The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Problem

"There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all." These words are spoken by the Elder of the Orthodox monastery where we first meet our hero, Alyosha Fyodorovich Karamazov.

The Brothers Karamazov is full of insights that are easy to agree with. The reader of Freud can spot the "subject supposed to enjoy" in the perverse father Fyodor Pavlovich, the reader of René Girard can spot "mediated desire" on almost every page, the reader of Mikhail Bakhtin need not hunt very long for the "multi-voicedness" of the narrative technique, which consists mostly in open-ended ranting (especially in the trial scene that take up nearly 100 pages of such). The reader of Nietzsche will find abundant ressentiment. And the biographical reader of Dostoevsky finds unlimited recurrence of his cherished themes, anecdotes, and contemporary context. This is like a checklist.

But The Brothers Karamazov in so many places presents us with a hard saying like the one above. Who can hear it?

Again: "Each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the common guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us, for all people and for each person on this earth."

We would not be very good readers of novels if this maxim was something we could either accept or reject on its own. How does it work in this book? And how does this book work?

What does it mean to be guilty on behalf of others? How can I be responsible for the sins of other men? This is very abstract and theological. But it is also the main dynamic of the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich and the trial which take up hundreds of pages of the work: Ivan and Dmitri have not killed their father, not literally, and yet they are guilty. The difficult and demanding moral epigrams of the novel are not abstract and un-plotted bits of Christian ideology, but are in fact summaries of the central murder plot.

Some Statements

Zosima's brother, dying:

"Mother, don't weep, my dear," he would say, "I still have a long time to live, a long time to rejoice with you, and life, life is gladsome, joyful!"

"Ah, my dear, what sort of gladness is there for you, if you burn with fever all night and cough as if your lungs were about to burst?"

"Mama," he answered her, "do not weep, 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." 

"Life is paradise" is seemingly the worst description of the Dostoevskyan world, with its petty, grimy enmities, infectious gossip, and hysterical mediocrities. Zosima's mother parries the claim that life is paradise by pointing out that it just obviously is not: how can it be when you, my son, are wracked with illness, spitting up blood, and in the sleepless grip of fever? Didn't Christ cure the lepers in the New Testament? And here you are, uncured, raving. Ergo, we are left to ourselves, anything beyond this is a fantasy that obviously can't (or hasn't) come down to help you. 

"How can it be," she said, "that you are the most guilty before everyone? There are murderers and robbers, and how have you managed to sin so that you should accuse yourself most of all?"

"I do not know how to explain it to you, but I feel it so strongly that it pains me. And how could we have lived before, getting angry and not knowing anything?" Thus he awoke every day with more and more tenderness, rejoicing and all atremble with love.

"I do not know how to explain it to you, but I feel it so strongly that it pains me." The explanation is not going to be a theological statement, but instead the story of the Karamazov brothers. 

"In order to make the world over anew, people themselves must turn onto a different path... For everyone now strives most of all to separate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation. For all men in our age are separated into units, each seeks seclusion in his own hole, each withdraws from the others, hides himself, and hides what he has, and ends by pushing people away from himself… He is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people’s help, in people or in mankind, and now only trembles lest his money and his acquired privileges perish. Everywhere now the human mind has begun laughably not to understand that a man’s true security lies not in his own solitary effort, but in the general wholeness of humanity."

Marxist thinkers in the 20th century (Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, Alain Badiou) have argued for the importance of Utopia, of the Messianic: of the necessity of finding the future inscribed already in the wreck of the present, our salvation and future community in the defeats of the past. Alain Badiou's reading of Saint Paul has seen the crucifixion and resurrection as an Event that "is" nowhere and yet structures everything and makes us into "subjects," actors rather than assigned places. The transcendental is not out there; the transcendental (Christ's truth, the Logos) only is insofar as embodied, made flesh. And this holds true for the resurrection, too. The truth has not "ascended" and abandoned us, it is something we have to make, through human action and community. As Hegel says, "The in-itself is not an unrealized abstract universal that lacks an existence"—far from being a flitting, spectral half-reality, the True is in fact what is most actual and concrete. (Brecht: "Truth is concrete.")

