Would you consent to be the
architect on those conditions?
Tell me, and tell the truth.
- I.F.K.
Greetings, intrepid readers! By now you should be through Book 5 of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. As always, feel free to participate regardless of how far you’ve gotten, but please keep spoilers labeled so that new readers have a chance to discover the material on their own.
Last week we took a closer look at Russia’s socioeconomic situation in the mid-19th century, with some detail about the emancipation of its serfs, as background to Dmitri’s financial obsessions and the Snegiryov family troubles. This week we face a doozy: after eavesdropping on Smerdiakov and a lady caller, Alyosha has to listen to his brother Ivan talk for three straight chapters. Heh.
Let’s dive in!
Notes and Comments:
The first major work of commentary on Dostoevsky’s body of work was published ten years after his death: Vasily Rozanov’s Dostoevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. Rozanov himself was a strange bird, a brilliant if troubling genius whose early devotion to D. was so extreme, he even married his widow (I’ve written a bit about Rozanov here). Current opinion is mixed on Rozanov’s handling of the material, but I mention it to highlight that Dostoevsky Studies, as a field, begins with an extended essay on a single chapter in the current reading. So obviously it’s important.
There are a few themes in Rozanov that have persisted: he astutely connects “The Grand Inquisitor” to Dostoevsky’s trip to London and his earlier novella ”Notes from Underground”. To tease out some of this reasoning behind this, we should look at what was happening in Russian thought at the time, specifically the debate between two ideological groups, conventionally known as the “Westernizers” and the “Slavophiles”.
Russia has had a complicated relationship with the capital-W West for as long as its recorded history. It was founded, as per its medieval chronicles, by inviting the Scandinavian Varangians to rule over their chaotic and lawless tribes. Its religion came from Byzantium, and its alphabet soon followed. In ebbs and tides, it constructed an empire and later a philosophy of state on models later borrowed from the Germans, the French, and the English. After traveling incognito through the continent, Peter the Great bragged that his new city would be a Window to Europe, forcing his subjects to dress (and shave!) according to European fashions. Catherine, a devoted francophile, touted her empire as the fulfillment of Enlightenment ideals, and cultivated friendships with Voltaire and Diderot. Even the war against Napoleon, in 1812, led to a fad for French language and culture, rather than the reverse.
None of this happened without significant pushback. Peter’s edicts had to be enforced with blood; Catherine bore the disdain of intellectuals and historians for generations. But things really didn’t shape into a fully polarized ideological argument until the 19th century, when the debate about Russia was galvanized by another borrowing from Europe: romantic nationalism. Does a country have a unique spirit, a national genius, that can only be understood by its own people? Are the common folk better in touch with that genius, and with the natural beauty and heritage of the nation, than the corrupted upper and educated classes? Is a nation better served by emphasizing that genius instead of emulating others?
We’ll leave the nationalist side of the debate until next week (Dostoevsky mines it deeply in the next book), but for now we’ll focus on their opponents, the Westernizers, who believed that Russia’s path to development lay not in its own, often fallow fields, but in identifying and absorbing the best of what its western neighbors had to offer.
As we said, Russia borrowing from the West was nothing new, but the dreams of an Enlightenment-driven Russia always met with rocky transplant. Peter’s innovations were mostly in the service of greater order and control, with none of the philosophical underpinnings. For all of Catherine’s forward motion in areas like education and publication, her rule was despotic and driven by whim, and her era’s treatment of serfs notorious. In a cruel bit of history, one of the students Catherine sent abroad to learn Western thought and return it to Russia, Alexander Radishchev, she later condemned for exposing the violent, dehumanizing treatment of serfs in his travelogue, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (one of the great, genuinely progressive texts produced in 18th century Russia.) He was exiled to Siberia, and committed suicide only a few years after his return.
Radischev was only one of many cautionary tales over the next century: the Russian intellectual class, increasingly suspicious of autocratic power, fought (sometimes literally) for the kinds of advancements they were seeing in Europe after the French revolution. Why did serfdom still exist? Why couldn’t the Emperor cede some of his power to a representative government, à la England? Why shouldn’t certain rights be enshrined in a constitution?
Some Emperors were more sympathetic to these ideas (Alexander I, II) and some significantly less so (Nicholas I, II; Alexander III). A key moment in Russian history came on the death of the sympathetic Alexander I and accession of thoroughly unsympathetic Nicholas I, which Russia’s progressive thinkers rightly recognized as death-blow to their programme. On December 14, 1825, they attempted a poorly planned coup, and were executed/exiled for their efforts. Some sympathizers (like Pushkin!) kept a low profile for a while, but the heroic image of the Decembrist Revolt would live on in the increasingly vocal, angry world of Russian newspapers and literary circles.
