Post on 07-Nov-2021
University of Dallas University of Dallas
UDigital Commons UDigital Commons
Russian Novel Teaching
January 2021
Brothers Karamazov Lecture Brothers Karamazov Lecture
Louise Cowan
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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Cowan, Louise, "Brothers Karamazov Lecture" (2021). Russian Novel. 22. https://digitalcommons.udallas.edu/cowanteach_rusnov/22
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The Brothers Karamazov represents Dostoevsky’s
solution to the search that his entire life represents. As
an educated man, an intellectual, even in a backward
Russia, he was preoccupied with the question of God’s
existence–and even more, with the question of Christ’s
redemption of the human. He had tried to depict what
the follower of Christ must be like throughout his
writings, beginning with the negative Notes from
Underground, going on to locate Christian faith in Sonya,
a prostitute, who reads to the murderer Raskolnikov the
story of Lazarus. He tried the image of a perfectly good
man in The Idiot, only to find that goodness as we can
conceive of it is not only insufficient but turns rapidly to
something negative and destructive. In the Possessed,
now spoken of more frequently as Devils, he showed in
the figure of the beautiful but spiritually dead Stavrogin
the way in which human nobility and idealism can turn
into something very much like the antiChrist.
A short story; Dream of a Ridiculous Man, uncovers
for Dostoevsky the secret ingredient to Christlike
love: in this story
a man, in despair, intending to shoot himself, is
walking the streets of Petersburg when he is
accosted by a child, very much in distress, crying for
assistance. Something is wrong with the child’s
mother; and the pitiful young thing begs the man to
come with her to help. The man refuses, reasoning
that if he is about to commit suicide nothing shoudl
matter; but when he goes back into his lonely room,
he cannot get the child out of his mind. He raises the
gun to his temple; but suddenly finds himself
transported through space . . . . What he discovers
in this story is that suffering is an ineradicable part
of Christlike love. . . that the angelic imagination, as
Allen Tate has described it, is fatally misleading.
(What Jacques Maritain has called “angelism”) (And,
if you have not read it, what William Lynch treats of
in his Christ and Apollo, where he speaks of “going
through the finite.” It is this path through the
finite that induces the kind of suffering that
Dostoevsky shows us in his final novel, In The
Brothers Karamazov, he confronts the question
directly in the person of the three brothers, all of
whom must be crucified, so to say, if they are to
find the path to liberation.
According to many authorities, one can consider any
one of the three brothers the hero of the novel. We can
trace the course of each and find that it has its own
complication and resolution, its own peripeteia, its
anagnorisis. [Explain Aristotle’s Poetics]
But I think we can see that Alyosha is indeed the
real protagonist; it is he who connects all the other plot
lines; it is he whose inner development we watch
intimately. The parallel plots concerning his brothers’
progress are like the minor plots of Shakespeare, echoing
and extending the issues in the major plot. And yet the
situations of the two brothers are woven into Alyosha’s
life so that one cannot separate them.
These three plots are brought together with such
intricacy, such motion, that the reader is made fairly
dizzy putting the entire story together. For even though
Alyosha is the protagonist, the whole story is not simply
concerned with one of the brothers' lives: the entire
action must involve them all. What is the meaning of
Dostoevsky's peculiar use of fragmentation, dividing the
parts of the human psyche into separate faculties? D’s
novel The Idiot shows this phenomenon most clearly:
Myshkin and Rogozhin.
it was present also in The Devils: Shatov, Kirillov;
Stavrogin-Peter-Tikhon
and in Crime and Punishment:
Raskolnikov--Svidrigailov-- Razumihin
Part of the reason may lie, as we have been indicating, in
D's insight into the fragmenting nature of modernity.
