The Karamazov Case: Dostoevsky’s Argument for His Vision 9780567704375, 9780567704399, 9780567704382

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THE KARAMAZOV CASE

T&T Clark Explorations at the Crossroads of Theology and Aesthetics

Series editors Anthony Godzieba Jennifer Newsome Martin Judith Gruber

Volume I

THE KARAMAZOV CASE

Dostoevsky’s Argument for His Vision

Terrence W. Tilley

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Terrence W. Tilley, 2023 Terrence W. Tilley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. vi–vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Portrait of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Vasily Perov (1833-82). © Wikimedia Commons All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tilley, Terrence W., author. Title: The Karamazov case : Dostoevsky’s argument for his vision / Terrence W. Tilley. Description: London ; New York : T&T Clark, 2023. | Series: T&T Clark explorations at the crossroads of theology and aesthetics ; volume 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022055021 (print) | LCCN 2022055022 (ebook) | ISBN 9780567704375 (hardback) | ISBN 9780567704429 (paperback) | ISBN 9780567704382 (pdf) | ISBN 9780567704412 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881. Brat’ia Karamazovy. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PG3325.B73 T55 2023 (print) | LCC PG3325.B73 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/3--dc23/eng/20221125 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055021 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055022 ISBN: HB: 978-0-5677-0437-5 ePDF: 978-0-5677-0438-2 ePUB: 978-0-5677-0441-2 Series: T&T Clark Explorations at the Crossroads of Theology and Aesthetics Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.blo​omsb​ury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS Acknowledgmentsvi INTRODUCTION

1

Chapter 1 REASONING FAITH

11

Chapter 2 HOW TO HEAR A POLYPHONIC NOVEL

21

Chapter 3 SIX PATTERNS OF RATIONALITY AND IRRATIONALITY

35

Chapter 4 CONVERSIONS

53

Chapter 5 THE UNCONVERTED

75

Chapter 6 RETURNING HIS TICKET AND REFUSING FREEDOM

85

Chapter 7 THE SOCIAL VISION OF THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

103

Chapter 8 SOBORNOST’ IN THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

119

Chapter 9 THE KARAMAZOV CASE: “HURRAH FOR KARAMAZOV”

139

Bibliography159 Index165

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For nearly a quarter century, I read The Brothers Karamazov in biennial graduate seminars on God and suffering at the University of Dayton and Fordham University, and for over a decade I have been actively working on this book. I have incurred debts to many students and colleagues who have provided challenges, insights, and inspiration. I fear I have forgotten some of those debts. For that I apologize. To all who have shared the journey with me, my deep thanks. In particular, I now want to thank: Elizabeth A. Johnson, Dermot A. Lane, J. Patrick Hornbeck II, Paul Contino, William Shea, Gerry McCarthy, and Roger Corriveau, who read the whole manuscript at various stages and offered numerous helpful comments; Thomas Provenzola and Anthony Godzieba, who responded to preliminary papers presented at the Society for Philosophy of Religion and the Catholic Theological Society of America; Harry Nasuti, whose questions about Dmitri Karamazov’s role enabled me to see the shape of the whole argument; John Gleim and Jason Steidl, graduate assistants at Fordham University, whose bibliographical searches were most helpful; Jon Nilson, who shared his own extensive reflections on The Brothers Karamazov and its spirituality; the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham, which sponsored a faculty reading group on The Brothers Karamazov and the colleagues who participated; Theological Studies, and its editor, Philip Rossi, SJ, which published my earlier essay “The Fragility of Grace in the Karamazov World—and Ours,” December 2020; much material from that essay appears in Chapter 9 of this book; some material has been incorporated elsewhere in the text; the cloud of witnesses to Dostoevsky’s genius cited in the notes, who stimulated my thinking on the book—even when I disagreed with them; Fordham University, which provided a research leave to work on this book (2015–16); Anthony Godzieba and the editors at T&T Clark, who improved the quality of the prose and the clarity of the analysis with their welcome criticisms; friends and relatives too numerous to mention, who have supported me in this work and in so much else, especially Maureen A. Tilley (1948–2016), whose faith and love even now sustains the hope envisioned in this book; her patient partnering, parenting, mentoring, teaching, and scholarship brightened the lives of all who knew her. ●

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Acknowledgments

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Excerpts from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved. Excerpts from Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8. Copyright © 1984 by the University of Minnesota Press, used by permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

viii

I N T R O DU C T IO N

This book invites the reader to see the shape and scope of the argument that Fyodor Dostoevsky makes through the narrative of The Brothers Karamazov.1 His final novel responds to profound religious, moral, and philosophical questions current in his time. And in ours. It shows multiple ways of living in the Karamazov world. And in ours. It offers a reasoned response to those who rejected faith as irrational in his time. And in ours. It thus challenges readers, then and now, to realize2 their own particular vision. The centerpiece of the novel is Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov’s vivid and profound challenges to belief in God and religion. In his frontal attack, “Rebellion” (Book Five, section 4, 236–46), he shows why he cannot believe that our world, rife with undeserved, pointless suffering, could be created by a good and just God. In his tale “The Grand Inquisitor” (Book Five, section 5, 246–64), he portrays religious tyranny through a fable about the Roman Catholic Church as fathering the subterfuge of magic, the obfuscation of mystery, and the tyranny of subjugation in order to keep miserable people “happy,” though unfree. Dostoevsky pulls no punches in Ivan’s widely excerpted attacks in Book Five on the reasonableness of religious faith. Commentary on the novel is vast. Many have offered real insights into the themes, structures, characters, and events in the novel.3 Others have brought out 1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2002; originally published by North Point Press, 1990). The translation used herein is from this work unless otherwise indicated. Simple parenthetical references are to pages in this edition. I occasionally cite the apparatus and text of Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, A Norton Critical Edition, trans. Constance Garnett, ed. and rev. by Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976); further citations to this text will be parenthetical, using the translator and the page number (Garnett xxx). 2. Throughout this book, I use the term “realize” as not merely cognitive, but explicitly as an act that includes a cognitive component. To “realize” is “to make real.” 3. “The literature on Dostoevsky is in the process of becoming impossible to survey,” Geir Kjetsaa, Dostoevsky: A Writer’s Life, trans. Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff (New York: Viking, 1987), 387. The situation has, of course, become even more difficult since Kjetsaa wrote.

2

The Karamazov Case

the Christian vision of the novel as a whole, recognizing the novel as profoundly Christocentric4 or, similarly, a realistic narrative that reflects and refracts the incarnation.5 Yet my claim in this book is that Dostoevsky was also making an argument in and by this work, not only against the materialisms characteristic of Russian radicals6 of his time (as voiced by Ivan Karamazov) but also against irrational belief or disbelief, and further for a profoundly realistic understanding of how we can live in this defaced icon of a world.7 By displaying the unsatisfactoriness 4. Diane Oenning Thompson, The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) sees the novel as profoundly Christocentric: the central experiences of the main characters replicate or invert those of Christ, particularly his passion and resurrection. Cunningham takes a somewhat different approach in David S. Cunningham, “ ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ as Trinitarian Theology,” Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition, ed. George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 134–55, but sees the vision of the novel as displaying divine action in the world through the characters’ actions. 5. Paul J. Contino, Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ among the Karamazovs (Portland, OR: Cascade Books, 2020) utilizes the approach of Hans Frei, The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974) to show the “incarnational” world the novel creates. 6. James P. Scanlan, Dostoevsky the Thinker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002) is concerned to show Dostoevsky’s reasoning in service of his faith. He identifies Dostoevsky’s opponents as Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1828–89), Dmitry Pisarev (1840–68), and others who espoused what would later be called “rational egoism.” He has proffered a reconstruction of Dostoevsky’s overall philosophical anthropology, especially analyzing Notes from the Underground, but with a broad understanding of Dostoevsky’s fiction and non-fiction. I find additional opponents who are addressed by the arguments of The Brothers Karamazov. For an appreciative review of Scanlan’s important text that also rightly criticizes the argument for omissions or misconceptions at a number of points, see Diane Oenning Thompson, “Review of Dostoevsky the Thinker,” Slavonic and East European Review 81/2 (April 2003): 813–21. 7. If there be any adequate responses to the horrors in the world available to a Christian, The Brothers Karamazov lays out such a response. I write “response” rather than “theodicy” because The Brothers Karamazov is not a theodicy. Theodicies create more evils than they overcome. See my book The Evils of Theodicy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1991). Ross MacCullough (“Christ, the Karamazovs, and Compensational Theodicies,” Modern Theology 34/2 [2018]: 206–19) sees the novel as responding to Ivan’s challenge not so much with a theodicy that justifies present sufferings with eternal compensation; rather, it “resituates them in a way that supplies some of their defects: on the gratuity of grace, on the interpenetration of forgiveness; above all on the importance, and the intricacies of our free acceptance of God’s plan” (MacCullough, 219). These are strands in the novel’s argument, but it lays out a different discourse about God and suffering. These issues have a different significance in Dostoevsky’s discourse from that of the modern discourse of theodicy.

Introduction

3

of the other forms of life available then (and arguably now) and the hope of a life guided by the vision he portrays, he makes a narrative dialectical argument (in Aristotle’s sense) for his Christocentric vision. While the book was still being published serially, he wrote in a letter to K. P. Pobedonostsev that Book Six, “The Russian Monk,” would answer “that whole negative side.”8 Joseph Frank has commented, “Most modern readers have considered [Book Six] disappointingly ineffectual in countering the brunt of Ivan’s unbridled assault.”9 However, this particular book is only the beginning of his first response to Ivan in the novel. The response is continued by Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov (Alyosha) who carries the work of the Russian monk Zosima out of the monastery into the world. Alyosha’s role is to show how to live in a world rife with suffering. But this is not Dostoevsky’s only response. After the work was completed, he raged in his notebook against his critics: “These fools haven’t even begun to dream of a denial of God as powerful as the one I have placed in the Inquisitor and in the preceding chapter, to which the entire novel serves as a response.”10 This second response envisions a world that Ivan does not see. Recognizing both responses and how they reinforce each other is an unexplored key to understanding the argument in and of The Brothers Karamazov. In short, Dostoevsky offered two interlinked responses to Ivan’s challenges, one in the novel and the other by the novel as a whole.11 8. Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein, eds, Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 485–7; at 486. The letter of August 25/September 6, 1879, was to Konstatin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, a tutor of the young future czar Alexander. Pobedonostsev was politically reactionary, a member of the Senate and in 1880 became director general of the Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. For a brief discussion of Pobedonostsev life and work, see https://www.bri​tann​ica.com/biogra​phy/Kon​stan​tin-Petrov​ich-Pobedo​nost​sev. 9. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 621; also see 600, 604, 607, 627 (this is the final volume in his magnificent five-volume series on Dostoevsky’s life and writings); Joseph Frank, “Dostoevsky and Evil,” Between Rationality and Religion: Essays in Russian Literature and Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 213; Scott M. Kenworthy, “ ‘Dostoevsky’s Religion.’ A Review of Steven Cassedy, Dostoevsky’s Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75/2 (June 2007): 462. 10. Marina Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev: The Art of Integral Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 55; emphasis added. Joseph Frank noted this point in both Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 622–3, and in Between Religion and Rationality, 213–14, but his analyses of the response in the novel and of the novel do not show how the two responses are connected. 11. Nathan Rosen, “Style and Structure in The Brothers Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor and the Russian Monk)” (Garnett, 841–51), comes close to recognizing the linkage between the two answers, but has a different view of the matter than the one developed here, finding that the answer of the novel is in the actions of the brothers and that this answer is not

4

The Karamazov Case

The Brothers Karamazov is, as Dostoevsky wrote to Pobedonostsev, “not really a point-by-point refutation of the ideas formulated earlier (by the Grand Inquisitor and earlier), but only an indirect one … [T]‌he opposition is not made point by point but, so to speak, in the form of an artistic picture.”12 As Joseph Frank put it, “The ideas he opposed are invariably combated by portraying their effects on the lives of his characters, not by attempting to demonstrate their lack of theoretical persuasiveness or rational coherence.”13 Frank is right: Dostoevsky does not so much state his argument but rather shows his argument through his characters’ actions and interactions, the plot, and the settings of the novel. Pace Frank, however, we will see that the novel does argue against the “rational coherence” of some characters’ views and for an explicitly Orthodox vision. Critics have not yet understood the entire argument that the novel makes. I see two reasons for this oversight. First, even if they recognize both answers to Ivan, they do not attempt to show how both answers to Ivan’s challenges comprise an argument for the possibility of what Dostoevsky calls “realism.” Second, many simply presume that “faith” is opposed to “reason.” As Joseph Frank, for example, put it, “The main theme of the novel [is] the conflict between reason and faith.”14 Writers have laid out positions taken by Ivan (“reason”) and Alyosha (“faith”) in order to show the conflict between reason and faith, often much to the detriment of “faith.”15 And if faith is presumed to oppose reason, how could one possibly find really an “argument,” but of a different nature from the “intellectual arguments” of Ivan in “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor” (at 851). 12. Frank and Goldstein, Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, 486. 13. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 607. 14. See Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 287–9, 570–1, 578–9, 584–5, 589–90, 604–7, 677–81, for discussions of the conflicts between faith and reason; quotation at 578. Also note the title of his collection of essays, Between Rationality and Religion. Gary Saul Morson opposes “practical reason and small acts of goodness … [which] do not seem terribly Christian or spiritual” and “pure faith, to which one clings in spite of all ‘opposite proofs’ ” in “The God of Onions: The Brothers Karamazov and the Mythic Prosaic,” A New Word on “The Brothers Karamazov,” ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 108. Nicholas Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, trans. Donald Attwater (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1957), does something analogous, but “inversely.” He proposes an opposition of “faith” to “willfulness” throughout his work. Berdyaev sees both as exercises of fundamental human freedom. However, I argue in Chapters 5 and 6 that the exercises of freedom and reason by sensualists, the superstitious, the naively religious, and materialists are quite distinct, a point not found in Berdyaev who seems to have a monological notion of “freedom.” Thompson, The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory, happily avoids this problem by making cultural remembering (and forgetting) of the Orthodox tradition the key to her approach. 15. For examples see Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Knopf, 1956), 55–7; Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 607, and Between Religion and Rationality, 204–15; Kenworthy, “Dostoevsky’s Religion,” 461–4.

Introduction

5

a reasonable argument for a position taken in and on faith? Critics can and do see the shape of the vision of the novel but not the argument that supports it. However, Rowan Williams has rightly claimed that “the tension in Dostoevsky is not straightforwardly between belief and unbelief.”16 The present book invites the reader to recognize the variety of ways people both reason and have faith and how Dostoevsky’s responses to Ivan both in and through the novel challenge the readers to realize and perhaps change their own ultimate commitments. Readers may reject the argument or the vision, but then why do they think that their position is more credible than the one Dostoevsky argues for? The first two chapters lay out the approach. Chapter 1 clears the ground by articulating a nuanced understanding of how people, believers or not, both have faith and engage in reasoning. Chapter 2 builds a framework for ferreting out the argument of the novel. It begins by exploring the depth of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ground-breaking analysis of The Brothers Karamazov as a “polyphonic novel” that allows distinct multiple voices to develop dialogically, even argumentatively. In a polyphonic novel, the characters’ standpoints cannot be reduced to mere contributions to a monophonic authorial viewpoint. Bakhtin found that whatever unity the text had was to be found not so much in the text as “above the word, above the voice, above the accent.”17 He also claimed that no one before him had uncovered such unity that his analysis revealed. Bakhtin’s profound insights are a natural springboard for using the concept of communicative action and readerresponse criticism to complete the interpretive structure for recognizing the power of both the vision and the argument of the novel. Seven chapters then show how to understand that the linked replies to Ivan both in and by the novel are an argument for the novel’s vision. Chapter 3 explores the polyphony of ways of believing in The Brothers Karamazov. It shows that there are not two (“faith” vs. “reason”) but at least six central and distinctive “forms of life” or “mentalités” in the novel: realism, materialism, sensualism, superstition, religious naïveté, and manipulation.18 Dostoevsky’s novel argues for realism and 16. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 223. 17. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, History and Theory of Literature, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 43. This translation is from the revised Russian edition of 1963 that includes additional notes beyond the original edition of 1929. 18. “Realist” is Dostoevsky’s narrator’s label for Alyosha and is repeated frequently in Book One to describe him. This is not a philosophical position in opposition to idealism or constructivism but a label for a person of good sense who acts well. “Atheist” is the narrator’s label for Ivan, but a more comprehensive label is “materialist” that is sometimes associated with it (e.g., 164). So, in denying the existence of God, immortality, and the devil (134) and by labeling his mind “Euclidean” (235), Ivan paints himself as a materialist. While the narrator’s voice is neither always reliable nor representative of the author’s viewpoint, these descriptors, especially in the only book in which the narrator’s voice dominates, do seem fair. Moreover, a moderately reliable narrator is needed to set the stage for the whole

6

The Karamazov Case

against some of the other “forms of life” displayed in the world of the novel—and in ours. Exploring the various ways that key figures in the novel display these patterns of using and misusing reason opens up the space for understanding the place of conversion in the novel. Chapters 4 and 5 show the significance of the pattern of conversions and nonconversions of characters in The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky wrote to his editor that the chapter that narrates Alyosha’s conversion experience was perhaps the “most essential” chapter in the whole novel.19 However, one can see the pattern of conversions and nonconversions only in light of the distinctive mentalités developed in the previous chapter.20 Chapter 4 shows how conversion can be, and for Dostoevsky often is, a reasonable response to challenging events, and Chapter 5 shows why resistance to conversion is a failure to accept realism. Dostoevsky’s exploration of conversion is a component in his argument to persuade his readers that to be realistic (in his sense) is to be reasonable. Chapter 6 examines the most famous line in the novel. Ivan says, “It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return the ticket” (245). The whole novel turns on this scene—even on this sentence. What is Ivan doing

novel and the characters’ development in it if the novel is not to tumble into incoherence. In a letter to his editor N. A. Lyubimov (May 10, 1879), Dostoevsky wrote that Ivan’s “convictions are precisely what I consider the synthesis of contemporary Russian anarchism. The rejection not of God but of the sense of His creation” (Garnett, 757). Ivan cannot make sense of the world as a divine creation. He can and does consistently describe the world in materialistic terms. Another alternative is posed by Toby Betenson, “Ivan Karamazov Is a Hopeless Romantic,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 77/1 (2015): 65–73. His only argument for this descriptor is that Ivan seems to be “emotionally” tied to his fundamental axioms. But that is only a part of the story. 19. Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Genesis, Language, and Style of Dostoevsky’s Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 7. 20. The essays in Robert Louis Jackson, ed., A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), helpfully note seven conversions, but none of the authors surfaces a pattern. Robin Feuer Miller (“The Brothers Karamazov Today,” in A New Word on “The Brothers Karamazov,” ed. Robert Louis Jackson, 3–16 shows Ivan’s potential for conversion (unrealized in my view) and Dmitri’s conversion. Vladimir Golstein (“Accidental Families and Surrogate Fathers: Richard, Grigory, and Smerdyakov,” in A New Word on “The Brothers Karamazov,” edited by Robert Louis Jackson [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003], 93–5) elucidates Ivan’s sardonic discussion of the conversion of a young orphan, Richard, in “Rebellion.” Gary Saul Morson (“The God of Onions,” 113) discusses Alyosha’s conversion. Caryl Emerson (“Zosima’s ‘Mysterious Visitor’: Again Bakhtin on Dostoevsky, and Dostoevsky on Heaven and Hell,” in A New Word on “The Brothers Karamazov,” ed. Robert Louis Jackson, 156, 172) analyzes both Zosima’s conversion and Dostoevsky’s conversion.

Introduction

7

in returning the ticket (билет)? Here the account of communicative action developed earlier helps demonstrate the meaning of the act Ivan performs in his classic “Rebellion.” The act of returning his ticket is key to Ivan’s character. Dostoevsky rejects Ivan’s materialism by showing that Ivan’s notion of freedom is incoherent. The novel develops an account of human freedom (based in the possibility, but not the necessity, of conversion) in an explicitly Orthodox view of person in community. Chapters 7 and 8 turn from a focus on the personal to the social vision of the novel. They examine four topics: the central settings of the novel, the notion of “doubling” and “mirroring” in the novel,21 the significance of the group of boys as a community, and Dmitri’s trial, which provides a critique of the system of justice introduced in Russia shortly before the time of the novel. Chapter 8, in particular, argues that the social vision of The Brothers Karamazov is a distinctive form of sobornost’. Sobornost’ is a complex concept with no single term in English sufficient to render the richness of its meaning.22 The term sobornost’ (соборностъ) originates in an 1867 Russian translation of an 1853 essay by the lay Slavophile theologian, Aleksei Khomiakov, “Quelques mots par un chrétien orthodoxe sur les communions occidentales à l’occasion d’une brochure de M. Laurentie.”23 Marina Kostalevsky situates and explains the concept of sobornost’ this way: According to Aleksei Khomiakov [1804–60], who along with Ivan Kireevskii [1806–56] was a founder of the Slavophile movement, the notion of sobornost’ conveys the specific sense of a harmony between unity and freedom preserved 21. It is widely recognized that the novel is full of characters who “double” or “mirror” the main characters. Terras provides a partial summary of the pattern of doubling (Karamazov Companion, 104–7). Like others, he underplays the significance of the pattern of conversion in the novel, which in turn affects his understanding of doubling. 22. The range of meanings is surveyed helpfully in Georges Nivat, “Sobornost” [соборностъ] (Russian),” in Dictionary of Untranslatables, ed. Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1001–4. Ashley John Moyse, Scott A. Kirkland, and John C. McDowell, eds, Correlating Sobornost: Conversations between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), rarely refers to The Brothers Karamazov. 23. Paul Valliere, “The Conciliar Fellowship of the Church in Karl Barth and Modern Orthodox Theology,” in Correlating Sobornost: Conversations between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox Tradition, ed. Ashley John Moyse, Scott A. Kirkland, and John C. McDowell (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 34, n. 13. Valliere notes that the term includes notions of “catholicity” (the wholeness, more than the universality, of the Church), “fellowship” (the κοινονία or community of the church), and “conciliarity” (that ecumenical councils, not executive, i.e., papal or monepiscopal, authority, define the consensus of the church on the meaning of the faith); at 12–14. Valliere also finds sobornost’ intimately connected with the Eucharist, a point at best only hinted at in The Brothers Karamazov.

8

The Karamazov Case in Orthodoxy since the earliest ages of Christianity, as opposed to the Western European models of unity without freedom, represented by the Catholic Church, and freedom without unity, embodied in Protestantism. Therefore, the Orthodox religion, intrinsically endowed with the unifying spirit of sobornost’, is both the principle and the means of bringing together all aspects of human life and thus achieving its wholeness.24

One need not agree with the Slavophiles’ wholesale rejection of Western religion (which influenced Dostoevsky) to understand the point: that a way that goes beyond totalitarianism and radical individualism is necessary to account for authentic human freedom.25 Sobornost’ is the central practice and goal of the coinherent community that enables humanity to thrive. Two oft-repeated ideas in the novel “that each of us is guilty26 in everything before everyone” (290) and “life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over” (288) indicate the novel’s basic approach to the spirit of sobornost’. Dostoevsky does not use the term sobornost’ in The Brothers Karamazov. I think it likely that Dostoevsky avoided using this term and other terms distinctive to Orthodox thought in general and the Slavophile movement in particular in order to avoid giving fodder to support his radical opponents’ repeated criticisms of his work.27 However, Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), Russian philosopher and theologian, as well as a friend of Dostoevsky, claimed, “The Church as positive social ideal was to be the central idea of a new novel or a new series of novels, of which only the first was written—The Brothers Karamazov.”28 Sobornost’ is that 24. Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 9. 25. Additionally, one may appreciate the novel’s vision that Paul Contino accurately identifies as “incarnational realism,” even while not pardoning Dostoevsky’s biases: his anti-Semitism, antipathy for the Polish, and his other unfortunate (at least) views he shared with some other nineteenth-century Russians (including his jaundiced vision of the Roman Catholic Church). 26. Alain Toumayan (“I More Than the Others: Dostoevsky and Levinas,” Yale French Studies no. 104: Encounters with Levinas [2004], 56) is one of many who notes the difficulty of this term. He finds that Levinas emphasizes that in The Brothers Karamozov, one is guilty before/responsible to all. Yet “guilt” is preferable to “responsible.” Caryl Emerson has noted that vinovat is a religious term: “ ‘guilt’ does not need to imply accusations of criminality, or the humiliation of moral darkness. The concept is humbling rather than humiliating” (email to the author, April 8, 2021). The term vinovat has been translated as “responsible,” but that translation can easily obscure the religious sense of the term. 27. Frank, Dostoevsky: Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, details some of the controversies (548–64) and Dostoevsky’s frustration with them (for example, at 713). 28. Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 32, quoting Soloviev, Stikhotvoreniia, estetika, literaturnaia kritika, compiled with introduction and commentary by N. V. Kotrelev (Moscow, 1990), 176. Soloviev developed a political theology of “free theocracy” that

Introduction

9

ideal. Chapters 7 and 8 lay out the argument for understanding this ideal (without assuming that it has yet been or will be realized). Sobornost’ can be understood as one way of understanding in practice what Paul wrote in 1 Cor. 12:27 regarding different roles in the Christian community: “You are the body of Christ and each of you a particular member of it.” It is a particularly Russian Orthodox understanding of how the Church effectively realizes Christ’s reconciling and redeeming work in the present. Chapter 9 weaves together the analyses of the previous six chapters. It begins by recalling the two very different answers Dostoevsky gave to the question of how he responded to Ivan’s challenge. It argues that the shape and scope of Dostoevsky’s vision can be displayed as an argument that Immanuel Kant’s great questions (“What can I know?” “What ought I do?” “What may I hope?”29) are the wrong questions. Dostoevsky was familiar with Kantianism as it was widely discussed in Russian intellectual circles in his time. The novel argues that individualistic pure reason alone is inadequate to be realistic, and that the questions of practical reason and judgment to be asked by us (‘ “What ought we to do?” “What may we hope?”) to be realists. Understanding the trajectory of this argument not only clarifies and intensifies its argument for the religious vision displayed in the novel but also challenges the readers’ own ultimate commitments. The unequaled power of The Brothers Karamazov is that the novel shows by means of its polyphony how the world could be properly understood in multiple ways and occupied in various manners. If we readers do not respond in thought and action to realize one among the multiple possibilities, we have missed the force of the novel. We cannot know with absolute certainty which understanding is the best and which actions are right—that is the upshot of an authentically shaped Dostoevsky’s social vision, partly (at least) undermining the Western intellectual traditions Dostoevsky had embraced in the 1840s. However, as a novelist, not a theologian or philosopher, Dostoevsky is not offering a theory of sobornost’, but narrating a dynamic picture of one form of sobornost’. I have not found any helpful point-by-point comparisons with theological accounts. 29. These questions are formulated in Critique of Pure Reason A805/B833. These and subsequent citations of this work follow the standard convention of referring to the pagination in the original German first (A) edition (1781) and the second (B) edition (1787). I have been aided by previous analyses of the Kantian influence on the novel, especially including Evgenia Cherkasova, Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009); Steven Cassedy, Dostoevsky’s Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), in dialogue with Iakov Emmanuilovich Golosovsker, Dostoevskii I Kant (not otherwise cited; it went through ten editions in Russian); Marina Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, especially 166–9 (who also discusses Kant in reflecting on Golosovsker); Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966); Katya Tolstaya, Kaleidoscope: Dostoevsky and Early Dialectical Theology, trans. Anthony Runia, ed. Frank Bestebreurtje, Brill’s Series in Church History, vol. 61 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), especially 91–101.

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The Karamazov Case

polyphonic novel. But The Brothers Karamazov argues that we can hope! Some of us live in Ivan’s materialistic world with no hope possible after we have achieved the apogees of our lives.30 Some of us live in the worlds of pleasure-seeking and religious fanaticism oblivious to the cares of others beyond our own group. But some of us live in a world with a trust that hopes that what this theological and philosophical novel demonstrates is not only good and beautiful but also realistic and true: that human love, flawed as it is, is an icon illumined by the power of divine love; that the real presence of that divine love can be sensed even in and through the sins and sufferings in the world; that we can share that trust if we can accept the argument for the Karamazov vision, and if we have the courage to realize a fitting version of that vision appropriate to our world.

30. Ivan avers that he will thirst for life “until my thirtieth year, after which I myself shall want no more, so it seems to me” (230).

Chapter 1 REASONING FAITH The Problems of Construing Reason and Faith Oppositionally As noted in the introduction, some critics construe The Brothers Karamazov as displaying “faith” and “reason” in opposition to each other.1 The late Joseph Frank, one of the finest Dostoevsky scholars writing in English, situates the novel in a culture that took reason to conflict with faith, “understood very sharply as the irrational core of Christian commitment.”2 As a comment on the cultural context, I find this persuasive. However, if that conflict is presumed to be a key to the structure of the book, I argue below that such a presumption3 is misleading. Moreover, many have found that Ivan’s challenges to faith undermine Dostoevsky’s portrayal of a saintly response (begun in Book Six, “The Russian Monk”). The “faith response” of Zosima and Alyosha to Ivan’s skeptical reasoning in the novel is seen as inadequate or incomplete (at best). Ivan’s “protest against God on behalf of a suffering humanity” is finally unanswered, if not unanswerable.4 Dostoevsky’s defense of faith is thus a failure.

1. See the references to Frank, Morson, Berdayev, and Thompson in the introduction, n. 14. 2. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 570. A similar comment might be made about popular disputes over science and religion in our own era. This dichotomy is reinforced in the recent popular refutations of religion by atheists like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion [New York: Bantam Books, 2006]) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything [New York: Warner 12, 2007]). As Roman Catholic scholars like John F. Haught, Denis Edwards, William J. Stoeger, SJ, and others have shown in various works, there are alternative theological accounts that give full room to science from a religious perspective. 3. The term “presumption” is normally used as a “term of art” throughout this book. A presumption is a “ground rule” for a practice, like the “presumption of innocence” in criminal trials; without this presumption, criminal trials cannot happen as they do. But presumptions are rules that make practices possible, not assertions—and thus are not true or false. A presumption of innocence in criminal law does not warrant an assumption or assertion that a defendant is innocent. 4. Cf. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 621; Frank, Between Rationality and Religion, 213; Kenworthy, “Dostoevsky’s Religion,” 162.

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The Karamazov Case

A letter Dostoevsky wrote in 1854 just after he was released from prison seems to support the view that Dostoevsky was an irrationalist in his faith. He wrote to Natalya Fonvizina that “if someone succeeded in proving to me that Christ was outside the truth, and if, indeed, the truth was outside Christ, I would sooner remain with Christ than with the truth.”5 As Rowan Williams put it, “It is a statement that confirms the suspicions of those who see in Dostoevsky a great literary imagination distorted by irrational and self-tormenting religiosity which he clings to in the face of the evidence of a nightmare world.”6 However, the context and form of this letter suggest a different interpretation. Dostoevsky was writing just after he was released from his Siberian imprisonment. His correspondent was a deeply religious and well-read spouse of one of the Decembrists7 who had followed her husband into exile and lived in Siberia for twenty-five years. While Dostoevsky reflects the opposition in the culture as noted by Frank above, he does not accept it. His claim is hypothetical. To a woman of faith, he confesses that his faith is fundamental. Stating that if an argument were successful is not stating that it is or even could be successful. This letter is very weak evidence, at best, for an alleged opposition of faith and reason. Moreover, as Williams put it, “It would be a mistake, then, to take the words of the Fonvizina letter as some sort of immutable testimony: he is slowly evolving a religious idiom and practice and still uncertain of how to relate it to the Orthodox tradition.”8 When he wrote The Brothers Karamazov a quarter century later, his faith had matured significantly, as Chapter 3 of this book will show. One must also note a derisive comment from Dostoevsky’s notebooks about the radical critics who attacked The Brothers Karamazov, mentioned briefly in the introduction: The villains mocked me for an uneducated and retrograde faith in God. These fools haven’t even begun to dream of a denial of God as powerful as the one I have placed in the Inquisitor and in the preceding chapter, to which the entire novel serves as a response. But I believe in God not as some idiot (fanatic) does. And they wanted to teach me and laughed at my backwardness! Their stupid nature cannot even conceive of a denial as powerful as that which I have gone beyond. What would they teach me!9 5. Frank and Goldstein, Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, 67–70; quotation at 68. 6. Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, 15. The following paragraph is indebted to Williams’s analysis. 7. Decembrists were men, primarily army officers, who participated in a brief and thoroughly repressed revolution against the Czar in December 1825. Some of the Russian intelligentsia found them inspirational. 8. Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, 17. Williams also notes that Dostoevsky had undergone a sort of conversion experience while in exile and was only beginning to engage in serious religious practice and thought. 9. Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 55; first two emphases in original; the final emphasis added.

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His outrage shows that Dostoevsky vehemently rejects the accusation of his faith being irrational. His faith is not irrational (although others’ faith may be irrational) but “educated” and is strengthened by passing through the fire of rationalists’ attacks on his faith. One cannot simply identify Ivan’s position as “reason” and then equate that “reason” with the 1854 letter’s reference to “truth.” Of course, if The Brothers Karamazov showed that “truth” were limited to Ivan’s form of materialism, then Dostoevsky would have to go beyond such limited truth so as to “remain with Christ.” But an identification of “truth” in an 1854 letter with Ivan’s “reason” in the 1879 novel is not warranted. Dostoevsky’s understanding of knowing the truth goes far beyond Ivan’s reason but is nonetheless reasonable.10 In sum, a presumption that faith and reason are opposed distorts Dostoevsky’s views on faithfulness and reasoning expressed in and through The Brothers Karamazov. If this oppositional approach is both fairly common and yet unwarranted, what is its source? To steal a phrase that Mikhail Bakhtin uses about another topic, it is a “profound structural characteristic of the ideological creativity of modern times.”11 This “structural characteristic” emerged in and from the Enlightenment to create a war between reason and religious faith. With the rise of empirical science and critical history—very good things, in my view—“reason” became essentialized and contrasted with an equally essentialized and fixed understanding of “faith” as either irrational or as a personal commitment without a reasonable basis. Modern thinkers often equate “reason” with a priori analysis and a posteriori investigations of fact. God, the “intentional object” of faith, could then appear only in the (not fully rationalized) gaps science had not yet closed in its understanding of the world. As such gaps became ever smaller, God progressively disappeared from the world as scientific reason understood it. The cultural upshot was that only a faith seemingly contrary to reason and science could possibly imagine any god, whether “God” designated the creator of the world or a powerful “supernatural” force or forces within it.12 10. This issue is discussed at length in Chapters 6 and 9 of this book. For another account of reason and faith in Dostoevsky’s work more generally, see Scanlan, Dostoevsky the Thinker, 5–8. Scanlan sees Dostoevsky rejecting rationalism in favor of a more capacious reasonableness. The present approach, like Scanlon, sees Dostoevsky as reasoning in and reasoning out of a position of faith, but, unlike Scanlon, sees The Brothers Karamazov as an argument for a particular understanding of that reaonableness in the intellectual context of his time. 11. See Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 82. 12. These issues have been much discussed. See William C. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996); he dates the mistaken turn to the seventeenth century. Also see Michael Buckley (At the Origins of Modern Atheism [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987]), who sees the wrong turn as rooted in the apologetics of some Catholic theologians early in the seventeenth century; Frei (The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative), who sees the seventeenth-century shift from the Bible as the book whose story limns the structures of

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The Karamazov Case

An Alternate Approach However, engaging Dostoevsky’s argument in a productive way demands more than the “usual” simplistic opposition between faith and reason. A more nuanced and integrated approach to the relationship of having faith and engaging in reasoning is needed to disclose more fully what the novel is driving at. What if faith is not an irrational stance but a relationship, specifically the relationship that one has with one’s “god”?13 A “god” is or represents the ultimate source(s) of value and center(s) of meaning in one’s life, an “ultimate” that is not necessarily personal. In this sense of “god,” some secular humanists make a god of—that is, have faith in—humanity.14 Some scientific materialists make a god of—have faith in—science. Some Mahayana Buddhists have faith in the Three Jewels of Buddhism: the Buddha, the Dharma (teaching), and the Samgha (the community of monks). Some patriots make a god of their country. Some racists take “blood and soil” as their god. Some contemporary capitalists make money and power their gods. In this particular sense of the term “god,” there are no atheists. Modern “atheism” is not a religious faith stance but rather a denial of the reality of a personal God as the ultimate center of meaning and source of value in human life. Atheists can still be asked, “What at root gives your lives meaning and value? What are your centers of meaning and sources of value?” In this sense of “god,” these questions ask, “What is it that functions as your god(s)?” The point is that not every pattern of faith is religious, that is, relationship with a personal God or gods. There are “secular” faiths as well. Faith is a relationship that incorporates emotional, moral, and cognitive components. Some philosophers understand faith as an emotional response, but

the real world to a book that must be interpreted as a book about universal truths, events, or facts in the world (not an overarching narrative) because so many parts of the text came to be revealed by science and history as poetic fictions; Terrence W. Tilley, History, Theology, and Faith: Dissolving the Modern Problematic (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), especially 70–4, which focuses on the loss of the “preternatural,” and sees important anticipations in Montaigne; John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) concurs for the most part but finds the separation possible only after nominalism (specifically Luis de Molina in the sixteenth century). 13. These paragraphs sketch the analysis in my Faith: What It Is and What It Isn’t. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1957), and H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper, 1960) have influenced my approach. 14. In Faith: What It, Is and What It Isn’t, I argue that scientific materialism and secular humanism are no less “faith stances” than are Christian theism and other religious commitments (20, 60–3). Some humanists accept a “credo” that is much like a faith statement. See American Humanist Association, “The Humanist Manifesto III,” http:// www.ameri​canh​uman​ist.org.

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this notion is inadequate because it is incomplete.15 Some rationalistic Christians (and their opponents) reduce faith to believing (or rejecting) some propositions about God. This is also inadequate because it, too, is incomplete. Some philosophers, following after Immanuel Kant’s eighteenth-century arguments, see faith as only a foundation or a prop for morality. This too is inadequate, if, for no other reason that it is empirically undercut: some people of faith are profoundly immoral, and some deeply moral people have no religious faith. Understanding a person’s or community’s pattern of faith, though, requires recognizing all three components. If, to take an extreme example, one source of meaning and center of value is the white race, then interdependent emotive, moral, and cognitive components must be present. The manifestation of racial supremacy may often be emotional, but faith in white supremacy also requires one both to hold certain beliefs about race, to feel that white people or white culture is better than other people or cultures, and to embody those beliefs and emotions in racist actions or inactions. Rather than reducing faith to one of its components, it is better to see different kinds of faith as providing different patterns of feeling, understanding, and action. Patriots may think their country is the best, love it, and be willing to go to war over a commodity like oil that their country needs and that another country possesses. A Muslim who delights in whiskey, engages in no alms-giving (one of the five “pillars” of Islam), and believes the Qur’an was not revealed by God is hardly an exemplary Muslim. Christians should not only trust in God but also respond to the God revealed in and through Jesus Christ (sometimes with questions and difficulties or doubts, sometimes with acceptance), and attempt to live a morally good life. People display their faith in and through the way they understand things, feel about them, and act with regard to them. Unfortunately, unscrupulous people can claim to have a faith and then use that “faith” as a cover story to deceive others. Some hypocritical politicians display a faith that they don’t actually hold to dupe their “base” into supporting them. Scientists who have rigged results or suppressed legitimate results could not have faith in science but would be misusing science in service for another “god” they 15. For example, with regard to The Brothers Karamazov, philosopher Stewart Sutherland, a sympathetic commentator, has claimed that Dostoevsky “offers us an account of Christian belief ‘as an artistic picture,’ or as I have suggested a ‘form of life’ ” in Atheism and the Rejection of God: Contemporary Philosophy and The Brothers Karamazov (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 132. So far, so good. However, Sutherland is concerned primarily with the contrast between “atheism” and “belief ” as “forms of life” rooted in “emotions.” Sutherland simply transposes the “faith vs. reason” dichotomy into a new key that leaves intact the structural opposition that his envisioned positivistic opponents presume. Sutherland sees Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of a “form of life” as a pattern of human living. For a review of the contested understandings of “form of life” and an attempted resolution, see Daniele MoyalSharrock, “Wittgenstein on Forms of Life, Patterns of Life, and Ways of Living,” Nordic Wittgenstein Review (October 6, 2015), 21–42, https://www.nordi​cwit​tgen​stei​nrev​iew.com/ arti​cle/view/3362.

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The Karamazov Case

took as their source of meaning and center of value, perhaps money or prestige. One way these cover stories are uncovered is by noting the disconnects between professed beliefs, attitudes, and actions and a person’s real ones—in a word, by exposing hypocrisy.16 As a relationship, the reasonableness of faith is no more calculable or experimentally justifiable than is the reasonableness of love. Yet one can and does evaluate the various forms of love and faith. Like commitments to lovers, commitment to a particular form of faith may be prudent or imprudent.17 Commitments based on demonstrably erroneous assumptions are imprudent. Someone who comes to have faith in the Great Pumpkin because she thinks Linus in Peanuts is correct is imprudent; so is someone who thinks the earth is literally flat or 6,027 years old. Those who come to have faith in their country and not recognize that they may have to go to war if so ordered don’t understand patriotic faith. Someone who expects a promiscuous lover instantly to develop perfect fidelity on the wedding night may well be imprudent. In general, if one finds that the actions, emotions, and understandings one has of one’s love (and that one’s lover has of one) are fitting, then one can prudently respond “Yes!” if asked, “Will you marry me?” Similarly, if one finds that the moral actions, dominant emotions, and openness to an understanding of what one knows rigorously (and revising that understanding when necessary) are constituents of a faith, whether religious or not, then it is at least not unreasonable to live in and live out that pattern of faith. Faith commitments may be found reasonable or wise even if we cannot finally test them empirically, calculate their worth mathematically, or show them to be “right” or “true” by knock-down evidence and argument. In that, faith is analogous to love. Admittedly, this understanding of faith may require some to rethink their understanding of faith as a relationship, rather than merely belief, feeling, or action. The attribution of faith to every person—except, arguably, persons who find no meaning or value in their lives and their worlds and are mired in suicidal despair—requires thinking about “gods” as the intentional objects of a faith relationship rather than presuming all gods are spiritual or supernatural beings.18 But the virtues of this approach outweigh such difficulties. Primarily, it is useful 16. This is one way to separate fakes and phonies from religious traditions’ “saints” and “pathfinders” or the wise ones Aristotle recognized as phronimoi in his Nicomachean Ethics VI.5. 17. This paragraph summarizes the assessment process advocated in my Wisdom of Religious Commitment; also see my Faith: What It Is and What It Isn’t, chapter five. 18. Anthony Godzieba has argued that those mired in despair “still have a ‘faith,’ even in ‘meaninglessness’ or ‘the absurd’ as their overarching value.” He finds them caught “like Nietzsche, in a performative contradiction: ‘There are no absolute truths’ is proposed as an absolute true statement” (note to author, April 19, 2022). I agree, but that would be true only for those who declare their despair to be suicidal, but do not commit suicide.

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in that it shows how patterns of faith tie together belief, emotion, and action, and shows that someone who is not conventionally religious also displays how persons’ patterns of faith shape the lives they lead. Beyond the utility of the relational approach to faith, it highlights a fact that is unaccounted for in some other approaches: that our quests for explanation necessarily end in the inexplicable.19 Reason alone cannot explain its own limits but only recognize where they lie. Science cannot explain why science works but can show how (at least some) things work. Hence, ultimately, even the naturalistic faiths also end their quests in the inexplicable. There is no rational explanation that answers final questions like, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” “Why does science work?” “Why be moral?” “Why is that the ‘nature of things’?” “Who made the world?” The quest for explanation reaches an endpoint. This endpoint is necessarily inexplicable— otherwise, explanations could go on. Explanation comes to an end, not in the irrational, but at the point where adducing empirical evidence, giving reasoned explanations, and constructing logical arguments no longer work. As history shows, that endpoint shifts as explanations expand or contract. Explanations of scientific naturalists, religious monotheists, and religious naturalists all come to an end in the inexplicable. They may be able to discover what caused their ultimate commitments, but this is not an explanation of the reasons for continuing to hold those commitments. Yet they may elucidate, uncover, and explore their ultimate commitments and thus explore, and possibly even rethink, their faith(s) in their god(s) in a form of reasonableness that goes beyond logical deduction or scientific explanation. As exploring a commitment to love another person goes beyond pure explanation, so a commitment to have faith in a god or gods requires forms of reasoning beyond explanation. Even if what is inexplicable cannot be explained, that does not mean it cannot be displayed, reasonably explored, more thoroughly understood, and morally and aesthetically evaluated. One does not explain but elucidates what one finds cannot be explained. Elucidation is a form of reasoning and argument different from using evidence to warrant scientific hypotheses. The Brothers Karamazov elucidates and argues for Dostoevsky’s mature vision. Its narrative forms a dialectical, not deductive or inductive, argument. 19. Harry V. Stopes-Roe dubbed these “terminal quests” in “The Intelligibility of the Universe,” Reason and Religion, ed. Stuart C. Brown (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 44–71, especially 55, 58–9; his term is “unintelligible” rather than “inexplicable.” Ian T. Ramsey had a more generalized understanding. He claimed that when the games of causal or motivational or legal explanations reached the inexplicable, one played “a logical stop card” when one came to the limits of explanation. See his Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases (London: SCM Press, 1957), 63. John Churchill (“Wonder and the End of Explanation: Wittgenstein and Religious Sensibility,” Philosophical Investigations 17/2 [April 1994]: 388–416) argues that exploring the “end of explanation” can evoke “wonder,” analogous to mystical awe.

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The Karamazov Case

Moreover, science qua science cannot answer “where does it all come from?” or “ultimate why?” questions. When scientists offer answers to such questions, they doff their lab coats and don their metaphysicians’ aprons to cook up an answer. The believers’ quests are no less rooted in positions for which there can be no explanation than are scientists’ quests. Neither ultimate commitment is surely irrational even though no explanation can justify them. Another form of reasoning is needed. In sum, both naturalists and thoughtful religious believers can and do seek to understand the world. Theistic believers find the world intelligible because God made it so. Naturalists find it intelligible in itself. They all reason within the realm rooted in their ultimate commitments, the realm of the explicable. The patterns they display are various forms of thinking, feeling, and acting in the context of a pattern of faith that can be envisioned and elucidated but cannot be finally explained. Both religious believers and scientific naturalists can make visible what they see as the limits of explanation. They can understand each other well enough to agree on many issues even if they cannot agree on any claims beyond natural ones or the endpoints of their terminal quests. Seeing faith as a relationship to one’s gods accounts for these facts in a way other approaches do not.

The Brothers Karamazov and the Elucidation of Faith What Bakhtin calls the novel’s “irrevocable multivoicedness and variovoicedness”20 is relevant to this point. The novel is a complex contrapuntal, multivoiced work, in which Dostoevsky elucidates patterns of reasoning (and the failure of reasoning) in, around, through, in spite of, in opposition to, and out of characters’ commitments. Even if one cannot explain why explanations end at a particular point, how one lives in and lives out those patterns of belief shows what it means to accept their particular patterns of reasonableness and of the wisdom of their terminal quests. If one takes seriously the novel’s polyphony and the complexity of its characters—and I use a musical metaphor purposefully here—one can see that the characters show multiple patterns for living in and living out their basic commitments in their various faith patterns. A novel can be—and The Brothers Karamazov definitely is—a performative way to elucidate these patterns, and their emotional, cognitive, and volitional components. As with exploring the terminal points of ultimate quests, one cannot give definitive arguments that explain why one presumption or set of presumptions should be preferred in approaching a novel. Yet one can argue against a presumption by showing it has internal problems, is rooted in a flawed understanding, or yields bad analyses or other unhappy results. I have sketched the problems of the “faith versus reason” optic above.

20. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 265.

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Why accept an alternative approach? I can only answer that the rest of this book displays the worth of the approach adopted herein. Just as one can display what it means to accept a presumption by narrating the shapes of the lives that accept this or that presumption, so one can show what it means to accept an interpretive presumption by showing the interpretation. The argument proceeds in ambulando. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky does not attempt to demonstrate, to say why his viewpoint should be accepted. Rather, his novel is performative: it shows the significance of living out different basic presumptions. His approach is neither rationalistic argument nor explanation but an elucidating, dialectical narrative, showing the lived significance of patterns in ways that people live in and live out their faiths. If all people have ultimate sources of value and centers of meaning, then they reason in the context of their ultimate commitments that cannot be explained or explained away.21 That does not imply that people are necessarily stuck in one pattern, nor that every pattern is somehow irrational. One’s ultimate commitments can shift. Persons can convert from one pattern of faith-based reasoning to another. How that happens in The Brothers Karamazov is explored in Chapters 4 through 6. Before that, however, Chapter 3 will show the distinctive presumptions of this particular approach that limns the patterns of faith in the novel.

21. A point Dostoevsky would accept. See his narrator’s description of Alyosha’s realism (25–6) as discussed in Chapter 3 of this book.

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Chapter 2 H OW T O H E A R A P O LY P HO N IC N OV E L

In this chapter, I explore the brilliant Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s originative concept of the “polyphonic novel” and the consequent insights that illuminate The Brothers Karamazov.1 In the course of this analysis, I extend Bakhtin’s insights using reader-response literary criticism and an analysis of communicative actions to develop an approach beyond a simplistic “faith vs. reason” opposition that has often been used before as an interpretive key. My aim here is to elucidate the presumptions that ground my understanding of the distinctive and profoundly challenging argument in The Brothers Karamazov detailed in the rest of this book.

