Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky 1821-1881
Great Book #52, Mortimer Adler, Editor
Read April 11 – September 4, 2000, some on Santa Rosa Island
Reviewed September 9 and 11, 2000
This book is three treatises in one. It is a great murder mystery; it is a description of the lives of passionate, non-linear people and their interactions; and it is a catalogue of Theologies and their outworkings. In particular, the Theologies of the characters are well stated in great detail in their speeches and conversations with each other. I came upon thoughts there that I didn’t know anyone else but me had had. I also came upon thoughts that were new to me.
The basic story is of the life, death, and consequences of the death of the worthless father, Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov. He has three sons by two different women and cared nothing for any of the sons or wives. The eldest, Ivan became a man of the world, forthright and conscientious. The youngest, Alyosha, apprentices as a monk. The middle brother, Mitya (Dimitri), has great, undisciplined passion and strife and is ultimately accused of the murder of his father. He was there but we eventually learn that he didn’t do it. It was the valet…. The whole conflict was over some mismanaged inheritance, or perception of inheritance and over a woman who knew how to flout her stuff, Grushenka. There are other women, an aristocratic Katya who can’t decide whether to love Ivan or Mitya, and the invalid daughter Lise of Madame Hohlakov who proposes to Alyosha while he is still at the monastery. Alyosha’s idol is Father Zossima for whom he is an acolyte. The Father passes on, and much is said of his history and Theology too, and the fact that his corpse began to smell, dispelling some of the power his miracles had had on others in the past. A smelling corpse was apparently a curse from God.
All these characters are developed with lavish richness and their interactions and thoughts related by Dostoevsky from a first person point of view of someone unimportant who lived in the small town and who would know about such things.
I marked several treatises on faith and Theology throughout the book, which I found helpful in the development of my own … faith.
For instance, we have this gem by the author of Alyosha’s belief in miracles in Book I, Chapter 5:
“…. miracles are never a stumbling block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, ‘I do not believe till I see.’”
And a little later, “For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of form taken by atheism today, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.”
Dostoevsky captures the irrational human spirit in each character, the way that they will believe one thing, profess another, and then act in very complex ways that don’t relate to either belief or profession. Even in the violent non-murderer Mitya, one finds the whole range of human emotion and insane behaviors, most of them heightened beyond passion. And, in a clever touch at the end, after Mitya has been convicted and Ivan is going to spend half of his inheritance to help him escape, but has fallen ill and Katya says she will carry it out, even though it means leaving Mitya to Grushenka in Siberia, you have all these characters making professions of what they believe and what they will do and how they will act in the future and, after having read the whole book, you know that what they have said has nothing to do with how their lives will play out.
Through the book there are discussions of science and atheism versus faith and tradition and the various confessions of faith of Ivan, Mitya, and Alyosha in their places. Indeed, Alyosha’s consumes much of a book in that it also contains the written recollections concerning his beloved Father Zossima.
The women don’t confess faith; they just behave with total irrationality, or in some cases terrible strength or weakness and even self-destructive tendencies. This may be a viewpoint of the time. There is also the “classist” attitude that the educated are more worthy than the peasants. So be it, for purposes of this narrative.
The devil is discussed. In one place, Zossima claims, “I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” In another, Ivan, hallucinating, has a long discussion with the devil, who claims of himself that he has not been allowed to quit his job, that if he did, nothing would ever happen, and the universe would be one big tedious church service.
I’ve had that fear too.
He deals with suffering on earth, and the problem of freedom, where the Grand Inquisitor recognizes Christ and sends him back saying something like, “Freedom is too easy, you’ve had your chance, now let us rule the people as they wish to be ruled.” He discusses signs from heaven and the reason why there is an earth, why social solidarity is better than individual effort (shudder!), the sensibility of young people, the philosopher who spent a quadrillion years (hell is on the metric system….) wandering in the dark because it was against his principles to live after death.
The most poignant confession is of Smerdyakov, who argues conclusively that it is no sin but only reasonable to renounce ones faith in order not to be punished by the heathens, and then having done so not to be as guilty, because God would punish the heathens less, as they were heathens. And, no one has faith in sufficient measure to move mountains into the sea, except maybe one or two in the world who are hidden and wouldn’t do such a thing anyway. This rampage, argument, really between Smerdyakov and his guardian, the butler, Grigory, to the amusement of Fydor and mild horror of Alyosha, goes on for much of a chapter and I haven’t done it justice in this summary, but it is one way of thinking about things, and many such ways of thinking are proposed by the author.
In this and in many other places, people’s emotions go to extremes, by today’s standards. They are red faced in rage or weepy, for example.
I marked all these places in the book in pencil, and more, excepting the one of Smerdyakov, which is Chapter 6 that bears his name in Book III, “The Sensualists.”
The basic plot is that Mitya is a self-admitted scoundrel who talks as if he wished to preserve some notion of honor. Smerdyakov takes miscues from Ivan and kills the master but Mitya is there, doesn’t see it happen, and nearly kills Grigory while fleeing. He flies to a nearby town, wasting money in every direction while he goes, talking with the driver about heaven and hell, considering suicide at daybreak all the way, but wanting one last look at Grushenka who has gone off with a Polish suitor and benefactor. They party all night at a snobbish proprietor’s inn (nonetheless, he scoops up his share of the wasted wealth) and finally, about three in the morning, the authorities show up, arrest him, drag Grushenka away to another room, and conduct a preliminary investigation which takes an entire book. Much of this was what I read in the tent and on the beach at Santa Rosa.
A trial is held; a famous lawyer is brought in from St. Petersburg, a doctor from Moscow. Things go well, then badly, then they improve. He is convicted. The jury has some peasants on it. Fantastic speeches of principle and modern notions are made and absorbed by men who are touched and women who swoon. The rest is epilogue.
In the end, Alyosha comforts a band of boys on the death of their friend. “[The church where the funeral was held] was an old and rather poor church; many of the ikons were without settings; but such churches are the best for praying in.” Poor Ilusha’s father acted senseless. The family was in grief. None of the boys wanted to act with energy for fear of being inappropriate. Alyosha led them, ultimately rejoicing, with an idea. No matter what happened or where they went, they would always be part of each other, and they would always revel in the times they had together. Reinforcement for yet another idea that I had had, that every day that goes by and every joining and separation that one experiences is the beginning of something and the end of something. The days that are gone are only memories, they are just as dead as they will be after we are dead ourselves. A person doesn’t die at once, he dies to the past throughout life, even at the end when that’s about all that’s left.
In the end, every person is capable of some good and commits some. Every person is capable of some evil and commits some of that too. Some do a great deal more good than evil, like Alyosha, some the reverse, like Mitya. Some go crazy, like Ivan and Lise. And Mitya. Some are ornery like Katya or frivolous like Grushenka. Some are lecherous sots like Fydor Pavlovitch Karamazov. All are loyal; all are disloyal.
Events of unspeakable horror are related, as are situations of indescribable bliss.
It’s all worth it because, “I exist.”
Dostoevsky is a great author.