Lily Alexander
Transparent things, through which the past shines! A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish.
The Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы) by Fyodor Dostoevsky has grown in popularity over time, becoming a “cult classic”. Written in 1880, the novel has served as an inspiration for the media industry, and its thriller and crime fiction writers. The international film and TV adaptations of The Brothers Karamazov count stands at 32 (on imdb.com). Dostoevsky’s body of work has generated hundreds of cinematic versions around the world, creating a universe of references and resonances. (They include such screen landmarks as The Idiot (1951) by Akira Kurosawa; Taxi Driver (1976) by Martin Scorsese; and Fight Club (1999) by David Fincher, to name a few.) One of the top mystery books of world culture, The Brothers Karamazov (TBK), can be examined within a spectrum of contexts. This essay offers the mythopoetic, anthropological, and narratological perspectives on the novel, particularly relevant to world-building theory and practice. It is the first part of a larger work intended to continue the exploration of mythopoesis, the novel as a cultural form, and the works by Dostoevsky in the contexts of world-building and interactive storytelling.
In a nutshell, the story unfolds through the suspense of inevitable murder, with too many potential suspects to count. The psychological framing of the unpredictable cast is meant to intrigue: the character portrayals exceed the complexity levels required for a whodunit. When the unthinkable happens — but not the way one would expect — it leaves everybody puzzled, and the truth may never be revealed. Readers are left on their own to solve the story-riddle, unsure whom to trust. Implicitly but forcefully, Dostoevsky propels the themes of moral choice and conscience. Despite the tragic irony of the situation, the author shows faith in his readers, respects their dignity, and encourages them to search for the truth.
Even if a detective novel was not Dostoevsky’s ultimate goal, the deep-seated layers of hidden content should be examined. Only by tracing the clashes among socio-cultural codes in this novel, can its meaning-making processes be revealed. The Brothers Karamazov, 19th-century opus of Shakespearean scale, is a recognized masterpiece of Psychological Realism and Critical Realism, accurately depicting its era, hence, a high point of the historical fiction. An influential work of Fantastic Realism, this novel is a prototype of the cultural construct we term “imaginary world”. This concept belongs to the recently evolving field of knowledge, stimulated by its immense impact on media culture. Dostoevsky’s masterpiece remains a subject of heated debates and conflicting interpretations. Just like any myth, the writer’s last work — his testament — was designed to provoke discussions and encourage the decoding of its concealed messages.
This essay addresses the riddles of TBK and elucidates the ways of creating imaginary worlds. A part of the scholarly network for the fictional worlds-exploration, this study is meant to enrich the theory and practice of storytelling media by examining the pivotal narrative-symbolic logic which propelled TBK to worldwide fame. This goal is approached by interleaving several analytical methods. Dostoevsky studies, including the vast scholarship on TBK, envelopes the widest range of contexts possible. Yet, unlike the typically applied foci of religion, politics, and narratology, this author’s goal is to examine the powerful ways mythology is integrated into the novel’s imaginary world. Examined even overanalyzed in endless milieu, TBK is rarely explored within the realms of anthropology or folklore, and never that of fictional world-building. Yet, its locale, figures, and their actions are more than fictional: bluntly symbolic, they are a dynamic part of the (neo)mythological discourse. This essay explores the organizational principles of the imaginary world employed by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the effectiveness of mythic-symbolic codes the writer selected for his storyworld (in which historicity borders with the fantastic), and the functions of mythological references in creating the content and the far-reaching message of TBK.
In this volume, TBK serves as a case study for emerging world-building theory, a new field of knowledge this book is meant to advance. The main focus is on mythopoesis, understood as the engagement of the modern narrative media with myth. Mythology is defined here as a narrative system rooted in the worldviews, beliefs, and (proto-)religious semantics of the ancient people, expressed through a set of stories (myths). Different mythologies aligned with particular geographies and historical timelines generated distinct symbolic systems, infused with the embedded imagery and values. We don’t employ here the term mythology in the context of ideology studies (initiated by the Frankfurt School). Yet we should not overlook that traditional mythologies and political neo-mythologies of mass societies may clash through the system of storyworld dissonances, carefully orchestrated and highlighted by the mythopoetic authors of the last centuries. In short, the old mythic beings are summoned to resolve the dead-ends of our political debates, when we don’t have enough wisdom to achieve it ourselves.
This essay highlights the building blocks, narrative codes, and algorithms of mythopoesis employable in our era. Among them are the notions of mytheme (mythic theme), a recurrent transcultural theme in world myths, and mythologeme (the logic of plot development). Each mytheme has typically two to four transcultural patterns of story premise unfolding, or a mythologeme, which is to a mytheme what is a verb to a noun. Mythologemes activate and examine the possible ways each mytheme may unfold in culture. For example, “the brotherhood” is a mytheme, encompassing twin brothers and other brotherly ties; including such offshoots/spinoffs of Modernity and Romanticism as the Doppelgangers, or the (paradoxical/mystical) doubles portrayed by Dostoevsky’s contemporaries Robert Stevenson in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The resulting set of mythologemes sprouting from the inquiry “Am I my brother’s keeper?” may range from “one sibling giving his life to save another” to “a brother killing a brother”. While related to the functionality of cultural algorithms, the mythemes, nevertheless, may merge within new narrative traditions, while mythologemes may be bent or inverted by authors. No doubt, Dostoevsky employed the mythopoetic elements thoughtfully, yet creatively and often astonishingly.
Mythopoesis is a vital subject for the success of contemporary world-building practices. Hence, this article examines the mythopoetic depths and engines of the novel, paying special attention to Dostoevsky’s mythopoetic resources, tactics, and strategies. Mythopoetic tactics help to skillfully organize a storyworld, while mythopoetic strategies are meant to influence the larger cultural (and political!) discourse. The writer was exceptionally well-read in world literature. Mythological resources available to Dostoevsky in the late 19th century include the world myths and fairytales, the Hellenic and European narrative traditions, Slavic mythologies and Russian folklore, as well as the neo-mythologies emerging in the European Modernity and the literature of his time. The mythic motifs he selected may have been employed either subliminally or intentionally. We need to examine the plausible sources to understand his strategic choices. From what cultural depths did the mythopoetic tropes emerge; which ones, when, and why? What unsolved historical problems prompted specific elements to surface, in response to the call of our cultural needs?
This essay is meant to stimulate world-building theory and practice by drawing attention to three mythopoetic cultural mechanisms as essential and instrumental. The highlighted notions include the proposed concept of mythopoetic suspense, and the nearly forgotten but valuable concepts of mythological eschatology and misterium (or mysterium). Mythopoetic suspense, while bestowing the aesthetic pleasure of “story magic”, creates sudden perception shifts, instrumental in building dramatic, semantic, and axiological tensions. It aligns with Aristotle’s emphasis on astonishment and the Formalists’ making strange. Mythological eschatology is instrumental is clarifying and resolving those tensions, while tracing each story figure’s moral steps through the revelations of consequential logic. Misterium provides the unique conditions for these processes to take place and climax to (cathartic) resolutions. These concepts-blueprints arise as the instrumental symbolic frameworks or operating systems, which are vital for the compelling world-building.
The above-highlighted useful notions will serve to solve the riddles of TBK and outline the potential of mythopoesis as the meaning-making mechanism of culture. The proposed interdisciplinary approach is hoped to illuminate the “hidden corners” of the novel and its symbolic discourse, perceptible only within the realms of mythology. The world narrative heritage represents a colossal and powerful resource for emerging storytelling media. Hence, learning from the classical writer how to employ this treasured cultural reserve is important. It is from this perspective that we will attempt to “understand” Dostoevsky, the brothers Karamazov, and the role of myth in Fantastic Realism and fictional world-building.
A magnum opus of 800-plus pages, The Brothers Karamazov includes 12 books, an Epilogue, and a promise of a sequence, embodying a consequential imaginary world with a provocative fusion of the real and the fantastic. The novel, often viewed as a narrative maze and animated riddle, was indeed designed as a multi-layered mystery, enigmatic on many (symbolic) levels. The puzzling and dynamic world of TBK keeps “spinning”, forcing manifold characters to toss and turn, revealing their conflicting sides. Some storyworld edges are polygonal and see-through, opening (into) new startling depths and emerging into “other realms”. To this day, the commenters argue why the God and the Devil “visit” this crime scene, and disagree on whether the supernatural encounters “really” occur in the storyworld or if they are fruits of characters’ imaginations.
