicine. It’s a useless establishment.” This remark might not
seem scientistic, but in the tradition of Russian radicalism the deliverers
of medical care received none of the honor accorded to the investiga
tors of medical truth.
Kolya goes on to attack Alyosha and the boys for sentimentalizing
in their visits to Ilyusha, and later, after an “impressive silence,” he

makes an excursion into scientism and utopian political positivism:
“I love to observe realism, Smurov. Have you observed

how dogs meet and sniff each other? They obey some com
mon law of nature there.”
“Yes, it’s sort of funny.”
“No, it’s not funny. You’re wrong about that. In nature
there’s nothing funny, however, it might seem to a man
with his prejudices. . . . That’s a thought of Rakitin’s, a
remarkable thought. I’m a socialist, Smurov.”
“And what’s a socialist?” . . .
“That’s if all are equal and own common property, and
there are no marriages, and religion and all the laws are the
way each person wants, and, well, and so on. You’re still
young for that; it’s early for you. It’s chilly, though.” . . .
“Have you noticed, Smurov, the way in the middle of
winter, if it’s fifteen or even eighteen degrees, it doesn’t
seem so cold as now, for example, at the beginning of
winter. . . . With people everything’s a matter of habit,
even in governmental and political relationships.”
Kolya then pauses to tease a benign peasant he passes, concluding, “I
love to talk with the people, and am always prepared to give it its
due. . . . With the people, you have to know how to talk.”
The picture of the young radical pontificating to a devotedly
receptive follower had become ironic at least as early as Fathers and
Sons and savage in Leskov’s An Enigmatic Man. The catalogue of
shibboleths recurs two chapters later in another setting, also as old as
Turgenev, with the young man patronizingly enlightening the older
about radical doctrine. The indoctrination of Alyosha also starts with
the statement that medicine is villainy. After an interruption by con
cerns involving Ilyusha, Kolya expounds on his schoolboy cynicism
toward history, which parodies Ivan’s sense of the meaninglessness of
history as described by Dostoevsky to Liubimov. Kolya says:
I don’t ascribe much importance to all those old wives’ tales,
and in general haven’t too much respect for world his
tory. . . . It’s the study of the series of human stupidities,
and that’s all. I respect only mathematics and natural sci
ence. . . . Again, these classical languages . . . classical lan
guages, if you want my opinion about them, are a police

measure. . . . They’re introduced because they’re tiresome
and because they dull our capacities. ... It was pointless, so
how could it be made more pointless? And that’s when they
thought up the classical languages.
At this point, one boy in the group shouts out, “And he’s the top
student in Latin.” In enunciating one of the standard doctrines of the
practical and scientistic radicals, Kolya displays his disinterestedness.
This rejection of what he labels “baseness” (podlost’) offers a child’s
equivalent of the nobility with which the Grand Inquisitor rejects the
salvation he has the ability to earn, or with which Ivan returns his
ticket. The gesture is the same, and the love for the oppressed is the
same, but the schoolboy’s showing off infects the reader’s recollection
of the Inquisitor’s magnificent self-sacrifice.
Dostoevsky’s central quarrel with the radicals may well have
involved their attitude toward religion. Kolya follows his splendid
thirteen-year-old statement that contact with reality would cure Alyosha’s
mysticism with this definition of mysticism: “Well, God and all.” He
elaborates his ideas about God, which turn out to be a travesty of
Ivan’s ambivalent abstention from denial.
“I don’t have anything against God. Of course, God is

only a hypothesis—but—I admit that He is necessary for
order—for the order of the world and so on—and if He did
not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him,” added
Kolya, starting to blush. . . . “Even without believing in
God, it’s possible to love mankind. . . . I’ve read Candide, in
Russian translation. . . . I’m a socialist, Karamazov, an in
corrigible socialist. . . . The Christian faith has served only
the rich and noble, to hold the lower class in slavery, isn’t
that true? ... I am not against Christ. That was a really
humane person, and if He had lived in our time, He would
have joined the revolutionists right away and maybe played
a prominent role—that’s certain, even.”
The talk about hypotheses, the order of things, the necessity for
God, and the possibility of love without God all plainly reminds the
reader of Ivan. The talk about socialism, the sins of Christianity, and
Christ’s need to join the revolutionists recalls the Grand Inquisitor.
Ivan has observed, “Everything that in Europe is a hypothesis is
immediately an axiom for the Russian boy.” His frequent use of the
word “boy” (mal’chik) prepares the reader for the repetition of these
doctrines by a real boy, culminating in the word-for-word repetition
of Voltaire’s aphorism about the invention of God. But this aphorism
is the highest reach of Kolya’s sophistication, whereas for Ivan it is the
starting point for two passionate statements about a single vision of
humanity. We have already noted the first: “I think that if the Devil
does not exist, and man in fact created him, then he created him in
his own image and likeness.” The second is so powerful that it needed
Kolya’s parody:
And indeed, man did invent God. It would be nothing

strange and nothing wondrous for God to really exist, but
the wondrous thing is that such a thought, the thought of
the necessity of God, could creep into the head of such a
savage and evil animal as man; it is so holy, so touching, so
wise, and does such honor to man.
Through this entire catalogue of shibboleths, Ivan’s doctrines
become associated with the conceit and embarrassed self-consciousness
that are Kolya’s most visible traits. The rhetorical function of Kolya’s
conceit is curiously related to the best-known source for Kolya. George
Chulkov has shown that many of Kolya’s doctrines coincide closely
with statements made by Belinsky. And we know that in the early
seventies Dostoevsky found conceit to be a central feature of Belinsky’s
character. Arkady Dolinin has summed up Dostoevsky’s attitude
toward Belinsky at that time by using a series of quotations from
Dostoevsky’s letters:
“Belinsky, that most rotten, dull, and shameful phenome
non of Russian life.” “A stinkbug, Belinsky was just an
impotent and feeble little talent.” “Belinsky cursed Russia
and knowingly brought upon her so much woe.” “In Belinsky
there was so much petty conceit, viciousness, impatience,
exacerbation, baseness, but most of all conceit. It never
occurred to him that he himself was disgusting. He was
pleased with himself in the highest degree, and that was
already a stinking, shameful, personal stupidity.” “He re
lated to Gogol’s characters superficially to the point of mean
inglessness. . . . He scolded Pushkin when Pushkin casts off his
false pose. . . . He rejected the end of Eugene Onegin. ...”
“He didn’t even understand his own people. He didn’t even

understand Turgenev.”
Perhaps here, in this vision of Belinsky, is a source for some of the

conceit in Kolya, for some of the littleness and incomprehension. Of
course, the nastiness that is such a conspicuous part of these letters has
disappeared. Kolya can be cruel, arrogant, conceited, but there is no
stinking, shameful talentlessness in him. These qualities seem to sur
vive in two places. One is Kolya’s vision of himself: “Tell me,
Karamazov,” he asks, “do you despise me terribly?” And the other
repository for these unpleasant qualities is Rakitin, who embodies
them superbly.
Dolinin argues, however, that Dostoevsky’s view of Belinsky and
his political attitude as a whole underwent a revolution in 1876, and
that by the time The Brothers Karamazov began to emerge, he was
expressing some of the old ardor he had felt for the Belinsky who had
honored and befriended him in 1846. He refers to him as “the most
honorable and noble Belinsky,” and echoes Apollon Grigor’ev’s claim
that “if he had lived longer, Belinsky would necessarily have joined the
Slavophiles.” The chronological lines may not be so neat as Dolinin
makes them, but the ambivalence is certainly there. If the vile and
nasty traits Dostoevsky saw in Belinsky went to make Rakitin, we
should look in a novel of the 1870s for some expression of the magnifi
cent eloquence and true self-sacrifice Dostoevsky also attributed to
him. Here the most obvious repository is Ivan himself. Indeed, an
excellent critic of Dostoevsky, Alfred Rammelmeyer, considers Belinsky
a chief source for the Grand Inquisitor, documenting his case primarily
with Belinsky’s letters to Botkin, which Pypin had published not long
before the writing of The Brothers Karamazov.
If Kolya and Ivan both derive from Belinsky, one from the noble
vision and one from the little, conceited vision, with Rakitin as the
repository for all the vilest traits, at first glance it might seem that
Chulkov had oversimplified the pattem, and that Kolya resembles
Belinsky because Ivan does and Kolya is a parody of Ivan. On the basis
of the notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov, I would suggest another
pattern of development. For years Dostoevsky had been working on
two projects, the life of a great sinner and a book about children.
Earlier he had planned two other great novels, “Atheism” and the
Russian Candide. The great sinner, whose life was to be traced from
childhood, was to fall into radicalism and eventually to be saved. This
career coincides not with Ivan’s, not with Alyosha’s, both of which
have been connected with the plan, but with Kolya’s. If this formula
tion is right, in the mid-1870s the plans for the Russian Candide, for
“Atheism,” for the life of the great sinner, and for the novel about
children all became focused on the figure of little Kolya Krasotkin. The
earliest surviving notes we have for The Brothers Karamazov relate to
him. The figure of Ivan the radical emerges only later. Ivan then, like
Rakitin, would have come into existence as a repository for traits
Dostoevsky could not incorporate into a child when he merged the
heroes of these four unwritten novels into a single youthful figure.
Once the character of Ivan had been spun off, it assumed the
residual loveliness of Belinsky and of Aleksandr Herzen. Indeed, it
might perhaps be argued that the ideological revolution in Dostoevsky’s
thinking which Dolinin dates to the mid-1870s was the result and not
the cause of the emergence of Ivan from the mass of materials that
were to become the novel. About the figure of Ivan would gather the
noble doubts, the mighty pity, the love of life, of humanity, of family
that were later to make him so dangerous to the ideological intentions
Dostoevsky described in his letter to Liubimov. In this case, I would
suggest that the child is father of the man.
VI
We no longer need Dostoevsky’s letter to Liubimov or any other
statement as evidence in our evaluation of Lawrence’s argument that
Dostoevsky agreed with Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor. We have been
looking at what Dostoevsky did, not what he said. We have ascribed his
eloquence not to his sincerity but to his borrowings. We have ascribed
the kiss of Christ not to acquiescence but to ideological irony. We have
ascribed the pivotal position of Ivan in part to the parodic figures
clustering around him. And we have offered the rhetorical energy
Dostoevsky expended on the deprecation of Ivan as evidence of his
good faith in promising to confute Ivan’s doctrines.
In this final section we must return to the disjunction we started
with and ask why Dostoevsky’s rhetoric failed to convince Lawrence
and many others. Lawrence, of course, was writing an introduction to
a dubious enterprise, a separate edition to the legend of the Grand
Inquisitor. The isolation of the passage could explain Lawrence’s mis
reading, but not the widespread prevalence of his view. One could say
that many readers read badly or read with preestablished conclusions
because certain early errors have been immortalized. But major writers
should have a rhetoric that will preclude such errors about the central
issues of a work. The final explanation for the failure of Dostoevsky’s
rhetoric to communicate his intent may involve a technical truth he
had mastered early in his career.
There are a number of connections between The Brothers Karamazov
and Crime and Punishment. Let us consider the passage in Crime and
Punishment where Raskolnikov has just committed the double murder
and stands poised for his getaway. He opens the door and listens at the
head of the stairs. Someone goes out of the building. He is about to
leave when he hears someone entering the building, and he grows
convinced that the person is coming to visit his victims. At the last
minute he slips back and silently bolts the door, then listens, holding
his breath, while this visitor and another discuss how to get in. And at
some point in these three pages, the reader suddenly realizes that he
too is holding his breath. The descriptions of Raskolnikov have been
contagious, and without willing it or even knowing it at first, the
reader has concentrated his entire poised attentiveness and desire on the
escape of this murderer. In short, Dostoevsky manipulates the reader
into the experience of having just committed a murder.
He uses this device many times in Crime and Punishment. It is not
original with him, for it is a common trick in the picaresque to involve
the reader’s attention in the escape of a first person narrator he deplores.
Stanley Fish suggests, for example, that in Paradise Lost, Milton in
spires sympathy with Satan as a way of letting the reader experience
Adam’s fall, then destroys this sympathy step by step, until all the
fallen angels turn to snakes; according to this interpretation, Blake’s
belief that Milton favored Satan rests on the beginning not the whole
work (Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost). Dostoevsky
abandons this technique in the novels after Crime and Punishment; he
never again shows us the mind of a murderer from the inside. But in
The Brothers Karamazov he does take us inside the mind of a vicarious
criminal, Ivan, whose “all is lawful” stimulates or liberates Smerdyakov’s
murderous proclivities.
By carrying his reader through a genuine experience of what it
means to be a Russian radical—a compassionate, noble, generous,
tortured, loving one—Dostoevsky implicates the reader in the feelings
of guilt, self-consciousness, stupidity, and even savagery to which he
makes radicalism lead Ivan, Kolya, Rakitin, and several other charac
ters. The epigraph of the novel comes from the Gospel according to
St. John: “Except a corn of wheat fall upon the ground and die, it
abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” The seed here
is the grace of God, which John says will bear fruit only if it dies. By
this reckoning the Grand Inquisitor's effort to isolate mankind from
evil is actually making grace sterile by not letting it die. Dostoevsky
prefers to tempt his readers, as Rakitin and Ivan tempted Alyosha and
as the Devil tempted Christ. He tries to carry his readers through a
death of grace as dangerous as Zosima’s in his youth, or Alyosha’s
when his faith is shaken, hoping he can bring them out beyond as
fertile disseminators of grace. Dostoevsky thus is engaging not in
communication but in manipulation. Instead of the semiotic model we
struggled with, we need a cybernetic one.
This use of the novel for the propagation of active grace entails the
danger that the process may stop at the first step, and the less grave but
more likely danger that readers may interpret the author’s intention as
stopping at the first step. Dostoevsky took this risk, and a substantial,
but I think decreasing, number of his readers have justified his fear and
trembling.
Verbal Pollution in
Gary Saul Morson
"I am a lie, and the father of lies. ”

Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov
Ivan is a riddle, says Alyosha, characteristically overlooking his still

more puzzling brother, Smerdyakov. Smerdyakov outwits all the nov
el’s intellectuals and detectives; and critics have been no more success
ful in clarifying his motives or the complex symbolism of his behavior.
If he robs and kills his father for money, why does he return it? Why
does he kill himself and, more important, why the day before the trial?
Is he aware in advance that the conspiracy will also destroy Ivan?
Smerdyakov moves the plot of Karamazov and stands at the center of
its theodicy, but he has eluded systematic explanation. This riddler is
himself his most important unanswered riddle.
This paper argues that the mystery surrounding Smerdyakov re
sults not only from his own strategy, but from Dostoevsky’s as well.
Karamazov is about the inadequacy of explanatory systems to em
brace the moral universe, and Smerdyakov embodies anomaly to all
possible systems. The novel’s drama lies not only in its characters’
encounter with crime, but in their systems’ encounter with anomaly,
with the exceptions they cannot, but must, account for. Ivan exhausts
his catalogue of theodicies with his “collection of facts” which defy
explanation, facts which, indeed, can only be understood by not at
tempting to generalize their pain. “ ‘I understand nothing,’ Ivan went
From PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3 (1978).
© 1978 by North-Holland Publishing Co.
85
86 / Gary Saul Morson
on as though in delirium. T don’t want to understand anything now. I

want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind long ago not to
understand. If I try to understand anything, I shall be false to the fact
and I have determined to stick to the fact’ ” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 4).
Ivan refers to the clear language of mathematics only to show it fares
no better in a “non-Euclidian” universe, and the devil’s encyclopedia
of cosmologies only points to the arbitrariness of choosing any one of
them. Ivan does not refute the Christian myth, he refutes mythopoesis
itself. So Dmitri argues that all aesthetics stands mute before the
paradoxical “beauty of Sodom.” “God sets us nothing but riddles,” he
declares. “Here all shores meet and all contradictions exist side by
side” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 3).
That is where we find Smerdyakov: parallel Unes converge and all
shores meet where he stands. Smerdyakov personifies anomaly, he is
“x in an indeterminate equation,” the incomprehensible fact which “is
only too necessary on earth.” This failed librarian embodies the failure
of all classification, and his confusion of writing systems—recall that
he records French in Cyrillic letters—becomes symbolic mockery of all
semiosis. We find him at the boundaries he defies; he is the eternally
liminal, and his power is the power of margins.
My analysis centers on the margin. I employ Mary Douglas’s
vocabulary in defining evil in Karamazov as anomaly, and in identify
ing the power to defile with the defiance of categories we use to
comprehend the universe. In the symbolic system of the novel, the
oppositions pollution/purity, dirt/order, chaos/form are homologous.
“Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a
systematic ordering and classification of matter,” and “our pollution
behavior is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to
confuse or contradict cherished classifications” (M. Douglas, Purity and
Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo). We redeem a
chaotic universe by ordering it, and it follows that we fear whatever
challenges our systems. The liminal is the monstrous, and transitional
states threaten precisely because they are “betwixt and between” our
categories. Beyond the map of well-marked social and natural places,
and around its indeterminate internal boundaries—like the disputed
one between Miusov’s property and the monastery—lies a realm of
transgression and contradiction, of monstrous births and confusions of
nature, which we must avoid—both literally and figuratively—like the
plague.
Boundaries are therefore of vital importance in the novel, and
Verbal Pollution in The Brothers Karamazov ! 87
danger threatens those who leave mapped and gridded places for
interstitial space. System fears its margins, and seeks not to admit the
inadmissible. Power therefore belongs to the gatekeepers; trust must
be placed in those who mediate. To Douglas, the cook is also a
symbolic gatekeeper, who selects the clean and transforms the raw into
the assimilable. And from this it follows that he is in a strategic
position to do harm—to pollute and poison—if he chooses.
Smerdyakov is both cook and gatekeeper, and his role in the novel
is the false mediator. He is first mentioned as an unreliable messenger:
I am late to Father Zossima’s cell, Dmitri explains, because “the valet
Smerdyakov (...) told me twice over that the appointment was for
one” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 6). Indeed, the plot of the novel turns on
Smerdyakov’s abuse of his role as guard: he betrays the secret of the
signals to Dmitri, confides his broken confidence in Ivan, and murders
the master he is supposed to protect. Similarly, his abuse of his role of
cook becomes the catalyst of the novel’s story of “The Boys”; Ilyusha’s
fate depends on Smerdyakov’s lesson on how to pollute food (putting
a pin in a piece of bread). One wonders what he puts in his soup. He
himself is constantly described in terms of dirt, putridity, and defile
ment; during his second interview with Ivan, “cockroaches swarmed
in amazing numbers, so that there was a continual rustling from
them.” No wonder he is fastidious about what he eats. The cook
stinks. The name Smerdyakov, of course, means “the stinker.” His
prototype is Iago—the narrator of Karamazov discusses Othello—and
what he owes the earlier villain is his reputation for honesty, the trust
which places him in the position to poison.
But Smerdyakov not only guards the margins, he is defined (or,
rather, remains undefined) by them. As his mother slept in porches
and passageways, he is found at gates, fences, crossroads, and thresh
olds. He is conceived in a fetid passage, a place whose stench he will
transmit: his father violates his mother as he “passed through the
‘backway,’ which led between the back gardens of the houses, with
hurdles on either side. This way leads out onto the bridge over the
long, stinking pool which we were accustomed to call a river” (part 1,
bk. 3, chap. 2). Illegitimate and an orphan, he bears a fictitious sur
name and a questionable patronymic; and it is possible that his first
name, Paul, is a mocking reminder of another kind of problematic
identity and invention of name. Indeed, even Smerdyakov’s illegiti
mate paternity is double. While rumor points to Fyodor Pavlovich, it
may have been the escaped convict Karp who raped Stinking Lizaveta.
Significantly, Smerdyakov is a changeling as well as a foundling, and

this ambiguous status once again doubles his identity. He is bom on
the very night of the burial of Grigory’s child, and Marfa Petrovna
confuses his cry with that of the dead baby. Their adoption of him
once again multiplies his parentage. The child he replaces, it is crucial
to note, is monstrous. He is bom with six fingers and his father
demands that “the dragon” (as he calls his son) remain unbaptized,
outside the Christian community. “A confusion of nature has taken
place,” he explains; the line between the human and the nonhuman has
been threatened by the monstrous birth. It is at this point that Grigory
begins reading that prototypical theodicy, the Book of Job.
Smerdyakov’s mother also defies all social categories. A fool-in-
Christ, she is. an embodied paradox and cannot be judged by ordinary
social conventions. She lives on charity but herself gives alms to the
wealthy ladies of the town who are, the narrator says, “pleased to take
it.” She even seems to lie outside the opposition male/female (though
a grown woman, she is allowed to dress only in a smock) and,
perhaps, human/animal. Recall that Fyodor Pavlovich rapes her to
prove that someone “could possibly look upon such an animal as a
woman” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 2). So her son is both ageless and sexless.
Returning from Moscow, “He suddenly somehow aged in an extraor
dinary way. Completely out of keeping with his age, he grew wrin
kled, yellow, and began to resemble a castrate” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 6).
Like his changeling brother, Smerdyakov seems to lie somewhere
between the human and the nonhuman. “Our little lost one has sent us
this,” Grigory says to his wife, “who has come from the devil’s son
and a holy innocent” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 2). Something beyond
ordinary generation seems to be involved in his birth, the novel’s
counter-nativity. A holy virgin has been raped by “the father of lies,”
and if some rumors assume that someone must have helped Lizaveta
climb over the fence to give birth, “others hinted at something more
uncanny” to explain the impossible feat. In addition to demonic im
pregnation, Grigory also suggests a spontaneous vegetative mutation.
“You are not a human being,” he tells the child he calls a “monster” to
his face. “You grew from the mildew in the bathhouse. That’s what
you are” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 6). Here, again, Smerdyakov is linked to
the rot and stench he transmits. Fyodor Pavlovich’s reference to him as
Balaam’s ass, the animal that speaks, also places him on the margins of
the human.
The biblical reference, of course, also suggests Smerdyakov’s abil-
ity to manipulate language. When Balaam’s ass speaks, one pays atten
tion not only to what he says, but to language itself. In fact,
Smerdyakov’s most effective pollution is verbal pollution. Literally
and figuratively, his first crime is the betrayal of signs. He pursues
language and logic to their margins where they generate absurdity and
paradox; and so he confuses the distinctions on which thought itself
depends. This is the intent of his unanswerable riddle about the source
of light on the first day of Creation before the creation of the sun on
the fourth. Like the devil’s complaints about rheumatism and profes
sions of agnosticism, Smerdyakov’s riddles join the incongruous and
the contradictory. His speech acts therefore resemble taboo acts, which
also mix what should remain distinct. A riddle is a linguistic changeling.
And paradox is a linguistic double. Smerdyakov is one of
Dostoevsky’s gallery of paradoxicalists; for the paradox, like Smerdyakov
himself, is duplicitous. In particular, Smerdyakov is the master of the
genre of the “rhetorical paradox,” the praise of something essentially
unpraisable. Erasmus’s Praise of Folly is simply the best known exam
ple of the genre. Beginning in antiquity, the rhetorical paradox in
cludes encomia to flies, fleas, gnats and nuts; drunkenness and incontinence;
imprisonment and exile; bastardy and the codpiece. In Dostoevsky’s
own Diary of a Writer, the diarist’s friend “the paradoxicalist” praises
war and hypocrisy. So Smerdyakov defends apostasy (in “The Con
troversy”) and does it with the biblical citations and jesuitical preci
sion that are conventional for this mock scholarly genre.
As in all paradox, the point of Smerdyakov’s argument is not the
ostensible point. His reasoning is not so much a defence of apostasy as
an attack on reasoning. Here logic is used to mock logic, distinctions
to foil the process of making distinctions. Paradox is logic’s parody.
As in Smerdyakov’s ceremonial burial of cats he has hanged, forms
faithfully but inappropriately fulfilled call attention to their own arti
fice. The absurdity forces thought to consider itself; therefore, the
rhetorical paradox ultimately reduces to the self-referential one.
Smerdyakov is a direct descendant of that mythical Epiminides of
Crete who swore that all Cretans were liars.
Smerdyakov’s paradox, as Fyodor Pavlovich observes, is formu
lated for Ivan’s benefit; and, indeed, Ivan is also a master of the genre.
In Father Zossima’s cell, Miusov becomes entangled in the contradic
tions of Ivan’s reported assertion that crime, even to cannibalism, is the
only “honorable” course of action for an atheist. “From this paradox,
gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric and paradoxical
friend Ivan Fyodorovich’s theories” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 6). If