The Metaphor of Polyphony Victor Terras’s introduction to and commentary on The Brothers Karamazov is a boon to every Anglophonic student of the novel. His work is meticulous and exhaustive but never pedantic or tedious. Yet his approach to the “polyphony” of the novel (a term first applied to the novel in 1929 by Bakhtin), while suggestive, only very briefly explores the meaning of “polyphony.”2 Yet, if Bakhtin is right— and I think he is—Dostoevsky has written a novel that displays a particular kind of polyphony. This chapter asks: What sort of polyphony? Why is it so important? Bakhtin develops the concept of “polyphony” in much the same way as Dostoevsky develops his characters in The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky’s characters do not evolve over time as they travel the path plotted out in the novel. Dostoevsky’s characters are revealed in two sets of a few days, set months apart. The myriad components of their characters are already present in the time span

1. The extent to which unacknowledged religious and theological claims influenced Bakhtin in his unique approach, formulated in Russia in the time of Stalin, is disputed. Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 182, n. 50, has an excellent brief survey of these disputes. Nonetheless, these disputes do not affect my use of Bakhtin’s work. 2. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 85–7. He recognizes the many independent voices in the novel, attempts to rank the voices in a hierarchy, and recognizes the duets and ensembles (his terms are “duos” and “conclaves”).

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of the novel. The author’s techniques include flashbacks, memories, side plots, revelatory encounters, and other devices; but the plot occurs in a compressed time frame. Bakhtin hones his understanding of polyphony by building from a basic image to a more developed understanding of the “polyphonic novel” reflecting on different texts and genres. Over the course of his treatise, the basic concept as discussed in his first chapter is enlarged and elucidated. That first chapter is devoted to analyzing “Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Novel and Its Treatment in Critical Literature.” He begins with a “structural characteristic”: Dostoevsky, like Goethe’s Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him. A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels.3

Bakhtin goes on to claim that previous critics had failed to recognize Dostoevsky’s invention of this new type of novel. These critics had tried to understand his novels in a traditional way, “monophonically,” as if the ensemble of characters coalesced in a plot that served the author’s singular purpose. Bakhtin found that Dostoevsky changed the literary game. Bakhtin claims that “only The Brothers Karamazov has a completely polyphonic ending, but precisely for that reason, from the ordinary (that is, the monologic) point of view, the novel remains uncompleted.”4 The polyphonic novel seems incomplete because the novel does not bring the dialogue among the independent voices to a resolution. Nor does the novel have a clearly correct reading. The analogy to musical polyphony, especially counterpoint, is revealing. As in listening to polyphonic music, one can lose the “whole behind the individual voices”5 if one focuses on only one melody line in the music or on only the “hero” of the novel. Bakhtin then concludes this chapter with a summary of his key insight, mentioned above in the introduction: Everyone interprets in his own way Dostoevsky’s ultimate word, but all equally interpret it as a single word, a single voice, a single accent, and therein lies their fundamental mistake. The unity of the polyphonic novel—a unity standing above the word, above the voice, above the accent—has yet to be discovered.6

3. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 6 (emphases in original). 4. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 40. 5. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 43. 6. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 43.

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Bakhtin does not conclude that there is no unity in The Brothers Karamazov but that any possible unity cannot be recognized apart from the reader realizing the dialogical polyphony that structures the text.7 The metaphor of polyphony can be elusive. Marina Kostalevsky, for example, complains that “Bakhtin never gave a formulaic definition of polyphonic unity.”8 However, Bakhtin did provide a paradigm for understanding polyphonic unity in his final exposition of the concept in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, namely opera, and in particular the nineteenth-century Romantic opera. Bakhtin’s analysis does not define the concept of polyphony but imaginatively elucidates the metaphor by developing an analogy with opera as he reflects on Dostoevsky’s work. First, Bakhtin notes that Dostoevsky almost never speaks of music in his novels.9 But he then notes that in The Adolescent (also translated with the title A Raw Youth), which was published as The Brothers Karamazov was beginning to take shape, the character Trishatov, “in his drunken maunderings,”10 details his plan for an opera. Bakhtin comments that in this passage Dostoevsky “offers a musical image for the interrelationship of voices analyzed by us above.” That is, Bakhtin finds that the polyphony of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel is operatic. Second, Bakhtin quotes the episode from The Adolescent at great length. Here’s the quotation: 7. Cassedy recognizes the polyphony of Dostoevsky’s novels. He finds Dostoevsky expresses beliefs in terms of Kantian antinomies and philosophical antitheses, and even revels in inconsistent beliefs (Dostoevsky’s Religion, 84–113). Yet he also argues that a journal entry from 1864, written while keeping vigil over the body of his first wife, expresses Dostoevsky’s “ideal” Christian beliefs that are practically untenable (177). Cassedy finds these beliefs quietly structuring all or almost all of his later great novels. The particular brand of Christianity that Dostoevsky conceives “leads to a type of believing that threatens the wholeness and internal continuity of the individual personality” (177)—hardly a fair assessment of an author whose Grand Inquisitor lauds the anthill as the work of worshiping the devil (257). In essence, Cassedy is claiming that the seemingly incomplete novels were completed in advance, structured by Dostoevsky’s ideology, evidently just the type of monologism Bakhtin rebutted. Cassedy also reduces religious commitment and practice to holding beliefs, a profoundly flawed move; for arguments against such “belief reductionism” of religious faith, see Chapter 1 of this book and its sources in my earlier work, Terrence W. Tilley, The Wisdom of Religious Commitment (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995), especially chapter three; and Tilley, Faith: What It Is and What It Isn’t (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), especially chapters one and two. 8. Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 13. 9. All quotations in these paragraphs, including the long quotation from The Adolescent are from Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 223–4; unless otherwise indicated, emphases and ellipses are in the source. 10. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 187. Frank also notes that this episode is a “respite” (188) from the plot of the novel, but attributes no other significance to it. The Brothers Karamazov also refers to Faust (647).

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The Karamazov Case Tell me, do you like music? I’m crazy about music. I’ll play you something when I come to see you. I’ve studied piano for years seriously, and I can play really well. If I were to compose an opera, I’d choose a theme from Faust. I love Faust. I keep composing music for that scene in the cathedral—oh, just in my head, of course …. The interior of that Gothic cathedral, the choir, the hymns …. In comes Gretchen … the choir is medieval—you can hear the fifteenth century at once. Gretchen is in despair. First, a recitative, played very softly, but full of suffering and terror, while the choir thunders grimly, sternly, and impersonally. “Dies irae, dies illa!”And then, all of a sudden, the devil’s voice sings the devil’s song. You can’t see him, there’s only his song mingling with the hymns, almost blending into them, although it’s completely different from them—I manage to convey that somehow. The devil’s song is long, persistent. A tenor—it absolutely must be a tenor. It begins softly and tenderly. “Do you remember, Gretchen, when, still an innocent child, you came here with your mother and lisped your prayers from the old prayer book?” But the devil’s voice grows louder, more passionate, more intense, it floats on higher notes that contain despair, tears, and infinite, irretrievable hopelessness: “there’s no forgiveness, Gretchen, no forgiveness here for you!” Gretchen wants to pray but only cries of pain come from her breast—you know, the breast shaken by sobs and convulsions …. And all this time the devil’s song continues and pierces her soul deeper and deeper like a spear—the notes get higher and higher and then, suddenly, it all breaks off in a shriek: “Accursed one, this is the end!” … Gretchen falls on her knees, her hands clasped in front of her. And then comes her prayer. Something very short, semi-recitative, but completely simple, without ornamentation, again very medieval, only four lines—Stradella11 has a passage with a score a bit like that …. And then, on the last note, she faints! There’s general confusion, they pick her up, and suddenly the choir thunders forth. It must sound like an explosion of voices, an inspirational, triumphant, irresistible outburst, somewhat like “Borne on high by angels ….” So that everything is shaken to its foundations and it all merges into one single overwhelming, exalted “Hosanna!”—like an outcry from the whole universe …. And they carry Gretchen off, and just at that moment the curtain must fall.

Bakhtin then comments, “A part of that musical plan—although in the form of literary works—was indisputably realized by Dostoevsky, and realized quite frequently and with the most varied material.” In sum, Bakhtin identifies the particular kind of polyphony in Dostoevsky’s work as operatic. Trishatov’s discussion of Faust in The Adolescent shows Dostoevsky’s familiarity at least with Goethe’s work but possibly with one or more of the Faust operas of the nineteenth century. Bakhtin’s point is that Dostoevsky’s novels utilize 11. Alessandro Stradella (1639–82) was a baroque composer known for his six operas and numerous cantatas. See https://www.bri​tann​ica.com/biogra​phy/Ale​ssan​dro-Strade​llaItal​ian-compo​ser.

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opportunities that could be found only in opera. This leads to the question “What opportunities does music, especially operatic polyphony, uniquely provide?”12 The key opportunity is the way voices mix. Consider the famous sextet in Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor or the quartet in the final act of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto. In each, voices clash and meld. Each expresses its own hopes or fears, regrets or satisfactions, plans or frustrations. Each voice has a distinctive Fach (range and style) and distinctive lyrics, often conflicting with other voices. The operatic polyphony allows each voice its own theme but musically in dialogue with the other voices. In these ensemble movements, each character sings his or her own part. But something emerges beyond these independent voices. There is no resolution of the conflicts revealed in these ensembles unless one takes the deaths of some of the characters (e.g., Lucia and Edgardo in Lucia; Gilda in Rigoletto) as resolutions. Yet even these characters’ deaths do not clearly resolve the plots of the operas. Even though the plots are not resolved, the music, when well-performed, provokes a response from the audience that can be ecstatic. A line given to the character of Mozart speaking to the Emperor in the film Amadeus crystallizes this: “Sire, only opera can do this. In a play if more than one person speaks at the same time, it’s just noise, no one can understand a word. But with opera, with music … with music you can have twenty individuals all talking at the same time, and it’s not noise, it’s a perfect harmony!”13 That harmony is not found in the words but heard in the music. The operatic polyphony comes to a musical unity, above any voice, above any text, above any accents. A resolution is constructed when the hearer attends to the music generated by the ensemble as a whole, never erasing the conflicts nor satisfactorily resolving them all. Harmony in opera does not necessarily signal a harmonious resolution of the plot. Another opportunity to explore is Trishatov’s giving the role of the devil to a tenor. In many nineteenth-century operas, the hero (sometimes tragic, sometimes inept or comic) is a tenor; the villain is a baritone or bass. In popular operas based on Faust (Gounod’s Faust, Boito’s Mefistofele, Berlioz’s “dramatic legend” La Damnation de Faust), the role of the devil is assigned to a bass or bass-baritone. The lead tenor sings Dr. Faustus. Trishatov’s proposal plays against this. His devil is a tenor who almost blends into the hymns. Yet his voice is not of them: “It’s completely different from them.” Unlike the visible characters in the three operas noted above, the voice of the devil in Trishatov’s opera is heard in the cathedral, although he remains unseen. His tenor voice fits alongside the singing of the chorus and can “pierce one’s soul.” His song breaks off with a shriek in ways that would be difficult for a bass or baritone to perform credibly. Was Dostoevsky’s character (or Dostoevsky himself) playing 12. The following paragraphs develop claims in my “Narrative Theology Post Mortem Dei? Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative III,” in Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, ed. Morny Joy (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1997), especially 175–81. 13. Peter Shaffer, Amadeus (1984), at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086​879/quo​tes.

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against the more typical vocal casting of Faust operas of his time? There is no evidence that resolves this question, but why would he insist that the villain of the piece be a tenor in contrast with the typical approach that gives the (supposed) hero’s role to the tenor? Nor is it clear whether the devil joined in the “explosion of voices, an inspirational, triumphant, irresistible outburst” that becomes an ecstatic “outcry from the whole universe.” But placing the devil in the cathedral and giving him the power to pierce souls shows the evil one as a powerful and mysterious force, often blending in with the other voices in the opera (unlike the distinctive bass or bass-baritone casting of Mephistopheles whose voice, costume, and actions distinguish him as different from the other characters in the other Faustian operas). Trishatov’s unexpected casting of the devil as the lead tenor suggests the possibility that the “casting” of The Brothers Karamazov may also be unexpected. The devil’s voice is in the Karamazov world as the tenor Mephistopheles is in Trishatov’s operatic world. Ivan’s dialogue with the devil (Book Eleven, chapter nine; 634–50) seems to drive him mad or possessed. After that encounter, his voice becomes startlingly different—he seems uncertain rather than confident. His voice is finally absent from the novel’s concluding scenes, as Trishatov’s devil may be. Further, it is opportune to note that in The Brothers Karamazov, even if it is an “operatic polyphony,” there is no final “overwhelming, exalted ‘Hosanna!’—like an outcry from the whole universe” as in Trishatov’s imagined opera. Indeed, Ivan profoundly rejects such an ultimate resolution; so does Alyosha (245). Ivan says he has a “childlike conviction” that a “moment of eternal harmony” can justify everything that has afflicted each and all, “but I do not accept it and I do not want to accept it” (235–6). After his “Rebellion,” the refusal of harmony on behalf of suffering humanity is explicit (245–6). “Hosannahs” occur only in the mouth of the devil who torments (or is imagined by) Ivan. There is no final resolution for the problem of the world in the world. But because the problem is not finally resolved in the world of the novel does not imply that there are no ways to live with it.14 As with many chronic illnesses, even if evils in the world cannot be cured in the world, those who suffer can be cared for. However, there is a proximate resolution in the world of The Brothers Kara­ mazov, one that is incomplete and tentative. It occurs at the memorial for one of the boys, the deceased Ilyusha Snegiryov. After the memorial, Alyosha and the rest of the boys walk off, hand in hand, to the memorial pancake dinner, an “ancient, eternal thing.” They anticipate being together for their entire lives. They cheer, “Hurrah for Karamazov” (776). And then the novel ends. This is not an overwhelming Hosanna sung by the whole universe but an ecstatic moment realized only in the memory and hope of a dozen boys who have formed a real, if nascent, community. Perhaps this quotidian ending of the novel is simply transitional to another novel. Or perhaps it signals that joy and satisfaction are 14. Chapters 7 and 8 of this book argue that one of the unexplored patterns in the novel shows how it is possible to live without a final resolution.

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to be found in the everyday, not the extraordinary. Or perhaps the curtain is not falling as a triumphant chorus sings but remains open, inviting the reader to act to join the ensemble in its conclusion. The finale of The Brothers Karamazov eschews both triumph and closure. The gang agrees to carry on. If one reads the novel as “monophonic,” it is incomplete. It never reaches a final unity, a resolution. But if the novel is “polyphonic,” as an opera ensemble is, then any possible resolution cannot come in the text alone but only when the reader interprets the text. The text of The Brothers Karamazov does not offer closure but burdens the reader with making a choice of one way of closure, or another, or no closure at all. It requires the reader to perform an interpretive act because it challenges the reader to answer the question “Since there seems to be no cure for suffering, how ought we care for the suffering?” Each of the brothers displays different patterns of care or neglect of care, a point I will develop in the following section.

Interpreting Polyphony Music is not what is written on the page of the score. A score is a detailed and often demanding road map of how to make the music. The music is realized— literally, made real—only in performance. A performer must go through extensive training to perform a role in or conduct an opera. The listener must learn how to listen to the complexities of music, text, and performance to appreciate the music. One cannot walk into most operas and appreciate them “cold,” a reason for the common aphorism that “opera is an acquired taste.”15 To perform in and to listen to an opera are demanding skills of rather different kinds with different patterns of preparation. But both are learned through practice guided by teachers, mentors, and coaches. Different producers stage operas differently. They sometimes set them in times and places not envisioned by the composer and librettist. They may make different cuts in long operas. Their productions reveal (or distort) ways for the work to challenge the audience. Yet they all have to deal with the score and libretto of the work they perform. Even if the score is identical, the performances, the realization of the work, can and do differ. Just as audacious productions of classic operas (the wild variety of ways of staging Richard Wagner’s cycle Der Ring des Niebelungen, for example) can open up the boundaries of the interpretive community or raise wails of protest, so the various readings of classic texts (paradigmatically the Bible; but not that text alone) open up the boundaries of interpretation. Even the accepted description of the text becomes different as the range of insightful interpretation

15. This is not to say that one’s response to one’s first opera cannot be overwhelming, or shocking, or revelatory, or deeply emotional. But even if one is deeply moved by attending one’s first opera, perhaps La Traviata or La Bohème, that is a long way from being able to appreciate opera, either as an individual work or as an art form.

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changes.16 This is not to suggest, though, that there are no boundaries at all. For example, despite the operatic music in them, some Warner Brothers cartoons are not operas starring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. To suggest they were operas rather than appreciative parodies would reveal that such interpreters didn’t know what they were talking about.17 Such views would be outside the limits that the interpretive community accepted. As with music, so with the polyphonic novel. For a great novel, many interpretations are possible. New, even radical reinterpretations are possible and may eventually come to be accepted as being within the range of possible interpretations. However, the text is not the novel.18 Again, as with music, so with the novel: it is realized in the readers’ acts of reading it. Reading is an act. A reader performs an act of interpretation in reading a novel. Successful interpretive acts require practice and preparation. Practice and preparation assume a community of mentors and coaches, students, and apprentices. Hence, reader-response critics write of “communities of interpretation.” These communities carry traditions of practice that contextualize and constrain interpretation by giving it a shape and a direction.19 Recognizing this constraint does not preclude fresh readings but sets limits on what a text is and what a reading of a text can be.20 Neither the text alone nor the reader alone is an independent source of an interpretation. Stanley Fish summarizes this approach in the following way: In this new vision both texts and readers lose the independence that would be necessary for either of them to claim the honor of being the source of interpretive authority; both are absorbed by the interpretive community which, because it is responsible for all acts interpreters can possibly perform, is finally responsible for the texts those performances bring into the world.21 16. Cf. Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 141, 144. 17. Chuck Jones, the director of the acclaimed cartoons “The Rabbit of Seville” and “What’s Opera, Doc?” appreciated opera and used the cartoons to introduce classical music to children. See Joshua Kosman, “From Elmer Fudd to ‘Toy Story,’ S. F. Opera explores the links between opera and animation.” https://dateb​ook.sfch​roni​cle.com/mov​ies-tv/fro m-elmer-fudd-to-toy-story-s-f-opera-explo​res-the-links-betw​een-opera-and-animat​ion; accessed March 26, 2021. 18. I am not denying that, as a literary work, The Brothers Karamazov is correctly identified as fitting in the literary genre “novel.” Rather, I am distinguishing “text” from “novel” here for the purpose of clarifying the difference between the act of writing a novel and the text that is written. The next section “Interpretive Acts” explicates this point. 19. Cf. Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, 26. The following paragraphs adapt Fish’s argument. 20. Cf. Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, 83. 21. Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, 142. I assume that Fish means that the community sets the conditions or parameters for performing interpretive acts, not that the community

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Fish’s response also defends reader-response criticism against charges of “subjectivity” in performance. The reader has the burden of choosing or forming one or another interpretation. But the novel and its significance do not surface from the depths of a single interpreter’s brain but from the community of interpreters that has developed expertise in reading texts and specifically the text under consideration. One implication of reader-response approaches is the locus of disagreement about a novel. Readers might agree about the text. But they might disagree about the significance and implications of the novel. Different readers may emphasize one plot turn as key or disagree about who the “real hero” of the novel is. Their readings show that the text has evoked different responses in and from different readers. Their readings find different ways that the book has challenged them. Even if the text is the same, the novel read by different readers may appear quite differently in those readings. The quotation from Fish above does not distinguish a novel from its text. However, drawing that distinction makes sense of the varied interpretations of great works. Once the text of a work has been established, it may stay the same while the readers seem to read “different novels,” or at least a novel with very different meanings. Such differences are not in the text but in the readings enabled and constrained by communities of interpreters. The relation between the text and the novel is analogous to that of the score and the performance of music: in reading the text, the reader realizes the novel. Which performance of reading or of an opera is good or better or best? Such questions cannot be resolved by merely reading the text or the score but by evaluating the performances. As with performing music, so with reading literature. What I am proposing here is that a truly polyphonic reading of The Brothers Karamazov accounts not only for the different positions the characters take but also for the different patterns of feeling, understanding, and acting, the different voices in which they speak in the novel. The realm of significance is rooted not merely in the content the voices utter as found in the text but also in the responses of the reader that construct the text as a novel and discern its significance.

Interpretive Acts Writing and publishing a novel (or a monograph, article, blog, short story, poem, operatic score, etc.) is a communicative act. Whatever else authors and composers may want, they want to be read or performed. Reading is engaging in an action or pattern of actions in response to the communicative act that conveys the text to the reader. Speech-act theory elucidates such communicative actions.22 performs such acts when he writes of the community being “finally responsible” for the texts the interpretive performers proffer. 22. The following paragraphs summarize for present purposes the speech-act theory laid out in my The Evils of Theodicy, chapters one through three, and the sources cited

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A communicative act contains a locution or a text, that is, the content, the words, or the sentence that one vocalizes (or writes in a written communicative act). But the locution does not determine the significance of the act. “Fire!” may be a speech-act. Said loudly by an officer to a squad of soldiers aiming their rifles at a condemned prisoner, it is an order. Yelled out in a crowded theater by an audience member, it is a warning (or a crime if there is no fire). Said softly by a young Scout after finally getting the tinder lit by friction from a stick, it may be an expression of relief. The “text” of each utterance may be the same, but the context for the acts and the act that the speaker or writer performs in uttering or writing the locution or the text, the illocutionary act, determines the range of meanings possible for the locutionary or textual matter. Communicative acts also have results and consequences when they are taken up, that is, heard or read. If we expect certain results of our responses to our acts of speaking or writing, those intentions or expectations are perlocutionary acts, acts performed “by” (per-) the locution.23 The results one gets through uttering the locution are perlocutionary effects. Some of these effects are intended results that are generally expected, others unintended consequences that were not foreseen. The officer yelling “Fire!” performs the perlocutionary act that intends the killing of the prisoner. If the squad members fail to hear the command and do not shoot at all, there was no uptake of, that is, response to, the command; hence, there could be no perlocutionary effects or consequences. The perlocutionary act failed. If there are other effects, such as a squad member shooting at the wrong target, these are indeed perlocutionary effects. However, such effects are not the result of a perlocutionary act but show that the speaker’s perlocutionary act was not fully effective. Both unintended (and unanticipatable) perlocutionary effects and failure of uptake indicate that the intended perlocutionary effects did not match the perlocutionary act the communicator performed. Perlocutionary acts are what the speaker does by performing the illocutionary act and perlocutionary effects are what happens through performing the speech-act. The speech-act is complete when its component acts or subacts are realized. Written communicative acts have the same structure. This is anticipated in David Hume’s famous comment in My Own Life about the publication of his Treatise of Human Nature: “It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.”24 Hume’s attempt therein. Both oral “speech-acts” and written “speech-acts” are “communicative acts.” Of course, there are other communicative acts, for example, gestures, touches, and so on, but these are not texts to be read, utterances to be heard, or scores to be performed, and so are not in our purview. 23. Perlocutionary acts cannot be separated from locutionary and illocuationary acts. One can consider each of these as distinguishable, but inseparable, components in or “subacts” in a communicative action. 24. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited by Norman Kemp Smith (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, n.d.), 234.

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at a communicative act failed because his perlocutionary act failed to excite the anticipated perlocutionary effects. If this seems complex, consider my making an angel food cake from scratch. I perform the acts that constitute making the cake. It comes out of the oven perfectly. The actions I perform are analogous to illocutions; the results to perlocutionary acts. But contextual factors are also relevant. I want my friends to enjoy the cake. You cannot resist eating a slice. However, I had no idea that you cannot resist cake and are allergic to egg whites. This is “some other factor” that shapes the consequences of my baking the cake. I didn’t—and possibly couldn’t— mean to give you indigestion by making the cake (unless, of course, I am wicked and knew what would happen, and performed a vicious, not a generous, act). So even if I did make the cake with the best of intentions and you got the stomach ache by my making it and your eating it, it can be an unintended effect of my action of baking the cake. Communicative acts are one subset of human actions that involve agent’s performance, including generating effects, and consequences or results when someone is affected by the act. One kind of communicative act, declarative, has the unique property of creating new states of affairs. Typical examples include baptizing a baby, naming a ship, exchanging wedding vows, adjudicating in favor of a plaintiff in a tort case. Before the declarative act is performed, the baby is not yet a Christian, the ship is not yet named the S. S. Minnow, the couple is not yet married, the plaintiff ’s award not yet determined.25 A declarative speech-act changes the state of affairs if performed by the right persons in the right circumstances. What was not true becomes true in and by performing the declarative act. In this type of communicative act, the illocution and the perlocution are the same: once we perform these acts, the results are what we said they are!26 The creation of a novel is a declarative act. It is the creation of a fictional world or a slice of a world that did not exist before the act was performed. Dostoevsky wrote the text of The Brothers Karamazov, a textual locutionary act. His purposes were multiple. He had something to say. He wanted people to react. He needed the money. He had a vision of the world profoundly influenced by Orthodoxy, particularly through his friendship with Vladimir Soloviev.27 He probably had 25. This applies to written declaratives as well. I would argue that Augustine’s Confessions are an example of a declarative act that declare, before God and his fellow Christians, that he truly is a “repentant sinner.” See my The Evils of Theodicy, 70–6. 26. Such a declaration occurs in The Brothers Karamazov, but it is a vicious one. Chapter two of the epilogue, “For a Moment the Lie Became Truth,” recognizes the peasants’ verdict as a declarative speech act: Mitya says, “ ‘And how they set me up in court! They really set me up!’ ‘Even if they hadn’t set you up, you’d have been convicted anyway,’ Alyosha said, sighing” (765). Declaring Dmitri legally guilty, even though he was not, makes him legally guilty. Declarative speech-acts that falsify states of affairs, if accepted as true, evilly make those states of affairs into accepted truths. Falsehoods and errors become legal truths with serious effects! 27. See Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 32.

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many other purposes, too. In writing the text, he performed the illocutionary acts of writing the text, submitting the novel, getting it published as a serial and later as a book, and so on. By writing the text, he performed a perlocutionary act that had the result of provoking reactions, causing debates, earning money, and so on. The (written) locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act and effects sketch the range of possible interpretations of the novel. The novel is significant only when readers take it up. The text is interpreted when the acts performed in and by writing and publishing the text are taken up as a perlocutionary effect—in this case, performing an interpretive action. Of course, in one sense the novel just is the text. But as a culturally significant piece of literature, it is an act that evokes responses. Because writing a novel is a declarative act, the writer brings that virtual world into being. In and by writing The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky declares what “the world of the novel” is, shows what its vision is, and raises the question for active readers whether this is what the real world might be. As speech-act theory shows that what one says is something one does, construing the novel as a communicative act rather than merely a text makes sense not only of the power of the novel to evoke responses but also of the diverse interpretations by various readers that occur in varied contexts. Authors do intend perlocutionary effects, but what later effects their works have is finally beyond their control.28 Hence, the variety of interpretations of classic texts.

Reading The Brothers Karamazov The significance of The Brothers Karamazov is not found in the text alone but also in how the interpreters act as they read the novel. Just as the score for Boito’s Mefistofele is not the opera but a template for performing the opera so it can be heard, so the text of Dostoevsky’s novel is a template for realizing the world it narrates. As the music properly exists only in performance that brings together singing actors and audience, the novel qua novel properly exists only in the community that brings together the text’s producer and its readers. Even if we all agree on the printed text, the “locutionary component” of the declarative act that Dostoevsky performed, we may well disagree about what he is doing in and by writing the novel and what we understand by taking it up and trying to make sense of it.29 28. This applies inversely to “failed” novels or novels that are no longer read. They fail because there is little or no uptake, and, hence, no readers’ responses. They fail in their perlocutionary ineffectiveness. 29. An obvious analogue here is the Bible. Scholars almost completely agree on its text; indeed, Philip Schaff (Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1883], 177) opined that even then only about fifty textual variants had any significance. However, even if different religious communities agree on the biblical text, their interpretations and pronouncements make it seem as if they are reading entirely different books.

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To reiterate Bakhtin’s point, Dostoevsky does not create voiceless slaves but “free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him.”30 Terras notes that the readers’ responses “will have a part in the establishing of a hierarchy of ‘voices.’ ”31 The text plays only one part in doing so; the readers also play a crucial part. The boys do not exclaim, “Hurrah for Alyosha!” but “Hurrah for Karamazov.” Of course, it seems obvious that they mean “Alyosha.” Or is it obvious?32 The text shows Dostoevsky’s strong preference for Alyosha’s way. By the end of the novel, Ivan’s has descended into a silent delirium. But Dostoevsky had planned at least a second volume beyond this “biography” of Alyosha. What it would contain is not known, but Ivan is not dead at the end of this novel. He could recover his reason. Readers cannot write off his voice, his version of the world. He could voice the way the world actually is. Perhaps this accolade is true: “If Dostoevsky’s novel is viewed as a novel of ideas, then Ivan, the middle brother, is the hero.”33 Perhaps it is one or another of the Karamazovs whom the boys praise; or perhaps all three. The novel does not come to a closure.34 The readers’ uptakes are their own acts, brought about through the perlocutionary act of writing the novel. Bakhtin anticipated this point: The word, the living word, inseparably linked with dialogic communion, by its very nature wants to be heard and answered. By its very dialogic nature it presupposes an ultimate dialogic instancing. To receive the word, to be heard. The impermissibility of second-hand resolution. My word remains in the continuing dialogue, where it will be heard, answered and reinterpreted.35 30. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 6. 31. Terras, A Karamazov Companion, 86. 32. For example, Rosen, “Style and Structure in The Brothers Karamazov” proffers an analysis that would make the “Hurrah” sound for all three brothers. 33. https://www.encyc​lope​dia.com/arts/educ​atio​nal-magazi​nes/broth​ers-karama​zov. This article had been viewed over 3.5 million times when I accessed it (May 25, 2020). A. Boyce Gibson has a more balanced analysis when he notes that “any one of the three brothers, from a particular point of view, is the centre of the story. Dmitri commands the plot; Ivan is the ideological centre; Alyosha is the spiritual climax” (The Religion of Dostoevsky [London: SCM Press, 1957], 175). 34. J. Patrick Hornbeck II has suggested to me that the opera analogy may break down here. But most tragic operas end with the death of one or more main characters, leaving the other characters to continue on. And most comic operas, like The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, or Falstaff leave the future open. Neither brings closure to a portrayal of the way the world is. Rather, operas come to a finale with the resolution of a limited set of events. 35. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 300. These remarks are from Appendix II, “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book” (1961).

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The reader’s response in reading the text is a component of the performative act that realizes the novel. Readers must complete the act by coming to judgment about how to understand and interpret the voices in this polyphonic novel.

Conclusion Dostoevsky’s ranking of the voices seems clear; Alyosha’s voice seems the highest.36 D. H. Lawrence, Albert Camus, and other readers find a different ranking and judge the novel to valorize Ivan’s voice (Garnett, 829–41). Rowan Williams finds that Dmitri’s fate shapes the novel.37 However, such interpretive variation by competent readers makes sense if we see the novel as a declarative illocutionary act with the locutionary content being its text and the interpretations as perlocutionary effects, that is, action readers perform in response to the novel. An informed reader can come to the terrifying conclusion that The Brothers Karamazov is unresolved. If my world is Alyosha’s world or analogous to it, it may not be the world. The real world may be displayed through Ivan or Fyodor. The text does not settle the matter but leaves the reader to resolve it by interpreting it—or to leave it unresolved. As Bakhtin concluded a chapter, so I follow him in concluding this discussion of the significance of the polyphonic novel as a communicative act and the extension of the discussion of polyphony to a reader-response approach that brings out the profound indeterminacy of the novel: “Everyone interprets in his own way Dostoevsky’s ultimate word, but all equally interpret it as a single word, a single voice, a single accent, and therein lies their fundamental mistake. The unity of the polyphonic novel—a unity standing above the word, above the voice, above the accent—has yet to be discovered.”38 The present work is but one proposal for a polyphonic reading of the novel that recognizes the unresolved nature of the uncompleted argument made in and by the novel and its text, an argument that can only be completed through the act of reading and responding to the novel.

36. The narrator calls him the hero of the novel (3). 37. Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, 201. 38. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 43.

Chapter 3 S I X P AT T E R N S O F R AT IO NA L I T Y A N D I R R AT IO NA L I T Y

The stage has been set. The interpretive framework assembled in the previous chapters now enables us to explore the significance of the polyvalent patterns of rationality and irrationality displayed in and through a variety of characters in The Brothers Karamazov. This chapter examines six basic patterns: materialism, realism, sensualism, superstition, religious simplicity, and manipulation.1 It analyzes the ways in which characters of each type form beliefs, thus providing both a way to see the patterns that shape the relationships among the Karamazovs and a way to distinguish realistic religious belief from religious simplicity and superstition.2 Ivan is the exemplar of materialism, Alyosha is a realist. Fyodor (and Dmitri in the first two-thirds of the novel) is a sensualist. Father Ferapont is the principal exhibitor of superstition. The “shriekers” who seek miracles from Zosima are naïve, simple religious people. Mikhail Rakitin is a manipulator; it is possible that he is a budding sociopath, although the evidence is too slim to make such a judgment (237–45). There may also be a seventh pattern or mentalité

1. Dmitry Tschižewskij, in “Schiller and The Brothers Karamazov” (Garnett, 794–807), finds a threefold pattern different from the one developed here. Ivan, Smerdyakov, Rakitin, and Fetyukovich are intellectuals and “cold”; Fyodor and Dmitri are sensualists; Zosima and Alyosha are “higher men,” but different from Schiller’s or (later) Nietzsche’s. As his project has a different goal from the present one (he is concerned to lay out Dostoevsky’s “corrective” to the excessive pride found in Schiller’s “higher man”), he finds different patterns, ignores the superstitious characters discussed later, and also neglects Dmitri’s conversion that is discussed in the next chapter. 2. I use the term “superstition” with some trepidation. The term is incorrigibly polemical, often used to contrast “your” false religion with “our” true religion. See my “The Philosophy of Religion and the Concept of Religion: D. Z. Phillips on Religion and Superstition,” and “ ‘Superstition’ as a Philosopher’s Gloss on Practice: A Rejoinder to D. Z. Phillips,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68/2 (June 2000), 345–56 and 363–5, respectively; a response from Phillips, “Practices, Practice, and Superstition: A Response to Terrence W. Tilley,” appears on pp. 357–61 of the same issue. Since Dostoevsky contrasts true and false religion in The Brothers Karamazov, I have decided to use the label.

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sketched in the novel, a less vicious version of Rakitin’s manipulative way, which I would label “blinkered bureaucrat,” “careerist,” or (perhaps anachronistically) “apparatchik.”3 My claim in this chapter is simple: recognizing these patterns offers a better optic for understanding the patterns of reasoning (or unreasoning) mentalités in the novel than the optic of “faith vs. reason.”4

Materialism Ivan is the materialist5 par excellence. The root of his materialism is his thoroughly Euclidean mind. In the chapter immediately before “Rebellion,” titled “The Brothers Get Acquainted,” Ivan proclaims his allegiance to Euclidean geometry, claiming that “if God exists, and if he indeed created the earth, then, as we know perfectly well, he created it in accordance with Euclidean geometry” (235). Ivan then refers to Lobachevskian geometry.6 He simply refuses to accept the possibility that any 3. The exemplars for this pattern appear primarily in Book Twelve that narrates Dmitri’s trial. These include, for example, the lawyers (Ippolit Kirilovich for the prosecution, and Fetyukovich for the defense), the unnamed judge with a “hemorrhoidal face” (659), the unnamed doctor from Moscow, and others. Each of these men does their job, but that is all they do. However, this pattern is not as fully developed as the six forms of life discussed in this chapter, and may simply be illustrations of Dostoevsky’s opposition to the legal reforms discussed in Chapters 7 and 8 of this book, as the judge and lawyers seem to seek conviction or acquittal of Dmitri without regard to the soundness of the arguments or the justice of the result. 4. Let me express some caveats with regard to using this approach. First, “doubles” of these characters expand the understanding of these types beyond the major exemplary characters in the text. I refer to them occasionally. Second, the characters are not isolated monads. They shape each other. Two or more characters may share a trait, but those traits may have different places in the webs of convictions and the patterns of their actions the characters display. Third, some characters, such as Dmitri and Grushenka, importantly shift from exemplifying predominantly one of these types to displaying another, a point explored in the next chapter. 5. For the choice of this label for Ivan and his doubles, see the introduction, n. 16. Ivan’s life portrays the life of one who accepted only the materialism of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and ignored or rejected Kant’s other critiques. The first critique has no room for things in themselves or spiritual realities, just as Ivan does not. For Kant, these emerge in the Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment. For Ivan, they do not emerge in The Brothers Karamazov. 6. For Dostoevsky’s knowledge of mathematics, see Michael Abernathy Marsh-Soloway, The Mathematical Genius of F.M. Dostoevsky: Imaginary Numbers, Statistics, Non-Euclidean Geometry, and Infinity (PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 2016), https://libra​etd.lib. virgi​nia.edu/publ​ic_v​iew/6d56zw​619, especially 290–5.

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non-Euclidean geometry is possible: “Let the parallel lines meet [at infinity] even before my own eyes: I shall look and say, yes, they meet, and still I will not accept it. That is my essence, Alyosha, that is my thesis” (236).7 Ivan asserts a claim about all reality. His human mind can think only of three spatial dimensions. Thus, the world has three spatial dimensions, and if God created the world, God created it in three spatial dimensions. Now, Lobachevskian geometry is inconsistent with three-dimensional Euclidean geometry. Therefore, Ivan cannot find the alternative geometry to be valid.8 If Ivan saw the parallel lines meet in infinity, he would have to fault the evidence of his senses rather than his unshakable commitment to Euclidean geometry. But Ivan relies on his senses to make his interpretation. Thus, in the end, he would have to deny the evidence of his senses on which he relies. Ivan may seem to be a realist, but Alyosha knows him to be primarily an atheist (31). More fundamentally, he appears here as an inconsistently empirical Euclidean materialist. Ivan explicitly denies the spiritual realm. He prefers the world of facts: “I don’t … want to understand anything. I want to stick to the fact” (243). He seems truly to respect Father Zosima who has heard the turbulence of Ivan’s soul as Ivan rejects belief in God and immortality (70). God and immortality are not material facts, even if Zosima’s and Ivan’s attitudes are. That rejection of the spiritual is seen in Ivan’s and Alyosha’s responses to their father’s questions later in the novel: [Fyodor:] “But still, tell me: is there a God or not? But seriously. I want to be serious now.” [Ivan:] “No, there is no God.” “Alyosha, is there a God?” [Alyosha:] “There is.” “And is there immortality, Ivan? At least some kind, at least a little, a teenytiny one?” “There is no immortality either.” “Not of any kind?” “Not of any kind …” “Alyosha, is there immortality?” “There is.” “Both God and immortality?” “Both God and immortality. Immortality is in God.” (134)

7. Ivan’s refusal to accept the possibility of parallel lines meeting suggests he is not a “realist” as the novel describes realism. I have never seen this chapter anthologized. 8. The problems multiple geometries create for a univocal understanding of “space” and especially the implications for Kant’s synthetic a priori were noted by F. C. S. Schiller, “NonEuclidean Geometry and the Kantian A Priori,” The Philosophical Review 5/2 (March 1896), 173–80, especially 178–9.

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The dialogue goes on with Ivan denying the reality of the devil and Fyodor mostly agreeing with Ivan. In Ivan’s view, if humans have a soul, it is not immortal. And there is no God for a redeemed soul to be “in.” Later in “The Brothers Get Acquainted,” Ivan reflects on projection theories of God with explicit reference to Voltaire (and probably reflecting Feuerbach’s views as well). He seems to nuance his stance, but he does so paradoxically.9 He says: As for me, I long ago decided not to think about whether man created God or God created man …. My task is to explain to you as quickly as possible my essence, that is, what sort of man I am, what I believe in, and what I hope for, is that right? And therefore I declare that I accept God pure and simple …. I have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind, and therefore it is not for us to resolve things that are not of this world. And I advise you never to think about it, Alyosha my friend, and most especially about whether God exists or not. All such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions. And so I accept God … [but] I do not accept this world of God’s, I do not admit it at all, although I know it exists. (235; emphasis added)

What Ivan gives with one hand, he takes back with the other. He accepts God as a human creation and God as the creator of humans. He cannot say he prefers either view. In effect, Ivan is refusing to engage in what Chapter 1 identified as a “terminal quest,” because Ivan can find no evidence to explain why one view is better than the other. For him, the lack of facts to warrant an explanation makes the question of whether God is the product of humanity or humanity is the product of God, one that cannot be decided. God could be a creator or an illusion: either fits the facts. Ivan’s point is to discover the facts in the three-dimensional world in which he lives. So inconsistency about the status of God as real or imaginary is immaterial. The text occasionally labels Ivan as an atheist (13, 80). But his atheism is not a simple rejection of a personal God. His materialist atheism is rooted in his “earthly mind” thinking in three dimensions, a mind that cannot fathom how to think about anything beyond the material world. He believes neither in God nor in immortality (nor can he coherently believe in freedom, as we will see in Chapter 6), not because there are good arguments against them but because all arguments about the alleged realities that are beyond the endpoint of materialists’ quests cannot be resolved because appealing to “the facts” fails to support either belief or unbelief. He does give lip service to the notion of God. The world he observes is rotten. His litany of suffering in “Rebellion” describes horrors: ethnic prejudice; family 9. Earlier in the novel, Rakitin identifies another paradox in Ivan’s stance. He has written an article about the separation of church and state, which is discussed at length in Book One (60–7). Rakitin comments: “Right now your brother Ivan is publishing little theological articles as a joke, for some unknown, stupid reason, since he himself is an atheist and admits the baseness of it—that’s your brother Ivan” (80).

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annihilators; Slavs who “burn, kill, rape women and children, … nail prisoners by the ears to fence … and in the morning hang them”; Turks who toss live babies in the air and impale them on their bayonets and shoot babies in the face; a boy abused as a child who becomes a monster, repents of his crimes, and is executed anyway; a peasant who beats a horse; cases of horrific child abuse; and a general who sics his dogs on and kills an offending boy in front of the boy’s mother (237– 45). But is there a final harmony that would assuage the brokenness of those who endured unbearable suffering? Could they even accept it? Ivan says he wishes such ultimate harmony were true (235–6). He may even hope a bit that it is or will be so. Ivan is anguished, but finally, his materialism cannot and will not accept any hope that goes beyond the evidence, beyond the facts. Ivan sees such hope as mere fantasy and will not join in accepting it. Some may see Ivan as the embodiment of rationality, as the “hero” of the novel. But given his fundamental statements about his mind, he is better construed as the embodiment of materialism. He is a paragon of rationality only if materialism is the ultimate form of reasoning, only if reasoning is limited to perceived matter (and however much mind it generates). Is it? The answer to that question may indeed be “up in the air” in The Brothers Karamazov.

Realism In Book One, the narrator calls Alyosha a “realist”: “Some will say, perhaps, that red cheeks are quite compatible with both fanaticism and mysticism, but it seems to me that Alyosha was even more of a realist than the rest of us” (25). He does believe in immortality and God, and accepts miracles (though not the kind that the superstitious irrationalists expect). However, the narrator notes, “In just the same way, if he had decided that immortality and God do not exist, he would immediately have joined the atheists and socialists” (26).10 This unexpected comment may indicate that Alyosha is no less aware of the chaos and suffering in the world than is Ivan. Or it may indicate that had circumstances been otherwise, they would have been comrades. But Alyosha is neither materialistic nor fanatically spiritual. He sees the world Ivan does but believes in “more” without blinding himself to the worldly facts. The endpoint of his own terminal quest is beyond the three-dimensional, material world. Some may think a miracle is necessary to think beyond materiality. Yet miracles will not bring a realistic person to faith. Skeptics will doubt their senses rather 10. The narrator has called Alyosha an “early lover of mankind” (18). Juxtaposing these two descriptions of Alyosha suggests that Enlightenment values are not incompatible with Alyosha’s religious commitment. The translator notes “lover of mankind: an epithet for Christ in many Orthodox prayers and liturgical exclamations” (779, 1.1.4, n. 1). Thompson, The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory, 312–16, discusses this and other epithets that mark Alyosha as a Christological hero.

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than believe a miracle has occurred. As the narrator puts it, “In the realist, faith is not born from miracles but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles” (26). Alyosha is a realist who sees more to the world than Ivan’s materialism can see. Seeing a miracle is not a cause of such religious faith but may be an effect of such faith. Before his death, Father Zosima has sent Alyosha out of the monastery and into the world. Alyosha doubles Father Zosima, save that Zosima is a hermit and Alyosha lives in the world. However, Alyosha does not merely observe and report on the world as Ivan does. Alyosha observes the world directly and acts to resolve the problems and conflicts he sees. The novel contrasts him with Ivan. Ivan is a meticulous “collector of certain little facts” (239) and a weaver of a “muddled poem” (262). Alyosha is an observant, involved, practical problem solver. He cannot cure all the evils in the world, but he does care for the sufferers as Ivan does not. A realist sees practical problems and tries to solve them. Ivan solves no practical problems, save possibly one he created (633–4). Alyosha is constantly “in the fray” with others, attempting to resolve problems. When he notices a small gang of schoolboys (176), he intervenes in their rock-throwing fight. He goes to talk with the one boy Ilyusha Snegiryov who was being stoned by six others. But the boy throws stones at Alyosha and bites him on the middle finger “deeply, to the bone” (179). He is injured by a boy in the process of solving the children’s problems—an incident that leads to reconciliation, a resolution of the problems. Alyosha carries 200 rubles from Katerina Ivanovna Verkhotsev, at that moment his brother Dmitri’s fiancée (194),11 and intends to give them to Captain Snegiryov to try to compensate for Dmitri’s having insulted him. Snegiryov refuses the money (208–12), but Alyosha understands that accepting them would have violated Snegiryov’s honor. He predicts that, having displayed his honor, Snegiryov will later take the money and use it well (214–17), which he does (517). Later in the novel, when Dmitri is adjudicated to be guilty of their father’s murder, Alyosha works to resolve the problem by conspiring with Dmitri, Katya, and Grushenka (both women who were earlier involved in love triangles with the Karamazovs; 757–68). Together they adapt Ivan’s plan to rescue Dmitri. Alyosha is consistently involved in seeing and solving problems in the real world. His realism is both open-eyed and practical. Realism is antithetical to self-deception. Realists see clearly what there is, who others are, and who they themselves are. Father Zosima and Father Paissy are realists; Grushenka, Dmitri, and Kolya Krasotkin become characters who also in the end fill out the realist type. But Alyosha is a paradigm of Dostoevskian realism: a generous, practical, involved problem solver with eyes wide open to 11. The narrator notes that there were reports circulating that Ivan was in love with Katerina and wanted to “win her away” from Dmitri (186). Dmitri refers to her as his “former fiancée” during his interrogation after his arrest (490).

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what is going on in the world. He understands others and seems comfortable with the man he is to be. He is willing to risk repairing the ills that plague the defaced icon of the world. He is a lover, not merely an observer, of humanity. Of course, he is much more than that.12 Rowan Williams identifies “the twin enemies of a religious ‘realism’—timeless ecstatic acceptance on the one hand and neutral reportage of the world’s ‘beingtoward-death’ on the other.”13 Williams’s latter “enemy” is surely correct. Ivan’s materialism exemplifies this stance. However, Williams’s characterization of the former “enemy” is not drawn so much from the novel as from the ranks of its readers. Materialists and skeptics who reject religious practice often identify religious faith as “timeless ecstatic acceptance” that refuses to see and respond to the painful realities of the world. Indeed, some opponents of religious belief go on to identify such myopic panglossianism as the essence of faith. Alyosha and his doubles show how religious realists both act for the good and hope for the best in a world that is beleaguered with sin and suffering. A materialist like Ivan portrays a world beleaguered with evils but finds the reason for the evils “incomprehensible” (244), does not act to alleviate them, and offers no hope for any alleviation or remediation. However brilliant Ivan is, the novel portrays him as unrealistic in that his mind avoids dealing practically with the realities he knows about. Realists see the ills in the world and respond by acting to try to remedy them.

Sensualism Sensualism is an irrationalist pattern. To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy: realists are all alike; irrationalists are irrational in their own ways. Fyodor Karamazov, for example, has a character and mind so inconsistent that his inability to be, think, and behave rationally is obvious. He forms his beliefs willy-nilly. In the first eight books of the novel, Dmitri is also a sensualist. His behavior is erratic at best. Fyodor (though superstitious) is not religious—quite the opposite. He is a buffoon, a carouser, a drunken sensualist. When his second wife left him to run off with a destitute seminarian, he “set up a regular harem in his house and gave himself to the most unbridled drinking” (9). His behavior is often inappropriate. For example, while drunk, he probably left his companions and raped Stinking Lizaveta, a young holy fool14 beloved in the town; she died in delivering a bastard 12. Other differences between Ivan’s materialism and Alyosha’s realism, especially in practical matters, will be seen later. 13. Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, 74. 14. The significance of the holy fool in Russian Orthodox culture and in The Brothers Karamazov cannot be ignored. Citing Harriet Murav (Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993]) in her article, “Holy Fools,” “Natasha” (pseud.) sees Dostoevsky as writing “ ‘holy foolishly.’ ‘Brothers’ is in the form of an icon, with its ‘glimmering of restoration just beyond its boundaries ….’ Murav describes three basic Russian types of ‘holy fool’: the born fool, like

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son, Smerdyakov. He has neglected his legitimate sons as children; eventually relatives carted them off, as he had them living meanly with the servants. Yet Dostoevsky portrays Fyodor as a more complex character than he does the other irrationalists. He is cunning.15 He has wooed and won two wives and then abused them. He was clever enough to amass a fortune “as much as a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash” (7).16 He is competing with Dmitri for the affections of Grushenka and constructs elaborate fantasies about luring her to his abode. The narrator describes Fyodor as “one of the most muddleheaded madcaps of our district” (7). He was a “sponger”17 (7, 8, 19, 41) but one who had been a small landowner. He and his sons have an “earthy force,” “earthy and violent,” says Alyosha (220). Fyodor fears two of his sons, Ivan and Dmitri, and appears as a model of self-contradictory thought and self-defeating behavior. For example, the narrator describes his vacillating behavior on hearing of the death of his second wife: Fyodor Pavlovich was drunk when he learned of his wife’s death, and the story goes that he ran down the street, lifting his hands to the sky and joyfully shouting: “Now lettest thy servant depart in peace.” Others say that he wept and sobbed like a little child, so much so that they say he was pitiable to see, however repulsive they found him. Both versions may very well be true—that is, that he rejoiced at his release and wept for her who released him, all at the same time. (9)

‘stinking Lizaveta,’ often said to have the gift of augury; the religious person who is also or who becomes or is sporadically mad, like Ferapont; and the purest form, a person who is foolish for Christ, in her words, ‘a person who feigns madness or folly as an ascetic feat of self-humiliation.’ ” http://dostoe​vsky​crit​ical​jour​nal.blogs​pot.com/2007/07/holy-fool.html. However, Father Ferapont is not a religious holy fool, but a superstitious one. The truly religious holy fool is an ironic figure who displays the folly of the world’s wisdom; the authentic “holy fool” is not a victim of superstition. Thus, collapsing Lizaveta and Ferapont into the same category may be an error, as a “holy fool” might even be a realist or a naïve believer. 15. If Fyodor is the father of the brothers, he has to have traits that he can pass on to them, however much they diverge from him and each other, and however much they develop under the influence of others. Hence, he must be portrayed at least as somewhat complex. 16. M. Bookmark calculated the contemporary purchasing power at around $2,000,000 (https://cur​ated​flot​sam.wordpr​ess.com/2014/12/12/the-value-of-a-dost​oyev​sky-rou​ble/). While the calculations are quite rough and the actual value may be significantly less, 100,000 roubles is nonetheless a goodly sum of money. 17. The epithet “sponger” connects Fyodor with Ivan’s imagined devil, also a “sponger” (636–8). As Fyodor lives off others, so the Devil lives off Ivan’s mind.

