Just now, thanks to new translations, there is a Dostoevsky boom in Japan, so much so that I could read Crime and Punishment with students at their own request last year. According to a schoolmate of his, the translator Kameyama is astonished at the sales of his Brothers Karamazov. The Russians have historically had a powerful appeal in Japan; there were 24 Japanese translations of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina extant in 1978; 25 of his Resurrection. The influence of Dostoevsky can be seen in Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion and Endo Shusaku’s The Sea and Poison, as well as in the brilliant films based on these works. What is it that thrills the Japanese readers of Karamazov today? Could it be the religious theme of the novel: a quest for resurrection?
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Theological Dialogue with Dostoevsky
Happy the youth that has been stirred by the melodrama and awed by the lofty themes of Dostoevsky’s four major novels. But can one return to them as sixty looms? Turgenev would seem a more suitable companion for later middle age – charming, measured, totally skeptical, convinced that every personal relationship or political cause can only end in ‘smoke.’ I read the novel of that title in the hot springs of Beppu at the start of the year, in the French version prepared under the supervision of the author himself. It is a récit as pellucid as a shallow stream, very comme il faut, undisturbed by any Dostoevskian stretchings after metaphysical insight.
Full of the energy and ambition that comes from faith, and thus immune to the siren-call of resigned disillusion, Rowan Williams took time off from the problems of the Anglican Communion to engage strenuously with Dostoevsky in a book in the series ‘The Making of the Christian Imagination.’ Dr Williams embraces the novelist as a Christian visionary whose work is a message ‘from faith to faith’ and generously vindicates him as the shaper of an authentic contemporary Christian vision of the world.
As a modern churchman without blinkers, Rowan Williams has opened a new chapter in the conversation between faith and literature, following in the footsteps of Romano Guardini, a deep thinker who stepped aside from the troublesome world of professional theology in order to write searching literary monographs on Dante, Pascal, Hölderlin, Rilke and Dostoevsky. Guardini’s Dostoevsky book is laden with long quotations, and like Williams he is not afraid to intervene with theological judgments of his own, bringing to bear the weight of his own experience as pastor and churchman.
Like Guardini, Williams is convinced that if we would bring the Gospel to bear on the complexity of human nature, it is needful to study the latter where it is most richly presented – in literature. Already in a delightful book misnamed Anglican Identities, he has taken seriously the dialogue between Christianity and contemporary literary culture, which is perhaps even more important than the dialogue with science or than inter-religious dialogue. He presents Christianity as a comprehensive imaginative vision of the world rather than just a set of dogmas. He shows how theology adds a contemplative depth to literary criticism, and how the two disciplines can rejuvenate each other.
A further challenge would be to engage writers like Turgenev and his great friends Flaubert and Henry James, whose worlds get along smoothly without any reference to God, though it seems that Turgenev rued his lack of faith. Writers whose relationship to Christian orthodoxy is complex or antagonistic also demand to be addressed. David Taylor reminds me that even though God is mentioned in all of Beckett’s works, there is still no monograph on Beckett and Christianity. Such writers insist on being heard on their own terms, and peremptory dogma will cut no ice with them. They can be encountered only in the vein of patient, humane listening and conversation.
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Barriers to Re-reading Dostoevsky
To embark on reading Dostoevsky one must put aside the civilized squeamishness that Jane Austen and Henry James cultivated. While Dostoevsky is a close student of human behavior, he is no guide to manners. If people attempt discretion and restraint at any point in his narratives, this is quickly undone by some impulsive outburst. The characters unmask themselves and each other all the time, not in a subtle and long-drawn-out way as in James, but in direct plunges into psychological nakedness. It is as if Dostoevsky was sufficiently confident in the wealth of the human material at his disposal to forgo the interest aroused by clothes and masks. It is true that exquisite manners are ascribed to Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, but these are a cipher for his ‘Christlikeness’ and finally his detachment from normal humanity.