Smerdyakov argues the holiness of apostasy, then Ivan’s Inquisitor
legend defends the Christianity of the Anti-Christ: Ivan is quite liter
ally the devil’s advocate.
Almost as soon as Ivan finishes his legend, he realizes that
Smerdyakov was on his mind as he recited it. Though he is not
consciously aware of it, Smerdyakov’s paradox was not so much a
request for approval as the challenge to a verbal duel, and the Inquisi
tor legend, like the dialogue with Smerdyakov that follows it, is in fact
Ivan’s unwitting acceptance of the challenge. The duel is literally a
matter of life and death.
One must understand the different motives behind Ivan’s and
Smerdyakov’s paradoxes to comprehend Smerdyakov’s strategy for
winning the duel. Ivan formulates his paradoxes from despair, in
hopeless quest of their resolution. His paradoxes are a plea for the
world to make sense, Smerdyakov’s an attempt to render it senseless.
For Ivan, the point of the paradox is not reason’s self-cancellation, but
its equivocation. It is statement that avoids statement, because he
refuses to “accept” what he would have to say. In paradox is protec
tion, in casuistry camouflage. The paradoxicalist eludes commitment
to any single position; all of his diction is contra-diction. “Your poem
is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of Him—as you meant it to be” (part
2, bk. 5, chap. 5), says Alyosha, and he is almost right: it is both.
Similarly, Ivan’s article on church courts pleases both the ecclesiastics
and the atheists until “finally some sagacious persons opined that the
article was nothing but an impudent satirical burlesque” (part 1, bk. 1,
chap. 3). Or, more accurately, a paradox.
The key point about paradox is that its statements do not refer to
their ostensible referents, but only to their opposites in the same
argument. There are no positions, only juxtapositions. That is why
their sentences cannot be removed from context: to do so would
be to replace a contradiction with an unambiguous statement. Now
Smerdyakov’s strategy is to do just that. He himself sets paradoxes
well enough to know that one cannot escape from their tautological
circles from within. So he falsifies Ivan’s position. Ivan wishes and
does not wish to kill his father; he wants him dead but he also wants to
protect him. Smerdyakov simply acts on one half of the contradiction
and takes the other as concealment. He turns contradiction into con
spiracy, and so equivocation becomes action and silence consent. In
other words, Smerdyakov responds to Ivan’s unspoken paradoxes with
Verbal Pollution in The Brothers Karamazov / 91
one of his own: that not to act is to act, and only to act (i.e., to get up
and “beat Smerdyakov’’) would be not to act. It is often said that the
murder scene is left out of Karamazov, but in a sense this is not so. It
takes place immediately after the discussion with Smerdyakov when
Ivan is standing on the staircase just listening to his father. “That
‘action’ all of his life afterwards he called ‘infamous,’ and at the bottom
of his heart, he thought of it as the basest action of his life” (part 2, bk.
5, chap. 7). The quotations around “action” are the mark of paradox.
The paradoxical sentence becomes a death sentence: in Karamazov,
the murder weapon is speech. Or, rather, meta-speech. Ivan’s paradoxes,
like those of Fyodor Pavlovich and Smerdyakov, derive from his
manipulation of what Gregory Bateson has called metacommunicative
statements, statements of the type: “This is only fiction,” “take this as
a joke,” “I am only teasing.” This kind of statement tells us how to
understand the statements that follow; it frames them with a set of
conventions which remove them from ordinary discourse as surely as
the nonreferential “truth” of a novel differs from the truth of journal
ism. Ivan constantly uses this language about language to avoid state
ment altogether, to lead his audience into the labyrinths of the subjunctive.
He tells Alyosha that his argument in “Over the Brandy” was simply a
“tease” but he calls that very explanation “nonsense” as well. Like
Miusov, Alyosha must continually ask Ivan if he is joking; and Ivan
more than once responds (in words and forced laughter) that he was,
perhaps, jesting when he said he was jesting. His meta-statements, in
other words, are themselves preceded by meta-meta-statements: he
frames the frame. This is, of course, the same elusive strategy the devil
will later use on him: “I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns, and I
have my motive in it. It’s the new method” (part 4, bk. 11, chap. 9). If
Fyodor Pavlovich’s paradox is the Liar (I always lie, he tells Father
Zossima, I am lying now), then Ivan’s is the Jester.
The plot of Karamazov turns on one of Ivan’s metacommunicative
statements: “I only wish.” I will always protect my father’s life, he
tells Alyosha, but “in my wishes I reserve myself full latitude” (part 1,
bk. 3, chap. 9). What he overlooks is that Smerdyakov refuses to
understand metacommunicative language of any kind. For him, all
statements are in the indicative. He tells his father that he dislikes
Gogol because the Dikanka stories are “all untrue” and he rejects
poetry, he explains, because “whoever talks in rhyme?” And as he
equates fiction with lies, so he turns wishes into commands.
But Smerdyakov is well enough able to manipulate metacom-
municative language if he chooses. Recall that the well-wrought casu

istry of “The Controversy” is based on the equation of the unspoken
wish to apostasy with apostasy itself. If Ivan reframes his statements
with jest, Smerdyakov uses the significant silence. The key moments
of the conversation in which the murder is plotted are its long pauses,
when Smerdyakov implies that everything spoken is in code. What is
said, he conveys with a wink, is what is left unsaid. “ ‘I put you off with
a secondary reason,’ he seemed to suggest, ‘simply to stay some
thing.’ ” Now it is Ivan who must demand direct statement: “Damn
you! Speak out what you want!” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 6). Smerdyakov’s
proverb—“it’s always worthwhile speaking to a clever man”—is sim
ply the uttered meta-statement that conclusively affirms silent conspiracy.
But even this statement is reframed in the three interviews with
Ivan that follow the murder. The meta-statement, too, was in code,
Smerdyakov explains, and meant the opposite of the approval of Ivan’s
departure that it pretended to be. In turn, this explanation is itself
reframed in a later interview. Smerdyakov simply outmaneuvers Ivan
in their verbal duels: he is a better maker of meta-communicative
statements. Ivan comes to Smerdyakov to decipher the code of their
previous conversation, but he does not immediately realize that
Smerdyakov’s decoding is itself encoded. This conversation, too, is
punctuated with significant silences and retroactively reframed by a
final statement about what they will not say (and, implicitly, have not
said), a statement that is structurally equivalent to “it’s always worth
while speaking to a clever man.” “If you don’t speak of that, I shall say
nothing to that conversation of ours at the gate” (part 4, bk. 11, chap.
6), Smerdyakov concludes the first interview. Ivan must return for a
second interview to decode the first, and a third to decode the second.
He is trapped in a process of infinite semiosis, and his only possible
escape from the prison house of language is to abandon language for
action.
The problem, however, is that the action he must take—a public
confession—is also verbal. And Smerdyakov’s suicide effectively makes
that action impossible. The court assumes that Ivan decides to confess
because Smerdyakov’s suicide makes a lie undetectable: and that, in
deed, is why Smerdyakov kills himself. Like Ivan’s madness, the op
portunity to lie makes the audience reframe his confession as a noble
fabrication to save his brother. Smerdyakov’s suicide note uses a sim
ilar device to seal Dmitri’s fate. The mock-Christian note—“I destroy
myself of my own will and inclination so as to blame no one” (part 4,
bk. 12, chap. 8)—lies, characteristically for Smerdyakov, by what it

does not say, by its silence about his murderous guilt. The prosecutor
can plausibly reason that Smerdyakov could not have committed the
murder, because there is no reason to conceal the truth in a suicide
note. But that is precisely how Smerdyakov does conceal the truth.
Knowing that convention frames suicide notes as true, he realizes that
they are strategically a perfect place to lie. In short, both the self
destruction and the note function as metacommunication which effec
tively frames the true statements of his brothers as lies.
Furthermore, Smerdyakov’s suicide not only has a linguistic func
tion, it is itself the analogue to his favorite linguistic paradox of
self-reference. I am suggesting that his self-destruction re-enacts the
self-cancellation of language in paradox. By extension, Smerdyakov’s
epilepsy (as symbolic suicide) and his father’s self-mockery also mirror
their linguistic self-reference; so, indeed, does the novel’s motif of
self-laceration. It is also worth noting that all of the novel’s examples
of archetypical crimes repeat the circular structure of the self-referential
paradox, are quite literally vicious circles. Ivan’s example is cannibal
ism, in which man eats man. Parricide, the destruction of the source of
one’s own life, may be described as a tautology of generation; the same
argument applies to the Inquisitor’s threat of deicide. As the characters
describe themselves and each other as lies, riddles, and paradoxes, so
their fate enacts the logic of these very forms. If Smerdyakov’s para
dox is reflected in suicide, Ivan begets a double—and a double who
puns, inverts proverbs, and denies his own existence. As in his paradoxes,
Ivan argues with himself, and, again as in paradox, contradiction leads
to self-reference. “Can one observe oneself that one is going mad?”
(part 4, bk. 11, chap. 5), he asks Alyosha.
Like his methods, Smerdyakov’s motives can be explained by the
logic of margins. The anomaly to all classifications, he takes revenge
by destroying the systems that exclude him. Most obviously he de
stroys his family, and, symbolically, family itself. He ruins his broth
ers because they do not acknowledge him as a brother. Perhaps the
most important scene for understanding his motives—and how even
Alyosha contributes to the tragedy—is his encounter with Alyosha in
“Smerdyakov with a Guitar.” “Will Brother Dmitri be back soon?”
asks Alyosha. And he means “my brother Dmitri,” thus implicitly
denying his fraternity with Smerdyakov. Smerdyakov (who calls his
brother Dmitri Fyodorovich) responds with murderous irony that he is
not his brother’s keeper. The reference to the first fratricide does more
than point to the archetypical nature of his crime. It also obliquely

reminds Alyosha that while the biblical phrase is conventionally used
in an extended sense to refer to one’s fellow man, in this case Dmitri
really is Smerdyakov’s brother. As Fyodor Pavlovich forgets who
Ivan’s mother is, Alyosha overlooks who Smerdyakov’s father is.
Smerdyakov’s revenge is for his epithets: because he is not called
“Brother Pavel,” but “the valet Smerdyakov” or (as he poisonously
recalls Ivan’s phrase) “the stinking lackey.” The drama of the novel is
already implicit in its title: how many “brothers” are there?
In destroying Ivan, Smerdyakov destroys the personification of
system. Indeed, his plot against his brother constitutes parricide as well
as fratricide, since Ivan is his spiritual father. I am suggesting that
Smerdyakov plots the destruction of his brother with as much care and
foresight as he plans the death of his father. Ivan learns too late—and
most critics have not learned at all—that he has underestimated
Smerdyakov. “You are not a fool,” declares an amazed Ivan at the end
of their last interview; and Smerdyakov responds in triumph, “It was
your pride made you think I was a fool” (part 4, bk. 11, chap. 8).
Smerdyakov pretends to be stupid, just as he feigns cowardice and
honesty: because each of these reputations gives credence to his lies.
Even the well-informed narrator, who is “ashamed of keeping my
readers’ attention so long occupied with these menials” (part 1, bk. 3,
chap. 2), underestimates the murderer. On this point, at least, it is the
defense attorney from Petersburg who is right: “I especially found in
him no trace of the timidity on which the prosecutor so insisted. There
was absolutely no simplicity about him either. I found in him, on the
contrary, an extreme mistrustfulness concealed under a mask of na
ivete, and an intelligence of considerable range” (part 4, bk. 12, chap.
12).
Smerdyakov’s silence echoes another: Christ’s refusal to answer
the Inquisitor. There is, I think, a significance to these silences that
goes beyond this narrative, and applies to the limitations of narrative
itself. The wisdom that Christ and Smerdyakov share is the inade
quacy of story to embrace the moral universe. Ivan seeks to account
for (tell the story that will explain) evil, but evil is unaccountable.
Narrative can only reach the place where narrative fails, and at its best
points to the realm of the unspeakable. The Inquisitor constructs his
story to provoke Christ’s speech; and so all narrative (Karamazov im
plies) is a provocation of the unspeakable. Itself language, narrative is a
challenge to language. Karamazov—like so much of Russian literature—is
Verbal Pollution in The Brothers Karamazov / 95
ultimately literature about literature’s failure. What narrative cannot

speak about, it must pass over in silence.
And that is what Karamazov does. Its real story is what it cannot
tell. That, I think, is the meaning of the puzzling author’s foreword,
which insists that the text we have is only a preface to an unwritten
second volume, which is (would be) the real story. Karamazov takes
narrative to its limits, and what lies beyond is the non-narratable. Its
text speaks to the silence, and in it the silence speaks.
The Self's Negativity
Maire Jaanus Kurrick
A negative tragic recognition is forced upon Ivan in and after his third
dialogue with Smerdyakov. He has first of all to absorb the shock of
the permeability and openness of individual consciousnesses to each
other. He has to learn that while we speak, an unconscious speech
accompanies the conscious one, and that the former can dominate and
negate the latter. The self is not like a fortress, autonomously closed in
itself and for itself. Only in silence could we achieve such an auton
omy. But speech communicates. It is heard and absorbed. It is the way
individuals become intertwined in each others’ consciousnesses. Speech,
furthermore, is also not autonomous, not logically in and for itself. It
also is permeable, open to the unconscious which seeps through it.
Speech is inherently dialogic or double, invigorated or infected by the
unconscious will. Smerdyakov only makes plain what he had under
stood, what part of Ivan’s speech he had listened to, when he is
convinced that Ivan truly did not know what he, Smerdyakov, was
going to do or what he had done. Then, against Ivan’s conscious denial
of knowing, Smerdyakov elaborates the unconscious speech and will
of which he made himself the agent and servant. Smerdyakov is
proXoundly_disappointed and disgusted that so “clever”a man as Ivan
knows really SO little ahout the reality and cleverness of unconscious
speech.
Following this comes Ivan’s self-dialogue, his shocking and only
partial avowal of the cowardly, drab, accommodating, limited, con-
From Literature and Negation. © 1979 by Columbia University Press.
97
98 / Maire Jaanus Kurrick
scious, and pettily critical “devil” he has been. Ivan’s devil is a purely
subjective devil. He knows nothing about God; he knows only Ivan.
What is so dazzling about this devil compared to Goethe’s Mephis
topheles, who was also subjective, is that he has lost all the transcen
dental, sublime aspects of subjectivity. He is no longer the grand No
issuing from a transcendental ego to match its sublime Yes. He is
merely the ordinary Ivan, who Ivan does not want to be, and his least
glamorous doubts and negations. He is so thoroughly reduced, subjec
tivized, and secularized that he cannot any longer understand his ori
gins, the story of fallen angels and other such anecdotes about him.
These origins have for him the meaning of a dead and now merely
puzzling and senseless myth which had best be forgotten. The only
devil to whom he refers and feels any relationship to is Mephistopheles,
precisely because the latter was also the representative of a subjective
dimension in Faust, but he refers to Mephistopheles only in order to
negate thoroughly his identity with him. Mephistopheles is his antithe
sis. Thus he signifies the death and end of all grandiose, transcendental
rebellion—the end of the transcendental No, of all negative aspirations
and defiance. He is the aspersion cast on Ivan’s own “root”—his
nonacceptance of the world. He points to Ivan’s negative idealism as
mere sham, misplaced effort, romantic dreaming. He is the selfs
negation of all its own grander, more single-minded, and goal-oriented
negations. He is negation reduced to mere negativism, to petty resis
tance. In his denials he represents not so much- the reduced-power of
negation as its dispersal in triviality, stupidity, and egotism.
He is the possibility of Ivan at fifty, without his grand illusions
and theatrical rebellions, a gentleman in reduced circumstances, faith
less, domesticated, but still philosophizing. He is stupid, trivial, base,
contemptible because he is so realistic and nonaspiring. He is so ac
commodating because he knows Ivan thoroughly and knows that he
recognizes no intellectual equals. But it is precisely by his mere animal
cunning and cleverness that he undermines Ivan and overcomes his
disdainful intelligence. He torments Ivan with the very opposite of the
noble intellect by proving, undeniably, that the base intellect is a match
for it, a formidable power in its own way. Intellectually he is the
caricature of Ivan’s mind. He holds up the mirror of the base mind that
avoids, escapes, and survives by committing no absurd, senseless,
noble deeds. Ivan’s devil is “a clever man”—too clever and base to be
theoretically consequent. He loves fife too much; he is too earthly and
sensuous to deceive himself by theory. He can theorize but, given his
The Self’s Negativity ! 99
debased existential attachments, he can also trivialize his theorizing. He

is too sensuous to be a consequent nihilist. He has proposed not that
the world be annihilated as Mephistopheles did, but that he be. Yet he
is easily swayed from this extreme and willing to play his part of
negator in the world’s comedy for the sake of the pleasure of occasion
ally living, taking on human shape, suffering, going to the baths,
catching a cold, getting rheumatism.
He reduces the transcendental Goethean drama of negation and
affirmation to mere farce and comedy. It is a “tragedy” in the hands of
men and ideologues, one that they blindly insist on perpetuating. He
plays his intellectual part as a critic, creating contradictions and opposi
tions to keep the intellectual game going, but his real interests lie
elsewhere, in the concrete, bodily life of men. He is amazed by the
concreteness and substantiality of their real bodily pains and pleasures.
His measuring rod for all things is existence. Life is not unarrestable
Goethean striving, but suffering. That’s given. But it is a suffering in
existence. “But what about me? I suffer, but still, I don’t live. I am x
in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has
lost all beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name.”
His aspiration, in so far as he has any, is precisely the opposite of
Goethean infinite striving: he strives for the finite, the limited, the
circumscribed—for all that man with his body represents. He tempts
Ivan, too, to be purely human, stupid, and real. He tempts him
cynically to forget his overreaching, his dreams of a new godless man,
and his fictional impulses, in which he reorganizes the real and projects
new possibilities and conditions of existence. He tries to show him
that existence as it is in its most banal form is something that one can
be content with. He tempts Ivan with contentment and with the
reconciUation with trivial existence. The devil knows thoroughly the
incongruity in Ivan’s existence—the discrepancy between Ivan’s exis
tential love for life and his dreams of an existence for men other than
this one that he loves—and he exploits it to the hilt. As a very clever
man he knows what is out of tune and nonadapted in Ivan’s thoughts,
feelings, and conduct, and he knows that it is banal, brute existence
that Ivan always ignores. Thus he brings it to the foreground, holding
Ivan’s attention by what his whole conscious being denies and rejects.
In appearance the devil is comic compared to other devils, who
were awe-inspiring and admirable, and his procedure is comic. He
knows what every brilliant comedian knows and Ivan does not: that
the intellect can be caricatured because its values are arbitrary and not
based on reality. Everything that has no final authenticity can be

caricatured; for the devil, that is everything. The persistence of Ivan’s
refusal to accept banal existence as the foreground, with intellectual
activity playing merely a part in the background, is dramatized in the
dialogue as Ivan’s acceptance or nonacceptance of the devil as a reality.
Ivan’s denial of the devil’s reality isjiis demal of a part of himself. He
cannot maintain this position with any kind of logical consistency
because obviously the devil knows him and his thoughts, but knows
and sees them in a way that is different from the way Ivan consciously
knows and sees his thought. Yet the devil also knows more than his
thought or knows how to extend it further into banality and stupidity.
He knows that thought oscillates between the extremes of the trivial
and the exalted, the base and the noble, and that Ivan has had in his
thought processes to repress a whole series of less ripe, powerful, or
convincing notions, which now the devil takes delight in retrieving as
inalienably a part of thought itself. If the devil is real, and Ivan in
desperation-tries to so, h^ knowledge of heP ind other
world, which is merely paltry and anecdotal, contradicts-this. He
knows no more about it than the common man. His “transcendental”
conceptions echo precisely the changes in the human moral vision of
sin and redemption. If the devil had at least some connection to the
grand_archrebe.L Satan, ive
a context, albeit spiritually merely a negative and demonic-one. But
this devil denies his connection to the grandeur of past evil and rebel
lion. He cannot be sublimated. And thus all that Ivan had struggled to
be and thought that he was is reduced to petty, egotistic, and meaning
less evil. The reduction of the-demonic is what Ivan-finds so painful
and unacceptable, even as his mind forces him to recognize it.
Ivan’s confused efforts to perceive the devil on a real objective
level, and yet to deny this devil and this dreadful and drab demonic
subjectivity, lead him into the logical trap of acknowledging together
with the objectivity of evil the entire transcendental enterprise pinned
on faith. “Confess that you have faith even to the ten-thousandth of a
grain,” says the devil. Ivan violently denies that he has any such-faith,
seeking to escape his own trap. But this makes his only alternative
accepting this part of his subjectivity. And this for him is so terrible, so
equally nonacceptable, that he confesses both now and to Alyosha later
that he should like to believe in the devil; he would prefer to. For
Alyosha this is sufficient to be the beginning of a sign of conversion;
for Ivan it is the beginning of madness. His madness lies in having to
The Self’s Negativity / 101
deny what he knows is himself. If subjectivity is all there is, his

rebellion is reduced to confounded self-negation.
Ivan’s grandiose refusal of faith is reduced by the devil to a refusal
that hangs merely on common sense. He describes how he was with
Christ at the cross and how he longed to be borne aloft on the bosom
of Christ together with the thief who believed. But like the nonbe
liever, the other thief, he remained where he was, fastened down by
common sense.
But common sense—oh, a most unhappy trait in my character—
kept me in due bounds and I let the moment pass! For what
would have happened, I reflected, what would have hap
pened after my hosannah? Everything on earth would have
been extinguished at once and no events could have occurred.
And so, solely from a sense of duty and my social position, I
was forced to suppress the good moment and to stick to my
nasty task.
Atheism and disbelief need no elaborate intellection—the immense
strain of reason that Ivan had put into them. Atheism has always
existed and it is merely the consequence of the inertia, the stop, the
“this is ridiculous,” by which common sense prompts us to stay where
we are and think before we act. Common sense—our inability for
spontaneous self-abandon—“let[s] the moment pass.” Faust had been
able to seize every moment because he lacked this unhappy trait,
because he was not concretely human but ideal. This devil, unlike all
others, has the desire but not the ability for exaltation. Reason is but
the rationalization of common sense; it issues from common sense to
justify the arrest of emotion and action. Reason quite reasonably dem
onstrates the absurdity of Goethe’s Faust and its hosannic conclusion.
This conclusion signifies the end of everything, an apocalypse, and this
is absurd and untrue because obviously everything has gone on and
must go on. The devil undermines Ivan’s faith in the freedom of his
intellect. The old Socratic daimon, which said no and prevented Socra
tes from doing various things, was not reason but merely his common
sense, telling him to think before he acted. Reason is but the inhibition
of feeling and movement. It stops them and then proceeds to justify
the arrest, sometimes elaborating them into grand negations and
necessity. This devil, unlike all others, does not feel free, but
determined.
Ivan’s “Geological Cataclysm,” so the devil demonstrates, was noth-
102 ! Maire Jaanus Kurrick
ing but a rather paltry and noncommonsensical revision of Goethe’s

Faust in existential terms.
Everyone will know that he is mortal and will accept death
proudly and serenely like a God. His pride will teach him
that it’s useless for him to repine at life’s being a mo
ment. . . . Love will be sufficient only for a moment of life,
but the very consciousness of its momentariness will inten
sify its fire.
Ivan’s vision stands in the shadow of Goethe’s, sharing in its fire,
ethicality, and idealism. That there is a reversal between existence and
the beyond is merely superficial compared to all the optimistic baggage
Ivan retains from Goethe. Ivan wanted to swindle, to commit a crime.
But why, the devil asks him, does he have to justify a desire by moral
and logical constructs? Why can he not swindle honestly out of irratio
nal emotion or for the sake of common sense? To Smerdyakov it had
made good common sense on all grounds that he wanted to murder his
father. Emotionally he hated him; he was disgusting and useless and
troublesome and he had the money that Ivan needed. Later at the trial,
Ivan utters the irrational truth: “Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?”
But he goes to the trial, unable to let the moment pass, unable to stop
himself by common sense. It is the sheer irrationality of his conscience,
which he knows or condemns reasonably—out of common sense—as
being no more than a habit, a reflex acquired by a practice of seven
thousand years to which he cannot reconcile himself. He breaks into
madness not because he cannot rationally accept the fact of irrational,
unconscious emotions, but because he cannot rationally accept acting
on an irrational impulse, and thereby confirming the existence of an
unconscious conscience.
The devil’s appearance signifies the destruction of Ivan’s intellect.
The intellect is simultaneously enlarged and reduced. It acquires a
dubious, shadowy, shabby side, an origin in base impulses. Ivan in
dicts his own intelligence as his Grand Inquisitor had Christ. He
devalues it as banal, reactive, derivative, and unoriginal. If we cannot
affirm and rely on the intellect, what then? Then we are tottering at the
boundary of our mind, of our very being, toward madness and inco
herence. The devil scene is Ivan’s masochistic attack on his own
grandest affirmations and negations, and the reversal of Goethe’s Faust,
with its ultimate triumph of affirmation, into the option of a reduced
finite affirmation on the one hand, and an endless struggle of self
deception, self-evasion, and self-justification on the other. We can

continue to negate until we grow mad and stupid or make the limited
affirmation, the confirmation of another, that is possible.
Ivan is the author of “The Grand Inquisitor,’’ which Dostoevsky
called “so powerful a rejection of God” as has never yet been con
ceived, and he was himself worried whether he could contradict the
chapter. The Grand Inquisitor is Christ’s antagonist, believing the
devil’s interpretation of mankind. His conscience obeys his intelli
gence, which received its illumination from the devil. The devil is for
him the eternal intellect who revealed his comprehension of the human
condition by the three questions he posed to Christ. It is the devil who
understands man, and not Christ. “From those questions alone, from
the miracle of their statement, we can see that we have here to do not
with the fleeting human intelligence, but with the absolute and eter
nal.” Men need material security; they put the self-preservation of their
bodies foremost. They deeply desire immortality and fear a life aimed
toward death which strikes them as meaningless and purposeless. They
also crave authority and fear choice, disorder, and anarchy. They
cannot fully believe without palpable proof or the presence provided
by concrete, sensuous experience. Christ’s demands demonstrate that
he misinterpreted human nature, that he did not love man, and that he
was mad. Christ condemned man to suffering by elevating him and
giving him freedom. But man is by nature a slave to his own cravings
and weaknesses. He is weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. There
is madness in the Christ-ideal, which the Grand Inquisitor refuses to
serve in order to reduce men’s suffering. “I awakened and would not
serve madness.” The answering kiss of Christ “glows in his heart, but
the old man adheres to his idea.” The Grand Inquisitor adheres to the
truth of the intellect revealed by the devil. He succumbs to the cunning
of intellect, its power to maintain itself against all other truths.
Ivan’s “Geological Cataclysm” is the optimistic parallel to that
work, written by a Grand Inquisitor who joyously affirms that from
the negation ofGod alone, man’s transformation into another, higher
creature will follow. J‘Geplogical Cataclysm” is a Feuerbaçhûn -work
but, as the devil points out, the hitch in it is that men are inveterately
stupid, and self-deluding as in fact the Grand Inqiijsifor hid said,
that this vision of the new man is, therefore, Ivan’s alone, giving only
Ivan license to do anything he please.
In Ivan’s nightmare the devil is not at all, as is the Grand Inquisi
tor, a negator of Christ. “Before time was, by some decree which I
could never make out, I was predestined ‘to deny’ and yet I am
genuinely goodhearted and not at all inclined to negation.” When he
negates, it is against his will and inclination. He cannot really negate
because there is nothing he is sure of. Negation is for him a mystery; it
presupposes certitude, and he is not certain of anything. He is an
agnostic, he doesn’t know whether God exists or not. He dreams only
of what he does not have: a human body, of‘‘becoming incarnate once
for all and irrevocably in the form of some merchant’s wife weighing
two hundred fifty pounds, and of believing all she believes.” He longs
simply to be human, bodily and real, on any terms. The devil lacks the
transcendental intellect that the Grand Inquisitor gave him credit for
having. He is the Grand Inquisitor’s definition of the human, only
suffering from a lack of realism. He is a skeptical kind of Enlighten
ment intellectual, perpetually ironizing and banalizing his own thoughts;
he is a Descartes split permanently and irrevocably from his body. He
is the destruction of Ivan’s intellectual beauty and pride, its leveling,
trivialization, and reduction. He is Ivan’s life-force, his existential will
to persist, his “longing for life” and his will “to go on living in spite of
“logic,” now made apparent as a contradiction to Ivan’s intellectual
aspirations and negations. The devil’s intellect represents the one that is
more coherent and in tune with Ivan’s primitive, crude, unbridled,
earthy love for life. The devil is Ivan as his father. The devil is, above
all, irrational negation. Ivan has erred in thinking that his grand repu
diations were rational.
This is the other half of the grandiose devil we have imagined, the
negativism, the stubborn resistance to meaning, the trivial, the insig
nificant, and the shabby that Goethe had largely excluded from his
vision of Mephistopheles. He is not intentional evil, but unintentional,
ignorant, and undesigned evil, the evil that comes about uncon
sciously, as Ivan’s evil does. His is the evil of the functionary, of the
servant and sponger who does what he is told in order to be accepted,
or who does what he thinks others want him to do in order to be
amicable; he is accommodating so as to be able to remain comfortable
and unperturbed. In that sense, he is even a debasement of Smerdyakov,
who at least believed temporarily that his action was a truth. This devil
knows no truth, nor does he believe it exists. He only knows existence
is, and that this is what he lacks. He is less than a will to murder; he is
the inertness of the self itself, its death, its sense of life as comedy and
farce.
The Self’s Negativity ! 105
We understand that comedy; I, for instance, simply and

directly demand that I be annihilated. No, live, I am told,
for there’d be nothing without you. ... So against the grain
I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational because I
am commanded to.
He is the death impulse pure and simple made to serve, against his
will, other and complex purposes that he cannot comprehend. He has
an obscure part in maintaining the diversity and plurality of this world.
But he does not understand why this diversity and contradiction are
necessary. He is the negation that comprehends neither its relation to
death nor life. He is a wish for death too weak to refuse life, weak out
of inertia, not desire. He tempts Ivan not into disbelief but belief. Thus
he becomes the utter perversion of the satanic idea. His vision of
paradise, of course, is utterly banal, conventional, and inert. It is like
his dream of being human, two hundred fifty pounds of inactivity and
utter lack of striving. He wants to prove to Ivan that what he claimed
was “his root”—to refuse, not to accept the world as it is—is meaning
less and absurd. Further, the perfection of rebellion, never to be
reconciled to what is, cannot logically be maintained.
The radical secularization of God’s attributes that Feuerbach urged,
attributes which were to be reabsorbed and rediscovered in man, have
in Dostoevsky a counterpart in the radical secularization of the devil,
who has also to be reappropriated as the stupid, inert, and contradic
tory self, the self incapable of otherness or the absolute, the self as
Thanatos. Both God and the devil, however, have too vast a subjective
significance to be readily appropriated. Dostoevsky portrays the shock
of consciousness suffering under this excess and remainder, this need
to absorb into the self what was thought to be objective and may still
be so. Consciousness staggers as its definition of autonomous self
recognizing and self-recognizable selfhood is broken. How can the
question “What am I?” be answered when the self is evidently another,
an unconscious, something permeable and open both to itself and the
other, doubly double, always speaking toward an inaccessible un
known both within and without? The negativity of the self becomes
truly formidable when the essential pluralizing moment within the self
breaks it into irremediable extremes with opposite characteristics.
Dostoevsky no doubt demanded to read Hegel, declaring “My
whole future is bound up with this,” because Hegel’s vision of coexis-
tence also entailed the vision of the self as another, the problem of
recognition, and self-multiplication. All the Karamazovs suffer and
exhibit the force of fickle, fragmented selfhood. They are all the actors
of the volatile, free, spontaneous spurts of energy in the self. Like
Dimitri, they do not know which of their impulses possess true reality.
Their prankish and theatrical self-presentation is an assertion of the self
regardless of the other and regardless, too, of the self. Their freedom is
a freedom from and not for anything. They are all driven naysayers.
They are, to begin with, psychologically free of any social bonds, so
that Dostoevsky can reveal how they might not be free a? brothers. If
and when they do become bound in their fantastic self-inventiveness, it
is only by the limitations and possibilities and effects of each upon the
other. Ivan is the last to recognize any bonds to himself and the last to
recognize another as part of himself.
Dostoevsky knew that the recognition of coexistence had to be
based on something other than either sympathetic imagination, the
powers of identification, or conscious intellectual recognition. It had to
be based on a necessity other than consciousness or imagination. He
found this necessity in living speech, that act of selfhood which inher
ently declares “I am the other,” a need to speak, to recognize and be
recognized. Only speech entails the actuality of the other, even when
the actuality of that other is denied in the very act of speaking. That
actuality then reappears in the self as its own negated speech, as it
does in Ivan when he has to come to accept his ties to Smerdyakov, his
father, and the devil.
In the time of negation, in the slowness of impeded perception
that is negation, he comes to acknowledge his cowardly, arrogant
participation in the murder of his father and also in Smerdyakov’s
suicide. Negation in his nightmare functions as the agent of retarda
tion, allowing him to glimpse the discrepancy between the simplicity
of consciousness and the unsolvable complexity of an unconscious that
accompanies it. What is important for Dostoevsky, however, is not
primarily the mystery of the unconscious, but the extent to which it is
clearer, more “intellectual,” more dialogic than it had ever been be
fore. Dostoevsky is concerned with the extent to which the con
sciously negated points to a new definition of selfhood, to that which
destroys Ivan’s notions of identity. Dostoevsky searches for a basis, a
ground from which individualism can be criticized and overcome. He
establishes that the recognition of the other can occur only when
consciousness breaks.
Until the idea of coexistence is felt as a reality, the master-slave