Rooted in the ritual riddle, all mystery genres operate by means of “secret codes”. Narration in TBK is channeled via a nameless figure with a mysterious identity, a mediator between the Author and the readers. The action takes place in the imaginary provincial town; but its name is so ill-omened that the enigmatic Narrator admits to fear to even utter it. The location of TBK is a metaphor of a town in 19th-century Russia, as well as a typical “transnational” settlement of any repressive unfair society, the ill-fated “any town” of the humankind. The name of this locale is Skotopogonievsk, which represents a sort of (intentionally) awkward-by-design verbal construction, bleeding with the author’s spiteful sarcasm. Such name cannot exist in its language, exposing the impossible, insulting, humiliating place the semantic abyss. The town name literally means “the place where the cattle is chased toward. . . (slaughter)”. Clearly, by “the cattle” the writer means men, “all of us”, the people. This locale is his dystopian metaphor for the “place of hell”.1 Each story character even when confessing hidden feelings, troubling thoughts, or shameful deeds reveals alternative identities, never being “equal to Self” (resonating with Dostoevsky’s most notorious protagonist Raskolnikov, the Split Man of Crime & Punishment (1866)). When introduced to a crowded social storyworld, we observe the imaginary psychological projections of living-breathing humans, throwing goliath mythic shadows. To deepen the poetic mystery of TBK, some storyworld inhabitants unveil (a presence of) fantastic silhouettes behind them.
The threads of mythology are naturally woven into the mythopoesis of the modern novel. Mythic characters in Fantastic/Magic Realism preside over the dramatic action from Great Time, the timeless Olympus of sorts.2 This powerful team does not promise to debate Keynesian economics or solve our socio-political problems. Alert and supportive, the mythic beings watch from the cloud-balcony to calmly remind the humans that our challenges, dictators, and seeming “dead-ends” are temporal; but we should continue looking for answers ourselves.
The mythic contours of this novel channel a whole world of influences. The mythological circuit to be utilized in the studies of Dostoevsky encompasses the three symbolic orbits: Slavic mythology (native to Dostoevsky), pagan beliefs, and Russian fairy tales; the mythic pantheon of Hellenism promoted to a transcultural code that buoyed Renaissance and Classicism; and the cultural-political neo-mythology of European post-Enlightenment. Through multiple sources, mythopoesis affects reality by re-creating the symbolic community in unimaginable fusions and odd political alliances. Magic Realism plays with our expectations by invoking resonances and dissonances of mythic images, which unexpectedly sync or clash, yet inciting our compassion toward the afflicted fictional populace. Mythopoesis astonishes by re-aligning the storyworld groupings, untangling friends from foes, and revealing which characters cannot be forgiven and which ones should be saved.
TBK is famous for its symbolic and paradigmatic value: it has the transcultural, proverbial significance, addressing issues topical for all generations and eras. The pivotal theme of fathers and sons is manifest in the title, referencing the influential novel Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev.3 TBK may be viewed as a modern take on King Oedipus’s familial problem, aligned with the themes of murder and guilty conscience. All brothers, in some way, find the figure of their patriarch intolerable. What would they do?
The mythic tale of Oedipus is rooted in the conflict between cultural codes. This is the central idea in the first structural study on the subject, Vladimir Propp’s “Oedipus in Light of Folklore” (1944).4 As Propp notes, the Oedipus tale’s dramatic trigger was the crisis in the ancient world, which represents the clash of two social orders: the matrilineal and patrilineal. As will be shown in this essay, TBK reveals a clash of several cultural codes, although different from those of Oedipus’s mythic era. Let us extend Propp’s idea by suggesting that any culture clash, that is, between influential cultural codes, which deeply affect societies, is first tested and symbolically “resolved” (in hypothetical ways) within a narrative. Only later the conflicts are approached by logic and law, while their resolutions in reality may follow the proposals from the fiction.
The crisis of Oedipus was triggered by the social condition in which the father was not recognized; in a sense, the male parent’s identity was largely unknown to his offspring, and if known, it meant little in all matters of legacy, heritage, and succession. For emerging civil society, this “mystery” had many consequences, both predictable and tragically unforeseen. The Riddle of the Sphinx, therefore, “challenged” the evolving civilization to define the (life-asserting) essence of manhood. One assumes that social harmony needs fathers to take full moral responsibility for their children. The mythological, historical, ethical, political, and philosophical meaning of fatherhood (the fathers’ impact on the world) was at the heart of the classic tale (The Odyssey and its referential framework addressed the same theme, but from a different narrative perspective). What kind of world do fathers leave for the new generation? Predictably, this story signified the birth of tragedy. The myth of Oedipus foresees and “projects” the imaginary, long-term, catastrophic “butterfly effects” of existential memory gaps between generations and within the family, a keystone of society.
The two epigraphs for this essay, chosen for setting up a discussion, highlight the clash of opinions represented by contemporary literary critic Dmitry Bykov (b. 1967) and renowned novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977). Their aesthetic views diverge on whether we should simplify the approach to such a puzzling, multifaceted narrative as TBK. Nabokov is a writer whose imagery and sentence structure are more than metaphorical; they overflow and burst with the sprouting seeds of mythopoesis. The apt image-concept “transparent things”, envisioned by Nabokov, implies that the modern novel serves as a veil, concealing yet vaguely revealing the rich symbolic imagery of myth, while its deep-seated codes and values transpire through the literary text. Employing the metaphor of transparent things, this essay highlights the mythological undercurrents of the novel and show that TBK transcends the crime fiction genre, opening for us the transpiring contours of myth, with its immense depth of field and “forgotten” value systems, which have “something to say” about Modernity. Regardless of how subliminal the flow of images was in the author’s mind, the mythic themes are instrumental, playing a dynamic role in the meaning-making of TBK.
A narrative puzzle, the novel is designed to be complicated. Should the tactics of a simplified analysis of TBK’s multifaceted nature prevail? Nabokov favors embracing the poetic complexity. Conversely, Bykov reduces Dostoevsky to a postmodernist, while concluding that TBK is essentially just an early “whodunit” and imitation of Dickens.5 However, the crime investigation with multiple suspects emerged as a cultural form rooted in the 19th-century socio-economic reality.6 The genre’s dissemination was not due to one writer’s influence on another. Bykov insists that there is no answer: we will never know who the killer is because none of the characters, even while confessing, is a “reliable narrator”. This is a neo-postmodernist interpretation of TBK. (The postmodernist era lasted from the 1960s to 1990s, and was replaced by new aesthetic paradigms.) To some extent, it may be true: Dostoevsky’s humans are not equal to themselves; they all are the “underground” and “split” types (as per The Double (1846), Notes from the Underground (1864), and Crime and Punishment (1866), where the antihero’s surname means “split”).
Yet, essentially to Dostoevsky, each personality is shaped by one’s precious deeper truth, which channels his whole worldview, held up by the gravity of a person’s sacred faith based on individual values. Dostoevsky’s characters take their beliefs seriously and argue about them fiercely. A mischievous provocateur and performance artist, Bykov half-jokingly exclaims that Dostoevsky may have been unaware of the content he himself created: “Even Dostoevsky does not understand Dostoevsky”, Bykov says. The idea that much of the imagery may emerge from the artist’s subconscious is neither new nor lessening his creative achievement. Mythological consciousness has a capacity of facilitating understanding of complexities, according to Lev Vygotsky (a founding father of modern psychology who commented on Primitive Mentality (1922) by Lucien Levy-Bruhl). Hence, we will undertake a journey away from postmodernism and toward mythopoesis, into the realms where mythology nurtures the artist’s imagination and his search for the higher truth.