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Fyodor is a rudderless ship blown hither and yon by the winds of his passions. It is not that he goes off course; he is not self-consistent enough to have a course to deviate from! In Book Three, “The Sensualists,” Dmitri, among others, also is portrayed as a sensualist. Alyosha comes across him hiding, behaving oddly, and talking wildly. He is drinking but less than a quarter of a bottle of cognac; he needs “two bottles to get drunk” (106). He recites some of Schiller’s poetry and asks Alyosha not to “think I’m just a brute of an officer who drinks cognac and goes whoring” (106– 7).18 Then he goes on: I want to tell you now about the “insects,” about those to whom God gave sensuality: To insects—sensuality! I am that very insect, brother, and those words are precisely about me. And all of us Karamazovs are like that, and in you, an angel, the same insect lives and stirs up storms in your blood. Storms, because sensuality is a storm, more than a storm. (108)

Dmitri rattles off his early seductions, his financial shenanigans with Katerina Ivanovna, his running off to Mokroye (where he is believed to have spent the 3,000 rubles he had taken from Katerina to fund a three-day bash), and his wild plan to steal 3,000 rubles from his father to pay Katerina back. When Dmitri appears through the next five books, he is always gripped by passion. He repeats that he will kill his father to get the money. He dashes about wildly, even foolishly, to raise the money. He spies on his father as Fyodor waits for Grushenka to come to him: Mitya watched from the side, and did not move. The whole of the old man’s profile, which he found so loathsome, the whole of his drooping Adam’s apple, his hooked nose, smiling in sweet expectation, his lips—all was brightly lit from the left by the slanting light of the lamp shining from the room. Terrible, furious anger suddenly boiled up in Mitya’s heart. “There he was, his rival, his tormentor, the tormentor of his life!” It was a surge of that same sudden, vengeful and furious anger of which he had spoken, as if in anticipation, to Alyosha during their conversation in the gazebo four days earlier, in response to Alyosha’s question, “How can you say you will kill father?” (392)

18. Frank (Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 590, 591) sees Dmitri as revealing “an unexpected depth and impressiveness” in Book Three, Chapter Four, especially through his extensive quotation of poetry. Frank also alludes to “an obscure sense of nature as God’s handiwork,” but in fact Dmitri’s comment, “I don’t kiss the earth, I don’t tear open her bosom” (107) may be a pointed contrast to Alyosha’s future conversion narrative, embracing and kissing the earth (362).

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After a break in the narrative (to avoid describing Fyodor’s murder), Dmitri’s wild behavior is again displayed. He runs from the house. The servant Grigory chases him up a wall yelling, “Parricide!” (394). Dmitri bashes him on the head with a pestle. He examines the prostrate Grigory and becomes covered with blood. He runs about like a madman. He gets a pistol. He chases Grushenka to Mokroye and throws another spree. Grushenka, drunk, says that she is his. His behavior is manic. Then the police commissioner comes for a word with him. Dmitri thinks he must have murdered Grigory. He seems to confess: “ ‘The old man!’ Mitya cried in a frenzy, ‘the old man and his blood …! I un-der-stand’ ” (443). And then he is arrested for the murder of his father. And he did not understand! He thought he had killed Grigory, who had been something of a father to him. Dmitri’s passions finally carry him into “Delirium” (the title of Book Eight, chapter eight). To this point he “doubles” the irrational sensualism of Fyodor, extending our understanding of the type. Just as Fyodor was “cunning,” so Dmitri may not have been just a drunk and a whorer. But his passions mark him as an exemplar of sensual irrationalism. Yet, as we shall see, he changes.

Superstition The monk Father Ferapont exemplifies superstition. This is another form of irrationalism. He is doubled by the “little monk from St. Sylvester’s” (55). Father Ferapont is “a great faster and keeper of silence.” He regarded the institution of elders “a harmful and frivolous innovation.” A number of brothers sympathize with him and many laymen “honored him as a great ascetic and a righteous man, even though they regarded him unquestionably as a holy fool” (166). It was rumored that he kept silent because he was conversing with “heavenly spirits” (167). Father Ferapont has a remarkably materialistic view of devils. In conversation with the visiting monk, he remarked on all the devils he had seen around the monastery: I saw one sitting on one monk’s chest, hiding under his cassock, with only his little horns sticking out; another monk had one peeking out of his pocket, looking shifty-eyed, because he was afraid of me; another had one living in his stomach, his unclean belly; and there was one who had one hanging on his neck, clinging to him, and he was carrying him around without even seeing him …. I’m telling you—I see, I see throughout. As I was leaving the Superior’s, I looked—there was one hiding from me behind the door, a real beefy one, a yard and a half tall or more, with a thick tail, brown, long, and he happened to stick the tip of it into the doorjamb, and me being no fool, I suddenly slammed the door shut and pinched his tail. He started squealing, struggling, and I crossed him to death with the sign of the Cross, the triple one. He dropped dead on the spot, like a squashed spider. He must be rotten and stinking in that corner now, and they don’t see, they don’t smell a thing. (168–9)

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Father Ferapont’s understanding of the Holy Ghost as a dove is equally materialistic. The little monk from St. Sylvester’s asks whether the tales that Father Ferapont is in constant communication with the Holy Spirit are true. Father Ferapont responds that the Holy Spirit does come to him: “He flies down. He does.” “How does he fly down? In what form?” “As a bird.” “The Holy Spirit in the form of a dove?” “There is the Holy Spirit, and there is the Holispirit. The Holispirit is different, he can descend as some other bird—a swallow, a goldfinch, a tomtit.” “And how can you tell him from a tomtit?” “He speaks.” “How does he speak? In what language?” “Human language.” “And what does he tell you?” “Well, today he announced that a fool would visit me and ask improper questions. You want to know too much, monk.” (169)

Ferapont’s superstition is the converse of Ivan’s materialism: whereas Ivan understands only the material world, Ferapont understands the spiritual world in terms so startlingly materialist as to exhibit the epitome of irrational superstition. Ferapont’s literalistic superstition extends to nature. He continues, after a pause, to query the visitor: “And do you see this tree?” asked Father Ferapont …. “I see it most blessed father.” “For you it’s an elm, but for me the picture is different.” “What is it for you?” the little monk asked after pausing in vain expectation. “It happens during the night. Do you see those two branches? In the night, behold, Christ stretches forth his arms to me, searching for me with those arms, I see it clearly and tremble. Fearsome, oh fearsome.” “Why is it fearsome, if it’s Christ himself?” “He may grab hold of me and ascend me.” “Alive?” “What, haven’t you heard of the spirit and power of Elijah? He may seize me and carry me off.” (169)

Ferapont, the great keeper of the fast who eats “mushrooms and berries” (168) in the forest, projects his fantasies even onto an elm tree. His superstitious faith seems to descend into delusion. When Father Zosima dies, his body begins to decompose quickly. A number of monks take this as a sign of God’s disfavor; some are troubled by it. Father Ferapont loudly condemns Father Zosima because he “stunk” (335). Yet the realistic Father Paissy, in contrast, condemns such a rush to judgment, in effect

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rejecting such superstition that blindly accepts a traditional belief that saints’ bodies are miraculously preserved after death. In his sardonic soliloquy on going to hell (which he evidently thinks he richly deserves, were it to exist), Fyodor Karamazov, at least for a bit, “doubles” Ferapont. Like Ferapont, he is a literalistic materialist in religious matters. If the devils are to drag him down to hell, he argues, they will have to have their hooks in him. He then flies off in literalistic superstitious fantasy: And then I think: hooks? Where do they get them? What are they made of? Iron? Where do they forge them? Have they got some kind of factory down there? You know, in the monastery the monks probably believe there’s a ceiling in hell, for instance. Now me, I’m ready to believe in hell, only there shouldn’t be any ceiling; that would be, as it were, more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran, in other words. Does it really make any difference—with a ceiling or without a ceiling? But that’s what the damned question is all about! Because if there’s no ceiling, then there are no hooks. And if there are no hooks, the whole thing falls apart, which, again, is unlikely, because then who will drag me down with hooks, because if they don’t drag me down, what then, and where is there any justice in the world? (24)

This speech also effectively mocks Ferapont’s literalist religious materialism. The contrast between the realism of Zosima, Alyosha, and Father Paissy, and Ferapont’s superstition could not be more obvious. Although he is a minor character in the novel, the descriptions of Ferapont’s superstition effectively contrast with realism. Dostoevsky uses Ferapont to show that those who identify religious faith as illusion or delusion are, alas, not unwarranted in their rejection of some believers’ pattern of faith. The humor of Father Ferapont’s discourse ironically underlines the difference between his irrationalism and Alyosha’s realism. His immoderate faith is rooted in a failure to hear others, to learn from those who respectfully disagree with him, and to cling mindlessly to beliefs that isolate him from more reasonable patterns of religious faith, whether realistic or naïve. However, the contrast is very important: it shows that Dostoevsky was quite aware of such self-deceptive superstition and effectively denies that such gross superstition has anything to do with realism or realistic religious faith like his own.

Religious Naïveté/Simplicity Victor Terras astutely notes that “Dostoevsky stations a considerable number of normal and natural characters (and their voices) along the edges of his narrative as points of reference and as reminders that The Brothers Karamazov is a model of contemporary Russian reality.”19 Many of them are what Terras says: normal and natural. But some of them are religious in a way quite different from either 19. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 87, with reference to A. Boyce Gibson, Religion of Dostoevsky, 117.

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Alyosha the realist or Father Ferapont the superstitious. They are the simple folk who are portrayed in various places. The scene in which pilgrims come to Father Zosima shows their pattern: their religion is not superstitious but not especially reflective. It is “naïve” or “simple.” 20 Once the pilgrims approach Father Zosima, “they prostrated before him, wept, kissed his feet, kissed the ground he stood on, and cried out; women held their children up to him, they brought him the sick ‘shriekers’ ”(30).21 They sought solace and healing: “Many of those who came with sick children or adult relatives and implored the elder to lay his hands on them and say a prayer over them, he saw return soon, some even the next day, and, falling in tears before the elder, thank him for healing their sick” (30). They are religiously untroubled, unlike Ivan who narrates the catalog of evils as evidence for his unbelief. They are neither sensualists like Fyodor nor superstitious like Ferapont but ordinary believers who suffer evils, endure their suffering, and hope for relief. What makes this a distinctive type is that it is composed of ordinary people, especially the serfs of Russia in whom Dostoevsky had so much hope and trust. The narrator, at this point omniscient and probably reliable, describes Alyosha’s response to them: Oh, how well he understood that for the humble soul of the simple Russian, worn out by toil and grief, and, above all, by everlasting injustice and everlasting sin, his own and the world’s, there is no stronger need and consolation to find some holy thing or person, to fall down before him and venerate him: “though with us there is sin, unrighteousness, and temptation, still, all the same, there is on earth, in such and such a place, somewhere, someone, holy and exalted; he has the truth, he knows the truth, so the truth does not die on earth, and therefore will some day come to us and will reign over all the earth, as has been promised.” Alyosha knew that this was precisely how the people felt and even reasoned. (30)

Their religious hope may lead them to expect unlikely solutions to their problems. But they do not turn elm branches into Christ’s arms; they do not invoke devils; nor do they deny the reality of grief. They simply hope that someone holy has and knows the truth, and will return to rule the earth. Their views are saturated in tradition. Such religious simplicity may be uncritical, innocent of the materialists’ challenges, but has the virtue of sustaining the believers’ endurance. In a chapter devoted to Zosima’s encounter with the pilgrim women (46–53), he responds to them with loving kindness, thoughtful advice, blessings, and 20. William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997, first published 1902], 78–113), devotes a chapter on “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” to an analogous group he calls the “once-born souls.” 21. Ivan’s and Alyosha’s mother was a “shrieker” who suffered from a “feminine nervous disorder, including hysterical fits” (13).

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consolations. Some illnesses seem abated, but that seems less important. The tone of this chapter suggests they have hope flowering out of their despair. They are not so much imagining an Elijah-like escape from this world as seeking healing for everyday ills. They do not materialize the spiritual as the superstitious do but live religiously in a world that is not black and white but shaded with grays. And some of them receive cures for their ills. The narrator has characterized Alyosha’s response to them: Whether it was a real healing or simply a natural improvement in the course of the disease was a question that did not exist for Alyosha, for he already fully believed in the spiritual power of his teacher, and his glory was, as it were, Alyosha’s own triumph. His heart especially throbbed and he became radiant when the elder came out to the crowd of simple pilgrims waiting for him at the gates of the hermitage, who flocked from all over Russia purposely to see the elder and receive his blessing. (30)

Whether a miracle occurred was irrelevant; in Alyosha’s eyes, Father Zosima’s spiritual power was not the stuff of superstition. Moreover, Father Zosima sought to avoid inculcating, or even supporting, any such beliefs about his “miraculous” power in his followers. Nonetheless, he did not quash their hopes or attempt to differentiate natural from miraculous healing. Rather, this “hero” of the novel shows great sympathy with them. The novel portrays them in a light far more sympathetic than the one it shines on superstitious. This type of religious practice and belief is, perhaps, not a major theme in the novel. Yet it highlights a form of religiosity quite different from the superstition of Ferapont or the Realism of Alyosha and Zosima. Realists see the burdens and problems others have, recognize the truths in materialists’ claims (neither Alyosha nor later Dmitri denies Ivan’s insights; cf. 245–6, 507–8), have compassion, and act responsibly. Hence, the novel demonstrates at least three distinct ways of living out and living in a faith tradition: realism, superstition, and everyday simple religious practice and belief. It does not argue against ordinary naïve belief but neither does it laud it. The way the novel portrays superstition, perhaps as a form of the “irrational core of Christian commitment,”22 effectively is an argument against that mentalité but not against “religious naïveté” or “religious simplicity” as portrayed here.

Manipulation The narrator describes Mikhail Rakitin, the seminarian, as “so skillful … in manipulating everyone and presenting himself to everyone according to the wishes of each, whenever he saw the least advantage for himself ” (328). The narrator has 22. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 570.

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introduced Rakitin as a seminarist-careerist (43). Victor Terras’s comments on the appellation “seminarist” are apt: [It] had a pejorative ring. Seminarians, of low social background (at best, from the more or less hereditary lower clergy), were poor, often uncouth, uneducated, and crudely materialistic. Many quit their studies to pursue a secular career. Others became revolutionaries. The word seminarist was usually associated with the image of a person exceedingly self-assured and proud of his learning, as well as inclined to literalism and pedantry. Rakitin is a seminarist par excellence.23

Rakitin uses and abuses Dmitri by planning to write an article to start his literary career about the Karamazovs, the crime, and the trial (see 588, 666–7). Although he shares some characteristics with Ivan and Fyodor, unlike them, he seems to have no real pattern or character beyond a penchant for manipulating others and promoting his own interests. Alyosha was “almost close” to Rakitin, and in the monastery, he alone knew what Rakitin thought (43). Like Ivan, Rakitin is a materialist, but he differs from Ivan’s view by saying that he believes that morality is possible even without believing in the immortality of the soul. He tells Alyosha he finds it “in the love of liberty, equality, fraternity” (82), articulating a dedication to the ideals of the French revolution. He has concealed the fact that he is a freethinker and a socialist of sorts, views rather unsuitable for someone preparing for holy orders in Orthodox Russia. In contrast to Alyosha and to Ivan’s views, Rakitin declares “squalid” Ivan’s theory that if “there is no immortality of the soul, then there is no virtue, and therefore everything is permitted.” Rakitin avers, “Mankind will find strength in itself to live for virtue, even without believing in the immortality of the soul” (82). Is it ironic that a manipulative deceiver like Rakitin advocates for atheistic virtue? Rakitin shows whatever face his beholder wants to see. Unlike many other characters, he is deceptive and constantly looking for his own advantage. When Alyosha mentions to him that Grushenka is his relative, for instance, Rakitin vehemently denies it (82), despite the fact that she is his cousin. He has “connections everywhere and made spies everywhere.” Alyosha sees Rakitin as “dishonest and was decidedly unaware of it” (85). Rakitin feigns friendship with Alyosha, but when Zosima dies and begins to stink, Rakitin—having been promised twentyfive rubles by Grushenka to do so—fetches the “virgin” Alyosha to Grushenka’s clutches so she can seduce him. Rakitin visits Dmitri in prison many times before his trial, in all likelihood to collect material for his pamphlet that he would publish about the trial (574–5; 586–7). Rakitin “did not like meeting Alyosha, hardly spoke to him, and greeted him with difficulty” (587). After Rakitin leaves, Alyosha and Dmitri discuss him and reveal his duplicity. Dmitri then rejects Rakitin’s views and finds Rakitin to 23. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 158; the next few pages of his commentary are scathing in their discussion of Rakitin’s role.

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be lying: “If God is driven from the earth, we’ll meet him underground.” Even those underground who cannot see the sun still know that the sun exists. “And the whole of life is there—in knowing that the sun is” (592). Dmitri rejects Rakitin’s atheism: even in the darkest times if one cannot feel God’s presence, God is there. Like his brothers, Dmitri recognizes the impossibility of living rightly without God. During Dmitri’s trial, Rakitin gives testimony against Dmitri. The narrator calls him “one of the most important witnesses” (666). Despite his freethinking, the defense attorney asks him whether he wrote a narrative, “The Life of the Elder, Father Zosima, Fallen Asleep in God, published by the diocesan authorities, full of profound and religious thoughts, and with an excellent and pious dedication to His Grace” (667). He admits to writing it but not for publication. After testifying, the narrator says that he “left the stage, somewhat besmirched” (668). Later in the trial, Grushenka admits in public that they are cousins. He is embarrassed to be seen as Grushenka’s cousin, and all of his testimony, according to the narrator, is “finally scrapped and destroyed in the general opinion” (684). After the trial, Dmitri refuses to see Rakitin in prison. Rakitin disappears from the text. Like the religiously naïve, Rakitin’s voice is heard mostly “at the edge” of the novel. But when he has brought Alyosha and Grushenka for a tryst, his selfishness is a visible presence. His performance at the trial reinforces the fact that he is manipulative. The novel portrays him as a person who loves only himself and whose faith is in himself: he is his own god, and no one and nothing has value or meaning except insofar as it serves that god. Terras comments appropriately: “Rakitin … believes that virtue is immanent in human nature. Dostoevsky’s refutation of this position is Rakitin himself, a person not only devoid of virtue but incapable of it.”24 The Brothers Karamazov is thus an argument not so much against the “enlightened” values of the French Revolution as it is against those deceivers and manipulators whose only loyalty is to themselves.

Conclusion The Brothers Karamazov is not about “faith vs. reason” but offers a much more nuanced argument. The novel argues for Zosima’s and Alyosha’s realism. In displaying materialism, sensualism, superstition, and manipulation as patterns of belief, feeling, and action that constitute patterns of faith, it argues against them. It acknowledges the shape of faith that the ordinary simple believer displays and clearly differentiates it from the painful awareness of realism, the irrationality of sensualism and superstition, and the self-centered pattern of manipulation. This is the argument of the novel: the realist lives as a person who is epistemically and ethically virtuous in a way displayed in no other form of life. 24. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 162; he adds that his liberalism was of a sort popular in Russia in the 1860s; also see Pevear’s comments (782, n. 2 and 4).

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If the “non-realists” in the novel have a “timeless” quality, it is not because they are beyond time but rather because they are frozen in time. Whereas the characters who flesh out the type of realism that Dostoevsky values display change over time—sometimes within the time frame of the novel, sometimes seen through flashbacks to earlier times or other plot devices—the others (save Dmitri and the boy Kolya Krasotkin) do not change. The Brothers Karamazov portrays types of people who differ in ultimate commitments, their intellectual, moral, and religious (or irreligious or superstitious) practices, and their responses to others. Materialists observe the world, recognize nothing beyond the material world, and see that world as needing no explanation. Realists, if religious believers, recognize the world as created by God (as a “fractured icon” of divine loving presence), find God to need no explanation, and not only observe the same world the materialists do but also work to repair the defaced icon of the world. The superstitious materialize the spiritual in bizarre ways, fail to engage in a terminal quest, and overlook much in the world. The religiously naïve may seek miracles, assume that an elder or other whom they recognize as a Christ-figure in the world can bring resolution to their problems, and respond with care for others. The sensualists live for their own pleasure in each moment, think almost incoherently about the world, its origin, and its end, and care little, if at all, for others. The manipulators seek only their own good, take the world to be a place of conflict that they wish to use in order to win what they wish, and treat others with disdain. Each type also differs in the shapes of their faiths. Realists see what there is and respond practically. Materialists theoretically limit what they can accept and are not open to any possibilities beyond those material limits. Superstitious people spin out imaginative webs that collapse the spiritual into the farcical. Religiously simple people hope or wish that salvation for their hopeless conditions can be found. Sensualists root what they wish and live in their passions, often momentary ones. Manipulators believe in and care for nothing and no one save themselves. The point of the present analysis is to highlight the shape of the epistemic argument in the novel. In so doing, it claims that the novel not only displays a profound Christian vision of a harsh and fearful love but that it also proffers an argument for preferring that sort of religious vision over the other forms of life or mentalités in the novel. As Dostoevsky wrote in the context of Orthodox Christianity, his vision is couched in those terms. That does not preclude the possibility that other religious contexts might not develop analogous visions. But arguing for such a view would take us far beyond the limits of this book. Nonetheless, the novel itself cannot determine how readers should respond to the novel. Each of the voices of the materialist Ivan, the realist Alyosha, the manipulator Rakitin, or one of the irrationalists offer possibly true ways of portraying accurately and responding appropriately to the situations, events, and people in the Karamazov world. And, perhaps, in ours. While the author argues for Zosima and Alyosha’s realism and against other patterns of faith, the polyphony of the novel portrays realism persuasively enough to be a viable option. Its portrayal of Rakitin’s manipulative version of materialism reflects the rapacious personalities

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whose lives are arguments for construing the world as a war and seeking to win it at all costs, even if Rakitin is shown up in the novel. We can speculate that perhaps such a person could even be elected to the highest office in the land. While the novel’s arguments against sensualism and superstition may be strong, it cannot show which vision, which pattern of faith that I have sketched in this chapter is actually reliable—or if any is. We cannot know if any of the ways of being in the world portrayed in the novel are truly wise. The polyphonic novel is not an answer to but an intensification of the challenges to the readers’ commitments to their ultimate sources of value and centers of meaning. While Dostoevsky’s ranking of the brothers favors Alyosha, I noted in the previous chapter that Albert Camus and Rowan Williams hint otherwise. Yet it is not a monophonic narrative coming to the resolution that the author supports and commends to the reader. The polyphonic novel challenges readers to act: to accept one (or none) of the understandings and practical responses shown in The Brothers Karamazov, to answer the question “Which of them live in the real world?” or “Which chorus ought I join?” The novel also argues for the need for conversion. That is the topic for the next chapter.

Chapter 4 C O N V E R SIO N S

In the introduction, I noted that scholars have recognized that conversions play a significant role in Dostoevsky’s work.1 But few have discovered a significant pattern in those conversions.2 Zosima’s brother Markel, Zosima, Alyosha, Dmitri, Grushenka, the boy Kolya,3 and others undergo conversion. They are strong characters whose minds and lives change significantly, not necessarily because of an irresistible “Damascus road” experience but often in response to particular people or events that challenge them to rethink their practices and beliefs. As Dostoevsky was submitting his novel for serial publication, he wrote to his editor in September 1879: “ ‘Cana of Galilee,’ is the most essential [chapter] in the whole book, and perhaps the whole novel.”4 Why is it most essential? My claim is that it is not merely the particular event narrated in the chapter (although if Alyosha is the hero, then this is the most important conversion in the novel), but that it is also essential because conversion is essential to understand Dostoevsky’s vision and his argument for it. “Conversion” functions as a leitmotif in the novel. What Dostoevsky means by the word can be shown by analyzing the pattern of conversions in this chapter, nonconversions in the next chapter, and the significance of Ivan’s nonconversion 1. See the introduction, n. 20 for comments on this. 2. One important exception is Julian W. Connolly, “Dostoevskij’s Guide to Spiritual Epiphany in The Brothers Karamazov,” Studies in Eastern European Thought 59 (2007): 39– 54. He discusses Alyosha’s conversion, an event in Dmitri’s conversion discussed in the section “Dmitri.” Ivan’s meeting with his devil provides an enlightening counterexample. Connolly generally eschews “conversion” in favor of calling each a “transformational revelatory experience.” Another is Contino in Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism, who sees The Brothers Karamazov as presenting a “prosaics of conversion” (29) and emphasizes that conversions require a “descent into humility” (30)—a point I have incorporated from his insightful work. 3. His character enters the novel only in Book Ten, although he is mentioned earlier (189). His conversion is discussed in Chapter 7 of this book as a way of showing how particular communities ground characters’ ability to convert. 4. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 7; the whole letter is in Frank and Goldstein, Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, 487–8.

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in the following chapter. Without the pattern, the key positive argument of the novel as a whole cannot be seen, namely, that religious faith can be realistic and reasonable. What are the patterns in the conversions? In essence, the novel argues that some are reasonable and responsible enough to change in the face of challenges, while others are too rigid to endure a conversion or are too constantly changing to be able to have or to recognize a conversion. But such a simple answer fails to display the dimensions of conversion in The Brothers Karamazov. To be converted requires a certain humility, an acknowledgment that one doesn’t have everything right. It is also effectively requires one to join a community of problem-solving “realists” like Zosima and Alyosha. To refuse conversion is rooted in pride, an unshakeable commitment to one’s views despite evidence, others’ pleas, and challenges. To refuse conversion is to refuse to accept a place in that wider community. And as Chapter 6 argues, Ivan’s returning his ticket marks an explicit rejection of conversion. The Brothers Karamazov argues that a person needs to be a realist or “to convert to realism” if a person would live well in the world. While these three chapters focus on individual persons, Chapters 7 and 8 explore Dostoevsky’s social vision. The social vision of the novel grounds individuality and freedom in the communities that shape a person. While The Brothers Karamazov displays an Orthodox vision, it is not a theological treatise. Hence, the discussion of whether Dostoevsky or his works are orthodoxly Orthodox or merely minimally religious seems to me to ask questions that a novel cannot answer.5 I begin with some phenomenological comments on conversion and conversions and then go on to the patterns of conversions in The Brothers Karamazov.

Conversion Perhaps the most influential writing on conversion in the philosophical and psychological literature is William James’s chapters in The Varieties of Religious Experience.6 James began by identifying a “hot place in a man’s consciousness, the group of ideas from which he works, call it the habitual centre of his personal energy.”7 James W. McClendon Jr. and James M. Smith helpfully identified these 5. I discuss this issue in “The Fragility of Grace in the Karamazov World—and in Ours,” Theological Studies 81/4 (December 2020), 838–9, n. 30. There I argue against the notion espoused by some critics that one finds only “minimal religion” in The Brothers Karamazov. 6. James, Varieties. In many ways, Walter E. Conn (Christian Conversion: A Developmental Interpretation of Autonomy and Surrender [Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986]) offers a theological account that is richer than James’s, but its focus on conversion is in the service of moral and spiritual development. For present purposes, James’s approach helps focus specifically on the phenomenology of the events and their fruits and is more useful than Conn’s focus on its place in a person’s development. 7. James, Varieties, 165; emphasis and non-inclusive language in the original. James first contrasts those who are “healthy minded” with those who have “sick souls.” The latter

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sorts of central controlling ideas as convictions, defined as “a persistent belief such that if X (a person or community) has a conviction, it will not easily be relinquished and it cannot be relinquished without making X a significantly different person (or community) than before.”8 A conversion, then, is a significant convictional shift or a significant change in someone’s habitual center of personal energy.9 James noted that conversions may be sudden or gradual, voluntary or involuntary, conscious or subconscious. The key is not how the change occurs or what causes it, but what changes: one’s central convictions and thus the shape of one’s life. In discussing Leo Tolstoy’s conversion, James noted that a “not infrequent consequence” of conversion is like Tolstoy’s, “a transfiguration of the face of nature …. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth.”10 Conversion involves what we might label a “new vision of the whole.” It is not merely that we change our minds. As our central convictions shift, our whole world shifts. And if I and my world change, then how I live in the world changes, too. James finds the arguments between believers and nonbelievers about the causes or roots of conversion to be irrelevant. The believers who claim that they have a supernatural cause and are thus genuine assert what is unverifiable. The unbelievers who claim that conversions have purely natural and explicable causes and are thus bogus presume that material conditions are the sufficient conditions of the conversion, a claim that is unproven. This sort of argument between both camps cannot be resolved. So how can one assess conversions? The key to evaluating lives in general and conversions, in particular, is thus not their debatable roots but their visible fruits. James put it this way: Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. group need conversion in order for them to be healed. Each of the converts in The Brothers Karamazov do have some sickness of soul (in contrast to the naively religious), but not necessarily of the kind that James describes. 8. James Wm. McClendon Jr. and James M. Smith, Convictions: Defusing Religious Relativism, Revised Edition (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity International Press, 1994), 5; italics removed; first published as Understanding Religious Convictions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 7. James’s Varieties focused on conversions from a nonreligious state to religious commitment, and only in passing allowing for “counter-conversions” going the other way (151–3); McClendon and Smith do not have that limitation, as convictions may be religious or not, and conversion may or may not involve an explicit religious component. A person might convert from tolerant agnosticism to militant atheism, for instance. Their approach helps especially with understanding Ivan’s resistance discussed in the next chapter. 9. This “habitual center” is the ancestor of the center of meaning and source of value discussed in Chapter 2. In terms from that chapter, conversion is coming to faith in a god or gods different from the god(s) one had faith in before the conversion. 10. James, Varieties, 131. As we shall see later in this chapter, this is a characteristic of Alyosha’s conversion experience, but not explicitly seen in the others.

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The Karamazov Case If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.11

As lives are particular, judgments cannot be made wholesale but only in particular cases. James contrasts the converts with the “natural man [sic].” According to James, “natural men” are those who are unconverted to religious faith. Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any circumstances could be, converted …. They are either incapable of imagining the invisible; or else, in the language of devotion, they are life-long subjects of “barrenness” and “dryness.” Such inaptitude for religious faith may in some cases be intellectual in its origin.12

James also eschews any general judgment on the value of a converted life over a “non-converted” or “natural” one. He notes that “converted men as a class are indistinguishable from natural men; some natural men even excel some converted men in their fruits.”13 Of course, not everything changes when someone is converted. So much in a person’s mind and heart remains the same both before and after conversion. When we replace a central conviction in our web of belief,14 the geometry of the whole web changes even if many or most of its strands remain intact. To use James’ terms, the “hot place” moves. One is not a new person, but the same person transformed so significantly as to feel new. One may see previously unnoticed connections among one’s beliefs. One may surface subconscious beliefs. Something previously found annoying or disgusting may become enjoyed or appreciated. One may repent of acts now seen as sinful and resolve to “sin no more.” But as one’s convictions shift significantly, so one’s web shifts even if particular beliefs remain intact. And as one’s central and distinctive convictions shift, one’s world shifts as well.15

11. James, Varieties, 194–5. 12. James, Varieties, 171. He notes that even a long-standing resistance to religious conversion can be overcome; the “lifelong” is not prospective, but a retrospective judgment. 13. James, Varieties, 195. By this point, the “religion of healthy-mindedness,” that is, the religious faith of the “once born,” has factored out of his argument. His later arguments about “saintliness” and its value do not rely on the contrast of the “once-born” and the “twice-born.” 14. The phrase is derived from W. V. O. Quine and J. S. Ulian, The Web of Belief, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1978). 15. James’s remarks on Tolstoy (Varieties, 156–8) explicate this.

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The Brothers Karamazov narrates stories of people who convert and people who do not. It reveals what the “fruits” are in their particular lives. Dostoevsky’s novel thus provides characters who display particular and paradigmatic views of, responses to, and actions in the realms of earth and heaven (in James’s sense of those terms).

Conversion in The Brothers Karamazov My thesis here is that the novel shows that the profound shift that constitutes conversion is no less reasonable than any other adaptation of one’s beliefs to new evidence or other challenges. The Brothers Karamazov portrays conversions that “make sense.” The fruits of these conversions show that they are reasonable. One of the markers of reasonableness is intellectual responsibility.16 A person who cannot examine and even change their beliefs in the face of the discovery that one holds contradictory beliefs or in the light cast by significant new evidence is to some degree irresponsible. The reasonable person is a responsible realist. Realists change, sometimes substantively, when confronted with evidential conflict or inconsistencies in their web of beliefs. Of course, a balance must be maintained here. A reasonable person can neither hold blindly to a belief in the face of overwhelmingly relevant evidence against their belief nor can they refuse to hold any belief merely because the tide of supporting evidence may ebb, flow, and eddy. With regard to their convictions, reasonable people may adapt those beliefs to new circumstances but properly resist abandoning them—not in the least because the cost of doing so is so high.17 Yet sometimes, people’s patterns of ideas, attitudes, 16. We presume to hold people responsible for their voluntary actions and exonerate people from full responsibility for their involuntary acts. Some epistemologists claim that many, if not most or all, of our beliefs are “involuntary” and thus we are not responsible for what we believe. But this is seriously flawed. (A racist who believes that Black folk are inferior is “not responsible”? Drunkards who believe they are sober enough to drive automobiles are not responsible for that belief and its consequences?) A better approach is that of philosopher Linda Zagzebski. She shows that with regard to belief-formation, “voluntary” and “involuntary” are polar types and recommends that we construe doxastic (belief-forming) actions on a scale from “most voluntary” to “least voluntary.” Hence, some responsibility applies however our beliefs are generated; the question is what kind and degree of responsibility. See her Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and Vice and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66–8. Throughout this work, she discusses various forms and levels of responsibility for belief formation, especially those beliefs that guide actions. 17. This point was made eloquently by Mitchell in his response to Flew. See AntonyFlew, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell, “Theology and Falsification,” New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (London: SCM Press, 1955), 96–108. Fundamentalist Christians’ opposition to evolution while accepting science more generally can be a blind belief. Other Christians’ accepting a theory of evolution may modify their

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and actions shift so significantly that “conversion” is the apt term for their shifts. And such conversions can be responsible and reasonable. Markel Father Zosima’s younger brother, Markel, is the earliest conversion narrated in the novel, antedating the time of the novel by decades; his story is told in a flashback that requires fewer than four pages in the printed text. It functions as a sketch or template for the pattern other characters exhibit in their own conversions. Alyosha begins narrating the life of Father Zosima in Book Six with Markel’s deathbed conversion (287–90).18 It is voluntary, sudden, and conscious. He had been an atheist who did not fast during Lent (287). Seeing him slowly dying, his mother asks him to observe Lent and take communion. He resisted. But then on Tuesday of Holy Week, he “started keeping the fast and going to church. ‘I’m doing it for your sake, mother, to give you joy and peace,’ he said to her” (288). Rather than sticking stubbornly to his atheism, he humbly accepts his mother’s urgent pleas and feels her love for him. As spring comes, he is “utterly changed in spirit— such a wondrous change had suddenly become in him” (288). He tells his mother not to weep and despite being ill, he exults, “life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over” (288). He later voices a key theme in The Brothers Karamazov, one that is found in at least seven scenes in the novel: “And I shall also tell you, dear mother, that each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.” And finally, he tells Zosima: “ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘go now, play, live for me!’ … He died the third week after Easter” (290). Joseph Frank insightfully comments on the significance of Markel. After the family doctor declares that Markel’s final illness has afflicted his brain, Frank analyzes his experience: But the afflicted young man is only rejoicing in that ecstatic apprehension of life as an ultimate good that even Ivan had experienced—and that Dostoevsky himself had once voiced in the shadow of death. Just after returning to prison from his mock execution, and still under its impact, he had written to his brother Mikhail, “Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness,” and he had wished “to love and embrace just someone from among

beliefs about God’s action in the world, but their acceptance does not entail a conversion to atheism. Such modification exemplifies one form of reasonable believing. 18. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 623, notes that the story of Zosima’s youth “is narrated, as in a zhitie, in a style intended to awaken pious and reverential responses opposed to the agitations and passions depicted elsewhere.” This comment seems to downplay the significance of the story for the novel. While it has the form of a pious tale, it anticipates the pattern of conversion in the novel.

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those I knew.” Markel obviously emphasizes this crucial epiphanic sentiment, which is passed on through him to Father Zosima and then to Alyosha.19

The connections show this sketch is a template. The central themes of “life as paradise” and “guilty before all” originated in Markel’s conversion long before the time of the novel. The other conversions put flesh on this skeleton. In effect, the significance of conversion emerges only when the other conversion stories are seen as “doubling” it. As understanding Bakhtin’s concept of “polyphony” requires working through multiple characterizations, understanding the significance of conversion in The Brothers Karamazov requires recognizing the patterns that emerge in the multiple conversion narratives. In placing this conversion story near the beginning of his first response to Ivan and in setting it as a flashback, the author signals the importance of conversion in his narrative—an importance that Frank rightly connects to Dostoevsky’s “epiphany.” Yet how is it connected to the other conversions in the novel? It anticipates three important aspects of them. First, the conversions in the novel are not irrational. The strong characters, whose conversion stories “double” Markel’s, respond to new circumstances by adapting to them responsibly. Even in the bare-bones template, is it unreasonable for Markel to change his life in the face of his mother’s concern and his coming death? By what standard would we judge this? If we use the Jamesian standards of “fruit,” then this conversion clearly has had good fruits. Markel is at peace. He gives his mother joy and peace (288). Its consequences suggest, even if they do not definitively show, that the conversion was reasonable, not an irrational response. Second, a significant factor in each conversion experience is human love. As Alyosha narrates it, Markel’s conversion is as mundane as flipping a switch: on Monday of Holy Week, he’s an atheist who will not fast, but on Tuesday he’s an active believer. When others come to visit, he acknowledges their love which he has only come to appreciate in his converted state (288–9). He “awoke every day with more and more tenderness, rejoicing and all atremble with love” (289). Markel responds humbly to maternal love; it is a constituent of his conversion. Third, if the fruits of these conversions are good—and the novel portrays them all as good—then whatever their causes, we ought to “idealize and venerate” them, as James put it. Markel’s conversion displays the fruits of peace and joy in the 19. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 624. Ivan’s experience of exultation, however, is qualified by his expectation that he will thirst for life “until my thirtieth year, after which I myself shall want no more, so it seems to me” (230). By that time the youth that alone sustained him will be gone. Frank notes (602) that Ivan’s words “raise the specter of a suicide out of despair,” although there are other possibilities for understanding this utterance. While Dostoevsky himself may have had suicidal thoughts, none of his “converted” characters do. Others’ acceptance of life is unqualified and unlimited, whereas Ivan sees life as a limited, not unlimited, good.

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face of suffering and expectation of death. Whether one thinks such a conversion to be a self-induced delusion or a divine answer to human prayer, given the circumstances, even Markel’s abrupt about-face has good fruits. It is, thus, to be “venerated.” Zosima Zosima’s conversion is a sudden, involuntary, and conscious act of horrified repentance for having beaten his servant. The situation that generated Zosima’s shame is complex. He is in the military. He had earlier thought he had been in love with a young woman. She married another while he was stationed for two months in another town. He was so self-absorbed that he had not recognized that the couple had already been betrothed even as he had courted her. He describes his mind as “clouded” as he sought revenge by insulting her husband enough to force him to challenge Zinovy (Zosima’s name before he became a monk) to an illegal duel. The duel was set. He returned home, “ferocious and ugly.” He beat his servant, became remorseful, had a bad night, and came to his senses. He recalled what he had done: I stood as if dazed, and the sun was shining, the leaves were rejoicing, glistening, and the birds, the birds were praising God … I covered my face with my hands, fell on my bed, and burst into sobs. And then I remembered my brother Markel, and his words to the servants before his death: “My good ones, my dears, why are you serving me, why do you love me, and am I worthy of being served?” “Yes, am I worthy?” This question then pierced my mind for the first time in my life. “Mother, heart of my heart, truly each of us is guilty before everyone and for everyone, only people do not know it, and if they knew it, the world would at once become a paradise.” “Lord,” I wept and thought, “can that possibly not be true?.” (298)

He traveled to the site of the duel. He then looked lovingly at the other man whose pistol shot nicks Zinovy’s ear. Zinovy then refuses to fight. The duelists’ seconds and his opponent are incensed at his refusal. “Yesterday I was still a fool, but today I’ve grown wiser,” he tells them (299). He is castigated for bringing disgrace to the regiment. He apologizes to the husband and announces plans to leave the military in order to enter the monastery. He recalls later sharing his new insight with others before entering the monastic life: All these conversations generally took place on social evenings, in the company of ladies; it was the women who liked to listen to me then, and who made the men listen. “But how is it possible that I am guilty for everyone,” they would all laugh in my face, “well, for instance, can I be guilty for you?” “But how can you even understand it,” I would answer, “if the whole world has long since gone off on a different path, and if we consider what is a veritable lie to be the truth, and demand the same lie from others: Here for once in my life I have acted sincerely,

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and what then? I’ve become a sort of holy fool20 for you all and though you’ve come to love me, you still laugh at me.” (300–1)

Zinovy was entering a new world and taking a new name. Can this conversion be reasonable? Is it reasonable to come to abort a foolish duel that could undermine the happiness of a woman he esteemed and her husband? Is it reasonable to regret beating a servant and humbly repent of it? If so, then this conversion is reasonable. Is love a factor? Unlike Markel’s conversion, maternal love is not a condition for this conversion but his recall of Markel’s words and of his mother’s love—not to mention his love for the woman, the couple’s love for each other, and his realization that his servant did indeed care for him as Markel’s had—all this love factors into the narrative. Are the fruits good? From his later perspective, Zosima could likely recognize himself as a sick soul whose conversion had healed him. The fruits of his conversion are in the story of his life. In short, Dostoevsky portrays Zosima’s life as a monastic elder most positively. He has become one who is patient even with the simple, weary but good-hearted “women of faith” (46–59). He is a respected teacher. The fruits of his conversion from the military to the monastic life, from self-absorption to realism, display both goodness and wisdom. Frank comments on the “salutary effect of Zosima’s life” and the “serenity” of that life, “as opposed to the agitations and passions depicted elsewhere.”21 Zosima’s conversion is reasonable, responsible, and shows good fruits. Alyosha Alyosha’s profound conversion experience is sudden, involuntary, and conscious. Dostoevsky needs two scenes on the eventful day of Zosima’s death to portray it fully. Alyosha is not converted from atheism to religious faith or from a violent life to a peaceful one. Rather, his conversion involves both a recommitment to and a transformation of his vocation. His conversion marks the beginning of his mature vocation. The change was profound. He had been a monk sheltered in the monastery. He becomes an apostle22 sent into a fractious world. The first scene is his encounter with Grushenka and Rakitin at Grushenka’s house. The scene is foreshadowed in Book One of the novel. There Rakitin has called Alyosha a virgin, a sensualist (like his father), and a holy fool (like his mother). He continues: “You know, Grushenka said to me: ‘Bring him over (meaning you), and I’ll pull his little cassock off ’ ” (80). 20. For the significance of this term, see Chapter 3, n. 14. 21. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 623. I would add that such agitations and passions characterized Zosima before his conversion. 22. Dostoevsky’s text does not call Alyosha an “apostle,” but frequently notes that Father Zosima, and later Father Paissy, send him into the world as the risen Jesus sends out his disciples as narrated in Matt. 28:16-20.

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Book Seven begins with a chapter narrating Zosima’s death, a seismic shock to Alyosha’s vocation. He is shattered when the remains of his beloved elder begin to stink (330). No miracles occur—and many of the monks had expected miracles from this holy man’s mortal flesh (339). Physical corruption and a lack of wonders are seen by some as God’s refusal to affirm Zosima’s worth as an elder. The next books find Alyosha beginning to murmur against God. Rakitin stokes the flames of this rebellion. Alyosha contemplates eating a sausage, drinking, and cuddling up to Grushenka (341–3). Rakitin avers, “So you’ve gotten angry with your God now, you’ve rebelled.” Something flashes in Alyosha’s eyes and he responds, “ ‘I do not rebel against my God, I simply “do not accept his world,” ’ Alyosha suddenly smiled crookedly” (341). Rakitin quickly calls this quotation from Ivan’s rebellion “gibberish”23 and then gloats that he would abet the destruction of Alyosha’s vocation and “see the ‘disgrace of the righteous man,’ the probable ‘fall’ of Alyosha ‘from the saints to the sinners,’ which he was already savoring in anticipation” (343). When they get to Grushenka’s house, she hops onto Alyosha’s lap (348). Alyosha is amazed that he didn’t feel fear at this woman’s action but felt only curiosity. Champagne is served. Alyosha sips once but then refuses to drink more. The scene continues: “Then I won’t drink either,” Grushenka cut in, “I don’t want to anyway. Drink the whole bottle yourself, Rakitka. If Alyosha drinks, I’ll drink, too.” “What sentimental slop,” Rakitin taunted. “And sitting on his lap all the time! Granted he has his grief, but what have you got? He rebelled against his God, he was going to gobble sausage ….” “Why so?” “His elder died today, the elder Zosima, the saint.” “The elder Zosima died!” Grushenka exclaimed. “Oh, Lord, I didn’t know!” She crossed herself piously. “Lord, but what am I doing now, sitting on his lap!” She suddenly gave a start as if in fright, jumped off his knees at once, and sat down on the sofa. Alyosha gave her a long, surprised look, and something seemed to light up in his face. “Rakitin,” he suddenly said loudly and firmly, “don’t taunt me with having rebelled against my God. I don’t want to hold any anger against you, and therefore you be kinder, too. I’ve lost such a treasure as you never had, and you cannot judge me now. You’d do better to look here, at her: did you see how she spared me? I came here looking for a wicked soul— I was drawn to that, because I was 23. This inability to understand Ivan’s basic insight distinguishes Rakitin’s understanding from Ivan’s. Their ideas overlap, but as Dmitri states, “Brother Ivan is not Rakitin” (592). Kolya Krasotkin’s summary of Rakitin’s “socialism” has some overlap with Ivan’s ideas, but displays a different style and more dogmatic content (527). Ivan also called his ideas “gibberish” (244, 265), but his own self-mocking is not the same thing as Rakitin mocking Alyosha’s quotation of Ivan.

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low and wicked myself, but I found a true sister, I found a treasure—a loving soul … She spared me just now … I’m speaking of you, Agrafena Alexandrovna. You restored my soul just now.” (351)

Rakitin then laughs spitefully at the thought of Grushenka (of all people!) saving Alyosha. This scene portrays both how the ground has shaken under Alyosha’s vocation and how Grushenka’s restorative action sets the stage for the second event. His ironic invocation of Ivan’s refusal to accept God’s world may be a knee-jerk reaction of a distraught follower of the elder but one that he finally does not own. Grushenka has not torn his cassock off but spared him. She has not humiliated him, and he has humbly recognized her as a “true sister.” She is not a “man-eater,” but a loving soul whose actions light up Alyosha’s face. No longer a wavering cloistered monk, the loving soul of his true sister makes it possible for Alyosha to become the “double” that would fight to bring Zosima’s wisdom and goodness into the world. The second scene of his conversion actualizes the possibility. The most essential chapter, “Cana of Galilee” (359–63), narrates the change. The chapter begins with Alyosha returning to the monastery and entering Zosima’s hermitage. Only Father Paissy is awake, reading the Gospel over the coffin. Alyosha’s perturbation is gone. Earlier, the stench of Zosima’s putrefying body had been so bad that the window had to be opened and a fresh breeze admitted. But now “the air was fresh and rather cool” (359). Alyosha kneels and prays without focus. He hears Father Paissy reading the pericope from John’s gospel wherein Mary asks her son Jesus to provide wine for a wedding. “Ah, that miracle, ah, that lovely miracle! Not grief, but men’s joy Christ visited when he worked his first miracle, he helped men’s joy … ‘He who loves men, loves their joy’”, Alyosha recalls Zosima saying. When the reading comes to Jesus’ hesitation, Alyosha urges Jesus on: “Do it … Joy, the joy of some poor, very poor people” (360). Jesus turns the water into wine having humbly accepted the request of his mother despite it not being his time. Alyosha is overwhelmed by a sense of joy: Jesus had acted out of love for the poor folk who couldn’t afford enough wine. In doing so, Jesus gave them joy. He sleeps, has a vision of the wizened old monk who had guided him and then hears the late Father Zosima’s voice. He leaves the cell to throw himself on the earth: He did not know why he was embracing it, he did not know why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kissing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages. “Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears …” rang in his soul. What was he weeping for? Oh, in his rapture he wept even for the stars that shone on him from the abyss, and “he was not ashamed of this ecstasy.” It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, “touching other worlds.” He wanted to forgive everyone and for everything, and to ask forgiveness, oh, not for himself!