Certainly part of it is attributable to the modern
tendency to “go underground” and hence project a part
of oneself on others. But even further, Dostoevsky was
deeply aware of the diabolical; as a poet, a seer, he knew
that the devil’s kingdomwas the realm of falsity, that
Satan is the one who says “I am not.” This negative
world constantly attempts to take on the real world, to
assume it. The double, then, as Dostoevsky presents it to
us in many of his writings, is an appearance of that
falsity that marks the antiworld of Satan. Smerdyakov ,
the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan’s visitor are certainly doubles
in this sense of Ivan’s troubled soul; Dmitri is a double of
his father; Fr. Zossima works hard to keep Alyosha from
being a double.
But part of the reason for all this plurality also lies
in the Russian concept of sobornost. Dostoevsky writes
about this unity in his Diary of a Writer; he exhibits it in
his novels.
We are to see it exhibited more clearly in The Brothers K.
than in any of his other works. Each of the brothers
longs for that fulness of being that is to be found in
sobornost (the concept is something like the earthly
counterpart of the mystical body). Smerdyakov is so
embittered, his life so stunted, that he cannot even
conceive of this sort of relationship. I am the vine; you
are the branches. If a branch be cut away from the vine,
it will wither.
In a sense, Ivan's “poem”, his Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor, comes out of this deep longing for unity: for
the good of his fellowmen. The injury of a person by
another person is an atrocity, an offense against the
good of the whole. Ivan ends by having to defend
mankind against the creator God who apparently will
make light of human suffering.
Alyosha exhibits the true way to sobornost: love in action;
not yearning, not eros, not resentment (which comes of
disillusionment), but acts of love, done with cheerfulness,
merriment, joy.
It is this path to the simplicity of wisdom and the union
with all living things in love that each of the brothers
must take. The novel is open ended; we don't know how
all of it will turn out. The novels "bleeds" over into life, as
we might say.
________________________________________________________
But the basic theme of the two books that we read for
today is to be found in the word that Mme. Kokhlakov
first introduces: nadryv, laceration. It is a difficult
Russian word to translate, ranging in its meaning all the
way from laceration to hysteria, from exacerbation to
self-torment. But behind all its meanings lies the
concept of pride:
buffoonery implies behaving absurdly out of
shame
laceration implies torturing oneself out of pride
Every character in this section of the novel is involved in
some way with this kind of laceration. Fr. Ferapont first
introduces the thing itself, with his fierce pride in his
asceticism, his envy and downright hatred of Fr Z, his ill
will toward visitors, his intense self-satisfaction in his
own virtue.
He goes without food, punishes his body to lacerate
himself out of pride.
(Though I give my body to be burned and have not love, I
am nothing.) Alyosha sees Fr. Z again (who is the direct
antithesis of laceration. He has moved beyond his
suffering and has lived so long in his faith and love that
he has developed a quiet cheerfulness even about his
illness and approaching death. He reiterates his charge to
Alyosha to be near his brothers, promising not to die
until Alyosha is with him, so that he can say his last
word to this disciple who loves him.
Alyosha goes from spiritual father to the house of his
biological father, Fyodor, who is in a vile mood. He is
worrying about whether Grushenka will come to him,
expresses his resentment of Dmitri and his fear of Ivan.
Ivan is not like us, he tells Alyosha. Ivan loves nobody.
Fyodor is bitter–in a bad mood. But when he accuses
himself of being spiteful, Alyosha replies, “You are not
spiteful, but twisted.”and kisses his father on the shoulder
as he leaves. On the way to see Lise, he is hit by a
stone–and encounters in the boy who throws the stone
instead of lacerations, real suffering. Ilusha has been
humiliated so badly that he cannot recover from the
wound; he is quite literally crushed–for his father’s
honor. He throws a stone that hits Alyosha; the other
boys tell Alyosha that this is a bad boy, a dangerous one.
They have teased him by calling him “wisp of tow.”
(His father a retired captain in the military, had been
pulled by the beard by Dmitri Karamazov in front of his
son; the boy is ashamed for his father.) But if we analyze
his behavior, we see that it does not at all stem from self
laceration. He is truly suffering–out of love and an
innate nobility. He loves his father and is jealous for his
honor. (The stone throwing incident with Alyosha–and
the badly bitten finger (163).
