Dostoevsky (182 page)

The preface, however, contains remarks about Russian criticism and critics that would come more naturally from the pen of a professonal writer. It is more the author than the provincial chronicler who explains that from the outset he wished to focus attention on Alyosha, even though he is still “a vague and undefined protagonist” (14: 5) who will become more important in a second volume. Because Dostoevsky wished to indicate the future importance of Alyosha, he felt it necessary to say a few words about him outside the framework of this first story.

Dostoevsky sets out immediately to counter the prejudices that he knew would be stirred by Alyosha’s Christian commitment and the other peculiarities of his character. Alyosha, he writes, is “an original” (
chudak
), but his singularity does not mean that his strangeness and eccentricity have nothing to teach others. “For not only is an eccentric ‘not always’ a particularity and a separate element, but on the contrary, it happens sometimes that such a person . . . carries within himself the heart of the whole, and the rest of the men of his epoch have for some reason been temporarily torn from it, as if by a gust of wind” (14: 5). Alyosha and his teacher, Zosima, were certainly the heart of the Russian “whole”
for Dostoevsky, and one aim of the book was to drive this point home to those who rejected the divinity of Christ while revering the values of the Russian people who came to adore him through the person of Zosima.

Book 1 opens with a series of short background chapters devoted to the history of the Karamazov family in which Dostoevsky touches on all the main characters and thematic motifs that he will develop so luxuriantly later. Dostoevsky’s characters, always portrayed in a relatively brief time span, obviously cannot undergo a long process of maturation. Instead, they appear to grow in size and stature because, even if a change occurs, it is accomplished through developing latent aspects of the personality already present from the start. This is probably why, as the characters visibly amplify before our eyes, the reader receives so strong an impression of their monumentality.

No such change takes place in the elder Karamazov, who incarnates personal and social viciousness on a grand scale. He totally neglects his three children by his two wives, who grow up as members of the kind of “accidental family” that Dostoevsky increasingly felt to be typical of educated Russian society. His presumed bastard, Smerdyakov, is treated with a contempt that only increases the latter’s resentment and hidden rage. Feodor Pavlovich, however, is not simply a monster of wickedness existing solely on the level of his insatiable appetites; he is clever and cynical, educated enough to sprinkle his talk with French phrases, to be familiar with Schiller’s
The Robbers
, and he is shown to have strange velleities that suggest some concealed modicum of inner life. On receiving the news of the death of his domineering first wife—the mother of Dimitry—he both shouts with joy and weeps. Years later, though continuing to abuse the monks, he donates a thousand rubles to the monastery to pay for requiems for her soul. This leitmotif of the “broad” Russian nature, swinging between competing moral-psychological extremes, characterizes both Feodor Pavlovich and his eldest son Dimitry, and its symbolic significance will be highlighted toward the end of the book.

The narrator sketches Dimitry’s recklessly dissipated army career, and his expectations that he would inherit money from his mother on coming of age, before moving on to the second brother, Ivan, who possesses the familiar traits of Dostoevsky’s young intellectuals. He is a reserved and morose nature thrown back on itself and brooding over the injustices of the world. The ideas that absorb him now express the core of the Populist problematic. Is it possible to transform the world into a realization of the Christian ideal without a belief in Christ? Ivan’s inner conflict is suggested by the ambiguity surrounding his article on the ecclesiastical courts, which had been applauded both by the Church party and the secularists. The issue was whether such courts should be subordinate to
the state (and hence secular) authorities, or whether state courts should ultimately be absorbed by ecclesiastical ones, whose decisions would be made according to the law of Christ. Ivan had presented both extreme positions with equal force, and each party thought it could claim him as an advocate. In reality, his apparent refusal to choose already presents the inner conflict that will ultimately lead to his mental breakdown.

It is to Alyosha that, after Feodor Pavlovich, the narrator devotes the most attention. Dostoevsky endeavors to persuade the reader that, unlike the previous incarnation of his moral ideal in Myshkin, such a figure was not “a fanatic . . . and not even a mystic” (14: 17); on the contrary, he was “a well-grown, red-cheeked, clear-eyed lad of nineteen, radiant with health” (14: 24). He is immediately associated with Christian values by his earliest memory, that of his mother, partially deranged by her suffering at the hands of Feodor Pavlovich, who prays for him before the image of the Mother of God, “as though to put him under the Mother’s protection.” Alyosha’s moral sensibility is thus shaped by the all-forgiving love traditionally associated with the Mother of God in Russian Orthodoxy. “There was something about [Alyosha] which made one feel at once . . . that he did not care to be a judge of others—that he would never take it upon himself to criticize and would never condemn anyone for anything” (14: 18).

The depiction of Alyosha’s character and behavior, which the narrator makes no attempt to explain psychologically, conforms to the hagiographical pattern; the moral purity of his nature, and the love that he inspires in everyone despite his “eccentricity,” are traditional saintly attributes. The forces that move him, which are left deliberately vague so as to suggest a possibly otherwordly inspiration, come from the childhood impressions just mentioned, and from the nature of the religious vocation they have inspired. Alyosha was instinctively religious, and until his faith is tested later, he has had no doubts about God or immortality, or even about the truth of the miraculous legends connected with the institution of elders (
startsy
). Novices who entrusted themselves to an elder committed their will to his guidance in “the hope of self-conquest, of self-mastery” (14: 28), and Alyosha had decided to submit himself to Zosima in this way. He fully shared the Russian peasantry’s adoration of the ideals of holiness embodied in the saintly monk, whom he also believed to possess the gift of a spiritual force—the force of Christian love—capable of redeeming the world.

