Book Review: The Brothers Karamazov
Portrait of Garshin by Repin
A dramatization of proper therapy.
***
In his seminal biography on Dostoyevsky, Joseph Frank unequivocally states that the purpose of The Brothers Karamazov was to inoculate Russian culture against totalitarianism. The fever that would become the Revolution was progressing at the time, and Dostoyevsky wanted to cure it. Though he wasn’t a political philosopher, he knew a culture that perceived an individual to be good would be less likely to sacrifice him to communism. This is an astute observation—an often overlooked aspect of our politics is our even implicit view of man’s nature. How we set up the panda habitat at a zoo is a reflection of how we view their nature as well.
So how do we know man is good and so capable of living for himself? The proof, Dostoyevsky insists, is in man’s ability to decide to have faith in the divinity of Christ.
I’ve heard better arguments in Oscar acceptance speeches. As history indicates, The Brothers Karamazov did about as much to stem dictatorship as the Treaty of Versailles. The “morality doesn’t exist without faith” argument commits several fallacies, and fallacious arguments are only effective when they preach, not teach. Dostoyevsky’s philosophical education barely reached beyond The New Testament, so what else was there for him to grab hold of?
There is, however, another proof of man’s nobility in The Brothers Karamazov—a more fundamental proof—a proof that neither Frank nor other commentators have noticed. It’s a proof we can only see when we switch out our philosophy lens for a psychology one. From this perspective, one of how an individual relates with himself, Dostoyevsky elucidates a more noble nature of man than even Christ’s divinity could bestow upon him.
Regardless of any high-minded aim the novel may have, the story itself is magnetic. It revolves around the murder of Fyodor Karamazov, an aging, low-tier land owner. His relationship with his three sons, the titular brothers—Dimitry the brute, Ivan the intellectual, and Alyosha the monk—drives much of the story leading up to the murder. The interactions between the characters, especially in the first half of the book, are an excuse for philosophical debate, notably about free will and the problem of evil. These debates, though potentially a distraction, add deeper layers that propitiate the visceral plot. The mix of pensive intellectualism and dramatic tension effortlessly build in unison, becoming greater than the sum of their parts. The backdrop of a post-serfdom, pre-Revolution Russia renders the ideas especially impactful. It’s a rare inflection point in history—Biblical in its magnitude—when a new morality, one that had been defended for at least a century, was about to be implemented nationwide. A first-hand, journalistic account of Jesus and his apostles visiting a small town in Galilee would be similarly arresting. Dostoyevsky centers this veritable first-hand account around a boy, Ilyusha, and his family. Class rigidity and hopelessness drip from every word. Dostoyevsky defends freedom, but to do so with honesty, he gives totalitarianism a fair hearing. He knew the Revolution would be wrong even if it was understandable. This empathy takes a book that could have felt like propaganda and renders it authentic. For a story that has an agenda, it doesn’t feel like it has an agenda.
Though the plot revolves around a murder and the milieu that may have led to it, the theme revolves around the parable of the Grand Inquisitor, written by Ivan. It’s right up there with The Odyssey and The Great Gatsby in terms of literary relevance. Therefore, if nothing else, it’s good to know if you want to fit in at luncheons where appetizers are called hors d'oeuvres and tweed is making a comeback.
In the story, Jesus returns to Spain during the height of the inquisition. He performs a few miracles to leave little doubt he is indeed who he says he is. Yet the Grand Inquisitor arrests Him anyway, and the heart of the story takes place in Jesus’s dungeon, where the Inquisitor justifies his action. Jesus, he insists, made a huge mistake when he resisted the three temptations. Christ should have turned stones into bread, taken power over the Church, and removed the burden of free will from man. People are too stupid to feed themselves, think for themselves, and pray for themselves. They need to be controlled, and that’s what the Catholic Church understands. The Grand Inquisitor knows full well the Church has strayed from Christ’s teachings, but Christ was too idealistic, and that’s why he must be imprisoned. To bestow humanity with nobility is to give whiskey and car keys to teenagers (thanks PJ). The response to this tirade is: Jesus rises and gives the Inquisitor a single kiss on his bloodless lips. Whether the kiss penetrated his heart is left up to question, but Jesus was tacitly allowed to walk out of the cell.