reality in which the Grand Inquisitor believes cannot be overcome. It is
a division that the conscious intellect inevitably sees in reality. Zosima’s
conversion occurs at the moment when the question of the validity of
the master-slave relationship forces itself upon him. His ethical and
affective denial of any basis in reality for the relationship produces in
him instantaneous bliss. Zosima discovers that he has the power to say
“I am and I love.” “I am love” is the core of Christ’s meaning, the
meaning of his kiss, and the answer to the Grand Inquisitor’s “I am
intellect.”
Zosima’s conversion consists of four stages. First, he spontane
ously discovers that he has done wrong: “What a crime!” The reality
of conscience erupts in him inexplicably, suddenly. Suddenly he feels
“something vile and shameful” and he knows that his feeling has to do
with the fact that he beat his servant, Afanasy, the night before. Sud
denly the servant who had been to him no more than an object becomes
a full subject, a living real human being whom it is a crime to beat, to
treat like an object. The miracle of conscience is that it makes others
into subjects. Suddenly they acquire the same reality we have for
ourselves. Conscience is the birth in the self of the other as a subject,
the moment of the transformation of the other as object into subject.
After Zosima spontaneously discovers that he is wrong, the model of
what is right is provided for him by his brother. Suddenly he remem
bers the words of his brother Markel and his example of love. This
memory completes Zosima’s ethical awareness:
Yes, am I worth it? flashed through my mind. After all
what am I worth, that another man, a fellow creature, made
in the likeness and image of God, should serve me? For the
first time in my life this question forced itself upon me.
Full ethical awareness means that the other cannot be my servant or I a
master. From this follows Zosima’s act of going to his servant and
asking for his forgiveness. Since the servant seems not to understand
these words, Zosima feels impelled to reinforce them by a gesture: “I
dropped at his feet and bowed my head to the ground.” This bow
becomes the great symbol of the overcoming of the master-slave
dialectic in the novel, and it is repeated in various ways—inadequately,
half-heartedly, or with conviction and joy—by others. Zosima, who
had never thought ethically about his relationship to others, who had
lived merely by social codes and conventions, such as those that told
him to fight a duel and kill a man for his honor, comes for the first
time and independently to question what this relationship to the other
could and should be. He becomes an ethical man who acquires a sense
of the absolute value of another man, another who cannot be beaten
without this beating being felt to be a crime. He gives birth to the
reality of the other in a deep unconscious conscience and then feels
compelled to communicate this new feeling in a deed and an action. He
resigns his singular, individual “human self” not, as in Kierkegaard,
for a new “theological self” with God, but for a self of coexistence;
only after that experience do the truth and reality of Christ come
flooding back to him. The way to Christ is via the detour of coexis
tence, the recognition of the self and the other, the self as love (“I am
and I am love”), via the bow that overcomes the Grand Inquisitor’s
master-slave reality. There is no other way to Christ or God in
Dostoevsky. The leap of faith can only occur after the recognition of
the other. “Active love” alone expels doubt; the only way to God is
the existential way of coexistence. Finally, after this act, Zosima feels
ecstasy, bliss. He is in paradise.
We don’t understand that life is a paradise, for we have only
to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its
beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.
. . . there was such bliss in my heart as I had never known
before in my life.
It is by this sense of bliss that never again leaves him that he truly
triumphs over the Grand Inquisitor, who is forever unhappy, suffer
ing, morose, and tragic. Zosima is converted not by dogma or by a
sudden vision of Christ, but by having a new vision of man. He gives
birth in himself to a man and then he gives birth in himself to Christ.
Coexistence—the transformation of his servant and slave into a man—is
established here by conscience and love and not, as in Hegel by reason.
Faith is not reason, or paradoxy as in Kierkegaard, but active love.
Faith follows from a spontaneous awakening to the other. Zosima
says, “I am two,” “I am this vibration and resonance with another.”
As soon as one commits the act of love and recognizes the quality and
freedom of the other in oneself, one believes in Christ, because then
one has acted out the truth of His vision of humanity. We rediscover
the eternal model of love only when we discover our own ability to
say, “I am and I am love.” This is the certitude of selfhood that
Zosima opposes to the Grand Inquisitor’s individualism, to his “I am
I,” “I am intellect,” “I am autonomous reason.” Zosima opposes the

conscience of the heart to the rational conscience of the Grand Inquisitor
and of Ivan, each of whom tries to adhere ethically to what merely his
consciousness tells him.
Behind Zosima’s conversion, and unimaginable without it, is the
“unconscious” example of his brother. It is not Zosima but his brother
who first had the vision of servantless brotherhood. It is his example,
which Zosima had consciously denied and ignored, that now erupts as
if from his unconscious into a vital, meaningful memory. This mem
ory of a living example, and not the model of Christ, is crucial in his
conversion. Zosima preaches his faith in the importance of the example
because it is the concrete, living demonstration men need to persist in
their faith and to believe that men can live together rather than in
solitude: “Sometimes even if he has to do it alone, and his conduct
seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men’s
souls out of their solitude, and spur them to some act of brotherly love
even if he seems crazy, so that the great idea may not die.” The
memory of the model is what, for example, Dimitri lacks at the
moment when he bows to Katerina. He bows to her need; he discovers
an ethical impulse in himself that strikes him as utterly inexplicable and
absurd. The impulse comes neither to a full-fledged ethical awareness
in him at that moment nor is there the memory of a model to reinforce
and make flower the impulse. The model has to take us by surprise—it
has to seem to erupt from the unconscious. But actually we are not
dealing here with the real unconscious but with an unconscious mem
ory. Dostoevsky, unlike George Eliot, does relegate the unknown to
the self, but the unknown is not yet the truly hidden unconscious. He
is trying to say that the “thou” of the “I” is born as if in a dream, out
of some other, deeper level of selfhood than consciousness (in Zosima’s
unconscious memory, in Ivan’s unacknowledged dimension of speech
and self-dialogue) but that this dimension still has the characteristics of
consciousness. It can be objectified, it is like what is known, and not
yet radically different from and opposed to the known. If for Zosima
there had been no crucial living model, this very absence may have
prevented his conversion. The conscious model tends to become a law;
the unconscious model, when it becomes activated, strikes us as a free
choice in the self. Love cannot be compelled; it has to be freely chosen.
Love is the free choice of nonautonomy, a free rejection of the intellec
tual vision that posits autonomous egos. Love is the awareness of the
other, a conscience that testifies to them but that does not judge them.
The Grand Inquisitor’s vision of man believes in inequality and by

institutionalizing it, it perpetuates the separateness of men. Zosima’s
vision hopes to overcome this separateness by presupposing looser ego
boundaries and the possibility of men’s discovery of each other. His
vision presupposes the need for communion and dialogue. Speech,
confession, is for him the sign that the intellect itself is entwined in
love, exhibiting itself as the need to speak and to be heard. The devil’s
vision criticizes and points to the madness in both visions. He ac
knowledges his aesthetic and affective attraction to Zosima’s ideal, but
states that in practice common sense and reason bar him from that
bliss. He sees that in man there is an unfortunate and inexplicable
tendency not to leap or an inability to leap out of consciousness, a
tendency which turns into full-fledged atheism. He proves that when a
man does leap, not to God, but to the side of another, the moral
dimension of the leap is highly dubious. It may be a leap not only out
of habit, but pride in being admired, both for the boldness of one’s sins
and for the generosity of renouncing oneself for one’s brother. The
seeming “ethical” aspect of Ivan’s resolution may be nothing but a
darker extension of his egotism. The overcoming of separateness here
may be merely a sham way of perpetuating and exhibiting the domina
tion of one by the other. One makes the given situation serve the aims
of the self and turns others into functionaries and applauders of the
self.
Ivan tortures himself with his need to be suspicious of any ethical,
outflowing impulse. The devil is not allowed to comment on the
figure of the suffering, noble Grand Inquisitor at all, but he comments
on him indirectly by elaborating on the “Geological Cataclysm” and
making evident its strength (the authority of the use of power and the
domination of the exceptional over the nonexceptional) and its weak
ness (its need to justify the domination ethically, which in fact weakens
the case for domination). For domination is just an irrational, inherent
impulse, a kind of will to power that defies ethical justification because
it simply is. So the devil argues for the existence of a different type of
man, one who is readily an atheist and master, or even a murderer,
even as he undermines his very argument by also proving the utter
commonness of Ivan both as an intellectual and as a sensuous man. He
is only a potential atheist, master, and murderer in the grand style
because he doesn’t have the power to maintain his own visions or the
courage to commit any final acts in thought or practice. Ivan is a
master who begot a lackey and servant without even knowing it. And
when he is forced to acknowledge the servant by the servant himself,

he does so with disbelief and disgust. He who recognizes the other
because he is forced to do so by the other has not recognized him.
Everything here is the reverse of Zosima’s recognition of his servant, a
discovery, a creation, ending in bliss.
Ivan doubts, he revises, he undoes himself, and secretly he suspects
himself of commonness, desire for faith, and stupidity. He is afraid he
has had grand visions of the elect, the masters, to counterbalance the
fact that in his soul he feels himself to be a lackey, a brother only to
fools like his father and Smerdyakov. (And more like the former
precisely because he could never kill himself.) Thus the devil’s argu
ment on the whole maintains a distinction between men as types but
forces Ivan to acknowledge his general negative likeness to a certain
thoroughly negative type. He breaks Ivan’s sense of autonomy, but
not the autonomy of the type. The situation remains the same: those
who can love love those who cannot love in return. There are those
who escape madness by giving birth in themselves to the other, and
those who never can.
At the trial Ivan is on the stand to test the possibility of breaking
the type, but he ends in incoherence and a fit of screaming, having
testified once again to his desire for faith and his nonpossession of it. “I
would give a quadrillion quadrillions for two seconds ofjoy,” he cries,
but he is still the man lying on the road in protest. Ivan’s dialogic
impulse opens up the self in a new dialogic way, but when he speaks to
other men it is a monologue he presents, the content of which is his
dialogue with himself. He can speak, but he no longer listens or
communicates. His monologue is mad and incomprehensible to others,
but he cannot control his madness and is dragged out of court as a
disrupter. The most he can do is to present himself as he is to other
men, to represent to them his self-recognition in an undisguised way.
He is the old hero in a novel with new heroes—a Don Quixote who
has corrected his self-deception and deluded self-objectifications to the
point where he destroys himself. In his anxiety to be accurate, to
establish the true nature of his consciousness, he has undermined all the
possible bases of truth and accuracy and the very possibility of coher
ent speech.
Speech is negation and identification, self-objectification and self
loss in the objectification. Ivan’s speech becomes sheer negation and
self-loss. Negation, which was in Hegel and Goethe part of the force
of reason, demonstrates now its unreasonable and wild activity in
consciousness, turning the idea of the unity and wholeness of the self
into mere delusion. Consciousness appears but as a proliferation of
symbols or negation, conscious statements that have to be retracted,
until the self is consumed in the activity of making negations and
retracting them. Ivan’s tragedy is the impossibility of making a definite
and final negation, one that could define him without destroying him.
His tragedy is being caught in a mad, irrational paradoxy of negations.
Consciousness here loses itself in and through its conscious negations.
Symbols of negations become the self’s exasperating ex-centricity.
The logos of the novel’s irony and dialogue, in so far as it
concerned the self, passes now beyond self-recognition into a tragic,
boundless unknown, a realm where self-recognition depends on the
recognition of the other and by the other, or the recognition of an
intention not to recognize the other in the self. But the self as an entity
that cannot and does not wish to recognize itself as an ex-centricity, as
a need for recognizing or being recognized by another, is so purely
negative a notion of selfhood that it has to be refused. Yet it is the
logical counterpart of the idea that the self is this recognition by and of
another.
Ivan’s speech does not share his being but declares it. He speaks to
himself; still, does he not speak to be heard? Does not every utterance
presuppose another who listens? And has he not by the very fact of
speaking given “an onion,” though he would no doubt withdraw it as
does the old woman in the tale? Or perhaps his kind of speech cannot
be counted as an onion to begin with? For Alyosha it can. It is the sign
of a pre-form of conscience. It is no more than that because Ivan
testifies to a crime for which he feels no guilt. The feeling “What a
crime!” which initiated Zosima’s conversion is absent in him. Yet he
“gives” the testimony, something extra that he does not have to give.
And behind it stands his traumatic recognition of himself as a model
for Smerdyakov, whom he continues to hate, of Dimitri in his inno
cence and need, whom he also hates, and, above all, of himself as the
son of a father who can only be hated. His recognition is of those
whom he cannot recognize. He hates himself for doing a stupid thing
for stupid and dead people. “Why, why is everything so stupid?” is all
he is able to feel and think at the trial. It is still a rational perception,
but one which registers the total absence of the rational. The percep
tion of reason’s absence is one moment away from its ceasing to be, its
nonexistence. His choice and commitment to the end is to a reason that
has ceased to be.
In Ivan, European rational subjectivity and its effort to constitute

the ego, to liberate it from the superego and to establish a rational,
critical self, unfettered by inherited social and historical patterns, quickly
comes to grief. The Hegelian notion of a consciousness modeled on the
autonomy of the intellect proves to be weak, powerless, and poten
tially, the source of immense evil. In Anna Karenina’s case, conscious
ness chose rationally to will nothing rather than not to will. In Ivan’s
case, rational negation is no longer possible. The immense remainder—
all that consciousness could not encompass—is no longer one that can
be rationally absorbed into another synthesis, not even into a negative
one. The negativity of the self, its power to sever and disassociate and
thereby to proliferate and produce opposites and contradictory polarities,
turns into an activity that can no longer be ordered into a rational
process. The remainder becomes too vast for synthesis because con
sciousness turns out to be too deep, too continuous with an uncon
scious opposite. This madness of negativity, this double splitting that
cannot be healed, is also felt in the form. This failure of the newly
emergent ego to establish itself as a synthesis gives back to the novel
the tragic dimension of art which the Platonic dialogue form had lost
in its alliance with the logos.
To shore up the weakness of the emergent ego, Alyosha forms an
alliance between the self and others. In his vision, that is the only way
for subjectivity to avoid madness and despair. Alyosha’s very manner
of being in the world is as if based on an unconscious acknowledgment
that the self is a reflection, given or received from another from the
beginning. It bears from its inception, to borrow Lacan’s formulation,
the marks of another, and seeks throughout life confirmation in the
recognition of the other. There are marvelous moments in Dostoevsky
where the self comes upon its recognition by another, such as the
moment when Dimitri discovers that someone has put a pillow under
his head while he was asleep. “Who put that pillow under my head?
Who was so kind?” he exclaims in joy. The great moment of bliss is
always that of being recognized by the other or recognizing the other,
and not as in Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy the solitary moment of
self-recognition.
In Dostoevsky these moments of the recognition of coexistence
have a constitutive effect on the consciousness. The philosophic sense
of wonder and mystery aroused by such moments has the power to
convert the ego from self-absorption to an openness toward others.
The heroes correct not merely a blindness in the self toward itself, but
their whole orientation to others. They feel suddenly and completely

estranged from themselves as they were, from their former autono
mous egos in which they were closed off within themselves from
others, those with whom they could only engage in a power struggle
of domination and servitude, a struggle such as Katerina and Dimitri
carry on throughout the novel. Instead of negating their particularity
for a more open and spacious (but egotistic) generality, as occurs in the
Hegelian system, they raise the struggle to another level altogether.
For them the alienation in the self is not a self-alienation, a subjective
otherness, but the concrete alienation from the actuality of the men
who coexist with them. For them the recognition of the other ceases to
be, as it always is for Katerina, a humiliation and displacement of the
self, a self-loss.
No doubt there is as much madness and illusion in their sense of
unity, wholeness, and continuity with others as there is in the autono
mous ego’s sense of its unity and wholeness. Both are based, in
different ways, on the denial of difference, variety, multiplicity, frag
mentation, and dispersal. At least this is why Alyosha appears to Lisa,
and often to readers, as unreal, insubstantial, and unconvincing.
“Alyosha, why is it I don’t respect you?” asks Lisa. “I am very fond of
you, but I don’t respect you. If I respected you, I wouldn’t talk to you
without shame, would I?” Lisa disrespects him for his lack of borders,
of determinate intellectual and moral judgments, of an autonomy that
would prevent her saying everything to him and flowing into him.
Alyosha has looser ego boundaries because he is not an “I am” but
an “I am the other”; he is more like a mirror who reflects others, one
in whom others find merely themselves, rather than his own “I.”
Alyosha has no self against which the other can struggle. It is as if he
disappears, merely to listen, and the others go on speaking shamelessly
because they are left free, undominated, unrepelled, and unabsorbed.
Lisa cannot respect Alyosha because his “I am the other” means also “I
am not myself,” and if there is no self, there can be no self-pride, and
therefore no respect from another. Here, in another sense, subjectivity
is lost, for the self s becoming is absorbed and delayed in the becoming
of others who fail to become, and who fail to become partly because
they do not know how to become outside of a system of egos strug
gling for domination and servitude. What meaning can an asubjective
subjectivity have? What can be its goal?
Its single meaning is affective. Its “truth” lies in the sense of joy
with which it overcomes fear and despair. Nonetheless, some men
consciously choose despair over joy, precisely because by that they

salvage an ego, critical and detached from others, which strikes them
as the truth. The major problem, however, with an ego like Ivan’s is
that it cannot recognize others as emotional wholes but only as part
objects. Alyosha in his openness recognizes others as complete per
sons, but runs into the same problem that Ivan runs into with himself,
the incomplete and interminable aspect of the consciousness in the
other. Thus madness and inexplicable rejections and repulsions also
enter into all of Alyosha’s relations with others.
What ultimately helps to organize the potentially explosive mad
ness in the novel is Dostoevsky’s parallelism of the new myths of
subjectivity with the past myths of God. The religious fictions play the
part of objective correlatives that partly illuminate and guide the signif
icance of the purely existential experiences of coexistence even as they
obscure and conceal them. Fundamentally, the book is an existential
denial of the immanence of transcendence. Yet, subjectivity can by
faith in coexistence leap the barrier and rediscover in itself a certain
continuity with the old myths. The myths of selfhood come to be
haunted by the old myths, even when the self, as is true in Ivan’s case,
wishes fundamentally to repudiate their existence. Ivan comes to ap
prehend that to repudiate their existence is to repudiate one’s own
existence. His dilemma is precisely that he does not wish to and
therefore cannot resee and reconstitute the old myth of the devil. But if
the shabby devil that he sees is all there is, then, he is shabby too and all
is stupid. There is an imbalance in the book between the negative and
positive characters’ relationship to the past. Alyosha is at the marriage
feast in Cana although he does not dare look on the face of Christ, but
Ivan sits with his devil. Hell is nothing but “the suffering of no longer
being able to love,” as Zosima said. Only to the positive heroes is
objectivity given via the objectivity of the other. Only for these heroes
do the old myths contribute to the self s stabilization in its objectifications.
They are reintroduced boldly by Fyodor Karamazov near the beginning.
“Speak, all the same, is there a God, or not? Only, be

serious. I want you to be serious now.”
“No, there is no God.”
“Alyoshka, is there a God?”
“There is.”
“Ivan, and is there immortality of some sort, just a little,
just a tiny bit?”
“There is no immortality either.”

“None at all?”
“None at all.”
“There’s absolute nothingness then. Perhaps there is just
something? Anything is better than nothing!”
“Absolute nothingness.”
“Alyoshka, is there immortality?”
“There is.”
“God and immortality?”
“God and immortality. In God is immortality.”
“Hmmm! It’s more likely Ivan’s right. Good Lord! to
think what faith, what force of all kinds, man has lavished
for nothing, on that dream, and for how many thousand
years. Who is it laughing at man? Ivan! For the last time,
once for all, is there a God or not? I ask for the last time!”
“And for the last time there is not.”
“Who is laughing at mankind, Ivan?”
“It must be the devil,” said Ivan Fyodorovich, smiling.
“And the devil? Does he exist?”
“No, there’s no devil either.”
“It’s a pity. Damn it all, what wouldn’t I do to the man
who first invented God! Hanging on a bitter aspen tree
would be too good for him.”
The method is to raise a question and to demonstrate that any

question inherently carries the possibility both of an answer of yes and
no, which is in fact no answer at all, but a demonstration of the
ineluctable presence of dualities, oppositions, and polar extremes. It is
the ever-repeated return of a maddening doubt and uncertainty.
It is axiomatic for the classical novel that what is represented in
the characters is repeated in the structure. The reason structural repeti
tion acquires a dimension in Dostoevsky and Dickens different from
that which it had in Austen, Eliot, and Tolstoy is that the self has
acquired another dimension. In the latter artists, the fundamental ratio
nality of self-development and self-recognition allowed the artists to
construct an artistic base of rational patterns of repetition guided pre
eminently by the need to make a world formally palpable and sensu
ous. Even when these artistic reinforcements of the world of the work
included irony, ironic reversal, or the multiplication of the point of
view, they were free of anxiety and compulsion. But in Dostoevsky
and Dickens the need to repeat grows less artistic and rational and
more psychological, becoming a need to repeat fundamentally because
what has been represented has not yet been understood or recognized
and needs to be repeated because it demands to be recognized.
The repetitions, made in ironic composure in Austen, which pro
duced an orderly, layered series of new revelations and possibilities
which could be absorbed in spite and because of the negative shock of
disjunction, turn now into an ironic anxiety over the impossibility of
either adequate representation or recognition. Instead of the orderly
temporal ironic layering of Austen or even the additional spatial multi
plication of irony in various points of view in George Eliot, there is a
sense of inadequacy and madness. The self-dissociation and doubling,
signifying the chronic intrapsychic conflict, is repeated in the doubling
of the characters by parody, caricature, and repetition, and in the
structure as the repetition of one small community in another. The
radical parody and doubling leave no image sacrosanct.
“Negatively,” the repetitions point to deep and unresolvable doubt.
“Positively,” the repetition points to a kind of negative, parodistic
union of all opposites, where everyone doubled into their extremes do
interact with everyone else on some level. But here, simultaneously,
repetition becomes the correlate of the self’s radical ex-centricity, its
tragic and infuriating unknowableness, the very absence of the subjec
tivity on which the novel based itself.
In its new repetition-compulsion and anxiety, the technique that
guaranteed the novel’s form shows itself as unresolved and noncon-
cludable, as tragic and self-negating. Technique, which was the guar
antee of final clarity and control, comes itself to be invaded by an
intention not to be understood, a demonic element of displacement,
echoing that of the displaced and dispersed self. As in a dream, we
reach the impasse of conscious negation, and perceive another speech,
more terrible and more uncontrollable, of unconscious negation.
The self’s negativity struggling with an unnegatable (because un
known) unconscious in the self, repeated in technique, signifies at once
the limit and end of the novel’s form as it has been and its return to
tragedy. This return was made possible largely by the rediscovery of
dialogue as an irrational manifestation and experience in life rather than
a purely rational and controllable one. The breakthrough to free and
open dialogue also breaks the rational dialectical model. What is char
acteristic of this new dialecticism is its tendency toward dispersal, its
inability to be synthesized by reason or faith. Alyosha makes Ivan his
hope. But what of Smerdyakov? Where is conscience to be found in

his doubly conscienceless act toward the other in murder and toward
himself in suicide? The all-consuming, maddening doubt which splits
and dissociates everything into opposites, the doubt which is nothing
but a figure for Dostoevsky’s own doubt and ambivalence and which
Dostoevsky would like to eliminate from the question of the existence
of conscience in man, cannot be eliminated. The release of the mind’s
immense and productive capacity for negativity, its interacting con
scious and unconscious negations, is no longer amenable to synthesis.
Irony is the novel’s formal demonstration of its awareness of
negativity. The irony is immense and extreme and there is no logos in
the present to contain it. There is no answer in the present generation
of the Karamazovs. Dostoevsky manages only to gather the present
together by looking toward the logos of the past and by projecting a
logos into the future: other fathers for other generations of sons.
Dostoevsky’s novel conforms to Lukacs’ idea of the novel’s form as
being capable only of the “affirmation of dissonance.” Dissonance in
Dostoevsky is the form, the only and tragic one available in a world,
not merely split, but dispersed, and forsaken by God. If there is a truth
or a consolation in this new, open dialogue, it has nothing to do with
reason or unreason, but with feeling. The truth lies, if anywhere, in
the sudden, unconscious pleasure and pain that this dialogue some
times brings.
The Wound and the Lamentation:
Ivan’s Rebellion
Robert Louis Jackson
“I hear the message clear, but am offaith devoid. ”