Hegel identified the divide in Christian subjectivity between the fallible, sinful creature we are and the immortal, eternal essence of God, and called it "unhappy consciousness": there is no possibility of union with the unchangeable; religious life organized this way is a pathetic farce. Dostoevsky shares with all of the thinkers just named a total reversal of this perspective. "Life is paradise." It is only that "we have arranged everything in the world so repugnantly that to do [the right thing, to stop sinning] was nearly impossible."

Utopia, the Second Coming, the Event, Paradise: we have to stop pushing these things away into a glorious future that can never come about, and instead recognize them and pledge ourselves to the truth in the ugly, mundane, and self-evidently not perfect.

We can see now why nothing disgusted Dostoevsky more than two central tenets of what he identified as atheism and socialism:

1. Man's nature will be changed; life itself will be changed; we have only to arrange things so that we will be made good, by circumstances. (socialism)
2. There is no God. (atheism)

In ordinary thinking, these two ideas have precious little to do with each other. But the force of Dostoevsky's thought is that the right-here-ness of salvation, of dropping to one's knees this very instant and begging forgiveness. God is right here when I change my nature: that is all that Dostoevsky is saying. The transformation of the world is not something that comes first, or on schedule. History cannot be appealed to any more than God, as the guarantor of the actions that will make a new world.

The Plot of The Brothers Karamazov

Dmitri's motives (which he admits all too freely) for killing his father are sexual jealousy, financial acrimony over his inheritance, and a passionate and changeful mind that veers into scandal and abuse--just like Fyodor Pavlovich. Of course, motives themselves do not add up to committing a crime.

Ivan's "guilt" is more complex, in that he has apparently abetted the real murderer by absenting himself on the day of the crime, having been tipped off. Ivan had wished "precisely for Dmitri to kill father, and the sooner the better"; it is Ivan who had something to gain (his brother's inheritance and fiancée) by getting Dmitri out of the way. He is tormented by the hallucinated appearance of the devil, and by repeated, semi-compulsive visits to the real murderer. Ivan's brother Alyosha pleads with him:

"I know only one thing... It was not you who killed father... You've told yourself several times that you were the murderer... You've accused yourself and confessed to yourself... You are mistaken, the murderer was not you.... God has sent me to tell you that!... I've spoken this word to you for the whole of your life: it was not you!"

Ivan's position is indeed Satanic, but it is not only the Gospels' Satan that he invokes, namely he who tempts Christ in the desert. There is also the Satan of Job, another materialist, who believes that God created the universe "in accordance with Euclidean geometry." 

"I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony, in which we are all supposed to merge, I believe in the Word for whom the universe is yearning, and who himself was 'with God,' who himself is God, and so on... It's not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God's, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept." 

The confession that discloses the identity of the real killer, which retrospectively shows the intricate committing of the crime and the elaborate frame-up,  does not only illuminate the "facts of the case," does not only clear away the ambiguous (not to say raving) indications of guilt which land Dmitri in Siberia for the murder of his father. Beyond this judicial knowledge, in the figure of the despised, uncanny Smerdyakov the brothers recognize themselves and their own Oedipal imbrications. If the rousing ending of the novel unites the brothers, gives them a new purpose and pledges them to concern and help, it is starting from this recognition of identity with Smerdyakov. Smerdyakov is a grotesque parody of faith: "As a child he was fond of hanging cats and then burying them with ceremony. He would put on a sheet, which served him as a vestment, chant, and swing something over the dead cat as if it were a censer." He utters the greatest blasphemy imaginable: "I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all."

That is to say, while none of the brothers did kill their father, their identification is with a vanishing and hateful position. The recognition of how "we are all Smerdyakov" is simultaneously a dissolution of that place (he commits suicide) and a struggle against this identity, born out of the nadir of their implication in his filthy cynicism and resentment.

Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Master and Margarita is one of those novels, like Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, or George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, containing two stories which barely intersect. One of the pleasures of the multi-plot Victorian novel (and War and Peace is like this, too) is to see widely divergent points brought together in a final vortex of connectivity. The kind of novel I am talking about refuses this: the hemispheres only just meet, like the fleeting touch of dance partners in, well, a Tolstoy novel.

Master and Margarita might really be said to have three narratives: the “Satan comes to town” story, which for the most part reads like a combination of Gogol’s Dead Souls and a sort of Don Quixote in reverse; the love story between the author Master and the unhappily married Margarita; and the story of Pontius Pilate, which is the subject of Master’s novel, but is narrated variously through Satan, a burned manuscript of said novel, and a madman’s drugged hallucination. 

It seems axiomatic to me that we can’t say anything about the work as a whole without knowing how to put these parts together. Well, that is, unless we want to say that the book is a “satirical condemnation of Stalinist terror,” decide that this is worth our time to learn, and leave it at that.

Not that I am sure the novel *is* worth our time. The coordination of the different strands is uneven, many of the characters do not even rise to one-dimensionality, it abounds in clichéd and uninteresting depictions of greed and vice, and the ending is not of a sort that we are used to (since in the tradition of Gogol, Sterne, whose novels don’t really “conclude” but just break off).

 The translation I read links me to a website (greatbooks.org) with “discussion questions” which are not at all fatuous. Here are the most interesting.

• Why does Woland come to Moscow?

At an aesthetic level, this can be answered with reference to Georg Lukács’ typology, in The Theory of the Novel, of Sterne, Cervantes, and Gogol as novels of “abstract idealism,” namely “the demonism of the narrowing of the soul… forgets the existence of any distance between ideal and idea… Reality does not satisfy this a priori demand, thinks that reality is bewitched by evil demons… the complete absence of an inner problematic.” This is only to refer the problem to one of literary theory, but it is almost a literal paraphrase of Woland’s mission: the demonic but non-psychological mania to bewitch reality, to bring it into line with a monomaniacal directive. This is also the plot of Don Quixote.

But Woland arrives in Moscow first to answer an argument about the existence of God between the editor Berlioz and the poet Homeless, in chapter 1. He poses them the following question: “If there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?… [and how can man govern himself when he] cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?” And the entire action of this part of the novel is Woland’s repeated demonstration that the bureaucratic “governance” that man has set up for himself is a fragile, vain farce–a proliferation of little frauds and petty grievances. The key to this part of the novel, then, is that Woland’s mission is not to “enchant” but to disenchant, to unmask, to expose… Do I need to tell you that the devil is subversive?

• When Woland sees Margarita’s compassion for Pilate, why does he tell her, “Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that”? 

What we learn from reading Paradise Lost, Faust, The Merchant of Venice, and the Bible’s Job, is that the devil is a liar. Woland says, “Don’t trouble yourself here,” and she immediately does trouble herself about Pilate’s fate. But again I have a Lukács answer: against the strivings of the demonic, “outside reality remains quite untouched.” Moscow is a bit burnt-up, but not really altered by the end of the book. That “everything will turn out right” is an acknowledgement (as we see in this scene) of his own (final) impotence, as we had seen before, when Woland addresses Matthew Levi:

You uttered your words as if you don’t acknowledge shadows, or evil either. Kindly consider the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? Shadows are cast by objects and people.

Satan is “real” only in this sense. “Everything will turn out all right” in the sense that magical diamonds will turn into worthless sardine labels…

• Why is the story of Pontius Pilate presented as not only written by the master, but also told by Woland, dreamed by Ivan, and read by Margarita? 

A better question perhaps would be what the story of Master and Margarita has to do with the Woland plot. For me it is the weakest part of the book. Ivan is the character who most nearly experiences the Stalinist paranoiac institution as a mirror of the Pilate story, but… Margarita? Of course she represents THE virtue of the book, given that “There is no greater vice than cowardice”–but am I alone in feeling that the novel would be strengthened by dropping both Master and Margarita? (Evidently these were the last pieces to be added, over various drafts.) If Master is guilty vis-a-vis Margarita, or himself, this is too lightly sketched-in to stand up to the overwhelming magic of the Pilate and Woland sections.