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The Karamazov Case But for all and for everything, “as others are asking for me,” rang again in his soul. But with each moment he felt clearly and almost tangibly something as firm and immovable as this heavenly vault descend into his soul. Some sort of idea, as it were, was coming to reign in his mind—now for the whole of his life and into ages of ages. He fell to the earth a weak youth and rose up a fighter, steadfast for the rest of his life, and he knew it and felt it suddenly, in that very moment of his ecstasy. Never, never in all his life would Alyosha forget that moment. “Someone visited my soul in that hour,” he would say afterwards with firm belief in his words. (362–3)

Three days after his conversion he obeys Father Zosima’s earlier instruction to leave the monastery after the elder had died (77). These scenes portray how divine grace came to Alyosha and either reinforced or brought about his commitment to repair the world. Grushenka’s love and the love of Christ for the poor at Cana change him significantly.24 Their acts of love humbled Alyosha. They, in their love for others, are portrayed as agents of divine grace in the world. As a realist, Alyosha is not merely open to divine grace but also will become an embodiment of such grace in the world. This is not to say that graceful people are not also flawed sinners. Nor are they always effective. Save for the perfect human, Jesus Christ, divine grace is found in flawed vessels. Alyosha’s conversion enabled him to accept his release from the monastery to be sent forth into the world. His shaky religious vocation became rock solid. Like St. Francis of Assisi, a Western “holy fool” who preached (or seemed to preach) to birds, he would work for reconciliation in the world. However ecstatic the conversion experience was, its fruits are a graceful love that generates both joy and commitment. The exhibition of his virtues portrayed in Christ-like actions becomes a major plot line throughout the rest of the novel. Alyosha doubles Zosima but doesn’t simply imitate him. Zosima left the world, entered monastic life, and waited in the monastery for the world to come to him. Alyosha entered the monastery, then was sent out from it to minister in the world. Like many of the conversion experiences William James narrates, a new “self ” emerges. Not that he isn’t the same man he was. But his wavering has ceased and his central conviction that he has to “fight” for God has been crystallized. Is this reasonable? If Alyosha is a realist as described in Chapter 3 of this book, then this conversion is reasonable. What makes this double-barreled conversion distinctive is Alyosha’s recognition of Grushenka’s love and the love 24. If sobornost’ (discussed more fully in Chapter 8) can be extended to the natural world, then this scene hints at the entanglement of the social and the natural. Scanlan (Dostoevsky the Thinker, 14–56) seems to see a dichotomy of matter and spirit in Dostoevsky’s philosophy. Given Alyosha’s embrace of the earth (362), such a disjunction seems at best implausible and at odds with Orthodox understandings of the relationship of God to the world, correctly signaled by Contino’s notion of Incarnational Realism.

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Christ has for his mother and for the poor couple celebrating their wedding feast. Grushenka’s love for him and Zosima’s love for him, recalled as he listened by the coffin, are clearly factors in this conversion. Its fruits are what he did in the world thereafter, not merely portrayed in the novel but apparently cheered by the boys as the novel ends (776). It would not be unfair to say that Alyosha came to his senses in and through this complex conversion experience. This experience shows yet again that a conversion is not irrational but a humble and prudent response to unexpected events, events that in this case shook Alyosha’s soul. The combined quakes of the stench of Zosima’s body, the love of Grushenka, and the “hearing” of Zosima’s voice during the reading of the Cana pericope brought about a reasonable response. Alyosha’s conversion might well be regarded as “venerable” by a Jamesian. Grushenka Grushenka’s conversion is probably gradual, involuntary, and unconscious. Dostoevsky paints her as a pragmatic realist. People perceived her, perhaps wrongly, as a wanton woman. When she was seventeen, she had a relationship with a Polish army officer who abandoned her. She had “remained in poverty and disgrace” (344). She was “rescued” by the merchant Samsonov and goes to live with him. The narrator describes her, on her arrival in their town, as a “timid, shy, eighteen-year-old girl, delicate, thin, pensive, and sad” (343–4). The narrator summarizes her development: Thus, in four years, from the sensitive, offended, and pitiful orphan, there emerged a red-cheeked, full-bodied Russian beauty, a woman of bold and determined character, proud and insolent, knowing the value of money, acquisitive, tightfisted, and cautious, who by hook or crook had already succeeded, so they said, in knocking together a little fortune of her own. (344)

She amassed her little fortune in part by buying up promissory notes on the cheap (as did Fyodor) and then collecting on them. She seems to allow men to exploit her, but throughout the first books of the novel, she effectively manipulates them. Many men lust after her, but none has any success with her (except possibly Samsonov) after her relationship with her Polish officer. A crucial twist of the plot will be her response to a messenger bearing a letter from her one-time Polish lover who turns out not to be an officer but a customs clerk. He invites her to see him in Mokroye after many years of separation and the death of his wife (349). Rakitin brings Alyosha to her so she can have her way with him. But when she hears that Zosima has died that day, she jumps off his lap. Understanding Alyosha’s loss, Grushenka begins a new path. She realizes that “ ‘I’m wicked, not good … . I will start crying, I will start crying!’ Grushenka kept repeating. ‘He called me his sister, I’ll never forget it! Just know one thing, Rakitka, I may be wicked, but still I gave an onion’ ” (352). Rakitin responds, “An onion? Ah, the devil, they really have gone crazy!” (352). Rakitin is blind to the onion’s significance.

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Victor Terras writes that “the champagne party celebrating Alyosha’s fall turns into a moment of moral rebirth for Grushen’ka.”25 But it is not merely “moral rebirth,” but a profound conversion, marked by the legend of the onion,26 as told by Grushenka: Once upon a time there was a woman, and she was wicked as wicked could be, and she died. And not one good deed was left behind her. The devils took her and threw her into the lake of fire.27 And her guardian angel stood thinking: what good deed of hers can I remember to tell God? Then he remembered and said to God: once she pulled up an onion and gave it to a beggar woman. And God answered: now take that same onion, hold it out to her in the lake, let her take hold of it, and pull, and if you pull her out of the lake, she can go to paradise, but if the onion breaks, she can stay where she is. The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her: here, woman, he said, take hold of it and I’ll pull. And he began pulling carefully, and had almost pulled her all the way out, when other sinners in the lake saw her being pulled out and all began holding on to her so as to be pulled out with her. But the woman was wicked as wicked could be, and she began to kick them with her feet: “It’s me who’s getting pulled out, not you; it’s my onion, not yours.” No sooner did she say it than the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake and is burning there to this day. And the angel wept and went away. That’s the fable, Alyosha, I know it by heart, because I myself am that wicked woman. I boasted to Rakitin that I gave an onion, but I’ll say it differently to you: in my whole life I’ve given just one little onion, that’s how much good I’ve done. (352–3)

Giving an onion is an act of love, one that can overcome many sins as long as one continues to be a person who gives an onion. Rakitin sarcastically acknowledges Alyosha’s effect on Grushenka: “ ‘So you converted a sinful woman?’ he laughed spitefully to Alyosha. ‘Turned a harlot onto 25. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 269, n. 78. However, the usually insightful Terras is misled here. Alyosha, however tempted and shaken, did not actually “fall.” This is not merely a moral rebirth but a conversion scene. Dmitri is the one who eats sausage and drinks vodka—in a quite different situation (379). 26. Dostoevsky claimed that this tale was a “gem” told to him by a peasant woman (789, n. 3). In a letter to his editor, A. N. Lyubimov, he asked that he “be especially thorough when correcting the proofs concerning the legend of the onion” (Frank and Goldstein, Selected Letters, 489; the editors note that at least two versions of the story had previously appeared in print, so Dostoevsky’s view that his was the first publication was mistaken). 27. Ivan describes a lake of fire in his prefatory comments on “The Grand Inquisitor.” He narrates an episode in “a Byzantine apocryphal legend” translated into Old Church Slavonic in the middle ages (786). The Archangel Michael is guiding the Mother of God through hell and she “ ‘sees sins and sufferings. Among them, by the way, there is an amusing class of sinners in a burning lake: some of them sink so far down into the lake that they can no longer come up again, and “these God forgets”—an expression of extraordinary depth and force’ ” (247).

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the path of truth? Drove out the seven devils, eh? So here’s where today’s expected miracles took place!’ ‘Stop it, Rakitin,’ Alyosha replied with suffering in his soul” (358). In actuality, Grushenka’s and Alyosha’s care for each other was instrumental in converting them both. Later during Alyosha’s vision of Father Zosima, Zosima seems to attend the marriage feast at Cana. In Alyosha’s vision, Zosima then says: Why are you marveling at me: I gave a little onion and so I am here. And there are many here who only gave an onion, only one little onion … What are our deeds? And you, quiet one, you, my meek boy today, too, were able to give a little onion to a woman who hungered. Begin, my dear, begin, my meek one, to do your work! (361)

Alyosha then kisses the earth. The giving of the onion links the legend, Grushenka, Alyosha, and Zosima. It is a paradigm of a graceful act, an act of love for both the giver and the recipient. It represents the antithesis of selfishness: when the woman in the legend turns selfish, the grace-filled love evaporates as the onion breaks. Grushenka will be heading to the nearby town of Mokroye to meet up with her former lover. She had come to understand that she had continued to love him. Dmitri chases her to Mokroye where he sees that the reunion is not going well. She is bored and drunk. Nonetheless, she commits herself to Dmitri, refusing to have sex with him until they can do it “honestly” (441). She agrees to go away with him (442). Once Dmitri is arrested, she claims that she is as guilty of Fyodor’s murder as Dmitri because she drove Dmitri to it (457), a confession that she later recants at Dmitri’s trial because he didn’t, she says, kill his father (683). But in the end, she is unable to forgive her rival, Katerina Ivanovna Verkhotsev,28 because of the latter’s heartless pride (767). Grushenka avers that she will forgive Katerina if Katerina can free Dimitri, but she cannot forgive her unconditionally. Even a converted person is not perfect, with failures and sins mixed in with graceful actions. Grushenka had earlier confided to Alyosha that she had loved Dmitri once “for one hour”29 and told Alyosha to bow to his brother for her (358), as Zosima had 28. Katerina Ivanovna is the daughter of a colonel whose accounts were short. She humiliatingly takes money from Dmitri to cover the shortage (111–15). She and Dmitri are engaged a few months later (115). During Dmitri’s imprisonment, she does not visit him. During his trial, she betrays him by presenting a letter that he had written to her while drunk, saying that he would “ ‘go to my father and smash his head in’ ” and take the 3,000 rubles he owed her from under his pillow (618–19). Both Ivan (619) and Dmitri (689) are in love–hate relationships with her. Eventually, Dmitri and Katya resolve their differences and go their own ways (765–7). 29. Later, at the trial, Grushenka’s servants would say that she feared Dmitri and allowed him to visit “only out of fear, because, they said, ‘he threatened to kill her’ ” (345). At least at some points (cf. 347), she did also fear Dmitri.

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in the first meeting with the Karamazovs (74). In effect, Grushenka’s conversion begins with her acknowledgment of her love for Dmitri and Alyosha. Her conversion is inextricably linked with Alyosha’s (as noted above) and Dmitri’s. What remains constant in her personality is her sensible pragmatism. It is not as if her conversion process makes her reasonable and good. She is already reasonable. And she is never unqualifiedly good, but at the crucial moment, she gave an onion. She humbly recognizes her wicked deeds as well. The fruits of her change are tied up with her relationship with Dmitri as much as anything. Her power to calm or tame him because of their mutual love is a remarkable consequence that effectively converts Dmitri from a frantic flibbertigibbet to a man who is calm in the face of impending calamity. The narrator notes some of the fruits of Grushenka’s conversion. After a fiveweek-long illness after Dmitri’s arrest and two weeks of recovery, she is described as “thin and sallow” (563). Alyosha is said to love to meet her eyes upon visiting her. Something firm and aware seemed to have settled in her eyes. Some spiritual turnabout told in her; a certain steadfast, humble, but good and irrevocable resolution appeared …. There was no trace, for example of her former frivolity. Alyosha found it strange, too, that despite all the misfortune of a terrible crime almost at the very moment she had become engaged to [Dmitri], despite her illness afterwards, and the threat of the almost inevitable verdict to come, Grushenka still had not lost her former youthful gaiety. In her proud eyes, there now shown a certain gentleness. (563; emphasis added)

This description of her attitude, combined with her actions in support of Dmitri later on in the novel and her belief and hope for the future, strongly suggests that her conversion bore good fruit. If conversions are to be judged by their fruits, then The Brothers Karamazov displays this conversion as quite good. Dmitri Dmitri’s conversion is evidently gradual, probably involuntary, and likely subconscious. Richard Pevear characterizes Dmitri Karamazov as standing “ ‘in the dark’ at the exact center of [the novel]. He is the sensual man, impulsive and ‘poetic,’ the child of his father’s first marriage” (xiv). Dmitri calls himself an insect (108), a scoundrel (156), a beast (492), a thief (493) and is involved in two love triangles. It would be quite an understatement to say that throughout the first eight books of the novel, his behavior is erratic, emotional, capricious, occasionally demeaning, and sensually irrational. Perhaps he is not a Jamesian “sick soul” or “divided self,” but he is certainly a splintered one. However, after the murder of his father, Mitya chases Grushenka to Mokroye on the “same night, perhaps the same hour, when Alyosha threw himself to the earth ‘vowing ecstatically to love it unto ages of ages’ ” (409). The narrator says that he “shall not be believed, perhaps,” that Mitya was not jealous of Grushenka’s first love and would step aside for him (but only for him) because the Pole who had written asking her to visit him at Mokroye

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was first (409). This is the beginning of his conversion, linked by the narrator with Alyosha’s. Mitya pays for another bacchanal and gambles with the Pole (431), a game at which the Pole was cheating, a fact that becomes public later at Dmitri’s trial (670). Grushenka is bored with the Polish officer. He is a miserable person. She begins to treat Dmitri tenderly. He responds to Grushenka, drinks with her, contemplates suicide (436–7) but then honorably accepts her profound attachment to him (441). But the deputy commissioner comes on the scene and arrests Dmitri for the murder of his father. He becomes delirious. He thinks he has killed the servant Grigory. Grushenka declares herself guilty because she had tormented Fyodor and driven Dmitri to murder. Evidently believing that Dmitri has been a parricide, she accepts the shared guilt before all there to witness it: “Judge us together!” Grushenka went on exclaiming frenziedly, still on her knees. “Punish us together, I’ll go with him now even to execution!” “Grusha, my life, my blood, my holy one!” Mitya threw himself on his knees beside her and caught her tightly in his arms. “Don’t believe her,” he shouted, “she’s not guilty of anything, of any blood or anything!” (457)

They were then separated. Dmitri has to endure his three torments (his arrest for that murder, the police interrogation, and the production of “evidence” against him), confess his faults and sins, and suffer through his trial.30 His trial occurs three months after his arrest. During the trial, he has a dream of a snowy November ride on a cart (507–8).31 He comes across a peasant village with half of the huts burned, a line of poor women, including an emaciated woman whose baby is blue from the cold and crying because the mother’s breasts are dry. He doesn’t understand why. The narrator continues with Dmitri addressing the peasant who drives the cart: “Tell me: why are these burnt-out mothers standing here, why are the people poor, why is the wee one poor, why is the steppe bare, why don’t they embrace 30. Joseph Frank comments that one reason Book Nine is in the novel is to contrast the old legal routine with the new, and another “was to develop the moral growth and stature of Dimitry, a process that had already begun with his decision ‘to step aside’ and with the blossoming of his genuine love for Grushenka. Dimitry too undergoes a decisive moral transformation, and his ‘spiritual purification’ is completed during the several hours of the examination to which Book 9 is devoted” (Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 655). Frank does not label this profound change a “conversion.” 31. Connolly, “Dostoevskij’s Guide to Spiritual Epiphany,” 48, 49, helpfully notes that his experience “exhibits clear parallels with Alësha’s but in its essential contents it reflects Dmitrij’s more earthly or material orientation.” It also reflects a “new spirit of selflessness that was not entirely evident in his character before.” I am not sure that spirit was evident at all.

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In this dream, Dostoevsky narrates the completion of Dmitri’s conversion. His questions may not be reasonable in a narrow sense,32 but they are questions that seek an explanation. Unlike Ivan, who has merely portrayed the atrocities in the world in his “Rebellion,” Dmitri wants to know why these things happen. Unlike Ivan, he wants to understand and to do something for those who suffer. Unlike Ivan, he puts himself into the picture of senseless cruelty and suffering; he does not merely remain an external observer. The contrast with Ivan’s narration of the evils in the world in “Rebellion,” as well as Ivan’s neutrality that seems not to care for the sufferers, seems clear. That contrast is a subtle component of the novel’s argument. Ivan may know the facts, but Dmitri wants to understand why the evils occur. In dealing with the evils of the world, Dmitri’s dream is an important alternative to Ivan’s account. It is not the facts on which they differ. Ivan gets the facts right. Dmitri shows that what is important goes beyond the facts in order to account for how and why the facts are as they are. Ivan cannot do so; he can only relate the facts. Dmitri’s questions ask why the icon of God’s world has been desecrated. His dream marks Dmitri as having left the ranks of the sensualist irrationalists and joined the realists: he sees the suffering (as does Ivan) and wants to act to relieve it (as Ivan apparently does not). Upon waking Dmitri discovers a pillow under his head. Some unknown person had performed an act of compassion, “but his whole soul was as if shaken with 32. Frank comments: “No answer is given to these questions, which Dimitri himself felt ‘were unreasonable and senseless,’ but his response is a sudden uplifting of emotion that marks the completion of his moral-spiritual transformation” (Dostoevsky, The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 660; emphasis added). Yes, one can respond to a vow like Grushenka’s with emotion, but Dmitri’s gradual conversion is not merely emotional; it is a profound shift in his convictions, making himself a significantly different person, as McClendon and Smith would put it.

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tears” (508). Sensing that the forthcoming verdict will not be favorable, Grushenka is brought in as Dmitri is about to be taken away. After signing the transcript of the interrogation, he speaks: “ ‘I had a good dream, gentlemen,’ he said somehow strangely, with a sort of new face, as if lit up with joy” (508). Later, Grushenka made a low bow to Mitya. “I’ve told you that I am yours, and I will be yours, I will go with you forever, wherever they doom you to go. Farewell, guiltless man, who have been your own ruin.” Her lips trembled, tears flowed from her eyes. “Forgive me, Grusha, for my love, that I’ve ruined you, too, with my love.” (510)

While Alyosha’s tremors were stilled through a dream, Dmitri is shaken by his. He later says to Alyosha: Brother, in these past two months I’ve sensed a new man in me, a new man has arisen in me! He was shut up inside me, but if it weren’t for this thunderbolt, he never would have appeared. Frightening! What do I care if I spend twenty years pounding out iron ore in the mines …. It’s for the “wee one” that I will go. Because everyone is guilty for everyone else. For all the “wee ones,” because there are little children and big children. All people are “wee ones.” and I’ll go for all of them because there must be someone who will go for all of them. I didn’t kill father, but I must go. I accept! (591)

Dmitri, like Markel, realizes that all are guilty before all, but like Christ he will humbly accept his undeserved punishment and go to exile in Siberia for all of them. Dmitri’s slowly dawning realization of who he is becoming despite (or because of) the trials brings him to accept his fate, whatever it is—not a passive acceptance but an active consent to whatever happens. Such consent is not limited to knowing facts, but it is a commitment to understanding how and why they have come about. To be reasonable is to know more than just the facts. The power of Grushenka’s love is obvious even if, for the months between the arrest and the trial, it is not narrated in the text. Her love is the key. After the declaration at Mokroye, he becomes more stable. He accepts the (wrongful) verdict. And he contemplates abandoning Russia with Grushenka and going to America as Ivan had plotted (764–5). The fruits of this change are not joy so much as serenity. Early in the novel, Zosima said, “For people are created for happiness, and he who is completely happy can at once be deemed worthy of saying to himself: ‘I have fulfilled God’s commandment on this earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints all the holy martyrs were happy” (55). The love of Dmitri and Grushenka makes possible the emergence of a new man. That new man cannot be alone: “I really cannot live without Grusha,” (595) whether he is to be sent to the mines as punishment for being found guilty of patricide or to escape to America. With her, the old man of

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interminable wanton dissoluteness has become a new man of (mostly) calm joy, ready to face whatever happens. The power of love is what enables Dmitri to live a more balanced, less headstrong life thereafter. He has fulfilled God’s command and become happy. And, as Chapter 9 will show, that love shows the distinctive kind of happiness that Zosima finds people are created for. Conversion can lead to happiness, to the healing of a splintered soul. Another “venerable” conversion.

Conclusion The Brothers Karamazov portrays all of these characters undergoing a form of conversion. Their lives change fundamentally. Each has a new center of personal energy, to use James’s words. Whether from atheism to religious faith, from violence to peaceableness, from sheltered vocation to worldly daring, from flirtatious teasing to repentant and reconciling sinner, or from frantic hedonism to equanimity, these conversions reshape lives. First, all of them make sense. They are not irrational or merely emotional. They are responses to particular challenges in particular circumstances. In each case what emerges is a better self, one more reasonable than the earlier self. Second, they are rooted in human love that is seen as an icon of divine love. What is distinctive about the conversions in The Brothers Karamazov is that they are interactive. Many of James’s examples in the Varieties either are solitary or abstracted from human interaction. But in the Karamazov world created by Dostoevsky, people respond without self-serving pride to each other in their conversions. Third, each of them has remarkably good fruits. Markel is reconciled to his mother and has a “good death.” The maiming or killing that is the usual result of a duel is averted—not to mention that Zosima becomes an elder as a later result of his conversion. Alyosha discovers his vocation and works for reconciliation in the world. Dmitri and Grushenka form a stable and happy relationship that they expect will endure exile, whether to Siberia or America. There is a fourth characteristic displayed in these particular conversions, beyond reasonableness, the love factor, and good fruits. These characteristics are all gifts. Conversions are not earned or built but given. They all echo Markel’s saying to his mother, “heart of my heart, my joyful one, you must know that verily each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and for everything” (289). The flipside of the love found in and through the conversions is the humility of one’s unworthiness and the recognition of one’s sinfulness. How can love ever be deserved? How can love be owed? A fifth characteristic of conversion in The Brothers Karamazov is that each convert becomes incorporated into a community of realists, “a living body of truth and love, imbued with the spirit of sobornost’.”33 Markel and Zosima explicitly join 33. Artur Mrowczynski-Van Allen, Teresa Obolevitch, and Pawel Rojek, “Introduction,” ed. Artur Mrowczynski-Van Allen, Teresa Obolevitch, and Pawel Rojek, Alexei

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the church community. Alyosha changes his pattern of life and becomes more of a realist, eschewing any disappointment at the putrefaction of Zosima’s body and, perhaps, other irrational superstitions. Dmitri and Grushenka form a community of love, a small community that anticipates the shape of the greater community— perhaps the church, understood universally, as Vladimir Soloviev thought.34 But this community is rooted in love and, as Aleksei Khomiakov remarked, “The communion in love is not only useful but fully necessary for the apprehension of truth, and the apprehension of truth is dependent upon it and impossible without it. That which is inaccessible for an individual’s pondering of truth becomes accessible only by conjoined thought, united by love.”35 There are true facts about a person, discernable even by materialists. But only in truly knowing—and even in loving—a person can the truth of that person be understood. Facts about persons are not sufficient for knowing them. Such a community is “coinherent.” Every society shapes its members. The community that has the spirit of sobornost’ as a practice shapes its members not as an external authority but through its being constituted by and in the members’ internal relationships with one another. This characteristic also implies a willingness to suffer with and for others.36 Because one is so deeply related to the others, one cannot avoid the possibility that, wittingly or not, the others may cause one mental and physical suffering, but one can know that others will also bear each other’s burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2). Human love is the proximate incarnation of ultimate divine grace.37 Both love and grace are never earned, always given. If there is grace in the world, it is

Khomiakov: The Mystery of Sobornost’, Ex Oriente Lux 3 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2019), Kindle Location 148. 34. However, Soloviev did not share the antipathy for the Roman Catholic Church characteristic of Dostoevsky or the progenitor of slavophilism, Aleksei Khomiakov, “the West’s most rabid detractor” as Elena Tverdislova put it in “Sobornost’ as a Linguistic, and Therefore Religious, Trap,” in ed. Mrówczyński-Van Allen, Obolevitch, and Rojek, Alexei Khomiakov: The Mystery of Sobornost’, 66, Kindle Location 2032. Tverdislova’s argument presumes that the concept of sobornost’ is necessarily entangled with the Russian serfdom, nationalism, and patriarchy that Khomiakov displayed. Other Orthodox thinkers who discuss sobornost’ believe that the insights the concept carries can be separated from such shortcomings. 35. Mrówczyński-Van Allen, Obolevitch, and Rojek, Alexei Khomiakov. Kindle Location 141, quoting Khomiakov, “On the ‘Fragments’: Discovered among I. V. Kireevsky’s Papers,” trans. Boris Jakim and Robert Bird, On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader, ed. Boris Jakim and Robert Bird (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne, 1998), 313. 36. This point is developed in Chapters 7 and 8 in the discussions of Kolya Krasotkin, the other boys, and the Snegiryov family. 37. I am quite aware that where the Western theologian (like me) will tend to write of “grace,” the Orthodox theologian will tend to write of the Holy Spirit. In the work of Gregory Palamas, for example, God’s grace is the uncreated energies of God that

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also showered on the guilty—and all are guilty before all. Markel cannot tell his mother what being guilty before and for everyone means, but understanding the pattern of conversion in the novel helps make it clear. Insofar as characters can recognize their solidarity in guilt, thus far can they recognize and humbly enact their solidarity in grace and become an icon of divine love. Whether all this is just a delusion remains undecided. The argument of the novel is not yet finished, but the conversions narrated in it portray lives that have been healed. Where does this leave the “unconverted”? Their patterns are the focus of the next chapter.

enliven, transform, and redeem humanity. Karl Rahner’s theology of grace can be seen as approaching an Orthodox view. For Rahner, the energy/presence of God (uncreated grace) is the source of “created grace.” Grace is never earned, but a free gift of God’s very self for both Palamas and Rahner—and for Dostoevsky. While there are important differences between such recent Western understandings and Orthodox theology, I think they factor out for the purposes of this analysis. I note that Robert L. Belknap (The Genesis of The Brothers Karamazov: The Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Making a Text [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990], 100) finds that “the operation of grace in the world” is a theme in Dostoevsky’s text.

Chapter 5 T H E U N C O N V E RT E D

In contrast to those discussed in the previous chapter, some characters remain fundamentally unchanged throughout the course of the novel. Three types of unconverted characters make their appearance. One type is exemplified by Rakitin, the self-centered manipulator. Another can be seen in the irrationalists, particularly Fyodor. The third is found in the materialist, Ivan. The common element is that they are not amenable to conversion. Why they resist conversion differs for each. The variety of these differences contributes to the performative argument of the novel.

The Manipulator The narrator notes that Rakitin is skillful both in manipulating people and in showing each a person they wish to see (328). He chides Alyosha for hoping for a miracle after Father Zosima’s death and provokes Alyosha into quoting Ivan’s refusal to accept God’s world (341). As he found Ivan’s denial of morality nonsense, so Rakitin finds this quotation of Ivan’s view “gibberish.” Rakitin led Alyosha on to his cousin Grushenka’s “for revenge.” As we saw, Rakitin was surprised at their exaltation, which offended and annoyed him, though he should have realized that everything had just come together for them both in such a way that their souls were shaken, which does not happen very often in life. “But Rakitin, who could be quite sensitive in understanding everything that concerned himself, was quite crude in understanding the feelings and sensations of his neighbors—partly because of his youthful inexperience, and partly because of his great egoism” (352). As the scene continues and he accepts the twenty-five ruble note as payment from Grushenka for delivering Alyosha, he converses sneeringly, spitefully, sarcastically, irritably, caustically. At one point he becomes angry, addressing Grushenka: “ ‘One loves for some reason, and what has either of you done for me?’ ‘You should love for no reason, like Alyosha’ [Grushenka responds]. ‘How does he love you? What has he shown you, that you’re making such a fuss about it?’ ” (353). As the scene continues, Alyosha and Grushenka weep. Then she flies off to Mokroye to join her “Polish officer.” Rakitin later comments spitefully to Alyosha

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on the “Pole”: “They say he’s lost his job. Now he’s heard that Grushenka has some money, so he’s come back—that’s the whole miracle …. And now you ‘despise’ ” me for those twenty-five roubles? You think I sold a true friend. But you’re not Christ, and I’m not Judas” (358). But that’s just the point: Alyosha is a Christ-figure and Rakitin is a Judas-figure. As Judas abandoned Jesus in the dark Garden of Gethsemane, Rakitin immediately abandons Alyosha alone in the darkness.1 Later in the novel, the reader discovers that Rakitin has influenced the boy Kolya Krasotkin to become a socialist, filling him with “rebellious” thoughts (527). Rakitin also visits Dmitri frequently in jail. Dmitri avers that Rakitin cannot understand that he has become “a new man,” and contrasts Rakitin with Ivan: Brother Ivan is not Rakitin, he hides his idea. Brother Ivan is a sphinx; he’s silent, silent all the time. And I’m tormented by God. Tormented only by that. What if he doesn’t exist? What if Rakitin is right, that it’s an artificial idea of mankind? So then, if he doesn’t exist, man is chief of the earth, of the universe. Splendid! Only how is he going to be virtuous without God? A good question! I keep thinking about it. Because whom will he love then—man, I mean? To whom will he be thankful, to whom will he sing the hymn? Rakitin laughs. Rakitin says it’s possible to love mankind even without God. Well, only a snotty little shrimp can affirm such a thing, but I can’t understand it. Life is simple for Rakitin: “You’d do better to worry about extending man’s civil rights,” he told me today, “or at least about not letting the price of beef go up; you’d render your love for mankind more simply and directly that way than with any philosophies.” But I came back at him: “And without God,” I said, “you’ll hike up the price of beef yourself, if the chance comes your way, and make a rouble on every kopeck.” (592–3)

Even Dmitri, after his conversion, comes to see through Rakitin’s manipulations and hypocrisy. During Dmitri’s trial, it becomes clear that Rakitin disdains Grushenka and is embarrassed by being recognized as her cousin (667, 683). Rakitin is clearly not a double for, nor an ideological comrade of, Ivan. What differentiates Rakitin from Ivan can be seen in Rakitin’s understanding and actions. Their basic views of humanity and morality differ widely. Like Ivan, he does not believe in God. Unlike Ivan, Rakitin claims that humanity is capable of virtue without God, yet his own pattern of actions simply refutes that. He finds Ivan’s essential stance to be unintelligible. He indoctrinates a teenager in socialism, while Ivan testifies to fellow adults. Rakitin’s actions display his manipulative and deceptive nature. His egoism is a form of pride that allows him to treat others with disdain. He finally weasels himself into the whole story in order to profit by writing an article or pamphlet about it—and one which the prosecutor quotes in his summation (667) as Rakitin’s testimony had been very useful for convicting Dmitri. 1. Cf. Thompson, The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory, 112–14.

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Rakitin remains unconverted because he has no capacity for virtue, especially humility. If he loves, it is self-love. He has no sense of responsibility to and for others. His challenge to Grushenka displays the core of these traits: “One loves for some reason, and what has either of you done for me?” Rakitin does not and cannot freely give his love. Love, for him, is not a mutual givingbut a quid pro quo transaction. He is insulated from the sort of gracious thunderbolt that hit Alyosha and Grushenka. If love is necessarily a factor in the sort of conversions that play out in The Brothers Karamazov, then Rakitin must remain unconverted because he is unloving—and perhaps unlovable. Nor can the reader imagine him as averring that he is “guilty before all.” Rakitin is a prime example of one form of what William James called the “natural man,” a person unable to imagine the invisible, one who is subject to lifelong “barrenness” and “dryness.”2 His lack of imagination, the absence of virtue, his manipulating schemes, his self-absorption, and his reading of love as transactional render him “not only devoid of virtue, but incapable of it.”3 James might have called him a “sick soul,” desperately in need of conversion but cutting himself off from the possibility of such a cure. As such, the novel portrays Rakitin’s manipulation as incapable of leading to human flourishing.

The Sensualist If conversions can be seen as prudent and thus reasonable, then sensualists as a class seem excluded because their characters are marked by imprudence and irrationality—unless they are knocked into becoming reasonable by conversion as Dmitri was. Similarly, the rigidity of the superstitious renders them incapable of feeling the sort of shock that could lead them to a coherent set of convictions and new patterns of actions. The idea of Father Ferapont converting is practically unimaginable. Yet a sensualist like Fyodor has displayed cunning. He evidently has some real ability to turn a profit in practical matters. His character is not rigid but constantly inconstant. Nothing has the power to shake his foundation because he has no foundation to shake. Such inconstancy means that he does not and cannot convert. Unlike Dmitri whose conversion gives him calm stability, Fyodor remains a buffoon. Even his death scene is buffoonish: cooing “sweetie, my little angel” (392) through the window to Grushenka whom he breathlessly imagined had finally succumbed to his seductive wiles. The narrator describes Fyodor’s fundamental characteristic as being a “muddleheaded madcap …. Again I say it was not stupidity—most of these madcaps are rather clever and shrewd—but precisely muddleheadedness, even a special, national form of it” (7). He was also described as “an evil buffoon and nothing more.” He does not love his first wife (but evidently enjoys sex) and confiscates her 2. See James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 171. 3. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 162.

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very large dowry (8). She abandons him and runs off with a destitute seminarian (9). During his second marriage, he introduced “loose women” into his house for “orgies” (13). After his second wife’s death, he forgot and forsook Ivan and Alyosha, leaving them, as he had earlier abandoned Dmitri, to be raised by his rather dull servant Grigory (14). In an initial visit to the monastery to try to get some kind of settlement of his dispute over money with Dmitri, he behaves disrespectfully, even foolishly: He describes himself: “Verily, I am a lie and the father of a lie! Or maybe not the father of a lie, I always get my texts mixed up; let’s say the son of a lie” (44). He awaits impatiently for Grushenka to come to his house (268) having told her that he has money for her and she had replied, “Maybe I’ll come” (121). He has 3,000 rubles for his “angel” and “chicky” (272). She never comes, he is killed, and the money is stolen. Despite his muddleheadedness, Fyodor does have financial ability. He was a landowner who did not live on his estate (7). He has a woodlot nearby in Chermashnya (372). He has lent money at interest and collected others’ promissory notes for 10% of their face value and then collected enough of them to make a profit (344). He hints that he is devilish (“the father of lies” allusion). But the conversions in the novel require both love and a challenging stimulus. Fyodor is unloving and unloved. Nothing challenges him sufficiently to move him to contemplate changing his life. Moreover, he is not able to be “guilty before all” because he has no sense of shame or guilt, as illustrated in the story of his rape of Stinking Lizaveta (98–9). One might think that he could be one of William James’s “sick souls” or “divided selves” who need reunification to become healthy. But, as James notes, “natural good” is simply not enough. Natural good “keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.”4 Fyodor is a different sort of “natural man” from Rakitin. Rakitin’s ideology and patterns of action are stable. But Fyodor is unmoored from any stable landing spot and is too much of a madcap to be able to realize that he is anything like a “sick soul.” He may be a “divided self,” but it would be more accurate to say that his “self ” is shattered into shards. If he is the son of the father of lies, he consistently fails to tell himself the truth. Unable to realize any constancy beyond being a buffoon, he cannot undergo a conversion, a significant convictional shift, or a significant change in someone’s habitual center of personal energy—he has no convictions and no center. He has nothing coherent to convert from and displays no desire to convert to anything but what he is. The portrait of Fyodor, like that of Rakitin, is one of a person who is not only devoid of virtue but incapable of it. Unlike Rakitin, Fyodor is too inconstant to have a coherent life. But Rakitin, unlike Fyodor, is constant in his self-serving manipulation of others. 4. James, Varieties, 143. He is (perhaps) exaggerating to make clear the differences.

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The Materialist Brother Ivan is famously the novel’s materialistic atheist. In contrast to those who convert, Ivan stubbornly refuses to change his mind. His convictions never change. Ivan resists recognizing that his narrow rationality (irrationality?) needs to be abandoned for something else. In William James’s terms, he is a “divided self,” a person who needs a conversion experience to become unified.5 Ivan neither renounces his views nor lives in despair—whatever despair he may expect to have in the future. He seems to be able to imagine a better world, especially in his “childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and smoothed over … and that ultimately, at the world’s finale, in the moment of eternal harmony there will occur and be revealed something so gracious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed” (235–6). He might wish this resolution to be true, but he will not accept it. To resolve his antinomies, it would be reasonable for him to adapt, convert, or be converted, but he does none of these.6 As Evgenia Cherkasova puts it about the underground man in Notes from the Underground, unless Ivan also allows his heart to be “genuinely involved in resolving ‘life’s questions,’ unless he strives to embody his knowledge and his truth, the anti-hero will not be able to overcome his moral deficiency. In the moral realm, the only truth that matters is the embodied, existential truth, sustained in the living individual’s committed, heartfelt relation to it.”7 Ivan is never involved in resolving the profound practical problems the other characters encounter. He remains aloof. Ivan does, however, embody his own unwarranted belief in the foundations of “his” knowledge and truth. Ivan lives in a “Euclidean universe” and cannot accept God’s “Euclidean creation. His commitment to Euclidean geometry is indefeasible.8 He admits that even against the evidence of his senses, he would hold fast to a Euclidean universe. “Let the parallel lines even meet before my own eyes: I shall look and say, yes, they meet, and still I will not accept it” (236). Ivan is totally certain of the geometry of the creation. Ivan’s world is created by his own illusion of certainty, untouched by the possibility of counterevidence. Ivan’s failure to be open to adaptation or conversion marks his psychology as rigid enough to be unreasonable and thus as unconvertible as any other irrationalist. Accepting Euclidean geometry may be a commonsense presumption fitting for everyday calculations regarding medium-sized objects, but it is possible that the universe may need non-Euclidean geometries to represent its 5. James, Varieties, “The Divided Self and the Process of Its Unification,” 143–59. 6. Contino (Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism, 138–40, 149–50) recognizes Ivan as a “divided self.” 7. Cherkasova, Dostoevsky and Kant, 49. 8. Few critics note this absoluteness of this claim. Malcolm Jones (Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience [London: Anthem Press, 2005], 118) is one of those who do.

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complexity. In fact, the need for alternative geometries destabilizes the certainty that the world is necessarily three-dimensional. Ivan refuses to accept uncertainty. Hence, Ivan asserts as certain an unwarranted and strongly challenged presumption of the sufficiency of Euclidean geometry.9 In effect, he slides from a reasonable use of Euclidean presumptions to account for the place of mediumsized objects to an assertion that Euclid’s theory is universally sufficient. Along with his commitment to reject the evidence of his own eyes that would undermine his worldview, this commitment to Euclid’s geometry marks Ivan’s commitment as being as absolute as any blind faith. But the truth to which he is proudly committed is also so irrationally rationalistic that he finally goes mad. This becomes clear in his conversation with Alyosha. Dostoevsky sets their discussion in a tavern. Ivan describes the behavior of “Russian boys” in taverns: “Well, then, what are they going to argue about, seizing this moment in the tavern? About none other than the universal questions: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God, well, they will talk about socialism and anarchism, about transforming the whole of mankind according to a new order” (234). Alyosha seems to agree with Ivan in seeing the latter questions as “the same” as the former but approached from the other end. Yet the atheist asks about what to do in the world, not about what the world is. Of course, if one rejects a creator (or cannot decide between God being a projected delusion or the creator) and cannot imagine anything actually beyond the visible, then all one has left to debate in the taverns is the furniture in the world. Setting Ivan’s most powerful articulations of his position in a tavern does not indicate that this is mere “tavern talk.” But the setting might occasion some suspicions regarding the seriousness of his view. It is not merely in geometry that Ivan is inconsistent. Regarding his article on church and state, the narrator says, “Finally some quick-witted people concluded that the whole article was just a brazen farce and mockery” (16; cf. 80). He cannot escape the antinomy of the acceptance of the reality of the devil that he nonetheless believes is a figment of his imagination (634–50). Later he testifies incoherently at his brother’s trial for the murder of their father, collapses (685–7), and never is heard from again. Ivan’s resistance to any change in his thought (not to mention his obtusely goading Smerdyakov into murdering their father) marks him as “unconverted,” perhaps, as James put it, due to intellectual factors,10 but more 9. Elena Fratto (“Getting the Story Straight: The Poetics of Non-Euclidean Space in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ and Kaverin’s ‘The Eleventh Axiom,” ’ The Russian Review: An American Quarterly Devoted to Russia Past and Present 77/3 [July 2018]: 396– 410) suggests that although Dostoevsky knew of Lobachevsky’s work, a literal translation of Ivan’s Euclidean notion of God’s creation may show a debt to Riemannian geometry (at 399–400). In any event, the sufficiency of Euclidean geometry as a total explanation had been undermined, and Dostoevsky portrays Ivan as committed to Euclidean geometry to show his irrationalism. 10. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 195.

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likely also due to his inability to love freely (as diagnosed by his father [174–5]) and his failure to act to benefit others. The extended encounter with the devil shows the root and the shape of Ivan’s inability to change significantly. Just as he cannot resolve the issue of whether God created humanity or humanity created God, so he cannot settle on whether he imagined the devil or if the devil’s reality is independent of his imagination. Just as he could not imagine changing his mind in the face of evidence that showed this not to be a world constructed according to Euclidean geometry, now he cannot imagine that the devil is both real and rooted in his imagination. The devil comes to him in a “nightmare.”11 The narrator comments that he is “on the verge of brain fever, which finally took complete possession of his organism” (634). But even this remark is ambiguous. How does one tell the difference between possession by a devil and possession by brain fever? Theologian and literary critic Ralph C. Wood makes comments that point in the right direction. He writes, “Yet Ivan’s final insanity is not to be explained as psychosis alone. In the Orthodox tradition, to deny the presence and reality of God is to be subject to a psychopathic condition. Not sharing the Western doctrine of original sin, the Orthodox hold that every person retains an efficacious awareness of God, even after the Fall.”12 From an Orthodox perspective, then, Ivan is both religiously ailing and psychologically unhinged. Throughout this chapter, Ivan protests again and again that the devil is just a dream, just a hallucination that embodies part of his consciousness. But the devil responds: There’s even a whole problem concerning this: one government minister even confessed to me himself that all his best ideas come to him when he’s asleep. Well, and so it is now. Though I am your hallucination, even so, as in a nightmare, I say original things, such as have never entered your head before, so that I’m not repeating your thoughts at all, and yet I am merely your nightmare and nothing more. (639)

The devil piles paradox on paradox to convince Ivan of his reality paradoxically: But hesitation, anxiety, the struggle between belief and disbelief—all that is sometimes such a torment for a conscientious man like yourself, that it’s better to hang oneself. Precisely because I knew you had a tiny bit of belief in me, I let in 11. Connolly (“Dostoevskij’s Guide to Spiritual Epiphany,” 50–2) contrasts Ivan’s diabolical epiphany with the epiphanies (conversion experiences) of Alyosha and Dmitri. 12. Ralph C. Wood, “Ivan Karamazov’s Mistake,” First Things, December 2002, https://www.firs​tthi​ngs.com/arti​cle/2002/12/ivan-kar​amaz​ovs-mist​ake. This attribution of awareness of the divine can also be found among some Western Christians, more or less inversely correlated with their acceptance of the doctrine of the total depravity of humanity, one interpretation (found mostly in some reformed theologies) of the key effect of original sin.

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The devil’s goal is to save Ivan’s soul! How? By getting him to reject his materialism and begin to believe in a realm beyond the material. The devil tells Ivan, “But, my God, I don’t make any claims to being your equal in intelligence. Mephistopheles, when he comes to Faust, testifies of himself that he desires evil, yet does only good. Well let him do as he likes, it’s quite the opposite with me” (647). The devil avers in terms that echo Trishatov’s imaginary opera in The Adolescent that he was there at Christ’s Ascension into Heaven. “I heard the joyful shrieks of the cherubim singing and shouting ‘Hosannah,’ and the thundering shout of rapture from the seraphim, which made heaven and all earth shake” (647). But Ivan’s devil could not join the chorus. “But common sense—oh, it’s the most unfortunate quality of my nature— kept me within due bounds even then, and I missed the moment” (647). At the end of the chapter, someone knocks on the window. The devil says it’s Alyosha. Ivan replies, “Shut up, deceiver, I knew it was Alyosha without you, I had a presentiment of him, and … of course he has ‘news’!” But Ivan cannot move; something has restrained his arms and legs. Once he breaks free, he says, “That was no dream! No, I swear it was no dream, it all just happened!” (650). He goes to the window, sees Alyosha, and hears the news that Smerdyakov has hanged himself. In the next chapter, he admits that the devil “is me …. I would much prefer that he were really he and not I!” (652–3). Alyosha prays for Ivan who is immersed in his torments. The narrator comments: “God, in whom he did not believe, and his truth were overcoming his heart, which still did not want to submit” (655). Finally, Ivan does not submit. Both Smerdyakov (620) and his devil (647) recognized his pride. He is offered a chance but refuses to go beyond his materialism. He could not humbly submit because his deepest certainties would have to be jettisoned. He remains a rigidly materialistic divided self. Ivan’s worldview is fragmented. And this is the point. Dostoevsky is not arguing against materialism but showing Ivan the materialist living with an unavoidably fragmented mind. He rejects his awareness of God. He rejects the realm of the spirit. He refuses not merely his ticket but also the God who, in an Orthodox view, is already in him and with him. He thus rejects even himself as graced by God. Ivan’s conflicts are profound. He wants to believe in the spiritual realm. His devil even tries to convince him of spiritual realities by his paradoxical argument. Does it matter whether Ivan created the persona of the devil or the devil created Ivan’s madness? But that is precisely Ivan’s problem. He cannot answer that question because he, like his devil, cannot get beyond “common sense,” such as his belief that the world is built in accord with Euclidean geometry. Desperately needing to resolve this question, Ivan cannot do so. He cannot accept that he needs a conversion to resolve his conflicts, a conversion to believing in at least the possibility that there may be something that is beyond the material world if he is

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to resolve his profound conflicts. The Brothers Karamazov portrays Ivan’s life as a materialist to be maddening.

Conclusion As shown in Chapter 3, The Brothers Karamazov mounted arguments against the mentalités displayed by Fyodor, Ivan, and Rakitin and the irrationalities of the sensualists and the superstitious. This chapter focuses on the manipulator Rakitin, the irrationalist Fyodor, and the materialist, Ivan.13 Their inability to convert is rooted in their problematical uses of reason; their inability to care for others; their failure to respond to real challenges, both intellectual and practical; and their characters. They cannot convert not because they are stubborn but because they do not have the intellectual or moral capacity to do so. Rakitin is a selfish manipulator, using others as means to his own ends. Fyodor is so constantly shifting that he has no (even minimally) settled position to convert from. Father Ferapont, whom we discussed earlier in Chapter 3, is a caricature. Ivan, although troubled (we finally see his turbulent soul revealed in his encounter with his devil) can no more decide whether he created the devil or the devil appeared to him than he can decide whether humanity created God or God created humanity. His Euclidean mind settles on avoiding the question altogether rather than resolving it—for resolving it would require a conversion to reasonableness in belief. These portraits form an argument against these characters’ mentalités. For them to become reasonable would take a conversion like Dmitri’s. But they literally cannot convert to “realism.” This inability offers reasons to reject such forms of life. Of course, some will attach little worth to realism, especially as portrayed in the novel. But the argument is that those who disvalue realism will cut themselves off from the gift of human happiness. Ivan’s refusal to accept the possibility of parallel lines meeting at infinity suggests he is not a realist. He says he would not accept the deliveries of his senses. While parallels meeting at infinity may not seem to be a miracle, it would indeed be one in Ivan’s world—the materialist, three-dimensional world portrayed by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. To admit it as “a fact of nature previously unknown” would be not merely to accept a fact but to overthrow a world in which it could not be a fact.14 These two chapters on converts and the unconverted reinforce the claims of Chapter 3. The novel’s portrayal of patterns of reasoning is one that contrasts Alyosha’s responsible realism with Ivan’s rigid materialism and with Father Ferapont’s (and others’) rigid superstition—the rigid cannot convert, the realist 13. The novel does not explore any conversions of the superstitious and religiously simple types, perhaps because these are not “live options” for the envisioned audience for the novel. 14. As the philosopher F. C. S. Schiller noted (see earlier n. 8 of Chapter 3).

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can. If Alyosha is the hero of the novel, then the conclusion is clear: the vision of the world is disfigured not only by materialism but also by religious fanaticism, sensualist hedonism, and selfish isolation. Truly understanding oneself and one’s world is available only to those able to convert and become part of the community of realists, a community that requires participation in action. Ivan’s refusal is an action. It is the action he has performed most importantly in “Rebellion.” He continues to return his ticket. Commentators on the novel have thoroughly explored what Ivan said. The next chapter explores what Ivan did in returning the ticket in order to show the connections between conversion and freedom on the one hand, and non-conversion and bondage on the other. These connections are crucial to understanding the novel’s argument for and against ways of living in the world as well as the polyphonic vision of the world in The Brothers Karamazov.

