1.17.2014 THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by feodor dostoevsky

some remarks on the book made in henry troyat's biography of dostoevsky, 'firebrand'....

..the Karamazov family live in a little provincial town.
K pere, a cynical and lewd old buffoon, has ruined his life with mysterious debauchery.
from his first wife who beat him unmercifully, he had a son Dmitri,
a savage brute with sudden impulses to honest and metaphysical preoccupations.
from his second wife, a peevish and hysterical woman, he had a son Ivan,
an irritable intellectual with a tormented and destructive mind-
a hero and martyr of negation.
but Aliosha, his youngest son, seems to be untouched by the hereditary curse of the Ks.
his disposition is characterized by male kindness,
the opposite of the asexual kindness of the hero of The Idiot.
he is the positive principle of the book, the luminous axis around which
the other characters whirl like black midges.
in addition to the three brothers, there is the infamous Smerdiakov,
a son of old K by a feebleminded deaf mute whom he had raped one night for sheer bravado.
the epileptic bastard serves as a lackey in his father's house.
he is stolid, pretentious, cunning, admires I who is annoyed by him
because in S he recognizes a caricature of himself.

Old K and his 4 sons quarrel with one another about a woman named Grushenka.
Smer, thinking that he is obeying I's secret wish, murders his father.
K is accused of the crime, sentenced to hard labor and leaves for siberia.
this is the story.

the book is dominated by 2 problems
-the problem of seduction and the problem of God.
it is the conflict between the idea of Gru and the idea of Christ.
the other characters are placed between these two poles.
some, like the old K, are symbols of sensuality;
others, like the starets (spiritual counselor in the russian orthodox church) Zosima,
are symbols of religious faith.
between these extremes the souls of the other characters are arranged skillfully in a hierarchical order.
Smer, D, I, and A are, so to speak, progressive embodiments of the same character
-the individual who shakes himself free of the beast
and is realized in the 'new man'.
these 4 brothers are one and the same being;
each represents a different stage of the single personality development.
'the ladder of vice is the same for all, Aliosha says to Dmitri.
'i am on the first rung, you are a little high-at the thirteenth, for instance.
in my opinion, it's absolutely the same thing'.

Grushenka too is on this 'thirteenth rung'.
this prostitute, the mistress of an old merchant who has rescued her from poverty,
is a courtesan (prostitute), says old K,
but probably a 'greater saint' than all the nuns in the convent.
'this woman is a beast', 'this woman is an angel',  retort the other characters.
and D exclaims, 'yes, that's what she is-a tigress.
the queen of immodesty, the completely infernal woman,
the queen of all fiendish women unleashed in the world'.
but what strikes A  is 'the naive and kind expression of her face'.

whom are we to believe?
all of them are right, for Gru has earned all of these opinions.
Gru, the young girl, the slut, the beast, the saint, embodies the multiple contradictions of woman.
she is woman on the model of polina suslova (a woman in Dostoevski's earlier life).
woman is folly become flesh,
women are worn out by waiting
and are disconsolate when their desires are gratified,
they yearn to give themselves and reproach men
for having taken them.
they are cruel for the pleasure of being gentle afterward,
then they are gentle for the pleasure of being cruel afterward.
they are perversely modest and voluptuously innocent.
they lie to God, to men, to themselves.
they are not caught in life, they toy with life, they pose before life as before a mirror.
and they make faces and change their expressions to give themselves the sensation of existing.
while permanence is for men the proud of their reality,
woman asserts her existence through change.
man wants to be one, woman wants to be multiple.
man feels his strength only in the full consciousness of his virtues and defects;
woman feels strong only in total unconsciousness of herself.
man is the organize world, woman the formless universe.
everything is possible with her,
nothing is certain with her.
one must flee from her
or else renounce dominion over her.