The reader of Dostoevsky must also come armed with a willingness to bear the strained, hysterical, frenzied nature of the emotions on display in his works. In one chapter of The Brothers Karamazov (Bk 4, 4), there are no fewer than three hysterical women, and though the chapter is largely humorous, it betrays a weakness in Dostoevsky’s treatment of emotion, which usually can become intense only by becoming shrill and strained. Romano Guardini found that Dostoevsky lacks the everyday middle between the heights and the depths of human experience; none of his characters do any ordinary work (p. 182); there is thus a hollowness in his Christian idealism and in the structure of his novels. There are many intense scenes that are superbly brought off, but the ‘hyper’ quality of the moods and gestures of the characters tend to undercut the value even of these superb scenes.
Dostoevsky can ‘do’ pathos with great ease, and even when we have been strained by hundreds of ‘punishing’ pages of introspection, melodrama, suspense, and strained nerves, he can surprise us with a tear-jerking moment such as that of Raskolnikov’s farewell to his mother. ‘‘‘Mother, whatever happens, whatever you hear about me, and whatever people tell you about me, will you go on loving me as you do now?” ... “Roddy my dear, my firstborn... now you’re just as when you were a little boy.... And if I’ve been crying all this time, it’s because my mother’s heart felt that you were in trouble, dear”’ (pp. 525-7).
Another feature that causes one to approach Dostoevsky with apprehension is the long discussions of God, evil and immortality. Himself a very opinionated man, Dostoevsky lends his characters passionately held views. Guardini (p. 179) lists four groups that Dostoevski hated: rationalists, socialists, Roman Catholics, and Germans (he forgot to add, Jews). These were not ‘opponents’ with whom Dostoevsky could sustain intelligent debate but ‘enemies’ whom he failed to understand and could not do justice to. The dramatization of the arguments redeems the tawdriness of the views. Guardini makes somewhat defensive and moralistic ad hominem comments on Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion against a God who permits the brutalization of children – ‘I just most respectfully return him the ticket’ (Karamazov, p. 245) – and the ensuing legend of the Grand Inquisitor. Torn out of context by many philosophical and theological commentators, these pages should indeed be seen as the expression of a morbid personality, yet they are allowed an irreducible power as they function within the intimate mutually challenging dialogue between Ivan and Alyosha. Ivan himself sets their discussion in the context of the craze among ‘Russian boys’ for discussing the great question: ‘What are they going to argue about, seizing this moment in the tavern? About none other than the universal questions: is there a God, is there immortality?... Russian conversations on these points are conducted as stupidly as possible… The stupider, the more to the point. The stupider, the clearer’ (pp. 234, 236).
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Rejoining the Human Race
Rowan Williams refutes the perception that the irresolution or open-endedness of Dostoevsky’s narratives is a sign of agnosticism. On the contrary, it stems from a deep faith in Providence. Insofar as it is possible for a novelist to do so, Dostoevsky allows his characters to develop autonomously, for good or evil, confident that the unfolding of their destinies will manifest the power of the gospel values. The novelist can ‘show in some degree what divine creation might be like’ – note the characteristic ‘might be’ rather than ‘is’ – ‘by creating a world in which the unexpected and unscripted is continually unfolding, in which there is no imposed last word’ (Williams, p. 234). Dostoevsky’s predecessors in this godlike art are authors such as Defoe and Balzac, who can set characters in motion, reveling in their freedom and vitality, refusing to judge them. Yet Dostoevsky does not set himself up as a pure artist ‘beyond good and evil.’ Rowan Williams shows that his far-flung narratives have a firm moral backbone and serve to drive home one simple, powerful thesis, which may be resumed as follows: It is diabolical to cut oneself off from human beings, to think of them as abstract ciphers, to exalt oneself over them; grace and salvation lie in recognizing our bonds with our fellow-creatures, in our shared corporeal and temporal condition, and in putting ourselves humbly and compassionately at their service.
Dostoevsky after eight months in the Petropavlovsky Fortress was taken out to what he thought would be his execution. Only at the last moment did he receive the actual sentence of eight years of penal servitude in Siberia, reduced to four. This reprieve was lived less as a trauma than as a resurrection, a return to life among his fellow human beings: ‘To be a human being among human beings’, he wrote to his brother the same day, ‘and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall... that is what life is, herein lies its task... The head which created, lived by the highest life of art, which acknowledged and had come to know the highest demands of the spirit, that head has been cut from my shoulders... But my heart is left me, and the same flesh and blood which likewise can love and suffer and desire and remember, and this is, after all, life... Never until now have such rich and healthy stores of spiritual life throbbed in me’ (Karamazov, pp. xii-xiii). Suffering brought Dostoevsky to a new place as an artist, made him an artist whose material was flesh-and-blood human life, lived intensely, from day to day. Hence the epigraph of Karamazov: ‘Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit’ (John 12:24). Living among criminals he attained a sense of values that resembles those of the saintly elder Zosima: ‘He who was most sinful the elder loved most of all’ (Karamazov, p. 29).
