Greetings, fellow Karamazov readers! We are roughly at the book’s halfway mark now (hoorah!), and I’m happy to report that the plot picks up tremendously for the downhill slope. 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 looked at one half of the major ideological divide that drove some of Dostoevsky’s arguments in this middle, highly dialectical portion of the novel. Now we’ll look at the side that D. found more sympathetic, and some of the formal, structural problems he encountered when trying to put this argument into practice.
Notes and Comments:
Before we get started, I have to make a quick addendum to last week’s discussion of the Westernizers: in trying to get all the intellectual groundwork down, I neglected to mention Dostoevsky’s #1 ideological opponent in this discussion, fellow writer and journalist Nikolai Chernyshevsky.
Chernyshevsky, a few years Dostoevsky’s junior, was another young writer-disciple of the critic-activist Vissarion Belinsky; unlike D., he maintained his leftist politics late in life. Also like D., he was arrested for his political work — he was editor of revolutionary magazine The Contemporary and an agitator for overthrowing the political order — and he was confined to the Peter Paul fortress in the middle of St. Petersburg before his own dramatic mock execution (this time with a fake sword) and subsequent Siberian exile. While in his prison cell, he wrote his most enduring work, and possibly the single most influential Russian novel of the 19th century, What is to Be Done?
The novel is a bit of a slog: a working-class woman finds physical and intellectual freedom by embracing the ideas of revolution, etc. Chernyshevsky was not a gifted writer, but the way the novel breaks down stagnant beliefs about social and economic roles and supplies them with a dizzying fantasy climax made it a more immediate and emotionally direct tool for the real-life revolutionaries that followed. Lenin loved it. Marx loved it. Even some begrudging conservative writers loved it.
That “fantasy climax” takes place during the heroine’s dreams, where Chernyshevsky lays out a stepwise, progressive history (borrowing heavily from Hegel and Marx, but with a pointedly feminist angle) that shows the human race evolving past various forms of oppression symbolized by the way men view women: as objects of animal lust, as objects of worship, as objects of chaste distance, but always as objects rather than as equals. But now the heroine is catapulted to the future, where she sees full equality, a world without nations, a world where people leave the cities and return to the countryside to live harmoniously agrarian lifestyles alongside advanced technology that makes even work feel like leisure. Oh, the technology!
Yes, Sasha said that sooner or later aluminum would replace wood, and perhaps even stone. Aluminum and more aluminum; all the spaces between the windows are hung with huge mirrors… Here in this hall half the floor has been left uncovered and one can see that it too is made of aluminum.
So Chernyshevsky wasn’t exactly an expert in the metallurgical arts, but his futurological vision inspired generations to come — but not Dostoevsky, who oscillated between horror (Chernyshevsky’s vision is London’s Crystal Palace writ large) and mockery (the aluminum revolutionary makes its way into Demons).
Anyway, it’s worth knowing Chernyshevsky to have a better understanding of D.’s primary sparring partner, the source of the era’s most potent and direct statements of everything D. opposed. Chernyshevsky was also a massive influence on future writers, including and especially Ayn Rand (despite their basic ideological differences).
Today we’re supposed to be taking a closer look at the conservative reaction against writers like Chernyshevsky and the Westernizers more broadly. The main group is conventionally known as Slavophiles for the way they foreground their Slavic-ness as an essential element of their thought, and pointedly in opposition to the corrupting, negative features of the West that had been imported to give Russia the veneer of “respectable” civilization. Ironically enough, this attitude was built out of another Western import: romantic nationalism.
We generally point to writer and philosopher Alexei Khomiakov as the father of the capital-S Slavophile movement (rather than merely the first to “love the Slavs,” where examples go back for centuries) in the 1830s, when Dostoevsky was still a teenager. His co-founder, Ivan Kireevsky, had traveled Europe like D. and found it a spiritually rotten experience. Hyper-individualism, rationality elevated to the point of idolatry, science applied as a social tool with no concern for the human beings being crushed underneath it… Why was Russia so obsessed with importing this?
But if “rationalism” is the province of Western thought, what could Russia offer? Khomiakov and Kireevsky used the term sobornost’ to indicate a kind of “sense of communality” they felt that distinguished the East from the West, the sense that everything is connected, not just as pre-New Age pablum,* but as a deeply metaphysical, spiritual understanding of the structure of God’s creation.
(* — Although, fittingly enough, New Age pablum was first established by a Russian writer in the 1870s.)
Sobornost’ cannot be rationally circumscribed — it affects our thoughts, our emotions, and our drive toward others in ways we can’t mathematically define or determine. It also links us with the natural world, to the wide, endless, often uninhabited regions of Russia, so different than Europe’s strangled cities. It is the essence of what is sometimes referred to as the Great Russian Soul.
In opposition to the West’s radical freedom, which, as we recall, ends in tyranny, Russia could offer the world the true gift of freedom: a full sense of communal belonging, Orthodox Christianity, and, as a unique manifestation of the deepest roots of Russian history, the Tsar as spiritual/national leader. In other words, the most conservative aspects of Slavophilism emphasized the same three-pronged ideology as Nicholas I: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. If that seems deeply un-free to us in the West, it’s because our obsessive rationalism has cut us off from our sense of community, from God, and from the essentially true freedom that comes from humility.
