The Notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov (1878-1880)

Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, has much in common with the murder mystery genre.  A murder is committed, and the executers of justice want to find out who committed it.  This genre often says a lot about how the author views how we know things; how one learns who the murderer is suggests a lot about how we might learn anything else.  Sherlock Holmes, for example, suggests that we learn through observation and reasoning.  In The Brothers Karamazov, the wrong man is convicted because all the material evidence is against him.

The devil, Ivan Karamazov tells us, is hiding under the table of material evidence.  But if the material evidence suggests that Dmitri Karamazov is guilty, how do we know he isn’t?  Because that isn’t what he would do.  Dmitri is, in essence, an honorable man.  The contrast between the essence of a person versus superficial material evidence is a key dichotomy in the novel.  This might be why Dostoevsky’s working notebooks for the novel spend such a disproportionate amount of time on the testimony of Doctor Herzenstube.  This testimony is not significant to the details of the murder, but Herzenstube reveals much about what Dmitri was like as a boy—Herzenstube knows Dmitri.  

In the chapters “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor,” God, too, is on trial.  How can we believe God is just when there is so much material evidence to the contrary?  Material evidence, the book seems to suggest, isn’t enough to make decisions on such weighty matters.  We need other methods of approaching essence.

This principle suggests much about how a novel is truthfully written.  Over-focus on visible cause and effect can blind me to the essence of the matter.  To limit my investigation to the comprehensible mechanics of a situation is to force the human experience into a tidy deception.  

How is this to be avoided?  Causality is the glue of most great stories, including The Brothers Karamazov.  How can we keep apparent causality from holding us back from true knowledge, from essence?

In these notebooks, Dostoevsky suggests that we can’t conceive of many of our strongest feelings, just as we can’t conceive of the pride of Satan.  This is because “the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here, but in other worlds.”  We possess a desire for life and the things of life that extends beyond ourselves.  We also possess a desire for death and self-destruction that extends beyond ourselves.  If we limit our study to the material, we will make the mistake that Dmitri’s accusers made—we will misunderstand humanity, to the detriment of justice.  Thus for fiction to be truthful, an approach must be made to other worlds.  

This is the tall order for the fiction writer.  Realism has a tendency to overlook all but the material.  Fantasy can easily enough make up another world, but that doesn’t solve the problem, either.  If the other world is simply made up, it won’t really be a world beyond our conceptions.  In fact, that made-up world might even more closely resemble the author’s conceptions than even the material world; it will likely have, baked in, all of the biases and limitations of the author.   This is perhaps why fantasy, new fabulism, and magical realism tend toward heavy-handed allegory.  When I am committed to reality, I am putting the world of the novel to a test outside of myself.  Fantasy can sometimes lack this test, and so it becomes more self-enclosed and even less true.  (This isn’t true of all fantasy, of course, it is simply a challenge of the genre.  Someone like J.R.R. Tolkien was able to avoid this trap because of his extensive knowledge of language and mythology and because of the thoroughness of his worldbuilding.  Tolkien was able to painstakingly develop a test that had its own rules, so much so that it could keep his idiosyncratic opinions in check).  If both realism and fantasy tend to fall into the same trap, how is it to be avoided?

Dostoevsky believes that seeds of other worlds exist in our world and within us, and key for us is, from a young age, to read the stories where those seeds can be seen and felt.  He mentions the story of Jacob dreaming about the ladder to heaven as well as lives of saints.  Coming into contact with beauty and wonder changes us and can open us to the essence beyond comprehension.  Dreams are very important to Dostoevsky, and he thinks that they shouldn’t be ignored.  The lives of saints are probably important to Dostoevsky for a few reasons.  First, the records of miracles were useful for breaking down the usual 19th century materialistic explanations to open the mind to truths beyond those parameters.  Also, a saint is someone who demonstrates more than the normal level of goodness.  If goodness comes from another world, than the more extreme examples of it might give us a more accurate sampling of what lies beyond.

I also think that a way to make room for the essential role other worlds play in our human causality is through metaphor.  Perhaps this is in part why such rich storytelling can come out of fairytales.  In most fairytales, there are two worlds: the familiar home life and fairyland.  This gives fairytales a multilayered dynamic that can approach truths which over scrupulous realism can’t reach.  This multi-world dynamic can also be reached through material metaphor as well.  For example, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Pemberly seems a different world than Longborn, though in the material sense, they are only separated by money, class, and geography.  This layered dynamic makes room in the story for the impingement of other worlds.  This dynamic has also been created by films that reference other films.  Nora Ephron once said that her film, Sleepless in Seattle, wasn’t about love, it was about love in the movies.  The protagonist, Annie, loves old romance movies, and these begin to function in the film as a sort of Platonic form of what love should be—something larger than the material explanations, which Annie’s brother sums up as, “Your subconscious telling their subconscious that they’re a perfect match—subconsciously.”  The use of film references widens the range of imagination by which we can conceive of Annie’s love.

One of the great advantages to fiction as a way of knowing is that it doesn’t have the same hangups as other forms.  By developing different, imaginative tests for veracity, we can circumvent the blind spots of the methods on which we are more accustomed to rely.