Rowan Williams can expound this theme richly and persuasively, not only because of his love of Russian culture and language and his sympathy with the Russian Church, but also because he is grounded in the most important critical work on Dostoevsky, that of Mikhail Bakhtin and his followers. It is this that gives his theological engagement with the novelist a sophisticated literary grip going beyond his predecessors such as Berdyaev or Guardini. Bakhtin showed how Dostoevsky stages a dialogal, polyphonic fiction, where no single voice drowns out the others. In key scenes of ‘carnivalesque’ abandon all the major characters of a novel are thrown together and allowed to react against one another in psychological nakedness. Strained nerves, elements of insanity, drunkenness, violence, and a total lack of tact and discretion give rise to the most embarrassing and sometimes farcical scenes. Out of this free-for-all, Dostoevsky is confident that the ‘truth’ will emerge, a truth that he has not plotted in advance.
The truth that emerges is not a desolate nihilism, as in Flaubert, though The Idiot and The Devils, ending as bleakly as Othello and King Lear, show that Dostoevsky is an open as any novelist to everything that makes human life seem meaningless and absurd. Rather, as the characters interact, they discover how deeply they are linked together by bonds of mutual responsibility. Stripped bare of pretension and self-deception, the characters are not consigned to some Beckettian dustbin, but come to mutual compassionate recognition and are illumined by the compassionate gaze of the author, imaging the divine compassion itself, the hidden reserve or resource behind the story, which breaks through in rare epiphanic moments. Rowan Williams pursues intently a subtle intersection of the literary and the theological, in the way that Dostoevsky’s posture as author lights up truths about the freedom of human beings under the divine gaze and the divine care.
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Raskolnikov
The son of a doctor, Dostoevsky spent his childhood in the grounds of a dingy Moscow hospital, where one may still visit the cramped rooms where he and his admired brother Mikhail did their lessons. Tuned in to human suffering even as a boy, and learning much more of it in his years of exile and imprisonment, he was a compulsive student of human behavior and in his novels offered something like a doctor’s report on the spiritual condition of humankind, with proposals for its amendment.
Crime and Punishment is almost literally the chronicle of a sick-bed. After his crime, Raskolnikov lies in a swoon for four days, like Lazarus in the tomb. The natural goodness of his mother, sister and best friend are a balm that cannot probe and heal his guilt. The supernatural theme is discreet at first: a woman offers him coins: ‘Take, dear, for the sake of Christ’ (Primi, batyushka, radi Khrista); he flings them in the Neva. In the second half of the novel, supernatural elements come to the fore: the devilish Svidrigaylov upsets the protagonist with talk of ghosts and a future life; the police investigator turns into a fatherly spiritual director, telling him that God has not yet finished with him: ‘Don’t think lightly of life, my dear fellow... Perhaps that was God’s way of leading you to Him... You’re not such a hopeless rotter, after all... At least you haven`t been deceiving yourself long; you’ve reached the end of the road all at once... Give yourself up to life without thinking; don’t worry, life will carry you out straight on the shore and put you on your feet’ (p. 471); the holy prostitute Sonya calls him to ‘come forth’ and exchanges crosses with him. The religious upshot of the novel is luminous: the love of Christ never ceases to bombard even the hardened sinner; ‘the love of Christ encircles us’ (2 Cor. 5:14).