Goethe, Faust
At the conclusion of the chapter entitled “Rebellion” in part 2, book 5,

of The Brothers Karamazov, the reader encounters one of the most
dramatic perorations in Dostoevsky’s work, and indeed in all of world
literature: a monologue, or prose-poem, in which Ivan protests the
suffering of children and concludes by returning his “entrance
ticket” to universal harmony. Ivan’s passionate outcry, as far as pure
content is concerned, is in large part a reiteration of ideas already
advanced in the main body of the chapter “Rebellion” and in the
preceding chapter, “The Brothers Get Acquainted.” But this final
poetic synthesis of his thought has a structure, set of imagery, and
dynamic of its own that deserve particular attention.
Ivan’s confession in “Rebellion” over the impossibility of loving
man at close quarters and his grueling stories about the suffering of
children build up an almost intolerable tension of thought and emo
tion. In these scenes, Dostoevsky reminds us, Ivan speaks “as though
in madness,” “as though in a delirium.” The suffering that Ivan
imposes on Alyosha by making him mentally witness scenes of brutal
ization of children (“I’ll stop if you wish,” he offers; but Alyosha
replies, “No, I too want to bear with the agony”) also acts as a terrible
self-laceration. In this context, Ivan’s final monologue emerges as
From The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes. © 1981 by Princeton Univer
sity Press.
119
120 / Robert Louis Jackson
something of a poetic catharsis, which releases pent-up emotion and at

the same time gives his tortured thought the final form of a dialectic of
permanent rebellion. Personal anguish escalates into the pathos of
universal suffering. In this prose-poem, suffering consciousness—the
very rhythms of unassuaged grief—become the essence of Ivan’s pro
test. A kind of Dionysian impulse triumphs in this strange heretical
passion—it is precisely the Apollonian structuring principle that is
denied—and Ivan and the reader are lifted on a wave of stupendous,
almost orgiastic lamentation.
The choice of the word “lamentation” to describe Ivan’s prose
poem is not arbitrary. The problem of the lamentation (prichitanie)—an
old Russian chant or song over the dead—is raised as a psychological
and philosophical phenomenon early in the novel in the chapter “Women
with Faith.” This chapter is crucial background to any consideration of
the rebellion of Ivan. “There’s something from afar off,” Zosima
observes as a peasant woman approaches him bearing news of the
death of her fourth and last child:
“From afar off, little Father, from afar off, from three hun
dred versts from here. From afar off, Father, from afar off,”
the woman pronounced in a singsong voice, swaying her
head rhythmically from side to side and resting her cheek in
her hand. She spoke as though chanting a dirge.
(bk. 2, chap. 3)
At this point the narrator pauses to comment on the form and

content of the lamentation:
There is a silent and much-suffering grief among the people;
it passes within and is silent. But there is also a heart
rending grief: it bursts out in tears and from that moment
passes into lamentations. . . . Such lamentations appease one
only insofar as they even further exacerbate and lacerate the
heart. Such grief, however, does not desire consolation; it
feeds only upon its feeling of despair. Lamentations are only
a need perpetually to reopen a wound.
(bk. 2, chap. 3)
The grief of the lamentation, the narrator stresses, does not desire
consolation. Its spiritual or ideological concomitant is doubt in God or
even nonbelief. It is not surprising, then, that the early Russian
Orthodox Church detected dangerous, even rebellious elements in the
Ivan’s Rebellion ! 121
popular folk lamentation. In the introduction to his collection of folk

lamentations in 1872, E. V. Barsov posited a pagan world view at the
core of the ancient poetry of lamentation:
That is why, without doubt the ancient Russian church took
action against such folk lamentations. . . . Church preachers
spoke out against them. In the old collections of church
writings ... we frequently encounter the injunction—“Oh,
do not weep too much over the dead.’’ In explaining the
wailings over coffin and grave as coming from a lack of
faith in the immortality of the soul, . . . preachers tried to
stop them by awakening faith in the resurrection of the
dead. “There is much rebellion in your grief for the dead.”
Father Zosima, psychologically more astute perhaps than the old
church fathers, takes a more conciliatory view toward the wailing of
the mothers. “And do not console yourself,” he advises, “and there is
no need to be consoled, do not console yourself, but weep.” Yet he
does not let the matter rest there. He is as cognizant as the church
fathers of the implications of excessive grief, of the rebellion latent in
the lamentation. Like the early church fathers, he seeks to cope with
this danger by arousing faith in the resurrection of the dead. Thus,
though advising mothers not to console themselves and to weep, he
stipulates:
However, each time that you weep, remember without fail
that your little son is united with the angels of God and is
looking at you from up there and sees you, and rejoices over
your tears, and points them out to God. And this great
maternal sorrow will be with you for a long time, but
finally it will turn into a quiet joy, and your bitter tears will
only be the tears of a quiet emotion and spiritual cleansing,
saving you from sins.
(bk. 2, chap. 3)
Tragic emotion should lead to spiritual catharsis. Yet one thing is

clear: for Zosima only the idea of immortality stands between tears and
despair, suffering and rebellion.
Such is Zosima’s statement on the mystery of suffering. It is an
anticipation of his more expressive and detailed treatment of the prob
lem of suffering and death in “The Russian Monk.” The lamentation
of the mothers, in all its explosive potential, is a forerunner—both in
its rhythms and spiritual content—of the wails of despair in Ivan’s

prose-poem at the end of “Rebellion.”
In his prefatory remarks to his legend of the Grand Inquisitor Ivan
characteristically identifies the pathos of his legend with that of the
Mother of God in the medieval Russian legend, “The Wanderings of
Our Lady through Hell.” “Shocked and weeping” at the sight of so
much suffering in hell, the Madonna prostrates herself before the
throne of God and begs mercy for all in hell. “My poem,” Ivan
remarks, “would have been that kind if it had appeared at that time,”
that is, in an age of faith. But it belongs to another, later period. Ivan
does not implore God the Father to be merciful, but rebels against
him, against the stern Pantokrator. Ivan’s rebellion takes on the charac
ter of an unending lamentation, in the narrator’s words, the kind that
“does not desire consolation,” that “feeds only upon its feeling of
despair,” that strives again and again to “reopen a wound.”
The center of Ivan’s lamentation, literally and figuratively, is a
wound, an image paralyzing to mind and spirit: it is the mutilation, the
physical as well as psychological disfiguration, of children. Zosima
envisages the departed child rejoicing in his resurrected state over his
mother’s tears and pointing them out to God. This representation of
mother and child is permeated with Christian symbolism and is, in its
own way, a religious painting. In his state of beatific happiness the
child finds his mother’s tears absurd. The message or moral of this
iconographie representation is that immortality renders inconsolable
grief meaningless. Ivan, on the other hand, is unable to conjure up
visions of angelic children gamboling about the throne of God the
Father and rejoicing at the tears of their grief-stricken mothers on
earth. Ivan has other visions the contemplation of which lead him
neither to quiet emotion, nor to spiritual catharsis, nor to a feeling of
absolution for his sins. For Ivan, who essentially takes on the suffering
of the mothers, it is the tears of the suffering children that render
God’s world absurd and meaningless; and in his despairing rebellion,
in his lamentation, he points out these tears, as it were, to God.
II
Ivan’s so-called long tirade in the second part of “The Brothers Get
Acquainted” may be considered a prose rehearsal for the final poetic
monologue. In this tirade Ivan attempts to explain to Alyosha “as
quickly as possible” his “essence, that is, what I believe in and what I
Ivan’s Rebellion / 123
hope for.” He is prepared, so he says, to accept God simply and to

believe in the meaning of life and eternal harmony. Yet in the final
analysis, he does not accept “this world of God.” He is convinced, it is
true, that
suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the insult
ing comedy of human contradictions will disappear . . .
that, ultimately, in the world finale, in the moment of
eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass
that it will suffice for all hearts, for the assuagement of all
indignation, for the expiation of all crimes of people, of all
the blood they have shed; that it will make it not only
possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with
man.
(bk. 5, chap. 3)
All this, Ivan concedes, may come to pass, “but I do not accept it and I
do not want to accept it! Granted that even parallel lines will meet: I
will see them and say that they meet, but I will still not accept it. That
is my essence, Alyosha, that is my thesis.”
The long tirade presents us with the paradox of Ivan’s essence: his
willingness to recognize Christian theological reality (at least for the
sake of argument), yet his refusal to accept it. But we do not learn why
he rejects the evidences of his understanding. The inner dynamic of his
paradox is disclosed in the body of the chapter “Rebellion” and, most
graphically, in the final dramatic peroration. There is a qualitative leap
here from narrative exposition—starkly vivid accounts of cruelty to
children—to the tortured rhythms of prose-poetry. It is as though the
emotional pressure built up by harrowing anecdote and personal con
fession now finds release or resolution in the language and rhythm of
poetry. Dostoevsky signals the shift to this final phase of Ivan’s rebel
lion by means of a dramatic pause in Ivan’s rapid-flowing discourse:
“Ivan fell silent for a moment, his face suddenly became very sad.”
After this pause he begins:
Listen to me: I selected only children to make things clearer.
Of the other tears of humanity with which the whole earth
is soaked from crust to core—I’ll not say anything, I have
deliberately narrowed my theme.
(bk. 5, chap. 4)
The abstract, almost academic character of the first and final phrases
contrasts sharply with the charged image at the center: the earth bathed
in the rain of tears of suffering humanity.
This image of the earth soaked from crust to core with the tears of
humanity harks back to the peasant mothers lamenting the deaths of
their children. It also looks forward to the moment of Alyosha’s
mystical union with the earth, when he flings himself down upon the
earth, driven by a desire to kiss it. But “he kissed it weeping, sobbing,
and watering it with his tears, and madly swore to love it, love it
forever. ‘Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears
of yours’—rang in his soul.” The image of the earth watered by tears
in this scene is marked by the spirit of reconciliation and universal
forgiveness. The earth is watered with tears of joy, and the result of
this mystic union with the earth is a sense of renewal. Alyosha “fell to
the earth a weak youth, but arose a firm fighter for the rest of his life.”
Ivan’s tears—the tears of humanity—are bitter tears of suffering. They
do not augur a harvest of reconciliation and forgiveness. Ivan will have
none of the mystical transmutation of tears into the waters of eternal
life, of suffering into salvation.
The various images that appear in Ivan’s peroration are, like his
stories, lacerations. Ivan’s conception of himself as a bedbug, for
instance, accurately conveys the hostile, underground character of his
pose of humility: “I am a bedbug, and I confess with all humility that I
cannot understand anything, why everything is arranged as it is.” The
whole movement of Ivan’s monologue—viewed as antitheodicy—is a
steady ascent from earth to heaven, from bedbug to God. The ascent is
steep and ends in a reversal of roles: the humiliation of God, the
representation of Him as a scurrilous merchandizer of souls, and the
transformation of the bedbug, Ivan, into a Christ figure.
What Ivan cannot understand—narrowing his “theme” to its core—is
the doctrine of original sin as it applies to children. “People have eaten
of the apple and learned to know good and evil, and became ‘as
gods’,” Ivan observes to Alyosha. “But children have eaten nothing
and so far are not guilty of anything.” Ivan repeats his thought again in
his final peroration, but with a significant change. “People themselves,
so it goes, are guilty: they were given paradise, they wanted freedom
and they stole fire from the heavens, themselves knowing that they
would become unhappy, therefore there is no reason to pity them.”
The allusion to Greek myth at this point is perhaps significant: the
figure of the eternally suffering, ever freshly wounded Prometheus
reflects Ivan’s own choice of permanent suffering in the name of a

higher justice.
The tense, spasmodic character of the opening lines of Ivan’s
monologue prelude a storm of emotion. This emotion breaks out into
the barely controlled rhythms of the fourth line. Ivan no longer merely
poses the problem here; he responds to it broadly and passionately and
in a deeply personal manner. An exclamatory, rhetorical “Oh” opens
the floodgates of new movement:
Oh, with my pitiful, earthly Euclidian mind all I know is
that there is suffering and that there are none guilty, that one
thing follows from another directly and simply, that every
thing flows and comes into equilibrium—but really that’s
only Euclidian nonsense, really I know that, but the point is
that I can’t consent to live by it! What do I care that none are
guilty and that one thing follows another directly and sim
ply and that I know this—I must have retribution or I will
destroy myself.
(bk. 5, chap. 4)
This passage in Russian, with its curious rocking, singsong rhythms,

its repetitions and alliterations, establishes the sound pattern of Ivan’s
lamentation. It is remarkable in the way its formal structure expresses
its ideas and tensions. The notion that everything flows and comes into
equilibrium is expressed in the extraordinary balance of syntactical
units or phrases in the passage.
Yet it is one thing to be presented with a formal equilibrium or
balance of elements, and it is another thing to accept it. The opposition
between “Euclidian mind” and “Euclidian nonsense” perfectly ex
presses the insupportable contradiction rending Ivan: reason, which he
will not relinquish, exposes a cruel mechanism in which people suffer,
no one is guilty, and everything balances out. But this abstract balanc
ing of things, or justice, is completely unacceptable to Ivan’s moral
sense. In spite of all equilibrium, he wants to know “why everything is
arranged as it is.” In fact, Ivan sees only suffering and finds no justice
or equilibrium. He himself seeks the moral satisfaction of real, Old
Testament justice, or retribution. But expressing his need for retribu
tion, Ivan reveals his deep sense of guilt and responsibility: if he does
not find retribution, he will destroy himself, that is, take upon him the
guilt and, through self-annihilation, reestablish the missing equilib-
num. The motif of the pseudo-Christ, important throughout the mono

logue, emerges clearly here. It is paradoxical in character: it not only
attests to an extraordinary degree of moral sensibility but to an ego
tism. “I did not suffer,” Ivan declares, “in order with my misdeeds
and sufferings to manure some kind of future harmony.”
It is apparent, however, that retributive punishment, though in
stinctively demanded for the satisfaction of a sense of moral outrage,
hardly disposes of the problems raised by human suffering. It has no
meaning to those who have unjustly suffered. “What can hell correct,”
Ivan asks toward the end of his lamentation, “when these [children]
already have been tormented?” But the notion of retribution, as Ivan
develops it, is only partially exhausted by the idea of punishment. The
moment of retribution is also a moment of revelation, of fulfillment of
divine prophecy. The destruction of the wicked coincides with the
exaltation of the good and the final triumph of God’s justice. This is
the day of judgment when, as Ivan puts it, “all will suddenly learn
why everything has been as it is,” “when the crown of knowledge will
be attained and all will be explained.” The notion of retributive justice
is for Ivan, then, a bridge or transition to the central problem and
phenomenon of divine reconciliation and harmony.
At the outset Ivan insists that he be on earth at the moment of
revelation so that he may see it himself:
I have believed, I want to see it myself, and if I am already
dead at that hour, then let them resurrect me, because if it all
takes place without me, then it will be too insulting. I did
not suffer in order with my misdeeds and sufferings to
manure some kind of future harmony. I want to see with
my own eyes how the hind lies down alongside the lion,
and how the slaughtered creature rises and embraces his
slaughterer.
(bk. 5, chap. 4)
The initial image in Ivan’s lamentation—the rain of tears soaking the

earth—was a first indication of Ivan’s bitter and mocking attitude
toward the concept of the universal harvest. His bitterness and cyni
cism is even more manifest in the second, as it were, agricultural image
of his lamentation: the representation of suffering as “manure” for
some future harmony. Ivan’s notion of the absurd and cruel character
of redemption in the divine plan could not, it would seem, be more
forcibly presented. The deliberate crudeness of the metaphor perfectly

conveys his lacerating and cruel thought.
At the outset of his peroration Ivan deviates from his theme—the
suffering of children—and places the emphasis upon his own need for
retribution, his desire for resurrection, and his unwillingness to let his
sufferings be manure for a future harmony in which he has no part.
But he quickly returns to his theme:
Listen: if everyone must suffer in order with suffering to
buy eternal harmony, then what have children got to do
with all this, tell me please? It is quite incomprehensible
why they have had to suffer, and why they have had to buy
harmony with sufferings. Why did they also have to become
material and manure for some future harmony? Solidarity in
sin among people I understand, I understand solidarity also
in retribution, but with children, however, there can be no
such solidarity in sin; and if it is true that they must, indeed,
stand in solidarity with their fathers and all the misdeeds of
their fathers, then, of course, this truth is not of this world
and is incomprehensible to me.
(bk. 5, chap. 4)
The metaphor of Ivan’s suffering as manure for future harmony now

develops into something more ugly and ominous: children as “material
and manure” for some future harmony. And in a dramatic period
marked by the repeated and ironical use of the word “solidarity,” Ivan
links the repellent notion of suffering as material and manure with the
idea of solidarity of men and children in sin.
At the same time, Ivan compares the dynamics of salvation to a
commercial transaction. In Dostoevsky’s notebook to The Brothers
Karamazov, we find the fines, “The Inquisitor: ‘God as a merchant. I
love humanity more than you’.” We do not need any prompting from
Dostoevsky’s notebooks, however, to realize that the god against whom
Ivan rebels is conceived as a supreme merchant or pawnbroker, traf
ficking in the sufferings of mankind and selling “tickets” to heaven at
exorbitant rates of interest. Ivan pursues the metaphor with a ven
geance. In his conception, man must “buy” (kupit’, pokupat') eternal
harmony with suffering, but at an unfavorable exchange rate: harmony
is “not worth” even the tiny tears of a tortured child, not worth it
because the tears remain “unexpiated” (neiskuplennye). “And if the
sufferings of children go to make up the sum of suffering which are

necessary for the purchase of the truth,” then “all this truth is not
worth such a price.” “We simply cannot afford to pay so much for
admission.” Ivan will “respectfully” return his ticket.
In the ironic subtext of Ivan’s rebellious lamentation, Jesus the
Redeemer (the only being, Ivan hints, who might have the “right to
forgive”) stands opposed to God the merchant. Jesus does not appear
in Ivan’s lamentation, but his omission is deliberate. Jesus has not yet
arrived in the cruel Old Testament world that Ivan posits. He is only
an hypothesis in Ivan’s legend of the Grand Inquisitor, as he is in the
long tirade where Ivan allows that “in the world’s finale, at the
moment of eternal harmony, something so precious [might] come to
pass that it would suffice for all hearts, for the assuaging of all resent
ments, for the expiation of all the crimes of humanity . . . that it will
make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened
with men.”
In “Rebellion” and in “Grand Inquisitor” Ivan posits a world that
is utterly loveless, freighted down with intolerable suffering and evil.
On the one hand, men are utterly undeserving of salvation: “After all,
they are vile and not deserving of love and have gotten their reward, ”
Ivan says of the adults who have eaten the apple. On the other hand, a
world where such terrible things occur makes a mockery of any
concept of a meaningful, God-made world. Ivan’s question, “Is there
in the whole world a being who could forgive and who would have
the right to forgive?” turns not on whether a Redeemer exists, but on
whether such a being has the right to forgive, can forgive. The real
question is whether the idea of Christ, precious and beyond all com
prehension, is relevant at all to the fundamental reality of human
existence, to man in all his vileness. “Christian love is a kind of
impossible miracle on earth,” Ivan insists. In Dostoevsky’s manuscript
of The Raw Youth Versilov gives the most extreme formulation to this
skepticism: “Without a doubt Christ could not love us, such as we are.
He suffered us. He forgave us, but certainly despised us; I at any rate
cannot conceive His countenance otherwise.” Man, in Ivan’s view, is
unworthy of the Redeemer. He deserves the Grand Inquisitor.
The full force of Ivan’s rebellion is expressed in a final, thrice-
repeated image: a general turns an offending eight-year-old boy over
to his hunting dogs to be tom to pieces before the eyes of his mother.
Ivan visualizes the moment of universal “hosanna,” the supreme mo-
ment when the crown of knowledge is achieved in the most emotion

ally charged passage in his lamentation:
Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! Now I understand
what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything
in heaven and earth blends into one hymn of praise and
everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: “Thou art
just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.” When the mother
embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all
three cry aloud with tears, “Thou art just, O Lord!”, then,
of course, the crown of knowledge will be achieved and all
will be made clear. But there’s the rub: it is precisely that
which I can’t accept. And while I am on earth, I make haste
to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it
really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again
to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest,
looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, “Thou
art just, O Lord!”, but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While
there is still time, I hasten to put myself on guard, and
therefore I renounce the higher harmony altogether.
(bk. 5, chap. 4)
Ivan’s renunciation of harmony is conveyed not so much verbally as

visually, in his mental image of the mother embracing the torturer
who has tom apart her child with dogs. It is this composite image, or
tableau, in which the scenes of murder and reconciliation are juxta

posed, that Ivan forever keeps before his eye and the eye of the reader.
It is this wound or laceration that lies at the center of his great
lamentation.
Thus, in the novel Ivan’s anti-utopian tableau, with its triumph of
suffering over harmony, is opposed to Zosima’s Christian utopian
tableau (the resurrected child rejoicing in the mother’s tears and point
ing them out to God), with its triumph of harmony over suffering.
Both pictures are constructed out of contradictory emotional elements.
But in Ivan’s picture the contradiction is, as it were, malignant: the
jarring elements constitute a permanent laceration; the idea of a recon
ciliation between the general and the mother is perceived, literally and
figuratively, as both impossible and repulsive. In Zosima’s picture, on
the other hand, the jarring elements (the tears of the mother and the
laughter of the child) are resolved in the triumphant miracle of resur
rection. In Ivan’s picture the owner of the dogs, the general, is a

satanic figure; the mother, in effect, embraces the devil. In Zosima’s
picture, the satanic figure is replaced by an unseen but ever-present and
solicitous God.
The images of suffering and harmony in Ivan’s picture are organi
cally incompatible with one another. The whole essence of Ivan’s
rebellion lies in his inability to relate the idea of divine justice and
harmony to the reality of injustice, suffering, and death. Ivan’s com
posite picture, or montage, conveys his sense of a meaningless and
absurd universe. The “real images and forms” of his dream of para
dise, the ridiculous man insisted, were full of harmony and beauty: “I
saw, I saw, and the living image filled my soul forever.” Ivan, too, sees,
but the images and forms of his vision of harmony are inharmonious
and grotesque and constitute a savage blow at the credibility of the
dream of harmony. Here, there is no form or beauty—obraz-, there is
only shapelessness—bezobrazie.
With Ivan’s repellent picture of the mother embracing the general
(in the background is the child being tom to pieces by the general’s
dogs) at the conclusion of “Rebellion,” the reader comes full circle to
the beginning of that chapter. There Ivan depicts John the Merciful
embracing a frozen and hungry beggar and breathing into “a mouth
putrid and loathsome from some awful disease.” The significance of
both these scenes, at the beginning and end of “Rebellion,” is clear; as
Ivan puts it, “Christian love”—love at close quarters, love for the
visible face of man—“is an impossible miracle on earth”: “For any one
to love a man he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face love
is gone.” John’s act of compassion, then, is not a triumph of love, in
Ivan’s view, but an act of self-laceration. It is of the same moral-
psychological order as the mother’s embrace of the murderer of her
child. Ivan removes the act of John from the realm of ethical inspira
tion to the subterranean realm of abnormal psychology. The action of
Ivan’s namesake, John, is possible in Ivan’s view only if we wish to
enjoy ugliness.
The opening picture of John the Merciful embracing the loath
some beggar thus anticipates the final discordant picture of reconcilia
tion in Ivan’s lamentation—the mock scene of universal harmony.
Both acts involve a self-renunciation that is instantly perceived by the
reader, or viewer, as self-disfiguration. The mother, like John, em
braces that which is loathsome and putrid. In both scenes “parallel
lines” meet. But what may be mathematically or theologically possible

is disclosed as morally and aesthetically unacceptable. In his two illus
trations Ivan reveals that he will have none of the perverse wonders of
non-Euclidian Christian moral geometry. His refusal to accept the
meeting point, that is, Christian reconciliation and harmony, is pre
sented as an instinctive inability to countenance a marriage of beauty
and the beast, in short, to contemplate any violation of the ideal of
beauty. The mother and child, of course, are for Ivan the symbol of
the inviolable moral-spiritual absolute.
Ill
Ivan’s rebellious lamentation grows more feverish as it approaches
its climax. Harmony is not worth even a tear of the tormented child who
prays to “sweet little God” with her unexpiated tears. “It is not worth
a single little tear because these tears remain unexpiated. They must be
expiated, otherwise there can be no harmony. But how, how,” asks
Ivan, “are you going to expiate them? Is it really possible? Will that
indeed happen through the fact that they will be avenged?” The need
for expiation again raises the question of retribution. But whereas at
the beginning of his lamentation Ivan insists on his subjective need for
retribution, here he emphasizes the objectively meaningless character
of retribution. Hell for the torturers, he notes, will in no way help
those who have already been tortured.
In the sophistic style of his father Ivan rounds off his argument
with the rhetorical question: “And what kind of harmony can there be
if there is hell? I want to forgive and embrace, I do not want people to
suffer any more.” The circular character of Ivan’s argumentation here
is typical of his thought. Like the Underground Man, Ivan is lacking in
“foundations.” In point of fact, Ivan does not want to forgive and
embrace. He does not believe that the mother has the right to forgive
the torturer. She may forgive him for her own sufferings perhaps, but
not for the suffering of the tortured child—“even if the child were to
forgive him for them!”
At this point Ivan asks the central question of his monologue: “Is
there in the whole world a being who could forgive and would have
the right to forgive?” Earlier in his long tirade he acknowledges that
something so precious could appear that might expiate the villainies of
men and forgive, even justify, all that had happened to people. But it is
precisely this that he does not want to accept. “I do not want har
mony, out of love for humanity I do not want it,” he exclaims at the
end of his monologue:
I would rather remain with my unavenged sufferings. I
would really rather remain with my unavenged suffering
and my unsatisfied indignation even if I were wrong. Besides,
too high a price is put on harmony; we simply cannot afford
to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to
give back my ticket of admission. And indeed if I am an
honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible.
And that’s what I’m doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept,
Alyosha, I’m only most respectfully returning Him the ticket.
(bk. 5, chap. 4)
Ivan, as Camus has noted, “rejects here the basic interdependence,

introduced by Christianity, between suffering and divine truth,” an
interdependence symbolically witnessed in the Passion of Christ. Even
if salvation—reconciliation and eternal harmony—constitutes the di
vine truth, Ivan rejects it in advance: the price is too high.
In rejecting the interdependence of suffering and Christian truth,
however, and in opposing justice to this truth, Ivan in fact establishes
an interdependence between hopeless suffering and a new terrible
truth: the reality of a tragic universe, an unjust cosmic order, or
disorder, in which humanity at large is hopelessly condemned to pain
and suffering. Psychologically, Ivan’s choice of endless suffering is
embodied in his rebellious lamentation. It can be compared to the
Underground Man’s revolt against the laws of nature or the “stone
wall”: it is neither victory nor reconciliation, but, figuratively speak
ing, a permanent, despairing beating of the head against the wall. In
Ivan’s rebellion the groans of the “man with toothache” in Notes from
the Underground are raised to the plane of a despairing lamentation over
a meaningless and cruel universe.
On the moral plane, however, Ivan’s rebellion—taking on the
form of an imitation of Christ—paradoxically introduces meaning into
the universe and reaffirms the necessity of the Redeemer. “Is there in
the whole world a being who could forgive and would have the right
to forgive?” asks Ivan. He does not answer this question directly, but
he knows that this right is acquired only through suffering and sacri
fice. Konstantin Mochulsky has called attention to the element of
“imposture” in Ivan’s rebellion: “A diabolic deceit is hidden in this
imposture. The atheist appeals to the noble human sentiments of

compassion, magnanimity, love, but on his lips this is pure rhetoric.”
Yet it seems there is more than diabolic deceit and conceit here. The
very nature of Ivan’s imposture is deeply ambivalent. What he sets out
to deny, he affirms in spite of himself by his unconscious wish to
imitate Christ. The imitation of Christ by its very nature is redemptive.
In his conversation with Alyosha, Ivan in jest recalls the “old
sinner in the eighteenth century,” Voltaire, “who delivered himself of
the statement that if there were no God, it would have been necessary
to invent him, ‘S’il n’existait pas Dieu il faudrait l’inventer.’ ” Ivan’s
usurpation of the role of Christ is, of course, such an invention, but
one that attests to a deep, albeit unconscious identity with Christ. Ivan
rebels against God’s world; he rebels out of despair. But in its inner
content, this rebellion bears witness to man’s continual need to redis
cover his humanity in himself, to sacrifice himself for others, in short,
to imitate Christ. The path of Ivan’s own moral and spiritual redemp
tion must take him from usurpation to imitation of Christ in deed as
well as word. But that path leads him first of all through the fires of
negation and denial.
On The Brothers Karamazov
John Jones
In the Crime and Punishment notebooks there is a reference to Mrs