At Mme K’s house, Alyosha asks her to bind up his
bleeding finger; and it is then that she uses the word
laceration to describe Katerina Ivanovna’s relation with
Ivan (165). And Alyosha is introduced to its perversity
when he talks with KI.(170) He sympathizes with her,
thinks her a good person—then sees the change in her
face when she turns from tears and woundedness into
someone gloating over a conquest. He talks with Lisa,
indicates that he plans to marry her despite her crippled
condition, despite her perverseness. KI tells Alyosha about
the incident with Capt Snigirov when Dmitri pulled his
beard in public. She wants to send money to the
destitute family and asks Alyosha to take it to them. The
scene is one of heart-rending destitution. Capt Snegirov,
who is no doubt cut to the quick, alternates between a
fawning abjectness and a bitter pride (183) The
mother is mentally ill; a sister is crippled; Ilyusha is
sinking into an illness aggravated by the stone that hit
him in the chest (186-88). Capt. Snegirov first accepts
the money then tramples on it. (193-4)
Later, when Alyosha tells Lisa about the family and
its misery, she listens and understands. “You think like
a martyr,” Alyosha tells her. (200)–and we have to see
that the martyr is entirely different from the person
given to nadryv. (Lisa’s behavior may look the same; but
D is telling us that it has entirely different roots.) Alyosha
admits to Lisa his own suffering (partly over his brothers,
losing his elder, an approaching crisis of faith. This too is
not a laceration but something that wells up from his
soul).(202)
He goes on from this visit with Lisa to encounter a
severe ordeal in his conversation with his brother Ivan.
Ivan’s is the most severe laceration in the novel: he has
tormented himself with his case against God by collecting
stories of child abuse from the newspapers and has dwelt
on them to the point of derangement.210
When we see the careful way in which Dostoevsky
has prepared us to read this section we should be all the
more alarmed at the widespread tendency to lift the
section out of the novel and read it as a religious and
political tract. The Grand Inquisitor fable represents a
major laceration on Ivan’s part, resulting in an allegory
created partly to exacerbate his own wounds and
partly to hurt this brother that he loves. But, just as the
views of all the other characters are their own and not
Dostoevsky’s, so is this section of the novel dramatically
suited to its narrator.
Because the Grand Inquisitor section is essentially a
battle between two “old men,” two spiritual fathers, as
we could speak of them–Ivan’s ninety-year old Grand
Inquisitor and Alyosha’s saintly advisor, sixty-five year
old Fr. Zossima–we need to lead up to the Grand
Inquisitor section (the most famous part of the book) by
seeing its context.
(We see from reading D’s novels that it is incarnation
(kenotic love) and resurrection that he emphasizes, not
goodness and immortality.)
Ivan: a noble, good young man without faith (in despair)
without under-standing of the “scandal” of
Christianity–his battleground is the most fully depicted
for us in the novel. Turned toward abstraction, he yet
retains the noble and good longing for the earth. His
pride in his sense of justice is what renders him abstract.
These two brothers, sons of the same mother (Sophia)
confront each other in what is a life struggle.
At this point we need to take up the Argument from
Structure:
cf (Gloucester, Polonius) Ivan
The way the story is told:
Reader Dostoevsky–author–narrator–Ivan–Grand
Inquisitor “poem”
Ivan is the author of this poem containing the
portrait of Christ
This is Ivan’s Christ. You may think Ivan
understands Christ sufficiently well to represent him
truthfully. But that is what we have to decide
from a close reading.
The beginning of the dialogue between brothers:
To get to know someone and then to say goodbye
thirst for life. Sticky little leaves
I accept God but I do not accept his world
how one can love one’s neighbors (does not
understand infused
virtues (faith, hope, charity)
the preoccupation with children
through the newspapers
Ivan’s dwelling on atrocities (violation of proportion;
hearsay. If we were there, we would work, or give
our lives: it would be bearable. The sick imaination
is not bearable.