Gru's beauty has bewitched old K.
this drunken, stingy, lying and vicious old mans seems to be a
a portrait of Dos's own father, painted with pitch.
'he was sentimental, yes, he was sentimental and wicked'...

in the presence of the beautiful  Gru, old K is nothing but a stammering and slobbering buffoon.
he gives her the portion of his estate that was to be D's inheritance.
every day he hopes that she will visit him
and wanders from room to room befuddled with lust, waiting endlessly;
but Gru does not yield to him, nor to K when he falls in love with her.
she laughs at father and son,
and as the days go by the two men hate each other more and more intensely.
'they scrutinized each other, with their knives ready in the sheaths'.

Raskolnikov
(i think a Dos character in another of his books..any name that is not specifically defined in what comes out of this biography are either book characters or people identified in other parts of this book..)
is obsessed by an idea to such an extent that he loses all freedom;
D and his father are so obsessed by a human being that they have become slaves of their desire.
'beauty is a terrible and horrible thin', says K.
its power over men equals and sometimes exceeds that of ideas.
the erotic madness of the K's is comparable to the political madness of the protagonists of The Possessed.
in both cases, the desire for an earthly gratification reduces man to the status of beast,
and the claim to the right of defying all morel limits leads him to depravity and murder.

'as for D, says his father, I will crush him like a cockroach'.

and D says of his father: 'i don't know-perhaps i will kill him, perhaps i won't.
i fear that i shall be unable to endure his face at such a moment.
i hate his adam's apple, his nose, his eyes, his impudent smile.
he disgusts me.
that is what frightens me'.

nevertheless, he spies upon his father, lest Gru , lured by promises of money,
should yield to the old man.
one night Grigori, the servant, surprises K in the garden.
K strikes him on the head with a pestle and runs away.
he finds Gru at the inn.
'then an orgy began, a mad party', with wine, songs, dancing.
Gru, completely drunk, admits to D that she is in love with him and wants to marry him.
'although you are a savage, she says to him, i know that you are noble.
from now on we must live honestly...let us be good and honest, let us not be like beasts
....take me far away from here...i don't want to stay here, i want to be far, far away'.

it is as though a looming disaster were intensifying the emotions of these sensual characters.
the foreknowledge of a terrible fate drives them to intensify their transient pleasures.
they are cheerful because they feel that they have no right to be cheerful.
and it is a fact that in Dos's characters all joys that are not strictly spiritual ones
seem strangely fragile.
at the very moment when we witness sudden happiness in an individual, we are perturbed,
because we know that he is doomed.
with the refinement of a sadist, Dos nurses the happiness of his hero before punishing him.
he does not strike a tired, sick body;
he gives the blow on a day when the individual is in his prime,
when his hopes are being fulfilled.
D is arrested at the height of amorous intoxication.
he is charged with parricide, (murder of a close relative)
and his protestations of innocence are of no avail;
all the evidence points to him as the criminal.

Smer, the actual murderer of their father,
plays the role of the diabolical double that is so dear to Dos.
what torture for an honest man to meet the embodiment of everything
dirty, unavowed, forgotten, beastly and cowardly that is buried in himself!
you are serene, you accept yourself
-and then suddenly you are confronted with an individual who is offal, the cesspool of yourself,
who is yourself in what is most vicious in yourself.
in his corrupt mouth, your noblest words sound like obvious stupidities;
in his narrow mind, your noblest ideas are turned against you.

thus I D walks his own alter ego like an ape on a leash.
he hates Smer; Smer is gratified by this hatred and commits murder
because he believes that he is thereby obeying a secret order from his master.
what has been only a vague hope in the heart of I K
is suddenly transformed into a monstrous actuality that horrifies him.
because of Smer who realizes the criminal intention of his master,
Ivan is guilty no longer of a dream but of a deed.
Smer stands for the fusion of the idea and the act,
he symbolizes the negation of spiritual irresponsibility, the punishment of the freethinker.

'you yourself, he says to i, have strongly desired your father's death...
you were incapable of killing him yourself,but you hoped that someone else would do it'.

I questions himself, tries to be reasonable, is troubled.
'yes, i have been waiting for this, and if so,  it is true that i wanted to kill him'.
and he asks his conscience, 'did i desire my father's death to this extent?'

I is guilty because of this thought, this intention.

