"Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain."

- The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevksy, Book III

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevksy responses. Part III.

i.

I don't want to put in any spoilers, but now reading it for the second time and knowing the "true" path of what's panning out and how it's going to conclude brings me much closer and empathetic to Dmitri – which I was completely lacking the last time.

For example, when he embarks on the mission to Lyagavy after being sent to him by Samsonov, absolutely certain that he has found the perfect business deal to secure the money he needs! Only to find out that he has been tricked, and now lost, alone and hungry, he walks the forest:

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"There was no vengeance in his soul for anyone, not even Samsonov. He strode along a narrow forest path, senseless, lost, with his 'lost idea,' not caring where he was going. A passing child might have knocked him down, so strengthless had he suddenly become in soul and body. Somehow he nevertheless got out of the forest: suddenly before him spread a boundless expanse of bare, harvested fields. 'What despair, what death all around!' he kept saying as he strode on."

ii.

The Brothers Karamazov has been a distinctful read because of its similarities and differences between Demons and Dostoevsky distinctive narrative style. The focus on child mentality and how in order to achieve salvation one has to become almost childhood like especially in the orthodox view is quite mind blowing. The book has their consistent tones of moral dualism, and christianity versus atheism as being a broader philosophical argument. The Brothers Karamazov makes it difficult to differentiate between what is fiction and what is Dostoevsky's actual opinion and viewpoint. The contrast between Ivan as being an ‘atheist rationalist’ who consistently throughout the book is able to seemingly overwhelm Alyosha with facts yet based on the perspective of the narration there is still this overall sense of Alyosha being somehow superior to Ivan. Most likely this is due to the fact that Alyosha is christian and Dostoevsky is trying to assert that no matter how scientific or factual one's argument may be, faith in God will always have hegemony over any scientific explanation. This book was definitely ahead of its time because of the level of contrast of embracing modernity versus Christian Morality and Piuty. This contrast is emphasized by criticisms on both sides and hearing the arguments of all three of the brothers viewpoints. Dostoevsky was attempting to use Ivan as a catalyst to critique the concept of atheism as rationale for why bad things happen in the world; Often a common rationale of modern atheists today. Ivan in his totality somewhat represents the rejection of tradition and the embrace of science and modern intellectualism.  Ivan being in contrast to his Younger brother Alyosha's belief set as the two are essentially a dualist pair. It seems that Dostoevsky was attempting to bridge a gap between increasingly dualistic viewpoints in Russia that was split between the rapidly liberalizing Russian public. Dostoevsky uses these brothers and their opposing viewpoints as a way to promote the fact that everyone should have a sense of childlike purity and that the lack of morality is why bad things happen in the world, not because there is no God. It seems that the murder of Fydor is pointed at being because of an overall lack of morality and that in order for there to be good and peace in the world, people must accept faith in God and a christian sense of morality and piety.

iii.

I'm interested in what sort of problem the corruption of Zosima's body presents and why it's so disconcerting to Alyosha. The narrator forgives Alyosha because he takes his doubt as sign that his faith is genuine, not lukewarm (allusion to Stavrogin), but Alyosha is nonetheless sinning, at least a little bit, by allowing the absence of miracles (which the incorruptibility of Zosima's remains would have been) to shake his faith. I know we are not supposed to ask God for miracles to shore up our faith, but I never understood why. A bit of proof doesn't seem like too much to ask an all-powerful being. But I recently came across an interesting explanation for why miracles ceased: I don't remember if it's in this book or if it's even Dostoyevsky who says this but faith based on miracles is in a way unfree. When you are confronted with a miracle, incontrovertible proof of the existence of God, you no longer have any choice but to believe, but then what's the value of faith? (In the same way that a strong enough argument takes away your freedom to believe the opposite of what it's arguing, which is why Gorgias the sophist makes no moral distinction between speech and physical violence, but we don't need to open that can of worms right now, I think). At the same time, and this is definitely in the book, a true skeptic can come up with a scientific explanation for any miracle, so maybe we can still have miracles without impairing our freedom to believe.

iv.