A hidden presence of this theological ‘background plenitude which continues to resource the narration and thus to give to the characters an excess of reality over and above the sum total of their past or their present circumstances’ (p. 149) was brought to my attention by the adroit young guide who in 2006 took me through the ghostly courtyards and dark narrow staircases of Raskolnikov’s house and that of the murdered women, up to the actual rooms. (He also pointed out Sonya Marmeladov’s house and her brothel, and the sites of basement pubs like the one where Raskolnikov meets her father. We met a ragged group of drunks, Baudelaire’s sept vieillards, who seemed to step straight out of the novel.) The streets of the locality, with the canal, form a Greek cross: Raskolnikov’s house is at the left corner of the upper arm, and Dostoevsky’s own house is diagonally opposite at the right corner of the lower arm. Moreover, from every door and window Raskolnikov looks out from, a church is visible.
Raskolnikov’s quest to understand his own motives makes excellent detective fiction, and constitutes a psychoanalysis avant la lettre, illustrating various illnesses of modern society and thought in the process. The tale does not lack credibility in our culture of internet nerds and geeks; we have Raskolnikovs galore, and strange murders by detached and lonely individuals abound. Dostoevsky merely intimates the protagonist’s future conversion and regeneration. As a dialogal novelist, he leaves his characters in a state of ongoing development, with an open future before them. The evil Svidrigaylov is in a sense Raskolnikov’s more successful ‘double’, showing more cold-blood decisiveness in the arts of murder and suicide; nor is he totally bad – he provides financially for Raskolnikov’s sister and for Sonya, and dies in part because of his rejection by the former. Christian vision is not a strait-jacket but allows the characters to be heard and understood in a wider, more understanding horizon than that of secular therapists. Love is able ‘to give sustained attention to the other and to hold open a door of change in them, while ‘free’ actions that are not so grounded and directed become further steps in the chain of self-enslavement’ (Williams, p. 150). At the same time, Dostoevsky calls on Christians to grow up to the full measure of this divine compassion and understanding, which meets people where they are, not curtailing the reality of their experience and desire.
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Myshkin
Sonya (Sophia) is perhaps too much a Christ-figure to be entirely convincing in terms of novelistic realism, despite Dr Williams’ insistence that she is not just a simple-minded ‘holy fool’, but a shrewd and active person, ‘stubbornly resolved to make Raskolnikov reenter common humanity’ (p. 153). In the next novel, The Idiot, the protagonist himself is a ‘holy fool’, intended as a perfectly good, selfless man. Here novelistic realism takes its revenge, for Myshkin’s Christlikeness reveals itself as a destructive force. Cast as the tender redeemer of the fallen woman Nastasya, he ends up pushing her into the arms of her murderer. His spiritual fraternity with the latter is sealed by an exchange of crosses, which Rowan Williams reads as inauthentic, mutually corrupting (pp. 154-8); but that is perhaps too harsh. The senile mother, beaming at the friendship between her son and Myshkin, is ‘surrounded with a holy breath’ according to Guardini (p. 397); and in Kurosawa’s film of the novel, the scene is one of grace. One might see the exchange as a pathetic attempt at fraternity, ending in failure like all the other attempts at action in the novel, and one might ascribe the failure not only to Rogozhin’s perversity and violence but also to Myshkin’s Hamletian impotence. In the end, his mind gone, Myshkin embraces Rogozhin over the dead body of the woman. The disturbing tableau could be taken to reveal the decomposition of Romantic Christianity, and the need for some more effective link to the death and resurrection of Christ. In the deconstruction of his protagonist – the self-deconstruction of a character that has escaped the author’s control – Dostoevsky is being weaned away from every tendency to sentimental unrealism.
Romano Guardini reads Myshkin as a sublime Christ-figure and sees The Idiot as Dostoevsky’s ‘deepest religious work,’ in which one detects ‘a mighty and deep presence of God, even though little is said of Him. He is there, He raises himself. He rules. That is clear. It is further clear that this presence comes to the fore in the person of Prince Myshkin’ (p. 357). However, Guardini admits that ‘the symbol of epilepsy can also contain the attempt to flee from the mature existence of grown-ups, from historical responsibility, back to the pre-personal’ (p. 373). But Guardini persists in seeing Myshkin as a ‘child of Heaven’ (p. 374), whom the world fails to understand. Like Christ, Myshkin draws people to himself, but they are scandalized in him (p. 391) and hate his innocence which judges them; this is especially clear in Rogozhin’s love-hate relationship to him. But Guardini also sees Myshkin as ‘falling’ through his attraction to the abyss when he returns to Nastasya Filipovna and Rogozhin’s dagger; ‘a quite concealed guilt, only a lack of vigilance and firmness – but there where this lack should never have found place, in the heart of a mission’ (p. 402). Guardini suggests that piety prompted Dostoevsky to make fall, not wishing to create a hero who could compare too closely with Christ, the only sinless man. Finally, Guardini admits that the figure of Myshkin has a discouraging variety of meanings, and gives the puzzled reader no certainty, but only a Kierkegaardian challenge to religious existence (pp. 410-11). Guardini suggests that we would have the same trouble understanding Jesus and making up our minds about him in the days before his vindication in the cross and resurrection (p. 412).
