That half is a drama, and it was played out there.
The second half is a tragedy, and it is being acted out here.
- D.F.K.
Greetings, readers! By now you should be at or near the end of Book 3 of 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 got our first taste of the family all together as they made a scene in the town monastery. This week Dostoevsky (finally) fills us in on some vital backstory: why Dmitri and Fyodor at feuding, what’s motivating the women in their perverse love triangle, and the possibility that the brothers are four rather than three in number…
Notes and Comments:
Confession! The last paragraph of Book 3, Chapter 3 is my favorite passage in Dostoevsky. The line in Dostoevsky I’m mostly likely to quote (for nefarious reasons) is Ivan’s dismissive “let one viper devour the other” (it comes in handy during internet flame wars). What I’m saying is: this is a big section of the book for me!
Commentators generally agree that TBK represents a culmination of D.’s work as a writer, wrapping up a lifetime of themes and obsessions, repurposing older characters and situations, and attempting as complete a statement of his life’s philosophy as he was perhaps capable of making. Against the hotheaded young Dmitri’s despair, this would be a good time to look at some formative moments in early Dostoevsky to see where it all started.
Fittingly enough, the germ for D.’s last novel comes from his earliest childhood: the murder of his father, a doctor who worked with what we’d now call “low-income” patients on the edge of Moscow. Sigmund Freud (pdf), among others, would have a field day interpreting D.’s ambivalent feelings about his cold, distant father, his horror at the murder, and the vile portrait of Fyodor that he gives his own name.
I’d rather start with D.’s entry into the literary scene. Like a lot of aspiring young writers, D. was transfixed by the most influential literary figure of the 1840s, a critic by the name of Vissarion Belinsky. In a break from most of his contemporaries, the very pro-West, anti-autocracy Belinsky argued that literature (and criticism) has a political and social purpose: he interpreted existing works through a political lens and encouraged young writers to tackle important social issues in their work.
The key work for young D. was Gogol’s masterful short story “The Overcoat,” which Belinsky argued was a work of great realism, the epitome of Russian concern for the “little man” (a major trope in Russian literature, begun, like all things, with Pushkin. The “little man” is the everyman crushed by the enormity of the state, the bureaucracy, the power of the emperor.) The misery and poverty of Gogol’s protagonist, Akaky Akakevich, was a powerful inducement for D. to express his early, quasi-left-leaning social concerns in literature.
(Side note: very few modern critics accept Belinsky’s reading of the Gogol. Incidentally, neither did Gogol. The brilliantly ironic narrative distance is vital to understanding the story.)
And so, Dostoevsky bursts onto the literary scene in 1845 with a sentimental epistolary novella Poor Folk (or Poor People), a tale of misery and poverty, which we’ll charitably say is “indebted” to Gogol’s “Overcoat”. Naturally Belinsky fell in love and proclaimed D. a brilliant newcomer in Russian literature, and D., who was never not a passionate human being, allowed this to inflate his ego to levels his peers found insufferable. Rumors spread that, when editors wanted to include Poor Folk in a volume of new literature, D. demanded special placement (first or last) with decorative borders drawn around it, etc. etc. True or not, he quickly developed a reputation both for arrogance and for thin skin.
Among those mildly annoyed by Dostoevsky’s pretensions was the already well-established Ivan Turgenev. In what was the beginning of a lifelong love/hate relationship, Turgenev helped circulate anonymous verses mocking D. in a local journal. The young writer was humiliated, and even more so when his second work, the fantastic novel The Double, was met with cool indifference. Another riff on Gogol, this time with a healthy dose of E.T.A. Hoffman, Dostoevsky’s horror-fantasy lacked the “realist” immediacy that Belinsky had sought and found in Poor Folk — the influential critic dismissively declared that the book’s depiction of madness is a topic “for doctors, not for poets” — and the same circle that praised D. earlier found little to enjoy. The young author was crushed.
So it’s strangely fitting that when Dostoevsky was arrested a few years later — he belonged to a reading group, the Petrashevsky Circle, that discussed issues banned in the Russian press — he was accused specifically of reading passages from Belinsky’s Letter to Gogol, a defense of social progressiveness over Gogol’s post-conversion belief in Russia’s god-given autocracy.
The story of Dostoevsky’s arrest, death sentence, and subsequent “salvation” has been told plenty of times (if you haven’t heard it: the execution was a sham, designed for prisoners to feel grateful to the emperor for granting them last-minute clemency), but it was Dostoevsky’s period in Siberia that had the more profound effect on what he was to become as a writer. Confronted from real despair, deprivation, violence and torture, his sympathies (already wavering) shifted entirely to a conservative defense of the Russian state and religion. Dostoevsky himself would emerge from the prisons revitalized by the success of his memoir, House of the Dead. It is one of the great works of prison literature, and counted Ivan Turgenev among its many admirers. Dostoevsky was back, but he’d be a very different writer than the hotheaded young writer they all remembered.
(One final sidenote: there is an oft-quoted line from House of the Dead that seems to pop up everywhere: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” or “You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners.” Some sites even give a page number, somehow. Don’t be fooled: this is not a Dostoevsky quote, and it certainly isn’t from House of the Dead.)
Questions for Discussion:
Let’s start with the big one: what the hell is Dmitri’s problem? Does his strange and contradictory set of infatuations and decisions make any sense to you? What exactly do you think is driving him? And why is he so drawn to his brother Alyosha?
And why did Grushenka pull off that humiliation of Katerina Ivanovna? What do you think was the purpose of that scene (particularly: why do it so publicly)?
The allegations about Smerdyakov’s parentage make our already unlovable Fyodor seem even more vile. Do you think they’re true? If so, what might be the implications for how we interpret (among other things) the title of the novel?
For Next Week:
How are we doing with this pace? Can we do Book 4 for next week? It’s a bit shorter than Book 3, and packed with incident.
Just a note looking ahead: when we get to it, I’d like to break Book 5 into two parts. It contains “The Grand Inquisitor,” which can be a difficult read (especially in the Garnett translation), and will give us more than enough food for discussion.
Characters in This Section:
(An asterisk indicates a newly introduced character who remains important later in the novel.)
- The Karamazov family: Fyodor, Dmitri, Ivan, Alyosha
- Their servants:
- Grigory Vassilevich
- Marfa Ignatieva, Grigory’s wife
- Pavel (“Fyodorovich”?) Smeryadkov
- his mother, “Stinking” Lizaveta; Kondratyeva, the widow who attempts to care for her
- “Karp,” a notorious convict on the loose
- Katerina Ivanovna (Katya)
- her older sister Agafya Ivanovna
- their father, a lieutenant-colonel; their uncle, a distinguished general
- three aunts; one is the general’s widow in Moscow, the other two are Katerina’s “chaperons”
- various characters involved in the money scandal: the Commander, Dr. Kravchenko, the merchant Trifonov, etc.
- Grushenka (Agrafena Alexandrovna)
- Foma*, a fellow soldier who helps arrange Dmitri’s binges
- the Elder Zosima
- with him: Porfiry the novice, Father Paissy
- Briefly mentioned, off-stage:
- Fyodor’s wives, Adelaida and Sofia
- Madame Khokhlakova (Hohlakova), writer of notes
- Her daughter Lise, who wrote a love letter-ish to Alyosha
- Rakitin, the seminarian
- Belyavsky, a former friend of Fyodor’s
Previous Entries in the Series:
- Announcement
- Introduction
- Book 1
- Book 2