Dmitri is killing me. It is so painful to watch this broken man. I was most struck by the extended scene with Pyotr, where his dangerous ambivalence is so terribly on display, and he utters his most succinct self-diagnosis: "There is no order in me, no higher order...My whole life has been disorder, and I must put it in order." (In this case, putting it "in order" was a plan to kill himself). His inner incoherence is the engine of his violence. His feelings are not that hard to understand--he hates his despicable father and fantasizes about murdering him--not an entirely uncommon for a person who has been coarsely and barely raised by a bad parent. His love for Grushenka is the definition of destructive passion--he loves her to distraction, without reason, with wild bouts of jealousy and simpering regret. His episodic grasping for God seems born of a genuine piety, and his magnanimity and honour of a genuine heart. Maybe that is why despite his irascibility, Alyosha is convinced of the goodness in his true nature.

Today we might describe Dmitri as not having "tools" or "strategies" to make good decisions. Self-pity and self-hatred are not habits that enlighten; they defy long-term thinking, they see consequences in a terrific flash of insight and compel one to add fuel to the fire, to do the most dangerous, extreme thing. This is in stark contrast to Alyosha's attempts to live his elder's teaching of "active love", which is not a quality one is born with but that is chosen over and over again; that requires a deep kind of listening that one might sincerely apprehend and interpret situations as they arise, and choose to act. All of Dmitri's actions, conversely, seem involuntary; he is perpetually trying to outrun himself, his shame. Spontaneity, speed and alcohol are the only means he has acquired to do this. There is no situation he can't make worse by refusing to see it clearly.

As ever, Dostoevsky is quite modern in his depiction of the ravages of terrible/absent parenting (whether or not he was explicitly trying to do that), and the distinct ways each of the brothers try to wrangle their lack of inner equilibrium are fascinating. Each one is facing a struggle, each has his own code.

v.

One of the weirdest weeks of my life (reading part III)… Like living in an epileptic’s dream… A new awareness of every detail and sensation that before I could not name.  As if I could feel the outline of my foot inside my shoe. The paranoia of not knowing who, how, or why and “but what if that means this and that was this all long?” How every character can feel disaster strike before it comes, the way that people with arthritis know when it will rain in their joints. Reading new meaning into each conversation that was… Why did Smerdyokov anticipate so much fear? How come the elder knew that Alyosha has the power to mitigate the suffering by seeing Dmitri? And if the elder bowed before the suffering that awaited him, doesn’t that mean that it’s not for naught? Suffering is a path to redemption if accepted on the basis of a path, but so often it appears here as mania…

The vantage point of a narrator who doesn’t have full omniscience nor clarity is helping me to see how unknown I’ve been to myself for eternity. In the constant scaling of perspectives, I am left asking myself, “What is the fate of one man as compared to the fate of a whole people?”

Perhaps truth is found in the paradox… in exchanging positions with everyone at once and finding oneself guilty for everything in front of everyone.

Mitya said,

"God and the devil are fighting here and the battlefield is the heart of man."

My heart broke reading of the trials surrounding Father Zosima's passing. Delusion compounds, there is so much deep confusion on Earth. Salvation is not dependent on any other force other than one’s own intention. What is called happiness is most often changing suffering. In desperation, all power is given away to an external source, not understanding the mechanics of faith… until a religion is externalized so much it becomes impossible to relate to it purely.

And for Alyosha. Where can he go when he’s given his life to God and is told to return to the world? Father Zossima’s humility in passing without a miracle but with the charity to give this to his foremost disciple felt like the blessings of the final empowerment. Faith that is too brittle to be questioned cannot be applied to the practicalities of daily life.

Each character here suffers at the cost of their biggest lie and must bow to the creation of life. In one scripture Buddha says, “May I view myself as the lowest of all” and expounds how this does not contradict being worthy of pure love. In this way, the enlightenment and transformation that each undergoes is collective. Freedom will never be achieved until it is achieved in the mind of every living being.

vi.