To the reader who does not embrace the sublime interpretation, which Guardini admits must remain a choice, for which the novel refuses to provide a solid warrant, The Idiot becomes instead the revelation of a nightmare world, a vision of Christianity without the resurrection. The novel is pervaded by references to scenes of execution: ‘In each of the four books that constitute the novel a strategic place is assigned to descriptions of executions or discussions of preordained death: Legros’ death by guillotine in Lyons (I, ii; I, v); a firing squad execution, halted at the last moment (I, v); Dubarry’s beheading (II, ii); speculation on the irony of execution as punishment for Ipolit, were he to commit murder, since he is soon to die of his disease anyway (III, v; III, vi); references to the fourteen-hour agony of the nobleman Glebov, condemned by Peter I to impalement on a stake in Red Square (IV, v); and to the decapitation of Sir Thomas More (IV, vi)’ (Holquist, p. 104). The two male protagonists gaze at a picture of Christ’s body decomposing in the tomb. This painting by Holbein the younger (1521) so fascinated Dostoevsky in Basel that he stood on a chair to examine it, to the consternation of his wife who feared the museum would fine them. Russian novelists tackle death not just as an event in a story, but as a radical problem to be solved. There was even a Russian librarian and pseudo-scientist, Nicolay Fyodorovich Fyodorov, who projected the resuscitation of the entire human race, by methods that he had some difficulty in clarifying. He was admired and befriended by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Soloviev, and Berdyaev (Lord, pp. 175-200).
The resurrections in Crime and Punishment were of a moral and spiritual order, and the language of resurrection of the dead was used only metaphorically and allegorically. Dostoevsky wanted more, and in The Idiot had his characters discuss frontally the riddle of physical death: ‘How can you overcome its laws, when even He, who conquered nature during his lifetime, could not overcome them?’ (quoted, Lord, p. 186). The Idiot produced no positive vision of life after death, and in The Devils the characters brood on the idea of creating eternal life here and now on earth. Kirillov declares: ‘Man will be God and undergo a physical change. The world will be transformed, together with his actions, thoughts and all his feelings’ (quoted, Lord, p. 188). Though these hopes are put in the mouth of terrorists suffering from diabolical blindness, they are hopes at which Dostoevsky himself clutched as props or provisional substitutes for the Christian hope of eternal life.
In The Devils, there are no Christ-figures; rather we are given a picture of how the Anti-Christ would take shape in the modern world. Its account of a fanatical terrorist cell is a chilling prophecy of what we have since seen in Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Jihadism and IRA terrorism. I am not sure that it is a good idea to emphasize so strongly the ‘typology of the demonic’ (Williams, p. 73), the ‘clarification of the nature of the demonic which is going on throughout the book’ (p. 71), for it suggests an intrusion of the theological framework on the realistic development of character, something that Dostoevsky took pains to avoid. The novel is a warning, to be sure, but that does not get in the way of a sustained, specifically novelistic empathy and interest. Some characters are just weak in the ordinary human way, not diabolically ‘possessed’, notably the imperious Mrs Stavrogin and her fatuous companion Stefan Verkhovensky, representing the ‘liberals’ of the 1840s generation. Others, such as Shatov, are primarily victims demanding our sympathy. Even the most diabolical characters, the terrorist ideologue Pyotr Verkhovensky, the fanatical nihilist Kirilov, and the sinister, detached Nicholas Stravrogin, are victims of the ideologies that possess them. Dostoevsky understands them all in basic human terms; no devil need be. The biblical title and epigraph point to the nature of the novel as a threnody rather than a satire.
