First published in 1984.
Freud thought The Brothers Karamazov “the most magnificent novel ever written,” and the current literary wisdom attributed the preeminence of Dostoyevksy’s masterpiece—the last book he wrote, finished two months before he died, in his sixtieth year—to its appeal not only for people who read for the story but also for people who like to think.
A crime story in one of its dimensions, a sublime whodunit, the book subtly conceals the identity of the murderer of Fyodor Karamazov, father of the brothers, long after the murder has been committed. It further succeeds in contriving a trial that’s both engrossing and hugely satisfying even though, at the end, justice isn’t done. Mean, greedy, shrewd, funny and remorseless, Fyodor Karamazov has enemies in numbers, among them three of his four sons. He cheats one son out of his inheritance and tries to steal his woman. He ridicules the problems of belief and unbelief that torture another son. By yet more devious means he exacerbates spite in a third and illegitimate son. We watch frustration mount in the prospective murderers—fury at Fyodor’s limitless selfishness, rage to protect what’s loved from his filth. Violence has to come, but when and from whom and with what consequence? The pages fly, the narrative line hissing electrifyingly from start to finish.
Yet the moral, political, and metaphysical dimensions of the narrative never recede from view. An outburst of violence in a Russian landowning family in the nineteenth century is seen to have bearings on revolutionary struggles throughout the world. A single rupture of filial and paternal obligations becomes a laboratory for the examination of the general breakdown of right relations between authority and the individual. When, at the trial of Karamazov’s accused murder, the defense advances a theory of justifiable homicide, that theory swiftly takes its place in a larger argument, developing from the first chapters, about whether ethical imperatives can survive without the support of religious faith. The limits of Christian and socialist utopias, the vanity of rationalism, the function of the miracle in human history, the meaning of Mother Russia—all are pondered in a manner that refuses to separate “issues” from the details of the family story. The novelist knows everything, so it seems, about the interdependencies of the world of ideas and the world of material facts. The products of that knowledge is incomparably rich discourse, and it’s this richness, according to the accepted reasoning—this combination of narrative drive and intellectual comprehensiveness—that warrants praise as noble as the praise conferred by Freud.
I have no quarrel with the accepted reasoning. The standard of richness of discourse is probably a sound basis on which to establish this book’s rank among masterpieces. It’s one thing, though, to understand literary rankings; it’s another grasp how a book works upon its readers. Lately, I have found Karamazov erupting in my head as I watch Senator X or Y explain the Central American problem on the evening news. (“The whole problem down there, folks, is hunger and poverty. No communism problem down there, just the hunger and poverty problem.”) When I’ve had recent occasion to consult it and the book is freshly alive for me, I’ve been conscious of being more alert to—more critical of—my habit of arriving overquickly at certainty about other people’s motives. It’s impossible to look into Karamazov casually (to check one’s memory of an episode, say, or the spelling of a name) without coming away with the feeling of having worked out—having toned up mentally, stretched one’s headpiece, reached a higher point of understanding. I know that claiming intimacy with a Great Book can be embarrassingly self-inflating. (“Me, I think continually on the truly great, consume no junk television, am a person of depth and elevation, etc., etc.”) I know, too, that The Brothers Karamazov cannot cure common bronchial ailments or make more bearable a neurosis. Still, I wish to come clean. I’ve used this book for years in ways other than as a school text, and I look upon it as an instrument of power.
Meaning what? Meaning this: the book puts me in touch with energies I forget I possess, strengths that, most days of my life, simply can’t be summoned. With Karamazov in my ear I’m suddenly repossessed of the capacity to think and feel along several tracks at once—to hold intact, over an extended patch of time, an array of tumultuously competing ways of being. Nobody reads this book. What you do is enter its storm of radically opposed understandings of life. Because of the writer’s genius, you not only weather the storm—feel its textures, finally make sense of it—but are nourished by it. You finish the book tougher and kinder, clearer-headed…intellectually enfiefed.
When trying to explain how the nourishment comes, a natural place to start with is the book’s most famous set piece, the chapter entitled “The Grand Inquisitor.” Ivan Karamazov, who’s lost his religious faith, reads aloud to his younger brother, a would-be monk. His text is a visionary prose poem he’s composed about an imagined return to earth by Jesus Christ. The return isn’t the promised Second Coming; Christ visits “His children only for a moment…” The moment is the sixteenth century, the place is Seville during the Inquisition, and the Savior is in jail, having been incarcerated by the cardinal charged with the burning of heretics. The purpose of lvan Karamazov’s poem isn’t to detail the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. It enables Ivan to lay out, in somebody else’s voice—that of the heretic-burning Grand Inquisitor—the fiercest conceivable indictment of Christ and Christianity.
The crux of the indictment is the assertion that Christ cruelly overestimated the intelligence of ordinary humankind. Most men and women “are only pitiful children.” Christ’s promise of a truth that would set us free—free of material desire, tribal idols, conventional wisdom, pragmatic realism—is too demanding and therefore intolerable. No craving is stronger in us than the craving for the loss of individuality. We seek disappearance into the herd, and no wish is less controllable in us than our wish for dependence. Hence the fate of rulers forced by historical accident into public adherence to Christian doctrine. They have no choice but to realize its fatuity and to set about, as secret unbelievers, to make it an instrument of the state. The Inquisitor and his colleagues will meet the human longing for bread, miracle, mystery, and authority—the human hunger for figures close at hand to whom supernatural powers can be attributed. Christians will be taught to bow down to churchmen and adulate superstition. “They will become timid,” says the Inquisitor. They will “look to us in fear as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and will be awestricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever that we have been able to subdue such a turbulent flock of thousands of millions. They will tremble impotently before our wrath, their minds will grow fearful. We shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children because we allow them sin.”