When 19th-century mythopoesis met the novel, two influential cultural forms merged to create the complex storyworlds of Fantastic Realism. (This encounter had already happened before, with the similar poetic tour-de-force in the post-Hellenic era of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses and the post-Medieval era of Rabelais’s Gargantua & Pantagruel, as explored by Bakhtin.) What is revelatory in Dostoevsky’s experimentations with the novel and today’s world-building is the idea of poetic persuasion through structure. In Modernity, matters of social significance increasingly come to light via the novel, a cultural form suitable for investigating behavioral puzzles and multiple points of view. While skillfully designed as a murder investigation, TBK is also a mockery of crime fiction genres. In other words, Dostoevsky builds his Temple, yet not without self-irony, decompressing his authorial self-importance, as suitable to the witty modern man. Layered upon his pathos and aspiration toward tragedy, self-parody and hidden laughter are essential to his fictional world-building.7 Bakhtin also insisted that world mythology is revealed in his interpretation, via carnivalesque humor, and intrinsically present in the structure of Dostoevsky’s novels. Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony (his theoretical metaphor means the integral sum of politically diverse points of view embedded within a storyworld) remains the most influential in Dostoevsky studies and among the theories of the novel. Thus, the real and the fantastic, pathos and irony, all converged in a dynamic fusion in TBK.
Astonishingly (as per Aristotle, who emphasized perception shift as a poetic necessity), in Dostoevsky, irony does not take away from pathos, but also from mystery. Much of the implicit “clever” irony comes from the novel’s world-model, in which what transpires for readers is that each (clueless) fictional character cannot see what his storyworld neighbor is doing, behind a story corner, even if only a few pages away. For such an “all-round” vision, narrative culture would employ the prying-everywhere Private Investigators and… supernatural beings. The present essay is meant to supplement Bakhtin’s model of the novel as a political chorus. The active voices from multifaceted world mythology transpiring though the text and illuminating with their “truths” should be added to the Bakhtinian polyphony of social voices, while assembling a panorama of multiple perspectives on reality within a fictional world.
This essay also initiates an inquiry into the diversity of cultural codes which are both set to clash and synchronized in TBK. How do disparate modeling systems, such as ritual, myth, storyworld, genre, polyphony, and spiritual quest, become coordinated and “work in concert” while generating this influential novel with a strong spiritual center? The imaginative modalities, to be references, include several types and levels of mythology: the transnational, explored by structural studies of myth; the classical European, with the roots in the Greek tradition; the post-Enlightenment European; and the poorly studied Russian folklore informed by early man’s ritual-mythological practices and pagan religions. This layering allows one to discover the stratification and hierarchical organization of diverse symbolic elements, employed for ontological timeless inquiries and for a candid appeal to the contemporaries via fictional world-building.
The massive text is roughly structured by the arc of three mythologemes (types of action, recurrent in myth and narrative): (1) The abusive Father-Tyrant is asking for trouble: he is almost “a dead man walking”; (2) Tensions rise, and the family is entangled in the knots of greed, hubris, and lust; emotions reach a boiling point and the Father is killed; and (3) One of the brothers, presumably innocent but framed, is arrested and put on trial. All participants of the murder investigation and court proceedings, including authorities, remain clueless, never coming close to solving the mystery. Formally, plot development encompasses the author’s designated 12 volumes, defined as separate “books”, with the 13th titled “Epilogue”. The novel’s 800-plus page length, many books in one, and a promise of a sequel, makes this work a precursor to a serial drama, linked by one original storyworld. Recent adaptations of TBK explicitly took the shape of a film series.
The Brothers Karamazov remains a mystery on many symbolic and diegetic levels: those of mythological consciousness, the ritual riddles, the embedded openness to variable interpretations and hermeneutics, the mastery of suspense, a craftsmanship of genre-writing of the murder mystery, and crime investigation (although they are “secretly” parodied). TBK represents, employs, and mocks, for all intents and purposes, the formula of the “whodunit”. The myth of the City-Jungle, emerging in the 19th century, laid the foundation for the helpless anticipation that neighbors won’t be their brother’s keepers. This abysmal fear that “anyone might have a motive” in the crowded yet anonymous urban space became a cultural premise for the rise of crime fiction with its embedded social riddles. Yet, Dostoevsky implies the nascent “whodunit” recipe and also challenges it. The Brothers Karamazov is also a skillful thriller: its storyworld is clouded by feverish anticipation. The narrative suspense occurs when the audience knows about the looming dangers, yet the characters don’t (as Hitchcock famously said). To rephrase, Dostoevsky amasses information on tacit malicious thoughts and sinful plans which is so excessive that the heads began to spin, not only those of the wary characters, but also those of the readers. The audience is gradually burdened by knowing “too much”. Suspense in this novel is manifold, transpiring on levels from zoological fear to philosophical angst.
The world-building of Modernity (including our own era of globalization) operates on the level of cultural codes, which are braided together, demonstrating multiple perspectives on, and conflicting interpretation of, the same story events, often creating both: defamiliarizing effects and stunning revelations. The codes’ fusions, conflicts, and counter-influences implicitly work on grand levels, redefining cultures. Yet these codes also work on the explicit levels of the plot, prompting characters to “disagree with themselves” and “suddenly” commit acts, confusing even to Self. This tragicomedy of errors helps in the uncovering of macro-cultural and social changes. Via story structure, the author comments on how the world is organized, yet also reveals how it is falling to pieces. In TBK, the symbolic codes are aligned with the margins and centers: the image-symbols are set to move in two defining trajectories: decentralizing and pivoting or focalizing. The centrifugal force launches into narrative orbit a startling and lavish variety of mythic imagery. The centripetal force tirelessly rearranges symbols, while building what we will call here the axiological axis mundi. (While tautological, this phrase highlights how both meanings, the system of values and the pillar of the world, are essentially the same thing.) Applying symbolic anthropology, this essay discloses several “hidden” codes and story forces, facilitating access to obscured layers of content.
Hitchcock defined suspense as the effect when the reader/audience’s knowledge exceeds that of those characters on-screen or “on-stage” (and in danger). Conversely, the (proposed here) mythopoetic suspense accompanies guests from the realms of mythology, who see infinitely more than the (mortal) story characters, and similarly naïve readers. We know that the visitors know what we don’t and cannot know, and it is frightening. We are in awe about the inevitable shift in perception and meaning, our incompatible scales of space-time, and how a mythic character would choose to act in our questionable social reality. Besides, the fictional “sightseers” are on the otherworldly side of life and death, hence, possess supernatural might we can’t imagine. When the Devil arrives in the world brutally oppressed by the tyrant-Stalin, what would he do? The Devil “would be shocked”! (As per Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master & Margarita (1967), banned for thirty years (1937–1967), a direct reference to The Brothers Karamazov). Incomparable realms, values, and powers create mythopoetic suspense, in which the audience’s thrill, excitement, thirst for magic, hope for liberation and catharsis, but also the infernal fear, are all fused together.
How do writers find and employ deep-seated mythological codes? To what extent are artists and audiences aware of the archaic symbolism employed in the media of modernity? Mythologies penetrate and empower modern texts through the artistic efforts, both conscious and subconscious. Some of us extensively research mythologies, yet many motifs penetrate our minds subliminally, via the local or transcultural layers we absorb. Readers/audiences may recognize mythological codes in artistic structure. When they don’t, the gaps in understanding trigger the adventurous experience and stimulate imagination, via mythopoetic suspense. Such codes may manifest in portions by explicit or implicit mythic imagery, effects of estrangement or defamiliarization, or a story’s mysteries, riddles, and twists. Overall, the cultural codes of mythological or religious symbolic frameworks effectively function through artistic structure, influencing readers with strategically imbedded puzzles or revelations, all of which subliminally enhance the total impact. Unlike in Hitchcockian suspense, where the readers notice dangers but characters remain perilously clueless, in mythopoetic suspense of Dostoevsky, Joyce, Bulgakov, Borges, Marques, or Tolkien, the readers are astonished and enchanted, but don’t grasp with cognitive lucidity all the symbolic meanings, which may appear illogical to the modern mind. Conversely, the many-faced Janus characters (part-mythic) are privileged to the secret/sacred knowledge of archaic mythological systems and values, to be gradually revealed through storyworld structure, or transpire.
