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27 Cards in this Set
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Alyosha |
The narrator describes Alyosha as the “hero” of The Brothers Karamazov and claims that the book is Alyosha’s “biography.” A young, handsome man of about twenty, Alyosha is remarkable for his extraordinarily mature religious faith, his selflessness, and his innate love of humankind. Alyosha is naturally good: his love of his fellow human beings is simply a part of his personality, and he rarely has to struggle against temptation or doubt. He spends his energy doing good deeds for his fellow men and trying as honestly as he can to help them become happier and more fulfilled. Alyosha is not judgmental and has an uncanny ability to understand the psychology of others. Despite his infallible goodness and his natural advantages, Alyosha has a gentle, easygoing personality that causes almost everyone who knows him to love him.At the same time, Alyosha is not naïve or innocent. He understands human evil and the burden of sin, but he practices universal forgiveness. Alyosha’s religious faith is the cornerstone of his character. His faith in a loving God, strengthened by his close relationship with the monastic elder Zosima, reinforces his love of mankind and his immense capability to do good. Even when Alyosha experiences doubt, his doubt is always resolved by his commitment to do good. At the end of the novel, Alyosha has become the mature embodiment of Zosima’s teachings, and he even helps to guarantee Zosima’s legacy by spreading his teachings among the young schoolboys of the town, who adore him.Alyosha is an unusual main character because he does not initiate much of the main action of the novel. Instead, he tends to react calmly to whatever the other characters are driven by passion. But The Brothers Karamazov is a novel that analyzes various ways of life—the coarse sensualism of Fyodor Pavlovich and the cold skepticism of Ivan both come under scrutiny—and questions each of them sharply. Alyosha’s way of life seems superior to that of the other characters. He is the moral center of the novel because he represents the model of attitude and behavior that Dostoevsky considers the right one, the one most conducive to human happiness and peace instead of the trauma and conflict that afflict most of the novel’s other major characters. |
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Ivan |
No character in The Brothers Karamazov is afflicted with more trauma or inner conflict than Ivan. Ivan is a brilliant student with an incisively analytical mind, and his intelligence is directly to blame for his descent into despair. Unable to reconcile the horror of unjust human suffering—particularly the suffering of children—with the idea of a loving God, Ivan is consumed with doubt and argues that even if God does exist, he is malicious and hostile, and loves to torture mankind. Ivan believes that human concepts of morality are dependent on the idea that the soul is immortal, meaning that people only worry about “right” and “wrong” behavior because they want to experience pleasure rather than pain in the afterlife. Because of his feelings about God, Ivan himself is unable to believe in the immortality of the soul, and thus he argues that good and evil are fraudulent categories, and that people may do whatever they wish without regard for morality. But Ivan only starts thinking about these concepts in the first place because he loves humanity—it is his concern for human suffering that initially leads him to reject God. His logical disbelief in morality is terribly painful for him because it would make a way of life such as Fyodor Pavlovich’s, which Ivan detests, an acceptable mode of human behavior. Dignified and coldly moral, Ivan wants to be able to accept an idea of goodness that would exalt mankind and reject Fyodor Pavlovich’s brutishness, but, trapped in his own logic, he is unable to do so. He is so beset with doubt, and so defensively determined to keep the rest of humanity at a distance, that he is unable to act on his love for Katerina, and seems to scorn the very thought of pursuing happiness for himself.After Smerdyakov murders Fyodor Pavlovich, Ivan’s crisis of faith becomes more traumatic still. Convinced by Smerdyakov that Ivan’s philosophy made it possible for Smerdyakov to kill Fyodor Pavlovich, Ivan is forced to confront two very difficult notions: first, that he is responsible for another human being, and second, that his beliefs have paved the way for murder. Ivan’s subsequent collapse into hallucination and madness represents the novel’s final rejection of his skeptical way of life. When the novel ends, Ivan is feverish and unconscious, having been taken home by Katerina to recuperate, and his future is uncertain. It may be that, with Katerina’s love, he will find a way to accept Alyosha’s faith or come to terms intellectually with morality and his own responsibility for others. Or it may be that he will never resolve his crisis—he may become permanently insane. But the extremely optimistic note on which the novel ends suggests that he will find some form of redemption. |
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Dmitri |
Dmitri is the most turbulent of the three brothers. Passionate, headstrong, and reckless, he combines Alyosha’s good heart with Fyodor Pavlovich’s heedless sensuality. Dmitri has lived a life torn between sin and redemption. Unlike Alyosha, Dmitri is dominated by his passions, but unlike Fyodor Pavlovich, he feels genuine remorse for the sins he has committed and gradually comes to hope that his soul can be redeemed through suffering. Because Dmitri is the character most poised between animalism and spiritual redemption, he often represents the plight of humanity itself in the novel. When he is arrested for the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich, the question of his guilt or innocence becomes a crucial question about human nature—whether it is founded on good or evil. Dmitri is not only innocent of the crime, he undergoes an ardent spiritual conversion in prison and emerges from his trial a stronger, better person, prepared to live a life of goodness and to do penance for his sins. Through Dmitri’s redemption and Ivan’s breakdown, Dostoevsky thus concludes the novel by rejecting doubt and skepticism in favor of faith and love. Dmitri’s redemption represents the novel’s optimistic conclusion about the nature of mankind. |
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Themes: The Conflict Between Faith and Doubt |
The central philosophical conflict of The Brothers Karamazov is the conflict between religious faith and doubt. The main characters illustrate the different kinds of behavior that these two positions generate. Faith in the novel refers to the positive, assenting belief in God practiced by Zosima and Alyosha, which lends itself to an active love of mankind, kindness, forgiveness, and a devotion to goodness. Doubt refers to the kind of logical skepticism that Ivan Karamazov practices, which, in pursuing the truth through the logical examination of evidence, lends itself to the rejection of God, the rejection of conventional notions of morality, a coldness toward mankind, and a crippling inner despair. Dostoevsky does not present these positions neutrally. He actively takes the side of faith, and illustrates through innumerable examples how a life of faith is happier than a life of doubt. Doubt, as we see in Smerdyakov’s murder of Fyodor Pavlovich and in Ivan’s breakdown, leads only to chaos and unhappiness. But the novel nevertheless examines the psychology of doubt with great objectivity and rigor. Through the character of Ivan, in chapters such as “The Grand Inquisitor,” Dostoevsky presents an incisive case against religion, the Church, and God, suggesting that the choice to embrace religious faith can only be made at great philosophical risk, and for reasons that defy a fully logical explanation. |
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Themes:The Burden of Free Will |
The novel argues forcefully that people have free will, whether they wish to or not. That is, every individual is free to choose whether to believe or disbelieve in God, whether to accept or reject morality, and whether to pursue good or evil. The condition of free will may seem to be a blessing, guaranteeing the spiritual independence of each individual and ensuring that no outside force can control the individual’s choices with regard to faith. But throughout The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky portrays free will as a curse, one that particularly plagues those characters who have chosen to doubt God’s existence. Free will can be seen as a curse because it places a crippling burden on humanity to voluntarily reject the securities, comforts, and protections of the world in favor of the uncertainties and hardships of religious belief. Most people are too weak to make this choice, Ivan argues, and most people are doomed to unhappy lives that end in eternal damnation. The Grand Inquisitor story in Book V explores Christ’s biblical rejection of the temptations offered to him by Satan and concludes that Christ was wrong to have rejected them, since his rejection won free will for humanity, but took away security. Nevertheless, the condition of free will is finally shown to be a necessary component of the simple and satisfying faith practiced by Alyosha and Zosima, and the novel’s optimistic conclusion suggests that perhaps people are not as weak as Ivan believes them to be. |
