Dostoevsky (191 page)

Rakitin has also been busy among the schoolchildren, in competition with Alyosha, and he is cited by Kolya as an authority who has converted him into being a “Socialist” (14: 474). Critics have long recognized Kolya as an embryonic Ivan, through whom Dostoevsky brilliantly transposes some of the dominating motifs of his book into an adolescent register. Kolya, for example, tells Alyosha that “God is only a hypothesis” (exactly Ivan’s position) and that “it’s possible for one who doesn’t believe in God to love mankind” (as does, in his perversely pitying fashion, Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor). Dostoevsky amuses himself when he has Kolya repeat what he has picked up from Rakitin: “I am not opposed to Christ . . . , He was a most humane person, and if He were alive today, He would be found in the ranks of the revolutionaries, and would perhaps play a conspicuous part” (14: 499–500). When asked for the source of this claim, Kolya can only reply that “they say he [Belinsky] said it”—and of course it was Dostoevsky himself who had made public this utterance of Belinsky’s in the
Diary of a Writer
.

Dostoevsky uses Kolya not only to parody the already familiar image of Ivan but also to anticipate the drama soon to be played out. One of Kolya’s escapades was to induce a peasant lad, “a stupid, round-mugged fellow of twenty,” to see what would occur if a cart was moved just as a goose was nibbling at a bag of oats with its neck under the wheel. A slight displacement of the cart then breaks the neck of the goose. When the two are hauled into court by the infuriated owner of the goose, “the errand boy” blubbered that Kolya had egged him on. But “I answered,” he explains to Alyosha, “with the utmost composure that I hadn’t egged him on, that I simply stated the general proposition, had spoken hypothetically” (14: 495–496). Ivan had assumed exactly the same role with Smerdyakov, stating the general proposition that “everything was permitted” and, at least for the moment, refusing like Kolya to accept any responsibility for what might occur as a result. The justice of the peace, amused by Kolya’s sophistry, lets him off with only a warning; but Ivan’s conscience will not allow him to escape so lightly.

Kolya harmed no one except the goose in this particular exhibition of egoistic playfulness, but the same is not the case with his treatment of poor, suffering Ilyusha. Even though Kolya knew that Ilyusha wished to see him most of all, he failed to join the other boys in visiting the bedside of their stricken comrade. Kolya’s need to dominate others and to control every situation in which he
becomes involved mimics the aim of Ivan’s creation, the Grand Inquisitor, to relieve humankind of the burden of freedom. Indeed, Kolya’s relation to Ilyusha in the past may well be seen as a callow facsimile of Ivan’s poetic invention. Ilyusha “was proud,” Kolya tells Alyosha, “but he was slavishly devoted to me, and yet all at once his eyes would flash, and he’d refuse to agree with me, fly into a rage.” Ilyusha seemed to be developing, as Kolya puts it, “a little free spirit of his own.” The reason was that “I was cold in responding to his endearments,” and “the tenderer he became, the colder I became” (14: 480, 482). Kolya’s aversion to “sheepish sentimentality” excludes any reciprocity of feeling, just as Ivan’s rationalism excludes (or represses) any emotions stemming from his moral conscience. But when Kolya comes face-to-face with the wasted, fever-ridden visage of the dying Ilyusha, his posture of commanding self-control breaks down, and he gives way to his feelings of pity and compassion.

Dostoevsky uses the long-suffering Snegiryov family, and the poignant love that exists beween Ilyusha and his father, as a foil to set off the rankling hatreds of the Karamazovs. The family’s condition has improved because the captain has accepted the charity of Katerina. But nothing can relieve his wrenching agony as he watches his doomed son expire before his eyes. Kolya had scornfully called the captain “a mountebank, a buffoon,” but Alyosha’s analysis presents Dostoevsky’s own understanding of this particular character-type. “These are people of deep feeling,” Alyosha says, “who have been somehow crushed. Buffoonery in them is a sort of resentful irony against those to whom they daren’t speak the truth, from having been for years humiliated and intimidated by them. Believe me, Krasotkin, that sort of buffoonery is sometimes tragic in the extreme” (14: 483). By such observations, Alyosha brings the boy to an awareness of how badly his pride had misled him in his treatment of Ilyusha and his contempt for the captain.