Chapter 6 R E T U R N I N G H I S T IC K E T A N D R E F U SI N G F R E E D OM

The conclusion to Ivan’s tirade against God’s world—with all the suffering and injustice really present in it (“Rebellion,” Book Five, chapter four)—is arguably the most famous, most important line in the entire novel: “It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket”(245). In light of this declaration, in this present chapter, I want to complete the analysis that I began in the previous two. Chapters 4 and 5 attempted to show that The Brothers Karamazov links reasonableness with conversion and forms of irrationality (including Ivan’s materialism) with nonconversion. The present chapter shows how both pairs are linked to freedom and bondage. Many commentators, especially those mired in the essentialized “faith versus reason” trap, miss the point that Ivan’s profoundly voiced materialism is incoherent or irrational. If the analysis offered in this chapter is correct, then we can show that the novel argues against Ivan’s position in a most dramatic way and shows his materialism finally to be irrational. The novel’s argument is not a typical philosophical or theological one. It is dialectical in that the narrative elucidates the significance of the forms of life explored in the novel. It is polyphonic in that each voice speaks on its own terms. It does not end with a demonstration or conclusion but with a challenge to the readers to respond by recognizing their own forms of life and acting to affirm or change them.

Returning His Ticket: Literary Roots Richard Pevear, one of the novel’s translators, rightly comments that Ivan’s “I hasten to return my ticket” (245) alludes to Friedrich Schiller’s 1784 poem, “Resignation” (785, n. 13). The tone of Schiller’s poem parallels Ivan’s own resignation to live his life to the fullest despite whatever misery and disorder there was in the world. Ivan expected that he would drink of the cup of life, but “by the age of thirty [would] probably drop the cup” (230). Like Schiller, Ivan mourns the passing of the springtime of his life. Victor Terras notes that the allusion is not a quotation: “Zhukovsky’s Russian translation of lines 3–4, stanza iii, of Schiller’s poem ‘Resignation’ reads: ‘the entrance letter to an earthly paradise/I return to Thee unopened’; and the context is comparable to that in

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Dostoevsky’s passage.”1 It seems unquestionable that Schiller’s poem influenced this episode. But what the episode means is another issue. Joseph Frank comments on Ivan’s returning his ticket in a way that disambiguates this crucial line. He writes that Ivan is returning “his ticket to a world of nonEuclidean eternal harmony that would redeem all suffering in the Euclidean realm.”2 Frank construes Ivan as rejecting a bogus rebalancing in eternity, outside of space-time. This is true but is only part of the story. What Frank does not comment on is the action that Ivan is performing—a refusal. Refusal of what? In this context, it may be to refuse the world. It may also be to refuse the price one pays in the world for eternal bliss. A refusal directed to whom? To God, who may exist or may be a projection, an issue Ivan does not have the ability to decide. But there is more to the story. I offer an approach that is perhaps more subtle but much more congruent with Ivan’s character and the spirit of Schiller’s poem. To start, consider four points. First, a ticket is not a letter. In Russian, “ticket” is bilet. It has a broad semantic range, similar to that of the French billet or the English “ticket.” As Larissa Volokhonsky, one of the novel’s translators, notes, it “means any ticket, be it a train (or bus, or …) ticket or to a theater performance, or to a ball/banquet. Any right to enter or travel. A ball/banquet is mentally my choice when I read it, since it gives the right to participate, not to watch.”3 Of course, the meaning of Ivan’s returning his ticket is open to interpretation, but if Volokhonsky is correct, then Ivan refuses to participate. He refuses to join others and interact with them. He does not merely leave a letter unopened but rather intentionally acts to return what he was given. 1. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 16. Schiller’s German text reads, “Empfange meinen Vollmachtbrief zum Glücke/Ich bring ihn unerbrochen dir zurücke” (https://www.friedr​ ich-schil​ler-arc​hiv.de/gedic​hte-schill​ers/hig​hlig​hts/resi​gnat​ion). The final line of the stanza is “Mein Lauf ist aus. Ich weiß von keiner Seligkeit” (My race is over. I know no blessedness), consistent with Ivan’s image of dropping the cup. As “der Glückseligkeit” is typically translated as “happiness,” the presence of “Seligkeit” (blessedness, bliss, salvation) in the final line makes some sense of the earthly paradise in the Russian translation. 2. Frank, Dostoevsky: Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 606. Ross MacCullough (“Christ, the Karamazovs, and Compensational Theodicies,” 206–19), argues that the matter is more complex if one sees all innocent suffering as incorporating and being incorporated by Christ’s innocent suffering. He also suggests that in rejecting God, Ivan is also rejecting the children, which contradicts Ivan’s coming “closest of any of the rationalistic humanists to loving humans and not just humanity” (at 219). He cites Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 432–3, in support of this reading of Ivan’s benign humanitarianism. But neither does Frank say this exactly nor is there any textual evidence in the novel other than the “Good Samaritan” episode discussed later in the text (and not cited by MacCullough) to support this view of Ivan. 3. Larissa Volokhonsky, email to Diane and Larry Welborn, May 29, 2013, in response to a question I asked them to raise with her. My thanks to the Welborns for sharing the response with me.

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Dostoevsky portrays Ivan as a meticulous observer who would have no reason to refuse a ticket to simply watch. But to refuse to participate fits with the pattern of his character. Second, the Russian translation of Schiller’s “Resignation” specifically mentions an “earthly paradise,” while Frank evidently presumes that the paradise Ivan rejects is heavenly. The “eternity” of the original German poem could well be beyond this world. Yet Dostoevsky’s novel is suffused with descriptions of an earthly paradise, such as the one Markel describes, discussed in Chapter 4. This description is later echoed by Zosima and Alyosha: “Mother, heart of my heart, truly each of us is guilty before everyone and for everyone, only people do not know it, and if they knew it, the world would at once become paradise” (298). God alone might be considered responsible for a heavenly paradise and the price on earth for entering that paradise. But an earthly paradise demands interaction and responsibility. Ivan characteristically does not interact and takes no responsibility to alleviate the evils of the world he narrates so powerfully in “Rebellion.” Ivan can be seen as returning his ticket to an earthly paradise as well as a heavenly one. If God created this world—and the world portrayed by Ivan is one valid perspective on the Karamazov world constructed in the novel—then it is an icon but a desecrated icon. The divine presence radiates through the icon, but human hands have painted it over and defaced it. All the evils that Ivan describes in “Rebellion” are the result of human choices. He does not commit himself to any action aimed at avenging or ameliorating the results of those horrific choices. He simply describes “facts.” “I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact, but I’ve made up my mind to stick to the fact” (243). If he understood why those facts came to be, then he would find himself in a position to do something about at least some of them—and perhaps even morally obligated to act in some instances. Ivan sticks to the facts and does not actively participate in the repair of the world. Perhaps only if one participates in constructing an earthly paradise can one see such construction as an iconic reconsecration of the world and thus be in a position to imagine a heavenly paradise—or the reality of God and the gift of freedom—as a possibility. Ivan’s isolation is shown by his returning his ticket for participating in the party or ball that reflects life in the everyday world. He returns the ticket to building an earthly paradise. Third, Frank presumes that God put the price on harmony. In Schiller’s German original, the addressee in the stanza is “Ehrwürdge Geistermutter—Ewigkeit,” literally, “Venerable Spirit-Mother—Eternity.” Given that Ivan is alluding to, rather than quoting, “Resignation,” this presumption seems perfectly legitimate. But the answer to the question of who put the price on harmony is truly underdetermined. It may be God. But which god? Certainly not the god that is a projection of “man” [sic] upon the clouds who is a delusion who cannot truly set a price! Also not the god who sits and waits in majestic pride for a rebellious sinner to return and grovel for forgiveness and reinstatement. But perhaps God revealed by the Son, a Father who sees the prodigal, has pity, runs out to and embraces the one who was lost and

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is now found, and then throws a party (Luke 15:11-32). The issue comes to the rub precisely in discerning which god one believes to be setting the price (and paying the price?). The text alone does not determine the answer but leaves the options open for the reader to figure out. Unfortunately, few if any commentators have noticed the relevance of Ivan’s profound ambiguity about which deity he intends, creator or projection. Fourth, Frank infers that Alyosha’s response is one of practically irrational faith to Ivan’s reason: The ideas [Dostoevsky] opposed are invariably combated by portraying their effects on the lives of his characters, not by attempting to demonstrate their lack of theoretical persuasiveness or rational coherence. Ivan’s sense of despair and inner desolation, his abused cynicism about his own youthful love of life, the contempt for mankind that has corrupted his feelings despite all his supposed “love of humanity”—all these are meant to illumine indirectly the hopelessness of his convictions.4

This interpretation is unexceptionable. But then Frank goes on to claim that this is the most “poignant dramatization of the conflict between reason and faith at the heart of the book …. Faith, as Dostoevsky wishes it to be felt in The Brothers Karamazov, must be totally pure, a commitment supported by nothing except a devotion to the image and example of Christ; and the arguments of reason against it must thus be given their fullest strength.”5 If our present analysis is correct, then the oppositional understanding of “faith vs. reason” that underlies Frank’s analysis of this crucial episode and its famous declaration is seriously misguided. No person has a “pure faith,” but all have a mixed one. I propose a different approach. The first question is not about what “the returned ticket” means and what the alternative is but about what Ivan is doing in returning his ticket. Our focus here is on the action, not the object. In returning his ticket, Ivan is refusing to participate, as much as possible, in the human condition, in understanding it, and in righting it. He is not refusing to watch—in fact, he observes well. But in refusing to participate in the world, he cuts himself off from the only arena in which there is meaningful freedom. He is not rejecting pure faith in God and immortality but refusing the freedom that realists realize. Dostoevsky is surely portraying the effects of Christian commitment in the lives of his positive characters, but he is also arguing that it is reasonable to live in such a way, for without this kind of commitment, freedom is impossible.

4. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 607. 5. Frank, Dostoevsky: Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 607. I would add that there is no character of such “pure” faith in the book. Alyosha, of course, comes close, but even he has flaws. “Faith” is not “opposed” to reason, but to the irrationalities of superstition, sensualism, manipulation, and materialism, as argued in Chapter 3.

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Why Returning the Ticket Is an Act of Refusing Freedom Ivan’s return of his ticket underlines his rejection of freedom. As many have noted, freedom is a central theme in the novel.6 If so, then one can explore the hypothesis that Ivan’s powerful action is connected to that central theme. Although Ivan seems to be the great proponent of human freedom, in returning his ticket he is in fact denying the reality of freedom in the only way “freedom” can make sense. There are four reasons to support this analysis. First, as noted in the introduction, The Brothers Karamazov is a novel that articulates a vision through its characters, their actions, and interactions. The ideas that Dostoevsky or his characters supported or opposed are lived out, not argued syllogistically. As Joseph Frank put it: “Indeed, he felt that any head-on confrontation might well be counterproductive.”7 This is not to deny that both Ivan and Zosima (as well as the latter’s doubles) are “hero-ideologists”; their positions are developed both in internal and external dialogues, often with multiple interruptions, as Bakhtin notes in his discussion of “The Grand Inquisitor” in this context.8 Dostoevsky does not so much argue syllogistically or inductively for or against his views. Rather, he proffers an argument by displaying the lived meaning of ideas through what his characters do (including dialogue with others) and what they undergo as the plot develops in the settings the characters inhabit. Frank’s “counterproductive” suggests that a direct argument would fail, not necessarily that there is no argument. Rather, the novelist’s purpose is not to demonstrate but to persuade, even to seduce, the reader into accepting a vision. This requires not a logical analysis or deductive argument but a rhetorical, dialectical, narrative argument. A logical argument would be a counterproductive attempt to convince Dostoevsky’s audience—both his radical opponents and those wavering in their own commitments—that a reasonable Christian faith is a more viable way to live than committing to rationalist materialism, superstition, sensualism, or manipulation. So, on the present reading, critics like Frank are entirely correct to see an opposition, but that opposition is not reason versus irrational faith but materialism and irrationalism versus realism. The issue is not about pure reason but about practical wisdom. The question is “Which, if any, way of living is wise?”9 The answer is not given by the author of the polyphonic text but by the readers who interact with and respond to it, as Chapter 9 argues. Zosima prescribes active love as a remedy for the disease of loss of belief in immortality and God. But such active love is “a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams” (58). It is realistic, and also the only way to understand the truth about other characters in the novel and other persons in real life. One’s observation of others’ behavior may be necessary, but it is not sufficient for 6. For example, Terras, Karamazov Companion, 138, n. 139. 7. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 430. 8. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 278–9. 9. This is the central question I explore in The Wisdom of Religious Commitment.

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knowing a person. One must interact with others. As a lecturer once quipped, “An observer is under the bed. A participant observer is in it.”10 A participant observer interprets the data far more than an uninvolved observer. The participant interacts, brings about some actions, and relates to the subject, typically as a more or less equal person. In effect, as “Rebellion” begins, Ivan rejects participation. “ ‘I must make an admission,’ Ivan began. ‘I never could understand how it’s possible to love one’s neighbors. In my opinion, it is precisely one’s neighbors that one cannot possibly love. Perhaps if they weren’t so nigh’ ” (236). He later notes, “It’s still possible to love one’s neighbor abstractly, and even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close” (237). He later admits that his understanding is nonparticipative: “You asked me what I was driving at: you see, I’m an amateur and collector of certain little facts; I copy them down from newspapers and stories, from wherever, and save them—would you believe it?—certain kinds of little anecdotes” (239). He does not participate in the events he narrates or even observe them firsthand.11 All of Ivan’s collected stories are read by him or told to him by another. He seems to be doing nothing but giving facts. But these are not even his own observations, yet he interprets these events he has not witnessed as displaying a world not worth accepting admission to. He does this because he refuses the ticket that would admit him into participation in the life of the world. Ivan is unable to imagine the invisible, incapable of depths of feeling, able to think but who does not act reflectively. Love is manifested in and through one’s actions. As Fyodor says, “Ivan loves nobody” (175). The narrative makes this clear: in response to Alyosha, Ivan says, “ ‘Am I my brother Dmitri’s keeper or something?’ Ivan snapped irritably, but suddenly smiled somehow bitterly. ‘Cain’s 10. By Dr. John Whiting, in his eighties at the time, speaking to an undergraduate class as a guest lecturer at University of California, Irvine; quoted in Greg Guest, Emily H. Namey, and Marilyn L. Mitchell, Collecting Qualitative Data: A Field Manual for Applied Research (London: Sage, 2013), 75, at https://www.sage​pub.com/sites/defa​ult/files/upm-binar​ies/484​ 54_c​h_3.pdf. 11. William James comments on this type of mentality in “The Will to Believe”: There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the “lowest kind of immorality” into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives! (The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. [1897; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1956], 25) James reinforces this view later by noting that a man [sic] of “snarling logicality” who refused to trust others would cut himself off from “a company of gentlemen” (at 28). Refusal to interact graciously cuts oneself off irrationally not only from the human community but also from the possibility of acknowledging even possible truths about God or the gods.

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answer to God about his murdered brother, eh? Maybe that’s what you’re thinking at the moment?’ ” (231–2), echoing Smerdyakov (226). Ivan does not act, much less act lovingly. It is not that the stories Ivan retells are not horrors. They are. But they are facts he has “collected” (241). And nowhere in “Rebellion” does Ivan assert that the actions performed by the evildoers were freely done. The one possible exception is in the following: “I am a bedbug, and I confess in all humility that I can understand nothing of why it’s all arranged as it is. So people themselves are to blame: they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, knowing that they would become unhappy—so why pity them?” (243) Again, he doesn’t ask why things are so arranged but asks in effect, “Why should I pity those fools?” Here he anticipates his next tale, “The Grand Inquisitor.” Rather than affirming freedom as a good, he aligns it with unhappiness. It is a mythical Promethean theft—one that never happened. Or a gift that is returned in the world displayed in “The Grand Inquisitor.” He then continues: Oh, with my pathetic, earthly Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and directly from one another, that everything flows and finds its level—but that is all Euclidean gibberish, of course I know that, and of course I cannot consent to live by it! What do I care that none are to blame and I know it. (243–4; emphasis added)

This Euclidean gibberish, though, is his essence (236), and in this “gibberish” he finds that none are to blame. Why are none to blame? Perhaps because no one is free enough to be held responsible. In Ivan’s Euclidean world, there can be no freedom. So this one possible exception is no more an acceptance of freedom than his earlier claim that “all such questions are unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions. And so, I accept God, not only willingly but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us’ ” (235). Rather, this seeming exception is another indicator of his “turbulent mind” which considers it unknowable whether humans created God or God created humans (235), and that “if the devil does not exist … man has therefore created him in his own image and likeness” (239). In the world, as Ivan constructs it, he believes that none are to blame because there is no freedom that would make blame possible. Of course, Ivan never clearly says he rejects freedom. Rather, his rejection of freedom is shown by what he does and what happens to him. He finally goes mad, reaching the acme of the inability to act freely. (His less intellectually gifted double and half brother, Smerdyakov, commits suicide.) Ivan can observe and report, discuss and argue, but he does not and cannot consistently engage in the kind of practice that, according to Zosima, overcomes doubts regarding the spiritual realm—namely, active love. In the abstract, Ivan is free to love his neighbor abstractly. In the concrete, he fails to love because he is not able to do so, free to do so. To accept the ticket to participate, he would have to recognize the freedom to

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do so and simultaneously freely take on the responsibilities in and to the human community such freedom requires. He refuses. Second, freedom actually cannot exist in Ivan’s materialist world. Of course, we now know, as Dostoevsky could not, that there is quantum indeterminacy at the atomic level and various forms of randomness in the physical world. But neither indeterminacy nor randomness is human freedom. Dostoevsky’s intellectual world was quite aware of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. While there is no direct evidence that Dostoevsky had read Kant,12 he had asked that a copy of The Critique of Pure Reason be sent to him while he was imprisoned and then in exile some thirty years earlier, so there is an indication that he was interested in Kant’s project.13 And Kantian epistemological themes shape the argument in and of The Brothers Karamazov, such as in Father Zosima’s comment, “That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things” (320), likely influenced by Kant’s distinction between phenomena (things as they appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves). In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that human reason does not know noumena but only phenomena that we first encounter through sense experience. He made this argument in order to show the compatibility of scientific reason with morality and faith. The truly important realities, Kant claimed, lie beyond the realm of pure reason. “God, freedom, and immortality” are the postulates (“presumptions” as that term is used in this book) of practical reason, neither verifiable nor falsifiable by pure reason but necessary and thus reasonable if there is to be any possibility of thinking that human choices and acts can be morally good or morally bad. Accepting these postulates is, for Kant, fully compatible with the exercise of pure reason. While religious authorities may find their traditional beliefs incompatible with science (as Bellarmine did with Galileo or modern fundamentalists do with biological evolution), if they are properly understood, then the postulates that make morality and religion possible are compatible with science in Kant’s view. Michael Rohlf makes this point about Kant’s philosophy clearly and effectively: The determinism of modern science no longer threatens the freedom required by traditional morality, because science and therefore determinism apply only to 12. Scanlan (Dostoevsky the Thinker, 21–3) discusses this point in the context of reflecting on the similarities of Dostoevsky’s argument to Kant’s. 13. See, inter alia, Katya Tolstaya, Kaleidoscope, especially 91–101. I find her reading of Kant less than charitable and, as a result, her account of Kant’s influence on Dostoevsky unwarrantedly negative. In a more positive account, Evgenia Cherkasova, in Dostoevsky and Kant, also shows that Dostoevsky was clearly influenced by detailed reports on Kant’s philosophy, and that German philosophy was widely discussed by Russian intellectuals of the time. Also see Miranda Pilipchuk, “A Good beyond Sanity: Immanuel Kant and Ivan Karamazov on the Justifiability of Human Suffering,” Concept 36 (2013): 1, at https://conc​ ept.journ​als.villan​ova.edu/arti​cle/view/1527.

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appearances, and there is room for freedom in the realm of things in themselves, where the self or soul is located. We cannot know (theoretically) that we are free, because we cannot know anything about things in themselves. But there are especially strong moral grounds for the belief in human freedom, which acts as “the keystone” supporting other morally grounded beliefs.14

We cannot know freedom “in theory” but only in practice. Freedom is beyond the realm of science. Pure reason considers things (“phenomena”) as categorically determined. Practical reason considers persons as autonomous and free, and freedom requires God and immortality if morality is to be real. Pure reason investigates phenomena, but practical reason guides actions. Ivan does not believe in God or immortality. Nor does he believe in the soul. Since there is nothing determinable beyond the facts of the material world, there cannot be any freedom in Ivan’s world. As Nicholas Berdyaev put it, “the simply ‘euclidian’ mind … is unable to grasp this thing [freedom] which seems to it an irrational mystery.”15 Ivan’s entire world is a world of materiality encountered by pure reason, neither practical reason nor aesthetic judgment. It is a world of facts. Freedom is not a fact in that world, hence Ivan cannot reasonably believe in freedom. If Kantian philosophy is a key to understanding the shape of the argument in and of The Brothers Karamazov,16 as I claim in Chapter 9, then by returning his “ticket,” Ivan refuses admission to the interactive world of practical reason, the world in which freedom to act is possible and in which love might be real as well. Third, a cornerstone of Ivan’s philosophy is that “everything is permitted.” This seems the pinnacle of freedom. Ivan endorses this formula (263), Rakitin reports it (82), Smerdyakov accepts it (625), and Ivan’s devil explores it and predicts the coming of a “new man” (649). However, its function in the novel is not to advocate freedom so much as to indicate rejection of God, immortality, morality—and, finally, of freedom itself. “Everything is permitted” seems to be Ivan’s assertion of freedom and especially of truly human free will, a will unfettered by tradition or morality. However, that assumption is dubious at best. If Ivan’s world is merely the materialist, deterministic, “phenomenal” world of Kant’s First Critique, then as freedom is 14. MichaelRohlf. “Immanuel Kant,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition). Edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanf​ord.edu/archi​ves/spr2​020/entr​ ies/kant/. Whether such a distinction between phenomena and noumena is viable is still a matter of philosophical debate. 15. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, 84–5. 16. The account of Ivan’s materialism in Chapter 3 of this book echoes the first critique’s materialism. But that is an incomplete understanding of reason on Kant’s view, which involves accepting the second (practical reason, moral philosophy) and third (aesthetic judgment) critiques. Pure materialists could not accept the latter critiques as they would imply the reality of a realm “beyond” the material world. Dostoevsky’s repeated references to two of the second critique’s postulates suggest his awareness of it.

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absent from Kant’s pure reason so it must be absent in Ivan’s world. Moreover, Ivan’s slogan is as compatible with determinism as it is with free will. One can do what one is determined to do without any moral compunction as well as one can freely choose whatever one wishes without moral compunction. Everything may be permitted, but everything also may be determined. One can get out of determinism only if one gets out of materialism. In a materialist world, no one can be blameworthy because no one has the freedom necessary to deserve praise or blame. Since Ivan does not escape his materialism, his watchword that “everything is permitted” cannot be taken as positively proclaiming free will. Rather, it is a negative assertion, a speech-act of “denegation”: it asserts nothing, and only rejects morality. Rejecting morality makes sense in a purely materialist world but not in a world that is both material and spiritual.17 Hence, Ivan’s “motto” must be as compatible with determinism as with free will, however unhappy this world may make him. In the first of his talks recorded in Alyosha’s biography, Father Zosima makes the linkage explicit. He attacks the “worldly” for distorting the image of God and his truth: They have science, and in science only that which is subject to the senses. But the spiritual world, the higher half of man’s being, is altogether rejected, banished with a sort of triumph, even with hatred. The world has proclaimed freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs: only slavery and suicide. (313)

Zosima’s words here echo the Kantian harmonics in the novel. He recognizes the limitations of “Kantian” materialism and shows what the result is: the absence of freedom. And so for Ivan: he thinks there is freedom, but it cannot be seen in the deterministic, material world that pure reason observes. Freedom requires something beyond the observation of facts and things as they appear to us, namely, reasonable accounts that are visible to those who know how to engage the world and its characters in practical, active participation. Zosima also articulates the true source of freedom: it comes from God and is reached through humble obedience (27). Berdyaev’s comment is insightful: “Christianity is the religion of freedom …. Divine grace itself is a complete freedom that can be destroyed neither by evil nor by the constraint of the good; God’s freedom and man’s freedom are reconciled in the grace of freelygiven love.”18 At the heart of being a Christian is not the act of affirming dogmas or 17. For a recent treatment of this view, see Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin, 2017). 18. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, 71–2. A perceived opposition between divine grace and human freedom is also rejected by classic Western religious thinkers such as Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Aquinas. See Roger Haight, S. J., Faith and Evolution: A Grace-Filled Naturalism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019), 101–3, and the sources he cites.

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succumbing to authoritarian legalism. It is the freedom to become the person that the Creator wants us to be. True obedience is not found in the bondage of a yoke but in the realization of authentic freedom, a worldly realization of the freedom of God freely given in, to, and through the world out of love. Of course, some of us will never become what God wants for us. Ivan’s “Rebellion” shows how some people destroy others, even the innocent. They have no chance to become free because they are disabled or killed before they can come to understand what it is to obey the God who brought them into being and has destined them for happiness. Others are deprived of a truly human community, cut off from the active love ingredient needed to have them accept God and immortality. Ivan rebels against the world God created. But is the problem of evil that Ivan so powerfully articulates a problem for those professing belief in God, or a problem of human vileness that has surfaced in the evil actions of soldiers with bayonets, peasants flogging horses, and parents abusing children (239–41) who do not realize their freedom through obedience? Freedom is realized in the graciously given love of God for humanity and of humans for each other. Divine love may be perfect, but human love is not. Even gracious free agents perform bad acts—which, as Father Zosima told Madame Khokhlakov, should not cause one to fear (58). Although imperfect, the human love displayed in The Brothers Karamazov is the proximate realization of the ultimate divine love. Such powerful love is seen most fully in the love and conversion of Grushenka and Dmitri, but it is indeed present in all the conversion narratives. Perhaps not all materialists reject freedom and do not know how to love. They may even avoid Ivan’s incoherence. But he cannot accept either freedom or love, since his world has no room for them. If he does think that there is either freedom or love, he is incoherent: such thoughts are beyond his Euclidean mind. Fourth, “God” and “immortality” are invoked twenty-one times in six separate episodes in the novel. But the third great postulate of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, freedom, is startlingly absent. “Freedom” is connected with God only twice (162, 314) and never with immortality. Over 60 percent of the occurrences of “freedom” in the novel occur in Ivan’s legend of “The Grand Inquisitor.” So Ivan’s pronouncements on freedom are centered in his “poem” (246) that rejects the tyranny of the Roman Catholic Church.19 As Berdyaev writes, “Two universal principles, then, confront one another in the Legend: freedom and compulsion, belief in the meaning of life and disbelief, divine love and humanitarian pity, Christ and Antichrist.”20 How are we to understand this “freedom”?

19. Ivan’s introduction to the poem both claims and refuses authorship: “ ‘I composed a poem once, about a year ago …. I’ve never composed two lines of verse in my whole life. But I made up this poem and memorized it. I made it up in great fervor. You’ll be my first reader—I mean, listener’ ” (246). Here I will not explore its brilliant and challenging literary structure but focus only on what is needed for the present argument. 20. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, 189.

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The legend roots human freedom in a divine gift. The ongoing argument between the Inquisitor and the returned Christ shows the hypocrisy of the Inquisitor who will keep people in bondage and the generosity of the Incarnate One who brought loving freedom. In league with the devil since the eighth century,21 the Inquisitor’s Roman Church has overcome the freedom Christ bestows “in order to make people happy” (251). They have replaced freedom with what people want: “miracle, mystery, and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once again led like sheep” (257). As Joseph Frank, following Roger Cox, insightfully comments, “the Grand Inquisitor has debased the authentic forms of miracle, mystery and authority into magic, mystification, and tyranny.”22 The sheep have given away their freedom to the shepherds. Whether they stole it from heaven or received it as a gift, it does not matter. They have now returned it to those who seem to be heaven’s earthly representatives. Yet their obedience is not through their shepherds to God but to the devil. The community they form is nothing but an anthill (257). The point that the tale of the Grand Inquisitor makes is all too often valid. Some religious “shepherds” use their power over the “flock” in order to keep them in servitude. They inculcate in the “sheep” the practice of blind obedience. At its dangerous peak, religious authority becomes unquestionable and inescapable. As Kathleen Boone put it with regard to Protestant fundamentalism, “We have seen that fundamentalist preachers wield their considerable clout by allying themselves with the [inerrant] Bible; their listeners heed both the [preachers’] word and the Word, without being able to tell which is which. To question the pastor or to disagree with him is often equated to disobedience against God.”23 The temptation to religious tyranny is present in any religious institution, whether their authority structures are visible or hidden. Yet, as Ralph C. Wood rightly claims, “Western readers of The Brothers Karamazov have remained virtually blind to Dostoevsky’s critique of the Grand Inquisitor. The reason, I believe, is that Ivan’s vision of human freedom is so very near to our own secular notion of liberty, and thus to our increasing relegation of the Christian gospel to the private sphere of mere preference.”24 Ivan’s understanding of freedom, however incompatible with the materialist position he displays, is claimed to be an unfettered choice: “everything is permitted.” I have argued earlier that this motto is not necessarily an assertion of 21. “The dating comes from the year 756, when Pepin the Short granted sovereignty over Ravenna to Pope Stephen II, thus recognizing the right of the pope to assume temporal power” (Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 614). 22. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 614 (emphasis added). 23. Kathleen C. Boone, The Bible Tells Them So: The Discourse of Protestant Fundamentalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 107. Something similar could be said about many religious institutions (e.g., some forms of Catholic integralism relying on an infallible pope). 24. Ralph C. Wood, “Ivan Karamazov’s Mistake,” First Things, December 2002, https:// www.firs​tthi​ngs.com/arti​cle/2002/12/ivan-kar​amaz​ovs-mist​ake.

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the sort of freedom that makes moral or immoral actions possible. Moreover, it is not the sort of freedom valued in The Brothers Karamazov. To cite Wood again: Our freedom resides rather in becoming communal selves who freely embrace our moral, religious, and political obligations. These responsibilities come to us less by our own choosing than through a thickly webbed network of shared friendships and familial ties, through political practices and religious promises. In a very real sense, such “encumbrances” choose us before we choose them. There is no mythical free and autonomous self that exists apart from these ties. There are only gladly or else miserably bound persons—namely, persons who find their duties and encumbrances to be either gracious or onerous.25

If Wood is right in this, then in refusing his ticket, Ivan is rejecting the possibility of his becoming authentically free. The freedom Ivan proclaims is the contrary of true freedom in the Orthodoxinspired vision of The Brothers Karamazov as well as in classic Western Christian theology. To be free is to be able to be responsible with and for others, not to be merely an isolated, autonomous decider. The miserably “bound” person may, of course, rebel against these ties. This is ultimately the core of Ivan’s “rebellion.” Throughout the novel, he rejects these ties to others in theory and practice until this finally drives him insane. Freedom as sheer autonomy, as liberation from restraint (“freedom from” or “negative freedom”)—this is a wholly inadequate concept of freedom, not only from an Orthodox perspective but also from any perspective. A person must also have the ability to act responsibly (“freedom to” or “positive freedom”) if one is to understand freedom.26 One can exercise that ability only in a community of interdependent persons. Negative freedom alone is meaningless at an individual level because the freedom to choose and act presumes that the individual is embedded in a community in, on, and along which one acts. One may act in ways that affect no others, but such acts may be nothing but abstractions from interactions (even committed libertarians cannot deny that our acts [typically] affect others even as they advocate for no more than minimal governmental restraint on individuals’ actions). From any reasonable perspective, then, “everything is permitted” must be adjudicated as an impossible motto. Once one reaches a clear understanding of authentic freedom as Dostoevsky portrays it in The Brothers Karamazov, then one can see it is not Kantian. Nor is Ivan’s view. In a brief summary for present purposes, Kant’s view is that our phenomenal self (I as I am and appear in the world) in the material world is “free” just in case that the motives for its action are from within, chosen by oneself. This view is a form of “compatiblism” because this understanding of freedom is compatible 25. Wood, “Ivan Karamazov’s Mistake.” 26. For a now classic discussion of these two types of freedom, see Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 166–217, and “Liberty,” 283–6.

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with the determinism advocated in Kant’s First Critique. But compatiblism is not sufficient to generate moral judgment. So Kant postulates another form of freedom, that of our noumenal self (I as I am in myself). Our noumenal self, for Kant, is autonomous. Phenomenal freedom is in time, on his view, but noumenal freedom is outside of time as the “soul” that chooses is not bound by space-time. We are and can be held responsible for our choices and actions because we choose them independent of material-world determinism.27 Because the self that is free and immortal is in the “spiritual” world beyond the “Euclidean realm” of Ivan’s world, Kant’s noumenal “self ” and its noumenal freedom cannot be Ivan’s either. For all of these reasons, Ivan’s return of his ticket signals his refusal of the only kind of freedom that is possible: the ability to act without constraint, yet responsibly, in community.

Why Refusing the Ticket Is Refusing the Truth of a Harsh and Fearful Love In epistemic terms, Ivan’s return of his ticket refuses truth. He has refused to see that his convictions are inconsistent and held indefeasibly. It is not the case that he doesn’t believe some true propositions or believes some false ones, and it is not the case that his facts are inaccurate. What he doesn’t believe—and indeed because of his blinkered imagination cannot grasp—is the truth that Zosima has described in his reflections of Job. “Overall is God’s truth, moving, reconciling, all-forgiving” (292) or, as Jn 8:32 urges, “Know the truth and the truth will make you free.” Truth is not first an attribute of propositions. Truth is first the practice of making true, as a carpenter “trues up” a board or as a letterpress typesetter “trues up” the right margin of a line of type in a job stick. Just as good carpenters and good typesetters engage in practices that yield what is true, so engaging in good belief- or knowledge-forming practices yields something true. What Zosima and John understand is that knowing the truth is primarily activated in and by participating in a powerful practice, not merely accepting a set of warranted propositional beliefs. Propositions are not the truths that make one free; they are only formulated in light of the practice of truth. Learning how to seek and realize the truth is learning how to be free. Ivan cannot get to the truth because he is not practicing reasoning in a way that will lead to the truth about people. As noted in Chapter 4, the facts about a person are not the truth of a person. Ivan observes facts; he does not understand the truth. What one can get as a result of practicing reasoning well is not merely knowledge of true propositions but knowledge of people. Before one knows that a proposition is true, or one knows a person, one must know how to understand by 27. For a more detailed analysis and analyses of some problems in Kant’s notions of freedom and his foundational concept of autonomy, see Rohlf, “Immanuel Kant,” especially section 5.

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learning how to know the truth by participating in embodied cognitive practices and in interactions with others.28 This is just what Ivan refuses. Ivan has no belief in God or immortality. How can such belief be acquired? In Book Two, chapter four, Father Zosima talks with a woman who has lost her belief in immortality (and nearly in God). At this point, she is identified only as a local landowner but later is named Katerina Osipovna Khokhlakov, mother of Liza (Lise). She implores Zosima: “How can it be proved, how can one be convinced? Oh, miserable me! … It is devastating, devastating.” [Zosima replies:] “No doubt it is devastating. One cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced.” “How? By what?” “By the experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul. That has been tested. It is certain.” (56)

After counseling the woman to avoid all lies (“especially the lie to yourself ”), to never be “frightened at your own faintheartedness” or by “your bad acts,” Zosima continues: I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science. (58)29 28. Because of innumerable problems with a common understanding of knowledge as “justified, true belief,” many analytical philosophers have agreed that these are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for knowledge. Some have sought another condition to add to these in order to overcome the problems, but formulating such a condition or conditions is controversial, at best. Other philosophers have argued for “virtue epistemology,” for example, Ernest Sosa (Knowing Full Well [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011]) and Linda Zagzebski (Virtues of the Mind). Whatever knowledge is, it is the result of properly exercising the ability to know. Virtue epistemology has the strength of getting the horse of knowing in front and pulling the cart of knowledge behind it. 29. Here, Zosima may be alluding to Khomiakov’s claim that I noted earlier in Chapter 4: “The communion in love is not only useful, but fully necessary for the apprehension of truth, and the apprehension of truth is dependent upon it and impossible without it. That which is inaccessible for an individual’s pondering of truth becomes

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Zosima offers more encouragement and blesses her. If Zosima is right, then active love is internally related to faith in God and belief in immortality. Hence, Ivan returning his ticket takes them all off the table in his Euclidean world. It is precisely the inability to embody such active love that trips Ivan up. Neither lack of love nor lack of faith can be overcome by proofs or argument but rather in practical and responsible engagement. Ivan refuses the ticket because his understanding and acceptance of God’s world would require active love from him. But he consistently shies away from such a harsh and fearful love. Only once in the course of the novel does Ivan act on behalf of another (633–4); the episode follows his third meeting with Smerdyakov and precedes his encounter with the devil. Ivan had earlier knocked a peasant into the snow and left him there. He now trips over the peasant unseen in the blizzard and acts like the Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel.30 He is “feeling very pleased. His thoughts were expanding and working” (634). He considers going to the prosecutor with the money he had gotten from Smerdyakov, as evidence that Smerdyakov had killed Fyodor and that Dmitri is innocent of the crime. The narrator portrays this scene along with descriptions of Ivan’s mental state. At first, Ivan feels joy. He feels he would no longer hesitate. He is happy. He cares for the peasant. But after he has spent a whole hour with the peasant, he decides to defer seeing the prosecutor until the next day, “and strangely all his joy, all his selfcontent vanished in a moment” (634). He may have tried to right the wrong he had done, but this one act does not blossom into a pattern that could be characterized as participating freely in a truly humane act of love. What gave Ivan his brief joy was his active care for someone else, being dutiful or generous. When he decides not to see the prosecutor, he has yet again chosen not to participate, not to act. That decision reaffirms his return of the ticket. The good he has done evaporates from his life. He “gave an onion” but, like the woman in the lake, almost immediately repudiated the practice of relating to others. Ivan then goes home, and feels dizzy, sick, and without strength. He paces nervously. He searches for something. And he finds his devil. The narrator suggests that Ivan’s one “good deed” reversing his assault on the peasant was truly aberrant. This episode may indeed foreshadow a rehabilitation in an anticipated later novel, but here it is simply out of character. To “return the ticket” is the action of an agent who refuses to exercise agency: to interact with others, to join the dance, to share a meal, or to engage in active love. To “return the ticket” is not a speech-act that asserts something accessible only by conjoined thought, united by love” (“Introduction,” in Mrowczynski-Van Allen et al., Alexei Khomiakov, quoting Khomiakov, “On the ‘Fragments’,” 313). 30. Alain Toumayan remarks that this incident suggests a “developing ethical consciousness, though one he is unable to acknowledge since it is at odds with his ideas, a conflict that will be expressed in his subsequent interview with the devil” (“I More Than the Others,” 58). However, Contino, Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism, 157, seems far more accurate: the scene suggests “a travesty of Jesus’ parable.”

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about the way the world is or should be. It is, in effect, the ironic or sarcastic inversion of a prayer of praise, a declarative speech-act in which Ivan asserts who he is with regard to God and returns the gift of grace. He thus becomes who he truly is: he refuses, he rebels. His act functions like other declarations. Parents know the name of their child long before the child is christened. Shipbuilders may well know the name of the ship they are building long before a celebrity cracks a bottle of champagne across its prow. Similarly, the progress of the novel does not keep Ivan’s identity a secret. He is a rebel who returns his ticket, an act that isolates him from the community in which freedom, compassion, truth, and love can be realized. Ivan does not merely reject an invitation to a non-Euclidean world where compensation for suffering will occur. That may be true of the locution, the content of the act. But the rejection occurs not because of his intellect but because of his will: his action of returning his ticket is a refusal to change his mind and to convert to a way of understanding that would refuse to confine knowledge to propositions about observed phenomena in the material world. It is a refusal to participate in the kinds of action that might have the (perhaps remote) possibility of bringing about anything like acceptance of God and immortality. It is the refusal of active love. And it is the refusal of hope—a point discussed in Chapter 9. Declaring that he returns the ticket makes that refusal clear.

Conclusion Ivan’s return of the ticket is his refusal to be part of a community of human freedom and love that is realized because of the presence of the divine. It is a rejection of the coinherent community in the world that God created, and by implication it signals an unwillingness to suffer with and for others. The reader cannot simply construe this as an intellectual rejection of God’s world because of all the evil in it. Ivan’s action is a practical, proud refusal to get involved in the world, to restore the icon of creation. The human exercise of the divine freedom is not the freedom of arbitrary or timeless choice but the unfettered ability to be responsible to and for others in community. Ivan refuses to take on this twofold responsibility; he returns his ticket that would admit him to this community’s activities. Returning it is not only a refusal to believe in God, freedom, and immortality but also a declaration that declares and shows him to be an individual who refuses to participate in the practices of a community that incarnates the spirit of sobornost’. Zosima noted that freedom is rooted in obedience. True obedience is true freedom. As he put it: Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet they alone constitute the way to real and true freedom: I cut away my superfluous and unnecessary needs, through obedience I humble and chasten my vain and proud will, and thereby, with God’s help, attain freedom of spirit, and with that, spiritual rejoicing! Which of the two is more capable of upholding and serving a great idea—the

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isolated rich man or one who is liberated from the tyranny of things and habits? (314)31

The critique of Ivan’s isolation and of the Kantian autonomous decider is implicit but clear. When Alyosha questions whether he is to leave the monastery, Father Paissy explains: But why did [Father Zosima] decide that you should now spend time in the world? It must mean that he foresees something in your destiny! Understand, Alexei, that even if you go back into the world, it will be as though it were an obedience imposed on you by your elder, and not for vain frivolity, not for worldly pleasure. (158)

It is through this authentic obedience to God who loves all and each of us into being (in contrast to the sheep’s obedient surrender to their shepherds who serve the devil) that Alyosha will be free to act and interact and attain freedom of spirit and spiritual joy.32 To Ivan, for whom everything is permitted, what looms in his future is madness. To refuse the ticket is to refuse to realize freedom. That’s what Ivan does. However, after all this, might the reader still entertain the view that materialism is the true end of humanity’s terminal quest? Perhaps this polyphonic novel is showing us that the world in which Zosima and Alyosha live and act is beyond real people’s capacity. Perhaps mendacious and manipulative Rakitin’s view is correct: that humanity “will find strength in itself to live for virtue without believing in the immortality of the soul! Find it in liberty, equality, fraternity” (82). Or perhaps we do live in a mad and maddening world, and freedom is an illusion. But before exploring that possibility, we need to examine more closely in the following chapters what Ivan has rejected. One cannot understand the novel’s argument without exploring its portrayal of that communal and social context in which a person participates.

31. An analogous paradox is attributed to Gandhi. “When a journalist asked ‘Can you tell me the secret of your life in three words?’ Gandhi referenced the Isha Upanishad and replied, ‘Yes! Renounce and enjoy.’ The Isha’s invocation and first verse endorse a view of life through renunciation, in which we covet nothing and therefore achieve real freedom.” See Nehal A. Patel, “ ‘Renounce and Enjoy’: The Pursuit of Happiness through Gandhi’s Simple Living and High Thinking,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice: 13:2 (2014), https://dig​ ital​comm​ons.law.seatt​leu.edu/sjsj/vol13/iss2/6. 32. For a brief reflection on the relationship of freedom and authority in a practical understanding of religious tradition, see my Inventing Catholic Tradition, 177–84.

Chapter 7 T H E S O C IA L V I SIO N O F T H E B R OT H E R S K A R A M A ZOV

Integral to the argument of The Brothers Karamazov is a distinctive social vision. One component of the vision is Dostoevsky’s response to the 1864 reform of the criminal justice system.1 Another is the literary pattern of “doubling” and “mirroring.”2 The setting of the novel in a very minor town in a constricted time frame particularizes the vision so that it could, ironically, be anywhere. This chapter aims to show how the main social components taken together illustrate the social vision of the novel as a whole. In Chapter 8, I will argue that this social vision is to be identified as a particular form of sobornost’ in the world of the Karamazovs.3 A leitmotif running through the present chapter is the issue of freedom. If freedom is an ability that one develops as one learns the obedience that enables one to live in one’s social contexts, then freedom in practice cannot be understood apart from communities that either promote a member’s authentic freedom or thwart it. The Brothers Karamazov argues for a particularly Orthodox vision of persons-in-community. If freedom is both positive and negative, if it means both freedom from constraint and freedom to act, and if a person becomes free in the context of a community, then one must understand the ways that The Brothers Karamazov construes its vision of community, its social vision. My analysis begins by recalling Grushenka’s remarkable tale of the onion as an imaginative overview of society. It then focuses on the importance of two main locations that occupy the same town. Next, it argues for the significance of 1. See Brian Conlon, “Dostoevsky v. The Judicial Reforms of 1864: How and Why One of Nineteenth-Century Russia’s Greatest Writers Criticized the Nation’s Most Successful Reform,” Russian Law Journal 2/4 (2014): 1–56. I am not so much interested in how Dostoevsky responded to the reform but rather focused on what the trial of Dmitri contributes to the social vision of the novel. 2. For example, see Terras, Karamazov Companion, 104–7. 3. Scanlan, Dostoevsky the Thinker, 158–96, distils a “Christian utopia” as Dostoevsky’s social vision. This approach underemphasizes the reality of relationships in constituting a person in the present world, not the future utopia. The social vision of the novel is not purely utopic.

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mirroring and doubling as social practices. A subplot—the story of the Snegiryovs, the boys, and Kolya Krasotkin—portrays the shape of a struggling, but functioning, community. The chapter ends with a consideration of Dmitri’s trial.

The Tale of the Onion Chapter 4 analyzed the legend of the onion as a way to show the redemptive power of a good deed. Here I want to begin by drawing out the implications of that legend for understanding the novel’s claims about the relationship of person and community. Recall that the angel was close to pulling the woman out of the lake when others grabbed on to join the exodus. “But the woman … began to kick them with her feet: ‘It’s me who’s getting pulled out, not you; it’s my onion, not yours.’ No sooner did she say it than the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake and is burning there to this day” (352). My onion, not yours. The opposition between “me” and “you” in the tale displays the woman’s refusal to think of “us.” The onion miraculously pulled them all out until she kicked the others off. By consciously acting to separate herself from them, she refused to be in solidarity with them. And so the marvelous onion broke. She fell. They all fell. The angel wept. The fragile onion would have held them all up had she kept faith with all the others. Her refusal plunged them all back into the hellish lake. That is the moral of the tale. This little fable reveals the basic vision of society in The Brothers Karamazov. If we wish to live, we must live together. If we would not perish in despair, we must live in shared hope and trust. To live together we must be united in freedom. To be united in freedom is not to live in an anthill without freedom (the Grand Inquisitor’s view of universal union [257]) nor in unbridled autonomy focused on self-concern (Rakitin’s view, shared somewhat with Fyodor and Ivan). Free reconciliation means that one must be humble enough to be guilty before all and thus responsible for all. The woman did not reconcile herself to her fellow sinners burning in the lake of fire but separated herself from them. Dostoevsky’s claim, then, is this: to separate yourself from the community is, in the end, self-destructive.

Settings Save for flashbacks, The Brothers Karamazov is profoundly constricted in time and place. The novel plays out in two sets of about three days, set a few months apart to allow time for the preparation of Dmitri’s case between his arrest and his trial. The novel is set a few years after the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, just as a new judicial system was being implemented. Places are necessary to “locate” human characters. People live, think, and act in particular contexts. The characters in the novel do not develop over time but live at a particular time and a particular place. The novel reveals who the characters are

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as if they are matryoshka dolls in the hands of an impatient child.4 A reader of The Brothers Karamazov can know these particular characters only in their particular place—even though their insights and oversights, their admirable and despicable practices, and their visions may have wider, perhaps even universal, import and incite the reader’s response in the readers’ particular times and places. One town provides the main locale. The Karamazovs’ home is in “the monstrous and wretched reality of ”5 the town of “Skotoprigonyevsk: roughly ‘Cattle-roundupville’ ” (792).6 Dmitri’s bacchanals are placed a mere 15 miles away in Mokroye (363). Mokroye is, in effect, a carnival town, portrayed as offering bread and circuses, dancing and drinking. While important events happen in Mokroye (such as Dmitri’s first bacchanal where he seems to spend the 3,000 rubles he has stolen from Katerina; Grushenka’s flight to her Polish officer, only to become disillusioned with him; Grushenka and Dmitri’s discovery of their love; and Dmitri’s arrest), that particular location does not seem particularly significant for the argument of the novel. Mokroye is incidental, an “alternative reality” to Skotoprigonyevsk but a place that is a satellite to Skotoprigonyevsk. The narrator reveals the town’s name to the reader—with some embarrassment— only on page 573 of the 777-page English translation cited herein. Yet the narrator has named the celebrated hermitage, Optina, as being in Kozelsk on page 27. That Skotoprigonyevsk is less “celebrated” and more “earthy” may in some way embarrass the narrator. By placing the novel in a minor town with an all-too-ordinary monastery, Dostoevsky implies that the events of the novel and the characters in it might be found almost anywhere—save in towns that have exemplary, perhaps even ideal, monasteries or towns with debauched monasteries, like the unnamed town nearby which was populated, Fyodor claims, perhaps duplicitously, by the monastery’s “wives” (24). Two cultural-geographic locations in the town are key: Fyodor’s house and the monastery. Fyodor’s house is fundamentally a house of debauchery and neglect. Fyodor buys or takes sex, drinks to excess, opens a number of taverns, torments his wives, neglects his sons, deceives his acquaintances, mistreats his servants, and plays the buffoon. The crucial event in the plot of the novel, the crime and sin of parricide, takes place in Fyodor’s house (393). Dmitri, fleeing from Grigory after the murder of Fyodor, also cracks the servant on the head with a pestle and 4. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 575, made this point using a different image: “His technique causes each to expand vertically, as it were, like a Japanese paper blossom, which, when moistened, metamorphoses from a tiny ball into a full-fledged flower; even if a change occurs, it is accomplished through developing latent aspects of the personality already present from the very start.” 5. Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 124. 6. Robin Feuer Miller, The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992) identifies in photographs between pages 82 and 83 places in the town of Skotoprigonyevsk with particular locations in Staraya Russa, the location of Dostoevsky’s house.

