Congratulations, fellow readers! After three months of dedicated reading, we have conquered Mount Karamazov together! (or, perhaps you’re a touch behind and have the summit in site: if so, you’re almost there!) You can now join the ranks of those who both have the book on your shelf and don’t have to qualify it with “I plan to read it one day, sure!” You have been tried by fire, and you have come out purified.
Or maybe not: I look forward to this week’s discussion because we can put together some overarching conclusions about What It is Dostoevsky was Doing and Whether We Think He Accomplished It. To help prod us along that path, I’ve put together some commentary by Dostoevsky readers, critics, and scholars, some substantial and some fleeting — maybe their thoughts will help clarify ours, or maybe we’ll find ourselves embarking in other directions?
Notes and Comments:
Vasily Rozanov, Dostoevsky’s first major commenter, on what the book does and does not accomplish in the end (translation mine):
There is no doubt that we lost many revelations of the human soul in the broken-off ending (or, more precisely, the main part) of The Brothers Karamazov, and that there would have been material really clarifying the path of life [i.e. if Dostoevsky had finished his original plan]. But this was not to be; in the part of the novel we have before us, Alyosha is only preparing himself for that task: he listens more than speaks, occasionally inserts a few comments into the speech of others, sometimes asking questions, but mostly watching in silence. However, all these features that only outline his character, but not to express it, are so subtly and accurately placed that the unfinished figure already shines before us as in real life. In him we have an inkling of the moral reformer, teacher, and prophet, whose breath is, however, stopped at the moment when the lips were about to open — a phenomenon unique in the literature, and not only for this reason. If we wanted to look for analogies to it, we would find it not in literature but in our painting. Namely, the figure of Jesus in the famous painting by Ivanov standing in the distance, but seemingly unnoticed among those standing closer to us, but nevertheless central and dominant over them. The image of Alyosha is a memorable one in our literature, his name is already being invoked when people meet certain rare and welcome phenomena in life; and, if we are destined to be reborn someday into something new and better, it is very possible that he will be the guiding star of this revival.
Konstantin Mochulsky, the most important scholar of Dostoevsky in Russian (trs. Michael A. Minihan):
The architectonics of Karamazov are distinguished by their unusual rigidity: the law of balance, of symmetry, of proportionality is observed by the author systematically… This is the most “constructed” and ideologically complete of all Dostoevsky’s works… Under the psychological exterior of the personality, Dostoevsky unveils its ontology and metaphysics. The history of the Karamazov family is an artistic myth which encompasses a religious mystery, [which] is why the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor stands at its center. [But] Dostoevsky was writing not a philosophical treatise or a theological system: he was composing a novel. Religious-philosophical material was introduced into the framework of the novel genre and treated according to its laws. A tense dramatic plot is constructed, at the center of which is an enigmatic crimes; the ideological masses are drawn into the whirlwind of the action, and clashing together, produce effective outbursts. In The Brothers Karamazov, the religious mystery-play is paradoxically joined with a crime novel. Notwithstanding all its depth, this is one of the most captivating and popular works of Russian literature.
Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky’s major biographer in English:
The central plot is carefully constructed so as to lead, with irresistible logic, to the conclusion of Dimitry’s guilt; the accumulated mass of circumstantial evidence pointing to him as the murderer is literally overwhelming. The fact remains, however, that he is innocent of the crime (though implicated in it by his parricidal impulses), and the reader is thus constantly confronted with the discrepancy between what reason might conclude and the intangible mystery of the human personality, capable even at the very last moment of conquering the drives of hatred and loathing. The entire arrangement of the plot action thus compels the reader to participate in the experience of discovering the limitations of reason. Only those among the characters who are willing to believe against all the evidence — only those whose love for Dimitry and whose faith, deriving from that love, are stronger than the concatenation of facts — only they are able to pierce through to the reality of moral-spiritual, as well as legal, truth in its most literal sense, and this motif illustrates why Dostoevsky could legitimately maintain that “the whole book” is a reply to the “Euclidean understanding” that created the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.
Albert Camus, in The Rebel (trs. Anthony Bower):
The fact that Ivan was defeated does not obviate the fact that once the problem is posed, the consequence must follow: rebellion is henceforth on the march towards action. This has already been demonstrated by Dostoievsky, with prophetic intensity, in his legend of the Grand Inquisitor. Ivan, finally, does not distinguish the creator from his creation. “It is not God I reject,” he says, “it is creation.” In other words, it is God the father, indistinguishable from what He created. His plot to usurp the throne, therefore, remains completely moral. He does not want to reform anything in creation. But creation being what it is, he claims the right to free himself morally and to free the rest of mankind with him.
Ralph Ellison, in a letter to Richard Wright explaining Dostoevsky’s influence on his fiction:
I’ve always preferred another Dostoevsky type, the Ivans and the Dmitris, rather than the Alyoshas or Myshkins.
Sherwood Anderson, in a letter to Hart Crane:
It is delightful that you should also have picked the two books I care for most, Karamazov and Possessed [i.e. Demons]. There is nothing like Karamazov anywhere else in literature — a bible.