Svidrigailov’s bad breath. Dostoevsky adds that this is to be mentioned
“in passing and only once.” The novel relates that “she always kept a
clove or something in her mouth,” and that is all. The explicit bad
breath has to wait fifteen years, for a different woman, for the right
book, for Karamazov the novel of evil smells.
The same crazed visionary woman who saw through the Tartar
kara and substituted the Russian for black, demands “And why make
such a fuss about my breath?” She continues, “The dead smell even
worse,” which is visionary in another sense, anticipating the events
following the death of the elder Zossima and the chapter “Odour of
Corruption.” She is Mrs Snegirev—a surname Dostoevsky hasn’t
used since his first novel, Poor People, the poem of lodging-house
smells: “in a way it’s stuffy, that’s not to say there’s a bad smell but, if
one may so express it, a slightly decaying, a sort of sharpish-sweetish
smell.”
Karamazov would never linger over a smell, would never describe;
its smells are as unqualified as its narrator who is its vanished author.
Even to call its smells evil, as I did just now, invites the objection that
smell is the master metaphor of the novel and that the novel is by no
means wholly evil. The prosecuting lawyer unites Karamazov breadth
and Karamazov Russianness in terms of smell when he says Dmitry
standing there in the dock carries on him “the very smell” of Russia’s
From Dostoevsky. © 1983 by John Jones. Clarendon Press, 1983.
135
136 / John Jones
past; and that is the truth, and Russia is not evil and nor is Dmitry. He
does many bad, smelly things. But he doesn’t kill his father. We
instantly distinguish the smell of his misdeeds from the psychophysical
taint which foreruns the murder and which makes neighbours of
Karamazov and the Oresteia. “If you ask me, the old man’s a sharp one:
he smells crime. Your house stinks of it.” Suddenly, the whole novel
seems to be tugging at the sleeve of myth.
“Stinks” here is a breath-of-mortal-corruption verb smerdet.
Throughout the novel it stands in a sensitive relation to the ordinary
Russian vonyat. The epileptic lackey Smerdyakov who commits the
murder is so called after his mother Stinking Lizaveta, a homeless
pauper in “our town.” There’s evidence that old Karamazov is
Smerdyakov’s father. Time and place suggest so, and we know he’d
sleep with anybody rather than nobody. As he himself remarks, “for
me ugly women do not exist.” So the lackey is probably a parricide.
And “lackey” brings to mind the archaic word smerd, which in a
neutral context one might translate “churl.” I don’t recall Dostoevsky
using it elsewhere in millions of words of fiction and journalism and
letters and notebooks and verse, but it occurs three times in Karamazov,
and the stink association for eye and ear can scarcely be doubted. Thus
the Americans (we know what Dostoevsky, and Dmitry through
Dostoevsky, thought of America) are called smerdi, where a happy
rendering might be “shits.”
Dmitry also calls Rakitin a smerd. Rakitin is the only out and out
detestable character in the novel, exhausting even Alyosha’s charity
and patience. “Dishonourable” is his verdict, and when one of his
schoolboy friends talking trendy, obviously second-hand rubbish draws
from him the quite uncharacteristically sharp question “What fool have
you got yourself mixed up with?” the fool turns out to be Rakitin. A
dangerous, poisonous fool, a shallow-shrewd fool, the kind of worldly
novice monk who is likely to end up a millionaire. He degrades
everything he touches. He stands alone in the novel because of the way
he needles all three Karamazov brothers, trying to mock the faith out
of Alyosha, to inflame Ivan’s un-Russian paper-person tendencies, to
exploit Dmitry and his terrible, spectacular troubles with a view to
getting his own journalistic career off the ground. He laughs at the idea
of the soul and talks physiology, and it’s even possible he has been
messing about with the unintellectual brother’s mind, for Dmitry
keeps talking about “realism” which isn’t the sort of abstract word one
would expect him to use, and nor is it very clear what he means. But no
On The Brothers Karamazov ! 137
matter. It doesn’t touch his instinctive devoutness, and the voice of the
eldest Karamazov brother remains unmistakably his own:
“It’s no longer a dream now! It’s realism, gentlemen, the
realism of actual life! I am the wolf and you are the hunters,
and you are hunting the wolf down.”
Though a smerd, Rakitin is not Smerdyakov, not the murderer.
But then Smerdyakov is only a surrogate murderer. And then again, it
is too clearcut to say Smerdyakov is Ivan’s deputy and leave it at that.
The circumstance of Ivan being out of the way on the fatal night was
not a plot, still less was Smerdyakov told to kill the old man. Karamazov
is a novel of nudges. Fainter, finer than nudges: animal intuition gives
the feel and the smell—the book’s master metaphor—better than hu
man bien entendu. And it would be falsely neat to place the murder
solely between the scented lackey and the second brother, his probable
half-brother. Dmitry is altogether capable of killing his father, except
with cool deliberation. In fact he knocks him down and sets about
kicking his face in before Ivan and Alyosha can drag him away; and on
the night of the murder, hesitating outside his father’s window, brass
pestle in hand, overwhelmed with hatred and revulsion—whether an
angel kissed him or some stranger wept tears of intercession at that
moment or his dead mother offered God a prayer, Dmitry never
knew. “But the devil was vanquished.”
This is one of those wonderful effects built up by accumulation
and variation, at the time itself, under interrogation, and during the
trial. Karamazov’s harvest is breadth, the horrors of holy Russia, a
solidarity in sin and retribution which encompasses the murdered
evildoer. “Why does such a man live?” demands Dmitry, and that is
the title of the chapter in which he asks the question, and the chapter
titles of this novel are uniquely active as to local stress and overall
configuration. The old man’s complicity in his own murder gets
carried by the book’s master metaphor. His house stinks. His life
stinks. Yet his mystic complicity never quite hardens into the judg
ment that he deserves to die. His nature is too broad to allow that.
Unlike Rakitin, old Karamazov is not through and through de
testable. “For me ugly women do not exist.” At the heart of his evil
ways I find an element of heroic dedication to the senses which I won’t
call redeeming or even attractive but—broad. He is capable of uttering
“bitter reproaches” over a badly cooked dinner even as he trembles
with desire for Grushenka, waiting for her to come to him. When his
138 / John Jones
first wife runs off he decides to go after her, and the fact that he has
decided to go makes him feel “fully entitled” to settle down where he
is to a terrific drinking bout. One contemptible episode happened long
ago so, he says, he isn’t ashamed to recount it. He describes himself as
“in the prime of life” and “a feeble old man” in the same conversation.
When Dmitry has beaten him up he chooses a red handkerchief as a
bandage and not a white one because he doesn’t want to look like a
hospital case. He admires his wounds in the mirror with indomitable
French bravura—a link with what James called “the moral enormous”
in Victor Hugo, a writer revered and overrated by Dostoevsky.
To Zossima he says, “You know, blessed father, you’d better not
encourage me to be my natural self—don’t risk it!” We see the point as
old Karamazov pictures the monks “looking at each other and eating
cabbage soup” and says Alyosha “is here being saved” (monastery as
salvation shop) and suggests that a soldier who has let himself be
flayed alive by Tartars rather than renounce his faith should have his
skin sent to some monastery— “I can imagine the crowds that would
flock there and the money the monastery would make”—and com
plains that God has given us only twenty-four hours in a day which is
“scarcely time to have a good sleep, let alone repent of our sins” and
wonders what all the fuss is about death: “In my opinion a man falls
asleep and doesn’t wake up, and that’s all there is to it.”
And yet when, in this uncontainable comic onslaught, Smerdyakov
argues that the soldier-martyr who was flayed alive would not have
sinned if he had renounced the name of Christ, and old Karamazov
retorts, “You’re talking nonsense, my lad, and for that you’ll go
straight to Hell and be roasted there like mutton,” hypocrisy is not the
only word for it. The man for whom death is the big sleep says, “I
daresay it will be easier going to the next world if you know for
certain what it’s like there.” Stranger still, the dab hand at blaspheming
who raises his arms solemnly over Zossima and pronounces “Blessed
is the womb that bare thee and the paps that gave thee suck—the paps
especially!”—stranger still, he does not blaspheme when he makes the
sign of the cross over Alyosha and dismisses Ivan with the immemorial
Russian “Christ be with you.” It’s a broader affair than our sense that
humour is the only thing when Mrs Virginsky hastens childbirth by
shocking her patients with pistol-shot atheistical sallies. Father and sons
gain breadth from each other, without which the Russianness of “Christ
be with you” would be folk-costume, and the solidarity of sin and
suffering just a thought. I am saying that the greatest marvel of
Karamazov is its spatializing the latent temporal energies of the “Life of

a Great Sinner” project, its spreading them in a fierce black smear
across the family. The novel presents the classic Dostoevsky no-home;
the wreckage of this household is utter. Nevertheless the binding
animal awareness we have encountered between Ivan and Smerdyakov
affects them all, even Alyosha. Standing in the hall he can tell by the
tone of his father’s high-pitched laugh in the room beyond that he is
“still far from drunk.” The book swarms with such details. They are
great levellers, weakening, even destroying, seniority and juniority and
affirming the one broad life, the Karamazov tapestry, the realm of
space. When, apropos their womanizing tussle, the father says he was
better looking than the son when he was his age, it feels like an unfair
thrust against Dmitry. As if to make amends old Karamazov calls Ivan
“my dear old man” (otets ti moy rodnoy, literally “father mine”), a
telltale image. If there must be generations then make them reversible.
It’s pertinent to the size, haze, and smelly incestuous suggestion of
Karamozov, that it both is and is not another generation-gap novel.
Likewise it is and is not another crime-and-punishment novel. In
the notebooks Dmitry first appears as Ilinsky, and Ilinsky is the real-
life name of the convict in The House of the Dead who was doing time
for a murder—a parricide—which it later transpires he never commit
ted. This “later” may be the germ of the fictional Karamazov “now”
which never arrives, the doings of the great-sinner hero “at this very
moment.” Of course it is Alyosha who has been cast as great sinner
and Dmitry as the man wrongly convicted of parricide, but that is how
the spatializing or spreading of themes across the family actually works.
The House of the Dead’s “later” is a stop-press device, abrupt and
intrusive. Karamazov’s “now” is a crime-and-punishment epilogue,
but an epilogue magnified and exalted into the real story, and one
which Dostoevsky refrains from writing.
It could be argued that the epilogue of Crime and Punishment too is
the real story, and that the real story is gestured at, not written. This
argument turns on the novel’s sovereign concern being acceptance of
suffering by the murderer (true confession, that is, as opposed to
owning up to the crime), and his reunion with the human family.
There’s no denying that these things only happen in the epilogue. But
luckily the upshot is that the epilogue is a mistake which nevertheless
does not prevent Crime and Punishment being the most powerful state
ment of alienation through evildoing in world literature since Macbeth.
And when he comes to write The Possessed it’s as if Dostoevsky had
140 / John Jones
learnt the lesson of that epilogue, for the “tomorrow” of Stepan

Verkhovcnsky’s “Tomorrow we shall all set off!” never comes, and this
most precious conviction of the novelist is entrusted to the flickering
twilight of “futile” Stepan’s dreamlike deathbed chatter: “Oh, let us
forgive, let us forgive, first and last let us forgive all and always. Let us
hope that we too shall be forgiven. Yes, because each and every one of
us have wronged one another. We are all guilty!”
A case if ever there was one of Dostoevsky creeping up on the
blind side of his dearest values. And in Karamazov this shared guilt—
what Ivan calls solidarity—is entrusted to dream itself. Dmitry is no
dreamer, but, exhausted by the party he gives for Grushenka, a skandal
as intense though not so drawn-out as the Possessed fete, “a revel to end
all revels,” and then driven further into the ground by interrogation,
he falls asleep and dreams a dream, a black dream, a kara/chemi dream
about “black cottages” and peasants “black with black misfortune,”
and about a starving baby. Later, he insists that he is being sent to
Siberia “for that baby.”
But at the time, when he wakes from his dream: “in a strange
voice with a new light as of joy in his face” Dmitry addresses his
tormentors, “I have had a good dream, gentlemen.” The most amaz
ing, the strangest “strange” in all Dostoevsky. Look no further for the
gap that separates him from all the others except Tolstoy. What is
good about this black dream? It transpires that the new light in Dmitry’s
face is no false dawn; when he talks about going to Siberia for the
starving baby he says, “Alyosha, during these last two months I have
become aware of a new man in me—a new man has arisen in me!”
Voskreseniel Regeneration and Resurrection! He thwarts any inclination
we may have to take the baby literally, that is to count it among the
helpless little ones of Ivan’s “Rebellion” tirade who do not grow up
into our adult solidarity of sin and retribution. “All of us are ‘babbies,’ ”
Dmitry says, clinging to the peasant word he heard in his dream; and
“all are responsible for all.”
As to the unrelieved and unexplained suffering of the dream itself,
Dmitry finds himself demanding why people are poor and the steppe
barren—questions huger even than Russia—and realizing he can nei
ther answer nor help asking them. And, still inside his dream, he
wants to do something so there shall be no more pain, no more tears;
to do something now, at once, decisively, regardless of all obstacles,
“with all the rash energy of the Karamazovs.” And then he hears
Grushenka’s voice and wakes up.
And next, an unsurpassable stroke. Dmitry is suddenly struck by

the fact that somebody must have put a pillow under his head while he
was asleep, because it was not there before.
“Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?”
he cried with a sort of ecstatic feeling of gratitude and with
tears in his voice.
However, “It was never discovered who that kind man was.”
The effect would not be what it is if Dmitry had found himself a
bed to rest on. He didn’t. He “lay down on a large chest covered with
a rug and fell asleep at once.” The chest transfigures the small, very
ordinary kindness of the pillow. But it wouldn’t do the same for
another writer. When I remarked that beds in Dostoevsky are not for
repose I wasn’t noting a quirk but looking through a peephole upon a
world without easy unwatchful relationships, without fresh air and
good humour and simple domestic and social routines, a world barred
to habit itself unless obsessive. That is why figures like Lieutenant
Smekalov sitting at the window with his long pipe are visitants and
prodigies. Fresh air! The “fume-laden hut” where Dmitry nearly gets
suffocated is at Chermashnya, the name of the Dostoevsky property,
whereas the actual black fire-ravaged place is unmistakably the setting
of Dmitry’s “good dream”—the supreme example of a floating hulk of
fact swept helplessly into the tiderace of the novelist’s invention.
So the hut with the last malfunctioning stove in Dostoevsky
borrows the name of the family property, and of course reemphasises
Karamazov's master metaphor of smell; while the historical, terrestrial
Chermashnya houses Dmitry’s dream. As to the pillow and never
finding out who that kind man was, we are face to face with the power
of absence and elsewhere and ignorance in relation to the sheer stuff of
this “thingy” novel. A pillow is a pillow. Dmitry waking with his
head on it feels intimations of newness, of a new man being bom in
him as he tells Alyosha afterwards. Hence the “new light” in his
face—which brings us back to the author’s foreward to his readers, and
the difficulty of presenting these deep-lying Dostoevsky devices as not
frivolous. At one level nothing comes of this “new fight,” and at
another everything. The Karamazov “now” which never arrives has to
rub along with our ultimate refusal to doubt that we have the “real”
novel in our hands.
The apocalyptic naturalism stressed by “regeneration/resurrection”
in the closing words of The House of the Dead and Crime and Punish-
142 / John Jones
ment, and by “salvation” lurking in the place Spasov across the water
in The Possessed, engrosses Karamazov totally. It works backwards as
well as forwards in its figuring of timelessness, and interrogation and
court proceedings are its perfect vehicle. We learn that the local doctor
Herzenstube, a devout, pedantic old bachelor, kept a kindly eye on
Dmitry when he was a child, motherless and neglected by his father.
He gave him nuts, the simplest of treats, and taught him to name the
Trinity in German—Dmitry tended to get stuck over Gott der Heilige
Geist, but never mind. “He was taken away,” Herzenstube tells the
court, “and I did not see him again.”
“And now twenty-three years later I am sitting one morn
ing in my study, my hair already white, and suddenly a
young man looking the picture of health walks in. I would
never have recognized him, but he raised his finger and said,
laughing, ‘Gott der l/ater, Gott der Sohn und Gott der Heilige
Geist! I’ve just arrived and have come to thank you for the
pound of nuts, for no one ever bought me a pound of nuts,
and you were the only one to do it.’ And then I remembered
the happy time of my youth and the poor boy with no boots
in the yard, and my heart turned over, and I said: ‘You are a
grateful young man, for you have remembered all your life
the pound of nuts I gave you in your childhood.’ And I
embraced him and blessed him. And I wept. He laughed,
but he wept too—for a Russian often laughs when he ought
to be weeping. But he wept, and I saw it. And now, alas!”
“And I am weeping now, German, I am weeping now
too, you good, good man!” Dmitry shouted suddenly from
his seat.
A magical reprise, grateful, sane, “lawful as eating” Shakespeare
might say, amid the tawdriness and hysteria of the courtroom and the
nauseating fluency of the lawyers’ speeches. And all the more wonder
ful for Dmitry’s bawled interjection from the dock, giving us the
whole man—that “rash energy of the Karamazovs”—in a shout: no
posturing but terrific self-projection. This is broad-brush Dostoevsky
at his most commanding. But it is close work too, as comparison of
notebooks and novel shows. The notebooks have already hit upon the
comic and touching idea that old Herzenstube, after decades away
from Germany, standing here giving evidence, shall forget the Russian
word for nut. He fumbles. The defending lawyer, sensing an advan-
tage, tries to prompt him. Herzenstube still fumbles. “Yes it grows on

a tree’’ he says in the notebooks. Karamazov adds “and they gather it
and give it to everyone,’’ tilting the funny old doctor’s discourse, but
ever so slightly, towards the visionary strangeness of a world better
than ours.
Nuts and the Trinity—a sudden reaching across in a novel which
succeeds in being locally immense. And a reaching back. The reader
may or may not remember Dmitry mentioning Schiller’s “an die
Freude” to Alyosha six hundred pages ago and saying he doesn’t
understand German, he just knows the words; and he—the reader—
faced with the Trinity now, may or may not ask himself which of us
knows more than the words, in German or in any other language, for
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. . . .
The conjuring of human beings as animals is even more powerful

in Karamazov than in Crime and Punishment and The Possessed. Also of
human beings as spiritual animals. The novel has an epigraph taken
from St John which focuses on the original fateful accident of concep
tion, fertility, new life, in relation to death:
Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a com of wheat fall
into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit.
And this invites comparison with The Possessed's epigraph, again from
the New Testament, where the mad Gadarene stampede and self
destruction are what the novel achieves, and where the healed man at
Christ’s feet is what it doesn’t: but no matter, because it doesn’t
attempt to; the coat of the parable gets cut according to the cloth of
Dostoevsky’s available creative energies.
Karamazov's relation to its epigraph is different, but with the
family likeness that runs through all the major works. According to St
John it has been wrong of me to speak of the novel’s pattern as a
bad-luck one, and with no more than an eye to the epigraph we must
allow that it has been pre-judging the issue to do so. Men like me need
a sudden blow, says Dmitry. He is less concerned about its human
injustice than the mystic legalism (or divine justice) of going to Siberia
for the starving baby in his black-but-good dream, which means
becoming worthy to suffer, which means the death of the old self and
the birth of the new. Which means, or rather is poised to mean,
144 ! John Jones
bringing forth much fruit—the end to which the epigraph directs us.
Dostoevsky does not suggest what the hero, a man made new, did
after the end of The House of the Dead, when his fetters were knocked
off. Or what the new life held in store for Raskolnikov, penitent at last
and accepting suffering in Crime and Punishment's epilogue. And we
have no idea whether the dead Stepan Verkhovensky got to Spasov.
And now, and finally, there is no afterwards in which Dmitry Karamazov
demonstrates (“By their fruits ye shall know them”) that it was no
bad-luck pattern which brought him to judgement, but fateful accident
theologized: we sneeze as the fit takes us, and every sneeze is numbered.
In The Possessed, when Shatov envisages a new start for the new
baby and for himself and his wife, one gets no premonition of a
miraculously healed man (Dostoevsky’s Russia); rather, of three thwarted
human futures, sane futures in a mad world; but the sanity is of and
within nature: “let us work hard,” says Shatov, displaying the novel
ist’s uncanny touch. But when in Karamazov “some kind man” places
a pillow under Dmitry’s head while he lies asleep on a chest, the fruit
of the spirit, thing and deed, is inescapably present and evident. The
kind man disappears and is never found, never identified. Dmitry
awakes and weeps inwardly to see the pillow: “his whole soul was
shaken with tears.” The fruit of the spirit is watered by the spiritual
animal’s tears of gratitude.
“To recognize our friends is a god,” Euripides says. Dmitry
greets his unknown benefactor; and the entire relationship between
Karamazov and its epigraph is one of mutual awareness, and therefore
of simultaneity, and of co-presence which may or may not be physical,
may be a pillow or compassion. This is not a roundabout way of
saying the epigraph gets realized in the novel. I am arguing that
outcome and hereafter, so insistent in the healed man of the Possessed
parable, have disappeared, and that the spatializing of a pointedly
temporal theme, already remarked by me of this novel qua generation
gap story, extends beyond the Karamazovs, father and sons and two
dead mothers, to crime, investigation, trial, conviction, sentence, where
what seems intractably sequential is reprocessed and re-reprocessed
through interrogation, the evidence of witnesses, the lawyers’ recon
structive speeches—all agents of space and then-and-now simultaneity.
The cumulation which distinguishes Karamazov throughout is, in imag
inative substance, a widening of vision not a passing of days, a learning
of what is there and not what happens next. Excitements, very genuine
and sequential excitements, like Smerdyakov’s account of how he did
it, are held in the amber of retrospect. And it is no contradiction to

speak of mounting tension at the trial, because a book takes time to
read. This temporal mounting accompanies the temporal experience of
turning the pages. Inside those pages there is the lateral spread from
claustrophobic courtroom to the naked little boy in a bathtub and the
young man returning to recite the Trinity in German to Doctor
Herzenstube and the not quite so young man restrained perhaps by his
dead mother’s prayers from killing his father. Dmitry’s wrongful
conviction is not a climax but an irony smeared across the whole
enormous episode at its close by a voice from the dispersing crowd
which pronounces “our dear old peasants” (the jury) “have stood up
for themselves.” Karamazov is a book without climaxes. Nothing
could be less like the unrelenting drive of Crime and Punishment
towards murder and then towards the climb up the spiral staircase to
admit to murder.
But, like Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s last novel has an
epilogue—as well as an epigraph like The Possessed. It may be asked
what there is left to say, to consign to an epilogue, if Karamazov is
truly a story without climaxes and it outcome and aftermath have
disappeared. Certainly no regeneration/resurrection (voskresenie). We
have seen what there is to see of the death of the old Dmitry and
the birth of the new. He first mentioned this change in the im
mediate aftermath of his black-but-good dream, long before he was
tried and convicted; but the reader feels it from the start, as does
Father Zossima who prostrates himself before a man instinct with
great and creative suffering. Thus, though Dmitry was not to know,
it’s misleading to talk about a change since what we have here is
the abiding mutual awareness of Dostoevsky’s novel and Jesus’ hard
gospel saying reported by John. One supposes Dmitry will go on
behaving badly, perhaps worse than badly sometimes. But he, the old
Dmitry, dies daily, and it hurts. “God knows my heart. He sees my
despair. He sees it all.” He talks a lot about God, and never pro
fanely. And the same is true of Grushenka who matches Dmitry’s
heavy direct passion with a feather-brained, let’s call it trigger-happy,
pious flair. She crosses herself “devoutly” when she hears the news of
Father Zossima’s death, then remembers she is sitting on Alyosha’s
knee and jumps off. Next things next. There’s birth around as well as
death, and birth hurts too, though Grushenka, unlike Dmitry, does
not go in for simple shouts of pain. She’s a very different spiritual
animal.
146 / John Jones
The disappearance of outcome and aftermath is the “now” which

never arrives, the “real” novel which never gets written, as experi
enced from inside Karamazov. Dmitry must be called the hero of our
book. Alyosha is the hero of the “real” one: the author tells his readers
so. This means—again of course from inside Karamazov—that death
and birth in the spirit are themes articulated through Dmitry, and the
blow which sends a man sprawling, the blow “men like me need,” is
explicitly his portion; while the mutualities of novel and com-of-
wheat epigraph appear at their most tender and tentative in Alyosha.
And as to Alyosha, no reader feels cheated unless he is determined
to. Tentativeness, imaged by Grushenka perching herself on the
novice monk’s knee, is sufficiency of knowledge within Karamazov;
whether she ever got the cassock off his back or seriously tried be
longs to the “now” whose positive and gratifying role is never to
come.
In the central chapters of the novel Zossima dies, the master
metaphor of smell is literalized, and Alyosha’s young life is assailed by
nature in the everyday form of mortal corruption. Dmitry wouldn’t
have batted an eyelid. “God knows my heart”; his immediate striding
access to the Maker of that heart strikes me as the most wonderful and
elusive achievement in all Dostoevsky. Alyosha’s faith, though ardent,
is not sure like that, and despite his loving gentle open ways and sweet
sleep and innocent dreams and gifts with children and live habit of
prayer—stupendous feats too—he is to be feared for. This is tentative
ness apprehended as danger. A smell infects him with Ivan’s “rebel
lion” and reduces him to wanting to believe. Eros awaits. (Perhaps
Eros should await: there is no “real” novel and this is not a real
question in the one we have.) Also he is the pretty boy around the
place, inside and outside the monastery, and some will think they catch
a hint, the merest head-toss, of sulky flirting.
With the impression of Grushenka clear and warm upon him,
though unaroused by her, he returns to the monastery and finds a
window open and a monk reading the New Testament over Zossima’s
coffin. “So the smell must have become stronger,” he thinks. He
kneels to pray and, exhausted, falls into a doze.
Dmitry goes to sleep on a chest and dreams of starving peasants.
“Why are people poor?” is his dream-question. And, “Why don’t they
embrace and kiss one another? Why don’t they sing joyful songs?” He
longs to put all of it right. Life should be something else.
As Alyosha dozes on his knees, life becomes something else—
somewhere else. The monk is reading of Jesus’ first miracle when he

turned water into wine for the wedding guests at Cana. Half asleep,
Alyosha thinks how poor they must have been, those people there, not
to have enough wine even for a wedding.
So, yet again, the image of the party. In The Possessed, and
exquisitely comic it is in the telling, we have a political meeting
disguised as a birthday party. At the centre of Karamazov is a wedding
party portrayed as a party but transfigured by a miracle. Both novels
have epigraphs in search of true community, one from the starting-
point of false community (the Gadarene “herd”) and the other of no
community (“it abideth alone”). False community and no community
go back to the beginning in Dostoevsky—to office and lodging-house
and seamstress’s lonely room. True community gets its first festive
apocalyptic twist in the house with the lights and music outside which
Mr Golyadkin stands in the rain trying to look at all its windows at
once.
The warm dry house is the somewhere else where life is some
thing else. But of course The Double's party is no less dubious than
“our hero’s” invitation to it. Karamazov doesn’t ask whether the wine
really flowed from outside nature at Cana, or whether, beyond the
iconic wedding feast, Christianity is true and the God-man invites us
all to the party of eternal life. One knows what Dostoevsky believed,
but that is irrelevant. One also knows that the greatness of his novel
permits none but a hooligan to receive the somewhere and something
else of Alyosha’s dozing apprehension at the level of the land of nod
and drinks on the house.
The dubiousness in and around Mr Golyadkin has evolved into
the huge spiritual tentativeness of Alyosha’s destiny. Like Dmitry, and
with all the passion of a Karamazov, he grasps his apocalyptic visita
tion as the opposite of tentative, as decisive. He senses a new world
unfold before him, and the reader remembers Stepan Verkhovensky
taking to the open road and hears again something very like the voice
of Joseph Conrad:
The vault of heaven stretched boundlessly wide above him,

full of soft, shining stars. From the zenith to the horizon the
Milky Way ran in two pale streams. The fresh, motionless,
serene night enfolded the earth. . . . The silence of the earth
seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery
of the earth came into contact with the mystery of the stars.
148 / John Jones
Nobody could be remoter from Alyosha in personal timbre and cir

cumstances than Stepan Verkhovensky. And yet the same man made
them both, imagining one as parasite, the other as monk—monks
are parasites according to old Karamazov—one launched upon quin-
tessentially comic and inconclusive journeying, “futile” by Mrs
Stavrogin’s cruel verdict, and the other contemplating the words of
Father Zossima “who had bidden him ‘sojourn in the world.’ ”
The Cana chapter reads free, shy, very rare. No novelist’s thumb
in the balance. And when Alyosha believes “something firm and
unshakable as that vault of heaven had entered his soul,” whereas the
overall feel of Alyosha in Karamazov is tentative, the conclusion should
be that the novel is bigger than he is, not that his experience in the cell
with the corpse and gospel reading and open window was false or
shallow. He can only speak for himself, and his destiny is not only for
himself, it does not cleave to him as if it were the clothes he stands up
in. The fulfilment of Alyosha’s destiny is spread in the broad and
spatial way of Karamazov across the “now” which never arrives; and
the “tomorrow we shall all set off” of Stepan’s death across the lake
from Spasov, which was an ever-receding horizon in The Possessed, a
novel of movement, becomes in Karamazov, that novel of sojourn
(for Zossima chose his word carefully), the envelope which surrounds
but has no part in the action, and within which the actors position
themselves, perforce temporarily, and therefore perch, singly like the
young man at prayer and the girl on the same young man’s knee; or
collectively like the blood-relations in the smelly tottering house of
wrath and lust, and like the wider community of Cattlepen, a place of
rotten wood and broken roads and jerry-building and miserable dank
back-alleys, including “moral ones.” Taking the two novels at a single
glance, life as shanty town in Karamazov complements life as gold rush
in The Possessed.
Sojourner at the start, Alyosha is equipped with pillow and mat
tress which his father (what a father!) exhorts him to bring home (and
what a home!) from the monastery. At the end, in the novel’s epi
logue, he is still travelling light and going nowhere except in the
context of his spiritual destiny and Zossima’s admonition. Ilyusha
Snegirev has died, and good with children as always Alyosha attends
the funeral and burial with Ilyusha’s school friends.
There will be a funeral feast afterwards. Kolya Krasotkin, a pre
cocious child, remarks the incongruity of eating pancakes while you
mourn. Kolya has been infected by Rakitin, the novel’s one smerd and
turner of life’s wine into water.
“Don’t let it worry you that we shall be eating pancakes. It’s
an old, age-old custom and there’s something nice about
that,” Alyosha laughed.
Life goes on. Alyosha lays pancakes alongside death very much as
Doctor Herzenstube laid nuts alongside the Trinity at Dmitry’s trial.
Both of them do justice to the breadth of Karamazov. Alyosha has just
been assuring Kolya and his friends of the truth of the Resurrection,
the theological voskresenie, so he is no less doctrinally embroiled than
was the good doctor. But Herzenstube’s Trinity, inside Karamazov, is
a business of knowing the German words—which in no way detracts
from the sublime encounter of healer and little boy who becomes the
young man newly returned, the picture of health, who becomes the
accused person roaring to everybody in court that he is weeping now.
And the epilogue’s Resurrection is the language of ardent youth, again
sublime and in no way a snug orthodoxy.
However, youth also throws a brick at a flock of sparrows, there
being no boy to throw stones at, because he is dead. And others are
not young, and neither are they ardent on the one hand or, on the
other, nature’s stone-throwers.
“Yes, yes, let’s go back to Mummy,” Snegirev suddenly
recollected again. “They’ll make up his little bed, they’ll
make up his bed!” he added as though afraid they would
really make up the bed, and he jumped up and ran home
again.
The Snegirev hovel is the last no-home in Dostoevsky, and the griev
ing half-crazed father’s fear for his child’s bed, following Dmitry’s
chest with a rug on it and Alyosha’s portable mattress and pillow, is
the final dislocation of the idea of repose.
Alyosha and the Hagiographic Hero
Valentina A. Vetlovskaya
“The main narrative is the second,” explains the narrator of The

Brothers Karamazov in his introductory remarks, “—it is the action of
my hero in our day, at the very present time. The first novel takes
place thirteen years ago, and it is hardly even a novel, but only a
period in my hero’s early youth. I cannot do without this first novel,
because much in the second would be unintelligible without it.”
Clearly Dostoevsky conceived of his work in the form of two
novels, of which the second (not known to us) is the main one. It
follows that without this second novel much in the first cannot be
entirely comprehensible. It is essential, therefore, that we seek out and
consider elements which might provide some clue to the overall struc
ture of the two novels. In this way the balance of parts in our presenta
tion will not be upset, and we shall avoid making secondary things
primary and primary ones secondary.
We may note at the outset that Dostoevsky wrote his introductory
remarks in 1878, that is, when beginning his work on The Brothers
Karamazov. The idea of a continuation of the novel, then, was not an
afterthought, the result of work already accomplished; rather, it pre
ceded the writing of the part of the work we know. The elements of
the work’s overall structure, then, its foundation, must certainly be in
place in the work as we know it—indeed, they must even be partially
visible. Otherwise the reader would not have been informed in the
From Twentieth Century Views: Dostoevsky, edited by Robert Louis Jackson.