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bloodies his hand and handkerchief trying to staunch the head wound—later taken to be “evidence” for his murder of Fyodor. How Ivan could tolerate living in such a house baffles the narrator (17). Yet the sons do not grow up in that house. At first, Fyodor abandoned his sons who were taken in by his servant Grigory and Grigory’s wife, Marfa. Later, he allowed other relatives to take Ivan and Dmitri away to raise and educate them at their own expense in Moscow. Smerdyakov, Lizavetta’s son, is portrayed as his lackey, living with Grigory and Marfa. Fyodor had sent him to Moscow to learn to cook. He is portrayed as a fastidious, unsociable, arrogant ingrate who hanged and buried cats, dressed foppishly, was afflicted with epilepsy (124–5), and would age rapidly. Alyosha was also raised by relatives, until the general who sheltered the boys died, and his wife decamped to Italy. He is then left to be raised by strangers until he returns home, soon to become a novice in the monastery. Even though Ivan lived there for a while as an adult, Fyodor’s house was hardly the boys’ home. While each of the brothers has characteristics “inherited” from their parents, Alyosha’s religiosity, Dmitri’s sensualism, and Ivan’s materialism likely were formed as much in other locales as in Fyodor’s house. By contrast, the monastery is to be a place dedicated to holiness. Yet it “had no relics of saints, no wonder-working icons, not even any glorious legends connected with its history, nor did it have to its credit any deeds or services to the fatherland” (27). It did have a tradition of elders, monks of extraordinary insight, deft spiritual directors who had undergone “moral regeneration … from slavery to freedom and to moral perfection” (29). Other monks run the gamut from the deceitful (Rakitin) to the irrational (Ferapont) to the dutiful and wise, including men like Father Paissy and the saintly and generous elder, Father Zosima. An elder in the monastery would take disciples. A disciple gives the elder his very will “in the hope that after the long trial he will achieve self-conquest, selfmastery to such a degree that he will, finally, through a whole life’s obedience, attain to perfect freedom” (27). In general, the novel envisions personal freedom as an outcome in a person’s life more than a right inherent in each person’s life. Alyosha Karamazov became Zosima’s disciple. The devotion of the townspeople to the local monastery is manifest. The monastery is said to be famous (10, 18, 27) even if it is in a cow town. Pilgrims from all over Russia come to visit the monastery but not to see its ikons or attend its services but to consult its elder. Neither Fyodor’s house nor Zosima’s monastery is a pure ideal type. There is deception and stupidity in the monastery. There is some goodness in Fyodor’s house, as Alyosha’s patience shows. That the residents of Fyodor’s house travel to the monastery to talk, dispute, learn, and sometimes mock shows that these are not entirely separate realms.7 Their location in the same town unites them. 7. Two other locations will be mentioned. Later in this chapter, the Snegiryov’s dilapidated house is the place in which Kolya Krasotkin and the boys gather with the family around the dying Ilyusha. In Chapter 9, Alyosha’s “speech at the stone” (where Ilyusha had wanted to be buried) and its locale appear. Other locales in the novel are not major

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The disparity of these locations in the town is crucial to understanding the shape of the community. Despite being the opposite of a cosmopolis, the town has a varied social environment. Even before the name is revealed, the town stands in stark contrast to cosmopolitan Moscow where the boys were raised, and Petersburg where Fyodor’s first wife fled with her seminarist paramour and where Ivan was a visitor. Each of these chief places in Skotoprigonyevsk houses different kinds of relationships, has different forms of governance, engages in different ways of sustaining themselves, and inculcates different desires, diversions, delights, declinations, and disapprobations. But members who belong to both co-exist and interact in the town. Skotoprigonyevsk is in Russia, and Russia is in the global community. It is a revealing microcosm presenting conflicts and a vision that can be found in the nation and in the world. Its very particularity grounds its universality. The town that holds both the monastery and Fyodor’s house shows that the world of the novel and the real world contain both a house that understood freedom in humble obedience and solidarity, and another house that understood freedom as an individual’s licentious and self-centered behavior that eschews much personal responsibility. In this sense, the two main locales may even mirror each other inversely. What this small town contributes to the social vision of the novel belongs to the analysis of the spirit of sobornost’ in Chapter 8.

Mirroring and Doubling Almost all commentators recognize the pattern of “doubling” or “mirroring” of characters in the novel. Terras calls this pattern a “basic structural device in The Brothers Karamazov.”8 Many “secondary” characters are tokens that flesh out aspects of a more general character type portrayed in one of the primary characters. Beyond that, characters with distinctive voices quote others, paraphrase them, and parody them. They offer different accounts of the same event, anticipate others’ ideas, and “respond to one another more directly, with irony, mockery, invective, tenderness, respect, and reverence.”9 In a rather “talky” novel, there is considerable cross-talk. This is not surprising in a thoroughly dialogic novel in

contributors to social vision: Mme. Khokhlakov’s nice house, Grushenka’s rooms, the Metropole tavern (important because Ivan and Alyosha get acquainted there), the woodlot nearby in Chermoshnya, and Ivan’s room (where he meets his devil), among others, are other locations found in or near Skotoprigonyevsk. 8. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 104. Much in this paragraph and the following one is indebted to Terras’s discussion 104–7, even though at points my recognitions of doubling and interpretations of their significance differs. 9. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 96.

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which characters become themselves in interaction, especially acting in speaking with other characters.10 In some instances, the doubling is enduring: for example, the eldest brother, Ivan Karamazov is “doubled” by his illegitimate half brother, Smerdyakov,11 arguably by the Grand Inquisitor and Mme. Khokhlakov (neither loves people), partially by Rakitin and Kolya Krasotkin as socialist atheists, minimally by the landowner Miusov, a comic figure who disappears from the novel after the first two books. Each of these doubles fleshes out the materialist “form of life” by “dumbing it down” or “extending it out.” They make the significance of the type obvious (e.g., the literalistic Smerdyakov) or by showing contrasts with the type (e.g., Rakitin and Kolya). Alyosha doubles Father Zosima who doubles Markel. At Zosima’s death, the narrator tells us that Father Paissy, “who had hitherto been stern and severe with him” became “a new and unlooked-for friend, a new director who ardently loved him—as if the elder Zosima, in dying, had bequeathed him Paissy” (171). Again the other characters extend the “realist” type but only after their conversions—that is, Dmitri, Grushenka, and Kolya Krasotkin. In other instances, the doubling is found in particular events, such as the episode of “An Odor of Corruption,” which “is a counterpoint to the theme of the second temptation of Christ. Alyosha’s vision in ‘Cana of Galilee’ is the counterpoint to Ivan’s later ‘vision’ of the devil, and thus a response to ‘the Grand Inquisitor’ as well.”12 Grushenka’s tale of the onion alludes to or comments on Ivan’s citation of the descent of the mother of God into hell in “The Grand Inquisitor.” But the image of “giving an onion” is also a leitmotif in the novel: Alyosha gave Grushenka an onion (357); in Alyosha’s vision, Zosima says he “and many others here” gave an onion (361); Grushenka recollects that she gave an onion during the party at Mokroye (440). If our analysis in Chapter 4 is correct, then there is a doubling effect in and among the characters who convert and those who do not. There is a familial pattern of mirroring or doubling as well. Lise Khokhlakov’s varying states of health mirror the varying states of mind of her mother, Katerina Osipovna. The Snegiryovs form a family oppressed by external actors (Dmitri insults the father, for example) as well as by their own poverty and illness. But the prime token of family doubling is the Karamazovs. All four sons are descendants of Fyodor even though they were not raised by him.13 Ivan extends his cleverness, 10. Compare Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, chapter five, especially his conclusion on the significance of dialogue at 265–6 and his discussion of “hero-ideologists” at 278–9. 11. Renè Girard, Fyodor Dostoevsky: Resurrection from the Underground, trans. and ed. James G. Williams (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1997), 131–4, takes “doubling” as diabolical. This is accurate for some cases, for example, Ivan and Smerdyakov, but not others, for example, Zosima and Alyosha. 12. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 105. 13. The novel may make this point a bit dubious, as Fyodor names the fourth brother Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov, whereas the three “legitimate” sons receive their father’s surname as well as the patronymic.

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Dmitri his sensuality, Smerdyakov his literal-mindedness, and Alyosha his occasional tenderness (as well as his mother’s religiosity), even awakening a “moral” sense in him (22–3). Alyosha also may be the only son who did not harbor a strong death wish for his father. Smerdyakov killed the old man, inspired by Ivan, while Dmitri had seriously considered killing him as well. The multiple patterns of mirroring and doubling show that people of the same type exist in different locations in the community. Irrational patterns, for instance, are found almost everywhere: Fyodor’s sensualism mirrors Ferapont’s superstition, which in turn inverts Ivan’s materialism. Realists can be found debating in taverns, cuddling attractive women,14 settling boyish battles, receiving pilgrims and preaching and teaching in the monastery, visiting the oppressed, and even living in a seeming house of sin. The distribution of the doubles shows that each type may appear almost anywhere. Not all monks are either holy or realists. Not all who hope for some form of miracle are irrational. Human communities are internally pluralist and connected in ways we may miss if we are not looking for such connections that are revealed by mirroring and doubling.

The Boys, the Snegiryovs, and Kolya Perhaps the most useful subplot for understanding the social vision of the novel is the story centered on Nikolai Ivanov (Kolya) Krasotkin. Unlike Alyosha, he does not move from one house or one community to another, or from the community of the monastery out into the world. Rather, he is a child whose father has died and who looks a lot like the individualistic Ivan or the manipulative Rakitin. Yet the community of the boys gathered around the dying Ilyusha Snegiryov and his family quietly converts Kolya as he participates in their fellowship. If we seek to discover how communities come together, one might point to this subplot as showing one way in which a new community is formed. The boys first appear in Book Four. There the narrator comments that “Alyosha could never pass children by with indifference” (176). Alyosha speaks rather condescendingly to one of a group of boys. A poorly dressed boy throws stones at the group from across the ditch, hits Alyosha, and more stones begin to fly. Alyosha throws none but tries to shield the single boy, Ilyusha Snegiryov, who has incurred 14. My endorsement of the central vision of the novel over the next two chapters is conscious of the substantial biases found in the novel while trying to see beyond them. The novel’s religious and political chauvinism creates problems for anyone attempting to see the potential range of the argument beyond Russian culture. That the novel participates in the androcentrism of Dostoevsky’s culture is obvious; I claim that it does not affect the shape of the argument of the novel as analyzed herein. Grushenka is probably one of only two or three female “heros” in Dostoevsky’s novels. However, I agree with Paul Contino: Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism “is my biggest stumbling block when reading Dostoevsky, and I suspect I’m not alone” (Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism, 190).

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the boys’ wrath for stabbing Kolya Krasotkin while in class (Kolya is mentioned here but becomes a significant character only in Book Ten).15 Alyosha talks to him, walks away, and Ilyusha hits him with another stone. “But seeing that he did not attack him even now, the boy went wild, like a little beast: he tore from his place and threw himself at Alyosha, and before Alyosha could make a move, the wicked boy bent down, seized his left hand in both hands, and bit his middle finger badly” (179). Alyosha is perplexed: “What was it that I did, and how have I wronged you, tell me?” (180). The boy bursts into tears and runs away. Alyosha continues to the Khokhlakovs where he proposes marriage to the wheelchair-bound Lize, and she and her mother take care of his wounded finger before sending him away, apparently thinking the proposal a joke (184–5). As it turns out, Ilyusha attacked Alyosha because Alyosha’s brother Dmitri had insulted the boy’s father, the former Captain Snegiryov, in a tavern. Dmitri then dragged him into the street by his scrawny beard and calling him—and it—a “whiskbroom.” The unfortunate man had been cashiered from the army, now had no work and was left impoverished, along with “a wretched family of sick children and a wife—who, it seems, is insane” (193–4). The story is related by Katerina Ivanovna, then Dmitri’s fiancée, from whom he had stolen 3,000 rubles and whom he had also insulted. She asks Alyosha to take 200 rubles to the family. When he does so, an unpleasant scene occurs. The boy who had earlier bit him, Ilyusha Nikolaiovich Snegiryov, is there. He is quite ill. His mother bursts into tears. Her husband gently wipes them from her face. His crippled daughter berates her father for his “showing off, all your stupid antics, which never get anywhere” (203). Alyosha confesses that he has come to understand that Ilyusha had taken revenge on him for his brother Dmitri’s insult to his father, and because he was also a Karamazov. “The thing is,” the captain explains, “that after that event all the children at school began calling him whiskbroom. Schoolchildren are merciless people: separately they’re God’s angels, but together, especially in school, they’re quite often merciless” (205). Alyosha implores Snegiryov to take Katerina’s charity: No one will know of it, no unjust gossip will arise from it … here are the two hundred roubles, and, I swear, you must accept them, otherwise … otherwise it follows that everyone in the world must be enemies of each other! But there are brothers in the world, too … You have a noble soul … you must understand, you must! (209)

Snegiryov takes the bills, throws them in the sand, and stomps on them. “Report to those who sent you that the whiskbroom does not sell his honor, sir!” (212). 15. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 8, notes that the idea to devote a separate book to “The Boys” came to Dostoevsky early in 1880. “Thus, his long-time project of a ‘novel about children’ was at least partly realized.” Mary Kate Holman has helped me to see the significance of this “partially realized novel.”

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Snegiryov runs off in tears, and Alyosha picks up the bills, thinking to return them to Katerina. The gang and the family are hardly communities. Alyosha and Katerina each display condescension toward them. Neither group seems at ease with the other. Rather than coinherent communities, the gang and the family appear as collections of disparate individuals. We hear of the boys again only after over 300 pages of prose.16 The Snegiryovs have eventually accepted Katerina’s charity and are not as impoverished as they were (540). Ilyusha is now deathly ill, perhaps with tuberculosis. The boys bring him joy by visiting him. Katerina has also brought in a medical specialist who pronounces hope for the patient only if they move to Sicily—a contemptuous recommendation, as it is an obvious impossibility for the impoverished and sickly family (559–60). Kolya Krasotkin then insults the doctor and threatens him with the dog he has brought along, Perezvon. Kolya is smart, a prankster, and a rascal, whose widowed mother watched over him, got him out of scrapes, and helped him with his homework. Kolya was also arrogant; he “looked down on everyone” but was “still a good friend and not overly conceited” (515). After an incident that had terrified both him and his mother—he had daringly laid between the rails while a train passed over him—they both broke down in tears. Kolya became quieter and took in a mangy dog and taught the dog tricks. After charmingly babysitting the two neighbor children, he meets up with another boy from the rock fight, Smurov. He tells Smurov that he is a socialist: “It’s when everyone is equal, everyone has property in common, there are no marriages, and each one has whatever religion and laws he likes and all the rest. You’re not grown up enough for that yet, you’re too young” (527).17 They head off with Perezvon to the Snegiryov’s dilapidated house where Alyosha (now dressed in a good coat and hat, not a cassock) waited. They have come to visit Ilyusha. 16. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 662–7, elegantly comments on Book Ten. This and the following paragraphs are indebted to his remarks, save that I give different weight than he does to the components of the “partial novel.” 17. Joseph Frank notes that “Critics have recognized Kolya as an embryonic Ivan, through whom Dostoevsky brilliantly transposes some of the dominating motifs of his book into an adolescent register” (Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 664). Victor Terras writes, “Kolia Krasotkin is a young Ivan Karamazov, and it is not at all sure that he will not return to Rakitin’s ideas once the novelty of Alyosha’s influence has worn off ” (Karamazov Companion, 67). Of course, there is no indication of such “wearing off ” in the novel. Terras identifies Kolya as a double of Ivan’s repeatedly (see Karamazov Companion, 55, 62, 96, 104). Kolya embraces a teenage form of socialism, not from Ivan, but from the manipulative and self-absorbed Rakitin. He doubles Rakitin’s view by averring that one can love humanity without believing in God (553). Kolya doubles both Ivan and Rakitin in different aspects. The ideas he utters have an internal tension indicating his unsettled character.

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Ilyusha sees his illness as punishment from God for having imitated Smerdyakov’s “vile trick” (535) of putting a pin in a piece of bread and feeding it to his dog, Zhuchka. The dog ate it, howled, chased her tail in distress, and ran off never to be seen again. But it turns out Perezvon was similar to Zhuchka. Smurov suggests that the boys pass Perezvon off as Zhuchka when they visit Ilyusha. But Kolya responds, “Schoolboy, do not stoop to lying, first; second, not even for a good cause” (525).18 Kolya has taken the time (too much time, in Alyosha’s view) to train the dog before visiting the Snegiryovs. He brought Ilyusha the dog to bring the boy joy, not realizing that it would have a deleterious effect on Ilyusha’s compromised health (544). The boys laugh, the family rejoices, Kolya’s most vile prank is detailed, his cleverness underlined, his arrogant “book-knowledge” again demonstrated. He then has a conversation with Alyosha, trumpeting his atheism and socialism. He accuses Christianity of having “only served the rich and noble, so as to keep the lower classes in slavery” (554). Kolya accuses Alyosha of obedience and mysticism and says he needs a dose of realism. But then he recalls that Ilyusha’s crippled sister, Ninochka, had “suddenly whispered to me as I was going out: ‘Why didn’t you come before?’ And in such a voice, so reproachful! I think she’s terribly kind and pathetic” (556). Alyosha picks up the dialogue: “Yes, yes! When you’ve come more often, you’ll see what sort of being she is. It’s very good for you to get to know such beings, in order to learn to value many other things besides, which you will learn precisely from knowing these beings,” Alyosha observed warmly. “That will remake you more than anything.” “Oh, how sorry I am and how I scold myself for not coming sooner!” Kolya exclaimed with bitter feeling. “Yes, it’s a great pity. You saw for yourself what a joyful impression you made on the poor child! And how he grieved as he waited for you!” “Don’t tell me! You’re just rubbing it in! It serves me right, though: it was vanity that kept me from coming, egoistic vanity and base despotism, which I haven’t been able to get rid of all my life, though all my life I’ve been trying to break myself. I’m a scoundrel in many ways, Karamazov, I see it now.” “No, you have a lovely nature, though it’s been perverted, and I fully understand how you could have such an influence on this noble and morbidly sensitive boy!” Alyosha replied ardently. “And you say that to me!” Kolya cried, “and just imagine, I thought—several times already since I came here today—I thought you despised me! If only you know how I value your opinion! … . Oh, Karamazov, I’m profoundly unhappy. Sometimes I imagine God knows what, that everyone is laughing at me, the whole world, and then I … then I’m quite ready to destroy the whole order of things.” (556–7) 18. Contino (Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism, 174–5) comments, “Showing no awareness of his own hypocrisy, Kolya rejects the idea with Kantian hauteur … even as he cloaks his own deceit.”

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Joseph Frank calls this “a miniature conversion experience” having given “vent to all the emotions kept carefully bottle up until that moment.”19 Yet this is more than an emotional experience. Kolya is not merely expressing repressed emotion so much as he is coming to a realization of who he has been and yet does not want to be. Unlike Ivan or Rakitin, he is converted from his illusion of materialist individualism. His habitual center of energy can and does move. He realizes how good it has been to know people by caring for them and interacting with them, rather than knowing facts about them or parading his knowledge in front of them. Ivan knew all the facts. Alyosha charges Kolya to move from being an unhappy person who knows what the facts are to being a person who works at knowing people. Knowing a person is something quite different from knowing that a person is tall or right-handed or witty or crippled or legally guilty of committing a criminal act or …. The conversion is not a change in emotions but a change in Kolya’s fundamental orientation to people. He came from a good family. He had participated in the group of rock-throwing boys. Once he understood that he had trained Perezvon out of pride, he could come to realize that his delayed realization had cut him off from the community that could show him the way to become who he truly is.20 In a way, Kolya mirrors the world: as the world is a defaced icon, he is an unhappy person. His conversion is effected by being with the impoverished (but now portrayed as devoted) Snegiryov family. The final poignant inclusion of Kolya in the family circle is the culmination of that conversion experience: Ilyusha prattled on in great excitement, but, apparently unable to go on, suddenly thrust both his thin arms out and, as firmly as he could, embraced the two of them, Kolya and his papa, uniting them in one embrace and pressing himself to them. The captain suddenly began shaking all over with silent sobs, and Kolya’s lips and chin started trembling …. “Papa, don’t cry … and when I die, you get some nice boy, another one … choose from all of them, a nice one, call him Ilyusha, and love him instead of me …” “Shut up, old man, you’ll get well!” Krasotkin suddenly shouted as if he were angry. “And don’t ever forget me, papa,” Ilyusha went on, “visit my grave.” (561)

The reference to the biblical Job (Job 32:14) getting a new family in Ilyusha’s instructions to his father to find a new son is clear, but it breaks papa’s heart. He

19. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 666. Frank does not note that Alyosha articulates a key to conversion in The Brothers Karamazov: knowing those beings will remake Kolya more than anything and he will revalue what he has disdained. 20. This “delay” may “double” Ivan’s delay in visiting the prosecutor as noted in Chapter 6. Kolya, however, comes to understand his failure as Ivan did not.

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rejects such consolation:21 “I don’t want a nice boy! I don’t want another boy!’ he whispered in a wild whisper, clenching his teeth. ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my tongue cleave” (562), quoting Psalm 137.22 Kolya joins in the embrace. Unlike Ivan who finds his neighbors too near to love, Kolya is coming to learn his shortcomings and his ability to love in this very close hug. In the context of the tragedy of Ilyusha’s illness and death, love and reconciliation become realized. Neither death nor suffering is sought or glorified. But insofar as it can, the community’s members care for the suffering and remember the dead as unique and beloved friends. The embrace is an emblem of the community. At the end of the novel, the boys reappear at Ilyusha’s funeral, emotionally shaken. But Kolya is no longer the arrogant prankster. He reflects on Dmitri’s being declared guilty of murdering his father: “Thus he will perish an innocent victim for the truth!” exclaimed Kolya. “But though he perish, he is happy! I am ready to envy him!” “What do you mean? How can you be? And why?” exclaimed the surprised Alyosha. “Oh, if only I, too, could some day offer myself as a sacrifice for truth!” Kolya said with enthusiasm. “But not for such a cause, not with such disgrace, not with such horror!” said Alyosha. “Of course … I should like to die for all mankind, and as for disgrace, it makes no difference; let our names perish, I respect your brother!” (768–9)

Kolya has thus come to double Alyosha whose life is an “imitation of Christ.”23 So Kolya comes to exhibit in his own life themes from Christ’s. Kolya has become involved with the boys, the Snegiryovs, and Alyosha. He has embraced a loving and suffering community. This embrace has transformed him. He no longer doubles Ivan/Rakitin but becomes part of a community that 21. This an entirely appropriate response to the Epilogue of Book of Job. See my The Evils of Theodicy, 89–112, chapter four, “Considering Job: Does Job Fear God for Naught?” 22. Frank (Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 667) notes the Job reference. He underlines the significance of this response by quoting a letter Dostoevsky had written on the death of his two-month-old daughter in 1868: “And now they tell me in consolation that I will have other children. But where is Sofya? Where is that little individual for whom, I dare to say, I would have accepted crucifixion so that she might live?” Kolya later expresses a similar sentiment about Ilyusha (773). 23. Thompson, The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory explores this with regard to Markel, Zosima, and Alyosha (at 250), Dmitri (275–80). Scanlan (Dostoevsky the Thinker, 116) comments, “Being Christlike as the moral ideal requires suffering for all. If hell is the suffering of being unable to love anyone, suffering for the love of all is its consummate defeat.”

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is to keep Ilyusha’s memory alive—in reference to the Orthodox funeral liturgy, the phrase “memory eternal” is pronounced four times in this final scene of the novel. Being part of the community may not keep them from doing great evil. “ ‘Perhaps,’ Alyosha says, ‘we will even become wicked later on, … will laugh at people’s tears and at those who say, as Kolya exclaimed today: “I want to suffer for all people”…’ ” (774). This “partial novel” displays “the interaction between an idealistic Christian character and a group of children.”24 Konstantin G. Isupov develops the significance of children for Dostoevsky: In Dostoevsky’s child, the sanction of the salvational presence comes into its own in a world thoroughly contaminated by falsehood. It is his conviction that if mankind is to be saved, it must be a mankind of children, and the convocation of souls in salvation not an orgy of adults by a Convocation of Children and a “child’s church.” (M. Bakhtin)25

Alyosha and the boys who remember Ilyusha form a community of care, memory, and hope, keys for an enduring community of solidarity. This convocation of a child’s church is an emblem of the ideal social vision in The Brothers Karamazov. It portrays a community that “converts” people like Kolya who come to accept the embrace of a community and to return the embrace by caring for the community in life by alleviating members’ suffering and in death by keeping memory and hope alive. This is sobornost’, which I explore in Chapter 8.

Dmitri’s Trial Dmitri’s trial is a carnival.26 Visiting lawyers, cosmopolitan tourists, and local townspeople overstuff the courtroom. Brian Conlon portrays the atmosphere well: The women want Dmitri acquitted because of his amorous reputation, the men want him to be convicted for the same reason, and the lawyers want to see a show of legal tactics. No one in the crowd is concerned about whether Dmitri actually committed the crime and the moral ramifications of his conviction or acquittal. The crowd is there to enjoy the drama of it all, to see the hero (in the case of the women) exonerated, or the villain (in the case of the men) denounced, while 24. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 662. 25. Konstantin G. Isupov, “Dostoevsky’s Transcendental Esthetic,” Russian Studies in Philosophy 50/3 (Winter 2011–12), 81–2. I have not been able to trace this Bakhtin reference. 26. See Terras, Karamazov Companion, 399, n. 3; 400, n. 5; 409, n. 101. Conlon (“Dostoevsky v. The Judicial Reforms of 1864,” 48–9) borrows extensively from Bakhtin on the understanding of how “carnival” functions as a literary genre based in Menippean satire.

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the lawyers are simply there for the technical mastery of the actors (lawyers). Whether the court reaches the correct outcome, either morally or legally, is wholly irrelevant.27

The description of the facial demeanors and clothing of those in the crowd contributes to the impression that this is a trial “out of control, a comedy of errors, a public space where the controlling power of the judge and jury are subverted by the outbursts of the witnesses and the defendant.”28 But the outbursts are not the only farcical element in the trial. Dmitri’s defense attorney does not refute the testimony of damaging witnesses. He only succeeds in “morally tainting each one of them” (670). Three medical experts analyze Dmitri’s psychology using one observation, that Dmitri “kept his eyes straight in front of him” (671). Dr. Herzenstube, the local, often bewildered, German doctor, testifies that Dmitri is mentally abnormal. The Moscow doctor agrees about the abnormality but finds it in Dmitri’s failure to look at his defense attorney. Dr. Varvinsky pronounces him normal just because he looked straight ahead. Katerina Ivanovna testifies both in favor of and in condemnation of Dmitri. The lawyers explain the same evidence and differ wildly. The defense lawyer pleads Dmitri’s innocence but from his speech suggests they vote to acquit Dmitri even if Dmitri’s is a parricide, as Fyodor deserved to be murdered! (747). Grigory misstates facts, Katerina Ivanovna introduces a damning letter written earlier by a drunken Dmitri in quite different circumstances, and Herzenstube tells a mawkish story about giving Dmitri a pound of nuts (674–5). Even the deranged Ivan blurts out the truth that this trial is a “circus” (686). The lawyers are the stars of the show. Their rhetoric extends for hours and completely loses sight of the goal: to find out the facts about the murder and thus to obtain a correct legal judgment.29 Of course, the reader knows that Dmitri is innocent, that the servant Grigory has offered mistaken testimony, and that both Ivan and Dmitri may be “morally” guilty of the murder in that they, at least at 27. Conlon, “Dostoevsky v. The Judicial Reforms of 1864,” 49–50. 28. Conlon, “Dostoevsky v. The Judicial Reforms of 1864,” 50–1. 29. Frank (Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 691) astutely notes that in Ippolit Kirillovich’s speech of summation, he charges Alyosha with blaming all the evils of Russia on European Enlightenment rather than Russians relying on their own native soil, and with engaging in “dark mysticism on the moral side, and witless chauvinism on the civic side” (697)—both claims that liberal opponents had made against Dostoevsky. The novel, of course, is an argument against these charges, but clearly the author allows for the arguments against his own views to have their place in his fictional world. Frank also notes that the defense lawyer, Fetyukovich, made “the same argument against unconditional filial love, based only on faith, that Ivan had made against a God-Father who incomprehensibly permits the undeserved suffering of His children” in arguing that the crime is not parricide (695). This connection to an element of Ivan’s approach to the legal issues is a clue that there is a parallel between Ivan’s understanding and the court’s, discussed later in the text.

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times, had wanted Fyodor dead, said so, and thus inspired Smerdyakov. But these facts are not part of the matter of the trial. Brian Conlon’s summation is clear. He begins by quoting Dmitri’s final words: “I did not kill him. I erred, but I loved the good … My thanks to the prosecutor, he said much about me that I did not know, but it is not true that I killed my father … My thanks also to the defense attorney, I wept listening to him, but it is not true that I killed my father, there was no need even to suppose it!” Dmitri’s simple honesty reveals a great deal about the lawyer’s speeches. Both speeches end up assuming Dmitri killed his father by presenting different “psychological novels” of the characters, based on the evidence presented in the case and assumptions about the character’s behavior. Where they differ is that the prosecutor argues that parricide should be punished, while Fetyukovich argues, through deceptive logical loops, that it should not be. For Dostoevsky, both lawyers far overstep their bounds as advocates for their own personal aggrandizement and lose sight of the truth and morality which characterize Dmitri’s final words.30

The peasants stand on their own. Based on the evidence, however flawed it may be, and not the lawyers’ speeches, however brilliant they may be, the peasants declare Dmitri guilty of a murder he did not commit. So much for idealizing the wisdom of the peasants in the novel—they prove unreliable when put to the test in the carnival of the trial.

Preliminary Conclusion The Brothers Karamazov has a distinctive social vision. Dmitri’s trial shows that this vision is not a political vision, for political structures are not the basis of a real community. Nor is it a fundamentally economic vision. The exchanges of money and property in the novel are not the basis for social reality but rather incidents that move the plot along and create riddles about the relationships among people. Fundamentally, the “communitarian anthropology” of the novel is the center of its social vision. Each person becomes more fully human through relationships, whether inherited, given, chosen, or fallen into. Ralph Wood’s comments about the kind of freedom Dostoevsky recognizes are on target.31 The fable of the onion inveighs against individualism. The mirrorings and doublings weave a network of relationships among the novel’s diverse characters. Sometimes the doubling is rigid (Ivan and Smerdyakov, for example), at other times shifting (Dmitri and most of the converted characters). The town is 30. Conlon, “Dostoevsky v. The Judicial Reforms of 1864,” 58; compare Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 693. 31. See pp. 96–8 above.

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the primary location for interactions, a pluralistic environment that can stand for the national and global environments. The social location of the novel participates in, and even exemplifies, the polyphony of the novel. The novella of the boys shows both that the true community is one that attracts the free commitment of members, freeing Kolya to become his true self, and involves not only the acceptance of suffering (even the suffering of a child like Ilyusha) but also the attempts, like Kolya’s clumsy introduction of the dog, to care for it even when there is no cure for that suffering. This social vision is a profoundly religious vision—the theme I explore in Chapter 8.

Chapter 8 S OB OR N O ST ’ I N T H E B R OT H E R S K A R A M A ZOV

Sobornost’ is a Russian Orthodox understanding of what human life under God should be. In this book’s introduction, I gave a brief definition of the term, and in the conclusion of Chapter 4 I discussed sobornost’ in a general way. This chapter will present a more detailed analysis, showing that the social vision of The Brothers Karamazov offers a particular understanding and application of the spirit of sobornost’, including some borrowing from both the Slavophiles’ views and Vladimir Soloviev’s ideas. The novel provides a distinctive vision. But since a novel is not a treatise or a tract, it does not state what the concept of sobornost’ means, but shows what it means in the world created in the novel. It moves sobornost’ from the conceptual realm and brings it to life in the Karamazov world. Dostoeveky offers a dialectical argument for an anthropology rooted in a coinherent community and against the sufficiency of a political-legal structure to ground and sustain it. For the Slavophiles, the term was based in the Old Slavonic translation of “katholikos” in the Nicene creed as sobornyi. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware holds that the basic sense of sobornost’ “is sufficiently clear. It means togetherness, integral unity, the organic gathering of the ‘many’ into ‘one’ … a free, mysticalontological union of those who, though they differ in personal qualities and individual being, are nevertheless one in the Spirit of Love.”1 Andrew Louth, on the other hand, opines that Aleksei Khomiakov’s notion of sobornost’ reflects “(his idealized view of) the Russian village; nothing much is added in the notion in its application in the Church.”2 However, this is not Dostoevsky’s understanding. The town in The Brothers Karamazov is more diverse, less idealized, less patriarchal, 1. Kallistos Ware “Afterword,” Correlating Sobornost, 336–7, citing Vladimir Ilyin, “The Nature and the Meaning of the Term ‘sobornost’,” Sobornost 1 (1935), 5. He takes his epigraph from Alexei Khomiakov: “The Church is one. Her unity follows of necessity from the unity of God; for the Church is not a multitude of persons in their separate individuality, but a unity of the grace of God.” Ware also notes that Orthodox thinkers have begun to expand the notion of sobornost’ to the social world and the natural world, perhaps anticipated in Alyosha’s embracing the earth in his conversion scene (338); Ware attributes this view to Ashley John Moyse, one of the editors of the volume. 2. Andrew Louth, “The Experience of Exile and the Discovery of Sobornost’,” Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 16/1–2 (2015): 82.

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and perhaps less agricultural than an idealized Russian village. It is the polyphonic location in which the spirit of sobornost’ can be (but may not be) realized. For Soloviev, the theological concept of sobornost’ seems to have become explicitly eschatological: “If the faith communicated by the Church to Christian humanity is a living faith, and if the grace of the sacraments is an effectual grace, the resultant union of the divine and the human cannot be limited to the special domain of religion, but must extend to all Man’s common relationships and must regenerate and transform his social and political life.”3 When viewed in this light, we can offer the interpretation that the novel may project a hope for the future, but it is situated in the present and can make no explicit predictions about what was to come after the story was finished. The novel does not clearly come down on one side or the other in the Orthodox dispute about whether sobornost’ is to be found in the Church, whether present or future, or to be the divine basis of a yet-unrealized goal of society.4 As a theological notion, sobornost’ is rooted in the Trinity’s “energies” in the world. The Trinity is the original and unique instance of unity in relationship. However, the Trinity, the intentional object of Christian faith, cannot be a character in a novel. Moreover, the “ontological” and the “divine” are beyond the terrestrial realm of the novel. The author can narrate its characters’ experiences of the divine, but not their “mystical-ontological” union with the divine. A reader can infer such a union from the narrated events, for example, from Alyosha’s vision in “Cana of Galilee,” but the novel does not and cannot assert the ontological status of such union. The Brothers Karamazov is not at odds with Orthodox belief. It does not deny Orthodox theology, but it cannot fully express an Orthodox theological vision in its fictional genre. Moreover, limiting the novel to particular places in this world also makes sense if Dostoevsky intended it to be read even by his atheist and anarchist opponents. Rubbing the readers’ noses in “mysticism” or an involved divinity or an explicit Slavophile understanding of “community” would not be helpful in either keeping his audience as large as possible or constructing a viable argument against those opponents.5 The novel’s approach offers a fundamentally anthropological argument: “What does it mean to be fully human?” Its performative argument is that community is the cradle in which persons develop individuality. As a social vision, The Brothers Karamazov includes political elements and presumes economic one, but it neither promotes a “political theology” nor endorses (or directly critiques) Russian 3. Vladimir Soloviev, Russia and the Universal Church, trans. Herbert Bles (London: Geoffrey Bles/The Centenary Press, 1948), 10. 4. For this debate, see Paul Valliere, “Conciliar Fellowship of the Church in Karl Barth,” 7–10. 5. See my “Fragility of Grace in the Karamazov World and Ours,” 838, n. 30. And, to be effective as an argument, the novel must include showing the problems in Ivan’s materialist reason; see Jackson, “Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone,” 243.

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“primitive socialism.” The financial transactions in the novel have no defining pattern, but they do serve as plot catalysts. Some scholars see a positive link between Soloviev’s “free theocracy” rooted in the love of God and Dostoevsky’s political views,6 while others see a disjunction.7 The chapters devoted to Dmitri’s trial for parricide show that the new Russian legal system was not an ingredient in the coinherent community valorized in The Brothers Karamazov. Political-legal structures are merely procedural, not substantial, and thus are unable to support a substantial vision of community. To think otherwise is to conflate substantial justice with procedural fairness. When Zosima sends Alyosha out into the world, it is not from a place where the ideal is already realized but to a place where it can be realized. Alyosha, the Snegiryovs, and the boys form a community that exemplifies in embryonic form the spirit of sobornost’ not in the monastery, but in the world. The Brothers Karamazov argues dialectically for a communitarian anthropology and against both a secular individualistic view of human nature and its polar opposite: humanity as an anthill. The argument is that sobornost’ is the realizable ideal of the human community, not merely of the monastic community. Indeed, that ideal is potentially present in an interactive human community.

The Tale of the Onion as Figuring Sobornost’ In the Chapter 7, I claimed that Grushenka’s tale limns the shape of the social vision of the novel. What does this mean for analyzing the novel’s vision of sobornost’? The novel envisions society as formed by members who “ ‘coinhere’ in one another,” whereas “liberal democratic society is founded on the sovereignty of the individual, and social relations represent only an external coincidence of individual interests.”8 The envisioned “coinherence” is essential for human flourishing, not 6. Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 112–44; this chapter on “Theocracy” is single-mindedly devoted to showing a basic identity of their social and political views despite Soloviev’s criticism of Dostoevsky’s “prejudices” (144); also see Paul Valliere, “Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900): Commentary,” in The Teachings of Modern Orthodox Christianity on Law, Politics, and Human Nature, ed. John Witte Jr. and Frank S. Alexander (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 33–105, at 37–8. 7. For example, S. Elayne Allen, “Dostoevsky, Soloviev, and the Problem of Theocracy in The Brothers Karamazov” (2017 honors thesis directed by Ralph Wood) argues that “The Grand Inquisitor” is a critique of Soloviev’s “free theocracy” articulated by Ivan Karamazov in Book Two, Chapter Five; https://bay​lor-ir.tdl.org/bitstr​eam/han​dle/2104/9968/susan_​ alle​n1_h​onor​sthe​sis.pdf. However, I find it more likely that Ivan’s “Grand Inquisitor” is not so much a critique as it is a warning about the dangers of authoritarianism that can be masked by a pious cover story told by authoritarian leaders to a community trying to incarnate sobornost’ or an analogous social vision. 8. Nathaniel Wood, “  ‘Sobornost,’ State Authority and Christian Society in Slavophile Political Theology,” in Religion, Authority and the State: From Constantine

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accidental or superficial. The people in the lake form an array of the damned. Had the individual woman realized that her life is not fully her own, but deeply and existentially related to others’ lives, then she could have carried them with her and the angel could have drawn all of them out of the lake of fire and into paradise. But she rebelled against the other lost souls out of fear that the weight of the others would break her onion. She refused to be guilty before/responsible to all of them. She wanted to hold on to an onion that she had given away as if it were still hers and hers alone. The “as if hers alone” is catastrophically revealed as an illusion. She thus forfeits this chance for paradise for herself and all the lake dwellers. Her fear cancels out the possibility of the love that is the substance of community. If they are a pseudo-community of rebellious individualists, perhaps any one of them would have kicked off the others. Perhaps their grabbing on to the woman was not solidaristic but selfish. Nonetheless, the point is that the failure to live in a coinherent community in the spirit of sobornost’ is to live in and live out a tragedy. If being individualists results in tragedy, then this is another piece of the argument against autonomous individualism, whether Ivan’s materialism or Rakitin’s selfabsorption. The novel strongly impels us to imagine humanity otherwise. What are the implications of this understanding? First, this social vision portrays the unity between “practical reason and small acts of goodness”9 as constituents of Orthodox Christian faith in particular and coinherent communities in general. Faith is not the expression of irrational belief, but of a relationship to one’s center of value and source of meaning. The community of coinherent people is not the center of one’s faith, but the carrier one’s faith tradition: it is the community that cares, remembers, and hopes. In these practices, the members come to know how to live in and live out their faith in the world. Communities without a “harsh and fearful love” would be a collection of unrelated monads or a collectivity of ants— the opponents that the novel’s argument envisions. The authentic earthly community must mediate and make visible the intentional object of its faith, God, who has brought it into being.10 The social vision of the to the Contemporary World, ed. Leo Lefebure (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 179. Although applied to the Slavophiles’ incipient political theology, it fits The Brothers Karamazov as well. Emmanuel Levinas seems to share this vision even as a non-Christian; see Alain Toumayan, “I More Than the Others.” While not fully germane to the issues discussed here, Wood’s mobilization of sobornost’ to illumine some current understandings of political theology is an important contribution. 9. See Chapter 7 (n. 12) for Gary Morson’s far more dismissive view. 10. The novel particularly envisions its hope to be realized in an Orthodox Christian context. This does not imply that other religious visions are offtrack; “analogous formulations” may well be found beyond Christianity. Other living faith traditions also form authentic communities but identify the intentional object of their faith differently. Christian communities have gone, are going, and will go in inauthentic directions too, especially if their understanding of what constitutes a coinherent community is narrow.

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novel sees the world as an icon. As such, not only the church but also the world are vehicles for divine grace. In a theological vein, the problem is that individualism and collectivism are anti-iconic, obstructing the vision of the divine light suffusing the world even in and through its miseries. Even the tale of the onion can be seen as an icon, revealing how one should respond to the divine. Second, the community makes it possible for persons to develop their individuality and their freedom. Persons in community learn and teach moral and religious practices.11 Morality and spirituality are neither motives for, causes of, nor results of each other. They are constituents of a faith, part of an integral whole. One’s individuality consists, in part, in the way in which one participates in—or abstains from—those practices. Unlike those who dwell in the anthill of determinism and do not develop freedom, or those individual monads who are essentially unrelated to each other, each person can and should develop freedom in learning how to become oneself in practice in the context of the coinherent community. Neither free will nor freedom is rooted in the individual as a right.12 Free will is the ability to act in novel ways.13 To act freely may well be an intrinsic human right, but it can only be realized as one learns how to make choices well. But with authentic freedom comes the possibility of “bad acts.” If those actions are bad, one risks harming, perhaps even destroying, the community. If one’s actions are good, then even if they do not conform to traditional ways, they benefit the community. True freedom—both “positive” and “negative”—is learned in and from obedience. This obedience is neither the mindless obedience that the Grand Inquisitor wants nor obedience only to oneself and one’s desires. True obedience is gracious and mindful. It leads one to be able to be the best of whatever one can be. It learns in and through love how to be truly free. But one learns how to love in community. One can develop the freedom to become oneself only in community. 11. This is not to deny that such communities can go awry in what they teach their members. The sad proliferation of intolerant religious communities filled with hatred for outsiders exemplifies one form of religious superstition not explored in the novel. Oppressive communities are another danger not much envisioned in the novel. 12. This may seem at odds with the mindset of liberal democracy. But even such a document of the Enlightenment as the US Declaration of Independence does not finally root freedom and rights in the individual but in the Creator. The Declaration can be taken “individualistically,” as many do. But one can also see it as rooted ultimately in God and proximately in the human race God has endowed with these rights as well as with the freedom to exercise them and have them respected. A person does have human rights, but generations of argument have not shown any consensus on the source of those rights. 13. All too often, debates about free will focus so intensely on freedom from constraint (negative freedom) that they ignore the freedom to act (positive freedom). This formulation is intended to recognize the focal acts of “free will,” that is, acting in unprecedented, unpredictable ways, thus avoiding the endless debates about libertarian and compatibilist views of freedom.

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To deny the community is finally to deny oneself and the freedom to be one’s best self—as Ivan’s returning his ticket showed, in contrast with Alyosha’s obedience to Father Zosima.14 Obedience to God in this understanding is not subservience to authorities or assertion of autonomy, but is the way to true freedom. God wants the best for each and every person. Of course, obedience has been and often is taken to be submission to authorities and thus incompatible with freedom. Whether the tyranny is religious or political, tyrannies portray freedom and obedience as antithetical. In the Grand Inquisitor’s anthill, there is pure obedience. In Ivan’s and Rakitin’s materialisms, there seems to be unbridled freedom. The argument that is performed in the novel shows that these antitheses are illusions and symptoms of warped views of authentic community and individuality and of freedom and authority. The practice of obedience to the One who desires all the best for each and all is the root of true freedom and authentic personhood in solidarity. Third, this approach has profound anthropological implications. In The Brothers Karamazov, the community is not constructed by individuals entering into a social contract but is the shared common ground from which each person’s individuality and ability to act freely develop. Individual choices and actions are not the most fundamental thing. Relationships are. Early on in the novel, Father Zosima has counseled Mme. Khokhlakov not to be frightened merely by “her own bad acts.” These are not the key issue. Rather, the person who seeks to live truthfully, to avoid lies, overcome fear and despair, is heading in the right direction. Zosima goes on to note that the key is active love that requires “labor and perseverance” (58). The woman in the lake did not merely perform one bad act. In fact, she performed only one good act—giving the onion. She failed to be in communion with her fellow sufferers when the angel tried to rescue her. In effect, grasping the onion the angel offered to her as her onion eclipsed her one good act. In so doing she rejected sobornost’. The novel does not focus on avoiding sin, but on acting with and for others. To put it simply, love is logically prior to deeds, evil or good, but expressed in and through good deeds. Thus, the novel highlights a contrast between the Orthodox and some Western Christian anthropology. The issue is whether sin or grace is effectively prior. The Orthodox world is one of grace, an icon that is stained, even fractured, by sin. In contrast, in some forms of Western Christianity, anthropologically speaking, human sin is effectively prior to saving grace. Humanity threw away grace in the sin of Adam and only divine intervention can save anything out of the damned mess. In other forms of Western Christianity, grace is never entirely “lost” but requires gracious cooperation with freely given and ubiquitous divine grace. The 14. Of course, authority figures can become tyrannical and destructive to the community. Perhaps the best obedience to God is disobedience or resistance to these types of authorities. While Christians outside of Orthodoxy may not have “monastic elders” to follow, every spiritual community has its wisdom figures whom one should follow (although discerning those who have true wisdom from those with mere cleverness is not always easy).

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novel’s view of sobornost’ is in tension with some, but not all, Western Christian understandings of the human person.15 The social vision of The Brothers Karamazov symbolized in the folk tale of the onion is not unparalleled. Andrew Louth cites Andrzej Walicki seeing Slavophilism as “an interesting variant of European conservative romanticism.”16 However, the basic insight that a person’s life is deeply and existentially emergent from a community is not unique to European conservative romanticism. This basic insight is reflected, for example, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” It is extended in the concept of the “community of creation” that rejects human dominion over nature and focuses on the community of all life on the earth.17 The novel argues that to be realistic, we must realize that we are together in this world.18 Moreover, the coinherent community portrayed in The Brothers Karamazov is not monochromatic, as conservative romantic visions tend to be, but polyphonic. Dostoevsky’s image of the community requires limited negative freedom in the service of the kind of wise obedience that leads to the key positive freedom, the ability to become oneself. Rebellion against the coinherent community rejects the created source of that freedom and leaves the individual adrift, relying on her or his own inadequate understandings and practices no longer empowered by the practices learned in community. Yet perhaps even the rebellious and the wicked may be included in that community, if only once they gave an onion and if they can give and receive onions again. 15. But not all. As noted earlier in Chapter 4 (n. 35), the great Orthodox theologian Gregory Palamas (1296–1369) has a theology of grace rather congruent with that of the late Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner. For both Palamas and Rahner, grace is never earned, but a free gift of God’s very self. As with the Orthodox, Rahner sees this world as a world of grace, but blighted by sin. Rahner’s anthropology, with its focus on the priority of grace, is thus closer to the Orthodox view than some other Western Christian theological anthropologies. 16. Louth, “The Experience of Exile,” 280. 17. See, for example, Elizabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 267–86, which lays out this vision in some detail. One might see Alyosha’s “watering [the earth] with his tears,” embracing it, and vowing “ecstatically to love it” (362), the climax of his conversion experience, to foreshadow a version of sobornost’ that encompasses the whole creation in a coinherent community. 18. This claim should be obvious in the variety of responses in the United States to the Covid-19 pandemic that began at the end of 2019 and continues as I write. The vision of a coinherent community realizes that each and all have social responsibilities as well as shared freedom. Those who behaved individualistically and irresponsibly during that pandemic refused to take responsibility for each other and consequently fueled the spread of the virus. Theirs is one individualistic version of that “liberal, democratic” view of society that destroys the very society that concocted it.

