The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, has a satisfying structure as a novel of ideas.  The story tests the ideas and the ideas bring out the significance of the story.  In Book Five, the character Ivan brings up challenging questions, one of the most urgent being: how can I accept a world where the innocent suffer?  With great pathos, he tells true accounts of children tortured by adults.  He is less concerned with whether or not God exists and more concerned with the fact that he can’t accept a God who would create a world where such things are allowed to happen.  Ivan wants to blame God in his ideas, and his father, Fyodor, in his life.  In his politics, he wants to blame the system (the tzar was sometimes referred to as a father).  

Later in Book Five, Ivan’s challenge is responded to by the life of Zossima.  Zossima believes that we are all guilty for all because we are all contributing to the status quo that makes virtue out of place.  No one will share until they become a brother to all, and it is this absence of brotherhood that we are all guilty.  The starting point for Zossima is for him to acknowledge that he is guilty—guilty of isolation and a lack of brotherhood which contributes to all of humanity’s problems.  Yes, Zossima says, the system keeps down individuals, but also, the system is only upheld by individuals.  Rearrangement of the system won’t save us.  Only loving one’s neighbor will.  

People often ask the question about crime if the responsibility lies with the individual or the system.  Zossima upends this dichotomy by claiming that responsibility lies with both.  Whenever I don’t love my neighbor, I contribute to the culture which makes love foreign, which makes the culture more vulnerable to crime.  Every time I withhold love, especially from children, I potentially plant a bad seed.  Even the birds would have a better time if I were more gracious.

Zossima sees the world like an ocean—touch it in one place and it echoes to the end of the world.  Responsibility is the opposite of isolation.  Zossima’s idea of responsibility isn’t that he, as single individual, must do everything or save everybody, but that he must acknowledge that he is inextricably bound to everyone and everything else, and that everything he does effects them all.  Responsibility is the honesty to see that one is part of the whole.  Zossima might not be able to change the whole, but he can keep the Image of harmony remembered in his circle of influence.

Zossima says that it is the goal of the Russian Monk to keep alive this Image, which he sees as the face of Christ.  He feels that it is threatened by European ideas that want to erase the consciousness of sin and replace it with the concept of environment.  In other words, the European ideas remove one’s sense of individual responsibility.  But without this awareness that I am the problem, no solution can be achieved.  Yes, the system contributes to crime, but individuals contribute to the system.  The solution can’t come through laws alone; love is required.

The whole story of the novel demonstrates this idea of responsibility.  Much of the plot revolves around Dmitri, a man who is innocent of his father’s death, but who is humiliated and wrongly convicted.  Here we see another suffering innocent.  But who is responsible for this tragedy?

As I follow the unfolding of this miscarriage of justice, I soon see that almost everyone he knows bears some responsibility for it.  Alyosha is responsible because he was supposed to be with Dmitri on the fatal night, but instead, he goes to Grushenka with the thought of letting her seduce him.  Ivan is responsible because he grooms Smerdyakov, the actual murderer, to commit the deed and to frame Dmitri.  The merchant, Samsonov, contributes by maliciously hoodwinking him, driving him into a state of severe agitation that made him more suspicious to the police.  The prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich, is responsible because his petty resentment against Dmitri causes him to see all of the facts through a prejudice against him, and his pride of his own psychological insight keeps him from being more self-questioning.  The district attorney, Nikolai Parfenovich, is responsible because his frivolous social life has dulled his sense of the human, which skews his judgement of Dmitri.  The ineptitude of the authorities in dealing with the case demonstrates how the impartial system is worthless without brotherly love.  The servant, Grigory, is responsible because his stubborn certainty leads him to confidently assert condemning evidence against Dmitri that he simply misremembered.  Dmitri’s defense attorney, Fetyukovich, is responsible because he was less concerned with the truth of the case and more concerned with his own rhetorical brilliance and with promoting fashionable ideas.  Katerina is responsible because she presents a biased picture of Dmitri that has a significant effect on the jury.  Grushenka is responsible because she intentionally tormented the jealousies of Dmitri and his father, which made Dmitri’s motive for murder so plausible.

The list could keep going, but the point is clear.  Almost everyone has a part to play in this miscarriage of justice which led to the suffering innocent, and this demonstrates Zossima’s point.  None of them has a right to scapegoat the jury for what happened—they all are too involved.   

Responsibility, however, cuts both ways.  We each not only can plant bad seeds that have far-reaching effects, we can also plant good seeds.  Just as the culpability piles up among the characters, so do positive transformations.  Zossima’s brother, Markel, has a transformation, as does his friend, the Mysterious Visitor, as well as Zossima himself.  Alyosha, too, has a dramatic change, as well as his brother, Dmitri, and Dmitri’s fiancee, Grushenka.  Alyosha’s protege, Kolya, also has a dramatic shift in his outlook.

Each of these people is impacted by a memory of seeing someone act with goodness and love.  Alyosha remembers his mother praying over him.  Zossima remembers his brother.  Dmitri remembers his doctor, Herzentube, giving him a pound of nuts.  And Alyosha entreats Kolya to remember how he loved his dying friend, Illyusha.  These good seeds were with each of these people when they were at their lowest, helping them to turn in a new direction.  This connects to the novel’s epigraph: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24).  The seed-memory lies within each of these characters until the moment of trial when the memory resurfaces with new force.

But the marvel of this novel is that it isn’t simply a description of how good seeds can flourish.  The book itself becomes a good seed planted in the reader.  In an early scene, a mother describes her grief over the loss of her little boy.  When I read this passage, I found myself saying aloud that I loved my wife, and I found myself wanting to do something for my wife and my son.  This is what this book does.  It doesn’t just describe the beautiful—it draws the beautiful out of the reader.  It appeals to the better nature present in all of us.  This is why, in his preface, Dostoevsky says that an odd man isn’t always an isolated case, but is precisely the one that bears within him the heart of the whole.  Alyosha, who Dostoevsky claims is the hero of the story, is odd in that he seems more loving than most, but his very oddness his what makes him so universal—he brings out that goodness that is within all of us.

This can be seen especially in the prosecutor’s speech.  This section is painful to read because we know what really happened, and we have to listen to this lawyer get it so plausibly wrong.  It makes me inwardly scream, “No, that’s not it!”  The speech has an interesting place in the structure of the novel.  It comes toward the end and serves as a meditation on all that came before.  The best novels don’t just have a passing glance over their themes, but they meditate on them at such depth that we can see what unites all the disparate events of the book and gain new insight.  What’s bizarre about Karamazov is that this summing-up meditation is an obvious and egregious misinterpretation.  This forces the readers to think up their own conclusions, which increases the impact of the novel because the conclusion is arising from within the readers rather than having it thrust upon them.