'you have killed him, you are the chief murderer.
i was only your helper, Smer insists.
the lackey proceeds to reveal the origin of his crime to his master.
the truth is that he committed murder because there was nothing to stop him.
thanks to the speeches of i, the intellectual,
Smer understood that 'everything is permissible' in this world.
if there is no God, there is no hell.
'if God does not exist, there is no such thing as being virtuous,
virtue is useless.
that is the way i reasoned'.

having thus negated the rules of common morality, having jumped over the wall,
Smer confuses freedom with license.
he commits murder and his act involves I who declared the
'evedrything is permissible',
and D, who said, 'why does such a man exist?'

I is innocent before human justice, but nothing can justify himself in his own eyes.
because he negates God, he is faced with Smer.
instead of superman, he discovers the ape;
instead of the luminous ladder, he perceives the abyss;
instead of defying superior reason, he is faced with madness.
this intelligent, educated, gifted man begins to suffer from hallucinations;
he undergoes a split of personality, he sees the devil and this devil is himself.
'it is myself, but with a different face...
you express my own thought....
only you have chosen my most foolish thoughts;
you are stupid and trivial'.

Ivan K is Dos, whom 'God has tortured all his life'.
I's blasphemous negations are Dos's own negations in his moments of doubt.
'these fools have not even dreamed of the power of negation that i have overcome', he writes.
and when I K says, 'can one accept universal harmony at the price of the tears of one little martyred child?'
it is Dos himself who speaks. (through I in the story)

I was to Dos what Smer is to I
-the embodiment of all that was odious in himself.
I was that part of the author's soul which he wanted to cast away
and the masterful punishment of his author.

shining above these wretched beings are two luminous figures, Aliosha and the starets Zosima.
the youngest of the brothers K is a novice in a peaceful monastery with big white walls,
but he is not a real mystic.
Dos writes of him, 'A was in no way a fanatic nor even, i think, a mystic.
he was simply a philanthropist ahead of his time'.

this boy is perfectly balance, perfectly adjusted to reality
and he has a serene confidence in God.
to be sure, he believes in miracles but he is not troubled by them;
they are the crowning of his faith, not its foundation.
'for a realist faith is not born of miracles; miracles are born of faith'.

thus A is a 'realist', a complete human being.
unlike Myshkin (the main character in the Idiot), he is of this world,
he is capable of understanding the views of his brothers and father;
he is not a stranger in relation to the sinners around him.
therefore his merit in resisting all temptations is the greater.
the starets Z tells him, 'this is what i think of you:
you will go forth from these walls and live like a monk in the world.
you will have many adversaries, but even your enemies will love you.
life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find happiness in misfortune;
you will bless life, and you will make others bless it
and this is what matters most'.

A was doubtless modeled on shidlovsky, Dos childhood friend,
and Soloviov, the philosopher with the face of Christ.
as for Z, we have seen that this character was inspired by
Tikhon Zadonsky and Father Ambrosius of the optina pustin monastery.

'the starets, writes Dos, is a man who absorbs your soul and your will in his own'.
he is a powerful confessor who rules the monastery by virtue of his extreme clairvoyance and the serene shrewdness of his advice.
'many say that as a result of receiving,for many years,
all those who came to pour out their hearts to him, eager for advice and consolation,
he finally acquired great perspicacity.
he would cast one glance at a stranger and guess why he had come, what he needed,
and even what tormented his conscience'.

like A, Z was a man before becoming a saint.
he lived among his fellow men and served in the army.
when he decided to become a monk he was motivated
not by despair or intellectual conviction, but by love.
Z's doctrine is a doctrine of love and joy.

the strarets repeats the words of his young brother,
'life is a paradise in which we all dwell, but we refuse to recognize this'.
he says also, 'everyone of us is guilty before all men, for all men, for everything'.

all men are united by universal sympathy and the villainy of any one man
has repercussions on the rest.
evil is not confined to single criminal and his direct victim; it spreads like a grease spot.
those who unconsciously desire evil are affected by it even if they do no evil
and those who have realized such desires in themselves without condemning them also suffer.
even those who know nothing of crime are mysteriously accomplices in it.

we are all responsible, defiled, unhappy.
we have stolen with the burglar whose face we do not know,
we have murdered with the parricide about whom we read in the newspapers,
raped with the lewd,
cursed with the blasphemous.
each of us bends under the sin of the world.
and yet all of us will be saved.
A says, 'man cannot commit a sin that can exhaust God's infinite love.
believe that God loves you more that you can conceive,
that he loves you in your sin and with your sin...
if you love, you belong to God.
love redeems everything, saves everything'.