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Alyosha
The theological design behind The Devils, like that behind Crime and Punishment, is grand and simple, and the relatively narrow focus allows tremendous intensity. The many-branched, pluralistic world of The Brothers Karamazov allows Dostoevsky’s theological themes to unfold more serenely, with no obligation to come to a definitive close. All the novel’s existential and theological explorations are connected with the dramatic action, which is packed into five days, with a two month interval between the third and fourth, an approximation to the ‘unity of time’ beloved of tragic dramatists, and perhaps the five-act tragic structure. (The time-scheme of Crime and Punishment is similar. We have two sets of three continuous days: the day before the murder, I, 1-6; the day of the murder, I, 6-7; the day after, II, 1-2; and then, after the four days of unconsciousness, II, 3-III, 1; III, 2-IV, 4; IV, 5-V, 5; finally, after a few days, the day of the confession, VI.)
Is Karamazov at last a novel that presents positively the Christian vision of the resurrection of the dead? Death had crossed Dostoevsky’s path at this time, in the loss of his son, Alyosha. The name is given to the hero: ‘Starting out on the biography of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov…’ (p. 3); but we shall discover that, in a twist characteristic of a murder mystery, Alyosha is upstaged by another character, the true hero – though Alyosha can figure as a future hero, a hero in waiting. Alyosha is also the name of a child bewept by a woman who visits the elder Zosima: ‘My soul is wasted over him. I look at his clothes, at his little shirt or his little boots, and start howling. I lay out all that he left behind, all his things, and look at them and howl... If only I could just have one more look at him... to hear him the way he used to play in the backyard and come in and shout in his little voice, “Mama, where are you?”. Only to hear how he walks across the room, just once, just one time, pat-pat-pat with his little feet... But he’s gone, dear father, he’s gone and I’ll never hear him again! His little belt is here, but he’s gone’. The elder replies: ‘Do not be comforted, but weep. Only each time you weep, do not fail to remember that your little son is one of God’s angels, that he looks down on you from there and sees you’ (pp. 49-50).
Another woman says to the elder: ‘This thought about a future life after death troubles me to the point of suffering, terror, and fright... If everyone has faith, where does it come from? And then they say that it all came originally from fear of the awesome phenomena of nature, and that there is nothing to it at all.’ The elder replies: ‘No doubt it is devastating. One cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced... By the experience of active love... The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul’ (pp. 55-6). Later at the paternal table Ivan proclaims his unbelief while Alyosha maintains that there is ‘both God and immortality. Immortality is in God.’ The father remarks: ‘Hm. More likely Ivan is right. Lord, just think how much faith, how much energy of all kinds man has spent on this dream, and for so many thousands of years!’ (p. 134).
The love between Alyosha and the children, especially the precocious intellectual, Kolya Krasotkin, encloses the final message of the novel. Prince Myshkin’s spontaneous and joyous communication with Kolya Epanchin in The Idiot is a first sketch of this; in general Alyosha is a successful counterpart of Myshkin, without the latter’s sickliness of body and mind but also with a more robust relationship to the faith. Yet just as Kirillov bites Peter Verkhovensky just before committing suicide, in order to bring that cold manipulator to feel human reality, so the bullied Ilyusha (whose father has been humiliated by Dmitri) bites Alyosha’s finger savagely at their first meeting, as if puncturing his Myshkinesque pose of Christlike graciousness.
The novel does not fully rejoin the Christian vision of eternal life. Aloysha is to be the bearer of that vision, but less perhaps in this novel than in its projected sequel. At first it might seem that Alyosha is the Christ-figure in the novel. He has spiritual insight, and answers Ivan’s tormented questions with serene conviction: ‘You asked just now if there is in the whole world a being who could and would have the right to forgive. But there is such a being, and he can forgive everything, forgive all and for all, because he himself gave his innocent blood for all and for everything’ (p. 246). Again: ‘No one man can forgive, but all in unison can’ (quoted, Lord, p. 199). Alyosha’s speech is marked in its final assurances by a sentimental fragility, increased by its being addressed to enthusiastic children: ‘“Karamazov!” cried Kolya, can it really be true as religion says, that we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyushecha?” “Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been,” Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy’ (p. 776). Lord (p. 195) judges these words too harshly, as immature and self-deceiving; they are perhaps a pointer to what the author hopes to give more body to in the sequel. But perhaps, too, Dostoevsky has said all that he had to say about eternal life, a topic that ultimately eludes the art of the novel.