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Themes:The Pervasiveness of Moral Responsibility |
One of the central lessons of the novel is that people should not judge one another, should forgive one another’s sins, and should pray for the redemption of criminals rather than their punishment. Zosima explains that this loving forgiveness is necessary because the chain of human causation is so interwoven that everyone bears some responsibility for the sins of everyone else. That is, one person’s actions have so many complicated effects on the actions of so many other people that it is impossible to trace all the consequences of any single action. Everything we do is influenced by innumerable actions of those around us, and as a result, no one can be held singly responsible for a crime or for a sin. This idea of shared responsibility is abhorrent to characters in the novel who doubt God and Christianity, especially Ivan, who repeatedly insists that he is not responsible for the actions of anyone but himself. Ivan’s arguments counter a belief in mutual responsibility, since he believes that without God or an afterlife, there is no moral law. In a world in which the absence of God makes moral distinctions meaningless, people are logically justified in simply acting out their desires. Additionally, Ivan’s deep distrust of human nature makes him inclined to keep the rest of humanity at a chilly distance, and the idea that the things he does affect other people makes him emotionally uncomfortable. When Smerdyakov explains to Ivan how Ivan’s amoral philosophical beliefs have made it possible for Smerdyakov to kill Fyodor Pavlovich, Ivan is suddenly forced to accept the harshest consequences of his relentless skepticism: not only has his doubt paved the way for murder, but he has no choice but to admit his own complicity in the execution of that murder. Ivan suddenly understands the nature of moral responsibility as it has been explained by Zosima, and the sudden comprehension is so overwhelming that it leads to a nervous breakdown—Dostoevsky’s final depiction of the consequences of doubt. |
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Motifs: Crime and Justice |
In the context of the novel’s larger exploration of sin, redemption, and justice, a major motif in the novel is the idea of crime and criminal justice. The crimes portrayed in the novel are also sins, or crimes against God, and the novel presents them in such a way as to suggest that human beings are not capable of passing judgment on one another. The only true judge, as we see in the aftermath of Dmitri’s wrongful conviction, is the conscience. Images of criminal justice in the novel occur most prominently in the debate between Ivan and the monks about ecclesiastical courts, in the story of the Grand Inquisitor, and in Dmitri’s arrest, imprisonment, and trial. |
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Motifs: Redemption Through Suffering |
A central part of Dostoevsky’s exploration of spiritual redemption is the idea that self-knowledge is necessary for a person to be redeemed. As Zosima explains in Book I, only when a man knows himself and faces himself honestly can he come to love others and love God. The principal way to arrive at that self-knowledge is through suffering. Suffering can occur either through the grief and guilt of sin, or, as in the case of Grushenka and Ivan, through the agony of illnesses that are metaphors for spiritual conditions. Apart from the sufferings of Grushenka and Ivan, the other major embodiment of this motif in the novel is Dmitri, who suffers through the misery of realizing his own evil before he can embrace his goodness. When Lise willfully slams her fingers in the door, she provides another, bitterly ironic instance of the motif. Lise wants to punish herself for being wicked, but her idea of suffering is so shallow, vain, and ridiculous that it is not really a serious attempt at redemption. |
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Motifs: The Profound Gesture |
Although The Brothers Karamazov is fundamentally an exploration of religious faith, the novel supports the idea that the choice to believe in God cannot be fully explained in rational terms. Profound, inexplicable gestures often take the place of argumentative dialogue. These gestures defy explanation, but convey a poetic sense of the qualities that make faith necessary and satisfying for the human soul. Examples of these profound, enigmatic gestures include Zosima kneeling before Dmitri in Book I, Christ kissing the Grand Inquisitor in Book V, Alyosha kissing Ivan in the same book, Zosima embracing the Earth just before he dies in Book VI, and Alyosha kissing the ground after his dream in Book VII. Each of these gestures can only be partially explained. Zosima, for example, kneels before Dmitri to acknowledge the suffering Dmitri will face. But none of these gestures can be fully explained, and their ambiguity is a way of challenging the rational paradigm that Ivan embraces. |
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Symbols: Characters as Symbols |
Because The Brothers Karamazov is both a realistic novel and a philosophical novel, Dostoevsky’s characterizations tend to yield fully drawn, believable individuals who also represent certain qualities and ideas bearing on the larger philosophical argument. The drama acted out between the characters becomes the drama of the larger ideas in conflict with one another. Most of the important symbols in the novel, then, are characters. Almost every major character in the novel embodies a concept: Alyosha represents faith, Ivan represents doubt, and Fyodor Pavlovich represents selfishness and physical appetite. Some characters have more specific designations. Smerdyakov, for instance, works primarily as a living symbol of Fyodor Pavlovich’s wickedness. |
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Symbols: Zosima’s Corpse |
The monks, including Alyosha, all expect Zosima’s death to be followed by a great miracle that will commemorate his extraordinary wisdom and virtue in life. They even expect that he will prove to be a saint. In monastic lore, one of the ways in which a saint can be detected after death is that his corpse, rather than emitting the stench of decay, is instead suffused with a pleasant smell. After Zosima’s death, however, no miracle occurs. Moreover, Zosima’s corpse begins to stink very quickly, exuding a particularly strong and putrid odor, which is taken by his enemies in the monastery as proof of his inner corruption. For Alyosha, who craves a miracle, the indignity visited upon Zosima’s corpse exemplifies the lack of validation with which the world often rewards religious faith. The fate of Zosima’s corpse suggests that faith is not justified by miracles. Rather, the person who chooses faith must do so in defiance of the many reasons to doubt. |
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Author’s Note & Book I: A Nice Little Family, Chapters 1–5 |