For example, a sum of money continually surfaces and disappears in the character communications in The Brothers Karamazov. The figures in the storyworld, related or distant, crave, steal, bribe, tease, plan murder, frighten, or attempt to buy love by means of notorious money. So many memorable situations and passions are attached to these fiercely emotional interactions that a reader may miss the point (or notice it!) that the amount remains the same in various scenes: about 3,000 rubles. It is with tragic irony that Dostoevsky makes a reference to the 30 pieces of silver, an ominous fetish employed among humans, while they betray or enslave each other.
This money, which everyone needs and thinks would save him, echoes the Golden Calf’s symbolism of the “wrong god”. This “talisman” is also reminiscent of magic coins from folktales, which cannot be lost or exchanged, always returning to its owner (presumably moved around by a dark spirit of sorts or a “laughing demon”). Yet, nothing (good) can be bought using it. While seldom this recovering coin may help “deserving characters”, more often this (cursed?) money plays tricks with naïve but obsessively greedy humans. Flowing through many lives, but avoiding all eager hands, this money brings luck to none of the undeserving. The wishing coin in folklore is acting differentially, rewarding or punishing based on the hidden truth of each person’s moral essence. This symbol is instrumental in TBK’s story development, performing diverse yet dramatically important roles, and always drastically shifting a social situation. This is only one example of how Dostoevsky plays with the visibility/obscurity of his symbolic images, hiding them in plain view. This sum of money with the ill-omened number becomes an agent of change, although nobody seems to notice this infernal entity’s persistent presence and a menacing role in the storyworld.
Researchers infer that the books by Dostoevsky have layers of hidden symbolism. For example, in Yuri Marmeladov’s Dostoevsky’s Secret Code: The Allegory of Elijah the Prophet (1987), Marmeladov is correct in tracing the connections between Ilya the Prophet and characters in Dostoevsky’s fiction.8 It has been a well-known conclusion (as per the Chicago School of Religious Studies of the 1960s–1980s) that in various cultures, mythic figures of the pagan gods of Thunder, such as the Slavic Perun, were gradually converted into the Elijah the Prophet within the evolving Christian contexts. Yet, there are many more mythological connotations or “secret codes” to be discovered in The Brothers Karamazov.
Why so many secrets? And why are we enthralled with storytelling full of riddles and puzzles? Early man’s interactions with his habitat were defined by the need for deciphering or “cracking the codes” of his natural environment. Secret signs and symbols “emitted” by his surroundings were believed to transpire and come to light, to be decoded (deciphered); and relied on for survival. Since the dawn of the “mythological mind”, it was assumed that the very interpretation of reality must include decrypting Mother Nature’s subtle signifiers and passing her implicit tests. The ancients depended on the faith that reality continuously speaks to them in many “natural languages”. Early man viewed these communications as “organically” obscured, because they were channeled through the inborn manifestations of nature, its sounds, movements, touches, colors, and shapes.9 Even before reading between the lines (of books), people had hopes of getting a whiff of change from Nature’s many communication channels. These subtle “micro-messages” which the Nature-gods and Spirits leave for the humans to grasp, encompass the sudden thunder, the flood, birds’ love songs, the raining toads, or the advent of the apple-clasping snake. Only through these signs, the “marks of gods”, could predictions be deemed reliable, while hidden truths about reality were revealed (or so our ancestors believed). Thus, the need for learning biosemantic communication with Nature later extended to mythology and narrative culture.
Various deities (initially, the animal-sprits) spoke different “natural” languages, and their dissonant chorus “had to” be synchronized. It is with the idea of the world governed by these diverse and “mysterious” semantics hence, in need of translation that a special deity was appointed (in the Hellenic tradition) to perform the clarification function, for both his fellow deities and the subordinate humans. The Olympus assigned the god Hermes a mission to launch hermeneutics, the activity of interpretation, endowed with “divine” revelatory power. Just as mythological image-concepts had formed a symbolic framework for the people at the dawn of culture, mythic subtexts function as a connecting tissue in much of modern storytelling.
To complicate things further (on purpose!), some spirits-deities, the entities of supernatural power, intentionally clouded their communication. They had to establish boundaries of understanding for humans, because the gods belong to the highest realm of powers set in Nature; while the mortals were expected to have a limited access to the (sacred) knowledge, unless they were “initiated”.10 Hence, the natural “hard to decode” languages and the “intentionally obscured” communications (symbolic, metaphorical, and proverbial) had set the foundations for the ritual riddles, a framework which shaped the ensuing mystery genres and the (metaphorical) language of art per se. Looking at the roots of mythological consciousness, which define its semantics, we can better grasp its functionality within narrative contexts. Everything appears to be (and is expected to be) a dynamic “sign” a signifier in the operational system of mythology; the more important and vital whenever it enables “survival”. The Renaissance, Baroque Art, and Romanticism facilitated interest in myth, which then soared during Modernism. Among the programmatic goals of emerging Modernism in the late 19th century was that of learning and employing various organic (expressive) and intentional (metaphorical) languages of the natural world, also mediated by ancient art. Dostoevsky lived and worked in the age spanning from Romanticism to Modernism. Unsurprisingly, cultural codes were on his mind.
The inquisitive reader, who suspects that the word karma resonates with the title, is right. A careful examiner of Dostoevsky’s fictional worlds notices his numerous tale-telling signs in naming. The ritual origin of naming is in the “mystical” linking of a person to powerful natural forces or spirits, with the purpose of establishing rewarding and safeguarding identification (as in naming European cities Berlin and Bern to ensure their citizens’ protection and ritual empowerment expected in the Bear-totem era). Authors often use a name to (subliminally) reveal a hidden truth about its bearer.
Karamazov, Karamzin, and Karamazin are real Russian surnames (of the Turkic linguistic roots). Yet, the writer chose a family name with a revelatory message about his protagonists. The surname Karamazov unsurprisingly shares etymological roots with the concept of karma (via Indo-European linguistic connections). The Russian noun kara means the (deserved) punishment from the higher powers (pagan gods, God, or fate) for committed sins and crimes. The verb mazat means to paint, draw, chart, and also to stain or pollute. The family name Karamazov, therefore, may be interpreted as “the fate is drawn or tarnished” or possibly “to draw/taint one’s fate with this person’s choices or actions”. The name explicitly points to the “karmic” meaning and the spiritual purpose of the novel. The protagonists are the brothers whose futures are being determined and drawn (on the scrolls of their timeless legacy, on some invisible tablets of Providence). Hence, the novel’s title is linked to such notions as Fortune, also highlighting that it is our life choices that shape our futures. “Fate is predetermined” is echoed in the family name Karamazov. Yet the novel implies that by means of decisions and actions people draw their own destiny; while the gods are watching.
Just by naming the family and casting his characters, Dostoevsky lets the air and shadows from mythological realms into his storyworld. His cast of characters, entangled in tragedy and mystery, includes the antihero father; his sons; the four women who fatefully influenced the lives of the Karamazov men; the town’s spiritual mentor; the locals and officials; several “weird” enigmatic types; as well as God and the Devil. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s arch-villain is Fyodor Karamazov. The story’s villain and the author teasingly “exchange masks”: they wear the same name, which in this context sounds tragic-ironic: the “gift from God” Theodoros (Fyodor in Russian). It is hard to overlook the fact that of all possible names, the author gave his antagonist his own name, with a whiff of self-irony (“How far is Everyman from society’s antiheroes?” is a lingering question).11
A few more tale-telling names have a Greek origin (Zosima, Dmitry, Katerina, Grusha, Alexei, and Ilya). In other novels, many names and surnames are symbolic. In Crime and Punishment, Rodion Raskolnikov’s given name means “he is born” while his surname means “split man”; Sonya, Sophia the Wise, Razymikhin means “sensible”); in Poor Folk (1846), there is Devyshkin (“girlish, gentle like a girl”); in The Idiot (1869), there is Myshkin (“little mouse”), Nastasia (“eternally growing”), and Rogozhin (“cheap rug”). Let’s look at other connotations with the potential symbolism bursting forth into the TBK plot functionality. Zosima, spiritual mentor, means life and the living (Forever?). Dmitry, the brother to be framed and sentenced, is the Earthly Man, the offspring of the Nature-goddess Demetra, and his love Agrafena “feet first”, the walking, wanderer on the earth. Ivan is symbolic of the Russian Everyman and the folktales’ Ivan the Fool. Alexei is the defender of man (a short version of Alexander). Katerina the Pure (vs. the Impure) connotes purification and catharsis (as in Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966)). Ilya is from the Hebrew Eliah, the son of God.