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Skotoprigonyevsk and Sobornost’ If one focuses on Dostoevsky’s choice to place his novel’s characters in “cattleroundup-ville,” one might be tempted to construe the monastery is an imperfect realization of the supernatural configuration of sobornost’, and Fyodor’s house as the worldly portal into the eternal lake of fire. This would be mistaken. Neither is the monastery perfectly good, nor Fyodor’s house fully evil, for nothing and no one in this world is perfectly good or evil. As Avril Pyman notes, the image of sobornost’ includes voices who disagree, as Ivan and Alyosha do.19 Pyman avers that the polyphony in The Brothers Karamazov is unresolved—the shape of the coinherent community is not a given. How, if at all, these places are and are to be related is unresolved, both in the world of the novel and in the real world. Yet in some way they must be located in one “polyphonic community.” The setting of the novel reinforces Pyman’s insight. Both monastery and Fyodor’s house are in the same town. Russia includes and knows the town. The town is a microcosm that reflects and refracts the macrocosm of the world. The town may be on the way to becoming a polyphonic and coinherent community, but that is beyond the purview of the novel. And the town—or the nation or the world—may never come to be realized as a true community. The setting suggests two possible futures. One is that the town will become a pluralistic coinherent community. The citizens in the town (or Russia or the world) will live responsibly with and for all despite whatever differences they have. They will realize their relatedness, their shared humanity, and even celebrate their differences. People may have bemused tolerance for the Fyodors of the town, appreciate the challenges of the Ivans, make efforts to overcome the manipulations of the Rakitins, and invite the Ivans, Kolyas, Dmitris, and Grushenkas to accept the ticket. Some of these “misfits” have embraced that “harsh and fearful love” so that the others would not be outcast, but rather would be recognized and treated as members of the community, people who shape and are shaped by their relationships in the community, even if they continue to revel in Fyodor’s house and Mokroye or even rebel against the relationships that shape them. The other possible future is that the town will splinter into individual manipulators, sensualists, or other “irrationalists” who tear each other down and live only foolish, shallow, selfish lives—held together, if at all, only by a political apparatus that constrains them and distorts their freedom.20 However, the truth about the future cannot be known in the present time of the novel. We cannot know whether either the town or our world can and will be pervaded by the spirit of sobornost’, for the town or our world is now and/or will be a fissured pseudo-community of competing interests. Nevertheless, the novel argues for the ideal of a coinherent community and against 19. Avril Pyman, “Dostoevsky in the Prism of the Orthodox Semiosphere,” Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition, 111–13. 20. The possibilities for understanding the relationships between politics and society are explored in the next section, “No Crime, but Punishment.”

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individualism by showing the lived implications for accepting the splintering of individualism. Mikhail Bakhtin has offered this key insight about the voices in the novel: “A plurality of voices, after all, is not meant to be eliminated in [Dostoevsky’s] works but in fact is meant to triumph.”21 So, too, with regard to the locations in Skotoprigonyevsk: a plurality of places is meant to triumph in a single location that can (and perhaps will) incarnate sobornost’. Bakhtin also claims, “The social and religious utopia inherent in his ideological views did not swallow up or dissolve in itself his objectively artistic vision.”22 But pace Bakhtin, it is precisely Dostoevsky’s artistic vision that shows that the social and religious vision of sobornost’ in The Brothers Karamazov is neither “utopic” nor homogenous, but can be found even in a crude town that harbors multiple locations, all of which are still fluid and in process, none of which are finished and static. The novel’s polyphonic vision is open-ended: the novel does not show which types of character or patterns of life, if any, will finally determine the social milieu of the town. If we take time and place seriously, the whole town of Skotoprigonyevsk, not any particular cultural-geographic location in it, foreshadows what the complex, polyphonic social vision of the novel and of sobornost’ might look like. It does not portray the ultimate goal, union with the divine in theosis, when God will be all in all and all will be in God—as noted earlier, God cannot be a character in a novel exploring the ways of living in this world. This is not some ultimate harmony that Ivan imagines as overcoming evils. Evils cannot, must not, be erased. Rather, it is the realization that all-there-is can show forth the divine for those who know how to see with care and to act so as to realize in this world the divine reality of sobornost’. The Brothers Karamazov cannot show what the ultimate shape of the town will be.23 If sobornost’ is realized in a community of love, then its members witness effectively to the rest of the town the wisdom of living in and living out such a community. The dozen children of the town and Alyosha form a fragile, nascent community that contains a preview of that ideal. But the novel does not attempt to delineate that ideal’s definitive shape. To give witness in word and in deed is a communicative act. With such witness, the community tells and shows what joyful communion with each other in God truly is, and by such gracious witness seeks to bring about a pluralistic yet coinherent community. Of course, such a community has no coercive power, for a coercive church is no real church at all in either Slavophilic or Soloviev’s forms 21. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 204. 22. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 250. 23. Nathaniel Wood notes that Soloviev (and later Sergei Bulgakov) had to “find a way to affirm the fundamental insights of the [Slavophile] experiment—ecclesial sobornost’ and its incompatibility with coercive authority—without leading the Church away from concrete engagement with state politics that was required to transform the present order” (“Sobornost’, State Authority, and Christian Society,” 196).

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of Orthodox theologies. The coinherent community may indeed be overwhelmed by alien forces. If the earthly paradise is to be found anywhere, it will be found someday in Skotoprigonyevsk. But the community may become as corrupted as the Grand Inquisitor’s imagined Catholicism or as individualized as the Protestantism imagined by the Slavophiles. The implications of this indeterminism will be developed in Chapter 9.

Mirroring and Doubling: Unexpected Links and Contrasts These mirrorings suggest that the patterns of doubling and mirroring are not only “structural devices,” as Terras calls them,24 but they are also ways of showing the influence of families and communities on their members, as well as reinforcing the ways to understand sobornost’ in the novel. For example, as Chapter 7 showed, realists are found in taverns, women’s houses, making peace, settling boyish battles, living in the monastery, visiting the oppressed, even living for a time in a seeming house of sin. Hence, realism is not practiced in only one location in this fictional town but can be found anywhere that people live in and live out that harsh and fearful love. Of course, nonrealist ways can also be found everywhere— that is reflected in the fact that superstition in the monastery is mirrored in the sensualism in Fyodor’s house. And insofar as Rakitin doubles Ivan, materialism can be found in multiple locales as well. First, the doublings and mirrorings are not merely a plot device. Dostoevsky certainly expands the understanding of the types of people he portrays by expanding the main exemplars with the words and deeds of others. The Karamazov sons, mostly rejected by their father, have difficult relationships with him. As they grew up apart from him, of course they are affected by other people, new circumstances, and new places they inhabit. These varying circumstances of living with relatives shapes each son differently. Eventually, Alyosha moves to the monastery as a novice, but does not condemn his father. As the narrator puts it very early in the novel: There was something in him that told one, that convinced one (and it was so all his life afterwards) that he did not want to be a judge of men, that he would not take judgment upon himself and would not condemn anyone for anything. It seemed, even, that he accepted everything without the least condemnation, though often with deep sadness. Moreover, in this sense he even went so far that no one could either surprise or frighten him, and this even in his very early youth. Coming to his father in his twentieth year, precisely into that den of dirty iniquity, he, chaste and pure, would simply retire quietly when it was unbearable to watch, yet without the least expression of contempt or condemnation of anyone at all. (19) 24. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 104.

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Yet he then centers his life in a new “family,” the monastic community. He has moved away from a house that cultivates sin to a house devoted to holiness— while staying in the same town. The promise of holiness and the prospect of becoming Zosima’s disciple attracted him to move into the monastic community. The doublings and mirrorings show that a particular community in a particular location does not produce or include only one type of person or aspiration. Second, following William W. Rowe, Terras notes the possibility of “triplicity” in the novel as well. In his discussion of “mirroring and doubling,” Terras notes that Dostoevsky’s three Karamazov brothers may correspond to Soloviev’s “three hypostases of being: spirit, intellect, and soul.”25 This speculation about the genesis of the characters could be part of the story. Dmitri (for the first eight books) is a figure of spirit; Ivan seems a paragon of intellect (but if so, a very flawed one, as Chapters 5 and 6 argued); Alyosha is a religious soul (but also a realist). Yet these human characters are so clearly mixtures of varying inclinations that they would be rather flawed instantiations of Soloviev’s hypostases. And where would the halfbrother, Smerdyakov, fit? The spirit of sobornost’ is an icon of the Trinity, even a sort of hypostatic union of divine and human.26 In this sense, the triune motifs may indeed echo the presence of the Triune God. Terras notes, “The notebooks to The Brothers Karamazov suggest that Dostoevsky conceived Dmitri’s epiphany at Mokroe as a parallel to ‘Cana of Galilee’ … and Ivan has his black epiphany with the devil.”27 Terras notes that Konstantin Mochulsky “draws attention to the parallelism in Books Nine and Eleven: Ivan’s three conversations with Smerdyakov parallel Dmitry’s three trials. It is not difficult to show that in Book Seven, Aliosha is likewise subjected to three trials: by Father Ferapont and his followers, by Rakitin and by Grushenka.”28 Another tripling can be seen in the contrast between an authentic religious understanding of “miracle, mystery, and authority” mirrored in a debased way by the Grand Inquisitor into “magic, mystification, and tyranny.”29 The “Legend of the

25. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 107. He cites Soloviev, Sixth and Seventh Discourses on Godmanhood from his Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3. He also cites other examples of “triplicity” from Rowe. 26. As seen in “Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” I.2 (2000), https://old.mos​pat.ru/en/docume​nts/soc​ial-conce​pts/. This supports both the Trinitarian and Christological analyses of the novel’s vision noted in the introduction as congruent. 27. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 107; Connolly, “Dostoevskij’s Guide to Spiritual Epiphany” makes a similar point. 28. Terras, Karamazov Companion, 107, citing K. Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 607. I am not persuaded that Alyosha’s interactions mentioned here are trials parallel to Ivan’s or Dmitri’s, as the encounters differ markedly. 29. As noted in Chapter 6, after Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871– 1881, 614.

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Grand Inquisitor” clearly reflects the Slavophilic critique of the Roman Catholic Church. However, to posit some of these examples as iconic of the Trinity seems to be stretching things. For instance, the kinds of trials are quite different, and the “trial” with Grushenka and Alyosha has profoundly different results from Ivan’s or Dmitri’s trials. Ivan’s encounter with his devil may be some kind of epiphany, but it is not a conversion experience that produces good fruits. Rather, it is an episode that is in continuity with Ivan’s “Euclidean mind” that seems to reach for something “more” that his own materialistic philosophy puts out of reach. The encounter—whether with the devil as real or with the devil as constructed in Ivan’s mind—contributes strongly to Ivan going insane. More plausible are the parallels in Books Nine (Dmitri’s torments) and Eleven (Ivan’s visits to Smerdyakov). Nonetheless, at least some of these envisioned “triplings” the novel’s presentation of sobornost’ as the spirit of a society united with and rooted in the community of love that is the Triune God. David S. Cunningham has underlined the Trinitarian root of the vision of the community: “Even the most debased, ‘black smeared’ characters point us back to the perfect communion of the inner life of God: the communion that informs and underwrites our common bond of humanity, and the communion in which even we ‘great sinners’ are called to participate.”30 Cunningham notes that Dostoevsky is often understood as a “psychologist” or “anthropologist,” an identification that obscures the novel’s “radically sacramental worldview” that signifies God “by the most mundane aspects of the created order as well as by its most glorious aspects.”31 Dostoevsky is indeed a brilliant psychologist and anthropologist, but understanding the human condition as he does requires accepting the argument he develops both for realism and for the world as a defaced icon. Third, what Terras and other commentators do not note is that when a person converts as described in Chapter 4, that person’s doubles change, precisely because the convert’s life changes. The convert’s web of relationships shifts, just as the convert’s web of convictions and beliefs shifts. For Dmitri, his doubling of Fyodor’s headlong sensuality and scamming character seems the key to his character up to his “epiphany.” But once he is remanded for trial, he becomes a realist. After his trial, he seems more like Alyosha in his equanimity and Ivan in his cleverness. But he and Grushenka may be unique as there is no other happily espoused or married couple in the novel.32 Kolya Krasotkin doubles Rakitin and/or Ivan before 30. David S. Cunningham, “ ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ as Trinitarian Theology,” 134–55, at 152. It is not clear to me how the “black-smeared” character (Smerdyakov) points back to the Trinity. Clearly he participates in the relationships that constitute the family, but his realizing Ivan’s death wish for his father suggests that his character is the antithesis of the love that is the shape of Trinitarian relations. 31. Cunningham, “ ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ as Trinitarian Theology,” 151. 32. Grigory and Marfa, Fyodor’s servants, might be another, but they are minor characters. They take in Fyodor’s sons, defend Fyodor, and Grigory testifies (wrongly) at Dmitri’s trial.

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his conversion, and Alyosha after it. Zosima was a member of the army before his conversion, and a member of the monastery after it; implicitly, his doubles change from soldiers to monks. In each case, the convert becomes more closely related to members of the new community. It is not merely personal conversion that is crucial, but the new sorts of relationships that develop in or as a result of the conversion. Fourth, commentators also fail to note in their discussions of mirroring and doubling that Dmitri’s dream of the miseries of the world (discussed in Chapter 4) vividly reflects and challenges Ivan’s indictment of the world in “Rebellion.” Here is an instance of mirroring that goes far beyond a structural device. Both Dmitri and Ivan recognize the evils in the world. As an example, each focuses on human choices to abuse children. Ivan, as he himself reminds us, collects facts (239). Notably, though, throughout his entire soliloquy in “Rebellion,” he never performs the act of asking “why” the world is this way, why the facts are as they are. On the other hand, in the seventeen lines of his dream narration (507; see pp. 69–70 of this book), Dmitri performs the act of asking “why” eleven different times (with an additional three repetitive “why” questions). To put it bluntly, if one does not ask “why,” one cannot even contemplate doing anything about the evils in the world. Ivan cannot ask “why” because his materialism is not open to moral or spiritual issues, or to interactions that might change his life. Robert Louis Jackson also notes another sort of doubling, in that both Ivan and Alyosha recognize the suffering of children in the world. His analysis of their differences is not far from my analysis of Ivan’s and Dmitri’s differences: Both Ivan’s denunciatory peroration [in “Rebellion”] and Alyosha’s hortatory speech to the boys [at the end of the epilogue] revolve around the suffering and death of a child: in the first case, a child torn to pieces by dogs in front of its mother; in the second, a boy, Ilyusha, humiliated, wounded unto death by people and circumstances. The suffering and death of a child, however, in both discourses inspires radically different conclusions on the part of the speakers. Ivan takes his case to heaven, while Alyosha brings his case down to earth. Ivan seeks to split Alyosha off from the elder Zosima and his faith. Alyosha finds in the drama and death of Ilyusha a meeting ground for union and communion among the boys and himself. Ivan returns his “ticket” to world harmony.33

Ivan and Alyosha do not differ so much in their understandings of the facts about the world, but in their responses to it. Alyosha and (eventually) Dmitri and Grushenka act in love, while Ivan does not. In these responses to human suffering, there is a sort of “tripling.” Ivan indicts the world God created and uses his little 33. Jackson, “Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone,” 235–6; as Chapter 6 shows, I differ with Jackson over the significance of Ivan’s returning the ticket.

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facts as a cudgel to beat believers. Dmitri responds to the evils in the world by asking why. Alyosha actively displays a response by working in and with a new community of care that realizes the spirit of sobornost’ in its practice. Alyosha’s open-eyed practice is a pragmatic argument for his mentalité. Ivan’s rebellion may be right, Dmitri’s questions may be right—this is an aspect of the polyphony of the novel—but the argument of the novel is to show that Alyosha, most of all, got it right. His actions and their fruits show the rightness of his approach. The doublings and mirrorings, then, are multiple and flesh out the social vision of The Brothers Karamazov. Families and communities necessarily incubate one’s developing a character but do not determine what sort of character someone will become. We mirror and double others as we become ourselves. The people of Skotoprigonyevsk are not external to but internally related to each other. Even a rebel like Ivan who refuses the ticket cannot finally avoid these relationships even as he rebels against them. The vision of sobornost’ in The Brothers Karamazov is inclusive; all may not be included (yet), but even some who resist are not excluded. Conversion is clearly personal, but not merely so: it is also social. As people convert, their “doubles” change. Converts’ relationships are realigned. Those unable to convert are portrayed as unable to participate in the organic fellowship and have the true freedom and personal integrity found in the community of solidarity. Their “doubles” remain consistent. And we can now recognize yet another possible “double” for Ivan: the woman who held on to “my” onion and refused to be responsible to/guilty before the community of sinners. She thus closed off her possibility of entering into paradise. She thus, like Ivan, refused a place in the community that makes true freedom and ultimately theosis possible. Not only do these mirrorings and doublings show the influence of family and community on a person’s character, but they also display that a coinherent community is composed of diverse groups, with multiple, overlapping, shifting “doublings” and “triplings.” The point is that sobornost’ as displayed in The Brothers Karamazov is polyphonic, not a monophonic community where one set of authorities rule and only one way of living, whether Zosima’s holiness, or Ivan’s materialism, or Fyodor-like debauchery, or the Inquisitor’s authoritarianism can be found. Skotoprigonyevsk is a polyphonic town that is now realizing or someday might realize sobornost’.

Witnessing Sobornost’ The boys, the Snegiryovs, and Kolya show how a community can effect a conversion without apparent conscious effort. The boys stick together. Their presence later supports Ilyusha and the Snegiryovs. Their gathering at Ilyusha’s stone in the last scene of the novel shows the significance of memory, especially of the deceased. In keeping Ilyusha’s memory alive, they preserve a tradition that empowers the community. Of course, that memory doesn’t make them saints—Alyosha verbalizes

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the realization that they may not avoid performing bad acts in the future. But as long as they support each other, they can be a nascent coinherent community, neither sacrificing freedom nor being cramped by the past, but remembering it together. And remembering, however much it is indebted to what was, is a practice of solidarity in the present.34 Kolya did not evidently seek conversion. He is a spoiled child, a blithe teenage socialist rascal. Only in talking with Alyosha does he reveal that he has been unhappy. But by then the conversion process has started and without realizing it, he has been gradually converted in his relationship with Ilyusha and the boys; he has even come to pledge to “suffer for others,” as Alyosha put it, in the future. Kolya is in the process of becoming the self as he ought to be as he comes to realize who he is while acting in and for that small community. Kolya’s conversion brings together the motifs of the spirit of sobornost’: a beloved community, the freedom to become oneself in that community, and even the power of the community to subtly effect a needed conversion on those who enter into interactions with its members. What the story adds to all this is that knowing persons, not knowing about them, is a key practice in the community. Those who know only facts may know something about a person, but the whole truth about a person can be found only in knowing that person. But to even begin to know a person, one has to be with a person, not simply observe them. The conversion of Kolya Krasotkin underlines the fact that Ivan’s returning his ticket is not merely a difference in outlook, but a refusal to acknowledge his relationships in the community. Having opened himself, however inadequately, to the boys and the Snegiryovs, Kolya’s story underlines the themes of this chapter and the contrast with Ivan’s stance. The social vision of The Brothers Karamazov is a performative argument by means of narrative that shows that one who refuses the challenges of life together is not free, but condemns himself to be alone with whatever devils accost him.

No Crime, but Punishment Let’s return to Dmitri’s trial. If it is a carnival, what is it doing? What does it satirize? A number of critics have seen this as an indictment of the new Russian justice system. Daniel Conlon represents this view well: While the legal reforms of 1864 reduced the fundamental unfairness of the previous system, “they did not reach Dostoevsky’s ideal of a legal system that would teach and morally regenerate the Russian people by declaring criminals morally culpable for their crimes, while at the same time showing Orthodox Christian compassion in refraining from unduly 34. In The Disciples’ Jesus: Christology as a Reconciling Practice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), I argued that Jesus is centrally remembered by the community of his disciples as they engage in the practices of reconciliation that he embodied with his first disciples.

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punishing them.”35 Similarly, Joseph Frank writes, “In Dostoevsky’s eyes, the new breed of lawyers were preoccupied with legal issues and tactics that they completely lost sight of the ‘moral’ aspects of the causes they were debating.”36 These views seem accurate, but Dostoevsky was addressing a more profound problem. Just as Ivan Karamazov limits himself to the materialist boundaries exemplified in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason wherein morality cannot be found, so the secular legal system binds itself to a judicial venue where morality is at worst impossible or at least irrelevant. It is not that the lawyers happen to lose sight of moral aspects, but that the moral aspects are literally unthinkable in the practice of the legal system that seeks procedural fairness, not substantial justice rooted in truth. However much a law or set of laws is crafted so as to embody moral rightness, once the proposal becomes the law of the land, morality factors out.37 Dmitri’s trial is a show, bread and circuses (as Ivan says) that distract people from realizing the fact that the system is not concerned with moral good and evil. The system’s goal is not a bad one: a justified legal verdict based on evidence that adduces the facts about what a person has done. Yet, in discussing Ivan’s article on the relationship of civil and ecclesiastical courts, both Ivan and Father Paissy describe the justice meted out by the civil courts as “mechanical” (64). Father Paissy contrasts the state’s punishment of criminal acts with the Church’s approach: All this exile to hard labor, and formerly with floggings, does not reform anyone, and above all does not even frighten almost any criminal, and the number of crimes not only does not diminish but increases all the more. Surely you will admit that. And it turns out that society, thus, is not protected at all, for although the harmful member is mechanically cut off and sent far away out of sight, another criminal appears at once to take his place, perhaps even two others. If anything protects society even in our time, and even reforms the criminal himself and transforms him into a different person, again it is Christ’s law alone, which manifests itself in the acknowledgment of one’s own conscience. Only if he acknowledges his guilt as a son of Christ’s society—that is, of the Church— will he acknowledge his guilt before society itself—that is, before the Church. 35. Conlon, “Dostoevsky v. The Judicial Reforms of 1864,” 59. Conlon later infers that Dostoevsky was critiquing more the lax implementation of the reforms, especially on lawyers’ conduct, than the system itself, a position I do not find warranted. 36. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 685. 37. It may seem that “intent” provides an exception to this. It does not. Establishing a person’s intent may be necessary for discerning what sort of act is performed, for example, murder versus voluntary manslaughter versus involuntary manslaughter, but does not determine whether the act is moral. A women found guilty of a “burning bed” killing of her abusive husband may have not acted immorally although her intent was to kill him; an act judged to be involuntary manslaughter may be legally excusable, but that does not entail that it was morally right.

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Thus, the modern criminal is capable of acknowledging his guilt before the Church alone, and not before the state. (64)38

Whatever one may think about the role of any actual church, the point about the state nonetheless stands: the legal process of the state is mechanical; it is a justice machine. It wants the facts about a person, not the truth of a person. It is often concerned with punishment far more than rehabilitation, much less conversion. It is not the scaffolding of a community constructed in the spirit of sobornost’ and must be recognized as having a quite different purpose. The truth of a person is beyond the justice system. The truth about Dmitri lies far beyond the mere facts given in evidence and testimony presented at his trial. That truth can be found when one knows him, not simply the facts and evidence about him. The concepts necessary for morality in Kant’s view (noumenal freedom, immortality, and God) cannot exist in or are irrelevant to the secular state’s understanding just as they cannot exist or are irrelevant as constituents for Ivan’s understanding. One cannot get to moral guilt and innocence from a system that addresses legal responsibility. Justice is concerned with whether reasonable persons, without mitigating circumstances or deceptive manipulation by others, did the illegal acts of which they are accused (whether performed freely or deterministically—such crucial philosophical issues are irrelevant in court). Only publicly available phenomena can count as facts and thus as acceptable evidence (save, of course, for expert psychologists’ testimony that interprets private facts, a situation thoroughly satirized in Dmitri’s trial). It is not as if the court system merely fails to reach the ideals Dostoevsky had set for it. Rather, it is simply not designed to reach those ideals.39 It is not that the lawyers and the jury just happen “to lose sight of the truth and morality which characterize Dmitri’s final words.” That sort of truth and that sort of morality are structurally and systematically invisible in the courts. Particular people may be concerned about moral and spiritual responsibility, but the justice system as a system is not. Satirizing the legal system is not necessarily rejecting it. More important, the judicial system’s concerns with “just the facts” mirrors Ivan’s concerns with just 38. Kostalevsky notes that Father Paissy’s summation of Ivan’s view is “very close to Soloviev’s line of thought” (Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 121), 39. If this seems unfair, consider another legal system, the current US income tax system. If the law is a teacher, it teaches accountants and tax attorneys how their clients can avoid paying anything like their fair share of taxes. The avoidance of paying what one truly owes is, for those who can afford the experts, part of the system. Or consider the current US criminal justice system in which the richer and whiter one is, the more likely one is to be found “innocent” of a crime of which one stands accused. People have a right to counsel in the system, of course, but not to good counsel, just to counsel that has not been shown to be incompetent. The point is that substantial justice cannot be founded in or guaranteed by minimalist or mechanical procedures.

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the facts. Neither Ivan’s materialism nor the courts’ mechanism is wrong about the facts, but both are inadequate to get to the substantial truth. Insofar as it gets the facts right, the judicial system works. But authentic community, substantial justice, and knowing the truth need more than “just the facts.” The carnival of the trial displays at minimum how profound an error it is to regard the legal system with its public evidence in particular and the “rationalized” laws of the state applying to all persons without regard to their characters as if it were the law governing a coinherent community. The social vision of the novel is clarified by Book Twelve, which shows the incomparability of the legal system and sobornost’. The legal system may be a structural necessity to keep order. But it is not and cannot be the ground of order and morality, because the practices and teloi of the legal system and the coinherent community are quite different. One tries to keep people in line no matter their beliefs, and the other seeks a coinherent community of freedom in solidarity under the Triune God. In short, the novel argues that it is a mistake to take the political-legal system as the system for sobornost’. Whether Dostoevsky would recognize the positive contributions of the state as did his close friend Vladimir Soloviev remains unclear. Soloviev “found positive significance in the freedom of the state, civil society, and the economy from ecclesiastical control.”40 Soloviev recognized a strict separation of the state (which can exercise coercion, but must not to do in the religious and moral spheres) from the church (which cannot coerce, but must empower the development of freedom and ultimately theosis). The state should, however, guarantee the external conditions that make true human development possible. The vision of the novel is compatible with both rejecting the state tout court and accepting it within its proper legal boundaries, recognizing that the competence of the state is, at best, analogous to knowing the facts about a person and not analogous to knowing a person. Perhaps The Brothers Karamazov “reflected in its purest form” Soloviev’s idea of theocracy.41 Or perhaps the author is as ambiguous about the separation of the state from the church as he was ambiguous in his love for Europe.42 As noted above, writing in the genre of the novel does not require the precision about theoretical issues that the genre of the theological treatise requires. The novel’s positive view of the place of the legal justice system is ambiguous. But the negative conclusion is quite clear: “Don’t take the state or its legal apparatus as embodying sobornost’; the state may be necessary for preserving for order, but it is in no way sufficient for realizing the blessed community.”

40. Nathaniel Wood and Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Orthodox Christianity and Political Theology: Thinking Beyond Empire” T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology, ed. Rubén Rosario Rodriguez (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 337–52, at 345. 41. Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 120. 42. Cf. Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 138–40.

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Conclusion The argument for sobornost’ in The Brothers Karamazov is, in a sense, a simple one. It is unrealistic to presume that we are essentially fully independent individuals. It is realistic to realize that we become who we are in community. We are all members of families and communities that have shaped us. We are constituted as persons in and by them. If we would be humbly responsible for/guilty before all as we lived in that community, then we would gracefully realize an earthly paradise, the proximal human social (and perhaps natural) reality of ultimate God-given sobornost’. Through the community, God empowers each person to realize true freedom. Such communities provide the locations in which we can learn how to know not merely the facts about other persons but also to know other persons. We are fundamentally social animals, icons of the sociality of the Triune God. What makes each of us different from the other is the distinctive, perhaps unique, set of relationships we develop. To think we can be ourselves without relationships is to be consigned to the hell of the anthill or the hell of illusory autonomy. The social vision is not monolithic. The communities in which we act live and act are plural. None of us lives in a single geo-cultural location. The different locations in the town may house groups in serious tension with each other, as the presence of Zosima’s house and Fyodor’s house in Skotoprigonyevsk show. Yet the community as a whole—the town, the country, the world—can be strong in a commitment to a polyphonic community rather than a monolithic anthill or a collection of independent interests. The social vision of The Brothers Karamazov does not merely argue for a particular form of communitarian anthropology, but for a theological anthropology. Human goodness and freedom come from God through our community/communities. We are each shaped by mirroring and doubling others. At their best, our communities enable us to understand ourselves and diverse others in the community even when we differ. We may disagree about the facts about other groups, but yet understand the other by understanding persons who form the other communities. The best communities teach and learn how its members can be truly free to become who we are. The worst are ruled by Grand Inquisitors and their minions, allow the spearing of babies with bayonets, the flogging of horses, and finally kill the possibility of any human future for the victims of tyranny and oppression. The social vision of the novel construes conversion from one community to another in social terms. The community formed by the boys, the Snegiryovs, and Alyosha draws Kolya into it. The love of Dmitri and Grushenka generate conversions. While some conversion experiences seem extraordinary, like Alyosha’s vision at Zosima’s coffin, they presume a community that carries a tradition that provides the context for the experience. The social vision of the novel allots, at best, a lesser role to the government. It is unrealistic to think that the state, by its nature, can enable us to be virtuous, develop our character, or empower us to be truly free. To expect otherwise is to be confused. Dmitri’s trial is a satirical attack on those who think that the contractual society allegedly formed by autonomous individuals can shape people of character.

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To expect the government to shape its citizens’ characters may well be rooted on an ideology that falsifies not only the facts, but the truth, about how we become free members of a community that is an icon of God in its sobornost’. The novel’s argument is rhetorical: if the alternatives to sobornost’—and presumably its analogs in other religious (and secular) traditions—are the hell of the anthill or the hell of autonomous isolation, then why would the reader not choose to live in and live out sobornost’ or its analogs in other traditions? Why would the reader choose irrationalism over realism? The final issue is whether the reader is led to realize whether the argument of The Brothers Karamazov makes its case. Can it and does it provide a vision of the real world?

Chapter 9 T H E K A R A M A Z OV C A SE : “ H U R R A H F O R K A R A M A Z OV ” Recapitulation and Preview The argument of this book began with two chapters setting forth the interpretive framework being developed. Chapter 1 argued for a rejection of the essentialized dichotomy of faith versus reason presumed by the novel’s many commentators. Chapter 2 turned to insights from Mikhail Bakhtin to show one how to read a polyphonic novel and argued that the readers’ acts of reading the novel are performances that realize the novel, much as musicians realize music in performance. Chapter 3 began the substantial work by analyzing the forms of life or mentalités displayed in the novel. Chapter 4 explored the pattern of conversions in the novel, and Chapter 5 the patterns of non-conversions. Chapter 6 argued that the novel portrays true freedom as available only to those converted from individualism to active participation in a community. Chapter 7 built on Chapter 6 by exploring the social vision of the novel. Chapter 8 analyzed that vision as a particular and distinctive narrative of the Orthodox concept of sobornost’. The present chapter draws the earlier analysis together to argue for an understanding of the novel as offering two linked responses to Ivan’s challenges and thus forming a persuasive (not demonstrative) aesthetic argument for its vision. To recap key points from the introduction, Dostoevsky acknowledged that he gave two very different responses to Ivan’s attack. “My hero chooses a theme I consider irrefutable: the senselessness of children’s suffering, and develops from it the absurdity of all historical reality” (Garnett, 758). Yet Dostoevsky does respond to Ivan’s challenge. He told his acquaintance, K. P. Pobedonostsev (who was horrified by Book Five), in a letter of August 24, 1879, that Book Six, “The Russian Monk,” was an answer “to that whole negative side.” He also noted that it was not “a direct point for point answer to the propositions previously expressed … but an oblique one. Something completely opposite to the world view expressed earlier appears in this part” (Garnett, 761–2). Many students of the novel, including Joseph Frank, found Ivan’s “protest against God on behalf of a suffering humanity” to be unanswerable.1 However, Dostoevsky also wrote in his notebook 1. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 604, 600; also see 696; Frank cites Vaclav Cerny, Essai sur le titanisme dans la poésie romantique accidentale entre 1815 et

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after The Brothers Karamazov was published, “These asses [his critics] could not even dream of such a powerful negation of God as is depicted in the Inquisitor and the preceding chapter, to which the entire novel serves as an answer.”2 Some commentators have noted that there are two sorts of answers but have not shown how they are not merely connected but inextricably intertwined.3 Recognizing both responses to Ivan’s challenges sets the stage for my claim about the shape of the novel’s argument: The Brothers Karamazov has an argument that responds critically to the three great questions that motivated Kant’s three great critiques.4 The Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) was Kant’s answer to 1850 (Prague, 1935) in reading the novel as a protest against God on behalf of a suffering humanity. 2. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 713 (emphasis in original). He notes that “most modern readers have considered it disappointingly ineffectual in countering the brunt of Ivan’s unbridled assault” (621). My own view is that most modern readings are warped by readers’ presuming that faith is irrational and opposed to reason. 3. See Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 457, 571, 713. When he links them explicitly (e.g., at 622–3), he seems to take the two answers as reducible to one. Alain Toumayan (“I More Than the Others,” 57) does something similar. Terras (Karamazov Companion, 47–59) considers only the first response and comments that “many critics have suggested that Dostoevsky failed in this respect” (48). 4. This reading builds on the work of those who see Kantianism as setting a key problematic for Dostoevsky’s novel. As noted in Chapter 6, there is no direct evidence that Dostoevsky ever read Kant’s critiques, but he is known to have asked for The Critique of Pure Reason some three decades before writing The Brothers Karamazov while in exile in Siberia. Cherkasova (Dostoevsky and Kant) attributes a “deontology of the heart” (which, I suspect, would perplex a Kantian) to Dostoevsky. Her work focuses only on morality, never mentioning the significance of Kantian epistemology or aesthetics that is central to my reading. Steven Cassedy (Dostoevsky’s Religion) helpfully discusses Dostoevsky as presenting differing antinomies of reason and faith, and finds Dostoevsky guilty of reveling in holding inconsistent beliefs (Dostoevsky’s Religion, 84–113), a view I show in Chapter 3 to be unwarranted. Cassedy does not fully recognize the profoundly polyphonic world Dostoevsky creates in his fiction, downplays the internal dialectic of characters in the novel, tends to equate the author’s own views with the apparent inconsistencies of the novel, and accepts the modernist oppositional reading that essentializes and postulates an ineradicable conflict between so-called irrational faith and reason. My argument is that a different Kantian approach to the novel can show how the polyphonic world of The Brothers Karamazov has a vision that is both coherent (if unresolved) and challenging to its readers. Robert Louis Jackson (Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form, 187–204) discusses Dostoevsky in relation to Kant and Schiller; he notes, “There is no evidence, however, that Dostoevsky clearly (if at all) distinguishes between the categories of the beautiful and the sublime” (Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form, 190), But then there is no evidence that Dostoevsky knew the Critique of Judgment or needed to utilize the different qualities that Kant found central to aesthetic judgments for him to make his “Karamazov case.”

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“What can I know?” The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) was one of Kant’s answers to “What ought I to do?”5 The Critique of Judgment (1790) includes Kant’s answers to “What may I hope?” The novel works to undermine a deterministic materialist understanding of pure reason that results if one limits reasoning to “First Critique” pure reason. It also argues for a profound reconfiguration of the questions and answers that motivate practical reason and judgment under the influence of a Russian Orthodox concept of sobornost’. Dostoevsky is not making a direct argument against Kant’s critical philosophy but rather a dialectical argument for a revision of Kant’s view.6 Nor am I claiming that the only or best perspective on the novel is as an answer to Kant.7 Dostoevsky does not create a fictional world whose characters are mere ambling arguments. His “hero-ideologists”8 articulate their ideologies but rarely in a straightforward way. Dostoevsky’s characters do not merely say, but more importantly they show, what it means to live according to certain ideas—Ivan according to individualistic “First Critique materialism,” the realists according to a “revised Second Critique practical reasoning,” and the lovers according to a “revised Third Critique hope.” By so doing, the novel’s polyphony offers a narrative dialectical argument that both recognizes and reconfigures modern individualism represented in Kant’s great critiques. Ivan shows how one lives out a materialist answer to “What can I know?” The story of his life portrays an autonomous individual living out that answer. His challenge in Book Five grows out of that life. Zosima, Alyosha, and their doubles show how to live out an answer to the question, “What ought we (not ‘I’) do?” Like Kant’s second question, this one cannot be asked from a purely materialistic perspective. Unlike Kant, The Brothers Karamazov emphasizes the fact that both we and our actions are always communal. The twisting road that leads to the love of Grushenka and Dmitri displays an answer to the question, “What may we (not ‘I’) hope?” We may hope that human 5. Kant’s conception of freedom as individual autonomy is individualistic. His analysis of moral duty is of an individual’s duty. In light of its rejection of an individualist anthropology, The Brothers Karamazov cannot accept that understanding. 6. If Dostoevsky were arguing against the philosophers, it would be directed against those, like the Russian “rational egoists,” who would accept something like a truncated Kantianism, the equivalent of a “First Critique only materialism.” The connections between the questions and the critiques are made explicit in Critique of Pure Reason, A805–20/ B833–47. Dostoevsky did not accept the questions formulated there as his own. 7. For example, Thompson (The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory) reads the novel in religious, not philosophical, terms and shows the profound Christocentrism of the novel. Cunningham (“ ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ as Trinitarian Theology”) sees the novel as having a sacramental vision. Contino (Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism) finds the novel to be a realistic narrative, analogous to understanding the Bible in a precritical way. Each of these are interesting variations on the same theme. My argument, I believe, is compatible with each of them. 8. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 278–9.

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love is both real and an icon of divine love, not an illusory projection of religious or other irrationalists. Alone, I can neither love nor have hope. In The Brothers Karamazov hope is always shared. If to be human is to be human in community, then one alone cannot hope humanly. The brilliance of the novel is that only “we together”—not “I alone”—can display an active response to the problems pure reason describes or share a hope about the shape of the whole. For as Kant himself noted in the Critique of Judgment, there can be contentions, but no proofs, in aesthetics.9 If this is the case, then particular judgments about the whole, presuming they are properly rooted in pure and practical reasoning, cannot be definitively decided on the basis of the facts or of one’s duties alone. But they can be evaluated on the basis of lives lived according to such judgments. The unequaled power of The Brothers Karamazov is that the novel shows how the world could be properly understood and lived in. But this is a polyphonic novel. The world might well be as barren and fruitless as the materialists present it, a deterministic living hell for many. The world might be irrational. One might as well live in it irrationally as an individual hedonist or as a spiritually superstitious collectivist with an in-group prejudice informing all one’s thoughts and actions. Or the world might be the war of each against all, where violence and manipulation are proper and indeed expected tactics. Or the world might be a paradise, an icon of God’s love even if we have defaced it. And perhaps it could again be a paradise, if only we would realize it. Dostoevsky is not arguing merely for an intellectual or religious idea but for undertaking a demanding set of actions: the practical realization of a worldly sobornost’. Of course, such actions might only be in service of another religious illusion, as the critique expressed in “The Grand Inquisitor” shows. Or it may be a quixotic quest to realize an impossible community. We cannot know which understanding of the world is most likely true and which actions are most appropriate. But the argument of The Brothers Karamazov gives room for hope: the world may be a defaced icon amenable to repair by the power of human (and divine) love. Dostoevsky’s novel’s unresolved polyphony makes demands of its readers. The indeterminacy of the “solution” in the text of the novel is finally a startling challenge to a serious reader.

“What Can I Know?” Chapter 3 argued that Ivan is the materialist par excellence. He exemplifies an answer to the First Critique’s question, “What can I know?” within a strict individualistic materialism that one can see in The Critique of Pure Reason abstracted from the 9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith; rev. and ed. Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 338, 340.

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other critiques. Is materialism the sum total of reasoning? I think not. Kant surely did not. In fact, materialists often presumed, unsupported, that materialism is true. This and can be, and often is, irrational (as Ivan’s is). In sum, the novel displays Ivan’s individualistic, materialist viewpoint as simply wrong-headed. First, many scientists and historians who turn to ultimate questions simply transfer the presumption of atheism necessary for their work (i.e., God is not an object of study in physics or sociology) into a metaphysical assumption (i.e., there is no God) without making an argument for the reasonableness of this transposition.10 What we presume in our quest to understand events, forces, and things in the world is not the same as what we assume or conclude about the world as a whole. Ivan assumes that his Euclidean geometry, properly presumed for studying “mid-sized” inanimate things, applies universally. This is fundamentally the same unwarranted move as scientists’ and philosophers’ move from nontheistic procedural presumptions to atheistic metaphysical assumptions. Just because their procedures fail to produce God or the gods doesn’t mean that there is no God. That requires another argument, perhaps for the sufficiency of their procedures to uncover all that humans can understand reasonably. But an argument for scientific sufficiency is a philosophical one about what there is—that is, metaphysics. Is there anything discoverable beyond the practices of “physics”—that is, science? Answering that question requires a metaphysical argument. Metaphysical claims require further warrant beyond simply assuming they are warranted simply because scientists are required to presume them for the purpose of engaging in scientific study.11 If no further warrant is developed, then “freely assumed, freely denied” is the correct response to the materialists. Scientific materialism might be a true account of the universe, but it is not proven. The materialist must argue for it. And Ivan, like many contemporary popularizing scientific scoffers, offers no further warrant. He truly portrays some of what happens in the world. But whether his speeches portray all that there is is another question. The novel argues that there is more to be seen than Ivan can see, more argument than either Ivan or the scientific scoffers give. What can be displayed, and what The Brothers Karamazov displays, is the living effects of these basic assumptions. In the discussion of terminal quests in Chapter 2, I acknowledged that one cannot give explanations for the final end one reaches in such a quest. All one can do is display how one lives in light of the claims articulated at the ends of one’s terminal quest. Ivan’s journey is an imaginative display of what it means to live by and in “First Critique materialism.” 10. Cf. my History, Theology, and Faith, 38–9. 11. Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) exemplify this jump to metaphysics without warrant. That they can “get away with this” is a facet of the intellectual culture of modernity, the “faith vs. reason” view discussed in Chapter 1.

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Second, Ivan’s form of materialism is irrational, as discussed in Chapter 3. He holds profoundly inconsistent convictions. As a materialist, he is an empiricist. He must accept what his senses show him unless he has good reason not to do so. But his reason for doubting his senses is that the universe is constructed in a Euclidean fashion. But rather than reexamine his belief, he inconsistently expects to doubt his senses—senses that he must accept. He has accepted Euclid on the basis of his senses. So he both accepts the deliverances of his senses but says he would doubt them if he saw parallel lines met at infinity. Ivan here does not argue for distrusting his senses in this case, but simply dogmatically assumes that doing so is correct. In effect, it is a “performative self-contradiction.” Ivan’s inconsistency extends to his meeting with the devil. It is beyond pure reason to say whether the devil is real or imaginary, as Ivan says about God. But Ivan’s devil (in whom he doesn’t believe) eventually torments him into what appears to be a nervous breakdown. Marina Kostalevsky has argued that the “pros and contras in the problematics of The Brothers Karamazov are resolved by the very plot of the novel, where Ivan Karamazov’s life appears as a search for truth.”12 But, pace Kostalevsky, it is a failed search, at least in this novel—Ivan’s materialist world is too circumscribed for his search to be successful. He can narrate facts but not reach the truth. There are multiple reasons why. First, Ivan’s inconsistency and his irrationally indefeasible commitments doom the search. Second, as the sometimes insightful Fyodor averred, “Ivan loves nobody” (175). To know and love persons is to act and to interact with them. Ivan may know lots of facts, but he does not interact. Third, he cannot even entertain the second and third great questions that Kant was driven to consider in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment because Dostoevsky creates him as a strict materialist. Fourth, he can observe and report facts and assumes that the facts constitute the whole truth. But if the whole truth includes but is not limited to the facts, then Ivan cannot reach the truth. In this, The Brothers Karamazov makes an argument against the reasonableness of Ivan’s mentalité. Because Ivan denies the realm of the spirit, he refuses not merely the ticket but also God’s grace. Grace is the ticket. Grace comes to one in and through the community. Ivan refuses to belong. The community makes it possible for its members to develop individuality and freedom (or in a less virtuous community to thwart their development). In refusing the ticket, he rejects the graceful community, however fractured, in which his own individuality was nourished. He takes graceless, spiritless matter as the whole of reality. That commitment drives him mad in the end. Of course, madness may be the ultimate truth—another terrifying possibility. If the Karamazov vision that Dostoevsky narrates actually portrays the real world, then the conclusion of the novel’s argument would be that Ivan must be wrong in his blinkered materialism. 12. Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 168.

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But the Karamazov vision may be a fairy tale—Ivan may be right. His materialistic web of belief may just need some pruning and tuning. That doesn’t happen in the novel, but readers might nonetheless be convinced that Ivan got it roughly right. They could justly claim that just because his materialism is problem plagued, that does not entail that all materialistic philosophies are false. The world may be a “whole” that exists as some materialists describe it. If so, then the world is literally hopeless. The power of Ivan’s voice in this polyphonic novel leaves that possibility open for the reader. Neither the author nor the reader can know for sure that materialism is wrong or inadequate because there is no explanation that can reveal the truth about a vision of the whole. Any vision of the whole might be an illusion. All this aesthetic argument can do is to display how one lives under the influence of a vision. Ivan displays what one can know about the material facts in the world. What is exactly right about this is that observing and understanding the facts using the best techniques and tools available is part of the way human beings are reasonable, both individually and socially. Yet The Brothers Karamazov shows what is wrong about this kind of reasoning. Ivan’s reason observes facts.13 But beyond his stubborn refusal to overcome inconsistencies, humans need also to judge and to act reasonably. While denying the reality of God and immortality (for Kant, the postulates or procedural presumptions needed to get practical reason going), Ivan judges that God’s world is not worthy of the ticket and acts to return it, another “performative self-contradiction.” Ivan does what he, given his materialist mentalité, denies the possibility of doing.14 A “reasonable life” requires not only pure reasoning but practical reasoning as well; not only thought but also action. A reasonable community needs justice but does not mistake it for the love that nurtures individuality or the truth sets people free. But then, perhaps human life, individually and socially, is not reasonable, not loving, not just, but a community of masters and slaves or a war of each against all.

13. Whatever issues there are in Kant’s understanding of reasoning, The Brothers Karamazov is not attempting to demonstrate Kant’s conceptual problems, but rather the problems of someone who refuses to go beyond a form of determinist and materialist “First Critique” reasoning. Dostoevsky also does not seem to have an argument for an alternative to the individualism of Ivan’s reasoning, but as I suggest in Chapter 4, n. 16 and Chapter 6, n. 28, given the novel’s understanding of the relationship of the person and their comm­ unity, some form of contemporary “virtue epistemology” might well be a fitting alternative. 14. This sort of inconsistency is another indicator that Ivan’s search for truth is a failure. Of course, were there future novels in which he could convert to an acceptance of the postulates for practical reasoning because he engages in practical reasoning and action himself, then these inconsistencies might form the basis for a change. But that does not happen in this novel.

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What Ought We Do? The novel’s implicit formulation of the second question importantly differs from Kant’s: through Father Zosima, Alyosha Karamazov, Kolya Krasotkin, and other characters, Dostoevsky pointedly asks “What ought we do?” This is the novel’s argument against autonomous individualism (whether Kant’s or Ivan’s) and for recognizing that practical reason can only be developed in community. Let’s come at this from two directions. First, does it make a difference to reject “I” and propose “we”? Robert Louis Jackson’s insightful analysis contrasts Alyosha’s final speech (774–5) with Ivan’s rebellion soliloquy (243–4) and thus provides a clue to the answer: Ivan’s speech is punctuated throughout by “I” …. The pronoun “I” and the Russian words for “my” and “me,” along with Russian verbs used in the first person (with the pronoun “I” being understood) appear sixty-three times in a text of eighty-one lines! Alyosha, in contrast, in a speech of almost identical length uses the plural “we” and its variants (“us,” “our”), thirty-seven times …. “I” in the twenty or so times it is used in Alyosha’s speech always interacts with “you” [in the plural].15

Jackson’s analysis lends textual support for the claim that Dostoevsky has Ivan and Alyosha take very different stances. The “we” is crucial for understanding what the novel is doing. In his narration of Alyosha’s approach, the narrator’s designates Alyosha as a “realist.” The shape of the novel’s argument is that reasoning must go beyond Ivan’s individualist materialism to “our” practical realism. Jackson also notes that Alyosha focuses on the future, whereas Ivan focuses on the past.16 This contrast is more subtle, more an inference than a claim with clear support from particular texts. Obviously, the Epilogue portrays Alyosha considering implementing Ivan’s plan for Dmitri’s escape17 and expressing hope for the future in the speech at the stone. There is little about Ivan’s future plans, other than that he expects to “drop the cup” of life when he turns thirty years old (230–1, 263–4). But such a contrast is not surprising. One cannot observe the future, so Ivan cannot say much, if anything, about it. Second, what is the goal of practical reasoning? The simplest answer is that it aims at good morality, good behavior, good practice. But these become possible only in interactions with others. We learn how to reason practically from others. 15. Jackson, “Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone,” 237, 238. 16. Jackson, “Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone,” 243. 17. Contino (Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism, 139–46) winsomely details a debate he has with Gary Rosenshield about whether Dmitri would go through with an escape to America. Contino presents good reasons on both sides of the debate. In the end, if I were forced to take a side, I would join Contino and find that Alyosha might have sent Dmitri to America.

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Simply put, our choices and actions affect others, and their choices and actions affect us. Just as knowing a person cannot be reduced to knowing facts about a person, so knowing how cannot be reduced to knowing facts. Practical reasoning is not a “knowing that,” but a “knowing how.” At its loftiest, the goal of practical reasoning is wisdom. And practical wisdom is what Aristotle called phronēsis in his Nicomachean Ethics. Such wisdom is learned from mimesis of phronimoi, thoughtful and sometimes creative imitation of the wise ones. The practically wise one is truly makarios, happy and/or blessed.18 Zosima and Alyosha affirm and (at least partially) show how the world could be a paradise if everyone were “guilty” before all and were forgiven by all (290, 362).19 For them, the truly wise person is reconciled with all others. Being a happy or blessed person (makarios) is not possible for an isolated individual but only with others. Whether reconciliation—and becoming makariotēs together—is a reasonable goal or an illusory one is a crucial matter in the argument in The Brothers Karamazov. However, that argument can be made only later, in reflecting on Kant’s third question. The psychology, epistemology, and rationality displayed by Zosima and Alyosha involve a willingness to risk suffering. Such risk is reasonable if they are to have any possibility of alleviating suffering, solving problems, or reconciling enemies. Reconciliation requires not merely being psychologically “guilty” before all but responsible to and for all. Practical reasoning is risky, as Alyosha’s actions show in interacting with others—whether approaching rock-throwing boys, carrying money to an insulted Captain Snegiryov, or helping unite the boys into a community of memory and hope as the novel ends. It is risky to try to resolve the most important need of the world: reconciliation that is the practice of the blessed/ happy community. Both the practice of and the goal of reconciliation entail solidarity. The novel’s particular understanding of the concept of sobornost’, explored in the previous chapter, is crucial here. We can only repair the world together. We cannot be reconciled alone but only together. Wholeness is not an individual project but a shared one. The fundamental social vision of the novel grounds its anthropology. We are together before we are apart, members of communities before we develop individuality. Throughout the novel, the realists are portrayed in interaction. In contrast, Rakitin acts alone for his own purposes, Fyodor’s interactions are often demeaning or bizarre, and Ivan’s final scene shows him interacting only with the devil. Only realists can engage in practical reasoning, if anyone can. Third, realists cannot merely observe the world. Kant particularly linked the first and second critiques as two forms of reasoning, not two separate investigations, 18. Contino (Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism) frequently labels Alyosha “prudent,” the usual English translation of Aquinas’ prudentia (the Latin translation of Aristotle’s phronēsis). 19. Also see Williams, Dostoevsky, 163.