Zosima had sent Alyosha into the world to do his work there, and the scene with Kolya and the boys is the first illustration of how such work might be accomplished. Alyosha listens patiently to all of Kolya’s prattle about “Socialism” and the various other “subversive” notions that he has picked up from Rakitin about Voltaire, God, and so on, all of which ape Ivan. Alyosha answers him “quietly, gently, and quite naturally, as though he were talking to someone of his own age, or even older.” Kolya thus undergoes a miniature conversion experience, similar to that of Alyosha and Dimitry, and confesses, “I am profoundly unhappy, I sometimes fancy . . . that everyone is laughing at me, the whole world, and that I feel ready to overturn the whole order of things.” He realizes now that “what kept me from coming [to see Ilyusha earlier] was my conceit, my egoistic vanity, and the beastly willfulness which I can never get rid of, though I have been struggling with it all my life.” After this avowal, he asks Alyosha if he does not find him “ridiculous,” and Alyosha admonishes him to overcome
any fear of confessing his faults. Indeed, such vanity is now “almost a sort of insanity,” Alyosha declares. “The devil has taken the form of that vanity and entered into a whole generation.” “ ‘It’s simply the devil,’ added Alyosha, without a trace of the smile that Kolya, staring at him, expected to see” (14: 503). Alyosha takes the devil seriously, refusing amusedly to dismiss such an antiquated superstition. Ivan will soon find himself oscillating between Kolya’s incredulity and Alyosha’s gravity as he struggles to determine whether the devil he sees is (or is not) a hallucination.

Book 10 ends with a variation on the Job motif that runs throughout the novel, and Dostoevsky now makes no effort to soften its emotionally devastating impact. The captain gives way to abject despair when the doctor from the capital fails to hold out any hope, and Kolya poignantly tells his father to “get a good boy” when he dies and “love him instead of me.” But the grief-stricken father, on leaving the room, tells Kolya and Alyosha “in a wild whisper”: “I don’t want a good boy, I don’t want another boy. . . . ‘If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my tongue. . . .’ ”—a biblical allusion that Kolya does not understand and asks Alyosha to explain (14: 507). Such a scene could well have been maudlin, but from Dostoevsky’s pen it conveys an overpowering purity and intensity of emotion. The death of his son Aleksey just two years before certainly contributed its share to the moving pathos of these pages. And he had written, in an anguished letter in 1868 on the death of his two-month-old daughter, Sofya, expressing the same inconsolable grief as the captain’s: “And now they tell me in consolation that I will have other children. But where . . . is that little individual for whom, I dare to say, I would have accepted crucifixion so that she might live?”
¹

In Book 11 the focus returns to the main characters and events in the two-month interval since Dimitry’s arrest. When Alyosha goes to visit Grushenka, she reports that Ivan has also been to see Dimitry secretly in prison, and the two appear to be involved in some private plan. The mystery of Ivan’s behavior and motivation thus begins to move into the foreground.

Dostoevsky, as we know, often introduces a serious theme by first giving it a comic or scandalous form. As Alyosha goes from Grushenka to visit Liza Khokhlakova he is, as usual, waylaid by her garrulous mother, who rambles on about the impending trial, and the satire becomes more serious as the loquacious lady chatters on about the possibility of a plea of temporary insanity, which Dimitry had insisted he would not accept because it implied his guilt. But Mme Khokhlakova is enchanted by the notion that crime could be just an “aberration” for which Dimitry was not really responsible. “They found out
about aberrations,” she tells Alyosha happily, “as soon as the law courts were reformed.” Indeed, for her no one can be guilty of anything, because “who isn’t suffering from aberration nowadays?—you, I, all are in a state of aberration and there are ever so many examples of it” (15: 18–19). This universal malady thus becomes a parodistic reversal of Zosima’s universal guilt, in which all are responsible for all. Mme Khokhlakova’s mindless volubility also brings into view the motif of mental instability and madness that will soon be illustrated by Ivan.