Book I provides a history of the major characters and their relationships, so the narrator can jump right into the main story in Book II without stopping to explain things as he goes. The narrator presents all of the incidents described in these chapters as though they take place before the real beginning of his story, describing the events as information that is generally well-known, repeated only for the convenience of a reader who somehow may not have heard it before. The narrator, as a result, is a strong presence in these chapters. The narrator signals that the story he tells is widely known by interjecting phrases such as “only later did we learn” and “well known in his own day.”The Brothers Karamazov is a cross between a realistic novel and a philosophical novel. The characters have extremely complicated and intricate psychologies, and yet they also each represent certain ideas and concepts. This combination of realism and philosophical symbolism is evident in these chapters, as each meticulously drawn character comes to embody a more abstract set of concepts and beliefs. Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, the father, with his orgies and his abhorrent treatment of his wives and children, embodies amoral, obnoxious Epicureanism—that is, a commitment to seeking pleasure rather than living responsibly or virtuously. Ivan Karamazov’s brilliant mind and burgeoning literary reputation embody the struggle to reconcile intellect with religious belief. Dmitri Karamazov’s violent hatred of his father and uncritical love of his brothers stand in opposition to Ivan’s critical faculties. Dmitri’s character illustrates the effects of action based on emotion rather than on intellect. Finally, Alyosha, whom Dostoevsky describes as the hero of the novel, is nearly the opposite of Fyodor Pavlovich. His love of mankind shows that he is innocent, pious, and virtuous without being mystical or fanatical.Each character in Dostoevsky’s quartet of personalities works as a foil, or contrast, for each of the others. Because the novel’s philosophical themes are immediately connected to the personalities of its characters, the conflicts and contrasts between the main characters come to symbolize some of the most fundamental problems of human existence. The difference between Ivan and Alyosha, for instance, represents the conflict between faith and doubt. Though none of these philosophical issues are given extensive treatment in this section, each of them, along with many others, is expanded and developed as the novel progresses. In the end, the story of the Karamazov brothers enacts a part of the drama of ideas on which civilization itself is based.There are several religious concepts in these chapters that may be unfamiliar to modern readers who are not members of the Russian Orthodox church, to which the Karamazovs belong. First, the article for which Ivan has gained notoriety before the story begins deals with the question of ecclesiastical courts. These are simply courts of law, which decide cases based not on the political laws that govern nations, but on religious law and the strictures of the church. Ecclesiastical courts in Russia at the time of the novel do not have the power to try or punish criminals. Ivan’s article argues that ecclesiastical courts should be given authority over criminal prosecution and punishment because if criminals knew they were defying God when they committed their crimes, many of them would choose to obey the law. Given Ivan’s reputation for religious doubt, many of the people who know him suspect that he does not entirely believe his own argument. Ivan’s argument is motivated not by a desire to punish, but, paradoxically, by compassion for mankind. He believes that without religious authority, people will descend into lawlessness and chaos. At the same time, because he does not believe in the church, Ivan rejects the notion of a binding morality. His article is sincere in that he believes his recommendations would improve the human condition, but insincere in that he does not believe in the ideas and institutions under which his recommendations would be carried out. The article, and the larger debate about ecclesiastical courts, thus serves to offer a preliminary insight into the nature of Ivan’s anguished mind: he is so committed to intellectual logic that he is led to advocate ideas he does not believe in his heart. |
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Book II: An Inappropriate Gathering, Chapters 1–4 |
Through the character of Zosima, Dostoevsky establishes a relationship between love and truth. As displayed in these chapters, the two qualities Zosima values above all others are love and honesty, particularly honesty with oneself. He connects these two ideas intimately: he tells both Fyodor Pavlovich and Madame Khokhlakov that they must be honest with themselves because a dishonest person loses the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, and thus loses the ability to respect and love other people. In Zosima’s view, the ability to love is based on the ability to recognize truth. He explains that if a person cannot believe in himself, he will quickly become suspicious of everyone around him, assuming that the world is full of lies. Because he cannot believe in his own perceptions, he will become unable to tell lies from truth, and because he is corrupted by his own dishonesty, he will suspect that everything is a lie. By becoming suspicious, he loses his respect for others and thus his ability to love them. This mode of reasoning represents a philosophy of doubt that opposes Alyosha’s loving faith. The process described by Zosima here is an incredibly incisive description of Fyodor Pavlovich’s personality and the road he has taken to arrive at it, but to a greater or lesser extent, it becomes relevant to nearly every character in the novel, including Ivan and Dmitri.Ivan’s speculation—if the soul is not immortal, then there is no morality at all, and people might as well live simply to satisfy their own selfish appetites—links the personality differences between the major characters to broad questions of philosophy and religious faith. Ivan’s troubling hypothesis prompts us to consider the difference between Alyosha’s selfless goodness and Fyodor Pavlovich’s selfish evil. Zosima is thus a central character in the early part of the novel, even though his role in the larger narrative is comparatively small, because he draws the connections between faith and goodness for us, helping us to understand the main characters. He is the first character in the novel to articulate some of Dostoevsky’s great themes. He is also important because of the role he plays in the mind of Alyosha, who venerates him absolutely. A great part of Alyosha’s moral feeling—his kindness, his desire to help others, his modesty—has been influenced by Zosima, and through Alyosha, Zosima’s example influences some of the most important actions in the novel.Zosima’s goodness causes us to see the flaws in the other characters. All of the other characters are troubled by some irritation or concern, some earthly flaw that makes them seem fallible and even petty in comparison to the saintly Zosima. Even Alyosha, who is relatively saintly himself, is made mortal in these chapters by his embarrassment over his family’s behavior in front of Zosima, and later by his awkwardness around Lise. Miusov’s flaw is his hatred of Fyodor Pavlovich, which fills him with an uncontrollable anger nearly every time Fyodor Pavlovich speaks. For his part, Fyodor Pavlovich is almost entirely fallible and flawed—he is obnoxious, disrespectful, vulgar, and dishonest, and he delights in intentionally irritating the other characters with his brutish humor and his buffoonery. The only person who is not made uncomfortable by Fyodor Pavlovich’s brazen behavior is Zosima, which illustrates Zosima’s own high level of spirituality. Only Zosima possesses the inner serenity and the unshakable love of mankind necessary to overlook Fyodor Pavlovich’s ugly personality and tolerate his boorish behavior. Fyodor Pavlovich’s children, as represented by Alyosha in this section, find him much harder to take. |
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Book II: An Inappropriate Gathering, Chapters 5–8 |
Zosima’s enigmatic action when he kneels before Dmitri is open to a variety of interpretations. Zosima is able to understand other people’s minds because his faith is logical and clearheaded. His kneeling before Dmitri indicates his understanding of something that no other character can see yet: that Dmitri, deep down, is a good man who will be forced to suffer before he can be redeemed. The narrative suggests that Zosima’s insight is vastly superior to the sly theorizing of Rakitin in Chapter 7—Zosima is able to predict Dmitri’s real future, whereas the rational Rakitin predicts that Dmitri will come to a violent end. In this way, Zosima’s bow fore-shadows Dmitri’s eventual fate. It also foreshadows a number of similarly enigmatic gestures made throughout the novel in moments of moral conflict, including Christ kissing the Grand Inquisitor and Alyosha kissing Ivan in Book V.Ivan’s argument that the entire notion of morality is dependent on the idea that the soul is immortal has a direct bearing on Fyodor Pavlovich’s character. If, as Ivan proposes, the idea of good and evil is dependent upon the existence of God, then Fyodor Pavlovich’s gross sensuality is a perfectly logical way for him to behave, as he does not believe in God. All of Fyodor Pavlovich’s morally questionable actions are irrelevant if morality is only a tool for securing a comfortable afterlife. Ivan himself seems to understand that Fyodor Pavlovich lives the logical extension of Ivan’s own beliefs. This relationship between the two characters explains the simultaneous love and hatred Ivan feels toward his father. Ivan hates Fyodor Pavlovich because Ivan dislikes the idea that his argument about morality could justify such an abhorrent figure as Fyodor. But Ivan must tolerate Fyodor Pavlovich, because criticizing him would undermine his argument. |
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Book III: The Sensualists, Chapters 1–11 |