© 1977 by Nauka, Leningrad, USSR.
151
152 / Valentina A. Vetlovskaya
introduction that the two novels have the “essential unity of the
whole”; in fact, there would be no question at all of any essential
unity.
The introductory remarks provide some indication of the sense of
the whole. The opening phrase of the introduction speaks of a biogra
phy: “In beginning the biography of my hero, Aleksey Fyodorovich
Karamazov,” etc. The narrator continues: “I have two novels and only
one biography.” What is important here, first, is that the narrator
author conceives of the whole as a biography, and, second, that Aleksey
Fyodorovich Karamazov is the center of this biography. The preemi
nence of precisely this hero is emphasized throughout the entire story,
in spite of the fact that the first novel is called The Brothers Karamazov.
The first line of the novel, closely related to the introduction, reads
as follows: “Aleksey Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of. . .
a landowner ... in our district.” The main hero is singled out.
Further, the introductory story of Alyosha appears in a special chapter
entitled, “The Third Son, Alyosha.” By contrast, the more laconic and
dry accounts of Dmitry and Ivan appear in chapters that seem to
diminish rather than accentuate the importance of these heroes: “He
Gets Rid of His Eldest Son,” “The Second Marriage and the Second
Family” (here Fyodor Pavlovich is in the foreground).
We may recall at this point that the word used for “biography,”
zhizneopisanie, signifies “vita.” The narrator of The Brothers Karamazov
emerges—not obtrusively, but clearly enough—as the narrator of a vita
with his “main” hero, Alyosha, as hero-saint. The point deserves
special emphasis. In this connection I. P. Eryomin has written about
the life of Theodosius of Pechersk:
From his first appearance in Nestor’s Chronicle, Theodosius

of Pechersk is presented to the reader in the “seraphic”
image of the ideally positive Christian hero-saint. And he
continues in the same basic image through the entire vita,
accompanied by prayerfully reverential epithets. . . . Even
in early youth, he is “one of God’s elect,” an “earthly
angel” and a “heavenly human being.” “Drawn to God’s
love,” even in childhood he reveals virtues not usually pos
sessed by an ordinary person in such a totality; he performs
acts that go beyond all norms of everyday human conduct:
these acts—his spiritual exploits—evoke pious consternation
in some people, in others, “unreasoning ones,” reproaches

and even derision.
The basic motifs and, in part, the tone of the preliminary charac
terization of Alyosha remind the reader of the typical hagiographical
tale. Thus, Alyosha has been living in the monastery “for the past
year, . . . and seemed willing to be cloistered there for the rest of his
life.” “He was ... an early lover of humanity,” the narrator further
explains, “and that he adopted the monastic life was simply because at
that time it struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul,
struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of
love.” The narrator will return to this motif again.
The opposition of the “darkness of earthly malice” and the “fight
of love,” and of (earthly) darkness and (heavenly) light in general, is a
metaphor common to the vita narrative, and one that goes back to the
evangelists’ texts. (This opposition is consistently pursued up to the
end of the novel.)
Like the typical hero of a hagiographie narrative, even in early
youth Alyosha feels the urge to depart from the vain world, because
earthy passions are alien to him.
The complex relations between the ideal hero of the vita and the
surrounding world make this hero strange to ordinary people and
ordinary perception. This is the way Alyosha is presented to the
reader. The narrator speaks right away of a strangeness, a certain
eccentricity in him, but at the same time explains that these qualities do
not, nevertheless, signify isolation: “On the contrary, it happens some
times that such a person [the eccentric—V.V.], I dare say, carries
within himself the very heart of the universal, and the rest of the men
of his epoch have for some reason been temporarily torn from it.” As a
result Alyosha is both set off against other people (this is typical for the
hero of a vita), and closely linked to them, because it is impossible to
go far from the “heart,” impossible to entirely break off from it. Such
a twist is unusual for a vita.
The desire for seclusion, the unchildlike pensiveness and concen
tration of the young Alyosha, his alienation from the playfulness and
joyfulness typical of children, pointed out by the narrator, develop the
same idea of the hero’s “strangeness” and “eccentricity.” Such a devel
opment is also typical of the vita narrative. But the “gift for arousing a
special love for oneself,” confirmed many times subsequently, is a sign
of that side of Alyosha’s character that, despite any strangeness (or.

perhaps, because of that strangeness), makes him dear to all people.
“He never tried to show off among his schoolfellows” is the
slightly altered expression of the motif of humility, the absence of
pride typical of the hero of the vita. This motif is reiterated in the
report that Alyosha “never resented an insult. It would happen that an
hour after the offence he would address the offender or answer some
question with as trustful and candid an expression as though nothing
had happened between them” (part 1, bk. 1, chap. 4).
The absence of pride, along with the complete indifference to
worldly goods (money, for example, both his own and that of others)
is emphasized by the words: “Another feature characteristic of him—
and very much so—was that he never worried about whose means he
was living on. In this respect he was the complete opposite of his older
brother Ivan Fyodorovich.” With regard to this lack of the vain and
sensitive pride with which his older brother is endowed, the narrator
considers it necessary to note again the strangeness, the “apparent”
holy-foolery of his “main” and “beloved” hero. (It is important that
this holy-foolery comes not from indifference or incivility in relation
to others, but, on the contrary, from an extreme and perhaps naïve
trustfulness and sympathy toward people.)
Alyosha’s “wild fanatical modesty and chastity” also belongs to
the obligatory attributes of the hero of the vita—another feature that
makes him strange from an ordinary point of view and that, for
example, makes “all his schoolfellows from the bottom class to the top
want to mock at him” and to look upon him “with compassion” (part
1, bk. 1, chap. 4).
In general, the motifs that are enumerated here exhaust the pre
liminary characterization of Alyosha. They are all marked and coordi
nated with the usual representation of the hero of the vita, who, even in
childhood, exhibits the uncommon characteristics of the future great
ascetic and saint.
Other motifs, too, are heard, in a very muffled form, but never
theless from the beginning—motifs that contrast with those just intro
duced and that are apparently intended to point not just to the future
great ascetic, but also to the future (perhaps also great) sinner. Rather
than analyzing them, however, let us merely say that the motives that
compel Alyosha to elect the monastery as the lot most congenial to
him also make this choice rather flimsy. The hero aspires to “truth”
and to “great deeds” and wants to achieve these things as hastily as
possible but, starting from this same aspiration, others go the opposite
road. Alyosha “was convinced of the existence of God and immortal
ity” (part 1, bk. 1, chap. 5), but after some time he could be “con
vinced” by something else (after all, he is only beginning to live).
Alyosha encounters an extraordinary elder in the monastery and falls in
love with him (part 1, bk. 1, chaps. 4 and 5), but this encounter is
fortuitous. Moreover, too strong a feeling of love for the elder alone is
not such an unconditionally good thing as it might at first appear.
These and similar considerations all arise in the reader’s mind not at
once, but only later, when the motifs of Alyosha’s preliminary charac
terization begin to recur. Acquiring additional hints and associations,
they take on an ambiguous character, leading the reader to contemplate
the idea of turns for the worse in the fate of the main hero.
For example, the teachings of the elder make it clear that belief in
God, which inspires the young hero, acquires the force of conviction
only when it is the result of “the experience of active love” (part 1, bk.
2, chap. 4). This “active” love is “a harsh and dreadful thing,” it is
“labor and fortitude, and thus for some people, perhaps, a whole
science.” Such a love the elder contrasts with “contemplative” love,
which “is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the
sight of all” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 4).
With the exception of the moment of self-admiration (which is in
no way connected with Alyosha), everything in the characterization of
“contemplative” love corresponds to the feeling with which Alyosha
enters on the “monastic road.” The hero is not yet ready for an “active”
love, for the “harsh and dreadful,” for “labor and fortitude.” There
fore his choice, despite the fact that it is natural for this essentially
saintly hero, has as yet the most hasty and preliminary character. It
perhaps serves as a premonitory allusion to the future, but it is not
very important in the present, for the hero begins directly from that
with which he should have ended.
As a result the image of the main hero of the “biography” is
presented as mobile, capable of further change, and lacking that sche
matic straightforwardness and fixity of form which burdens the typical
hero of a vita. Let us stress that this changeability and mobility is
indicated not so much in spite of the hagiographie canon, as within its
boundaries, thanks to the ambiguity, created by the narration, of
certain motifs originating in that canon.
It is precisely because Alyosha is not yet ready to serve God and
the “truth,” as he then imagined it, that the elder sends his “quiet
boy” out of the monastery: “This is not your place for the time. 1 bless
you for great service in the world. Yours will be a long pilgrimage . . .
You will have to bear all before you come back. There will be much to
do. But I don’t doubt you, and so I send you forth . . . Work, work
unceasingly” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 7). The fact that Alyosha is really
still too young, unstable, and unconfirmed in his (still naïve) beliefs, is
corroborated yet again by his reaction to the elder’s words. “Alyosha
started, when the elder said, *. . . leave the monastery. Go away for
good.’ ” The hero is perplexed, confused, frightened. “But how could
he be left without him [the elder—V.V.]? How could he live without
seeing and hearing him? Where should he go? He had told him not to
weep, and to leave the monastery. Good God! It was long since
Alyosha had known such anguish” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 7).
The above-cited motifs (on the one hand, the hero’s uncommon
ness even in early youth, his decision to go into a monastery; on the
other, his lack of inner preparation for this exploit, his dispatch into
the world for such preparation) signify that in this case we are dealing
with the organic combination in one character of the two usual types
of hagiographie hero. The first type is the hero who senses, almost
from infancy, his lofty calling, and subsequently follows it without
swerving (like Theodosius of Pechersk or Sergius of Radonezh). The
second type is the hero who turns to God and gives himself up to the
same asceticism after many trials, mistakes and errors (Ephraim Sirin).
Alyosha’s dispatch from the monastery does confront him with this set
of trials, for in relation to the hero of the vita, the world can only
appear in its tempting aspect.
After the presentation of the main hero, a motif arises that links
his name with that of Aleksey the Man of God. This motif is at first
heard obliquely. The hero of the vita, widely known in its time, is only
recalled to the reader’s mind. The occasion for this reminder is the
elder’s conversation with one of the devout women, who is wasting
away with grief over her dead boy. To the elder’s question as to what
her son was called, the mother answers:
“Aleksey, Father.”
“A sweet name. After Aleksey, the Man of God?”
“Of God, Father, of God, Aleksey the Man of God!”
“What a saint he was! I will remember him, mother.”
(part 1, bk. 2, chap. 3)
Alyosha and the Hagiographie Hero ! 157
Since the name of the main hero has already been mentioned and he
himself has been presented to the reader in a hagiographie halo, the
reminder of Aleksey the Man of God brings to mind certain details of
the “biography” that support the idea of Alyosha’s closeness to the
hagiographie hero mentioned here.
Aleksey the Man of God was born in Rome; his parents were rich
and distinguished Romans: “Under the emperors Arcadius and Honorius,
at the end of the fourth century, there lived in Rome a distinguished
man by the name of Euphimian, and his wife Aglaida.” In the version
of the life found in the Lives of the Saints by Dimitrius of Rostov, we
read: “There was in ancient Rome a pious man by the name of
Euphimian, at the time of the pious emperors Arcadius and Honorius,
great among the nobles and exceedingly wealthy.” In the Prologue
version of the life of Aleksey the Man of God we read: “He was from
ancient Rome, the son of Euphimian the patrician, his mother was
Aglaida.”
Clearly it is not by chance that it is precisely in the chapter, “The
Third Son, Alyosha,” that the portrait of Fyodor Pavlovich is given,
which ends with the words: “He was fond indeed of making fun of his
own face, though, I believe, he was well satisfied with it. He used
particularly to point to his nose, which was not very large, but very
delicate and conspicuously aquiline. ‘A regular Roman nose,’ he used to
say, ‘with my goitre I’ve quite the countenance of an ancient Roman
patrician of the decadent period’ ” (part 1, bk. 1, chap. 4). To be sure,
the evident resemblance between Fyodor Pavlovich and the father of
the ancient hero of the vita, who was by habit quite pious, is confined
to this casual remark.
Of course, this remark is important in general as well: it likens the
present to the past, gives the “particular” a broad significance, because
the “confusion,” decay, and “fall” of present-day Russian life is related
here to the “fall” of ancient Rome. If the analogy is continued, how
ever, then a rebirth out of this “fall,” like the rebirth of ancient
(pagan) Rome, must appear on the paths of Christianity. Moreover,
because Rome was unable to deal with this problem in its own time,
since, as Ivan explains, “Rome . . . retained too much of pagan civiliza
tion and culture” (part 1, bk. 2, chap. 5), then clearly the problem
stands now before the “fallen” and also decaying Russia. All this is in
accordance with Slavophile ideas and the Slavophile conception of the
history of the West and Russia, with which Dostoevsky sympathized.
If one believes the testimony of Vladimir Solovyov, these themes

should have been strongly heard in the second novel. In the first novel
they are only hinted at, and they are not the themes that are important
for us now. We are interested in Alyosha and his connections with the
hero of the ancient vita. It is likely that Fyodor Pavlovich’s claim to
resemblance to the ancient Roman is, in this respect, a significant
detail.
One would think that one of Alyosha’s recollections, which origi
nated in his infancy, has the same significance—a circumstance over
which the narrator lingers with a degree of conscientiousness that is
strange, it would seem, for such a trifle, and to which he subsequently
returns. Alyosha “remembered one still summer evening ... ; in a
corner of the room the holy image, before it a lighted lamp, and on her
knees before the image his mother, sobbing hysterically with cries and
moans, snatching him up in both arms, squeezing him close till it hurt,
and praying for him to the Mother of God, holding him out in both
arms to the image as though to put him under the Mother’s protec
tion” (part 1, bk. 1, chap. 4).
The mother’s prayer for her son, presented here as Alyosha’s most
vivid recollection, is clearly a modification of a motif in the life of
Aleksey the Man of God, in which the prayer originates either from
the mother alone, as here (and as, for example, in the redaction of
Dimitrius of Rostov), or from both parents (as in the edition in
Dostoevsky’s library), and where it precedes the miraculous birth of
the future saint. Thus in both cases the hero’s later career is linked with
an anticipatory parental supplication, anguish over the son and tears.
Also important is the fact that the prayer of Alyosha’s pious mother
appeals precisely to the Mother of God and to her protection.
In various redactions of this vita the saint, for whose sake God has
been implored, leaving home, gives himself up to an ascetic life on the
porch (or in the vestibule) of the temple of the Mother of God. After a
certain time the Mother of God orders her servant to bring Aleksey
into this temple, “for his prayer rises to God, and like a crown on the
royal head, so does the Holy Spirit rest upon him.”
In the sacred poem about Aleksey, which Dostoevsky knew as
well as he knew the vita, the Mother of God also sends the saint back
to his former home, to his father, mother, and spouse.
In the novel, the sending of Alyosha from the monastery back
into the world and also back to his relatives corresponds to this
sending of the saint back to his relatives—by God’s will (in the vita),
or by the command of the Mother of God (in the sacred poem).

Alyosha is sent back into the world by his spiritual father, Father
Zosima. It is subsequently pointed out by Ivan that this is a “divine”
elder, a “Pater Seraphicus,” and consequently his will is the will of
God. Not by chance, the Mother of God is also linked to the elder
from the very beginning; among the few trifling, briefly noted objects
in his elder’s cell, the icon of the Mother of God is singled out and
emphasized twice: “The cell was not very large and had a faded look.
It contained nothing but the necessary furniture, of course and poor
quality. There were two pots of flowers in the window, and a number
of icons in the corner—among them, one of the Mother of God, of
enormous dimensions and painted, apparently, long before the schism.
Before it a lamp was burning. Near it were two other icons in shining
settings, and, next to them, carved cherubims, china eggs, a Catholic
cross of ivory, and a Mater Dolorosa embracing it” (part 1, bk. 2,
chap. 2).
Clearly, the combination of the Orthodox and Catholic images of
the Mother of God in the elder’s cell, like the fact that the elder is at
once a Russian ascetic and a Pater Seraphicus, is accorded particular
significance here. After all, the life of Aleksey the Man of God is a very
ancient vita. The events described in it date back to the end of the
fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries, i.e., to the time when the
division of the Christian church had not yet occurred. This life is
familiar to Orthodox and Catholics alike. The Mother of God, at
whose temple the saintly youth appears, is, as it were, at once the
Orthodox Mother of God and the Catholic Mater Dolorosa. Father
Zosima, who sends Alyosha into the world, to his relatives, being at
once a Russian Orthodox ascetic and a Pater Seraphicus, reduplicates
this same motif.
Dostoevsky, though not overly concerned with formal matters
(the precise reproduction of the sequence of hagiographical motifs
and their literal transmission), nonetheless has adhered to the hagio
graphie outline in the most important points of Alyosha’s story. The
elder, for example, sends Alyosha back not only to his father and
brothers (Alyosha himself recalls his deceased mother and upon arrival
seeks out her grave), but also to his (here, it is true, future)
bride.
The complexity of Alyosha’s relations with Liza Khokhlakova is
noted from the very beginning: Alyosha’s attachment to Liza counter
vails his lofty goals.
160 I Valentina A. Vetlovskaya
“Why do you make fun of him [Alyosha—V.V.] like

that, naughty girl?” the elder says to her. Liza suddenly and
quite unexpectedly blushed. Her eyes flashed and her face
became quite serious. She began speaking quickly and ner
vously in a warm and resentful voice:
“Why has he forgotten everything, then? . . . No, now
he’s saving his soul! Why have you put that long gown on
him? If he runs he’ll fall.”
And suddenly she hid her face in her hands and went off
into terrible, uncontrollable . . . laughter. The elder listened
to her with a smile, and blessed her tenderly. . . .
“I will certainly send him,” the elder decided.
Let us note that it is hardly by chance that Alyosha’s future bride

and spouse is called Liza. In the Russian versions of the life of Aleksey
the Man of God, the name of the bride and spouse of the saint is not
mentioned, but several variants of the sacred poem speak either of
Katerina or of Lizaveta:
The father permitted him to wed
A princess renowned and promised to him,
Lizaveta by name.
In the elder’s conversation with the devout women, where the
name of Aleksey the Man of God is heard for the first time, the name
of Lizaveta is heard as well:
“Is that your little girl?”
“My little girl, Father, Lizaveta.”
“May the Lord bless you both, you and your babe Liza
veta ...”
He blessed them all and bowed low to them.
The chapter “A Lady of Little Faith” (following “Devout Peasant

Women”) involves four characters: elders (Alyosha’s spiritual father,
Father Zosima; Liza’s mother, Mme. Khokhlakova) and minors
(Alyosha, Liza). In view of the consistency of motifs, Alyosha’s link
with Aleksey the Man of God and Liza’s with Lizaveta, the bride and
spouse of the saint in the Russian sacred poem, can be assumed, while
the elder’s firm intention to send Alyosha to Liza after her mother’s
words and her own takes on the character of a betrothal. Subsequently

this betrothal is confirmed. Alyosha says to Liza: “I shall be leaving the
monastery altogether in a few days. If I go into the world, I must
marry. I know that. He [the elder, Dostoevsky’s emphasis—V.V.] told
me to marry, too. Whom could I marry better than you—and who
would have me except you? I have been thinking it over” (part 2,
bk. 5, chap. 1).
Aleksey the Man of God, the hero of the hagiographie narrative
and of the sacred poem, is mentioned a few more times later in the
novel. Thus, ordering his monks and devotees to read the sacred
writings to the people, the elder also speaks of the Lives of the Saints
and advises them to choose therefrom, at least “the life of Aleksey, the
Man of God” (part 2, bk. 6, chap. 1). Later, in the scene at Grushenka’s,
in response to Alyosha’s request that he not grow angry and condemn
others, Rakitin, in irritation, replies directly: “You were so primed up
with your elder’s teaching last night that now you have to let it off on
me, Alyoshenka, Man of God!” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 3). The seminar
ian Rakitin could not casually call Alyosha by the name of the saint.
The diminutive form used by Rakitin, entirely alien to the vita, is
known, however, to the sacred poem, in which it is, of course, uttered
in a different spirit:
He [the father of the saint—V.V.] calls the holy men to his house
And gives a name to the baby,
He gave him a sacred little name,—
Lekseyushko, little Man of God.
The epithet “prince,” which Grushenka accords to Alyosha in the
same scene, comes either from the vita, where this word is encoun
tered extremely rarely, to be sure, or (what is much more likely) from
the sacred poem, where it arises quite naturally against the background
of the usual folk appellations, and is to be found pretty much everywhere.
Later Mitya once again connects his younger brother with Aleksey
the Man of God: “Damn ethics. I am done for, Aleksey, I am, you
Man of God! I love you more than anyone. It makes my heart yearn to
look at you” (part 4, bk. 11, chap. 4). Thus a motif (Alyosha-Aleksey
the Man of God) that is introduced at first tentatively and as though in
passing, is heard at the end of the novel in full force.
As for the significance of this chain of motifs in the system of the
entire novel, let us first of all emphasize the fact that, in connecting his
hero with Aleksey the Man of God, Dostoevsky selects the central
figure of the most popular vita. “One may say without exaggeration.”
writes V.P. Adrianova-Perets in her study devoted specifically to this
vita, “that not one of the ascetics of the Russian land provoked such
interest, aroused such sympathy for his life, as did Aleksey the Man of
God.” In particular, the scholar sees the reason for such popularity in
the fact that this vita absorbed many beloved motifs of Russian hagiog
raphy (such motifs are also heard in The Brothers Karamazov, and
several of them are enumerated above).
Combined ably into a single artistic story . . . they were
associated in the consciousness of the Russian reader with a
large number of familiar images and ideas, and thus they
favored the popularity and the durability of this vita, which
gave an impetus to further treatments both in literature and
in popular poetry, in Russia as well.
The sacred poem about Aleksey which Dostoevsky had in mind as
well as the vita is just such a popular poetic reworking.
The basic features of the vita of Aleksey the Man of God and of
the sacred poem about him are Aleksey’s departure from home to
perform the exploits customary for the hero of a vita, and his life in his
parents’ home upon his return. It is precisely from the time when the
saint, unrecognized, lodges in his parents’ home, that a grave tempta
tion begins: the saint is faced not with a rejection of the world in order
to save himself and, perhaps, others, but with a sojourn in the world
for those same goals.
In accordance with the spirit and meaning of the vita and the poem
about Saint Aleksey, Alyosha Karamazov’s rapprochement with the
world and his relations at first turns out to be a trial for him. The
narrative is constructed so that after the scene in the monastery, which
serves as the starting point of the action, Alyosha is sent on errands by
first one, then another character; he listens to others’ stories, usually
filled with perturbation and grief, that cast doubt on the affirmation of
God’s endless love, charity, and beneficence. The tempting character
of these encounters, commissions, and confessions is conveyed through
various motifs.
Among these motifs, the indication of Alyosha’s suffering (in
contrast to his joyful sojourn in the monastery and his communion
with the elder) is one of the most constant and important ones. “This
request [of Katerina Ivanovna—V.V.] and the necessity of going had at
once aroused an uneasy feeling in his heart, and this feeling had grown
Alyosha and the Hagiographie Hero ! 163
more and more painful all the morning” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 3). So
begins Alyosha’s ascetic life in the world and his “ordeals.” On the
way to Katerina Ivanovna, Alyosha’s brother Mitya stops him:
“I might have sent anyone, but I wanted to send an
angel. ...”
“Did you really mean to send me?” cried Alyosha with
a distressed expression.
Alyosha’s suffering, which reveals the gravity of others’ appeals