It is worthwhile to further analyze what significance, if any, naming may have in this novel; and how names abet the storyworld’s complex system of meanings. Through nearly all the names in his novels, Dostoevsky adds some symbolically elevated perspective on a character’s nature or path in the world. Importantly, the novel generates its own narrative hermeneutics, which is grounded, implicitly, in the deep layers of existing symbolic systems, ascending from mythologies and religions. The game of decoding and meaning-making in TBK goes much deeper than the “whodunit?”.
The cast of characters consists of a very elaborate system of contrasting and resonating figures; almost like a chess set, ready for battle; and with carefully set traps. The inner circle is the Karamazov family, with the Father-tyrant, the main cause of the plot disequilibrium and a man impossible not to hate. This emotion is craftily provoked for readers to feel, which the younger generation of the Karamazov family predictably shares. The (folktale’s) three sons are of course at life’s crossroads, as mythic, journeying heroes should be. The oldest, Dmitri, is the Passionate one. The middle brother, Ivan, is the Smart and Educated one. The youngest, Alexei, is the Truth-seeker and a Kind Soul. The heart, the mind, and the soul. So far, good-old reliable clichés and unashamedly blunt symbolism. The devilish math of “How many brothers are in the novel?” is designated to be a separate puzzle to solve. There will transpire, through the storyworld folds, an yet unknown brother, Pavel, unrecognized on many symbolic levels. Part of the transcultural mytheme of the lost relative, returned to the family in a fateful manner (or by Fate with a karmic intension), this “secret” brother will play a pivotal role in the novel. His storyline was developed a century later into a separate work, and likewise “more-than-whodunit”, revolving around the tragic “bastard” figure (or the despised son-servant, who may explode one day), in Gosford Park (2001), directed by Robert Altman and written by Julian Fellowes.
The Karamazov men are involved with four women, who cannot be more different from each other. Two of them oddly have the same name, Liza. Of these Karamazovs’s “significant others” (for the men and for the plot), two are rich, two are poor, two are healthy, two are sick, two are loved, while two barely tolerated; traits come in unexpected sets. The math is getting more ominously playful. Three of the four femmes fatale would be “fatefully” involved with more than one of the Karamazov men, in various unforeseen combinations, but ensuring the chaos and fury of passions. Cherchez la femme, that is, ironically invoked by Dostoevsky.
The mythic and (near) supernatural figures include the God, the Devil, the Holy Sage, the chilling Grand Inquisitor, and the few Holy Fools, believed in Russia being “the children of God”. The strange, threshold silhouette the ghostly Narrator is neither here nor there, and is neither the author, nor a story character, despite his claim of living in the same town and being a neighbor, an “eyewitness” of sorts. While he conveys his cheeky comments on the story events, he is strapped in the limbo of the proscenium, between the real writer-Dostoevsky and generations of his infinite readers. Any liminal personae, residing in the mysterious place of betwixt and between, according to the founder of symbolic anthropology Victor Turner, transpires as a figure of ritual influence, sparking magic-infernal expectations.
Most ancillary figures fittingly for the novel step on the stage precisely to ricochet. The Brownian Motion they cause is one of accidental influences, in which one chance encounter or an explosive secret may have a long, fateful impact on this fictional world. The storyworld’s external circle consists of local residents of all ranks, and the officials, who enter the stage for the murder investigation and the court hearings. The townsfolk and administrators are mostly clueless and apathetic regarding God and the Divine perspective. The background social circles are painfully unaware, being deaf and blind, of the signs of Fate, meanings of the events, and higher truth. Some are confused about even basic facts of life and its social foundations. (Examples include the monks’ expectations that their devout peers’ bodies after death would not decay, or the spoiled rich girl’s belief that the Jews steal babies to drink their blood.)
Among the townspeople, a special place is allocated to one family, who are marginal in every way; the poor, suffering yet honorable father and his little son. Their surname, “Snegirev”, means of the bullfinch kind, a tiny snowbird, a vulnerable cold-weather survivor. The deep bond between the Snegirevs is a striking contrast to the toxic relations of the father and sons in the wealthy Karamazov family. Snegirev is a retired army officer: his social identity belongs to the transcultural narrative type of the “war veteran”, ascending to a heroic scale. This symbolism transpires through the pantheon of powerful, near-shamanistic old warriors of world mythology, which include the humble old soldier, invincible and wise, who can solve any problem in the Russian folklore. (Warriors who survived many battles are believed to have had many lives, or to be sort of “immortal”.) The veteran’s mythic-symbolic status would be even more elevated in the subsequent literature, from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865) (with Platon Karataev), to the novels by Erich Maria Remark. All the diverse characters of TBK are brought, or thrown, together to take part in the story’s intrigue and action, to express unique voices (the Bakhtinian polyphony or multiple point of view of reality), and via mythological eschatology: to be compared, to stand the tests, to measure up, to be assessed, and to be judged before gods.
The story characters act, hence, claim a position on life, and must be evaluated. One of the core paradigms of mythology is its innate eschatology, Mother Nature’s habit of keeping records and scoreboards of human deeds. The social connection with the members of the tribe in the presence of the worshipped anthropomorphic natural environment was the starting point of the “moral record keeping”. The concept of eschatology is rooted in the ritual paradigm of death-rebirth, a key concept in symbolic anthropology. Eschatology, initially, a human response to the crises of survival, which unleashed fears, began to grow into a moral framework, as vivid in the late Hellenic orphic tradition. Yet, the micro-elements of moral self-assessment could be traced back to the dawn of mythological consciousness. Humans were trying, desperately, to guess what Mother Nature considers “right and wrong”. The scholarly concept of mythological eschatology was developed by classicist and structuralist Olga Freidenberg in the 1930s to highlight that within all mythological frameworks, the idea of “keeping score” has always been implicitly embedded, and regulated by native moral systems. (It is tragic-ironic that in the darkest hours of Stalin’s purges, the scholar who would soon be ostracized, banned from visiting the university library, and fired for being Jewish (or “cosmopolitan” in Stalinist terms) developed the idea that even in the worlds of tyrants someone is watching).12
Mythological consciousness embraces the belief that someone is always watching be it a tree, a cloud, a sacred animal, the divine light, or anthropomorphic deity. This Observing Mind (Nature’s integral multi-source POV) keeps track of everyone’s deeds on the moral grid; with the counts to be announced when the mortal pleads for the afterlife. Christian eschatology would make this threshold even more rigid: one way or the other; heaven or hell. Yet, in the world of early religions, this accumulation of decrees and penalties/rewards prevails as the subtle yet omnipresent buildup (i.e., karma). The outcomes may vary for one’s afterlife; and the “informers” may similarly diverge Nature’s eyewitnesses, the multiple evidence sources for the verdict.
These silent witnesses may contribute from the manifold mythological layers of culture. In sum, the whole world of mythologies in the moral symbolic ecosystem of humanity may “judge” any character in the plot. (This is exactly the point in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) and Spirited Away (2002).) Mythological eschatology is the bridge to understanding how ethics gradually evolved, connecting the logic of living Nature, the emerging mythological consciousness and the perceived “narrative justice”. An intriguing detail about the evermore symbolic expression of mythological eschatology in the narratives of Modernity, particularly in the novel, is its manifestation by means of Fate. This “goddess” no longer reveals her face or persona, transpiring only through the turns of the story. Story twists, in the disguise of chance no more the explicit agent of the divine Nature or Fate, come to represent a narrative function.13 Story twists expose the limited partial truths the storyworld mortals are doomed to possess. Narrative peripeteias and accidents also symbolize the continual tests by reality, which Fate forces characters to take, entailing the “score keeping” for the records.