The Brothers Karamazov is a systematically ordered novel. Each of the story’s twelve books chronicles a specific phase of its development and approaches its narrative from a specific angle. Book I gives the novel’s background, detailing Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov’s past and the three brothers’ childhoods. Book II deals with the meeting at the monastery, outlines some of the novel’s major philosophical conflicts, and introduces us to the source of conflict between Fyodor Pavlovich and Dmitri—their rivalry for Grushenka. Book III finally introduces the town in which the main portion of the novel’s action takes place and presents a firsthand view of the situation between the main characters, as opposed to the secondhand views presented by Fyodor Pavlovich, Rakitin, and Dmitri in Book II. Significantly, Book III presents the narration from Alyosha’s perspective for an extended period of time. Although the narrator describes Alyosha as the “hero” of the novel, he has been only a minor participant in the story so far. One of The Brothers Karamazov’s major arguments is that Alyosha’s nonjudgmental love of humanity improves the lives of the people with whom he interacts. Specifically, he bridges the communication gap between Dmitri and Katerina, provides hope and love to Lise, and tends to Fyodor Pavlovich after Dmitri attacks him. Dostoevsky repeatedly shows how Alyosha is impervious to the conflicts and built-up hatreds of the other characters, and how his soothing, relieving presence encourages peace and resolution between them. Zosima’s understanding of Alyosha’s capability to do good is presumably what leads him to send Alyosha out of the monastery and back into the world. Although that decision is a mystery in Book II, in Book III it becomes clear that Zosima’s motivation is to allow Alyosha to do good in the world. Alyosha works to bring Zosima’s ideas to fruition in the real world and exemplifies the novel’s moral standpoint. Alyosha represents not only the simple, loving religious faith described by Zosima, but also the power of that faith to do actual good in the world.Dmitri represents a combination of the ideas that drive Alyosha and Fyodor Pavlovich. He has Fyodor Pavlovich’s inclination toward Epicurean sensuality and Alyosha’s inclination toward morality and faith. When Rakitin accuses Dmitri of having the same sensualist greed and lust as Fyodor Pavlovich, Dmitri reveals his deep-seated disgust with his own behavior. The fact that he hates himself for treating Katerina poorly makes him morally superior to Fyodor Pavlovich. It is difficult for us to imagine Fyodor Pavlovich feeling similar remorse. Additionally, the story about Dmitri’s abandoned attempt to blackmail Katerina into sleeping with him reveals a level of moral concern that is also lacking in Fyodor Pavlovich. Dmitri begins to emerge as the person Zosima recognizes him to be from the beginning: a troubled, confused young man, driven to sin by the power of his passions, but struggling to live by his conscience.The story of the birth of Smerdyakov, chronicled in the early chapters of Book III, reveals the extent of Fyodor Pavlovich’s disregard for moral laws. His seduction and possible rape of a helpless idiot girl, combined with his reprehensible treatment of the resulting child, reveal the worst consequences of a life lived with no conception of good and evil. This depraved existence is the sort of life Ivan unhappily sees as the logical course of action for a man who does not believe in God. The twisted, unpleasant Smerdyakov, cursed with epilepsy, becomes a symbol of Fyodor Pavlovich’s deformed life, the illegitimate son’s mean temperament and unhealthy body resulting directly from his father’s wicked behavior. The contrast between Alyosha and Fyodor Pavlovich illustrates the superiority of a life of faith and love over a life of doubt and selfishness. |
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Book IV: Strains, Chapters 1–7 |
Alyosha and Zosima are extremely similar characters. Alyosha possesses Zosima’s ability to ascertain a great deal about a person’s inner self through simple observation. Alyosha also practices Zosima’s -lesson of not judging other people. Finally, Alyosha’s interaction with his father shows his ability to feel empathy for people’s shortcomings while at the same time refraining from apologizing for their failings. His willingness to declare that his father is twisted illustrates his honesty and integrity, as well as his intricate understanding of human character—Alyosha draws a distinction between evil and immorality. His immediate understanding of Ivan and Katerina’s relationship, his respect for the captain, and his sense that there is more to Ilyusha than violence and hostility all attest to his ability to quickly understand other people, a skill he learns from Zosima. Dostoevsky links this capability to moral purity throughout the novel, implying that the more honest and simple a person’s faith is, the more easily that person will understand fellow human beings.The conflict between faith and doubt that pervades The Brothers Karamazov shows the detrimental effects of skepticism on the human character. For Dostoevsky, faith essentially represents a positive commitment to the truth, while doubt represents the suspicion that what poses as the truth is really a lie. As a result, a religious man like Zosima is capable of immediately perceiving the truth about others, whereas an irreligious man like Fyodor Pavlovich is consumed with suspicion and mistrust. Fyodor Pavlovich illustrates this difference in his suspicion that Ivan’s attempt to seduce Katerina is actually a plot to keep Grushenka from marrying Fyodor Pavlovich. Fyodor Pavlovich himself is so dishonest that he assumes everyone around him is equally dishonest, and as a result, his lack of self-respect translates into as a lack of respect for the rest of humanity. This breakdown is what Zosima means when he says that the man who is dishonest with himself is incapable of love.Whereas Alyosha and Zosima love humankind because of their faith, the doubt that Ivan and Katerina feel makes them fatalistic. They see human nature as unchangeable, and therefore view people’s lives as predetermined. Ivan sees Katerina’s need to humiliate herself before Dmitri as a necessary part of her personality, and with that knowledge, he is paralyzed to act on his love for her, which he pridefully scorns as irrelevant. Katerina, who has been deeply hurt by Dmitri, has a corresponding sense that other people will disappoint her and cause her pain, and this sense manifests itself in her haughty desire to be made a martyr by the inevitable betrayals of those around her. She is unable to accept happiness as a possible outcome in her life, and as a result, she embraces humiliation and pain. Thus, she is just as paralyzed as Ivan, similarly unable to act on her feelings. In both of their cases, Dostoevsky shows how a kernel of doubt can spread through a person’s character, transforming itself into a defensive pride that renders the person unable to be honest, happy, or capable of pursuing happiness. |
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Book V: Pro and Contra, Chapters 1–4 |
Ivan’s dinner conversation with Alyosha adds a new level of complexity to the novel’s exploration of religion and spirituality. The novel does not simplistically suggest that belief in God brings unmitigated happiness while doubt brings unmitigated suffering, and the brothers’ dinner conversation provides the rationale behind the idea that not believing in God is more reasonable and compassionate than believing in him. Through his description of the unjust suffering of children and of the general misery of mankind’s situation on Earth, Ivan presents the strongest case against religion in the novel. Ivan’s dilemma mirrors the biblical dilemma of Job, who asked how a loving God could allow mankind to endure injustice and misery for no apparent reason. Ivan cannot understand why young children would be made to suffer under a loving God. In rejecting outright the explanation that God’s ways are too mysterious for mankind to comprehend, Ivan illustrates the depth of his commitment to rational coherence. He can only believe in a God who is rational like the human beings he created, and he thinks that a truly loving God would have made the universe comprehensible to mankind. As such, Ivan’s religious doubt is slightly different from atheism, because Ivan says that if God does indeed exist, he is not good or just. The problem is not resolvable. Either no God exists, or a God exists who is the equivalent of a torturer. This problem is the ultimate source of Ivan’s despair. Ivan’s understanding of the world means that mankind is alone in the universe and that Fyodor Pavlovich’s revolting attitude toward life is acceptable and even logical. If this is not the case, then God himself must be a heartless tyrant. |