Dossier
Ivan hates more than he loves
I must have justice
Rebellion
there is one, Alyosha says. You have forgotten him.
227 Ah, the one without sin. As a matter of fact, I
composed a poem about him a year ago.
228 Preface: the Blessed Mother. Mercy for all. Consider
this desire of the unloving: pity instead of
love–rebellion at a situation that causes people to
suffer –to try to fix the blame;
By the time Christ appears, the stage has been set for
him, he comes as the gentle, infinitely compassionate
being
229 He came softly, unobserved, and yet strange to say,
everyone recognized Him.
He performs a public miracle.
Ivan is composing all this, out of his own
tortured mind. Does he know the real character of
Christ sufficiently to portray him?
[ Cf. Last Temptation of Christ; Renan’s humanized
Jesus.]
Here is our situation:
Alyosha Ivan
memory of his mother bitterness at life yet
idealism
knowledge of Fr. Zossima 1, Euclidean
mind–logic
2. Softhearted sensibility
Suffering of children
-
Alyosha’s Christ Ivan’s Christ
Problem: how to help human beings in their suffering
The double:
The Word Words (Tower of
Babel)
Beauty (Active love) Beauty (goodness:
the
Golden Age
Incarnation Abstraction
_________________________________________________________
sky Ideas Ideologies
angel civilization System (bureaucracy)
Mother Russia: culture Insularity
[xenophobia]
earth chthonic presences Demons,
ghosts, phantoms
cosmos God’s world The devil’s world
The novelist Robert Penn Warren had as his great theme
in all his works the discrepancy between World and Idea.
This, he maintained, was Hamlet's problem: we call it
appearance and reality; but that is not really an
adequate name for this most painful of all conflicts:
World vs Idea: the way things are vs the way they
+ought+ to be
For Ivan, this painful opposition manifests itself in the
question of human suffering: what can prevent it? what
can make man happy?
On one hand, we long for the purity of Jesus: his
non-judgmental compassion, his meekness and docility;
his refusal to take part in the passing show of political
life;
on the other, if the human enterprise is to have
meaning, we need
a working political order; we need strong leadership; we
need strength to go on after our own weakness has been
made manifest to us;
So Ivan's tormented mind visualizes this struggle
between the two irreconcilable opposites: both "calling"
themselves Christianity. The meek principle must simply
bow out of the picture; for, indeed, as the Grand
Inquisitor points out, He can be followed only by a few;
only the elect can live up to his demands; only a few can
be made happy by his teachings.
Let's look at some of the questions that arise from this
section:
1. What does the Grand Inquisitor not recognize about
Christ's way that makes human beings not quite so
helpless as the Inq implies?
2. What is the difference between Fr. Zossima's
Christianity and that of the Christ of the Grand
Inquisitor?
The greatest difference one notes between Ivan's
"mythical figures”in his poem is their sadness. Both the
Grand Inquisitor and Christ are melancholy,
compassionate in the sense of pitying the human race.
Fr. Zossima (and increasingly Alyosha) are full of
confidence and hope; delighted with life, living with
mystery, knowing, somehow, that love never fails.
Zossima refers to the Book of Job, in which the deepest
eternal truths come together with the passing earthly
show. Job cries out for Justice; he must learn that he
knows nothing of the ways of divine wisdom and must
repent in dust and ashes.
Fr. Z’s love Secularist’s love
“Active” “Dream”
Christ Grand
Inquisitor
Work, “science” sentiment social plan
discipline Absolute freedom slavery
cheerful Reproachful sad
respectful Pitying impersonally
of the person
Benevolent
suffering; redeems impotent miracle,
mystery,
Authority
individ. Responsibility retreats collectivism
in the world, not of it renounces world capitulates
to world
forgives Expects sinlessness permits sin
but
punishes
deviation
What Ivan has forgotten: forgiveness, grace, active love