Z does not summon the believer to embrace rigorous monastic rule,
to practice asceticism, to whimper with contrition.
he asks men only to admit their faults and to love.
what matters is not the result achieved, but the effort to achieve it.
when the proud man bows his head, he is closer to God than a lackey who falls on his knees,
because the proud man has had to struggle with himself in order to offer to God this sign of human modesty,
while the lackey prostrates himself by habit.

'do what you can
(note: 'agonize to enter the narrow door, for many will seek to enter and will not be able. luke 13.24)
and it will be taken into account.
that which seems to you wicked in you is purified by the very fact that you have realized it....
at the moment when you realize with horror that despite your efforts you are not only closer to your goal,
but have moved away from it, at that moment you will achieve your goal and you will behold...
the savior who, without you knowing it, has lovingly guided you'.

Z and A are bathed in the same blessed light.
they love and this is sufficient to gain the sympathy of simple people and children,..

the intellectual attacks this serene philosophy.
I K fights the serene faith of his brother with the diabolical arguments of the Grand Inquisitor.

(note: a man judging God!? how queer! how futile..and fatal!
 'for what if some did not believe?
shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?
God forbid.
yea let God be true, but every man a liar;
as it is written, that Thou mightest be justified in Thy sayings
and mightest overcome when Thou art judged'. romans 3.3-4)
the legend that i relates to A is the culmination of The brothers K
and probably the testament of Dos' literary career.
it sums up everything, illumines everything and is truly Dos's last word.

in seville, during the inquisition, Christ appears among the crowd.
He is recognized at once.
people throng around Him and beg Him for miracles.
J performs the miracles asked of Him.
then the Grand Inquisitor, a man of 90 with a dried up face and hollow eyes,
orders the arrest of the savior.
at night, the Grand Inquisitor visits Jesus in the dungeon.
'why have You come to disturb us', he says. For you do disturb us'
the old man proceeds to read a terrible indictment against Jesus.
the Grand Inquisitor does not believe in God or man.
he does not believe in God because he refuses to heed the savior's words,
'you have no right to add one word to what you have said
he does not believe in man because he maintains that the christian doctrine
goes beyond the moral strength of mankind.

he rejects the synthesis of the human and divine priciple in freedom.
'I want to make you free, Jesus had said,
but by proclaiming the freedom of choice between good and evil,
Jesus proclaimed man's responsibility, condemned man to the torments of his conscience
and made him the object of a whole machinery of suffering,
in which remorse, temptation and hope are inextricably mixed.
FREEDOM IS INCONCEIVABLE WITHOUT SUFFERING.
freedom can be bought only at the price of suffering.
and christianity is above all a religion of suffering.

thus man is confronted with a dilemma;
on the one hand, independence with moral torture,
on the other, well being through submission.
what will be his choice?

the Grand Inquisitor chooses for him.
Christ, he maintains, has overestimated the strength of His creatures
in imposing the ordeal of freedom on them.
'have you forgotten that man prefers peace, even death, to the freedom of choosing between good and evil?
man's great goal is happiness, and the task of the church is to organize his happiness on earth.
thus the church loves man better than Christ loves him
since Christ has placed an excessively heavy burden on his shoulders.

