Woe to him who in terrible trouble must thrust his soul into the fire’s embrace, hope for no comfort, not expect change. Well is the man who after his death-day may seek the Lord and find peace in the embrace of the Father.
—Beowulf
As great as Crime and Punishment is, it is with The Brothers Karamazov that Dostoevsky Cousteau-s his way to the darkest depths. In my opinion, no novel delves so insightfully into human psychology—and with as astonishing a range of personality types and behaviors—as Brothers K. Like the infamous (and probably apocryphal) Chinese meal where diners slice a tonsure from the skulls of living monkeys to lay bare their brains, Dostoevsky splits his characters open, exposing their inner workings to all. He shows us their deep motivations, digs his nails into their grime, teases out their weaknesses, all in service of making shadow-casting figures that we believe, feel, and recognize in ourselves.
The plot of The Brothers Karamazov is intricate in the extreme: Dmitri (a.k.a. Mitya—most everyone has multiple names; it is a Russian novel after all), Ivan, and Alyosha (Alexey) are the title characters. The first has a tempestuous relationship with a woman he blackmailed but owes money, Katarina (Katya), but really loves Grushenka, the mistress of his dissolute father, Fyodor. Ivan meanwhile loves and is loved by Katarina, but she won’t leave Dmitri for him. Alyosha is a monk, but he too is loved by a woman: Lise the cripple, one of my favorite characters. Eventually the father is killed, a significant sum of money disappears, and suddenly we have a murder mystery.
Almost all the characters in The Brothers K are troubled, but as with Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky is setting us up. For yes, we might see ourselves in Mitya or Ivan’s lovelorn anguish, or worse in Lise’s self-hatred or Fyodor’s dissipation, but it’s precisely their hopelessness that we aren’t supposed to feel. In spreading their psyches for the clear view of the reader, they become cautionary tales, parades put forth for our edification. For despite the on-the-scene despair the characters feel (and that we sympathize with), in every case there is a solution to the problem, and that solution is faith.
The setup is not dissimilar to that of the earlier novel. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov embodied the nihilist or the would-be Nietzschean superman desperately groping for redemption, unable from beginning to end to escape Marmaladov’s question “Do you understand what it means to have nowhere left to turn?” and, per the quote from Beowulf above, thrusting his soul into the fire’s, not the Father’s, embrace. In Brothers K, the types are more complex, the traps more refined, but the early setup not dissimilar. Just over one hundred pages into the novel, Dmitri, of the three brothers the most nihilistic—and likeable—by far, asks his saintly brother, Alyosha:
“Have you ever felt, have you ever dreamt of falling down a precipice into a pit? … I am afraid, but I enjoy it. It’s not enjoyment though, but ecstasy … I’m a Karamazov. For when I do leap into the pit, I go headlong with my heels up, and am pleased to be falling in that degrading attitude, and pride myself upon it. And in the very depths of that degradation I begin a hymn of praise. Let me be accursed!”
It sounds like a clear case of what psychologists now call reaction formation, but Dostoevsky has Dmitri tell us more: “I can’t endure the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What’s still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna.” Everything is rejected, but nothing is renounced—a recipe for obsession, for haunting. And in the culminative moment, Dmitri all but paraphrases Marmaladov, asking Alyosha, “Do you know the meaning of despair?”
Dmitri’s virtually limitless self-hatred leads him to a frenzied, ecstatic, almost joyful thumb-nosing of life and success and ultimately the God he desperately wants to believe in. He embodies a type of modern man for whom the author has much pity, not so much the nihilist as the lost, God-less soul, adrift without meaning or faith, even in himself.
All of this is part of what is perhaps the most incisive psychological concept the novel puts forth: that of “laceration” or “self-laceration.” The title of one of the novel’s sections, it describes how, in a state of horrific abjection, we are compelled to abject ourselves yet further as punishment for our guilt or shame. In Crime and Punishment, when Marmaladov knows his family needs the money in his pocket to keep from starving or freezing to death, instead of taking it home, he takes up his glass—almost gleefully—to drink it all away at the bar. His guilt and self-loathing run so deep he has to inflict this last and ultimate indignity on himself, as Raskolnikov will do as well. In Brothers K, we see self-laceration again and again: Dmitri taking the money he owes Katarina and blowing it in revels with Grushenka; Katya, Grushenka, and Lise all torturing and humiliating themselves, each other, and the Karamazovs whom they love; Fyodor, in the company of his son’s fellow monks, unable not to feel or resist his own degeneracy and buffoonery; and on and on. Dostoevsky takes pains to stress that to be a Karamazov (and who, he might add, is not?) is to bear an internal taint: the impulse to excess and self-destruction, the slide on the slippery slope.
Strangely enough, in a novel so much about character, the most famous brothers trio this side of the Gibbs are somewhat disappointing. Dmitri is easily the most complex, exhibiting self-laceration, guilt, and remorse—though in a rather straightforward way—but Ivan and Alyosha are almost two-dimensional. Ivan encapsulates the modern rationalist—cold and calculating and more soulless than lost-souled. And Alyosha, whom Dostoevsky calls his “hero,” the “lover of humanity,” is a pious, kind-hearted, almost simplistic good guy, the shoulder that everyone cries on and the person from whom everyone wants forgiveness, as if he was the God they otherwise can’t seem to find. The strongest characters, in my opinion, are the women: Katarina, Grushenka, and Lise. Each of them attaches to one or more of the Karamazov brothers as a triangulation of their own self-hatred; each is unable to reconcile her internal feelings and acts out in seemingly contradictory ways, ways that demonstrate the layering and internal turmoil of their various psyches. Time and again, when any of these three characters are on the page, I find myself with mouth agape at something they’ve done or said. If you are going to get the most out of The Brothers Karamazov, pay less attention to the brothers themselves and more to the self-lacerating women who love them.