The challenge to rationality is an interesting one, because it puts the question of “debate” into an unusual light: how do you “debate” with rationality when rationality is usually the standard by which debates are judged? This isn’t to say that Slavophiles (or Dostoevsky) rejected rationality in all forms, but that they argued its insufficiency: after all, a child with a reasonably good sense of rational argument can argue himself (and others) into intellectual dead-ends, as we’ve already seen throughout TBK.
But if not rationality, then what? This is where instruments like faith come in: our purest form of communion with the “real” reality is based on a non-rational engagement with our spiritual Father. And this category of mental engagement need not be limited to God, but an act of humility and common toward each other. Possibly the single most-quoted poem in 19th century Russia, by poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev, puts the point directly:
Russia is a thing of which
the intellect cannot conceive.
Hers is no common yardstick.
You measure her uniquely:
in Russia you believe!
(Note: the original poem is only four lines, but I think Jude’s translation is the best of the literally hundreds of attempts at this. See the link above for more prosaic renderings.)
The people we usually group under “Slavophile” was a diverse lot — some were even on the political left, believe that sobornost’ could form the ideological backbone of socioeconomic progress. Late in Dostoevsky’s life, another Slavophile-ish figure rose to great prominence on a more fully universalist version of this philosophy, the great theologian and writer Vladimir Solov’ev.
As a young thinker, Solov’ev (sometimes rendered Solovyov) developed a friendship with Dostoevsky despite the latter’s more nationalistic sympathies. Solov’ev agreed that Western hyper-individualism was a spiritual dead end, and the belief that social problems could all be solved by positive application of the latest science was dangerous (we’re entering the age of eugenics here, so he wasn’t wrong), but he also believed that sobornost’, if it was to be a fully communal experience, extended not just to Slavs and not in some narrowly parochial way, but to all of humanity. He believed the Orthodox and Catholic churches could reconcile. He believed that Jews, themselves deserving of basic dignity, had already figured these things out, and could provide a model for Christian reconciliation.
Despite some fundamental differences, Dostoevsky was deeply taken by the breadth of depth of Solov’ev’s philosophy of love. Unfortunately, Solov’ev’s life would get more complicated after Dostoevsky’s death. He rose to great prominence with a massively public failure: in his desire to elevate Christian ideals at the state level, he argued against the death penalty for the terrorists who assassinated Alexander II, for which he lost his position and his future. But he appealed to a new generation of thinkers who found his radical, all-embracing love a palliative in a difficult, violent era. He wrote a great deal of material and traveled widely, having what he described as three mystical visions of Holy Wisdom (in the form of a woman: Sofia), one of which took place in the reading room of the British Museum. He wrote about it in a thoroughly delightful poem. He still enjoys a reputation as one of Russia’s most original and intelligent thinkers.
Questions for Discussion:
Since the novel was serialized, the publication of Book 5 (including “The Grand Inquisitor”) led to a panic among readers, including religious figures, who wrote to Dostoevsky begging to know how he was going to disprove such a terrifying argument. He told them Book 6 is the response. First-time readers, especially younger ones, tend to find this response disappointing.
What are your thoughts? Do you find it a satisfying rebuttal? Noting our discussion above about the limits of rationality, how does D. try to get around this in terms of constructing an argument?
Alyosha deliberately echoes Ivan when responding to Rakitin’s taunts (“It’s not God I’m rebelling against, I simply ‘don’t accept His world.’”) How do we interpret this scene, and Alyosha’s crisis of conscience?
Does Grushenka’s discussion and behavior here help us put her meeting with Katerina Ivanovna in a different light? What kind of figure does she emerge as when interacting with Alyosha?
One of the big themes in these two books is faith in all its colors. What do you think are some of the overarching “lessons” about faith that D. is drawing from these seemingly unconnected events?
Characters Appearing in This Section:
- The Karamazovs (Fyodor, Dmitri, Ivan, Alyosha)
- Elder Zosima and his story:
- His mother and his brother Markel
- His servant Afanasy
- His unnamed first love and her husband
- His “mysterious visitor” Mikhail + characters in his own story
- various peasants, fellow officers, etc.
- Father Paissy, Father Iosif (the librarian), Father Mikhail (the warden), Father Anfim
- The seminarians Porfiry and Rakitin
- The monk from Obdorsk
- Father Ferapont, Zosima’s rival
- Madame Hohlakov (Khokhlakova)
- Grushenka (Agrafena Alexandrovna)
- her landlady, the widow Morozov(a)
- her “patron,” the widower Kuzma Kuzmich Samsonov
- her two servants: an old cook and her granddaughter Fenya
- her Polish officer she believes will save her
PREVIOUS ENTRIES IN THE SERIES:
- Announcement
- Introduction
- Book 1
- Book 2
- Book 3
- Book 4
- Book 5