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The Brothers Karamazov
Book III. 3.
Dmitri quotes Friedrich Schiller (Goethe's old friend) and invokes Silenus -- we are clearly in the right book. (The Brothers K. was published after Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations, but precedes all his other more famous works.)
Alyosha was not worried about his father and himself but he was worried about something else. He was worried about a woman, Katerina, who had so urgently begged him in the note handed to him by Madame Hohlakov to come and see her about something... Alyosha was not uneasy because he did not know what Katerina would speak about and what he must answer. And he was not afraid of her simply as a woman. Though he knew little of women, he had spent his life, from early childhood till he entered the monastery, entirely with women. He was simply afraid of Katerina. He had been afraid of her from the first time he saw her. He had only seen her two or three times, and had only said a few words to her. He thought of her as a beautiful, proud, domineering girl. But it was not her beauty which troubled him. It was something else. And the vagueness of his fear increased his apprehension. Katerina's aim was noble, he knew that. She was trying to save his brother Dmitri through generosity, although he had behaved very badly to her. Alyosha recognized and did justice to all these fine and generous sentiments, yet a chill came over him every time he drew near her house.
p113 ...Standing still for a minute, Alyosha reached a decision. Crossing with a rapid and accustomed gesture, and smiling, he turned and started toward his dread interview with Katerina.
[Taking a shortcut, Alyosha runs into Dmitri who is on the lookout for Grushenka, and they talk in a summerhouse in the garden.]
p117 ...I [Dmitri] should like to begin -- my confession -- with Schiller's 'Hymn to Joy.' [Wiki, but I'm confused because the poem below is not Schiller's "Ode to Joy" -- which was the basis of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and thus the Romantic theme Adrian reverses or takes back in Doctor Faustus. The only version of this I can find online is attributed to Anonymous or else links back to Dostoyevsky] I don't know German, I only know it's called that. Don't think I'm talking nonsense because I'm drunk. I'm not a bit drunk. Brandy's all very well, but I need two bottles to make me drunk.
p118 Silenus with his rosy phiz
Upon his stumbling ass.
But I haven't drunk a quarter of a bottle, and I'm not Silenus. I'm not Silenus, though I am strong, for I've made a decision once and for all. Don't be uneasy...
He raised his head thought a moment and began with enthusiasm:
"Wild and fearful in his cavern
Hid the naked troglodyte
And the homeless nomad wandered
Laying waste the fertile plain.
Menacing with spear and arrow
In the woods the hunter strayed. . . .
Woe to all poor wretches stranded
On those cruel and hostile shores!
"From the peak of high Olympus
Came the mother Ceres down,
Seeking in those savage regions
Her lost daughter Proserpine...
"From the fields and from the vineyards
Came no fruits to deck the feats, [feasts?]
Only flesh of blood-stained victims
Smoldered on the altar-fires,
And where'er the grieving goddess
Turns her melancholy gaze,
Sunk in vilest degradation
Man his loathsomeness displays."
p119 Dmitri broke into tears and grabbed Alyosha's hand. "Alyosha! Alyosha! In degradation, in degradation now, too. There's a terrible amount of suffering for man on earth, a terrible lot of trouble. Don't think I'm only a brute in an officer's uniform, wallowing in dirt and drink. I hardly think of anything but of that degraded man -- if only I'm not lying. I pray God I'm not lying and showing off. I think about that man because I am that man myself.
Would he purge his soul from vileness
And attain to light and worth,
He must turn and cling forever
To his ancient Mother Earth.
But the difficulty is how am I to cling forever to Mother Earth. I don't kiss her. I don't cling to her bosom. Am I to become a peasant or a shepherd? [Tolstoy would probably say "yes"] I go on and I don't know whether I'm going into darkness or to light and joy. That's the trouble. Everything in the world is a riddle! And whenever I've happened to sink into the vilest degradation (and it's always been happening) I always read that poem about Ceres and man. Has it reformed me? Never! For I'm a Karamazov. For when I do leap into the pit, I go headlong with my heels up, and I'm pleased to be falling and pride myself on it. And in the very depths of that degradation I begin a hymn of praise. Let me be accursed. Let me be vile and base, only let me kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is shrouded. Though I may be following the devil, I am Thy son, O Lord, and I love Thee. And I feel the joy without which the world cannot stand.
Joy everlasting fosters
The soul of all creation
It is her secret ferment fires
The cup of life with flame.
'Tis at her beck the grass hath turned
Each blade towards the light
And solar systems have evolved
From chaos and dark night,
Filling the realms of boundless space
Beyond the sage's sight.
p120
At bounteous nature's kindly breast,
All things that breathe drink Joy,
And birds and beasts and creeping things
All follow where She leads.
Her gifts to man are friends in need,
The wreath, the foaming must, [?]
To angels -- vision of God's throne,
To insects -- sensual lust.
So this is where the title of the 1995 movie Angels and Insects comes from. (Though maybe not, see my note above about the origin of this poem.) Just now, as I'm getting ready to publish this, it occurs to me that Dmitri does in fact bear a certain resemblance to Silenus. You could imagine him as a distant reincarnation of Silenus; unconscious of his true status but still drunken and wise in a rather unfocused way.
...I want to tell you now about the insects to whom God gave 'sensual lust.'
...
I am that insect, Alyosha, and it is said of me especially. All we Karamazovs are such insects. And angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest -- worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because if has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets before us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. [Is he looking at beauty in a "thing in itself" way, because you certainly could. The Karamazovs certainly represent fallen mankind here.] I am not an educated nor a cultured man, Alyosha, but I've thought a lot about this, It's terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve them as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad, too broad. I'd have him narrower, The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man. But a man always talks of his own ache...
There is a hint of the Madonna–whore complex here. But then that seems to be a staple of most Russian literature.
There follows Dmitri's story of his romance with Katerina and then Grushenka but I'm going to take a break as there is just so much to think about in every section of this book.
Butterflies to caterpillars
Earllier, I chanced to glance in the window of one of the conference rooms here at the Bank Cafe, and it was full of elderly people. The back row was all small, white, white haired women with moderately short hairdos. It occurred to me that those women were probably much more colorful -- and also taller -- 60 years ago. Instead of having hair of a uniform color and style, in all likelihood they then celebrated a whole range of colors and styles. I didn’t notice their clothes or their body types, but I imagine that those were probably more uniform now as well. Just the opposite of butterflies. (I guess I have to blame this analogy on Thomas Mann and his glasswings.)
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