and commissions for this “quiet boy,” is contrasted with the joy of
those who, voluntarily or not, tempt Alyosha: “ ‘Oh, gods,’ exclaims,
again, Mitya, T thank you for sending him to me by the back way,
and he came to me like the golden fish to the silly old fishermen in the
fable!’ ” (part 1, bk. 3 chap. 3). “ ‘Here he is! Here he is!’ yelled
Fyodor Pavlovich, highly delighted at seeing Alyosha. ‘Join us. Sit
down. Coffee is a lenten dish, but it’s hot and good. I don’t offer you
brandy, you’re keeping the fast. But would you like some? No; I’d
better give you some of our famous liqueur. . . . Now we’ve a treat
for you, in your own line, too. It’ll make you laugh. Balaam’s ass has
begun talking to us here’ ” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 6). “Alyosha left his
father’s house,” the narrator further recounts, “feeling even more
exhausted and dejected in spirit than when he had entered it. . . . He
felt something bordering upon despair, which he had never known till
then” (part 1, bk. 3, chap. 10).
The world into which Alyosha is sent by the elder disturbs and
torments the young hero.
Why, why, had he gone forth? Why had he sent him “into
the world”? thinks Alyosha, returning to the monastery the
very first day of his “travels.” Here was peace. Here was
holiness. But there was confusion, there was darkness in
which one lost one’s way and went astray at once.
The day after this sorrowful return Father Paisy, again seeing
Alyosha off “into the world,” pronounces unexpected parting words:
“Remember, young man, unceasingly . . . that worldly science, which
has become a great power, has . . . analyzed everything divine handed
down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of
this world have nothing left of all that was sacred of old” (part 2,
bk. 4, chap. 1). Hastening to “protect the young soul entrusted to him,”
Father Paisy speaks words that are of the utmost importance for an
understanding of subsequent events: “You are young,” he addresses
Alyosha, “and the temptations of the world are great and beyond your
strength to endure” (part 2, bk. 4, chap. 1).
Alyosha’s meeting with his father, then with the schoolchildren,
then the “lacerations,” of which the gravest is the last (the confession
of Captain Snegiryov, in which the theme of the innocently suffering
child is heard), continues the grave series of “temptations” of Alyosha.
The gloomy impressions from his first days of acquaintance with the
world, even before the conversation with his brother Ivan, behind
whom stands “worldly science,” make Alyosha let slip a phrase ex
pressing something that was “already undoubtedly tormenting him”:
“And perhaps I don’t even believe in God” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 1).
Alyosha’s sudden confession, on the one hand, and Father Paisy’s
warning, on the other, uttered on the same day as the brothers’
meeting in the tavern, both have a very direct relation to that meeting.
Ivan’s tempting speech, which comes along with the other temptations
but is stronger than they are, is addressed to the hero, who is already
disturbed by the world’s “darkness.” Here the suffering child, familiar
to the reader and to Alyosha through the captain’s confession, arises
once more on the lips of the “learned” Ivan, now as a kind of “em
blem” and basic argument of “worldly science,” which has left “noth
ing ... of all that was sacred of old.” Having told Alyosha about the
general and the persecuted child Ivan asks:
“Well—what did he deserve? To be shot? To be shot for
the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!”
“To be shot,” murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan
with a pale, twisted smile.
“Bravo!” cried Ivan, delighted. “If even you say so.”
The delight of the atheist Ivan, in accordance with the author’s concep
tion, must not only indicate temptation, as did earlier the delight of
Mitya or Fyodor Pavlovich, but also compromise Alyosha’s words in
the eyes of the reader: this delight signifies that here Alyosha proves to
be too close to his older brother. Ivan continues thus: “You’re a pretty
monk! So there is a little devil sitting in your heart, Alyosha Karamazov!”
In the author’s opinion, the reader must guess that if even the atheist
Ivan perceives no sanctity in Alyosha’s reaction (“Shoot him!”), and

begins to speak of a “devil,” then it must be that there is no such
sanctity.
Fulfilling others’ requests, listening to others (above all his brother
Ivan), Alyosha gives way to temptation. The “darkness” of the world
does not remain alien to this hero’s heart, and not only because he is
too young, but also because Alyosha, as he himself explains more than
once, is a Karamazov. Notwithstanding his strangeness, Alyosha is the
same sort of man as everyone else (in contrast to the vita and the poem,
in the novel this motif is carried out quite definitely). The very deep
affinity of the “angel” Alyosha for the other “sinners” presumes, for
the young and inexperienced hero, the possibility of committing the
same errors as the others. “Yes, yes, it is he, it is Pater Seraphicus, he
will save me—from him and forever!” (part 2, bk. 5, chap. 5)—races
helplessly through Alyosha’s mind when he hurries to the monastery
after the conversation with Ivan.
The death of Father Zosima and everything that follows it is a trial
that makes Alyosha’s heart overflow with suffering, and provokes his
reproaches and indignation. Speaking of these events, the narrator
distinguishes two circumstances that “exerted a very strong influence
on the heart and soul of the main . . . hero of the story” (part 3, bk. 7,
chap. 1). The first is Ivan’s pernicious influence on Alyosha. “Oh, it
was not that something of the fundamental, elemental, so to speak,
faith of his soul had been shaken. . . . Yet a vague but tormenting and
evil impression left by his conversation with Ivan the day before,
suddenly revived again now in his soul and seemed forcing its way to
the surface of his consciousness” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 2). Outraged by the
injustice of Heaven in relation to the deceased elder, Alyosha repeats
Ivan’s words: “I am not rebelling against my God; I simply ‘don’t
accept His world.’ ” The blasphemy of these words on the lips of the
young ascetic is obvious. “This is a jolly fine chance and mustn’t be
missed.” Rakitin immediately decides (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 2). The
second circumstance that the narrator emphasizes (both justifying and
condemning Alyosha) is that Alyosha loved his spiritual father, Father
Zosima, too much: “The fact is that all the love that lay concealed in
his pure young heart for everyone and everything had, for the past
year, been concentrated—and perhaps wrongly so—on one being, now
deceased. It is true that that being had for so long been accepted by
him as his ideal, that all his young strength and energy could not but
turn towards that ideal, even to the forgetting at the moment of

everyone and everything” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 2). These explanations
by the narrator are extremely important.
Growing indignant and grumbling, Alyosha, like Ivan, demands
“supreme justice,” which, in the young hero’s opinion, has been
“violated.” Instead of the glory and triumph of the deceased righteous
man, whom he loved with an exceptional love, Alyosha sees this
righteous man “degraded and dishonored” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 2).
The narrator insistently strives to show that Alyosha’s error (his grum
bling and indignation) is rooted in the exceptional nature of his love,
which—in its own way, of course, but essentially the same as with
Ivan—destroys the living connection between things. Alyosha invol
untarily forgets that his elder belongs entirely to the world, “sinful”
and “stinking” in its sins, and thus bears the guilt for its ugliness along
with everyone else. According to the logic of the narration it emerges
that the elder bears this guilt to an even greater degree than do others;
remitting others’ sins, he takes them upon his own soul and, conse
quently, answers for them, for it is clearly only under such a condition
that he has the right to forgive others. The idea of the connection
between each person and everyone else, and the responsibility of each
for everyone, repeated many times by the elder himself during his life,
underlies the artistic narrative here as well. But it is precisely this idea
that Alyosha has forgotten in his grief.
If Alyosha had loved the elder more “correctly,” that is, not with
an exceptional love but in the same way that he loved others, he would
not have found grounds in the righteous man’s “shame” for the
condemnation of “God’s world.” Everything in this world is con
nected. And just as there are none who are completely righteous, so
there are none who are completely sinful. For this reason the scene of
Alyosha and Grushenka, coming after the scene of the young hero’s
bitter suffering, harmoniously complements the story about the righ
teous man’s “shame.” Here the sinful woman unexpectedly reveals a
degree of love, reverence for sanctity, and compassion for her dispir
ited brother that, considering her “incorrect” view of things, would
not be supposed of her. Thanks to this, Grushenka is able to encourage
Alyosha: the loftiness of her soul, made manifest “at that moment,” is
the essential link in the chain of phenomena that, according to the
author’s conception, makes their entire relationship not frightfully
incongruous but comforting and harmonious.
Alyosha’s dream (“Cana of Galilee”) naturally concludes these
scenes. The boundlessness of God’s love for all people and the joy of
those who are united by this love are manifested here to the young
ascetic as if before his very eyes. The link of everyone with each other,
salutary and joyful when God is among people (a circumstance which
must be construed in a broad sense), staggers Alyosha’s soul with
ecstasy. The idea of the primordial beauty and purity of “God’s world,”
and of the responsibility of all people for the fact that they make this
beautiful world vicious, is what the author tries to emphasize in “Cana
of Galilee.” It is just this idea that Alyosha suddenly grasps, “for the
rest of his life and forever and ever”: “What was he weeping over? Oh!
in his rapture he was weeping even over those stars, which were
shining to him from the abyss of space . . . He longed to forgive
everyone and for everything, and to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for him
self, but for all men, for all and for everything. ‘And others are praying
for me too,’ echoed again in his soul. . . . He had fallen on the earth a
weak boy, but he rose up a resolute champion, and he knew and felt it
suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 4).
Thus the young ascetic’s passionate and exceptional love for his
spiritual father yields, at this important moment, to a just as passionate
love for the world and for all people without exception. “He who
loves everyone alike in compassion and indifferently,” reasons Isaak
Sirin, mentioned and quoted in The Brothers Karamazov, “has achieved
perfection.” Alyosha (not intellectually, but emotionally) finds a way
out of suffering in the joyful acceptance of “God’s world,” and in
union with everything and everyone. This loving union with people,
the intimate inclusion of them all (including the most sinful) in his soul
eliminates the contradiction between love of God and love of people—
the basic contradiction overcome by the hero of the ancient vita,
Aleksey the Man of God. For such an unqualified love, the possibility
of which is indicated by the moment of Alyosha’s ecstasy, is itself, in
the author’s conception, divine love. “ ‘Someone visited my soul in
that hour,’ Alyosha would say afterwards, with firm faith in his
words” (part 3, bk. 7, chap. 4). “ ‘Brothers,’ the elder used to teach,
‘have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the
semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all
God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. . . . Love the
animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will
perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin
to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love
the whole world with an all-embracing love’ ” (part 2, bk. 6, chap. 3)
If the moment of Alyosha’s ecstasy is prolonged (as the words of

the elder prophesy) or if this moment really acquires the greatest
significance in the hero’s life (as the narrator foretells), the world will
cease to play its tempting role for the young ascetic. When this world
is revealed to the hero in the beauty and harmony of all its relations,
and not in an ugly conglomeration of absurdities, when it evokes an
ecstatic rapture, then there is no place for the condemnation of its
creator. Dostoevsky clearly tries to carry out this idea.
True, it is possible that the moment of Alyosha’s ecstasy before
“God’s world” is only an anticipation. It is possible that subsequently
Alyosha will turn from the “correct road” once more. All this is
possible. But if Alyosha does turn from this road, then it would
certainly be in order for him to enter onto it later, once and for all. It is
precisely this outcome that the logic of the artistic narrative demands.
A person who joyfully takes into his soul the entire world (“both
the whole, and every grain of sand”) without exception, accepting all
people in spite of their “stinking sin,” loving it all with an equally deep
love, in other words, a person who comprehends the beauty and
blessing of God’s creation and along with it the beauty and blessing of
the creator, is, of course, a “man of God.” The world and God are
harmoniously reconciled in the soul of this hero.
So Alyosha emerges (or must emerge) from the grave trial to
which the “divine” elder sends him. And thus Dostoevsky interprets
the central figure and the central confrontation of the vita of Aleksey
the Man of God against a new background. In the continuation of the
novel about Alyosha this interpretation would, it is likely, appear more
clearly, but even now it is sufficiently obvious.
Chronology
1821 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky bom October 30 in a

Moscow hospital for the poor, where his father was a
resident surgeon.
1837 Death of Dostoevsky’s mother.
1838 Dostoevsky enters military engineering school in St.
Petersburg.
1839 In the wake of increasingly harsh and abusive treatment,
Dostoevsky believes, the serfs on Dostoevsky’s father’s
estate castrate and murder their master. Recent evidence,
however, casts doubt on the circumstances of his father’s
death.
1843 Dostoevsky finishes engineering course; joins engineering
department of the War Ministry.
1844 Resigns from his post. Publishes his translation of Eugenie
Grandet.
1845 Finishes his first novel, Poor Folk, which wins the acclaim
of radical critic Belinsky.
1846 Poor Folk published in St. Petersburg Miscellany. The Double
published in Notes from the Fatherland two weeks later.
1847 “A Novel in Nine Letters” published in The Contempo
rary. Dostoevsky frequents meetings of the Petrashevsky
circle, a clandestine society of progressive thinkers. Pub
lishes pamphlets in the St. Petersburg Chronicle and the St.
Petersburg News.
1848 Publication of A Strange Wife, A Faint Heart, “The Stories
of a Veteran,” Hie Christmas Tree and the Wedding, White
Nights, The Jealous Husband, and The Landlady, all in Notes
from the Fatherland. The latter work draws harsh criticism
from Belinsky.
169
170 ! Chronology
1849 Dostoevsky arrested for his role in the Petrashevsky cir

cle, and imprisoned in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul
Fortress. Sentenced to death, but at the last minute the
sentence is commuted to four years of forced labor in
Siberia. Sent to Omsk, where he remains until 1854.
1854 Dostoevsky enlists in the army as a private and is sent to
Semipalatinsk, near the Mongolian border.
1856 Promoted to lieutenant.
1857 Marries Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, a widow. A Little Hero
published anonymously in Notes from the Fatherland.
1858 Released from army; leaves Semipalatinsk for Tver.
1859 Is permitted to return to St. Petersburg. “Uncle’s Dream”
published in The Russian Word; A Friend of the Family
published in Notes from the Fatherland.
1860 Introduction and first chapter to Notes from the House of the
Dead are published. Work meets opposition from the cen
sor at The Russian Word.
1861 Notes from the House of the Dead in its entirety and The
Insulted and the Injured are published in Time, a journal
recently started by Dostoevsky’s brother Mikhail.
1862 First trip abroad. “An Unpleasant Predicament” published
in Time.
1863 “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” published in
Time. Time is suppressed. Second trip abroad.
1864 Publishes magazine Epoch with brother Mikhail. Notes
from Underground published in Epoch. Death of Dostoevsky’s
wife and, within a few months, his brother.
1865 Epoch ceases publication. Third trip abroad.
1866 Crime and Punishment serialized in The Russian Herald.
Anna Grigorievna Snitkina comes to work for Dostoevsky
as a stenographer. The Gambler published.
1867 Marries Snitkina. The couple goes abroad to live for the
next four years.
1868 The Idiot serialized in The Russian Herald. A daughter,
Sofia, is bom, but dies two months later.
1869 Daughter Lyubov’ bom in Dresden.
1870 The Eternal Husband published in Dawn.
1871-72 Returns to St. Petersburg. Son Fyodor bom. The Possessed
serialized in The Russian Herald.
1873-74 Editor of The Citizen. Diary of a Writer begins publication.
Chronology / 171
1875 Son Alexey (Alyosha) bom. A Raw Youth serialized in

Notes from the Fatherland.
1876 “A Gentle Spirit” published in Diary of a Writer.
1877 “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” published in Diary of a
Writer.
1878 Death of son Alyosha. Dostoevsky visits Optina monas
tery with Vladimir Solovyov; they meet Starets Amvrozy.
1879-80 The Brothers Karamazov serialized in The Russian Herald.
1881 Dostoevsky dies on January 28.
Contributors
Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale Univer

sity, is the author of The Anxiety of Influence, Poetry and Repression, and
many other volumes of literary criticism. His forthcoming study,
Freud: Transference and Authority, attempts a full-scale reading of all of
Freud’s major writings. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, he is general
editor of five series of literary criticism published by Chelsea House.
During 1987-88, he served as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Po
etry at Harvard University.
Richard A. Peace is Professor of Russian at Bristol University. He is
the author of Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels, Chekhov:
A Study of the Four Major Plays, and The Enigma of Gogol.
Michael Holquist is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale
University. He is the author of Dostoevsky and the Novel and co-author
of a biography of Bakhtin.
Robert L. Belknap is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
at Columbia University and the author of The Structure of The Brothers
Karamazov.
Gary Saul Morson is Associate Professor of Russian at Northwest
ern University and the author of The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s
Diary of a Writer and the Tradition of Literary Utopia.
Maire Jaanus Kurrick teaches English at Barnard College. She is
the author of Literature and Negation.
Robert Louis Jackson is Professor of Russian and Comparative
Literature at Yale University. His books include The Art of Dostoevsky :
Deliriums and Nocturnes, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form, and Dostoevsky’s
Underground Man in Russian Literature.
173
174 / Contributors
John Jones, who has lectured as Professor of Poetry at Oxford

University, is a Fellow of New College. His books include The Egotis
tical Sublime, John Keats’s Dream of Truth, Aristotle and Greek Tragedy,
and Dostoevsky.
Valentina A. Vetlovskaya is a senior research fellow at the Push
kin Institute of Russian Literature in Leningrad.
Bibliography
Amend, Victor E. “Theme and Form in The Brothers Karamazov." Modem Fiction
Studies 4 (1958): 240-52.
Anderson, Roger B. “The Meaning of Carnival in The Brothers Karamazov." Slavic
and East European Journal 23 (1979): 458-78.
--------- . “Mythical Implications in Father Zossima’s Religious Teachings.” Slavic
Review 38 (1979): 272-89.
Batchelor, R. “Literature, Society, and the Concept of Revolt.” European Studies
Review 5, no. 4 (1975): 395-427.
Belknap, Robert L. “Memory in The Brothers Karamazov." In American Contribu
tions to the Eighth International Congress of Slavists, edited by Victor Terras,
21-40. Columbus: Slavica, 1978.
--------- . The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov. The Hague: Mouton, 1967.
Berdyaev, Nikolai. Dostoevsky. Translated by Donald Attwater. New York:
Méridien, 1960.
Bertenson, Sergei. “The Brothers Karamazov at the Moscow Art Theatre.” Ameri
can Slavic and East European Review 16 (1957): 74—78.
Braun, Maximilian. “The Brothers Karamazov as an Expository Novel.” Canadian-
American Slavic Studies 6 (1972): 199-208.
Burnett, Leon. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky: A Centenary Collection. Oxford:
Holden Books, 1981.
Carter, Geoffrey. “Freud and The Brothers Karamazov." Literature and Psychology
31, no. 3 (1981): 15-32.
Cerny, Vaclav. Dostoevsky and His Devils. Translated by F. W. Galan. Ann Arbor:
Ardis, 1975.
Chaitin, Gilbert G. “Religion as Defense: The Structure of The Brothers Karamazov.”
Literature and Psychology 22, no. 2 (1972): 69-87.
Chapple, Richard L. A Dostoevsky Dictionary. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978.
Chavkin, Allan. “Ivan Karamazov’s Rebellion and Bellow’s The Victim.” Papers on
Language and Literature 16 (1980): 316—20.
Chickering, A. Lawrence. “The Grand Inquisitor: Dostoevsky’s Challenge to
Modem Man.” New Oxford Review 44, no. 4 (1978): 4-8.
Cox, Gary. Tyrant and Victim in Dostoevsky. Columbus: Slavica, 1984.
Curie, Richard. Characters of Dostoevsky: Studies from Four Novels. London:
Heinemann, 1950.
175
176 / Bibliography
Danow, David K. “Notes on Generating a Text: The Brothers Karamazov." Modem

Language Studies 11, no. 1 (1980): 75- 95.
--------- . “Subtexts of The Brothers Karamazov." Russian Literature 11 (1982): 173-208.
Dolenc, Ivan. Dostoevsky and Christ. Toronto: York, 1978.
Dunlop, John B. Staretz Amvrozy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima. Belmont,
Mass.: Nordland, 1972.
Fänger, Donald Lee. Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism. Cambridge: Harvard Uni
versity Press, 1965.
Fedorenko, Boris, and Irina Yakubovich. “Ilynsky-Karamazov: A Key to Charac
ter.” Soviet Literature, no. 339 (1976): 131-47.
Futrell, Michael. “Buddhism and The Brothers Karamazov." Dostoevsky Studies 2
(1981): 155-62.
Gibson, A. Boyce. “The Riddle of the Grand Inquisitor.” Melbourne Slavonic
Studies 4 (1970): 45-56.
Gide, André. Dostoevsky. Translated by Arnold Bennett. London: J. Bennett &
Sons, 1925.
Golubov, Alexander. “Religious Imagery in the Structure of The Brothers Karamazov. ”
In Russian and Slavic Literature, edited by Richard Freeborn, et al. Columbus:
Slavica, 1976.
Gordon, Haim. “Dostoevsky and Existentialist Education: Father Zosima as Reli
gious Educator.” Religious Education 74, no. 2 (March-April 1979): 198-209.
Grossman, Leonid Petrovich. Dostoevsky: A Biography. Translated by Mary Miller.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975.
Guardini, Romano. “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” Translated by Sally
Cunneen. Cross Currents 3 (Fall 1952): 58-86.
Haardt, A. “Ivan Karamazov’s Atheism as an Introduction to Russian Religious
Thought.” International Dostoevsky Society Bulletin 4 (1974): 31-32.
Hacker, Andrew. “Dostoevsky’s Disciples: Man and Sheep in Political Theory.”
Journal of Politics 17 (November 1955): 590-613.
Hesse, Hermann. In Sight of Chaos. Translated by Stephen Hudson. Zurich: Verlag
Sewylda, 1923.
Holquist, J. Michael. Dostoevsky and the Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer
sity Press, 1977.
Ivanov, Viacheslav. Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky. Translated
by Norman Cameron. London: Harvill Press, 1952.
Jackson, Robert Louis. The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.
--------- . Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1966.
--------- , ed. Dostoevsky: New Perspectives. Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984.
Jones, John. Dostoevsky. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Jones, Malcolm V. Dostoevsky: The Novel of Discord. London: P. Elek, 1976.
Jones, P. Philosophy and the Novel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.
Kabat, Geoffrey C. Ideology and Imagination: The Image of Society in Dostoevsky.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.
Kanzer, Mark. “The Vision of Father Zossima.” American Imago 8 (December
1951): 329-35.
Bibliography ! 177
Kellogg, G. Dark Prophets of Hope: Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, Faulkner. Chicago:

Loyola University Press, 1975.
Lavrin, Janko. Dostoevsky and His Creation. London: W. Collins & Sons, 1920.
Leatherbarrow, William J. Fedor Dostoevsky. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
Linner, Sven. Starets Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov: A Study in the Mimesis of
Virtue. Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature 4. Stockholm: Almqvist &
Wiksell, 1975.
Loewen, Harry. “Freedom and Rebellion in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Grand Inquisitor’
and Nietzsche’s The Antichrist." In Crisis and Commitment: Studies in German
and Russian Literature in Honor ofJ. IV. Dyck, edited by John Whiton. Water
loo: University of Waterloo Press, 1983.
Lord, Robert. Dostoevsky: Essays and Perspectives. London: Chatto & Windus, 1970.
McSweeney, Kerry. “Alyosha’s Sacred Memory.” Dalhousie Review 56 (Winter
1976-77): 663-70.
Manning, Clarence A. “The Grand Inquisitor.” American Theological Review 15
January 1933): 16- 26.
Matlaw, Ralph E. The Brothers Karamazov: Novelistic Technique. The Hague:
Mouton, 1957.
Meier-Grafe, Julius. Dostoevsky: The Man and His Work. Translated by Herbert H.
Marks. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928.
Merril, Reed B. “Ivan Karamazov and Harry Haller: The Consolation of Philoso
phy.” Comparative Literature Studies 8 (1971): 59-77.
Meyer, Priscilla, et al., eds. Dostoevsky and Gogol’. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979.
Mikhailovsky, Mikhail Konstantinovich. Dostoevsky: A Cruel Talent. Translated
by Spencer Cadmus. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979.
Murray, John Middleton. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Critical Study. London: Martin
Seeker, 1916.
Nilson, John. “Pride, Passion, and Pain: Hell in Other Words.” American Benedic
tine Review 32, no. 3 (1981): 209-31.
Nilsson, Nils A. “Dostoevskij and the Language of Suspense.” Scando-Slavica
16 (1970): 35-44.
Palumbo, Donald. “Convergence of the Left and Right: The Ironies of Political
Extremism Viewed through the Existential Perspectives of Dostoevsky, Faulk
ner, and Sartre.” Lamar Journal of the Humanities 9, no. 2 (Fall 1983): 21-31.
--------- . “The Theme of the Fortunate Fall in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:
The Effective Counterargument to Ivan’s Ambivalent Atheism.” CEA Critic
43, no. 4 (May 1981): 8-12.
Peace, Richard A. Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Plank, Robert. “One Grand Inquisitor and Some Lesser Ones.” Gamut 4 (Fall
1981): 29-38.
Rahv, Philip. Essays on Literature and Politics, 1932-1972. Boston: Houghton Mif
flin, 1978.
--------- . “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” Partisan Review 21 (May-June
1954): 249-71.
Ramsey, Paul. “God’s Grace and Man’s Guilt.” Journal of Religion 31 (January
1951): 21-37.
178 / Bibliography
--------- . “No Morality without Immortality: Dostoevski and the Meaning of

Atheism.” Journal of Religion 36 (April 1956): 90-108.
Rosen, Nathan. “Style and Structure in The Brothers Karamazov." Russian Literature
Triquarterly, no. 1 (1971): 352-65.
----------. “Why Dmitrii Karamazov Did Not Kill His Father.” Canadian-American
Slavic Studies 6 (1972): 209-24.
Ross, Rochelle H. “Who Is Ivan Karamazov?” Forum 8, no. 2 (1970): 39-43.
Rossbacher, Peter. “Schiller’s Poem ‘Resignation* and Dostoevsky’s Brat'ja
Karamazovy." Wiener Slavistiches Jahrbuch 23 (1977): 246-54.
Rowe, William W. “Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov: Some Com
parative Observations.” Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 10 (1974): 331-42.
--------- . Dostoevsky: Child and Man in His Works. New York: New York Univer
sity Press, 1968.
Rozanov, Vasily. Dostoevsky and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. Translated by
Spencer E. Roberts. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972.
Sandoz, Ellis. Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.
Schultze, Sydney. “Settings in Brat’ja Karamazovy." Russian Literature 19 (April
1986): 315-22.
Seduro, Vladimir. Dostoevsky in Russian Literary Criticism. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1969.
--------- . Dostoevsky’s Image in Russia Today. Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1975.
Shein, Louis J. “An Examination of the Kantian Antinomies in The Brothers
Karamazov." Germano-Slavica 2 (1973): 49-60.
Simmons, Ernest J. Dostoevsky: The Making of a Novelist. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1940.
Slochower, Harry. “Incest in The Brothers Karamazov.” American Imago 16 (1959):
127-45.
Strauss, G. “The Prophet: Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and Gide’s El Hadj.”
Australian Journal of French Studies 14 (January-April 1977): 88-104.
Strem, George. “The Moral World of Dostoevsky.” Russian Review 16 (1957):
15-26.
Sutherland, Stewart. Atheism and the Rejection of God: Contemporary Philosophy and
The Brothers Karamazov. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.
--------- . “Dostoevsky and the Grand Inquisitor: A Study in Atheism.” The Yale
Review 66 (March 1977): 364- 73.
Terras, Victor. A Karamazov Companion. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1981.
--------- . “Turgenev and the Devil in The Brothers Karamazov.” Canadian-American
Slavic Studies 6 (1972): 265-71.
Terry, Garth M., ed. New Essays on Dostoevsky. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer
sity Press, 1983.
Vivas, Eliseo. “The Two Dimensions of Reality in The Brothers Karamazov.”
Sewanee Review 59 (Winter 1951): 23-49.
Vladiv, Slobodanka. “Dostoevsky’s Major Novels as Semiotic Processes.” In Pro
ceedings of the Russian Colloquium, University of Melbourne, August 26—27, 1976.
Melbourne, Australia: Russian Department, University of Melbourne, 1977.
Bibliography / 179
Volkov, Vladimir. "Analysis of Smerdjakov.” Dostoevsky Studies 2 (1981): 143-46.

Walsh, Harry Hill. “The Book ofJob and the Dialectic of Theodicy in The Brothers
Karamazov." South Central Bulletin 37: 161-64.
Wasiolek, Edward. Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964.
-------- . “Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov." Explicator 16 (1957): Item 7.
-------- , ed. and trans. The Notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Weinrich, M. 1. “Ideological Antecedents of The Brothers Karamazov." Modem
Language Notes 64 (June 1949): 400-406.
Wcllck, Rene, ed. Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962.
Wharton, Robert V. “Dostoevsky’s Defense of Christ in The Brothers Karamazov:
Part Two.” Cithara 24, no. 1 (November 1984): 59-70.
-------- . “Roads to Happiness in The Brothers Karamazov: Dostoevsky’s Defense of
. Christ.” Cithara 23, no. 2 (May 1984): 3-15.
Yarmolinsky, Avrahm. Dostoevsky: Works and Days. New York: Funk & Wagnails,
1971.
Acknowledgments
“Justice and Punishment” (originally entitled “Justice and Punishment: The Broth
ers Karamazov") by Richard Peace from Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the
Major Novels by Richard Peace, © 1971 by Cambridge University Press. Re
printed by permission of Cambridge University Press.
“How Sons Become Fathers” by Michael Holquist from Dostoevsky and the Novel
by Michael Holquist, © 1977 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by
permission of Princeton University Press.
“The Rhetoric of an Ideological Novel” by Robert L. Belknap from Literature

and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800-1914, edited by William Mills Todd
111, © 1978 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Uni
versity. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Stanford University
Press.
“Verbal Pollution in The Brothers Karamazov" by Gary Saul Morson from PTL: A
Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3 (1978), © 1978 by North-
Holland Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of North-Holland
Publishing Company.
“The Self’s Negativity” (originally entitled “The Novel and Self’s Negativity”) by
Maire Jaanus Kurrick from Literature and Negation by Maire Jaanus Kurrick, ©
1979 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of Columbia
University Press.
“The Wound and the Lamentation: Ivan’s Rebellion” by Robert Louis Jackson
from The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes by Robert Louis Jackson, ©
1981 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton
University Press.
“On The Brothers Karamazov" by John Jones from Dostoevsky by John Jones, © 1983
by John Jones. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Clarendon Press,
Oxford University Press.
“Alyosha and the Hagiographie Hero” by Valentina A. Vetlovskaya from Twenti

eth Century Views: Dostoevsky, edited by Robert Louis Jackson and translated
by Nancy Pollack and Susanne Fusso, © 1977 by Nauka, Leningrad, USSR.
181
182 / Acknowledgments
Reprinted by permission of VAAP (All-Union Association of Authors’ Rights).