The Kiss makes for striking prose, but as previously stated, Dostoyevsky cannot explicate it any more than Christian Love. Psychologically, Dostoyevsky dramatizes the kiss, a dramatization that occurs in three stages. It’s a dramatization that’s Atlantean in magnitude—so far ahead of its time that it’s still ahead of our time—especially for a psychology scene that cannot figure out how to put “biology” and “gender” in the same sentence.
The first stage of the Kiss comes when Fyodor is killed and Dimitry is charged as the obvious suspect. While in a drunken, heartbroken stupor, he pays his father a visit to have one of their signature brawls. But he’s not there so Dimitry beats up the gardener instead. He takes Fyodor’s money, now covered in blood, as a loan to help him win back the heart of a girl who they compete over like tenth graders. Blood, motive, precedent, and sexual jealousy to boot—it looks worse for Dimitry than it did for OJ. Though something happens to Dimitry through the process of being arrested and charged that wouldn’t have happened otherwise—self-analysis. The DA submits him to an entire night of questioning, and even though the attorney is woefully inept, it doesn’t matter. For once Dimitry turns his hostility in on himself and he begins to get whiffs of what it means to have consciousness.
The second stage of the kiss begins when we find out who really killed Fyodor. Smerdyakov, his illegitimate and schizophrenic son, confesses as much to Ivan. And he does so without a hint of remorse because, after all, he only got the idea through listening to Ivan’s pontifications, which were predominantly a Marx plagiarism with a few, low-level jabs at Christianity. Ivan’s ideas sounded good, and more importantly it felt good to get ideologically worked up with his proto-Antifa brethren, but he never took the idea of class warfare to its natural conclusions. Leave it up to the deranged Smerdyakov to do that. The oppressor narrative ends in murder—but Ivan couldn’t see it until it was placed in a mind that’s ripe for murder.
Ivan, who previously only played with ideas, now must fully integrate them into his psyche. He receives a visitor that night who helps him do this. What follows is the best passage in a novel full of contenders for the best passage in literature. Ivan begins to realize what evil truly is. Turns out it’s less about horns and pitchforks and more about a guy who would show up to a wedding in a track suit—and an outdated one at that. It has no place on this earth, and reminds us just how painful and, I dare say, humbling a gut-check reality orientation can feel.
The third and final stage of the kiss culminates in the epilogue—after Dimitry plans his escape and Ivan is nurtured back to health by the love of a woman—the love, Dostoyevsky notes, Ivan never received from his mother.
During Alyosha’s intimate characterization, he encounters a group of boys, one of which, Ilyusha, is singled out and bullied by the others. Just when you think Dostoyevsky is a public school administrator here to hold a time-suck assembly about niceness, it turns out the relationship between the boys and Ilyusha is more nuanced. Each has played the role of oppressor and oppressed. The boys clearly need moral edification, but while Ivan is off contemplating the problem of evil, especially regarding children, Alyosha is there to teach them. It’s a subplot in that could be in danger of the paternalism if not cheesiness of a 90s movie about a white teacher in the inner city, but it’s masterfully done. In a book about morals, Dostoyevsky could have easily taken this opportunity to sound off about, well, morals. But he doesn’t. Perhaps this is a stylistic choice, but I think it was a philosophical choice as well. The third stage of the kiss involves Alyosha’s presence rather than sermon. The boys were the most cruel—at times psychopathically cruel—not when they disobeyed an admonishment, rather when they were isolated. At a particularly heart-wrenching moment—informed by Dostoyevsky’s personal tragedy—where no doubt a lesser author would have yielded to preachiness, Alyosha elegantly emphasizes camaraderie among the boys, and to appreciate each other while they’re here.
Self-analysis, intellectual honesty, and connection.
Dostoyevsky may not have understood a proper, reality-oriented concept of virtue. His philosophical education, after all, was limited. But he was falcon of observation, so he earned a veritable doctorate in psychology through his stint in a Siberian prison. As a proto-Frankl, he saw what constituted nobility in even the most destitute conditions, even if he could only demonstrate it symbolically. In this sense, the kiss that Jesus gives the Grand Inquisitor is The Brothers Karamazov itself.