Mythological eschatology (derived by Freidenberg from her studies of the Classics) is not too distant from the notion of karma, devised by the religious consciousness of India. This multifaceted stream of cultural meaning-making in the global mythology grew over time, and multiple semantic streams established that the worlds of supernatural beings (even before monotheism) have implicit, invisible to the human eye, mechanisms of judging all living beings in respect to the morality of their actions and organic responsibility for the world. Mythology makes it clear that these Irrational Forces (as Bakhtin called them, to fit in with the anti-religion phase in Stalinist discourse) would carry out justice, without hesitation or delay, through various “accidental” and natural-looking occurrences. In sum, mythological eschatology means that “Nature is watching” and the verdict will be quickly executed. The “Nature-Judge” has infinite means to implement her sentence.
The early representation of this eschatological effect is the “accidental” death by the falling wall in the proverbial tale of Cain and Abel (according to the Book of Jubilees 4:31). God specifically banned anyone’s interference with the destiny of the brother-killer (the theologians debate “why” to this day); perhaps to check if there is indeed karma in the natural course of the universe. Dealing with the archetypal moral dilemma of being one’s brother’s keeper, the tale implies the spectrum of possible relations between the symbolic brothers, expanding from the familial to the social scale. Cain kills his brother. Yet, the divine punishment was intentionally “postponed”. It was the narratological consequential punishment that eventually transpired: Cain oops was accidentally killed by the wall, which he, himself, erected. Already in the (mind behind) the Bible, we see how the mythological eschatology morphs into the religious eschatology and into the cultural logic of narrative justice.
Dostoevsky was a devoted Christian; however, he was curious about many diverse belief systems. Admittedly, he was also pochvennik (deeply rooted in the native soil), a member of the intellectual movement which treasured the “organic” growth of cultures and civilizations as well as all transhistorical values of the native land, including ancient beliefs, myths, and folklore. In 19th-century Russia, there was no sharp contradiction, as typical for the Slavic world, between the pagan and Christian faiths, particularly, among the peasants and the intelligentsia. Conversely, the major rift emerged between the believers-Slavophiles, and their opposition, the Westerners, those who aligned only with the European values, rationality and science. Hence, the traditional mythologies and mythological consciousness were part of Dostoevsky’s interests as a writer and thinker.
The intrinsic logic of myth, with its keen attention to the Nature’s balance and the tendency of harmony-restoration mythological justice was gradually replaced by the composite reasoning embedded in the complexity of fictional worlds, termed here “narratological”. This dynamic type of model, called “novel”, traced the restoration of justice through the social knots of long-winded trajectories, which were impossible for a single pair of eyes to see. Dostoevsky, along with the novel-writing giants of the 19th and 20th centuries, was one of the creators of this vital moral framework at the dawn of mass society.
The Brothers Karamazov adheres to the mytheme of the lost brother: the accepted/alienated and the brother known/unknown. Brought up separately and finally meeting, each young Karamazov tries to explain himself to his siblings, yet remaining unsure what really is on the other brother’s mind. The dilemma of one’s brother being recognized/unrecognized (in every sense, also syncing with the unrecognized father of Oedipus) has the eschatological implications. In TBK, readers are positioned to wait-and-guess which of the brothers would kill their father, and on what page (already!). But their predictions may fail because it might be an (unknown) brother (they don’t know) who kills his father and frames his (known) brother for this crime. The plot distraction, or the red herring (the author-planted false assumption) is the Father-Son’s ruthless and known rivalry for the same woman. And while they are a step away from killing each other, there is the foreshadowing of the even deeper hatred that would erupt into a crime. Just as Nature used to observe everything, a new agency, the mind of the novel, now keeps the scoreboards of all brothers’ actions, intentions, and hidden thoughts.
Moving from Mother Nature’s woodland into the City-Jungle, the characters in the novel are now tested by, and seek “vital signs” for survival in the grimaces of urban environment. The revelatory semantics are emitted here by the crossroads, chances, accidents, the Many-Faced Janus’s nature of humans, hypocritical “masks”, role-playing, eavesdropping, ominous anonymity, and all other hidden corners and folds of the city, from where anyone could “suddenly” attack.14 Therefore, it is in the nature of the novel to oversaturate the mythologized city narrative with the tale-telling and warning signs. Such is the imaginary world of TBK. In the emerging cultural form of the novel and its essential variety, the crime novel, eschatology and score-keeping are manifest in the investigation (where the clues, red herrings, accidents, chases, and confessions encompass the zigzag streams of revelatory information, essentially, all the helpful “vital” signs).
The enigmatic contours of the City-myth already transpire from the geometrical uncertainty of the Baroque and Piranesi’s ominous fantastic prisons; this distinct aesthetics later extends through the daunting urban tales of French Naturalism and Film Noir. The fogged city-image not only warns of looming dangers but also of the difficulties in moral judgment and finding the truth. How to correctly assign the “guilt” to the wrongdoers? They may include the accidental criminals or those fighting back to survive; the uncaring or empathetic witnesses; and even the victims, those vicious whom “anyone could kill”. The Whodunit story pattern, when many have a motive, serves as a backward mirror, showing the victim’s own crimes, in reverse. The readers are given tiny bits of the puzzle through hints and clues, so they may begin to explore the hidden realms of the storyworld. Intuition is engaged as an important mode of perception in this ritual riddle-cracking, so the keen reader/audience would exclaim with excitement “I knew it!” — before the characters do. Therefore, a super-novel like TBK would have to stockpile an enormous quantity of the subtle tale-telling signs, from all realms of mythology and contemporaneity, and gradually release them, making the storyworld-decoding a tough yet thrilling experience.
Eschatology, as mentioned earlier, is a moral grid by which one’s life is assessed at the threshold, as per mythologies and religions. In crime fiction, eschatology is both simplified and complicated. It becomes more straightforward since the goal is to catch the criminal and put him in jail, using the reliable legal apparatus of our civilization. Conversely, the good fiction tends to problematize the clichés, and add the “it’s not that simple” perspective, continuing the inquiry beyond the letter of the law. What if it is unclear who is to blame? Where the limits are in (life-long) self-defense? And how do misdeeds accumulate, unchecked in life, in the family, and in social reality?
The Brothers Karamazov, clearly “more than crime fiction”, may be viewed as a multi-genre enterprise. It has elements of crime drama, detective novel, coming of age, Bildungsroman, or the novel of education, romance, thriller, tragedy, confessional prose, and even farce or the “tragicomedy of errors”. Recognized as a psychological, philosophical, political, and historical novel, TBK is also a diatribe against social injustice, intact with its era’s Critical Realism. Yet, while pondering on the nature of The Brothers Karamazov’s genre, and acknowledging its experimental aspirations, we must invoke a notion of misterium, a near-forgotten yet enduring cultural form that has always remained timely.
The umbrella concept, central paradigm, and pivotal force which ties diverse elements together is misterium. The Brothers Karamazov cannot be understood without clarifying this notion, in both the historical and theoretical contexts, including an anthropological angle. This essay proposes restoring the Latin spelling misterium for the theoretical term referring to the phenomenon, which signifies the related cultural paradigm, while transcending chronologies. The word’s original Latin spelling helps to distinguish this important notion from the word mystery, recently overused, and a subject of heteroglossia: it conveys too many different meanings to remain a useful and clear term. Misterium (plural misteria, adjective misterial; from the Greek mist to squint, “shut”, or “eyes shut”) connotes the phenomenon both historical and timeless / transcultural, also meaningful for creating imaginary worlds.
What is misterium? Why did Dostoevsky need it, and how can world-building benefit from this forgotten cultural form? From the perspective of misterium, it does not matter whether the mythic beings visit the storyworld “for real” or as the ghosts of characters’ imagination. In misterium, which affords a sort of (religious) trance, the eyes are shut (this is what the word means, as its original Greek language etymology alludes). By its nature, one experiences the world that transpires through the eyes “wide shut”. In this “betwixt and between” liminal world,15 the characters bare their souls and conscience for judgment, before the diverse (newly assorted) gallery of mythic deities. Hence, their presence in the (modern) novel is justified. They oversee the court of divine justice, which unlike trial by humans, mocked in TBK by Dostoevsky, can determine what the truth “really is”.