This essay originally appeared in Poetika Romana “Brat’ia Karamazovy”
(Leningrad: Nauka, 1977), pp. 163-83.
Index
Adrianova-Perets, V. P., 162 141-42; as communication

Afanasiy, 32, 107 system, 57-58; and Crime and
Agricultural symbolism: and Punishment, 83; Dostoevsky’s
Alyosha, 30-31, 124; and attitude toward, 1; epigraph of,
Ivan’s rebellion, 126-27; in 143-44, 146, 147; epilogue of,
Zosima’s teaching, 27-29 145, 148, 149; and failure of
Aleksey the Man of God, 156-59, literature, 94-95; and Freud’s
160, 161-62, 167, 168 primal horde myth, 40-43;
Andrey (coachman), 26, 35 Grand Inquisitor legend in,
“Atheism” (planned Dostoevsky 4-5; how many “brothers” in,
novel), 81-82 94; humans as spiritual animals
Austen, Jane, 113, 116, 117 in, 143, 144, 145; murder scene/
Averkiev, Dmitry Vasilievich, night in, 91, 137; as narrative,
Likho, 60-61, 62, 63, 64 2; as novel of crime and punish
ment, 139; as novel of generation
gap, 139; as novel of nudges,
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 54 137; as novel of smells, 135,
Bakunin, Mikhail, 56-57 137, 141, 146; as novel without
Ballin (Kharkov businessman), climaxes, 145; “now” which
73-75 never arrives in, 139, 146, 148;
Barsov, E. V., 121 and The Possessed, 143, 147,
Bateson, Gregory, 91 148; spreading of themes in,
Belinsky, V. G., 56-57, 68, 69, 73, 138-39, 144—45; as two novels,
75, 80-81, 82 95, 151-52, 158
Belov, S. V., 74
Berdyaev, Nikolay, 51
Bernard, Claude, 73 Camus, Albert, on Ivan, 132
Bible, the. See Job, Book of; St. Cana feast and miracle, 30, 115,
John 147, 148, 166-67
Blake, William, 1-2, 3; on Milton Candide, Dostoevsky plans version
and Satan, 83 of, 81-82
Brothers Karamazov, The, 1, 5; Ceres and Demeter, cult of, 27
Alyosha’s preeminence in, 152; Chernyshevsky, Nikolay, What Is
apocalyptic naturalism in, to Be Done?, 73, 77
183
184 ! Index
Children: Alyosha’s treatment of, Crystal Palace, the, 14

34; and Dmitri, 25, 26, 35; and
Ilyusha’s funeral, 36-37; Ivan on
cruelties toward, 11, 13, 35, Darwin, Charles, 39
44, 54, 122; and Lise, 34, 35 Demeter, 27, 28
Christ: Dmitri as, 26-27; Descartes, René, 104
Dostoevsky on, 50; and Devil(s): Dostoevsky’s treatment
father-son relation, 50-51; and of, 58-64; and Grand
Grand Inquisitor, 45, 49-50, Inquisitor, 110; Ivan on, 13, 59,
65, 66, 82, 94, 103, 107; and 60, 80, 116; Ivan’s confronta
Ivan on human unworthiness, tion with, 4, 19-22, 45, 61-64,
128; Ivan as imitating, 124, 126, 97-98, 111; Ivan’s dilemma
132-33; Kolya on, 79; as over, 115; Ivan’s relation to,
model for Alyosha, 49, 50; and 98- 103, 104, 105; and
recognition of other, 108 negation, 98, 101, 103-5
Christianity: and fathers and sons, Devils, The, 17, 27
50; and Russian-Rome anal Diary of a Writer, The, 89
ogy, 157 Dickens, Charles, 116
Chulkov, George, 80, 81 Dimitrius of Rostov, Lives of the
Church and state: and Grand Saints, 157
Inquisitor, 12-13, 18; and Dolinin, Arkady, 80, 81, 82
justice/punishment, 9-10; and Dostoevsky, Aleksey (son of
Zosima, 18-19 Fyodor), 13, 37
Conrad, Joseph, 147 Dostoevsky, Fyodor: and Blake,
Conscience: of Grand Inquisitor, 1-2; and Dmitri, 4; and Hugo,
103; of heart vs. reason, 109; 138; and Ivan, 2, 4, 53, 54—57,
of Ivan, 21, 22, 102; and Ivan’s 58, 67; on Pushkin, 15; and
speech, 112; and “mysterious sacrifice of individual happiness,
visitor,” 27; and other as 14-
15
subject, 107; and Smerdyakov, “Dostoyevski and Parricide”
118; Zosima on, 10, 19, 22 (Freud), 2
Consciousness: Ballin on, 74—75; Double, The, 147
and conscience, 109; Dmitri Douglas, Mary, 86-87
as, 5; and Ivan’s monologue,
111-12; openness of, 97; as
rational subjectivity (Hegelian), Eliot, George, 109, 113, 116, 117
113, 114; as recognition of Eliseev, Grigory Zakharevich, 72,
coexistence, 113-14; and secular 73, 75
ization of devil and God, 105; Enigmatic Man, An (Leskov), 72,
and selfhood, 106 78
Crime and Punishment, 14—15; and Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, 89
Averkiev, 62; and Brothers Eryomin, I. P., 152
Karamazov, 83; epilogue of, 139, Euripides, 144
144, 145; Raskolnikov’s article Evil: as anomaly, 86; of Ivan, 104;
in, 8; and regeneration/ problem of, 67; as unaccount
resurrection, 141—42; and Mrs. able, 94. See also Job, Book
Svidrigailov’s bad breath, 135 of
Index ! 185
Faith; of Alyosha vs. Dmitri, 146; source for, 81; and Christ, 45,
Ivan’s denial of, 100-101, 111; 49-50, 65, 66, 82, 94, 103, 107;
as love not reason, 108; and and devil, 102-3, 104, 110;
recognition of other, 108 Dostoevsky’s letter on, 54-57;
Father, the: and Czar/God, 2-3, and grace, 84; and hell, 7; and
50; in Freud’s primal horde Ivan on human unworthiness,
myth, 39—40; and Oedpial crime, 128; and Kolya, 76-77, 79;
25 D. H. Lawrence on, 53-54, 55;
Fathers and Sons (Turgenev), 77, 78 master-slave reality in, 107,
Faust (Goethe), 101-3, 104 108; misreading of, 55, 82-83,
Ferapont, Father, 33, 60, 62 84; and parenthood, 44-45;
Fetyukovich, 23 and punishment, 12, 19; and
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 103, 105 separateness, 110; and Smerdy
Fish, Stanley, 83 akov, 90; and Zosima, 4,
Fonvizina, N. D., letter to, 50 18-19, 29, 49-50
Freedom: Christ’s offer of, 103; Grigorev, Apollon, 81
and devil of intellect, 101; vs. Grigory, 88
Grand Inquisitor authority, 4, Grushenka, 145; and Alyosha, 30,
44, 45, 103 145, 146, 161, 166; and devils,
Freud, Sigmund: on Brothers 62; in Dmitri’s dream, 26; and
Karamazov, 5, 42; “Dostoyevski hell, 7; and male fantasy, 3;
and Parricide,” 2; on God, 50; and Old Karamazov, 137; and
primal-horde myth of, 2, Rakitin as Judas, 70
39-43, 49, 51; Totem and Taboo, Guilt: of Dmitri, 24—27; of Ilyusha,
2, 39-40 35; in intellectual inspiration
Freudian master biography, 42-43; for crime, 36, 76; of Ivan,
and Alyosha, 40, 42, 48-50, 21-22, 36, 63; and Ivan’s
51; and Dmitry, 42, 48; and rebellion, 125; Kolya Krasotkin
Ivan, 40, 42, 43—46; and on, 36; shared, 140; and
Smerdyakov, 40, 41, 42, 43 Zosima on Christ, 67. See also
From the Other Shore (Herzen), 56 Conscience; Sin
Girard, René, 51 Hagiographie narrative: and

God, 5; Alyosha on, 115, 164; and Aloysha as hero, 153-61; and
devil’s nihilism, 21-22; and Zosima’s biography, 46
father, 2-3, 50; Ivan on, 13, 15, Hegel, G. W. F., 105-6, 111
59, 80, 116, 124, 127-28; Hell: in Brothers Karamazov, 7-8;
Kolya on, 79; and myths of and Ivan’s rebellion, 126, 131;
subjectivity, 115; and Old and “Mokroye,” 26; Zosima on,
Karamazov as father, 44 7, 67, 115
Goethe, J. W. von: and devil Herzen, Aleksandr, 56-57, 66, 68,
scene, 63, 98, 99; Faust, 101— 73, 75, 82
3, 104; and negation, 111 Herzenstube, 142—43, 145, 149
“Grand Inquisitor” legend, the, Hoffman, E. T. A., 62, 63
4—5, 64—66; Alyosha’s com House of the Dead, The, 139,
ment on, 66-67; Belinsky as 141-42, 144
186 / Index
Hugo, Victor, 138 166-67; as Christian visonary, 1;

destiny of, 147—48, 168; and
devils, 60; and Dmitri, 48, 161,
Idiot, The, 17, 33, 35, 62 163; faith of, 146; Freudian
Ilyusha Snegirev, 13, 35-37, 76, biography of, 40, 42, 48-50, 51;
77-78, 87, 148 on God, 115, 164; and
Individualism, Dostoevsky’s criti Grushenka, 145, 146, 161, 166;
cism of, 106, 108-9 as hero, 146, 152; as
Intellect: and Grand Inquisitor, hero-saint, 152-61; and Ilyusha
103; and Ivan vs. devil, 99- (“Fathers and Children”),
100, 101, 102; Ivan dominated 36-37; Ivan compared with, 152,
by, 1, 4, 20, 21. See also 154, 166; Ivan as hope of,
Reason and rationality 117-18; and Ivan’s rebellion,
Iosif, Father, 8 13-14, 70, 119, 164-65; and
Ippolit (The Idiot), 13, 62 Ivan’s speech, 112; and Kolya
Krasotkin, 75; and Lise, 34,
35, 114, 159-61; and punish
Jakobson, Roman, 57 ment, 13-14; and Rakitin,
James, Henry, 138 69-70, 136, 161, 165; and
Job, Book of, 1; and devil, 21, selfhood, 113, 114-15; as
63-64; Grigory reads, 88; and united with earth, 30-31, 124;
Old Karamazov as father-image, world as suffering and
3; and Zosima, 4, 16 temptation for, 162-65, 168; and
John the Merciful, Saint, 18, 130. Zosima, 29-31, 33-34, 42, 49,
See also St. John, The Gospel 148, 155, 156, 159, 165-66; and
According to Zosima’s biography, 47—48
Jones, John, 2, 3 Karamazov, Dmitri: and Alyosha,
Justice: Alyosha on, 29-30, 166; 48, 152, 161, 163; and
church vs. state conception of, brotherhood, 109; as conscious
9; of Dmitri’s going to Siberia, ness, 5; on contradictions of
143; eternal vs. earthly, 21; world, 86; Dostoevsky as, 4;
and Grand Inquisitor, 65-66; and dream of, 24-26, 140-41, 143,
Ivan’s rebellion, 11-12, 12-13, 146; and earth, 28-29; faith of,
16,
15- 30, 124-25, 126, 129, 146; Freudian biography of,
130, 132; and sacrifice of 42, 48; and “Grand Inquisitor,”
individual happiness, 14-15; 4, 5; guilt and punishment of,
Zosima on, 16-17, 23 22, 23-26, 143, 144, 145; as
hero, 146; Herzens tube cares
for, 142—43; Ilinsky as source
Karamazov, Adelaida Miusova for, 139; and Ivan, 4, 112; and
(mother of Dmitri), 41 Katerina, 109, 114; and night of
Karamazov, Aleksey (Alyosha, murder, 137; Old Karamazov
Alesha), 152; and Aleksey the beaten by, 137, 139; pillow
Man of God, 156-59, 160, provided for while asleep, 25,
161-62, 167, 168; and 113, 141; and Rakitin, 73,
brotherhood, 31—32; and Cana 136-37; rebirth of, 140, 143,
miracle, 30, 115, 146—47, 148, 145, 146; self unclear to, 106;
Index / 187
Karamazov (continued) Smerdyakov’s relation to, 43,

sensual nature of, 1; and smell, 76, 83, 97, 106, 112, 137, 139;
135-36; and Zosima, 22, 27, 28, speech of, 111, 112; trial
29, 33, 48, 145 appearance of, 111-12; and
Karamazov, Fyodor Pavlovich Zosima, 22. See also “Grand
(Old Karamazov), 2-3, 137-39; Inquisitor” legend
as Adam, 1; brothers’ desire for Karamazov, Ivan, “rebellion” of,
death of, 41, 48, 49, 137; on 10-14, 15-16, 18, 119^20,
devils, 59; and father of Aleksey 122-33; and Alyosha, 13-14, 49,
the Man of God, 157-58; 70, 119, 164-65; and Freudian
Lizaveta raped by, 41, 88; and biography, 44; and God as
old myths, 115—16; paradoxes merchant, 124, 127-28; and
of, 91; and primal horde myth, immortality of suffering chil
2, 40—41, 42-43; and dren, 122f as lamentation,
Smerdyakov, 41, 42, 43, 87, 420-22, 132; logic of, 19;
136; on Zosima, 28, 32-33 narrative-to-poetry leap in,
Karamazov, Ivan: and Alyosha, 123^24; and unacceptability of
112, 117-18, 152, 154, 166; reconciliation, 13QrOl; vs.
article on ecclestiastical courts Zosima on resurrection, 129^30
by, 8-10, 12, 13, 90; and Karamazov, Sophia Ivanovna
Belinsky, 81; characters tied to, (mother of Ivan and Alyosha), 41
67-68; and coexistence with Karamazov Companion, A (Terras),
other, 110-11; on devil, 13, 59, 1
60, 80, 116; devil confronts, 4, Karamazovism, 40-41, 42
19-22, 45, 61-64, 97-98, 111; Karenina, Anna, 113
and devil myth, 115; devil’s Katerina Ivanovna: and Alyosha in
relation to, 98-103, 104, 105; as world, 162-63; and Alyosha
divided (ambivalent), 8, 10, on brotherhood, 31; and Dmitri,
18, 66, 79; and Dmitri, 4, 112; 109, 114; and Ivan, 43—44; and
as Don Quixote, 111; male fantasy, 3
Dostoevesky’s attitude toward, Khokhlakov, Lise (Liza), 34, 35,
2, 4, 53, 54—57; Dostoevsky’s 60, 62, 114, 159-61
discrediting of, 58, 67; Freudian Khokhlakov, Mrs., 18, 160
biography of, 40, 42, 43-46; Kierkegaard, Soren, 108
on God, 13, 15, 59, 80, 116; Kirillov (The Devils), 17
guilt of, 36; and hell, 7; and Koteliansky, S. S., 53
immortality, 115—16; as intellect- Krasotkin, Kolya, 35-36, 50,
dominated, 1, 4, 20, 21, 102; 75-82, 148-49
and Kolya Krasotkin, 75-82; and
Lise, 35; and love, 18, 130,
166; and murder scene, 91; and Lacan, Jacques, 113
Rakitin, 68-75, 136; and “Landlady, The”, 59
rational subjectivity, 113; and Lawrence, D. H., on “Grand
recognition of other, 115; Inquisitor,” 53-54, 55, 82
self-doubts of, 110—11; and Lebedev (The Idiot) 35
Smerdyakov’s paradoxes, 89—91; Lebyadkin, Marya (The Devils),
Smerdyakov as parody of, 4; 27, 33
188 / Index
Leskov, Nikolay, An Enigmatic Notes from the Underground. See

Man, 72, 78 Underground Man
Likho (Averkiev), 60-61, 62, 63,
64
Liubimov, Nicolai Alekseevich, Oedipus complex, 39-40; and
letter to, 54, 55, 57, 63-64, 66, crime, 25. See also Freudian
78, 82 master biography
Lives of the Saints (Dimitrius of Old Karamazov. See Karamazov,
Rostov), 157 Fyodor Pavlovich
Lizaveta, 41, 87-88, 136 Oresteia, The, 136
Lobachevsky, Nikolay, 15
Logic or geometry, Euclidean and
non-Euclidean: and Grand Paisiy, Father, 8, 12, 163-64
Inquisitor, 66; and Ivan’s Parricide: in Freud’s primal horde
rebellion, 15-16, 86, 123, 125, myth, 39—40; and Ivan, 21;
130-31; of Zosima, 19. See also and Old Karamazov’s purpose,
Intellect; Reason and rationality 2-3; and Smerdyakov’s plot,
Love: active vs. contemplative, 94
155; of Alyosha, 34, 155, 166, Poor People (Dostoevsky), 135
167-68; and devil on mortality, Possessed, The: and Brothers
102; as free choice, 109; and Karamazov, 143, 144, 147, 148;
Ivan, 18, 130, 166; self as, 108; conclusion of, 46; and Crime and
Zosima on, 18, 66, 155 Punishment, 139—40; demons
Lukâcs, Gyorgy, 51, 118 in, 59; Dostoevsky on figures in,
54, 56; epigraph of, 143—44,
147; “salvation” in, 142
Marfa Petrovna, 88 Praise of Folly, The (Erasmus), 89
Markel (Zosima’s brother), 13, 46, Punishment, 7-8; of Dmitri, 22,
107 24; and Grand Inquisitor, 12,
Mil ton, John, 58, 83 19, 65-66; of Ilyusha, 35-36; of
Minaev, Dmitry, 72-73, 75 Ivan, 22, 58; and Ivan’s article,
Miracles: in Alesha’s dream, 30; at 9; and Ivan’s rebellion, 11,
Cana, 30, 115, 147, 148, 12-13, 18, 125, 126; and
166-67; and Grand Inquisitor’s “Karamazov,” 23-24; terms for,
authority, 44; and Kolya’s 22-23; Zosima on, 9-10, 19,
“resurrection” of dog, 76, 77; 35. See also Justice
and Zosima, 19, 29
Miusov (Muisov), 8, 14, 89, 91
Mochulsky, Konstantin, 132 Radicalism, Russian, 77; and Ivan,
“Mokroye,” 26 14, 53, 54, 56-57, 72, 83; and -
Murin (“The Landlady”), 59 Kolya, 77—79; and Rakitin, 71-72
Myshkin (The Idiot), 9, 17, 33 Rakitin, 136-37; and Alyosha,
69-70, 136, 161, 165; and
Dostoevsky on Belinsky, 81; and
Nihilism: devil on, 21; and Ivan, Ivan, 68-75; on Karamazovism,
17-18; and Kolya Krasotkin, 40; and Kolya, 149; and Old
36; and Old Karamazov, 3 Karamazov, 3
Index / 189
Rammelmeyer, Alfred, 56, 81 Slavophiles: and Belinsky, 81; and

Raskolnikov (Crime and Punish Russia-Rome analogy, 157
ment), 15, 62, 63, 144 Smekalov, Lieutenant, 141
Raw Youth, The, 128 Smerdyakov, 32, 33, 41, 87-88;
Reason and rationality: devil on, and common sense, 102;
19-20; as inhibition, 101; conscience lacking in, 118; and
Ivan’s commitment to, 112; and devil, 104; and Dmitri, 35; as
Ivan’s paradoxes, 90; in Ivan’s drives or instincts, 1; Freudian
rebellion, 125; Smerdyakov’s biography of, 40, 41, 42, 43;
mocking of, 89. See also Ilyusha taught by, 35, 76, 87;
Intellect; Logic or geometry, Ivan as parody of, 4; Ivan’s
Euclidean and non-Euclidean relation to, 43, 76, 83, 90-91,
Resurrection: and Alyosha, 51; of 97, 106, 112, 137, 139; and
epilogue, 149; and Ivan’s Judas parallel, 71; and
rebellion, 126, 127, 129-30; and metacommunicative language,
Kolya parodies, 76, 77; vs. 91-93; motives of, 93-94;
lamentation, 121; and St. John mystery of, 85, 86; and
12:24, 27 paradox, 89-91; on soldier
Rogozhin (The Idiot), 33 martyr, 138; as “stinking,”
Rome, ancient: Church taken over 136; suicide of, 43, 92-93, 106;
by, 9; and Russia, 157 and unconscious speech, 97; as
Rozanov, V. V., 55 unsympathetic, 2, 3; verbal
Rozenblium, Lia Mikhailovna, 64 pollution of, 88-89
Smith, Robertson, 39
Snegirev, Captain, 25, 31-32,
St. John, The Gospel According 33-34, 149, 164
to, epigraph from, 26-27, 29, Snegirev, Ilyusha, 13, 25, 35-37,
83-84, 143, 145, 146 76, 77-78, 148
Saltykov, Mikhail (pseud. Schedrin), Socialism. See Radicalism, Russian
69, 71 Solovyov, Vladimir, 158
Schiller, J. C. F. von, 68 Stavrogin (The Possessed), 15-16,
Self(hood): and Alyosha, 113, 46
114—15; devil lacking in, 104; Svidrigailov (Crime and Punish
of Karamazovs, 106; as love, ment), 62, 63
108; myths of, 115; negativity
of, 105; and novel form, 116—17;
and recognition of other, 112; Terras, Victor, A Karamazov
and religious myths, 115-16; and Companion, 1
Smerdyakov, 93; speech as, Theodosius of Pechersk, 152-53, 156
106; and unconscious, 106 Tolstoy, Leo, 2, 4, 113, 116, 140;
Sergius of Radonezh, 156 and D. H. Lawrence, 54
Shatov (The Possessed), 15-16, 144 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 2, 39—40
Sin: and Ivan’s rebellion, 124; Transcendent(al): devil as end of,
Russia as swarming with, 2; 98; and Dostoevsky on God, 5;
solidarity or connectedness in, as immanent, 115
67, 127, 137, 138, 140. See also Trofimovich, Stepan (The Pos
Conscience; Evil; Guilt sessed), 46
190 / Index
Turgenev, Ivan, Fathers and Sons, Zhuchka (dog), 35, 76

77, 78 Zosima (elder), 33; and Alyosha,
“Two truths,” (human and 29-31, 33-34, 42, 49, 148, 155,
divine), 16, 20-21 156, 159, 165-66; biography of,
46-48; on Book of Job, 4, 16;
and brotherhood, 31, 32;
Unconscious, the: and Ivan’s conversion of, 32, 46, 107-10,
conscience, 102; and novel’s 112; and cult of the earth, 27-28,
return to tragedy, 117; and self, 29, 33; on damnation, 66;
109 death and decomposition of, 28,
Underground Man, the: devil 29-30, 33, 47, 69-70, 135, 146;
compared with, 45; and Ivan, and Dmitri, 22, 27, 28, 29, 33,
15, 131, 132; and “literary,” 47 48, 145; and ecclesiastical-
courts discussion, 8, 9, 9-10;
God’s ways justified by,
Verkhovensky, Stepan (The 16-
17, 19, 67; and Grand
Possessed), 139-40, 144, 147, Inquisitor, 4, 18-19, 29,
148 49-50; and hell, 7, 67, 115; and
Versilov (The Raw Youth), 128 heresy, 32-33; and Ivan, 22;
Vetlovskaia, Valentina, 58 on justice, 16-17, 23; on
Voltaire: Ivan quotes, 60, 133; lamentations, 121; on love, 18,
Kolya quotes, 75 66, 155; and Old Karamazov,
28, 32-33; Rakitin’s “Life” of,
71; and reader’s identification, 3;
What Is to Be Done? (Cherny and Smerdyakov, 32; and St.
shevsky), 73, 77 John 12:24, 26-27

(Modem Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom (Ed.) - Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov-Chelsea House Publishers (1988)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Modem Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom (Ed.) - Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov-Chelsea House Publishers (1988)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Modem Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom (Ed.) - Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov-Chelsea House Publishers (1988)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Modem Critical Interpretations

The Orestcia Evelina Man and Superman

These and other titles in preparation

Edited and with an introduction by

Chelsea House Publishers 0 1988

Editor’s Note I vii

This book gathers together a representative selection of the best mod­

essentially an obscurantist, and Blake would have judged him to have

The old man’s complicity in his own murder gets carried by

By “broad” Jones means simply just too alive to deserve to die,

all. As a portrayer of women, Dostoevsky does not match Tolstoy, let

just as Ivan’s devil is too much a confused projection of Ivan. To be

A striking feature of The Brothers Karamazov, and one which marks it

From Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels. © 1971 by Cambridge

carried on throughout the whole novel; a debate which has as its

apparently diverse principles of Church and State; and this, he argues,

“It is like this,” began the elder, “sending people to penal

But in his teaching on the Church’s attitude to punishment, Zosima is

Oh, Alesha, I am not blaspheming. I do understand what a

The argument in Zosima’s cell on civil justice versus ecclesiastical

Yet the figure chosen by Ivan to represent the “Church turned

concrete theocracy—that very solution to the problem of synthesis

“Shoot him,” Alesha uttered quietly, raising his eyes

By centring his rejection of universal harmony so firmly on man,

As “harmony” might therefore be seen in purely human terms, Ivan’s

Alesha’s reply expresses a moral principle which runs through the

Raskolnikov had discovered that he could not found human happiness

The ideas of Ivan’s “Rebellion” are not allowed to stand unchal­

God’s world, which Ivan specifically rejects, is accepted whole­

We fell to talking about the beauty of God’s world and

beetle, every ant, every golden bee, everything so amazingly

dark thoughts, Ivan Karamazov, as we have seen, tells Alesha that he

words which parody Ivan’s own mathematical reasoning he hints at

You see, I too, like you yourself, am a prey to the fantastic,

this happens I sulk and grudgingly carry out my appointed

The enigma of “the two truths” is thus exemplified in the devil

“punishment” is not nakazaniye (the word which figures in the title

The word “kara,” therefore, seems to be particularly associated

element of his surname, “maz" suggests mazat’—“to daub,” “to smear”).

The realisation of the true nature of his guilt comes to him

He inwardly felt that although he was stupidly asking ques­

he wanted this to happen at once; he wanted to do this

Gentlemen, we are all cruel; we are all monsters; we all force

The dream confronts Dmitri with the far-reaching implications of

joyful songs. Nevertheless the dream ends on a hopeful note for he

The plight of the child demands sacrifice; Dmitri is going to

Zosima quotes this passage of Scripture to Alesha in explaining the

This expression, through agricultural symbolism, of the miracle of

In view of Zosima’s cult of the earth, the obeisance to Dmitri

These thoughts come to Alesha during the funeral rites performed

yardstick of “justice” shows how deeply the words of Ivan have

Alesha stood, looked, and suddenly, as though his legs were

Brotherhood, of course, is a concept present in the very title of the

Otherwise it would mean that everyone has to be the enemy

But the “active love” demanded by universal brotherhood must

It is indeed a scandal! No, Holy Fathers, with you one

This outburst is comic but, like Karamazov’s ramblings on Zosima as

This love of torment which she expresses so vividly here is itself

And if Krasotkin, who suspected nothing of the sort, had

This book gathers together a representative selection of the best mod

The ideas of Ivan’s “Rebellion” are not allowed to stand unchal

God’s world, which Ivan specifically rejects, is accepted whole

He inwardly felt that although he was stupidly asking ques

You must realise that there is nothing better, more power

... for me ugly women don’t exist. . . . What’s so wonder

Smerdyakov represents the most truncated version of the biogra

you. And Jesus gives the kiss of acquiescence to the Inquisi

Although Dostoevsky’s statement carries more authority than Law

municative language if he chooses. Recall that the well-wrought casu