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one about epistemology and the other about ethics. Ivan tells stories to adduce facts and data to support his view, without asking “why?” Dmitri does not answer the “why” questions he repeats in his soliloquy or evidently acts on the basis of them, but at least he asks them. People who reason practically about problems begin with “why?” Realism asks “Why are things as they are?” as a preliminary inquiry so we can ask the follow-up question, “What ought we do?” Moreover, this is a religious realism, in contrast to materialisms, superstition, sensualism, and manipulation. It is the realism that (as Dostoevsky claimed for himself) has passed through the powerful negation of God depicted in “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor.” The novel portrays the world as a damaged icon without pulling punches about the extent of the damage. Even though damaged, it is still a true icon deserving of veneration.20 To reason practically, to work to alleviate ills, to risk suffering, and to work toward paradise is to venerate God in His world. Remember that the narrator called Alyosha a “realist”: “It seems to me that Alyosha was even more of a realist than the rest of us … if he had decided that immortality and God do not exist, he would immediately have joined the atheists and socialists” (25–6). With this comment, the narrator signals that Alyosha and Ivan are essentially similar with regard to factual matters. While there is truth to this, differences with regard to belief in or rejection of God, freedom, and immortality are profound differences. Alyosha sees the world Ivan does. But he acts in the world as Ivan does not. Ivan is portrayed as a rebellious individual, even an anarchist. Alyosha, had he joined the atheists and the socialists, would embrace his revolutionary comrades. He would have to be something like a Zosima without faith working for something like a spirit of sobornost’ without God.21 Miracles are not the issue. Miracles do not bring a realistic person to faith, but a faithful realist might “allow for miracles” (26). Seeing miracles is not the result of realists’ self-deception, as are some of the miracles that the superstitious see. True miracles are found in the wonder evoked by life in God’s world, not some divine intervention fracturing natural laws. Alyosha’s dream at the side of Zosima’s coffin is the paradigm case of a real miracle, which causes him to quake in wonder. Realists at their best see clearly what there is, who others are, and who they themselves are. They respond at least sometimes with wonder and gratitude to miracles that are not magical interventions into the world but rather instances of the divine shining through the icon of the world. Realism is not merely open to grace but is an embodiment and an enactment of grace in the world. This is not to say graceful people are not also flawed, even sinners.22 No matter how hard one tries to do good, one sins. No matter how hard 20. My paraphrase based on Williams, Dostoevsky, 200. 21. For an argument against a view that Alyosha is a utopian, see my “The Fragility of Grace in the Karamazov World,” 840–1, n. 35. 22. Recall Father Zosima’s comments to Madame Khokhlakov not “to be frightened by your own bad acts” (58). Jackson (“Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone,” 243) notes that the boys and Alyosha will have lapses and setbacks. But failures cannot destroy relationships if the

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one tries to repair broken relationships, one can fail. Realists can and do fail. But they try to do what materialists cannot. Sobornost’ cannot be mechanically or automatically realized. The Spirit does not overpower those who resist grace. Success is not guaranteed. But the grace realists receive through their active participation in a community trying to realize the spirit of sobornost’ makes room for hope. Realists are not always graceful. For example, in the epilogue, Grushenka and her rival for Dmitri’s affections, Katerina Ivanovna, have a spiteful interaction. Both are portrayed as graceful agents for saving Dmitri. Katerina had loved him for his “magnanimous heart” (766) even though he disgraced and insulted her. She forgives him and will provide money for his escape if needed. Grushenka refuses to forgive Katya. Dmitri is “perhaps not even truthful” (766). None of them are purely graceful. Alyosha, that “early lover of mankind” (18), is the character in the novel most like Christ. However, Christ is an exception. He was “like us in all things save sin.” Christ was the only truly human agent who was also truly divine. His graciousness had no admixture of sin. But Alyosha and every other disciple are not, like Christ, purely transparent to the divine light. We block the light in our sinning. Human beings are all mixed blessings for ourselves and each other. Sobornost’ is always a work in progress. “What ought we do?” This is the question asked by and answered in The Brothers Karamazov. The realists in the novel provide the first response to Ivan’s challenge. The text portrays as “realistic” those characters who understand the world, or parts of it, and seek to repair its fractures. They seek to realize graciously a coinherent community, not a monolithic anthill. An Orthodox realist can formulate this by asking why the world is full of sin and suffering and then judging that the world should be recognized as a damaged icon.23 An Orthodox realist does not blame God for the state of the world. An Orthodox realist repairs the icon of the world so God’s love can be and be seen as present in and through the world. bad actors acknowledge they are “guilty of all” and responsible to all. Sins do not prohibit reconciliation but may be better understood as the (unhappy) condition for it to be possible. 23. Obviously, other religious traditions have analogous formulations. For example, Catholic theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson considers the natural world as evolving “by the operation of its own natural powers, making it a free partner in its own creation” while showing forth “the indwelling Spirit of God who continuously empowers and accompanies the evolving world through its history of shaping and breaking apart, birthing and perishing, hitting dead ends and finding new avenues into the future” (Ask the Beasts, 155–6). Given this understanding, she concludes by sketching “An Ecological Vocation” as a realistic way to respond to God’s world and what humans have done in and to it. The Brothers Karamazov particularly envisions its hope in an Orthodox Christian context. This does not imply that other religious visions are wrong. “Analogous formulations” may well be found beyond Christianity. My own view of the matter is sketched in “A Practical Conclusion,” the epilogue to The Wisdom of Religious Commitment, 155–60.

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But this all may be futile. Realizing the spirit of sobornost’ may be a delusion espoused by starry-eyed romantics or self-righteous slavophiles. If so, then such busy activity may be misguided or useless. This religious vision may be a delusion foisted on people by an ecclesial establishment operating by “magic, mystification, and tyranny.”24 How can anyone hope that this vision can be realized? The argument for realism, even religious realism, is the key argument in the novel. But that argument is completed by the argument of the novel.

What May We Hope? The third question that The Brothers Karamazov answers also differs from Kant’s question: In the relationship between Dmitri and Grushenka and in the novel as a whole, Dostoevsky shows “what we may hope.” Kant identified individual “happiness” (der Glückseligkeit) as the object of our hope. According to him,25 happiness is something earned by following the moral law, that is, doing one’s duty. To follow the law requires autonomy, being a rule unto oneself. Happiness may not be achieved in this life, but it is something one earns by acting according to the moral law as adumbrated in the second critique.26 Those individuals who do not earn happiness do not deserve and do not achieve happiness. Both Kant and Father Zosima agree that people desire happiness and that happiness is not a goal we can strive directly for. Here, though, is the difference: for Kant happiness is earned, a by-product of doing one’s duty, while for Zosima it is a gift.27 God created people for happiness: “For people are created for happiness, and he who is completely happy can at once be deemed worthy of saying to himself: ‘I have fulfilled God’s commandment on this earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints

24. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, 614, citing Roger Cox. 25. “Happiness is the satisfaction of all our desires …. The practical law, derived from the motive of happiness, I term pragmatic (rule of prudence), and that law, if there is such a law, which has no other motive than worthiness of being happy, I term moral (law of morality). The former advises us what we have to do if we wish to achieve happiness; the latter dictates to us how we must behave in order to deserve happiness” (Critique of Pure Reason A806; B834). Kant’s individualism is clear also in the Critique of Practical Reason. “For the wills of all do not have one and the same object, but each person has his own (his own welfare), which, to be sure, can accidentally agree with the purposes of others who are pursuing their own” (Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck [Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1956], 27). 26. To identify the morally right action, Kant developed (in various formulations) a “categorical imperative.” One formulation is “I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964], 70). 27. Scanlan in Dostoevsky the Thinker does not apparently recognize this difference.

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all the holy martyrs were happy” (55).28 This commandment is not the Kantian law of duty, but the law of Christ: “bearing one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2). But how is happiness a gift of God’s Spirit? Hidden in what seems a romantic overstatement is the key to happiness in the Karamazov world: Dmitri says to Alyosha, “Brother, in these past two months I’ve sensed a new man in me, a new man has arisen in me! He was shut up inside me, but if it weren’t for this thunderbolt, he never would have appeared” (591). That new man cannot be alone: “I really cannot live without Grusha” (595). Happiness is found not when an individual earns it, but when love freely brings it. Pace Kant, an individual cannot be blessed or happy in isolation but only in community. Of course, it is entirely possible that love is a delusion, an illusory product of biological and psychological mechanisms necessary for the survival of the species. If love can be reduced to the mechanical, to passion, or to other causes visible to pure reason, then it is no icon of the divine. If love is a delusion, then happiness is not real but simply as irrational a mystification of natural processes as love is. Dmitri’s happiness, if it is real, is not earned. Nor is it individual or autonomous. It is given to him in and through the love he shares with Grushenka and which they accept. One might even say that it is just the sort of miracle that Alyosha must be open to accepting and that Ivan could not. Dmitri becomes a new man. The love between him and Grushenka is not a superstitious expectation that saints’ bodies will not stink but a more subtle, profound, even “natural” miracle. Happiness is a gift of grace, realized in human relationships if it is realized at all. Like all gifts, it can be resisted. It also is not “merited,” but a free gift. Alyosha had received the gift of grace as a fighting love for the world. Dmitri and Grushenka give each other graceful love. They all display patterns of happiness. Ivan, without his ticket, is out in the cold. And these patterns of love and happiness circulate throughout the novel. Grushenka gives love freely. She restores Alyosha and sobers up Dmitri. As master and disciple, Zosima and Alyosha love each other. Grushenka loves the brothers. Dmitri returns Grushenka’s love. Alyosha becomes a sort of elder to the boys and they love each other and celebrate their community while remembering Ilyusha. Freely given love is the icon of divinity in the Karamazov world. Grushenka’s soliloquy, declaimed (perhaps drunkenly) just before Dmitri is arrested, is key: Tomorrow the convent, but today we’ll dance. I want to be naughty, good people, what of it, God will forgive. If I were God I’d forgive all people: “My dear sinners, from now on I forgive you all.” And I’ll go and ask forgiveness: “Forgive me, good people, I’m a foolish woman, that’s what.” I’m a beast, that’s what. But I want to 28. Compare Kant: “In this manner, through the concept of the highest good as the object and final end of pure practical reason, the moral law leads to religion. Religion is the recognition of all duties as divine commands, not as sanctions, i.e., arbitrary and contingent ordinances of a foreign will, but as essential laws of any free will as such” (Critique of Practical Reason,134).

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pray. I gave an onion. Wicked as I am, I want to pray! Mitya, let them dance, don’t interfere. Everyone in the world is good, every one of them. The world is a good place. We may be bad, but the world is a good place. We’re bad and good, both bad and good …. No, tell me, let me ask you, all of you come here and I’ll ask you; tell me this, all of you: why am I so good? I am good, I’m very good … Tell me, then: why am I so good? (440; emphasis added)

This self-proclaimed wicked woman is also good. How can that be? It is so because the world she lives in is a defaced icon. She is a sinner, guilty before all because she asks forgiveness of all. It is not that people are bad. People are both fundamentally good and all too often act badly. If God would forgive all, then this forgiveness is not and cannot be merited but must be a free gift of divine love, like her very own gift to Dmitri. Yet her God acts through sinners—and all are sinners. Grace is never pure. Nor is the world fully restored, any more than Skotoprogonyevsk is fully transformed into a community that is sobornost’. Yet even if grace is not pure and success is not assured, grace exists and brings hope.29 If we choose to act lovingly with others, we can hope for wholeness—sobornost’— in the world created by the Triune God, the world where the power of the divine can be and is realized. That is Dostoevsky’s world: there is hope for happiness for all in the community of true solidarity. The second response to Ivan is The Brothers Karamazov as a whole. Ivan is right to note the atrocities in the world. Alyosha, Dmitri, and Grushenka see this as well. But Ivan is wrong in returning his ticket to living together in the world, wrong not to ask “why,” and wrong in not caring to act. The world is God’s icon, but human perversity and selfishness have defaced it. God did not create sin, even though he created people that, to various degrees, sin. The repair of the world, perhaps never ending, perhaps futile, is possible only through human actions in solidarity with each other and with God in the spirit of sobornost’. These are graceful actions. Since Ivan sees a horribly broken world as simply God’s creation and cannot act in this world with hope, he cannot comprehend the response that the novel as a whole makes to him. Could he ever understand it? Obviously, he does not do so in the Karamazov world. Yet surprisingly there are hints that all is not lost for him.30 While Fyodor 29. One might expect the end to be some form of otherworldly salvation. Save for the folktale of the onion, it does not seem to be Dostoevsky’s central concern. However, Lee D. Johnson, unpersuasively in my opinion, finds that Smerdyakov “displays signs of a latent, unconscious understanding of … theosis” (“The Struggle for Theosis: Smerdyakov as a Would-Be Saint,” in A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov, 74–89). If the claims made in Chapters 4 and 7 are accurate, the worldly process of thēosis is a significant theme in understanding the converts and the vision of community portrayed in the novel. Given Ivan’s rejection of an eternal harmony that somehow compensates the lost children for their horrible suffering, whatever hope there is cannot be for that vision of the ultimate. At a minimum, a polyphony beyond either saying or showing might be the best one can do. 30. Thanks to Paul Contino who reminded me of this possibility in conversation.

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has told Alyosha not to love Ivan (136), just before his trial Dmitri urges Alyosha “Well, go, love Ivan!” (597). Alyosha leaves him in tears. He has come to realize the “ineluctable grief and despair” afflicting Dmitri. And then “deep, infinite compassion suddenly took hold of him and at once tormented him. His pierced heart ached terribly. ‘Love Ivan!’—he suddenly recalled Mitya’s parting words” (597). Given the power of love to convert people in the Karamazov world, Ivan’s plight may not be hopeless forever. A reader persuaded by Dostoevsky’s argument can, and arguably should, have hope even for Ivan. A further sign of hope is Ivan’s involvement with Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtsev. He developed a “fiery and mad passion for Katerina Ivanovna” (610). However, “he loved her madly, though it was true that at times he also hated her so much that he could even have killed her” (611). He cannot coherently decide whether he loved Katerina or lusted for her. Passions are visible to materialists even if understanding them as love or as lust goes beyond the facts. The narrator suggests that his feelings for Katerina are no less ambivalent than his understanding of God as creation or creator, or of the devil as real or as his delusion. Katerina deceives Ivan with a drunken letter from Dmitri that proves “mathematically” to Ivan that Dmitri has killed their father (618–19). She testifies at the trial and reads the letter, concealing its context and thus profoundly damaging Dmitri’s defense (689). Ivan collapses at the trial with “a frenzied cry” (687); the translator comments that it is a cry like those possessed by evil spirits (794). Katerina then takes him into her home to recover from his illness, despite what the gossips might say (757). The narrator, evidently speaking for the author, notes Ivan’s “fiery and mad passion” for her “which later affected his whole life: it could serve as the plot for another story, for a different novel” (610). The narrator, however unreliable at this point, finds room for hope. This ambivalence about the meaning of Ivan’s passion and the turbulence of their relationship contrasts strongly with the calm acceptance of Dmitri’s and Grushenka’s love. At best, whether Ivan’s mad passion and Katerina’s devotion can become love is, at best, not settled in this novel. Fiery passion may well fit in a materialist’s world; but the sort of love that enhances the lovers and endures seems to require something more of the spirit. If the love of Katerina and Alyosha is powerful enough to get Ivan involved, perhaps it can free him from his materialism and diabolical delusions. Even if Ivan cannot see the vision of the novel as a whole, its readers can. If readers do not work to realize a reconciled world, then they, like Ivan in the novel, would be hard-pressed to understand this response. If people do not interact graciously together to illumine the blighted icon, one cannot have hope for sobornost’.

Conclusion: Dostoevsky’s Challenge to His Readers Sobornost’ is what The Brothers Karamazov hopes for. It is both the means and the end, the practice and result of reconciling the whole of human life in

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a gracious response to and cooperation with God. Sobornost’ connects “what we can discover there is” with “what ought we do” and with “what may we hope.” If ultimate reconciliation is possible, then the realistic love that Zosima, Alyosha, Grushenka, and ultimately Dmitri show is not merely reasonable but profoundly wise. In the epilogue to the novel, sobornost’ is nourished in the plans to save Dmitri. “A man sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude still intends to be happy— isn’t that pitiful?” says Alyosha almost sardonically to Katerina Ivanovna (760). Dmitri is a new man who can be happy even though he was a legally innocent individual declared legally guilty. He also comes to understand how vile his insult to her was—and to beg her forgiveness. Sobornost’ is nourished in Alyosha’s profound speech to the boys who have gathered at the stone in memory of the dead child Ilyusha. Solidarity and remembrance are its themes. This is the finale of the novel. “Let us never forget him, and may his memory be eternal and good in our hearts now and unto ages of ages!” “Yes, yes, eternal, eternal,” all the boys cried in their ringing voices, with deep feeling in their faces. “Let us remember his face, and his clothes, and his poor boots, and his little coffin, and his unfortunate, sinful father, and how he bravely rose up against the whole class for him!” “We will, we will remember!” the boys cried again, “he was brave, he was kind!” “Ah, how I loved him!” exclaimed Kolya. “Ah, children, ah, dear friends, do not be afraid of life! How good life is when you do something good and rightful!” “Yes, yes,” the boys repeated ecstatically. “Karamazov, we love you!” a voice, which seemed to be Kartashov’s, exclaimed irrepressibly. “We love you, we love you,” everyone joined in. Many had tears shining in their eyes. “Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya proclaimed ecstatically. “And memory eternal for the dead boy!” Alyosha added again, with feeling. “Memory eternal!” the boys again joined in. “Karamazov!” cried Kolya, “can it really be true as religion says, that we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyushechka?” “Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been,” Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy. “Ah, how good that will be!” burst from Kolya. “Well, and now let’s end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don’t be disturbed that we’ll be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient, eternal thing, and there’s good in that, too,” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let’s go! And we go like this now, hand in hand.” (775–6)

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And so they go off to the memorial dinner, exulting and calling out, “Hurrah for Karamazov.” Robert Louis Jackson comments on The Brothers Karamazov as a whole as a response to Ivan beyond his response in Book Six, “The Russian Monk.” The realists act to restore the defaced icon of the world. The Karamazov vision, conveyed by the novel as a whole, seeks to show that the first answer fits reality better than Ivan’s returning his ticket. Jackson notes this: Seeks—because where we are involved with Dostoevsky versus Dostoevsky— and that is almost always the case in his major novels—there is not likely to be an answer, or voice, that definitively drowns out the other contending voices. As in a symphony or chorus, however, there are dominants and directions, and a sense of the whole picture. That whole picture constitutes a point of view. The novel, in its artistic unity, it might be said, knows where it is going.31

In light of Chapter 2’s discussion of the realization of the novel, that artistic unity is not merely a product of the text published as The Brothers Karamazov. The novel knows where it is going: it is an act, targeting readers who realize the novel in their reading and responding to the text published as The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky gave Ivan as profound a negation of God as is written anywhere. His “Rebellion” refracted Dostoevsky’s own spiritual experience, a negation through which he lived. As this chapter has argued, The Brothers Karamazov proffers an approach to responding to suffering that neither explains it nor explains it away but rather responds in and with the solidarity and support that is characteristic of the spirit of sobornost’. Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” shows the pitfalls of ecclesial authoritarianism. The superstitious irrationalists show the danger of blind faith, while the realists demonstrate than people of reasonable intelligence can maintain allegiance to an inherited faith tradition incarnated in a coinherent community. As I have emphasized here, the questions with which this book began are not answered directly, but the unfolding polyphony of the narrative itself is an argument that we can have hope for the world because we can practice solidarity. If we work to realize the goal of sobornost’, then we can and should have hope that the vision of the world as “a fractured icon under repair” is a vision of the real world. What gives Dostoevsky’s argument its power is that the novel shows unrelievedly that this hope might be bogus. The opposing understandings—that the world is a rational mechanism that has no room for freedom or that the world is a meaningless place where a wise individual cannot but live in superstitious or 31. Jackson, “Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone,” 234. Also see Scanlan, Dostoevsky the Thinker, 4: “To use Bakhtinian language, I would call Dostoevsky’s philosophizing dialogical in style, monological in substance.” Scanlan highlights the uncertainty of the future, which renders knowledge impossible, but makes hope possible. I would disagree that Dostoevsky’s hope is necessarily monological, at least if there are analogs in other faith traditions.

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sensualist irrationality—might be true. Materialism or irrationalism might be the way of the world. Can one really hope that the Karamazov world is a real response to Ivan? “One” cannot. That is precisely the point. The Karamazov Vision can be realized only if “we” live as actively as Zosima and Alyosha and as devotedly as Dmitri and Grushenka. It is by means of such substantive and particular practices, incarnating a harsh and fearful love rooted in and realized in a coinherent community and not in one’s imagination alone, that we can realize the hope that the novel as a whole conveys and that the final speech highlights. That is, the “small acts” and the “religious vision” are connected in the connections between and among people who take the time to know and care for each other. The two responses to Ivan are neither identical nor separate but integrally intertwined. In a novel full of people bowing, one bow stands out: Zosima’s bow to Dmitri in Book Two. He kneels at Dmitri’s feet and bows so low as to touch “the floor with his forehead” (74). Alyosha is amazed. Rowan Williams plumbs the meaning of this gesture: From one point of view, then, the most effective icon in [the novel] is Mitya … Mitya is the one to whom Zosima pays the kind of veneration that is given to icons. The icon as a cultic object shows brokenness healed and plurality reconciled, but translated into the terms of a human biography, the icon must be a story, a process, that shows the reality of a life that is disrupted by the awareness of loss or sin and still faithful to the world that the icon manifests, faithful enough to become answerable for that world’s reality and power.32

No other act of bowing in the novel is addressed to a person as an icon. Dmitri, thus portrayed as a fractured icon, is healed and unified in his conversion through Grushenka’s love. “The whole narrative of Karamazov is shaped by Mitya’s fate,” says Williams.33 But Dmitri’s fate is Grushenka. It is their love that is the icon. Dmitri’s restoration presages the world’s restoration. If the world is a desecrated icon, then realists are the ones who can and do sanctify it. This is the hope narrated in the world, the first response to Ivan’s challenge in the novel. This response is begun by Zosima and carried through by his doubles. The second response is the hope narrated for the world, that the realists are not deluded but are called to repair the damage to allow it to become a paradise. The second response is not the same as the first, but it is a vision affirming the realists’ practice. Dostoevsky’s argument is that to have hope both in and for the world is reasonable. Yet Ivan or the irrationalists might be correct. The world might become the world as Ivan sees it: without meaning, except to eat, drink, and make merry until one hits their own peak and then drops the cup of life. The world might become 32. Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, 201 (emphasis added). Zosima later tells Alyosha that he bowed to Dmitri’s “great future suffering” (285). 33. Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, 201.

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as they envision it: a mindless carnival for buffoons, a mindless sect for irrational “true believers” only, or a mindless war of all against all. The assumption of the autonomous individual who is free from as many constraints as possible will lead to a world in which people become less and less free to interact humanely. The real world may become as bleak as those worlds. For while the whole novel is an answer to Ivan, it is not, pace Jackson, only a “point of view.” It does know where it is going and also what it is doing: it is summoning its readers to action like the realists and offering hope that the coinherent community may emerge from truly human interactions, whether from Skotoprigonyevsk, from Russia, or from the world in which we all live. In other words, the world will become as Alyosha’s opponents see it if people fail to live realistically in the hope for the unity and freedom of sobornost’. But as with the hope that Alyosha and the boys generate in their commitment and memory, readers, if they so desire it, can live in solidarity. For that is the moral of Grushenka’s tale of the onion: If we hold together, the fragile onion will hold us up. A novel has a text but is not a text. It is an action, a communicative act that declares what the shape of a fictional world is and in so doing challenges its readers to react to that action, to interact with, and creatively realize, that possible world. The novel challenges the readers to realize the life-affirming beliefs, actions, and attitudes the novel displays in and through its dialectical argument. Everything we need to know is all right there in Skotoprigonyevsk, displayed over a few days a few months apart. The town is a prism that refracts Russia and even the world. In narrating the events that the people of the town lived through, the novel shows the various ways the world could be now and can become in the future. The town, the nation, the world could splinter into anarchy or evolve into that community of solidarity. This is the challenge The Brothers Karamazov gives its readers. We are making the world what it will be. All of our actions together shape our world. How are we realizing it? How are you realizing it? What are all of us doing in realizing what the world will be? The novel as a whole narrates a hope for the world. The challenge is to realize that hope. That challenge is taken up in the readers’ responses to the text. The challenge and resolution are not in the text, but, as Mikhail Bakhtin put it, they stand “above the word, above the voice, above the accent.”34 The challenge is received when readers become aware that they are realizing the world in the ways that they live. In the midst of recognizing these challenges, the novel confronts readers with a set of choices. Shall we see humanity as a coinherent community seeking unity, even as a subcommunity in the great community of creation, or as individuals in competition in a race for domination? Shall we realize that hope is possible only if we carry others with us as we grab the angel’s onion, or shall we selfishly kick all others off? Shall we realize a world that works for restorative justice, or which keeps the justice system a buffoonish carnival? Shall we live irrationally 34. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 43.

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as sensualists or superstitious believers in a cult isolated from people who are “not like us” (especially isolated from historians and scientists who can reveal the uncertainty of our comfortable certainties), or shall we live as realists? Shall we realize a world that does not encourage “dropping the cup” in suicidal despair? All of these—and many more—are the possible “perlocutionary” challenges of this polyphonic novel. Living together, in freedom and unity, in reconciliation, in sobornost’ even with all of creation (if Alyosha’s profound experience includes the natural world in life together) is the second response in hope to Ivan—above the word, the voice, the accent, but, if anywhere, in the readers’ responses to the case the novel makes for its vision. Where is the novel going? Those days in Skotoprigonyevsk tell a challenging truth not only about the town but about the world, true not merely of the Karamazov world but the world as well. In both, if we do what we ought, then we can realize love and hope, that incarnation of divine grace, can reconcile the world. That vision is invisible and unrealizable to anyone who is simply an isolated monad who wishes to refuse to recognize the community that has been the context for and a constituent in developing everyone’s free individuality. But the final truth may be that we will return the ticket that would have admitted us to the project of realizing a divinely graced world, and thus we will realize a world of bleak determinism. This or any novel isn’t going to settle the question. Its readers and their communities shall realize it. Finally, the argument of the novel is an aesthetic argument. Along the way, it sought to refute Ivan by portraying the harsh and fearful love that is a constituent of sobornost’. It may not be judged sublime or beautiful as Kant or Schiller would expect. But the real judgment requires answering this question: is it liveable? The novel’s aesthetic argument seeks to persuade the reader that, given the other mentalités available, realism like that of Zosima and Alyosha is the only option available for humans who want to live in a world worth dwelling in. Every other form of life displayed in the novel is either benignly blind (e.g., the religiously naive) or seriously flawed. No other option has a positive answer to the question, “What may we hope”?35 The novel ends with Alyosha and the boys, happy and laughing, acting in memory and hope, and on their way to a memorial supper for Ilyusha. Alyosha encourages them: “ ‘Well, let’s go! And we go like this now, hand in hand.’ ‘And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand: Hurrah for Karamazov!’ Kolya cried once more ecstatically, and once more all the boys joined in his exclamation” (776). In the end, the question is whether the readers can respond by actively joining the boys’ chorus in exclaiming, “Hurrah for Karamazov.”

35. My thanks to Scott MacDougall, who helped me formulate more clearly this understanding of the shape of the argument.

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INDEX Adolescent, The 23–4, 82 aesthetic argument 17, 139, 145, 158 aesthetics 93, 140, 142 Allen, Artur Mrówczyński-Van 73 Allen, S. Elayne 121 Alyosha see Karamazov, Alexei (Alyosha) Fyodorovich Amadeus 25 anthill 8, 96, 104, 121, 123–4, 137–8, 149 apparatchik 36 Aristotle 3, 16, 136, 147 atheism 5, 13–15, 38, 58, 61, 72, 112, 143 Augustine, Saint 31 Bakhtin, Mikhail 5, 13, 21–2 polyphonic unity 22–3 polyphony in Dostoevsky’s work 18, 24, 127 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 23 and reader response 33, 157 understanding of polyphony 22–4, 27 ball/banquet 86 Berdyaev, Nicholas 4, 93–5 Betenson, Toby 6 Boito, Arrigo 25, 32 bow 67, 71, 158 Boys, the Snegiryovs, and Kolya 109–15 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky) 1–2, 4–5, 8–10, 12, 18 anthropological issues 72–3, 88, 92, 97, 103–4, 115, 117, 147, 156–7; also see sobornost’ casting 26 Christocentric vision of 2, 64, 73, 149 conversion in 53–4, 57–74, 85, 113 as declarative communicative act 31–2, 34 faith and reason 11–18 freedom and bondage 85 political elements 120 polyphonic ending 22

polyphonic novel 5, 9–10, 26–7 polyphonic reading 28–9 problem of theocracy 121 reading the novel 32–4 sobornost’ in 72–3, 119–38, 149, 153–5, 158 social vision 103–19, 125 unconverted characters 75–83 Buddha 14 Buddhism 14 Camus, Albert 34 Cana of Galilee 41, 46, 48, 53, 63–5, 67, 108, 120 carpenter 98 Cassedy, Steven 3, 9, 23, 140 Cattle-roundup-ville 105 Cherkasova, Evgenia 9, 79, 92, 140 Chermashnya 78 Christ 149; also see Cana of Galilee and Antichrist 95 -figure and Judas-figure, 76 lover of mankind 39, 63–5, 149 temptation of, 108 and truth 12–13 Christian commitment, irrational core of 11–13, 48, 88–9, 122, 140 Christians 15 Church as coinherent community 8, 73, 101, 111, 119, 121–3, 125–8, 132–3, 136, 149, 155–7 Orthodox, 3, 9, 103, 122, 129 Roman Catholic 8, 73, 95–6 as social ideal 8, 120 and state 38, 80, 127, 135–6 communicative actions 5, 29–32, 34, 127, 157 communities of interpretation 28–9 Confessions (St. Augustine) 31 Conlon, Brian 103, 115

166 Conlon, Daniel 133 Connolly, Julian W. 53, 81 Contino, Paul 2, 8, 53, 64, 79, 109, 112, 146–7, 152 conversion 6, 53–7; also see unconverted characters Alyosha 53, 61–5 in The Brothers Karamazov 57–72 characteristics of 53–7, 72–3, 113 Dmitri, 53, 68–72 fruits of 61 Grushenka 65–8 Kolya Krasotkin 111–15, 133 love factors in 61 Markel 58–60 patterns in 54 reasonableness of 59, 65, 72 refusal of 54 transformation of vocation 61 Zosima 60–1 1 Corinthians 12:27 8 Cunningham, David S. 2, 130 Decembrists 12 declarative speech-act 26, 31–2, 85, 101, 117 Delirium 33, 44 denegation 93, 94 Der Ring des Niebelungen (Wagner, Richard) 27 devil 5, 38, 42, 81, 96 goal to save Ivan’s soul 82 and Ivan 37–8, 80–3 in opera 25–6 Dharma (teaching) 14 divided self 79, 82 Dmitri see Karamazov, Dmitri (Mitya) Fyodorovich Donizetti, Gaetano 25 Dostoevsky, Fyodor characters 21–2 and children 115 death of his daughter 114 epiphany 59 faith and reason 11–15 as irrationalist 12–15 letter to K. P. Pobedonostsev, 3, 4, 139 letter to N. A. Lyubimov, 6, 53, 66 letter to Natalya Fonvizina 12

Index notebooks 3, 12, 139–40 opponents’ claims 116 orthodox religious vision 51, 53–4 patterns of reasoning 18 Siberian imprisonment 12 social vision 54, 120–5 Dostoevsky: Mantle of the Prophet, 1871– 1881 (Frank) 3–4, 43, 58–9, 116 on Alyosha 88 on Book Nine 69 on Dmirtri 43, 70 on faith and reason 4, 11, 48, 87–9, 139 Grand Inquisitor 3–4, 91, 96, 108, 129 on Ivan 3–4, 59, 86–7, 89, 134 on Kolya and the boys 111–15 on Schiller 35, 85–7 on Zosima 61, 89 doubling see mirroring and doubling doubles 40, 43, 44, 46, 63, 107–9, 111, 114 Ehrwürdge Geistermutter-Ewigkeit 87 epistemic argument of the novel 51 epistemology 57, 147; also see virtue epistemology and ethics 50, 70, 148 Kantian 92, 140 eternal harmony see harmony, eternal Euclidean geometry 36–7, 79–82, 143 Euclidean materialist (Ivan) 37 Euclidean mind 5, 36, 38, 83, 91, 95, 130 Euclidean universe 79, 98, 100, 144 European conservative romanticism 125 faith blind 57, 80, 155 Brothers Karamazov 18–19, 50–2 defined (as relation) 14–15 elucidation of 18–19 and miracles 40, 148 pure 4, 88 and reason 12–14, 92 reasonableness of 16–17 relational approach 17, 122 secular 14 faith vs. reason 4, 5, 11–13, 15, 36, 50, 85, 88, 140 alternative approach 14–18 source of dichotomy 13 faith vs. superstition 44–6

Index Ferapont, Father 35 humor of 46 superstition of 42, 44–6 Fish, Stanley 28 Fonvizina, Natalya 12 form of life 3, 5–6, 15, 36, 50, 83, 85, 108, 139; also see mentalité Frank, Joseph; see Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet 1871–1881 Fratto, Elena 8 free will 123 freedom 4, 88, 95 and community 103–7, 117, 123–6, 133 and immortality Ivan’s notion 7, 85–102 Kant 92–4, 97–8, 135, 141 and sobornost’ 7–8, 54, 133, 157–8 and unhappiness 91 Zosima 94–5, 101–2 Fyodor see Karamazov, Fyodor Pavlovich God 13–15 action in the world 58 authentic obedience to as root of freedom 101–2, 124 denial of as psychopathy 81 denial of presence and reality as psychopathic 81 and freedom 95 and grace 73–4, 94, 119, 125, 144 illness as punishment from 112 and immortality 5, 37, 39, 80, 88, 89, 95, 99–101, 145, 148 of onions 4, 6, 66 and sobornost’ 119, 121–2, 127, 137–8 Trinity’s energies 73, 120, 129 Triune God 130–1, 136, 152 as ultimate source of value and center of meaning 14 “God, freedom and immortality” 92–3, 101, 135, 148 Godzieba, Anthony 16 “Good Samaritan episode,” 86, 100 grace 2, 73–4, 124–5, 144, 152 agents of 64 and freedom 94 as freely given 73, 149, 151 human love and 73, 94

167

Ivan’s ticket and 144 pure 152 Grand Inquisitor 1, 91, 95–6, 108, 128–30 Grushenka 40, 64–5, 68, 72, 108, 149, 154 and Alyosha, 61–3, 65 conversion 65–8 Dmitri and 43–4, 67–73, 95, 105, 130, 141, 151, 156 Fyodor and 42, 77–8 legend of the onion 65 and Polish officer 67–9, 75–6 in poverty 65 and Rakitin 49–50, 61–3, 75–7 and Samsonov 65 as sinner 66, 152 “guilty before all” 8, 58–60, 71, 72, 74, 77–8, 87, 104, 122, 132, 137, 147, 152 habitual center of energy 54–5, 113 happiness 58, 71, 72, 83, 86, 95, 147 Kant vs. Zosima 150–2 harmony conceptual 7 eternal 26, 39, 79, 86–7, 127, 131, 152 musical 25 heavenly spirits (Father Ferapont) 44 hedonism 72, 84 hell 46, 66, 108, 114, 137–8, 142 hemorrhoidal face 36 hero-ideologist 89, 108, 141 Holy Spirit 73 vs. holispirit 45 Hosanna 26, 82 humanists 14, 86 Hume, David 30 “Hurrah for Karamazov” 26, 33, 154, 155, 158 icon as delusion 151 Dmitri as 156 human love as icon of divine love 10, 72, 74, 141–2, 151 onion as 123 restoring the desecrated icon of the world 101, 142, 148–9, 155 spirit of sobornost’ as icon of Trinity 129–30, 138

168

Index

world as defaced icon 2, 41, 51, 70, 87, 113, 124, 130, 142, 148–9, 152–3, 155 Ilyusha see Snegiryov, Ilyusha Nikolaiovich immortality 88, 102 and God 5, 37, 39, 80, 88, 89, 92–3, 95, 99–101, 145, 148 individualism 117, 122–3, 127, 141–3, 146, 150 and collectivism 8, 123 individuality 119, 120, 124, 144–5 and collectivity 122 inexplicable, the 17 irrationalists 41–8, 75, 126 Islam, pillers of 15 Isupov, Konstantin G. 115 Ivan see Karamazov, Ivan (Vanya) Jackson, Robert Louis 9, 120, 131, 140, 146, 148, 155, 157 James, William 54, 64, 78–9 Job 32:14 113 Judas abandoned Jesus 76 Kant, Immanuel 9, 15, 23, 37, 83, 92–5, 140–5, 146–7, 150–1, 158 categorical imperative 150 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant) 9, 36, 83, 92–5, 141, 144, 151 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 9, 36, 83, 92–4, 140, 150 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 36, 141–2, 144 individualism of 102, 141, 150 phenomenal vs. noumenal freedom 97–8 Kantian harmonics 94 Karamazov, Alexei (Alyosha) Fyodorovich 3–4, 11, 26, 37, 49, 52, 70, 87, 128–9; also see faith Brothers Karamazov as biography of 33 as Christ-figure 39, 76, 114, 149 conversion 6, 53, 61–7, 73 dialogue with Fyodor and Ivan 37 and Enlightenment values 39 murmur against God 62 obedience to Father Zosima 102, 124 occasional tenderness 109 perturbation 63

problem solver 40, 109–11, 132 as realist 5, 35, 39–40, 41, 46, 47–8, 146–9 vision in “Cana of Galilee” 41, 46, 48 vocation 61–4, 72 Karamazov, Dmitri Fyodorovich (Mitya) 31, 34, 36, 40, 49–50, 71–2, 108, 132 conversion 53, 68–72, 129 fiancée 40, 110 Fyodor and 78, 109, 116–17 Grushenka and 67, 69, 71, 141, 150–1 Katerina Ivanovna Verkhotsev and 40, 67, 154 as sensualist 41, 43–4 trial 76, 115–17, 133–5, 137 Zosima’s bow 156 Karamazov, Fyodor Pavlovich 37, 46, 75, 105–6 death scene 43–4, 77, 100 dispute with Dmitri 78 on hell’s hooks 46 house of 105–7 muddleheaded madcap 77–8 as “natural man” (W. James) 78 sensualism of 41–3, 109, 77–8, 83 sick soul 78 wives 77–8 Karamazov, Ivan (Vanya) 4, 33, 66, 70, act of rebellion 7, 84, 87–98 ambivalence about God’s status 38, 83 ambivalence about his devil’s status 82, 83, 144, 153 atheist 5, 38 challenge to belief in God and religion 1, 155 childlike conviction 26 conflicts 82–3 contrast with Alyosha 40, 41, 131 contrast with Dmitri on evils 131 and conversion 79–83 denial of God and immortality 37 Dostoevsky’s responses 3–5, 59, 140, 149–53, 156–7 Euclideanism 5, 36, 37, 79–83, 91, 93, 95, 98, 100, 130, 143–4 Katerina Ivanovna Verkhotsev and 40, 67, 153 literary roots of “Rebellion” 85–8 materialism 37, 45, 85, 143–5, 147, 153

Index materialist 5, 35, 36–9, 83 pronouncements on freedom 95 protest against God 11, 85 refusing the truth of a harsh and fearful love 98–101 rejecting freedom 91–4, 95, 96–102 search for truth 143–4 suicidal ideation? 10, 59, 85 Karamazov Companion (Terras) 6–7, 21, 33, 46, 49–50, 53, 66, 77, 86, 89, 103, 107–8, 110–11, 115, 128–9, 140 Karamazovs 33, 35; also see specific Karamazovs Katerina see Verkhotsev, Katerina Ivanovna or Khokhlakov, Katerina Osipovna katholikos 119 Khokhlakov Katerina Osipovna 95, 99, 108, 110, 124, 148 Lize 108, 110 Khomiakov, Aleksei 7, 73, 99 notion of sobornost’ 119 King Jr., Martin Luther 125 Kjetsaa, Geir 1 Kolya see Krasotkin, Kolya Kosman, Joshua 28 Kostalevsky, Marina 3, 7, 9, 21, 23, 135–6, 144 Krasotkin, Kolya 40, 53, 76, 104, 108–15, 154, 158 conversion, 113–14, 118, 132–3 Lawrence, D. H. 34 “life is paradise” 8, 58–60, 142, 147 Lize see Khoklakov, Lize Lobachevskian geometry 36–7, 80 Louth, Andrew 119, 125 love, harsh and fearful 51, 89, 98–100, 122, 126, 128, 156, 158 Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti) 25 Luke 15:11-32 88 Lyubimov, N. A. 6, 53, 66 MacCullough, Ross 2, 86 Mahayana Buddhism 14 Makarios 147 manipulation 5, 35, 48–50, 89, 135, 142, 148

169

manipulators 51, 75–7, 126; also see Rakitin Markel, conversion 58–60 marriage feast at Cana see Cana of Galilee materialism 2, 7, 14, 36–9, 41, 79–83, 89, 142–6, 156 and freedom 92–5, 124 legal 134–6 and truth 13, 102, 144 materialist 4, 5, 14, 49, 51 atheism 38, 79 religious superstition 44–6 scientific 14 maternal love 59, 61 McClendon Jr., James Wm. 54–5, 70 Mefistofele (Boito) 25, 32 mentalité 5, 35–6, 48, 51, 90, 132, 145, 144, 158; also see forms of life Mephistopheles 82 as tenor 26 miracles 35, 39–40, 48, 51, 63, 75–6 mirroring and doubling 7, 36, 40–1, 44, 46, 59, 64, 76, 89, 91, 103, 107–9, 111, 113–14, 117, 128–32, 137, 141, 156 judicial system 133, 135 sobornost’ 128–32 Mitya see Karamazov, Dmitri Fyodorovich Mochulsky, Konstantin 129 moral compunction 94 deficiency (of anti-hero) 79 duty (Kant) 141 law (Kant) 150–1 rebirth (Grushenka) 66 regeneration 106 morality and law 133–6 multivoicedness 18 music 24, 29 “My onion, not yours” 104 “mystical-ontological” union 120 naturalists 18 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich 16 Nivat, Georges 7 nonconversion of characters 6, 75–84 non-Euclidean geometries 79

170 novel also see polyphonic novel creation 31 significance 32 writing and publishing 29–30 Obolevitch, Teresa 72–4 onion giving 65, 67, 68, 100, 108 legend of 66, 104, 108, 117 significance 65–7 as symbolizing sobornost’ 121–5 operas 23, 25 Trishatov’s opera 25 Paissy 40, 45, 46, 61, 63, 102, 108, 134–5 Palamas, Gregory 73–4, 125 parable Good Samaritan 86, 100 Prodigal Son 88–9 patterns of rationality and irrationality 35–6 manipulation 48–50 materialism 36–9 realism 39–41 religious naïveté/simplicity 46–8 sensualism 41–4 superstition 44–6 Perezvon 111–13 performative contradiction, 16 perlocutionary acts and effects, 30–2, 33–4, 103 perlocutionary challenge 158 Pevear, Richard 68, 85 phronēsis 147 pilgrim women 47 Pobedonostsev, K. P. 3–4, 139 political-legal system 119, 121, 136 polyphonic novel 5, 9–10, 21, 51, 102, 140, 142 argument in 150, 158 argument of 153–8 challenge of 1, 9, 51–2, 85, 89, 141, 153, 155, 157–8 as communicative act 29, 31–2, 34, 157 incompleteness of 22, 34, 126–7 interpretation 27–9 interpretive acts 29–32 location 120, 125, 132, 137 metaphor 21–7

Index significance of The Brothers Karamazov 32–4 unity of 22–3 polyphony 21–2 musical 22 operatic 26 presumptions 11, 13, 18–19, 29, 79, 80, 92, 143, 145 and assumptions 80, 143 and Kantian postulates 92 primitive socialism 121 Psalm 137 114 pure faith 4, 88 Pyman, Avril 126 Rakitin, Mikhail 35–6, 38, 48–9, 61, 122 and Alyosha 62, 66–7, 76 and Dmitri 50–2, 76 and Gruschenka 49, 61–3, 65–6, 76 instructs Kolya in socialism 76 as Judas-figure 76 as manipulator 75–7 as natural man (W. James) 77 rational egoism 2 Raw Youth, The (Dostoevsky) 23 reader-response criticism 23, 27–9, 33–4, 105, 157–8 realism 4–5, 39–41, 48, 51, 54, 83, 148, 150 reasoning 5 “Rebellion” 1, 7, 26, 38, 70, 84, 85, 87, 90–1, 95, 97, 131, 146, 148, 155 reductionism 23 religious naïveté/simplicity 46–8 religious vocation (Alyosha) 61–4, 72 “Resignation” 85–6 Rigoletto (Verdi) 25 Rohlf, Michael 92–3, 98 Rowe, William W. 129 “Russian Monk, The” 3, 11, 139, 155 Russian Orthodox culture 41, 109 saints 16 Samgha (the Buddhist community of monks) 14 Schiller, Friedrich 85–7, 140, 158 science and religion 11, 13, 57, 92, 94 secular faith 14 self-mocking 62

Index seminarist 49 sensualism 41–4, 77–8, 89, 126, 156 shriekers 35, 47 sin, original 81, 124 Skotoprigonyevsk 107, 132 cultural-geographic locations in 105 and Staraya Russa 105 Smerdyakov 42, 80, 82, 91, 100, 106, 108, 117 literal-mindedness 109 Smith, James M. 54–5 Snegiryov, Ilyusha Nikolaiovich 26, 40, 109–10 sobornost’ 7–9, 64, 72–3, 119–21, 150, 158 as icon of the Trinity 129, 138 mirroring and doubling 128–32 no crime, but punishment 133–6 novel’s vision 121 rejecting 101, 124, 144 Skotoprigonyevsk and 126–8 Slavophiles’ views 119 tale of onion as symbolizing 121–5 Vladimir Soloviev’s ideas 119 witnessing 132–3 sobornyi 119 social vision 103–4 Boys, the Snegiryovs, and Kolya 109–15 Dmitri’s trial 115–17 mirroring and doubling 107–9 onion, tale of 104 preliminary conclusion 117–18 settings 104–7 Soloviev, Vladimir 8, 31, 73, 119–21, 127–9, 135–6 Sosa, Ernest 99 speech-act 127, 157 declaration 31, 100–1 denegation 94 theory 29–32 Spirit of Love 119 sponger 42 Staraya Russa and Skotoprigonyevsk, 105 Stopes-Roe, Harry V. 17 Stradella, Allesandro 24 supernatural 13, 15, 55–6, 126 superstition 35, 44–6 Sutherland, Stewart 15

171

Svetlov, Agrafena Aexandrovna; see Grushenka terminal quests 17–18, 38, 51, 102, 143 Terras, Victor 21, 46, 49–50, 66, 85–6, 107–11, 128–30, 140 theodicy 2; also see harmony, eternal theology, 81, 125; also see sobornost’ of grace 74 Orthodox 7, 74, 141 political 120 Roman Catholic 11, 96, 125, 127–8, 14 Slavophilic 7–8, 119–20, 125, 127–8 Trinitarian 141 Thompson, Diane Oenning 2 timeless ecstatic acceptance 41 Tolstoy, Leo 41, 55 totalitarianism 7 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume) 30 Trinity’s energies 120 Triplicity and tripling 129–32 Trishatov 24–5 Triune God 136 Tschižewskij, Dmitry 35 typesetter 98 unconverted characters 75–83 universal union 104 Valliere, Paul 7, 120 variovoicedness 18 Venerable Spirit-Mother-Eternity 87 Verdi, Giuseppe 25 Verkhotsev, Katerina Ivanovna 40, 43, 67, 110–11 altercation with Grushenka 149 Dmitri and 105, 116 Ivan and 153–4 virtue epistemology 57, 99, 145 Volokhonsky, Larissa 86 Wagner, Richard 27 Walicki, Andrzej 124 Ware, Kallistos 119 Whiting, John 90 Williams, Rowan 5, 12, 34, 41, 52, 108, 147–8, 156 women of faith 61 Wood, Nathaniel 121, 127

172 Wood, Ralph C. 81, 96–7, 117 Zagzebski, Linda 57, 99 Zhitie 58 Zhuchka 112 Zhukovsky 85 Zosima 3, 11, 35, 40, 45, 71–2, 87, 89, 99, 121; also see happiness. love in army 131 coffin 148 conversion 60–1

Index death and decomposition 45, 49, 62–5, 73, 75 and Dmitri 156 on freedom 94–5, 101 God’s commandment on earth 71 hermitage 63 and Ivan 37 and Kantianism 92, 94, 146, 150 and pilgrims 47–8 realism of 40, 46, 48, 50–1 Zinovy 60–1