Historically, misterium refers to the ancient Greek and Roman public celebrations, performances and festivals, devoted to the local gods; the most well-known are the Eleusinian and Dionysian mysteries. (Classicists continue using the term “mystery” in respect to the public rituals of Antiquity/ancient Greece and Rome.) The established postulate of the anthropology of performance traces the origin of theater to ritual. But there was something else, in between, astonishingly poorly studied, yet of foundational significance. The transitional historic phase between ritual and theater, which lasted centuries, was misterium (ranging about a millennium BC and two centuries AD). Yet even with the emergence of stage arts, as we know them, misteria did not disappear from the realms of culture and religion, still influencing art, media, and narrative culture in many predictable and unexpected ways. Misterium has emerged as a media construct and a profound (timeless, rather than displaced from the historical arena) cultural paradigm, particularly revelatory for world-building theory and practice.
Ritual as a predecessor of theater art (and its heirs, film, television, and video games) is a well-established postulate of symbolic anthropology and performance studies.16 The influence of the initiation rituals on culture has been thoroughly studied. Named by Joseph Campbell, the “hero’s journey” has had a far-reaching impact on media culture. Less-known is the significance of the later phenomenon, misterium, which still overlaps with ritual, and therefore, was predictable, while already adding a specifically urban dimension to its essence. Emerged as a form of collective rituals in the settings of the first towns, misteria were devoted to synchronizing individual ritual actions of diverse participants in the growing settlements they all called home. A single-hero’s lonely journey of the earlier ritual culture was followed by socializing procedures, which took forms of coming together as a group in celebration of the native gods, the patrons of the settlement, and the surrounding nurturing fields.
The key features of misterium include: the simultaneous and parallel “journeys” of many participants who seek the acceptance through initiation; and the expression of loyalty to specific, locally valued gods, chosen with expectations of domestic benefits from the richly populated and diverse pantheon of Hellenic polytheism. There was also the invocation with invitation: the chorus of neighbors calling for the deity to arrive (in earlier rituals, the higher powers arrive when they see fit). The revelers also opened themselves to judgment in the effort to purify their souls and match the moral requirements from the beyond to ensure the “good life” in the afterlife. The moment of increasingly active participation of the community in relations with the patron deity was a subtle yet vital new aspect in the emerging town-culture misteria.
Gradually, transforming from the calendar-linked or the harvest-focused celebrations intended to ensure plentiful food supplies, misteria began to develop dramaturgy, at first re-playing key moments in the worshipped deity’s biography, and later presenting various human social situations to be examined and judged before gods. This branch evolved into man-authored drama and comedy (resolvable by human efforts, including laughing at oneself) and tragedy (typically unresolvable without the involvement of the gods from the machines, and their cathartic enlightening of human minds). We may say that the “eschatological” impulse (to be judged and corrected before too late) was now coming from the humans themselves.
The eyes were supposed to be shut as a mark/device of entering the other dimension, stepping from the profane/ordinary world through the portal of misterium into the sacred/divine realm, where the two kinds the gods and mortals can meet and resolve looming problems. With (symbolically) closed eyes in a mysterious mood the magic action of stepping across the threshold was expected to occur. We now employ for this purpose the “magic moments” of rising theater curtains, screens lighting up, and books opening. The key defining features of misteria include group participation; concern for the local home environment; the addressing of the pressing issues of social life; the human initiative in appealing to, and bringing in, the higher powers; readiness for moral judgment; and choosing the ever-increasing pantheon of gods (when civilization expanded) to be addressed from all realm/resources of the world mythologies and religions, to whom these newly re-elected individual deities the people would plead allegiance. This is what we observe in The Brothers Karamasov and perhaps what contemporary world-building aspires to achieve. In TBK, the author and his multiple characters (including his alter egos) cross the textual threshold (enhanced by multiple stories-within-stories) and invoke various higher powers, while seeking help in addressing the pressing social questions (in this case, Russia’s unresolvable political problems of undying Feudalism before the dawn of the 20th century).
Certainly, not all historically performed misteria were of the spiritual quality, as designated. There were different traditions and the bad apples, such as the violent or criminal Roman bacchanalias, “which were periodically banned, whether for their excessive violence or politically subversive messages.” (It is important to mention that the “corrupt” or the exploitative use of the powerful misterial form, governed by flawed moral or political aims, may happen in any century). Yet the fruitful traditions flourished around ancient Greece and the Mediterranean of late Antiquity, as described in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses and his biographies, depicting the writer’s real-life journeys and explorations of diverse deities’ cults, popular around the Mediterranean in the 2nd century AD. In essence, misteria have never left the realm of art entirely. Consider, for example, the key dramatic functions of the Ghost, the fertility god’s offspring Queen Hecuba, the Goddess Hecate, the Thunderstorm, and the array of mythic beings in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1609), Macbeth (1606), King Lear (1606), and Midsummer Night’s Dream (1605), respectively. Add to this the movement to restore ritual in the theater, pioneered in the 20th century by Artaud, Meyerhold, Grotowsky, and Brook; and the new tradition of screen passions (misteria!), directed by Dreyer, Pasolini, and Tarkovsky. The rise of Fantastic Realism, following European Romanticism and the vestiges of Modernism (the looming aesthetic revolution), encouraged experimentations with reality, myth, and fantasy.
It is important to add the notion of the misterial, as an adjective (as per the French and Italian roots). It applies to the quality proven to remain transhistorical and transcultural that has transpired in multiple cultural phenomena since the rise of the town-cultures of the Mediterranean before Hellenism, to modern-day media. The elements of the misterial beyond the Antiquity were later manifest in a variety of cultural expressions. They include the adventuristic novel, Medieval Cathedrals (some with their sentinels-gargoyles), church passion plays, Renaissance paintings, Cervantes’s self-ironic quest for the ideal Self in Don Quixote (1605), and Vermeer’s challenge to bend geometry for peeking into the other dimensions.
The mysteriousness of the Baroque and Gothic art was also part of this avenue, making a shift from the pathos of sacred mystery to the pragmatism of crime fiction in the narrative discourse. Initially, the dangerous, mythic shadows appeared invincible; later, the story efforts focused on finding and destroying the foes of society, however natural or supernatural they turn out to be. As emphasized by Bakhtin and Deleuze, it was the Baroque era which gave birth to crime fiction.17
The City-culture, with its overwhelming mosaic and multiple vistas, simply was in need of the spiritual centers. Therefore, misterium returns in Modernity not merely an aesthetic (theatrical, narrative), but a cultural phenomenon. And it is not authored or pioneered by individuals but represents the spiritual modality that aspires to find an embodiment in response to our cultural needs. Urban growth is overwhelmed with its rag-bag of the newly arriving townsfolk; hence, the sundry set of multifarious mythic deities is a proper match to the diversity of the city-culture. Just as in the turbulent Hellenic world of late Antiquity, strange types from the neighboring religions/cults may end up in the revised collections of active gods, mythopoesis of Magic and Fantastic Realism may parade the peculiar, quirky, offbeat, weird, and eccentric mythic powers/beings, encompassing the walking Nose, the giant talking black cat, the jailed god, and the omnipresent inquisitor.
The influence of the (macro) cultural form of misterium on Dostoevsky, an avid reader of world literature, reveals a long-term trajectory, via European heritage implicitly, but also via a short arc, explicitly, in the 1880s. When he was working on the novel, emerging French Symbolism was raising a question of the intrinsic religiosity of theater, or stage art as ritual.18 The echo of Symbolism profoundly influenced the Russian and Scandinavian dramatic art; as demonstrated by the Modernist theater experiments, and writings on the philosophy of art by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdyaev, Nikolai Evreinov, Pavel Florensky, Marc Chagall, Pavel Filonov, and later Antonin Artaud and Sergei Eisenstein.
The Baroque, Romanticism, and French Symbolism implicitly placed the stories in realms observable by the supernatural figures. These were metaphorical constructs, yet ones preserving the religious impulse, as is typical for any ritual process overlapping with art. In the decades preceding the 20th-century threshold, the cultural agenda of the misterium restoration was already explicitly discussed by artists and philosophers of the late 19th century, particularly in France and Russia. The restoration of misteria was one of the explicit core projects of Symbolism and Modernism, widely discussed in the theater and aesthetic circles. Symbolism, while not being explicitly religious, sought the understanding of the profound and meaningful symbolic (spiritual) processes of reality, through art.