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Book V: Pro and Contra, Chapter 5: The Grand Inquisitor |
The story of the Grand Inquisitor strongly resembles a biblical parable, the kind of story that Christ tells in the New Testament to illustrate a philosophical point. Both Ivan’s story and Christ’s stories use a fictional narrative to address a deep philosophical concern and are open to various interpretations. The similarity between Ivan’s story and Christ’s stories illustrates the uneasy relationship between Ivan and religion. At the same time that Ivan rejects religion’s ability to effectively guide human life, he relies on many of its principles in forming his own philosophical system. Like Christ, Ivan is deeply concerned with understanding the way we define what is right and what is wrong, and with understanding how morality guides human actions. However, Ivan ultimately rejects both Christ’s and God’s existence, as he cannot accept a supreme being with absolute power who would nonetheless allow the suffering that occurs on Earth.The story also implicitly brings up a new point with regard to Ivan’s argument about expanding the power of ecclesiastical courts. By setting his story in sixteenth-century Spain, where ecclesiastical courts were at the height of their power to try and punish criminals, Ivan asks what verdict such a court would have reached in judging Christ’s life. Since Christian religions teach that Christ lived a sinless life, presumably an ecclesiastical court would have been unable to find Christ guilty of any sin. However, the fact that Ivan’s court finds Christ guilty of sins against mankind illustrates the difference between Ivan’s religious beliefs and his beliefs in the efficacy of ecclesiastical courts. He sees the courts as an effective way to guide human action, but not necessarily as a way to induce men to believe more strongly in God or religion.The conflict between free will and security further illustrates the reasons for Ivan’s dissent from Christianity. The fundamental difference between Christ’s point of view and that of the Grand Inquisitor is the value that each of them places on freedom and comfort. Christ’s responses to the three temptations emphasize the importance of man’s ability to choose between right and wrong, while the Inquisitor’s interpretation of Christ’s actions emphasizes the greater value of living a comfortable life in which the right path has already been chosen by someone else.The assumption at the heart of the Inquisitor’s case is that Christ’s resistance of Satan’s temptations is meant to provide a symbolic example for the rest of mankind. The Inquisitor interprets the rejection of the temptations as Christ’s argument that humanity must reject certain securities: comfort, represented by bread; power and the safety that power brings, represented by the kingdoms; and superstition, represented by the miracle. The Inquisitor believes that Christ’s example places an impossible burden on mankind, which is inherently too weak to use its free will to find salvation. Effectively, the Inquisitor argues, the only option is for people to lead sinful lives ending in damnation. The Inquisitor’s Church, which is allied with Satan, seeks to provide people with stability and security in their lives, even if by doing so it ensures that they will be damned in the afterlife. Ivan’s story presents the Inquisitor, a man who considers himself an ally of Satan, as an admirable human being, acting against God but with humanity’s best interest at heart. Ivan does not believe that God acts in the best interest of mankind, but the implication that human nature is so weak that people are better off succumbing to the power of Satan is a radical response to the problem of free will. Ivan’s attitude stems from the psychology of doubt. Ivan’s over-riding skepticism makes it impossible for him to see anything but the bad side of human nature. As a result, he believes that people would be better off under the thumb of even a fraudulent religious authority rather than making their own decisions. Even though his argument is pessimistic, his reasoning is compelling.Just as Alyosha is unable to offer a satisfactory response to Ivan’s critique of God, Christ says nothing during the Inquisitor’s critique of him, one of several parallels between Alyosha and Christ during this chapter. But Christ’s enigmatic kiss on the Inquisitor’s lips after his indictment completely changes the tenor of the scene. Recalling Zosima’s bow before Dmitri at the monastery in Book I, the kiss represents an overriding act of love and forgiveness so innate that it can only be expressed wordlessly. On its deepest level, it defies explanation. The power of faith and love, Dostoevsky implies, is rooted in mystery—not simply in the empty and easily digestible idea that God’s will is too complex for people to understand, but in a resonant, active, unanswerable profundity. The kiss cannot overcome a logical argument, but at the same time there is no logical argument that can overcome the kiss. It represents the triumph of love and faith, on their own terms, over rational skepticism. In having Ivan end his poem on a note of such deep and moving ambiguity, Dostoevsky has his major opponent of religion acknowledge the power of faith, just as Dostoevsky himself, a proponent of faith, has used Ivan to acknowledge the power of doubt. Alyosha’s kiss for Ivan indicates how well the young Alyosha understands the problems of faith and doubt in a world characterized by free will, and just how committed his own will is to the positive goodness of faith. |
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Book V: Pro and Contra, Chapters 6–7→ |
These chapters foreshadow Smerdyakov’s eventual murder of Fyodor Pavlovich. Although Smerdyakov appears to be worried about Fyodor Pavlovich, his concern only serves to mask his deeper malice, and everything he does in this chapter lays the groundwork for killing his father the next night. He tells Ivan that Dmitri knows Grushenka’s secret knock purportedly because he is worried about Fyodor Pavlovich, but really because he wants suspicion to be cast on Dmitri so that Dmitri will be blamed when Fyodor Pavlovich’s body is found. He warns Ivan about his fear of an impending epileptic seizure ostensibly as proof of his fear for Fyodor Pavlovich, but really because he wants to prepare his own alibi for the night of the murder. After all, if he is a bedridden epileptic incapacitated in the aftermath of a seizure, he is hardly capable of a murder. But as we see in Chapter 7, Smerdyakov is capable of faking a seizure so convincingly that everyone around him is fooled. These chapters are thus full of foreshadowing, as every detail—from Grigory’s habit of taking a narcotic medicine to Ivan’s impending departure for Moscow—sets the scene for, and builds tension toward, Fyodor Pavlovich’s death.The complex combination of disgust and attraction that characterizes Ivan’s relationship with Smerdyakov manifests both Ivan’s hatred of human nature and his dissatisfaction with his own philosophy. When Ivan discusses philosophy with Smerdyakov, the conflicting forces in his character become clear. Ivan is excited at Smerdyakov’s interest, disgusted with Smerdyakov’s manner, and unhappy with himself for providing a hostile figure like Smerdyakov with an amoral philosophy that might justify anything Smerdyakov wants to do. Smerdyakov’s ingratiating behavior toward Ivan results from his realization that Ivan loathes Fyodor Pavlovich. He believes that Ivan is, on an unconscious level, using him to kill Fyodor Pavlovich. He thinks Ivan is preparing him by giving him a new moral outlook in which, because God does not play a role, there is no good or evil, and taking a life is not morally different from saving one.Ivan’s influence on Smerdyakov presents the philosophical difficulty in determining guilt for a crime. Ivan’s repeated insistence that people are not responsible for one another suggests that he is morally and psychologically free of guilt for Smerdyakov’s actions, no matter how much influence he may have exerted. On the one hand, if Ivan really believes everything he says about the absence of good and evil and the meaninglessness of responsibility, then he should have no cause to feel guilty about Fyodor Pavlovich’s death. On the other hand, if he does not really believe in his own argument, then the complicity he exhibits here will force him to confront the fact that he is partially to blame for the murder of his hated father. Dostoevsky does not show us the outcome of this philosophical question in these chapters, but Zosima has insisted that all people are responsible for the sins of all other people, and Ivan has insisted just the opposite. |
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Book VI: The Russian Monk, Chapters 1–3 |