I’ve been playing catchup this week, same as last, but being behind has made this book especially poignant. On Sunday I finished part two and began reading part three and so the ideas of The Grand Inquisitor/Ivan’s rebellion were still a very recent impression. On Monday morning I was reading TBK when I found out that there was a shooting at my old elementary and middle school back home in Nashville. It is surreal to read a story centered around children, specifically the torturing of innocents by god, and then to see such an event occur in a church that also so happens to be an elementary and middle school. While I have never been religious myself, events like this have always made it hard for me to understand how people find solace in a being that not only allowed the massacre of children to happen but willingly brought it to fruition.

The fact that Dostoevsky has created such an incredibly strong counter-argument to Christian theology, despite being a believer himself, is by far the most interesting aspect of TBK to me. Even though the story itself is quite engaging, I am most interested in seeing how Dostoevsky will explore the ideas presented in part 2 in the latter part of the novel. Alyosha’s development is interesting as well since the events after the passing of his beloved elder have really shaken him. The disgrace that his elder experienced by the common folk, and especially his fellow monks, made Alyosha feel as though a universal injustice had been committed. This culminates in him saying that he still loves his god but rejects his world. While I do not think that Alyosha’s faith has been diminished, since it explicitly states that the odor affected him because he believed too much and expected a miracle, I am curious as to how Alyosha can reconcile the lack of justice with his conception of a god with boundless love. In some sense this has already been reconciled during the scene that occurs after Alyosha returns from Grushenka’s, but I don’t feel that this idea has been explored fully.

Dimitri is a very tragic character. Despite all the debauchery he gets into he still seems to have many people who love him in a way that is not too dissimilar to the love that people have towards Aloysha. I felt this way particularly after Dimitri leaves to chase down Grushenka with Pyotr Illyich having a genuine concern towards him. Finally, the whole ‘I gave an onion’ idea is hilarious to me, yet it feels relatable in a horrible way.  

vii.

I love the whole interrogation scene between Mitya and Nikolai Parfenovich. Mitya’s persona is dominated by pride, and he is almost theatrically uncooperative at times; however, I think that this projection of himself is a way of masking the sort of horror that he actually feels at the situation. The moment that struck me most was when he is ordered to undress as his clothes are being searched for the missing 1500 roubles. He is described as feeling

“unbearably awkward…undressed, he himself seemed to feel guilty before them, and, above all, he was almost ready to agree that he had indeed suddenly become them, and, above all, he was almost ready to agree that he had indeed suddenly become lower than all of them, and that they now had every right to despise him” (484)

To witness him experience such “unbearable shame” and self-consciousness in this instance of literal bareness is revealing of how he might truly feel about the way that he is perceived by others. Mitya is constantly under scrutiny as a source of scandal, especially in relation to Fyodor Pavlovich—everybody seems to know about the tension between them, especially financially. It is also the case that Mitya sort of parades his Karamzov-ness around, and I interpret this search scene to be a moment of regret for the way, not only that he is perceived, but that he has portrayed himself. The pain that he feels at revealing his unclean underclothes, and removing his socks so that his “ugly” big toes are naked for all to see, speaks to a larger feeling of shame for everything that has gone wrong thus far. He has been made a fool of in that he fell for Samsonov’s trick of sending him to Lyagavy for money; he was arrested for his father’s murder while pretty much in bed with Grushenka; now, he is being accused of a parricide that he adamantly claims he did not commit. While this scene does speak more seriously to the baseness that Mitya sees in his own existence, it is also sort of hilarious, in particular when Nikolai Parfenovich returns with someone else’s clothes and Mitya is enraged. He encompasses the combination of “scoundrel” (that “sensual,”“insect”-like Karamazov essence [108]), a man in pain, and a small child.

viii.

Ooooof. Damn Dmitri. Calling Smerdyakov “a man of the most abject nature and a coward. Not just a coward, but a conjunction of all cowardice in the world taken together, walking on two legs. He was born a chicken,” yeah man, probably not the best idea/plan.