Brilliantly framed, the lnquisitor’s indictment forces the reader to dwell passionately on issues of faith and freedom that, in other settings, seem pallid or marginal; no student of the soul can shrug it off unmoved. Equally remarkable, the chapter offers an indirect, continuously arresting evocation of tormented unbelief. The Grand Inquisitor speaks with assured irony, but behind his voice we feel the presence of his inventor, Ivan Karamazov—a soul desperately anguished by loss of faith, desperately unwilling to admit the anguish. All the psychological complexity of nonautomatic atheism comes into view. We glimpse the connection between unbelief and the awareness of unusual intellectual powers; we grasp the thinker’s need to distance himself from the faithful, whose religious commitments are fundamentally mindless. Terrible questions rack Ivan’s conscience: Is my unbelief merely intellectual pride? Is it possible that my loss of faith is only a gesture of distaste for my inferiors? What’s the difference between genuine intellectual alienation and the mere taunting of the uneducated? If there is no difference, and if I’m capable of recognizing that, why can’t I shed my arrogance? Karamazov wrestles with guilt, struggles to reach some plateau from which to compose a view of his own pain. But no such plateau exists. Feeling its absence, the reader has a seizing intuition of the costs of the deprivation.
An immense achievement: the transformation of an experience one might have thought one couldn’t take seriously into a passion that matters overwhelmingly.
But this is only one voice, one mode of being, one melodic line in the chorus. In the very same book, within fifty pages of the first crisis of Ivan Karamazov’s despair, we live into a wholly different consciousness—a consciousness not a whit less rich or complex than Ivan’s—that is in the process of discovering true faith. One measure of Dostoyevsky’s magnificence is that he expects magnificence—magnificent diversity—in his reader. The consciousness discovering true faith belongs to Ivan’s brother Alyosha. It’s doubtless proper to regard the stages in the development of that consciousness as “answers” of a sort to the Grand Inquisitor’s indictment. The novelist offers a beautiful retelling of Christ’s first miracle—turning the water into wine at the wedding at Cana—and that story speaks to the Inquisitor’s traducing of Christ’s original message as coldly detached from such ordinary human desires as love of conviviality, lively parties, good times. A chapter called “An Onion” shows us an irradiating burst of moral glory in a creature hitherto degraded—a person resembling the normal stumbling humanity so depressingly portrayed by the Inquisitor. But we don’t experience any of this as counterargument. We experience it as an entrance into the grainy, moment-to-moment dawning, within a human creature, of the possibility of living “in faith” without dependence upon miracle and mystery; we discover, breathtakingly, what it would be like to break through, by the use of mind and sympathy, to the truth and freedom Christ promised.
If there were nothing in Karamazov except its demand that the reader rise to comprehension of the extremes of religious doubt and faith, the book would nevertheless stand unequaled. The movement, the pace—the assumption everywhere that imminent transcendence is no more and no less easy to comprehend than is agonized unbelief—create in themselves a marvelous impression of inclusiveness.
But the miracle of Karamazov is that its political, historical, and moral voices have a range that matches that of the discourse encompassing Ivan’s torment and Alyosha’s exaltation. At one moment in the book I inhabit the body and the set of mind of an enlightened political liberal; at the next I’m joined, mimetically, to an older, traditional sensibility anchored stoutly in its conviction of the unalterable objectivity of the law. Now I’m a stylish, tony Francophile; now I’m a crude, honest son of Mother Russia with a unique historical mission to fulfill. Always the human stuff in view is various. Always it demands a corresponding variousness from the reader.
And always, astonishingly, with the book in your hands, you feel you’re up to it. The book insists that you can do it, no sweat. You’re equal to this, says its voice. You’re not a lump. Granted, your daily intellectual life is a shade tame and flat: Op-Ed pages, candidates’ debates, news show gossips. Granted, your daily habit of thought doesn’t often ask much from you but a tolerant, bemused skepticism of the kind that settles in while Will or Wicker or Moyers or Agronsky is lipping off earnestly. But no matter: you have it in you to contend. You have it in you, says the voice of the book, to fight off reductiveness and trivialization. You have it in you to be impatient with oversimplification—indeed, to be sore enough about it to stand against it. And the only way in which anybody can stand against oversimplification and reductiveness is by ceaseless expenditure of concentrated, constructive sympathy, by steady alertness to the full vitality embodied within human difference, within each separate human sensibility, within each human set of contradictions.
Listening to all this, I do believe. I believe, that is, that my powers of understanding are not negligible, however underused, and that dancing to an extraordinary variety of rhythms in the world simultaneously is feasible. I’m saying, in sum, that what counts about Dostoyevsky’s “richness of discourse” is that it enormously expands a reader’s reach. I’m saying that I come back to Karamazov because it gives me, for a good stretch of hours, the gift I regard as the greatest of human gifts: a vibrantly mobile imagination.