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Dmitri
In late drafts of the novel, Dostoevsky adopts Fyodorov’s idea that children have a duty to resurrect their parents, a duty trampled on by the parricidal Dmitri and Ivan; but Fyodorov’s ideas leave no clear trace in the final text, even if the ecstatic language of Zosima’s long-deceased brother, Markel, and also that of Dmitri, may owe something to him. Robert Lord (p. 191) sees Markel as subscribing to a false idea of resurrection here on earth, in place of the Christian eschatological hope. But Romano Guardini is truer to the novel’s depiction of Markel. His ecstatic cry, ‘Am I not in paradise now?’ (p. 290) intimates ‘what is grounded in the resurrection of the Lord and must be accomplished in each believer: that body and soul are drawn to the divine and transformed into the heavenly – not ‘spirit’ – but human being’ (Guardini, p. 111). Later the young Zosima himself has a resurrection experience in youth, when realizing the folly of a duel he refuses to shoot: ‘“Gentlemen,” I cried suddenly from the bottom of my heart, “look at the divine gifts around us: the clear sky, the fresh air, the tender grass, the birds, nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, we alone, are godless and foolish, and do not understand that life is paradise, for we need only wish to understand, and it will come at once in all its beauty, and we shall embrace each other and weep”’ (p. 299). Very often in these novels the antithesis of resurrection is not death, but murder; the immediately following chapter, ‘the mysterious visitor,’ tells of a man who finds resurrection by publicly confessing his crime of murder.
Turning now to Dmitri, we find him quoting Schiller poems on the earth goddess Ceres and on joy as the mainspring of all creation, as he exclaims: ‘When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which the world cannot stand and be’ (p. 107). It is remarkable that Dmitri is always praying – perhaps even more than Alyosha. One recalls the dictum of the philosopher Proclus: ‘We are always praying in the depth of our soul.’ In his simple, impulsive, earthy good nature, Dmitri knows himself to be a child of God and instinctively seeks out the path God has determined for him.
Believing himself to have killed the servant Grigori, Dmitri spends the night in reckless revels, madly in love with Grushenka, intending to kill himself after it. Arrested for the murder of his father, he is overjoyed that he did not kill the other man after all, and babbles happily to the investigators. But his dignity is broken down in three phases which Dostoevsky names ‘the three torments of the soul’ – a reference to folk belief on purifying ordeals of the soul after death, but here suggestive of the torments of Christ in his passion. Then Dmitri is stripped of his garments, and registers shock that dignity could so quickly change to humiliation. Here Dmitri emerges as the novel’s Christ-figure. It also turns out that Dmitri’s wild and violent behavior was prompted by a nagging sense of guilt over having dishonorably appropriated 1500 roubles from his fiancée as a fund for running off with Grushenka – a sense of honor not understood at all by the investigators.
Dmitri has faced the full brunt of earthly and fleshly reality, exemplifying more fully than the virginal Alyosha the novel’s epigraph: ‘Unless the grain of wheat fall into the earth…” An earth-bound man, he lays down his life to protect his brother Ivan, whom he wrongly believes to have murdered their father. He also wants to suffer for the guilt of wishing his father’s death, and from a wider aspiration to redemptive suffering. The dying elder explains to Alyosha: ‘I bowed yesterday to his great future suffering... I seemed to see something terrible, as if his eyes yesterday expressed his whole fate’ (p. 285). Curiously, in his long discussion of the novel (pp. 108-239), Guardini scarcely notices Dmitri at all. Over-emphasizing Alyosha’s greatness, he fails to take the ‘wild’ eldest brother seriously.
It is not out of place here to speak of a sublimated masochism. Dostoevsky is alleged to have been plagued by sadistic fantasies (a perception launched by N. K. Mikhailovsky and taken up by Turgenev and Mario Praz), but surely the governing passion of his psyche was a radical masochism, dwarfing the sadistic elements. Moreover, the sadistic acts, especially in the case of Raskolnikov, may really be forms of masochistic self-harm, efforts to reconnect with reality. ‘Was it the old hag I killed? No, I killed myself, and not the old hag. I did away with myself at one blow and for good’ (p. 433). Dostoevsky’s own gambling addiction has a masochistic cast. The ecstatic promptitude with which his characters embrace redemptive suffering reflects the turn-about that enabled him to give a saving connotation to his degradation.