This submission to Zosima does not mean that Alyosha is detached from the questions posed by the modern world. Indeed, Dostoevsky brings Alyosha into immediate relation with the social-political situation by describing him as “an early lover of humanity,” as “a youth of our last epoch” (14: 17) passionately seeking truth and justice and ready to sacrifice himself for these ideals on the spot. These phrases unmistakably associate Alyosha with the discontent and moral idealism of the generation of the 1870s; and he is clearly intended, at least in this
initial volume, to offer an alternative form of “action” and “sacrifice” to that prevalent among the radical youth. For if Alyosha, we are told, “had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and Socialist (for Socialism is not merely the labor question or that of the fourth estate, it is the question of atheism in its contemporary incarnation, the question of the Tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to bring down Heaven on earth)” (14: 25). The same ideals and feelings that had led Alyosha to Zosima might have led him to atheism and Socialism since both offer divergent paths leading to the same goal of the transformation of earthly life into a society closer to the Kingdom of God; but the first would be guided by Christ, while the second is deprived of the moral compass that he provides.

It is also in relation to Alyosha that the main theme of the novel—the conflict between reason and faith—receives its first exemplification. When the narrator touches on Alyosha’s belief in miracles, he immediately explains that this did not prevent him from being “more of a realist than anyone” (14: 24). Alyosha’s “realism” does not counteract his faith because the latter is defined as an inner state or disposition anterior to (or at least independent of) anything external, visible, tangible, empirical. Alyosha’s faith thus colors and conditions all his apprehension of the empirical world; it is not the evidence from the world that inspires or discourages faith. Alyosha’s spiritual crisis will be caused by the decay of Zosima’s body, a crisis that is only one instance of Dostoevsky’s major theme—that true faith must be detached from anything external, any search for, or reliance on, a confirmation or justification of what should be a pure inner affirmation of the emotive will.

Dostoevsky plays endless variations on this irreconcilable opposition between faith, on the one hand, and the empirical and rational on the other—an opposition initially dramatized in a brief dialogue between Alyosha and his father. Feodor Pavlovich’s jeering words foreshadow Ivan’s soaring speculations, and they link the two in more than merely a father-son relation; but what will be noble and elevated in Ivan becomes vulgarly cynical in the corrupt old scoundrel. Agreeing to let Alyosha enter the monastery, the half-drunken Feodor explains the reason: “You’ll pray for us sinners; . . . I’ve always been thinking who would pray for me, and whether there’s anyone in the world to do it.” But this implicit admission of moral awareness and of a faith in an afterlife is immediately canceled by a scoffing inability to imagine the physical paraphernalia of hell. If there are hooks in hell that will drag Feodor down, where did they come from? Were they attached to a ceiling? “If there’s no ceiling there can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all breaks down, which is unlikely again, for then there would be none to drag me down to Hell, and if they don’t drag me down what justice is there in the world?
Il faudrait les inventer
, those hooks, on purpose for
me alone” (14: 23–24). This is the debased and niggling form of “realism”—a parody of Russian Voltairianism—in which Ivan’s “Euclidean understanding” becomes manifest in his father, in Mme Khokhlakova, in Smerdyakov, and finally in the hallucinatory devil, whom Ivan will accuse of representing “the nastiest and stupidest” of his blasphemous thoughts and feelings.

The action begins in Book 2 with the gathering of the Karamazovs in the monastery, and the threads of the main plot and subplots are skillfully exposed as the father and son shout furious insults at each other. The reader is also brought into the secluded world of the monastery, which Dostoevsky had never depicted before, and he contrasts the dignity and serenity of its inhabitants with the various types of egoistic self-concern exhibited by the secular characters. The grouping and succession of chapters is a part of Dostoevsky’s technique of conveying thematic motifs without direct authorial intervention. And so, after “the old buffoon” (Feodor plays his role to the hilt) has begun his sacrilegious antics in the cell of Zosima, the narrative shifts to the profoundly moving faith of the peasants assembled to receive the elder’s spiritual counsel and blessing. The chapter ends on a comforting note of Christian love and solidarity operating among the Russian people.

The tonality of reverence is then replaced by amusing satirical comedy. Zosima turns from the suffering peasantry to the spoiled and wealthy Mme Khokhlakova and her cripped daughter Liza. This giddy lady is Dostoevsky’s diverting portrait of an affluent society matron with intellectual pretensions, who swings like a weather vane in response to every fashionable ideological gust. Perhaps because she is in no position to cause any harm, she is treated with affectionate condescension. The tone is given by Zosima’s reply when she protests her overflowing “love for humanity” and her occasional dreams of becoming a sister of mercy. “Sometimes, unawares,” he observes, “you may do a good deed in reality” (14: 52). Not only do the self-indulgent lucubrations of Mme Khokhlakova provide an obvious antithesis to the devotion of the peasants, the exchange between Zosima and the burbling lady also prefigures one of the book’s deepest motifs.