Mental imbalance, specifically linked with the devil, appears both frighteningly and pathetically in the next chapter. On visiting Liza, who is now able to walk again, Alyosha notices a change for the worse in her mental state. She has begun to revel in sadomasochistic fantasies of destroying both others and herself—and hence has become “the little demon” of the chapter’s title. “Yes, I want disorder,” she tells Alyosha, affirming her desire that “everything might be destroyed.” Alyosha admonishes her that “you take evil for good,” though he cannot simply negate one of her provocative taunts: “Listen, your brother is being tried now for murdering his father, and everyone loves his having killed his father.” Then she tells him of a dream in which devils assailing her withdraw when she crosses herself, but return when she begins to revile God out loud. “It’s awful fun,” she says, “it takes your breath away” (15: 22–23).

Liza has also been visited by Ivan, who, instead of attempting, like Alyosha, to counter her sadomasochistic inclinations, had reinforced them by his complicity. When she tells him of how “nice” it would be to eat pineapple compote (an extreme luxury) while watching the prolonged agonies of a crucified child, “he laughed and said it really was nice” (15: 24). (Unfortunately, Dostoevsky could not resist the anti-Semitic implication that the child had been crucified by fanatical Jews to obtain Christian blood, and Alyosha refuses to deny that possibility.) Ivan, as we shall soon learn, is now being visited by a devil himself, and the implication is that he has brought his own illness with him to aggravate Liza’s. But she is not yet completely possessed by the evil spirit, and she appeals to Alyosha as her only rescuer, crying “Alyosha save me!” Liza still struggles against her worst impulses, and at the conclusion of this scene she puts her finger in the crack of the doorjamb, slams the door shut, and mutilates herself as punishment. “I am a wretch, a wretch, wretch, wretch!” she whispers, duplicating Ivan’s self-castigation as “a scoundrel” after he had departed on the day of the murder (15: 25).

When Alyosha next visits Dimitry in prison, he finds his brother upset because Rakitin has been attempting to undermine his faith in God. The revelatory effect of Dimitry’s dream about the burned-out village and the crying baby has permanently altered his own character and sense of values. Rakitin intended to write an article about the crime “to prove some theory,” namely, that Dimitry “couldn’t help murdering his father, he was corrupted by his environment, etc.” In a seriocomic recitation of Rakitin’s physiological determinism, Dimitry expresses
his dismay. “I’m sorry to lose God,” he says. God has been replaced by “sorts of little tails, the little tails of those nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering—then an image appears. . . . That’s why I see and think, because of those tails, and not at all because I’ve got a soul and that I am some sort of image and likeness” (that is, of God) (15: 28). When Dimitry had objected to this explanation, paraphrasing Ivan’s thesis that “without God and immortal life all things are lawful,” Rakitin laughingly agreed that “a clever man can do what he likes.” This reiteration of Ivan’s doctrine by the unscrupulous Rakitin lays the groundwork for the upcoming depiction of Ivan’s struggle with
his
conscience in the chapters that immediately follow. All the same, as Dostoevsky makes clear, the despicable Rakitin and the tormented Ivan are not comparable. “Brother Ivan is not Rakitin,” says Dimitry explicitly. “There is an idea in him” (15: 29).

Dimitry’s faith remains unshaken by Rakitin’s scornful sallies. Innocent though he knows himself to be, Dimitry is ready to go to Siberia “for all the babes . . . [and] because we are all responsible for all,” echoing again the doctrine of Zosima and implying the analogy with Christ (“I go for all”) (15: 10). Dostoevsky then probably draws on memories of his own imprisonment when Dimitry exclaims: “One cannot exist in prison without God, it’s even more impossible than out of prison. And then we men underground will sing from the bowels of the earth a tragic hymn to God, with Whom is joy. Hail to God and His joy! I love Him!” Dimitry’s rapturous affirmations rise to a climax when he declares: “I think I could stand any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment: ‘I exist’ ” (15: 31).

The five remaining chapters of Book 11 focus on Ivan, who has been constantly alluded to in the preceding four. Ivan finally appears in person during Alyosha’s visit to Katerina. Aware of his own increasing mental instability, oscillating as he does between states of lucidity and what he fears to be hallucinations (such as being visited by the devil), he asks Alyosha if it is possible to know that one is going mad.