The main philosophical conflict of the novel is apparent in the structural division between Books V and VI: the dark and brooding Book V is consumed with the tremors of Ivan’s doubt, while the more peaceful Book VI is devoted to the quiet wisdom of Zosima’s faith. Zosima’s final anecdotes work as a cooling antidote to the disturbing arguments in Book V, replacing Ivan’s frenzied logical examinations with more positive examples of the power of faith to do good in the world. In a way, the anecdote of the murderer is the exact opposite of the Grand Inquisitor story. The Grand Inquisitor story tells about an innocent man who is imprisoned and judged, while Zosima’s anecdote of the murderer tells about a guilty man who is goes free and is forgiven. The contrast in the two anecdotes reveals a great deal about the contrast between Zosima’s philosophy and Ivan’s. Zosima emphasizes the power of love to overcome sin, whereas Ivan emphasizes only the baseness of the world and the cold logic with which he believes it must be faced.In addition to the parallel between the story of the Grand Inquisitor and the anecdote of the murderer, there are a number of other parallels between things Zosima describes in Book VI and events that take place in the larger narrative, both before and after this section of the novel. For instance, Zosima’s description of himself in youth as a soldier like Dmitri, with a brother who helped to redeem him spiritually, echoes the relationship between Dmitri and Alyosha: Alyosha also helps to redeem Dmitri, and Zosima says specifically that Alyosha reminds him of his brother. Zosima’s youthful duel and the murder committed in the anecdote of the murderer are both crimes of passion committed for a woman’s love, and thus echo the rivalry between Fyodor Pavlovich and Dmitri for Grushenka. The murderer’s acceptance of responsibility and his desire to confess involve many of the same issues of responsibility and redemption that affect Ivan. These parallels ultimately are another sign of the infallible wisdom of Zosima. He is able to predict, better than anyone else, what lies ahead for the Karamazovs, and he is thus able to tailor his final lesson to what he knows will be Alyosha’s needs in the coming crisis. Alyosha has proved himself capable of internalizing Zosima’s lessons, and he emerges from this final conversation with Zosima better prepared to handle the hardships that lie ahead.Zosima’s death, as he stretches out his arms to embrace the Earth, is a symbol of acceptance and faith, indicating his love of God’s creation with the last energy left in his body. Zosima’s sincerity and his assent to the will of God are total. He does not die with fear, resentment, or regret. His final gesture is one of rapturous acquiescence, and thus Zosima’s death works as an emblem of everything he has taught, spoken, and stood for throughout the novel. |
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Book VII: Alyosha, Chapters 1–4 |
The panic in the monastery over the stench exuded by Zosima’s corpse is less bizarre than it may first appear. For modern readers, the idea of a corpse emitting a bad smell as it begins to decay is only natural. But in the lore of ancient monasteries, as in ancient medicine, odor was considered an extremely important and revealing quality. The Renaissance physician Paul Zacchias, whose 1557 work Quaestiones medico-legales was at the cutting edge of medical knowledge for its time, wrote that poison, infection, and disease were all transmittable through smell: “We have a thousand and one examples of living beings that have been infected by olfaction alone. . . . We see many people every day who fall into a serious or very serious state because of good or bad odors.” The way something smelled, then, was deeply revealing of its inner quality. A bad smell could be proof that something was internally diseased or corrupted. The importance of smell explains why Zosima’s enemies within the monastery go into such a frenzy when Zosima’s corpse begins to stink. They take the stench itself as proof of an inner unworthiness on Zosima’s part, so that the smell of his corpse threatens to invalidate the wisdom of his teaching.Additionally, the stench drives many of Zosima’s followers into despair, especially those who consider him nearly a saint. In monastic legend, from the medieval era through at least the eighteenth century, the smell of a corpse is often connected to the saintliness of the soul that inhabited it so that a corpse that does not stink is a miraculous sign of the authenticity and goodness of the recently deceased person. The Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau wrote, “In innumerable stories from the convents, you can tell whether the object seen in a vision is authentic by the smell it gives off, or whether a deceased religious is a saint by the good odor surrounding her.” The Brothers Karamazov is set in an era far removed, in some respects, from the medieval superstitions that underlie these legends—Ivan, for instance, would certainly scoff at them. But within the monastery, in a cloister in a small town in a remote part of Russia, it seems that the legends are more enduring. The high hopes that most of Zosima’s followers have for a miracle following his death are dashed by the smell of his corpse, which, because of the monks’ superstitions about odor, implies not only that Zosima was not a saint, but that he may not even have been a good man. |
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Book VII: Alyosha, Chapters 1–4 |
In the Grand Inquisitor chapter, we see how Christ rejects the Devil’s temptation to throw himself off the pinnacle, seek salvation from the angels, and show the people below a miracle that would restore their faith. The Grand Inquisitor’s insistence that Christ made a mistake in refusing to show the people a miracle is based on his emphatic belief that free will is not enough for most people to find salvation through faith: the monks illustrate this general principle that people need to witness miracles, because they are too weak to hold onto their faith without them. Everyone, even Alyosha, is optimistic about the possibility of a miracle after Zosima’s death, and the speedy putrefaction of Zosima’s corpse is an unpleasant reminder that, in the real world, there are no dazzling miracles, and faith is something that must be achieved without evidence.In these chapters, Dostoevsky creates a powerful and disturbing symbol of the problem of free will in religious belief. Without the security of miracles, people are left to their own devices, to choose either faith or doubt. The choice to doubt or disbelieve can be based on a model of rational evidence, but the choice to believe must be more mystical, based on a positive feeling of meaning and profundity that is often at odds with the world as we usually experience it. Zosima’s corpse represents a worldly impediment to faith. The physical reality of the world stubbornly works against the claims of faith, giving believers no validation for their belief. Even Alyosha, whose veneration of Zosima continually strengthens and protects his own faith, is driven to doubt by the events surrounding Zosima’s death. The anger that he feels toward God is similar to the cold, intellectual fury that underlies Ivan’s entire project of doubt. Both men are angry about God’s injustice: Alyosha because God permits the posthumous humiliation of his beloved Zosima, and Ivan because God permits the suffering of children.Rakitin and Grushenka first conspire to bring Alyosha to Grushenka’s because they are threatened by his apparently unshakable purity. Their mistrust and self-doubt are manifest in Rakitin’s smirking cynicism and Grushenka’s angry pride. They want to upset, frighten, or corrupt Alyosha so that his own faith no longer threatens their shared belief that the world is corrupt, painful, and ugly. When the opposite happens, and Alyosha’s troubled goodness elicits a chord of feeling and sympathy in Grushenka, the two young people each find unexpected salvation in their sudden understanding of one another. For Grushenka, finding a man who cares about her renews her faith in the world. Alyosha’s experience with Grushenka, on the other hand, reminds him that the validation of faith lies not in miracles, but in good deeds. He believes that faith is not invalidated simply because a corpse develops a stench, but that it can be validated by active love of mankind.Alyosha’s dream of Zosima demonstrates that Zosima’s legacy has not died with his body, but lives on in Alyosha’s good deeds, in the forgiveness and love that are the cornerstones of his faith. -Alyosha’s kissing of the earth after he wakes up is a turning point for him. A deliberate echo of Zosima’s final act before dying, it signifies that Alyosha has stepped into Zosima’s shoes and is now fully committed to leaving the monastery and doing good in the world. |
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Book VIII: Mitya, Chapters 1–8 |
