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Preface

The Brothers Karamazov as Transformational Classic

Near the end of his life, as Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was completing The Brothers Karamazov, he was invited to Moscow to give a speech in honor of the poet Pushkin. Most people there had been reading the novel as it was published in serial form,3 and Dostoevsky wrote a letter to his wife Anna, describing the way they greeted him: “crowds of men and women came backstage to shake my hand. As I walked across the hall during intermission, a host of people, youths and graybeards and ladies, rushed toward me exclaiming, ‘You’re our prophet. We’ve become better people since we read The Karamazovs.’ (In brief, I realized how tremendously important The Karamazovs is.)” (Selected Letters, 504).4 The author was, of course, delighted. He’d hoped his novel—which would be his last—would have such a positive impact on readers.

But can a work of literature really make one a “better” person? Early in the novel, the eldest brother, Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov, declares his doubt. He’s read great poets like Schiller and Goethe—he quotes them by heart!—but confesses to his brother, Alyosha: “Has it reformed me? Never! . . .” (96).5 A literary classic may move the reader by its aesthetic beauty, its integrity of form, its radiant representations of goodness. But, assuming the reader aspires to be good, can it move her or him further toward that goal—toward the “reformation” or transformation, for which Mitya yearns?

The premise of this book is that it can—and that The Brothers Karamazov has an especially powerful capacity to inspire its readers to be “better people.” David Tracy notes that in a classic, we “find something valuable, something ‘important’: some disclosure of reality in a moment that must be called one of ‘recognition’ which surprises, provokes, challenges, shocks, and eventually transforms us” (108, emphasis added).6 Some scholars, such as Mikhail Epstein, observe that regnant critical practices, typically marked by suspicion toward the text, have weakened our capacity for such recognition: “the humanities are no longer focusing on human reflection and self-transformation” (Transformative Humanities 2). Recently, Rita Felski has suggested that “literary theory would do well to reflect on—rather than condescend to—the uses of literature in everyday life: uses we have barely begun to understand. Such a reorientation, with any luck, might inspire more capacious, and more publicly persuasive, rationales for why literature, and the study of literature, matter.” She calls for “sustained attention to the sheer range and complexity of aesthetic experiences, including moments of recognition, enchantment, shock, and knowledge” (191). And, we might add, transformation.7

When I was nineteen, I was looking for a summer novel, and had heard of the classic called The Brothers Karamazov. I decided to read it during breaks from my summer job as a Manhattan messenger, and picked up a used copy at the Strand. Alas, I recall few shocks of recognition. I remember the used paperback’s plain, black and white Modern Library 1950 cover. I was baffled by the unrelenting intensity of its characters, impressed by the words of the wise Russian monk, but remember little else. I’d have made better sense of it all if I’d read it in a class or reading group, conversing with peers, guided by a good teacher. Six years later, I found such a class in Professor Tom Werge’s graduate seminar entitled “The Religious Imagination in Modern Literature.” This time I felt more of the novel’s deep “disclosure of reality.” It’s been part of my “equipment for living” ever since. For the past thirty years, I’ve been teaching the novel in “great books” curricula, and have re-read it so many times I’ve lost count.

The novel inspires me—as it has so many others—in its truth, beauty, and its portrayal of goodness in the face of evil. Its hero Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov—from here on simply “Alyosha,” as he’s called in the novel—does not, at first, seem very heroic or “remarkable.” The narrator himself admits this in his preface (7). The youngest of the Karamazov brothers, Alyosha is sent from the comforting shelter of the monastery by his mentor, the Elder Zosima, to practice “active love” (54) as “a monk in the world” (247). He attends lovingly, prudently to his drunken, lecherous father, his guilt-laden brothers and their lovers, a group of boys, and a troubled teenage girl. Active love is hard work, requiring habitual practice; it’s “harsh and dreadful” compared to “love in dreams.” His brother Ivan claims that “Christ-like love for men is a miracle impossible on earth” (205). But given Zosima’s insistence that grace is ever-present, “the miraculous power of the Lord” (56) guides even our feeblest efforts. Receptive to this reality of grace, Alyosha emerges as a luminous image of active love. At first glance an “eccentric,” he “carries within himself the very heart of the whole” (7). St. Paul says that “all things hold together” in Christ (Col 1:17). Analogously, in the world of this novel, all things hold together in Christ-like Alyosha Fyodorovich Karamazov.