And then came “the shot in the night”, the single text that galvanized the intellectual response to Westernization. Shortly after the Decembrist Revolt, a Russian who was traveling in Europe at the time wrote a “Philosophical Letter” on Russia’s place in world history. His name was Petr Chaadaev, a member of the intelligentsia and nascent philosopher, and his controversial letter was circulated illegally among readers for years before its official publication a decade later. While criticizing the shallow ways that Russia has borrowed foreign ideas for largely cosmetic purposes, Chaadaev’s thesis, in a nutshell, was that nations do have something to offer, but Russia’s history of cruelty, serfdom, and backwardness assured that its only contribution to world history would be as an object lesson — a failed state for more successful countries not to emulate:
Alone in the world, we have given it nothing, we have taught it nothing; we have added not a single idea to the multitude of man's ideas; we have contributed nothing to the progress of the human mind and we have disfigured everything we have gained from this process. Nothing, since the very first moment of our social existence, has issued from us for the general good of man; no useful thought has sprouted from the sterile soil of our fatherland; no great truth has sprung forth from our midst. We have not taken the trouble to invent anything ourselves and we have borrowed from the inventions of others only deceptive externals and useless luxury.
Westernizers took this as a brave call-to-arms, a warning to change course and recognize what those successful nations have done to escape their “infancy” (skimming over, perhaps, Chaadaev’s call for a sober, Western-style Christianity). Those opposed to them, like Dostoevsky, were taken aback by the arrogance of Chaadaev’s claims. Rozanov highlights this tidbit: in a letter describing his early plan for The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky imagines his young hero in a monastery and meeting, among other people, a negative character modeled specifically on Chaadaev. (This character was later watered down to our dear friend Miusov.)
Dostoevsky was already well-primed against Westernizing influences. In addition to his now poor assessment of former allies like Belinsky and Turgenev (the latter so fully Europeanized that Dostoevsky turned him into a mincing francophile in Demons), his travels through France and England horrified him. In London he found a terrible industrial metropolis, with smokestacks above and starving homeless below. Most famously, he describes the terror of London’s Crystal Palace, that monument to modernity, which he sees as the end result of Europe’s destructive obsession with Rationalism as the Answer to Everything. Though Western thought is ostensibly founded on freedom of the individual, D. argues, it all ends in deterministic social science and atheism. As Rozanov notes, D.’s first major statement on this in his fiction comes from his 1864 novella Notes from Underground, in which the protagonist sarcastically diagnoses the danger posed by Western thought:
Science itself will teach man... that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world.
There’s no doubt that “The Grand Inquisitor” has much larger implications than this, but Rozanov was the first to note the clear lineage of thought from D.’s European travels through Notes to this chapter in TBK, the single chapter, Rozanov believes, that stands as the culmination of D.’s philosophy.
As for a positive counter-argument? That’ll have to wait for the next installment...
Questions for Discussion:
How might the above discussion help inform our interpretation of Smerdiakov, especially after his discussion with Maria Kondratievna?
What seem to be the driving forces behind Ivan’s philosophy? Commenters typically note that he makes an unusual swerve in not basing his arguments on rejections of god (Ivan’s argument is not atheist, per se), as we’d usually see in these kinds of ideological dialectics.
Take Ivan’s challenge to Alyosha: would you consent to building a world on the kind of moral logic that Ivan lays out here?
Why might Roman Catholicism represent such a ripe target for Dostoevsky?
What do you make of Ivan’s strange reaction to requests that he “go to Chermashnya”?
For Next Time:
How are people doing so far? If you made it through Book 5 this week, you’ve scaled the most difficult mountain that we’ll face in this novel.
If everyone’s still on pace, I think we can manage both Books 6 and 7 by next week. Both together are only slightly longer than Book 5 by itself but nowhere near as dense with material. What do you all think?
Characters Appearing in This Section:
- The Karamazovs: Fyodor, Ivan, Alyosha
- the family servants: Grigory and Marfa, Pavel Fedorovich Smerdiakov
- Madame Khokhlakova (Hohlakov)
- Maria Kondratievna, daughter of the merchant’s widow who cared for Smerdiakov’s mother
- Characters discussed by Ivan:
- The Grand Inquisitor, Jesus, Satan, the people of Seville
- that cavalcade of horrors in “Rebellion”
- Also mentioned, but not appearing in person:
- The other Karamazov: Dmitri
- Dr. Herzenstube, who “can make nothing of it”
- The love triangle: Katrina Ivanovna, Grushenka (Agrafena Alexandrovna)
- Captain Snegiryov
- Elder Zosima, Father Paissy
- Fyodor’s business dealings in Chermashnya: the Maslovs and Gorstkin (Lyagavy)
Previous Entries in the Series:
- Announcement
- Introduction
- Book 1
- Book 2
- Book 3
- Book 4