I’m really enjoying the weight Dostoevsky plays with regarding doubt and shame, guilt and pride. I love Aloysha, and his naïveté. There’s something about innocence and the truth that exists inside of that. The way he deals with Zosima’s death, and the ridicule. He doesn’t give into the doubts, he fights back in his own way, making his own sense of miracles and joy and love. There’s also this theme of power… what is power? Is it  based more on spiritual belief, or is it physical, or is it the amount of cash you carry ?

As far as Dmitri’s journey… there’s a lot going on there. His desperations are bleeding out, he is flailing. And I can only imagine more deaths in Part 4.

ix.

On Part III: Spree and great torment...

I've been thinking a lot lately about installment, how the way we read Dostoevsky's work is so drastically different from how it would have been read contemporarily in Dostoevsky's time... Or is it?
The Brothers Karamazov was published over almost two years in serialized installments. Now we have the full text at our immediate disposal, and we can feverishly tear right through it in a matter of weeks. How much, then, of the madness perceived in Dostoevsky, is really the madness of the reader, who foolishly, rapidly devours this text in a kind of spree, trying to grasp hold of what is too great to ever perceive in a lifetime maybe, and was firstly intended to be read over a much longer, measured duration of regular installments? But then, the only way to read even now, is in periodic installments. One cannot, of course, read The Brothers Karamazov in a single sitting; we must pick it up, put it down, and then resume again; and in our class discussions too, we can only hope to cover as much terrain of the sprawling scope of this story as we have limited time for. But then, when we do pick up The Brothers Karamazov, we are so often immediately installed into the world of the novel. The reader installs themself into the voice of the narrator, and in the life of the characters, who then install themselves in the reader, as voices, whether we want them to or not; in fact, sometimes I do begin to feel almost as though possessed by demons—and at other times, in the presence of something ethereal and sacred... it's those slanting rays of light that I remember most of all, and I try to hold onto that imagery as I read on into the depths of the novel.

I think I'm just trying to make sense of how profoundly jarring and dreadful I found the hard shift in the novel from Alyosha to Mitya, and why I strangely find myself missing Ivan's cool rationalism, which now seems it would be a welcome relief in contrast to Dimitri's boisterous, impulsive rage. Mitya is a hideously lost soul, like a Raskolnikov made even more pathetic and irredeemable. Perhaps that's what a few more years of reckless abandon does to a person. He is 28 (the age I'll be turning later this year lol) and only two years off from 30, when Ivan has set his deadline to "smash the cup," and yet already Mitya's become a total degenerate. Worst of all is that his suffering is such a grand comedy, and he is deeply aware of this, moreover embracing it, never abandoning his irreverent sense of humor even at his gloomiest moments. "'What terrible tragedies realism inflicts on people," (398) Mitya laments after he is unable to awake the drunken Lyagavy, realizing his life is nothing more than a stupid joke. But, it's precisely this sad and self-deprecating humor that still makes me want to believe him somehow innocent, just as Grushenka does, even after all the buffoonery and preponderance of evidence against him. "'Farewell, guiltless man, who have been your own ruin.'" (540) I want so badly to believe in a glimmer of hope, some shred of decency in this man, even after he has shown time and again absolutely no indication of it.

This part of the book was a difficult read for me, despite how outrageously comical it often was, from the blundered murder escapade, through to the post-haste revelry and witty interrogation. However, the light at the end of the tunnel was that devastatingly beautiful and haunting passage describing Mitya's dream at the end of "The Evidence of the Witness. The Wee One," and indeed my favorite moment of the novel thus far. I was struck also by this one word uttered by the driver, "burnt-out," used to describe the peasant woman and her crying baby.

"They're poor, burnt out, they've got no bread, they're begging for their burnt-down place." (537)

This word "burnt-out" vividly recalled again the ruddy face of the wanderer in Ivan Kramskoy's Contemplation. And then, there is also the modern meaning of the word burnt-out: exhaustion, which is very much how I feel concluding Part III.

"'I had a good dream, gentlemen,' he said somehow strangely, with a sort of new face, as if lit up with joy.'" (538)

It's astounding that Dostoevsky could make me feel such compassion for what is in all evidence an outright foul individual. Well, farewell then Mitya, for now...