'because You placed man too high,
You acted pitilessly toward him,
You demanded too much of him'.
the ideal of Jesus in the form that it assumes in the gospels
can be realized only by a few chosen spirits.
christianity is an aristocratic religion and as such impossible.
religion is intended for the masses
and if must propose a way of life that can be followed by the masses.
it must bring comfort to fools, cowards, perverts and the sick.
it must be accessible to the lowest of mankind;
it must be vulgar.
in the place of freedom, uncertainty and spiritual suffering,
the Grand Inquisitor wants to give man a euclidean

(only one line may be drawn through a given point to a given parallel line...
note: here, the point seems,
the church's approach to God is the one line and Jesus' command the other...
the first possible and bringing good (as viewed by the Self)
and the second bringing continual trouble...ala luke 13.24 AGONIZE to enter the narrow door
for many will seek to enter and will not be able)

organization of the world.
at this point the Grand Inquisitor embraces Shigalev's
(think he was a revolutionary, a nihilist?, in st. petersburg)
doctrine.
he takes care of the crowd and defends the hungry and the weak.
he promises them not heavenly bread but earthly bread.
'You (Jesus) have promised them heavenly bread,
but can it compare with earthly bread, in the eyes of this weak human race,
eternally wicked and eternally ungrateful?...
to us, it is the weak who are precious'.
this religion of earthly bread is identical with the atheist socialism of The Possessed.

the Grand Inquisitor proclaims the ideal of mediocre happiness,
as against great spiritual aspirations:
'we shall give them the quiet happiness of weak creatures, such as they are by nature...
yes, we shall set them to work,
but in their leisure hours we shall organize their life like a child's game,
with childish songs, choruses and innocent dances.
oh, we shall allow them even sin, because they are weak and helpless'.
(note: and liquidate them if their 'sin' hinders our grand vision for mankind?)

it was in the name of man's freedom that Christ in the desert refused to succumb to the first temptation,
that of earthly bread.
according to the Grand Inquisitor, this was his first error.

His second error was His wish to be loved freely.
men cannot believe when guided by their hearts alone.
they need a certainty.
the divine promise is unintelligible to them,
it is enveloped in too much mystery, too much silence, too many allusions.
'You have chosen the strangest, most enigmatic, most indeterminate things
-everything that exceeds man's strength'.
man wants to be terrorized, enslaved,
he wants to be convinced of the inexorable NECESSITY of worshiping.

Christ allowed Himself to be crucified like a thief,
He bled on the cross and His death was witnessed by women in tears.
because He desired that man's love should not be won by miracles,
He moved away from man and lost him.
'You wanted a freely accorded love, not the servile passion of a terrified slave.
here again You overestimated man'.

thus the second temptation, that of authority,
is complemented by the third temptation, that of the miracle.

the Grand Inquisitor accepts these three temptations that Christ rejected.
he corrects the work of Christ by basing it on earthly bread, on authority and on miracles.
'and men rejoiced at being led again in a herd
and delivered from the fatal gift that caused them such torment'.

thus, christianity is no longer the religion of the elite but the religion of all.
the church betrays God out of love for man.
it uses Christ to symbolize not a spiritual but a social order.
it sets up 'christian communism'.
it formulates rigid duties, bourgeois
(concern with property values, respectability...strictly middle class)
theories and gives promises of absolution, pardon and eternal life
to reassure its lamentable flock.
rites, festivals and professions of faith are the official pageantry of the Divine Presence.
supernatural mystery is transformed into fairy tales for young persons
who partake of the sacrament for the first time.
it multiplies bells, incense, pictures and sculptures.
it mobilizes all the arts, all the senses, to dazzle the masses.
it diminishes God, offering him for sale like a commodity.

(note: witness the only instance of GREAT ANGER by Jesus in driving 'sales' our from His Father's house.)

and its triple lie, its triple blasphemy, is so cleverly contrived that no one dreams of denouncing it.
the church disavows Christ while extolling His (note: rabbit foot?) work.
it is the last refuge of atheism.
and men will burn Christ rather than renounce the facile dogmas
that the Grand Inquisitor has forged for them.
'they will cling to us with terror, like a young brood under their mother's wing...'

'if anyone deserves the stake more than all others, it is You', says the Inquisitor to Christ.
'tomorrow i shall order You to be burned'.