Dostoevsky described his final novel as a “Hosannah,” but admitted that his prayer of praise had passed through a “great furnace of doubt” (“From Dostoevsky’s Notebooks” 667). The novel gives narrative form to the author’s purgatorial passage. Dostoevsky knew suffering: the deaths of his mother and father when he was young; his youthful revolutionary exploits of behalf of the serfs and his subsequent arrest, mock execution, and years in Siberian prison; punishing debt, compulsive gambling, family turmoil, and the death of two of his little children. He knew that faith is buffeted by human experiences of finitude and pain. He gives “full latitude” to the rebellious voice of his character, Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (128), the intellectual middle brother.8 But he also portrayed characters who mediate Christ’s love in the midst of suffering, even as he anxiously wondered whether he’d offered “answer enough” to Ivan’s rebellion. You can hear Dostoevsky’s anxiety when he writes to his editor:

If I can bring it off I will have accomplished something useful: I will force them to admit that a pure and ideal Christian is not an abstraction but a tangible, real possibility that can be contemplated with our own eyes and that it is in Christianity alone that the salvation of the Russian people lies. . . . It is for this theme that the entire novel is written, and I only hope that I will carry it off—that’s what concerns me most now! (Letters 469–70)

Dostoevsky knew that he couldn’t really “force” his readers to accept his Christian ideal. Throughout the novel, he respects his readers’ interpretive freedom by portraying characters who resist the givenness of graced being—and who express potent reasons for doing so. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, among the most influential commentators on Dostoevsky’s work, highlights the novelist’s “polyphony”: the many, oft-clashing voices he represents in his novels. Bakhtin described the novelist’s world as a “church” comprised “of unmerged souls, where sinners and righteous men come together” (Problems 26–27). Dostoevsky’s characters are “unfinalizable”: the reader can’t quite “peg” them or ever reduce them to their worst actions. As artistic creator, Dostoevsky respects the freedom of his characters as persons, made free in the image of their Creator, and always capable of change. His personalism deepened the transformative potential of his final novel. He “carried it off.” Of course, he risked the possibility that some would find the rebellious voices more persuasive. James Wood offers only one example: “Dostoevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, in The Brothers Karamazov, is for me, an unanswerable attack on the cruelty of God’s hiddenness. In my early twenties, it proved decisive” (254). But there are many—I dare say more—who have found the novel to be a source of spiritual sustenance and hope.9

Hope is the indispensable virtue for pilgrims “on the way” and “bound for beatitude.”10 Hope rejects the Janus-faced temptations of presumption and despair, both forms of pride. But a pilgrim isn’t immune from doubt; in its depiction of human anguish, the novel raises reasons to doubt. Alyosha tries to bring wholeness to his dysfunctional, disfigured family, but wonders if he—and even God—are failing: “My brothers are destroying themselves. My father too. And they are destroying others with them. It’s ‘the earthly force of the Karamazovs,’ . . . a crude unbridled earthy force. Does the spirit of God move above that force?” (191). Dostoevsky asks Alyosha’s very question: Is divine grace present in the midst of human violence, trauma, and deformation, and if so where can it be found? Dostoevsky suggests that grace remains ever present, often mediated by persons like Alyosha, who serve as analogies of divine love.

A word about the structure of the book that follows. Part I presents a Prelude: these two initial chapters outline the theological ideas comprising Dostoevsky’s incarnational realism, and specific ways in which the novel embodies these ideas. Part II focuses upon the novel’s fictional persons: in their decisions and actions, the characters give personified form to the theme of incarnational realism, over the course of quotidian time. Some, especially those reading the novel for the first time, may wish to begin here and later circle back to Part One. In Chapter 3, we trace the way in which Zosima’s capacity as a confessor, his vision of responsibility “to all, for all,” develops, especially in his youthful encounter with Mikhail, his “mysterious visitor” and with others in his capacity as Elder in the local monastery. In Chapter 4, we follow Alyosha as he takes up the mantle of his elder, develops as a “monk in the world,” and, at the end of three days, ascends in his vision of Cana. In Chapter 5, we turn to Mitya’s struggle to become a “new man,” his torments, new life, and agonizing final decision, aided by Alyosha and Grushenka. In Chapter 6, we turn to Ivan’s rebellion, his anguished groping toward responsibility, and confession in court. Finally, in Chapter 7, we join Kolya, Ilyusha, the boys, and Lise, trace Alyosha’s generative role with the young people he encounters, and hear his final message of hope.