Dmitri sees his prison as a resurrection training camp: ‘Brother, in these past two months I’ve sensed a new man in me, a new man has arisen in me! He was shut up inside me, but if it weren’t for this thunderbolt, he never would have appeared. Frightening! What do I care if I spend twenty years pounding out iron ore in the mines, I’m not afraid of that at all, but I’m afraid of something else now: that this risen man not depart from me! Even there, in the mines, underground, you can find a human heart in the convict and murderer standing next to you, and you can be close to him, because there, too, it’s possible to live, and love, and suffer! You can revive and resurrect the frozen heart in this convict, you can look after him for years, and finally bring up from the cave into the light a soul that is lofty now, a suffering consciousness, you can revive an angel, resurrect a hero! And there are many of them, there are hundreds, and we’re all guilty for them… Oh, yes, we’ll be in chains, and there will be no freedom, but then, in our great grief, we shall rise once more into joy, without which it’s not possible for man to live, or for God to be, for God gives joy, it’s his prerogative… If God is driven from the earth [by the materialist philosophies that Dmitri despises], we’ll meet him underground!... And then from the depths of the earth we, the men underground, will start singing a tragic hymn to God, in whom there is joy’ (pp. 591-2). In an article, Fyodorov lamented Dostoevsky’s misunderstanding of his idea of resurrection, which he replaced with ‘one huge mystical hypothesis’ (Lord, p. 193). But in fact this is perhaps the most empirically grounded of Dostoevsky’s visions of resurrection.
All three brothers outgrow forms of inhuman detachment and move toward connection: ‘Thus Karamazov sketches different ways in which subjects or speakers may seek to protect themselves or have a last word – the sacred and socially fixed identity of a professed monk [Alyosha], the detached play of ideas in the inner life of an intellectual [Ivan], the passionate immersion in the moment of the sensualist [Dmitri]’ (Williams, p. 131). All of them are shaken up in the course of the action, and we are taught that it is good to be so shaken, and to welcome such occasions of rethinking and conversion when they overtake us in real life. We see human beings on the way, in the process of becoming, and this is done so well, and with an opening of such promising perspectives, that the sequel Dostoevsky intended to write would have been superfluous.
If we accept Lukacs’ definition of ‘the inner form of the novel’ as ‘the process of [a] problematic individual’s journeying toward himself’ (quoted, Holquist, p. 108), Karamazov follows three such journeys, Dmitri’s being the richest. Dmitri’s language has qualities lost in translation: ‘If Smerdyakov is a cacophony of human expression, Dmitri Karamazov is sheer magnificence. Dmitri is a poet and his language is Pushkin’s language. It is never difficult to set out Dmitri’s speech in free verse form, for it is in the finest poetic diction’ (Lord, p. 211). In the end, Dostoevsky is stuck with his old message of ‘rejoining the human race.’ Lazarus ‘comes forth’ not to eternal life but to this earthly life, now appreciated at its full worth. The epilogue somewhat blunts the drama of Dmitri’s resolution. Alyosha is concerned that Dmitri has taken on a role that may be too much for him: ‘You’re not ready, and such a cross is not for you… You want to regenerate another man in yourself through suffering; I say just remember that other man always, all your life, and wherever you escape to – and that is enough for you’ (p. 763). As in all the other novels, what is offered is just the possibility of resurrection or rebirth, shimmering on the horizon of the narrated action. It is enough for the novelist to have lit up this possibility amid the tumultuous confusion of human life, and to have transmitted to the readers some guidelines for their own quest for resurrection.
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REFERENCES
Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment, trans. David Magarshack. London: Penguin, 1951.
-----. The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990.
Romano Guardini. Religiöse Gestalten in Dostojewskijs Werk. Munich: Kösel, 1964.
Michael Holquist. Dostoevsky and the Novel. Princeton University Press, 1977.
Robert Lord. Dostoevsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.
Rowan Williams. Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2008.
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