he knows lives in his brother’s soul, in opposition to the mocking voice of doubt that ultimately becomes personified in the nightmare of the Devil. Alyosha says of Ivan «His mind is a prisoner of his soul. There is a great and unresolved thought in him. He is one of those who don’t need millions, they just need to get a thought straight.»
Dostoevsky wrote to his editor that his intention with book V, «Pro and Contra», was to portray «the seed of the idea of destruction in our time in Russia among the young people uprooted from reality». This seed is depicted as: «the rejection not of God but of the meaning of His creation. Socialism has sprung from the denial of the meaning of historical reality and ended in a program of destruction and anarchism.» In the chapter «Rebellion», the rationale behind Ivan’s rejection of God’s world is expounded in a long dialogue with Alyosha, in which he justifies his atheism on the grounds of the very principle—universal love and compassion—that is at the heart of the Christian faith. The unmitigated evil in the world, particularly as it relates to the suffering of children, is not something that can be accepted by a heart steeped in love, so Ivan feels bound in his conscience to «humbly return the ticket» to God. The idea of the refusal of love on the grounds of love is taken further in the subsequent «Legend of the Grand Inquisitor».
In a long dialogue, in which the second participant (the returned Christ) remains silent for its entire duration, the Inquisitor rejects the freedom and spiritual beauty of Christ’s teaching as being beyond the capability of earthly humanity, and affirms instead the bread-and-chains materialism derived from the Devil’s Temptations as being the only realistic and truly compassionate basis for the government of men. The Legend is Ivan’s confession of the struggle of «pro and contra» taking place within his own soul in relation to the problem of faith. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, «both the very form of its construction as The Grand Inquisitor’s dialogue with Christ and at the same time with himself, and the very unexpectedness and duality of its finale, indicate an internally dialogic disintegration at its ideological core.»
With Book VI, «The Russian Monk», Dostoevsky sought to provide the refutation of Ivan’s negation of God, through the teachings of the dying Elder, Zosima. The dark world of the Inquisitor’s reasoning is juxtaposed with the radiant, idyllically stylized communications of the dying Elder and Alyosha’s renderings of his life and teachings. Zosima, though suffering and near death, unreservedly communicates his love for those around him, and recounts the stories of the crucial moments in his progress along the spiritual path. Alyosha records these accounts for posterity, as well as the Elder’s teachings and discourses on various subjects, including: the significance of the Russian Monk; spiritual brotherhood between masters and servants; the impossibility of judging one’s fellow creatures; Faith, Prayer, Love, and Contiguity with Other Worlds; and the spiritual meaning of ‘hell’ as the suffering of being unable to Love. Dostoevsky based Zosima’s teachings on those of the 18th century Orthodox saint and spiritual writer Tikhon of Zadonsk, and constructed them around his own formulation of the essence of a true Christian faith: that all are responsible for all, and that «everyone is guilty before all and for everything, and therefore everyone is strong enough also to forgive everything for others». He was acutely aware of the difficulty of the artistic task he had set himself and of the incompatibility of the form and content of his «reply» with ordinary discourse and the everyday concerns of his contemporaries.
Freedom and mechanistic psychology
«Dostoevsky could hear dialogic relationships everywhere, in all manifestations of conscious and intelligent human life. Where consciousness began, there dialogue began also. Only purely mechanistic relationships are not dialogic, and Dostoevsky categorically denied their importance for understanding and interpreting life and the acts of man.»
Throughout the novel, in the very nature of all the characters and their interactions, the freedom of the human personality is affirmed, in opposition to any form of deterministic reduction. The «physiologism» that is being attacked is identified in the repeated references to Claude Bernard, who becomes for Dmitri a despised symbol of the scientific reduction of the human soul to impersonal physiological processes. For Dmitri the word ‘Bernard’ becomes the most contemptuous of insults. References to Bernard are in part a response to Zola’s theories about heredity and environment, gleaned from Bernard’s ideas, which functioned as the ideological background to the Les Rougon-Macquart series of novels.