Albert Einstein, in a 1920 letter to Paul Ehrenfest:
I am in raptures about The Brothers Karamazov. It is the most wonderful book I have ever put my hands on.
Einstein would later cite Dostoevsky in a 1930 debate on Science and God, claiming that Dostoevsky “exhibits life to us; but his aim to is present us with the mystery of spiritual existence and do so clearly and without comment.”
Kurt Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse Five:
Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn’t science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. “But that isn’t enough any more,” said Rosewater.
Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi:
Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not make wrong into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything away, so that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of equal value. Dostoevsky, for example, was right to protest against this kind of Heaven and this kind of grace in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal banquet beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing had happened.
My Own Two Cents:
One conventional way of thinking about the structure of the novel (which seems so ungainly on first read, despite Mochulsky’s correct observation that everything is so rigidly constructed) is that everything in the book hinges on a single question and answer. The question appears in Book 5:4 (“Rebellion”), and it’s asked by Ivan of his brother Alyosha:
“...Tell me yourself, I challenge you—answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature*—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”
“No, I wouldn't consent,” said Alyosha softly.
“And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy for ever?”
[* note: I use the Garnett translation here because I disagree very strongly with P/V, who translate Ivan’s question as “you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature,” i.e., making it sound like Alyosha himself would have to do the deed, which makes Alyosha’s “no” seem almost banal. Ivan asks the question in terms of passive necessity, that the torture and death “would be necessary.” I think this is a strong distinction between individual agency and passive acceptance of the requirements of Ivan’s hypothetical: in other words, Ivan is saying this is a condition of the world.]
As we see, Alyosha says no for himself, attempting to rebound that Christ would be able to lay the proper groundwork for forgiveness, which is what causes Ivan to launch into “The Grand Inquisitor.” But at the end of the book, when he has lost everything — his mentor dead, his father murdered, his eldest brother wrongly convicted, his middle brother mentally and physically broken — Alyosha is now ready to answer Ivan’s question in the affirmative:
Let us make a compact here, at Ilusha's stone, that we will never forget Ilusha and one another. And whatever happens to us later in life, if we don't meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones, do you remember, by the bridge? and afterwards we all grew so fond of him. He was a fine boy, a kind-hearted, brave boy, he felt for his father's honor and resented the cruel insult to him and stood up for him. And so in the first place, we will remember him, boys, all our lives. And even if we are occupied with most important things, if we attain to honor or fall into great misfortune—still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are.
In other words, faced with the scenario Ivan predicted earlier in the book, Alyosha decides to be the architect — or rather, the representative of The Architect on earth — and build the future happiness of these children on the unmotivated, unfair suffering and death of a child, Ilyusha. Readers have generally responded to this last chapter with disappointment, that it seems so uncharacteristically sunny after the events of the previous book. This is not unusual for Dostoevsky (see: Raskolnikov’s sudden conversion in Crime and Punishment), but because he laid this groundwork so early in the book, I find it immensely satisfying, as far as a final response to the book’s biggest moral challenge.
Moreover, I’d argue that Dostoevsky was trying to find the best way to maneuver through a tricky paradox: the proper treatment of faith in literature. Fiction tends to prep us for one of two outcomes: the Justice ending (the good rewarded, the bad punished) or the Injustice ending (the good punished, the bad rewarded), or possibly both distributed among characters. Dostoevsky’s task here was much more difficult, since one of the book’s big arguments is the necessity of faith.
The Justice ending rewards faith, which Dostoevsky considers illegitimate on those terms: recall the Inquisitor’s argument that Christ could descend from the cross, but that would bind everyone to faith, since it would no longer require free, conscious choice (once you see the miracle, you no longer have doubt). You need to have faith despite Christ’s decision not to bind you, despite the fact that the book’s holiest character, Zosima, was rotting in the church instead of exuding the scent of holy perfume. You need faith despite injustice.
However, the Injustice ending entails great risks: if the faithful aren’t rewarded, how do you convince readers that it was worth it? In other words, how do you assert the importance of faith despite the faithful characters losing in the end? And if you do make some promises about “rewards in the afterlife” that aren’t illustrated in the fiction, you risk turning your readers away from faith (which is, after all, exactly what happened: there’s a reason The Brothers Karamazov is so popular with young atheists.)
In the end, Dostoevsky chooses the Injustice ending and hopes that the character of Alyosha and his decision is enough of a moral center to guide us to the correct conclusions. Maybe that works for you, maybe it doesn’t, but I hope it helps explain some of the book’s structural logic and major accomplishments.
I’d love to hear your interpretations in the comments!
PREVIOUS ENTRIES IN THE SERIES:
- Announcement
- Introduction
- Book 1
- Book 2
- Book 3
- Book 4
- Book 5
- Books 6-7
- Book 8
- Book 9
- Books 10-11.2
- Books 11.3-11.10
- Books 12.1-12.9