Dostoevsky uses a variety of literary techniques to suggest that Dmitri is responsible for his father’s murder. Before Dmitri appears with a large amount of money, the narrator continually makes statements implying that Dmitri will steal Fyodor Pavlovich’s 3,000 rubles: “Only three or four hours before a certain incident, of which I will speak below, Mitya did not have a kopeck, and pawned his dearest possession for ten roubles, whereas three hours later he suddenly had thousands in his hands . . . but I anticipate.” Dmitri’s inner monologue is similarly misleading, as when Dmitri thinks about going to Madame Khokhlakov’s and realizes “fully and now with mathematical clarity that this was his last hope, that if this should fall through, there was nothing left in the world but ‘to kill and rob someone for the three thousand, and that’s all. . . .’” Dostoevsky also uses a technique called ellipsis, skipping over a moment of action in order to play on our expectations: he implies Dmitri’s guilt by leaving out the crucial stretch of action in Chapter 5, in between Dmitri’s discovery of Grushenka’s whereabouts and his arrival at Perkhotin’s office. This strategy leads us to suspect that Dmitri has killed his father in that time. Finally, the events we do see suggest Dmitri’s guilt. Dmitri is desperate, impassioned, and antagonistic toward Grigory. The combination of these factors makes Dmitri seem eminently capable of committing murder. The narrative throughout this book lays the groundwork for a surprise plot twist: the revelation in Book XI that Smerdyakov, and not Dmitri, is the murderer. Dostoevsky goes to such lengths to imply that an innocent man is guilty of such a crime for several reasons. First, making Dmitri guilty and then innocent in our mind is a way of enacting the spiritual rebirth that Dmitri experiences after his arrest. Second, making us learn that our judgment about Dmitri is wrong is a way of emphasizing Zosima’s advice never to judge anyone because all people are responsible for one another’s sins. Third, making Dmitri appear guilty is a way of emphasizing the extraordinary scope of his passion. Dmitri may not have committed murder, but he is clearly capable of such a crime, and possesses a tormented and sinful soul. The redemption of such a passionate person is all the more dramatic. Fourth, making Dmitri appear guilty is a way of making us feel the way most of the other characters do when they learn about the arrest. The whole town believes him to be guilty.Making Dmitri appear guilty is also a way for Dostoevsky to put human nature itself on trial. Throughout the novel we have seen various conceptions of human nature, ranging from Alyosha’s faith that people are essentially good, like Zosima, to Ivan’s belief that people are essentially bad, like Fyodor Pavlovich. But Dmitri combines the qualities of Fyodor Pavlovich and Zosima: he is a lustful and sinful man who nevertheless powerfully loves God. He commits bad deeds and longs to redeem them. He believes that he is bound for hell but pledges to love God even from the depths of hell. After spending a large amount of his fiancée’s money on a lavish vacation with another woman, he is now greedily desperate for even more money, but only so that he can salvage his honor with Katerina, and thus make up for his sin. By putting Dmitri on trial through circumstantial evidence, Dostoevsky essentially poses the question of whether Dmitri’s sinfulness or his goodness is the more fundamental aspect of his nature. This query in turn should make us question which of the two aspects is more fundamentally a characteristic of humanity. Dostoevsky wants us to consider whether humanity, burdened as it is with free will, is capable of overcoming its sinful nature and choosing to live within its good nature. When Dmitri is proved to be innocent shortly after he undergoes his powerful spiritual conversion, the question is answered in favor of human goodness—though not without a thorough understanding of the reality of evil in human life.Although a great deal of the novel’s thematic development relies on the events in these chapters, the chapters are so devoted to narrative action that there is comparatively little thematic development within Book VIII itself. Apart from the insight it offers into Dmitri’s tormented inner conflict, the most interesting psychological aspect of this section is its look at Grushenka’s growth since her encounter with Alyosha. Before, Grushenka is too proud and suspicious to acknowledge her love for Dmitri, but through Alyosha she discovers real goodness. As a result, she is at last capable of admitting to herself that the Polish officer is just a vulgar man who betrayed her in her youth, and that Dmitri is the man she really loves. Alyosha does not appear at all in the action of this book, but his presence is strongly felt in Grushenka’s positive acquiescence to her love for Dmitri—a lovely moment of goodness that is interrupted sharply by evil, with the arrival of the police and the announcement of the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich. |
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Book IX: The Preliminary Investigation, Chapters 1–9 |
This book is devoted to a description of the circumstantial evidence that makes Dmitri appear guilty of Fyodor Pavlovich’s murder. The question of whether Dmitri is guilty symbolically represents the greater question of whether human nature is fundamentally good or sinful, so the legal proceedings against Dmitri represent the trial of the human spirit. Just as Book V, especially in the Grand Inquisitor chapter, presents the novel’s indictment of God, Book IX begins its indictment of humanity. This book recounts Dmitri’s past in detail, and the stories of his innumerable sins are retold, as though to summarize the moral failings that lie at the heart of the case. Dmitri has lied to everyone, stolen from and cheated Katerina, turned to violence against Grigory, and been unable to control his passions for Grushenka. In short, he has committed the most common and universal sins of mankind.Dmitri’s bizarre, almost gleeful reaction to this list of sins reveals the seeds of his redemption. In Zosima’s anecdote of the murder in Book VI, Dostoevsky has drawn our attention to a peculiar psychological phenomenon: the desire of a guilty man to confess his guilt. The murderer in this anecdote had gotten away with his crime, but he could never find happiness because he was desperate to confess his guilt. As Zosima indicates in his argument with Ivan over ecclesiastical courts in Book II, conscience is the sternest judge of all. Even a criminal who has gotten away with his crime can be judged by his conscience. Like the murderer in Zosima’s anecdote, Dmitri has a conscience that judges him harshly, and also like the murderer, Dmitri is guilty, not of the charge of killing his father, but of all the lies, acts of violence, and other sins of his past. Like the murderer, part of Dmitri longs for his crimes to be known and judged, so he can find redemption in the suffering of his punishment. Dmitri’s glee throughout this passage is due in part to Grushenka’s declaration of love for him. But he also experiences relief to be in the hands of the police and to hear his crimes discussed openly and critically. This review of his past sins may seem like a damning indictment of humanity, but it is actually the first step in Dmitri’s transformation from a tormented and sinful man into a faithful and loving one. |
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Book X: Boys, Chapters 1–7 |
The stories of Alyosha’s influence on Kolya, Ilyusha, and the other boys develop a motif of the novel: the idea that faith and virtue can be taught and handed down as a legacy from one faithful man to the next. This legacy begins with Zosima’s brother, who teaches Zosima about loving God’s creation and forgiving mankind. Zosima passes the lessons on to Alyosha, and Alyosha now actively passes them on to the young boys he has befriended since his initial encounter with Ilyusha, keeping the chain of faith alive. Dostoevsky dramatizes the receptivity of children to moral teachings throughout this section of the novel. If Alyosha’s example is only partly successful in improving the lives of the adults to whom he is close, it is more successful among the children here in Book X. The boys look at Alyosha with unmitigated respect and adoration because he treats them with respect—as equals—as we see in his extended conversations with the wayward Kolya. The Brothers Karamazov ends on a note of optimism and encouragement, and a great deal of its positive tone seems to stem from the idea that Alyosha’s role as a teacher of the young will improve the faith of the next generation.This part of the novel shows Alyosha’s reaction to Ivan’s indictment of God. In these chapters, Alyosha encounters the very injustice that makes Ivan reject God—the suffering of children—and shows his response to it. Rather than recoiling in intellectual