Though the affirmation of freedom and rejection of mechanistic psychology is most openly and forcefully expressed through the character of Dmitri, as a theme it pervades the entire novel and virtually all of Dostoevsky’s other writings. Bakhtin discusses it in terms of what he calls the unfinalizability of Dostoevsky’s characters. In Dostoevsky, a fundamental refusal to be wholly defined by an external source (another person, a social interpretation, an ideology, a system of ‘knowledge’, or anything at all that places a finalizing limit on the primordial freedom of the living soul, including even death) is at the heart of the character. He sees this quality as essential to the human being, to being human, and in his most fiercely independent characters, such as Ivan and Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Nastasya Filippovna and Ippolit in The Idiot, or the Underground man in Notes From Underground, it is actively expressed in virtually all their words and deeds. According to Bakhtin, for Dostoevsky:
A man never coincides with himself. One cannot apply the formula of identity A≡A. In Dostoevsky’s artistic thinking the genuine life of the personality takes place at the point of non-coincidence between a man and himself, at his point of departure beyond the limits of all that he is as a material being – a being that can be spied on, defined, predicted apart from its own will, «at second hand». The genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself.
Style
Although written in the 19th century, The Brothers Karamazov displays a number of modern elements. Dostoevsky composed the book with a variety of literary techniques. Though privy to many of the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists, the narrator is a self-proclaimed writer; he discusses his own mannerisms and personal perceptions so often in the novel that he becomes a character. Through his descriptions, the narrator’s voice merges imperceptibly into the tone of the people he is describing, often extending into the characters’ most personal thoughts. There is no voice of authority in the story. In addition to the principal narrator, there are several sections narrated by other characters entirely, such as the story of The Grand Inquisitor and Zosima’s confessions.
Dostoevsky uses individual styles of speech to express the inner personality of each person. For example, the attorney Fetyukovich (based on Vladimir Spasovich) is characterized by malapropisms (e.g. ‘robbed’ for ‘stolen’, and at one point declares possible suspects in the murder ‘irresponsible’ rather than innocent).[citation needed] Several plot digressions provide insight into other apparently minor characters. For example, the narrative in Book Six is almost entirely devoted to Zosima’s biography, which contains a confession from a man whom he met many years before. Dostoevsky does not rely on a single source or a group of major characters to convey the themes of this book, but uses a variety of viewpoints, narratives and characters throughout.
Reception and influence
The Brothers Karamazov has had a deep influence on many public figures over the years for widely varying reasons. Admirers include scientists such as Albert Einstein, philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, as well as writers such as Virginia Woolf, Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, and Frederick Buechner.
British writer C.P. Snow writes of Einstein’s admiration for the novel: «The Brothers Karamazov—that for him in 1919 was the supreme summit of all literature. It remained so when I talked to him in 1937, and probably until the end of his life.»
Sigmund Freud called it «the most magnificent novel ever written» and was fascinated with what he saw as its Oedipal themes. In 1928 Freud published a paper titled «Dostoevsky and Parricide» in which he investigated Dostoevsky’s own neuroses. Freud claimed that Dostoevsky’s epilepsy was not a natural condition but instead a physical manifestation of the author’s hidden guilt over his own father’s death. According to Freud, Dostoevsky (and all other sons) wished for the death of his father because of latent desire for his mother; citing the fact that Dostoevsky’s epileptic fits began at age 18, the year his father died. It followed that more obvious themes of patricide and guilt, especially in the form of the moral guilt illustrated by Ivan Karamazov, were further literary evidence of his theory.
Franz Kafka felt indebted to Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov, calling himself and Dostoevsky «blood relatives» and was immensely interested in the hatred the brothers demonstrated toward their father in the novel. He probably found parallels with his own strained father-son relationship and drew on this theme to some extent in his works, especially the short story «The Judgment»).
James Joyce wrote:
Leo Tolstoy admired him but he thought that he had little artistic accomplishment or mind. Yet, as he said, ‘he admired his heart’, a criticism which contains a great deal of truth, for though his characters do act extravagantly, madly, almost, still their basis is firm enough underneath…. The Brothers Karamazov … made a deep impression on me … he created some unforgettable scenes [detail]….