The Modernists sought to weave trance-inducing experiences by invoking cosmic image-signs from the entirety of nature and culture to convey, via artistic mosaics, subliminal messages of revival and rebirth. These discussions were part of the public discourse among the artists, writers, cultural philosophers, and, of course, religious thinkers seeking to find innovative ways to restore religion in view of the dangerous trends of mass society. Russian thinkers and artists eagerly supported this movement (leading to the prominent Russian Symbolism of the Silver Age and also its forerunner, Fyodor Dostoevsky).19 The desired syncretism of the Arts proposed to fuse poetry, theater, literature, music, visual arts, and other multi-sensory experiences of synesthetic stimulation and total immersion. The motives behind this movement encompassed the concerns of the aesthetic, spiritual, and political nature, at the dawn of the 20th century.
Originating as a religious-performative experience, misterium evolved as the paradigmatic and transhistorical cultural form. It branched away from ritual, with its syncretic unity of “art-religion-knowledge” into the realms of narrative and theater, developing as a symbolic algorithm of culture. This split could be dated to the Renaissance, when misteria’s secular aspirations began to sprout in many artistic directions. Yet, while the religious impulse may take metaphorical expressions in the Arts, by its ritual nature, the axiological perspective of the gods, watching. . . can never be eliminated from the story framed by misterium (even if these higher beings take the identities of mythic entities or aliens). Misterium was repeatedly activated as a cultural tour-de-force by geo-political changes, associated with rapid expansions. When distant populations had to become one people under the umbrella of new ideas or governments, their beliefs and values were set to fuse or clash. “The wisdom of synchronization – the solution effective in both nature and culture – in its optimal forms leads to the advancements of individuals and groups.” The necessary mutual sharing and absorption of foundational myths led to the new empowerment of misteria, caused by the cultural need. Such eras include the late Antiquity, the Renaissance, the 19th-century threshold between the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the dawn of the 20th century, with the looming shadows of world wars. Our era of globalization is certainly part of this historical chain of expansions. Unsurprisingly, the modern-day world-building movement (already) has invoked the misterial elements in its media language and practice.
The joy of the locals for coming together in a communal event of spiritual unity (something Dostoevsky cared for deeply) morphed into the forms of virtual collectivity and collaboration on-line. Yet, there are also the real-world fan movements, carnivals, and conventions. Global media encourages sharing favorite stories and adopting the foreign-born magic friends from other cultures (or planets, or species). In place of the gods, any authority figures from the world mythologies may come into play; and we see many spectacular, influential characters from the fantasylands who teach us good lessons about humanity. Dramas, thrillers, and mysteries do not let us forget about our human flaws and unpredictability of the natural world. And here transpires the mechanism of mythopoetic suspense: elucidating the dark corners of respective cultures with hidden biases, envy, hubris, delusions, and dangerous ambitions. Mythological eschatology that insists on karmic revelations transforms into savvy narratological scoreboards, while the entire foundation of interactive storytelling is based on (moral) choices, social pathfinding, and consequential logic. Aspiring media artists and game designers may fantasize freely, engaging the treasures of world myths. The axiological framework and operating system of symbolic misterium will keep them grounded in moral values, which we continually reassess as an evolving global community.
1 This imaginary dystopian locale resonates with the Glupov-town of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The History of a Town (1870), a grotesque satire, politically risky novel relating the tragic-farcical chronicles of the fictitious Foolsville or Stupid Town, a caricature of the Russian Empire, with its sequence of monstrous rulers tormenting their hapless populations. This neo-mytheme also connotes Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969).
2 In his body of work, Bakhtin proposed and employed a notion of Great Time (Bolshoe vremya). This (metaphorical) concept implies symbolic-axiological eternity. The enormous, infinite realm of time is conceived by Bakhtin as populated by archetypal mythic figures and serving as a precious reserve of the most important values and perspectives on the world. What is interesting for the study of mythopoesis is that Bakhtin alludes that this enigmatic realm of Great Time is implicitly but actively present in all (best) narratives of humankind as a latent, deeply embedded POV. A philosophical anthropologist and predecessor of the semiotics of culture Bakhtin developed his own conceptual apparatus which integrates a poetic and a philosophical language. His conceptual system was enthusiastically reemployed by “the Bakhtin industry” in the humanities of the 1990s, particularly, in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. See: M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1968; M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, Texas, and London, England: University of Texas Press, 1981.
3 Ivan Turgenev’s classical novel Fathers and Sons (1862) had initially shaped the public discussion on intergenerational ideological tensions in Russia; shortly thereafter Dostoevsky began to write TBK.
4 For the seminal international collection, Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook (1995), on the archetypal myth, its co-editor, Alan Dundes, the leading American theorist of folklore, commissioned the translation of the influential work by Propp, the founding father of narratology and the structural studies of plot. See Allan Dundes and Lowell Edmunds, editors, Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
5 See Dmitry Bykov, Who Killed Fyodor Pavlovich, Audiobook lecture, Moscow, Russia: Litres, 2019. Bykov suggests that TBK was largely inspired by Charles Dickens’s similarly unfinished experiment, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).
6 See Lily Alexander, Fictional Worlds: Traditions in Narrative and the Age of Visual Culture, Charleston, South Carolina: CreateSpace, 2013, and Lily Alexander, “The Hero’s Journey” and “Mythology” in The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, New York, New York: Routledge, 2017, pages 11–20 and 115–126.
7 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. This now-classical work on polyphony in Dostoevsky and its anti-totalitarian ideas, first published in 1928, landed Bakhtin in the exile under Stalin, after he miraculously escaped a concentration camp sentence in 1928, with secret help from the Minister of Culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky. While Bakhtin spent 30 years behind the Ural Mountains (in Kazakhstan and Mordovia), banned from entering the European part of the Soviet Union, Dostoevsky, his subject and mentor, was largely banned from educational institutions during the Soviet era, with the exception of Crime and Punishment, taught as a moralizing parable.
8 Yuri Marmeladov, Dostoevsky’s Secret Code: The Allegory of Elijah the Prophet, Coronado, California: Coronar Press, 1987.
9 Lucien Levy-Bruhl was the first explorer of mythological consciousness. While at the brink of World War II, the anthropologist admitted having regret for employed “politically incorrect” terminology; his rich and original theoretical heritage is currently being effectively reevaluated in view of recent studies on the diverse forms of cognition and consciousness. See his book Primitive Mentality (1922).
10 The pioneer of initiation studies, and the first to discover “the hero’s journey” ritual paradigm, was Arnold Van Gennep, with his book Rites of Passage (1909), Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition, 2019.
11 It is another example of Dostoevsky’s “carnivalesque” humor, as outlined by Bakhtin (1928) 1984. The book “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics” by Mikhail Bakhtin was first published in 1928; translated into English in 1984.
12 Olga Fridenberg, Image & Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature, London and New York: Routledge, (1955) 1997.
13 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, Texas, and London, England: University of Texas Press, 1981.
14 See Vladimir Toporov, Myth, Ritual, Symbol, Image, (in Russian), Moscow, Russia: Progress, 1995. While Toporov was not the first to discover that Dostoevsky used the word “vdrug” (suddenly) hundreds of times throughout his fictional worlds, he does a comprehensive overview of this discovery and its significance.
15 Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), Piscataway, New Jersey: Aldine Transaction, 1995 paperback; and Victor W. Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, (1967) 1970.
16 See: Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of Folk Tale, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, (1928) 1984; Victor W. Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, New York, New York: PAJ Publications, 1987; Victor W. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York, New York: PAJ Books, 1982. Also see Lily Alexander, “The Hero’s Journey” in The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds. Specifically, on Greco-Roman mysteries, see the works from Classical Studies, for example: Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987; Jaime Alvar Ezquerra, Romanising Oriental Gods: Myth, Salvation, and Ethics in the Cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras, Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2008; and Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
17 The Baroque generated crime fiction, as per Bakhtin (1981) and Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
18 The 19th-century literary group known as Symbolists include Belgian/Flemish writer Maurice Maeterlinck, and the French authors Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé.
19 One such misterium-experiment, Vespers or The All-Night Virgil (1915) by Sergei Rakhmaninov (Mass for Unaccompanied Chorus) was recently performed in New York in St. Paul the Apostle Church, in February 2018.