horror, as Ivan does, Alyosha devotes himself to doing what he can to make the suffering child happier, bringing Ilyusha’s schoolmates to see him every day, helping to heal the rift between Ilyusha and Kolya, and generally providing Ilyusha and his family with friendship and support. Just as Zosima’s argument with Ivan in Book I stems from their opposite perspectives, with Zosima treating other people on an individual basis and Ivan looking at mankind as a whole, the contrast between Alyosha and Ivan in this situation stems from the same opposition. Ivan looks at the abstract idea of suffering children and is unable to reconcile the idea with his rational precepts about how God ought to be. His solution is to reject God. Alyosha, on the other hand, sees an actual suffering child and believes that it is God’s will for him to try to alleviate the child’s suffering to whatever degree he can. His solution is to help Ilyusha. Again, Dostoevsky shows how the psychology of skepticism walls itself off, in elaborate proofs and theorems, from having a positive effect on the world, while the psychology of faith, simplistic though it may be, concerns itself with doing good for others. This very subtle response to the indictment of God presented by Ivan in Book V brings the philosophical debate of the novel onto a plane of real human action, and shows the inadequacy of Ivan’s philosophy—which Ivan himself would readily acknowledge—to do good in the real world. |
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Book XI: Brother Ivan Fyodorovich, Chapters 1–10 |
Lise’s miserable behavior makes her a parody of Ivan. Like Ivan, she is frustrated and hurt by the world’s injustice, saying that she cannot respect anything. But whereas Ivan reacts to his frustration with an intellectually rigorous despair, Lise merely allows her doubts, both about the world and herself, to overwhelm her, so that she loses the ability to take anything seriously. Ivan’s laughter at Lise’s expression of her emotions is a response that involves both pity and -contempt. One of the main ideas of The Brothers Karamazov is that suffering can bring salvation, and that people who purge their sins through suffering can attain self-knowledge and redemption. Grushenka goes through this process, with Alyosha’s aid, in the aftermath of her horrible illness. But Lise vulgarizes this notion: her slamming the door on her finger is a pathetic attempt to invoke this principle, but because her attempt to suffer is full of such obvious vanity and self-pity, it is only a mockery of the lofty idea it seeks to copy. Apart from Zosima, Alyosha is the most moral character in the novel, and the strength and clarity of his faith are the moral center of the novel. For Alyosha to have faith in Dmitri is not surprising, because Alyosha has faith in human nature. On the other hand, there is a sense in which, within the scope of the novel, the great philosophical conflicts that run through the story are all riding on the question of Dmitri’s guilt or innocence. Thus, if Alyosha places his faith in Dmitri and is proved wrong, the idea of faith will be thrown into doubt.Ivan’s collapse into madness at the end of this section demolishes his cold dignity and reveals the terrifying emptiness at the heart of his philosophy. At the same time, his crisis brings some of the central ideas of the novel into direct conflict. As the novel progresses, Ivan continually resists the notion that he bears any moral responsibility for the actions of other human beings, saying instead that people are only responsible for their own actions. But his conversations with Smerdyakov gradually illustrate for him the role he played in enabling Smerdyakov to murder Fyodor Pavlovich. Ivan is therefore forced to accept the universal burden of sin for the first time, and it is the agony of this burden that leads to his mental breakdown. In a sense, Ivan’s skepticism is fueled by his general distrust of humanity. He withdraws into his detached intellectualism in part because he is unable to love other people, and wants to remain separate from them. Smerdyakov’s revelation that Ivan’s philosophy enabled him to murder Fyodor Pavlovich finally makes clear to Ivan the extent to which people are involved in one another’s lives. While illuminating the terrifying consequences of Ivan’s amoralism, Smerdyakov’s crime also shatters the walls Ivan has built around himself, and, in a way, the rest of humanity comes flooding in on him. Without the consolation of faith, Ivan cannot handle this burden. His hallucination of the devil, like the revelation of Smerdyakov’s guilt, shows him the nature of a world without God, but having so thoroughly rejected God, Ivan is left defenseless. His breakdown results from the collision between the psychology of doubt and the idea of moral responsibility. Ivan could endure one. He cannot endure both.Smerdyakov’s motivations for killing Fyodor Pavlovich are vague. Smerdyakov believes Ivan wanted him to kill Fyodor Pavlovich. But he has other motivations as well. Smerdyakov may be living Ivan’s philosophy that if there is no God, all is permitted. He may also kill for the money, or out of his own hatred of Fyodor Pavlovich. Finally, Smerdyakov may simply feel a desire to do evil. Allegorically, the murder signifies the logical extreme of Ivan’s arguments. Smerdyakov shares Fyodor Pavlovich’s brutish wickedness, and so, in a sense, Fyodor Pavlovich is killed by his own loathsome way of living. Ivan’s conviction that good and evil are fraudulent categories, and that no one has any moral responsibility to anyone else, has facilitated the destruction of one amoral monstrosity by another. The deeply moral Ivan loses his mind when confronted with the horror of this development, as apparently does Smerdyakov, whose unmourned suicide is the final cry of terror and pain to come from the novel’s exploration of the nihilism of disbelief. |
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Book XII: A Judicial Error, Chapters 1–14 |
Dmitri’s trial in Book XII is in many ways an anticlimax. Book XI contains a more shocking sequence of events, including Smerdyakov’s confession, Dmitri’s spiritual redemption, Ivan’s mental collapse, and Smerdyakov’s suicide. These revelations resolve the novel’s pressing moral questions, establish Dmitri’s innocence, and make whatever happens in the courtroom less consequential to the novel’s larger themes. In Book XII, Dostoevsky satirizes the Russian legal system through the incredibly long, pompous closing speeches of the lawyers. Part of the novel’s premise, however, is that the real judgment of Dmitri’s soul could not possibly take place in a courtroom. The idea that no human judgment can supplant the judgment of one’s own conscience first appears in Book I, when Zosima argues against Ivan’s proposals for the ecclesiastical courts by pointing out that no court could hope to judge a man as he must judge himself.Crime and justice are important motifs in The Brothers Karamazov, and the trial is the most sustained look at criminal justice in the novel. Dostoevsky refrains from pushing analytical conclusions about the nature or quality of Russian jurisprudence, and instead chooses simply to offer a thorough depiction of how a Russian criminal trial might actually look: he emphasizes the styles of legal argumentation, ranging from Fetyukovich’s precise dissections of witness’s statements to the rougher and more direct style of Kirrillovich; the emotions of the witnesses; and, above all, the reaction of the crowd to the drama at hand.Dostoevsky’s decision to write much of Book XII from the perspective of the crowd as a whole is both philosophically and aesthetically significant. This perspective gives the novel a sense of completion by providing dramatic resolution in both its individualistic and its abstract modes. The conflict has been played out between the two perspectives on humanity represented by Zosima and Ivan, the one looking at people as individuals, the other looking at humanity as an abstract whole. In Book XI, with the total collapse of Ivan’s philosophy, Dostoevsky gives us the private, individual resolution of the novel’s great questions, the most important resolution and the one matching Zosima’s worldview. In Book XII, he provides the large-scale, abstract resolution of the same questions from the perspective of the mob. The crowd comes to believe in Dmitri because they are moved by his story, suggesting that human nature is more good than it is evil. The crowd’s final reversal of their original impression that Dmitri is guilty—so that everyone in the room thinks he is innocent except the jurors—is Dostoevsky’s encouraging testament to mankind’s ability to discover truth. The crowd challenges the cynical assessment of mankind offered by Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor, even if it does so by allowing itself to be moved by the emotional drama of Dmitri’s story. |