Now the part that people tend to enjoy the most is the famous Grand Inquisitor section, based on a short story that Ivan wrote and recounts to Alyosha, in which Jesus has come back to Earth fifteen hundred years after his death to speak to the leader of the Spanish Inquisition. Their exchange is riveting—as intense as perhaps any scene ever penned, and the Inquisitor could be the most jaded character in all literature. He confesses that he controls the populace out of fear because they need fear, they need to be controlled, and if the Church didn’t serve that function, there would be chaos. And he goes on from there in an absolutely damning excoriation of Jesus for giving man freedom, for believing in man’s capabilities, letting him fail, and thus forcing the Church to “correct” his work (see “The Buzz”).
If you only read the Grand Inquisitor section, you could easily believe that Dostoevsky himself was an atheist or a nihilist with a Realpolitik of the most fatalistic stripe. But there is no question that the Grand Inquisitor is not intended to be Dostoevsky’s final word. Two chapters later we see the true center of the book: Alyosha’s mentor, Father Zossima, delivers a monologue that shows a quintessentially pious alternative to the arch-cynicism of the Grand Inquisitor. In a sense, the entire novel hinges on this revision; again Dostoevsky takes a page from Milton, as if to say, “If you thought you were supposed to believe that, let me tell you what you’re really supposed to believe.”
But what Zossima says might be the single most challenging gauntlet a book has ever thrown at the feet of its readers, the most extreme injunction to morality you will ever read: that we are all responsible for all sin in all men always. Yes, you heard that right: everyone, all the time. We are all linked; if one of us sins, we all sin. And so, like Bodhisattvas, we must strive for the forgiveness and deliverance of all humanity. The message is unequivocal and comprehensive. Could any project be more munificent, more humanitarian, but more seemingly unrealizable?
Even if none of us is capable of taking up Zossima’s challenge, Dostoevsky’s message and the spirit behind it remain. Like Alyosha, we are not to judge but to accept, all and everything. No wonder people retreat to the Grand Inquisitor’s pessimism; it’s an infinitely easier mental and philosophical position to take. But to connect one’s self with all humanity, to take them all on, and to realize, like Tolstoy does in Anna Karenina, that forgiveness and lack of judgment could unite us, that is Father Zossima and Dostoevsky’s ambition.
So we think back to Dmitri, to his father Fyodor’s antics, to the self-lacerating women, to Ivan in his fatalism, and again we ask Marmaladov’s question: Where do you turn? And now we see that The Brothers Karamazoy expands on the answer contained in Crime and Punishment. For with a person like Father Zossima in the world, there is a second alternative for those who have abandoned hope: It’s not only God’s mercy there waiting for us, there can be a terrestrial goodness, a grace, a majesty. Dostoevsky wants that to be you.
The Buzz: I’ve indicated already that the Grand Inquisitor section is the one 99 percent of people mention when they speak of The Brothers Karamazov—and no surprise. Its setup is fascinating: Christ meets with the chief figure of the ultrazealous Spanish Inquisition, ostensibly the most pious man on earth. And the Inquisitor says, “Why … art Thou come to hinder us? … I care not to know whether it is Thou or only a semblance of Him, but tomorrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake.” The leader of the Inquisition burning the Savior—you can already see why this section’s famous. He goes on to say that “people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us [the Church] and laid it humbly at our feet … [we] have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy.” Ouch.
The section is long and intricate, and short citations can’t do it justice, but my favorite lines refer to the weakness of human nature and the enormous (and, the Inquisitor says, unfair) expectation of asking men to have faith: “He who created them rebels must have meant to mock at them. … How are the weak ones to blame? … Canst Thou have simply come to the elect and for the elect?”
Yes, it seems as scathing and damning an indictment as there could be. But don’t stop there.
What People Don’t Know (But Should): As I say above, people often miss the point of this and Dostoevsky’s other books, laboring under the misconception that somehow he was a nihilist. But through Father Zossima, Dostoevsky’s message should be loud and clear. And even before his long monologue, Zossima summarizes his message for the monks of the monastery: “Love one another, Fathers … love God’s people … [Each monk] is responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins … each one personally for all mankind and every individual man. … Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love. Then every one of you will have the power to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world with your tears.” He’s talking to us, all of us. Now do you think Dostoevsky was nihilistic?
Best Line: A few more inspirational words from Father Zossima: “It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft tender gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long happy life—and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving! My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.”
What’s Sexy: Though the novel is sex-free, there is a very charged eroticism in Dmitri’s blackmailing of Katarina Ivanovna in Book III, chapter 4, for the money to save her father. Then there’s Grushenka, the woman of ill repute, described as having “a supple curve all over her body. You can see it in her little foot, even in her little toe.” She’s a bad girl, and you’ll see it in her speech and actions too.
Quirky Fact: Poor Dostoevsky, literally. Despite all his literary success, his was as rough a life as Cervantes’. When you read Father Zossima’s valedictory comments in “Best Line” above and remember the severely improverished, epileptic Dostoevsky, broken in body—but not in soul—by a death sentence commuted at the last minute and the subsequent four years in a Siberian prison, you just hope he’s right. Zossima’s beatific author certainly deserved such a heaven.
What to Skip: Although this is an all-time great novel, it does have one section that’s both annoying and doesn’t seem to fit: the fifty-odd pages of Book X, “The Boys,” a side story of a dying kid and his cronies. I hated it the first time I read it, and then reread it to make sure, and it really does stink. Why it’s there, I don’t know. Why you should read it, I don’t know either. I say don’t.