Christ approaches the Inquisitor and kisses his bloodless lips.
the old man shivers, opens the door and says,
'go away and don't come back'.

it is noteworthy that I, the atheist, exemplifies the divorce between religion and the church.
he attacks not Christ but the church, he defends not atheism, but unwittingly the true faith.
he, more than anyone else, stresses the supreme moral beauty of Christ,
his wish to be loved for His own sake.

according to Dos, the catholic theocracy alone is guilty of
having stolen the word of Christ for imperialistic purposes.
yet the byzantine orthodoxy can be accused of the same crime;
in fact any ecclesiastical system incurs the reproach of caesarism.
throughout its history the church has fought against the temptation
of denying spiritual freedom.
and yet the true mystery of Christ is the mystery of freedom.
the meaning of calvary is the assertion of man's perfect freedom of choice.
victorious divine truth would have compelled the allegiance of human souls apart from love.
crucified divine truth, truth humiliated, lacerated, covered with spittle and pus,
does not impose itself on man.
man believes not because but notwithstanding.
the act of faith in the presence of this corpse that is like any other corpse is perfectly free.
and Dos invites us to this free faith that is incomprehensible and logically inadmissible.

faced with the problem of God, I K rejects the theological explanation of the world.
he evokes the memory of all human suffering.
in his eyes the expiation of wrongdoers in eternity does not redeem the horrors
for which they were responsible during their earthly existence ;
'what is the use of all the hellish sufferings of the doomed, if a child has been tortured to death?'
moreover, he asks, 'where is harmony, if there is still a hell?
i want to forgive and to reconcile myself.
i do not desire that there should be more suffering'.
the explanation supplied by the church is oversimplified.
something more that the give and take principle is needed.  but what?

'how can i conceive anything about a God who is too high for me? he says.

thus this atheist does not deny God;
he rejects the possibility of conceiving Him.
to want God is not to be an atheist any longer.
to insult God, is to believe in God.
I's passionate negation is directed against the God of the church,
against the administrative, factitious, familiar God of the Grand Inquisitor.
I refuses to admit a God comprehensible to the human mind,
justified by human syllogisms and brought down to earth by humans.
'God is not of this world'.
he can only be a riddle, a hope.
the church spoils this hope by making it specific.

having thus reached the threshold of true faith, I withdraws.
he is filled with admiration because the idea of God could germinate in man's obtuse (not quick
or alert in perception) mind.
did God create man or did man create God?

I does not want to know the answer to this question.
before this world that is a failure,
before this God who does not even illumine His work,
I 'returns his entrance ticket', saying: 'i do not accept it, i refuse to accept it'.
and he renounces God out of love for mankind, as did the Grand Inquisitor in the legend.

having refused God, I becomes satanic.
I K is the devil.
he sees the devil in a delirium and this devil is himself.
the devil knows God, yet rejects Him.
'i was there, he says to I , when the Word expiring on the cross
ascended to heaven taking with Him the soul of the good thief who was crucified...
at that moment i should have liked to join all the choirs and cry hosannah with them....
but in view of my duties...i was compelled to repress a beautiful gesture and remain in my ignominy'.

thanks to the devil, i at last discovers the reasons for his own atheism.;
because of his desire to measure himself against God,
to do without God,
to replace God,
he refuses the faith that PURSUES Him.
here we find the theme of the superman, the concept so dear to Dos:
'the human mind  will grow great,
it will rise as high as satanic pride and
this will be the era of deified mankind'.
but I is not at ease in his atheism.
he hurls a cup of tea at the devil, 'like a woman'.
he drives out the devil, he drives himself out.
for it is difficult to deny a presence that one perceives inwardly to be necessary.
he is one of those who voluntarily take the path to hell.
he is sick with God.
will he die of this sickness?

Aliosha looks upon his brother with horror and pity
and in the end gently disses his mouth, just as Christ kissed the Grand Inquisitor.
such an answer is the only possible answer of a christian to an atheist.
for he can oppose only love to logic.
faith cannot be explained, cannot be imposed at order.
myshkin, the idiot, says to hippolyte, the unbeliever,
'go your way and forgive us our happiness.'.

'God will be victorious, thinks A.
'either Ivan will be resurrected in the light of truth or he will succumb in hatred'.
and he prays for his brother, because there is no other way of saving him.