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The Brothers Karamazov
I can’t help thinking, with Pavel, his mother, and the story of Gregory and Marfa’s child in mind, that the gene pool in a Russian village of serfs must be quite shallow. I wonder if this is another instance where the local farmers know to bring in distant studs for their animals but marry way too close to home generation after generation. Or perhaps, as in On the Black Hill, the farmers are actually smarter about this than society would let on.
We’ve been teased with the idea that Pavel is possibly another Karamazov brother, but it seems we are not to hear any more about it at the moment.
p139 ...He [Pavel Smerdyakov] was a young man of about twenty-four, remarkably unsociable and self-contained. Not that he was shy or bashful. On the contrary, he was conceited and seemed to despise everybody.
p140 ... He was brought up by Gregory and Marfa. But he grew up "with no sense of gratitude," as Gregory expressed it. He was an unfriendly boy, and seemed to look at the world with suspicion. [Just to refresh your memory, he is probably Fyodor's natural son by the ascetic dwarf and Fyodor gave him the name Smerdyakov which means Stinker.] In his childhood he liked to hang cats and bury them with great ceremony. He used to dress up in a sheet as though it were a surplice, and sing and wave some object over the dead cat as though it were a censer. [I wonder how much of this is psychology and how much a comment on religion] All this he did on the sly, with greatest secrecy. Gregory caught him once and beat him. He shrank into a corner and sulked there for a week. "He doesn't care for you or me, the beast," Gregory used to say to Marfa. "He doesn't care for anyone." Then speaking directly to the boy, he asked: "Are you a human being? You're not a human being. You grew from the mildew in the bathhouse. That's what you are." [This is the man who's only natural child was a "monster" in his own words, and who turned to religion after the child died and who raised Pavel upon finding him and his dying mother and seemed to view it as God making up for the mistake of the natural child] Smeryakov, it appeared afterwards, could never forgive Gregory those words. Gregory... began teaching him the Scriptures. But this teaching came to nothing. At the second or third lesson the boy suddenly grinned.
"What are you grinning for?" asked Gregory, looking at him threateningly from under his glasses.
"Oh, nothing. God created light on the first day, and the sun and moon, and stars on the fourth day. Where did the light come from on the first day?"
Definitely sounds like Ivan's half brother. What's interesting about this, if you are willing to interpret the meaning of "day" rather loosely, is that, according to the Big Bang theory, the universe would have begun as a hot plasma and it would have taken considerable time for stars to form.
Gregory was thunderstruck. the boy looked sarcastically at his teacher... Gregory could not restrain himself. "I'll show you where!" he cried, and gave the boy a slap on the cheek. The boy took the slap without a word, but withdrew into his corner again for some days. A week later he had his first attack of the disease to which he was subject all the rest of his life -- epilepsy.
[This from Wiki about epilepsy, "The ancient Greeks had contradictory views of the disease. They thought of epilepsy as a form of spiritual possession, but also associated the condition with genius and the divine. One of the names they gave to it was the sacred disease."]
...
...[As part of his scant education] Fyodor Karamazov gave him Evenings in a Cottage near Dikanka.
[Wiki translates this as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. It's a collection of short stories by Gogol.]
p141 Smerdyakov read a little, but didn't like it. He did not once smile, and ended by frowning.
"Why? Isn't it funny?" asked Fyodor Karamozov.
Smerdyakov did not answer.
"Answer, stupid!"
"it's all untrue," mumbled the boy.
"Then go to the devil! You have the soul of a lackey. Wait. Here's a book, Universal History. It's all true. Read it."
But Smeryakov did not get through ten pages of the history. He found it dull. So the bookcase was closed again.
...
p142 [He is sent to Moscow to be trained as a cook] ...Moscow itself had little interest for him; he saw very little there, and took scarcely any notice of anything. He went once to the theater, but returned silent and displeased with it. On the other hand, he came back to us... well dressed, in a clean coat and clean linen. He brushed his clothes most scrupulously twice a day and was very fond of cleaning his smart calf boots with a special English polish, so that they shone like mirrors.
He turned out to be a first-rate cook. Fyodor Karamazov paid him a salary, almost the whole of which Smerdyakov spent on clothes, pomade, perfumes, and such things. But he seemed to have as much contempt for the female sex as for men; he was discreet, almost unapproachable, with them...
p143 If it had occurred to anyone to wonder at the time what the young man was interested in, and what was on his mind, it would have been impossible to tell by looking at him. Yet he would sometimes stop suddenly in the house, or in the yard or street, and stand still for ten minutes, lost in thought. Studying his face one would have said that there was no thought in it, no reflection, but only a sort of contemplation.
...
There are a good many "contemplatives" among our peasants. And Smerdyakov was probably one of them. And he was probably greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why.
What an odd section. What an odd character. I wonder if the description of his interest in his personal appearance is meant to suggest bourgeois values? My first time through, I mostly ignored Pavel but he is certainly important to Dostoyevsky.
Book III. 7-8.
Better and better. Both ideas and intense plot and characterization all at the same time. I suspect serialization would have been the cure for the New Novel... but that’s not fair since I still haven’t actually read those people. Fyodor is such a great Christian character, like Goethe’s Faust he is a challenge to the forgiving nature of God and can only be forgiven through the mysterious working of the female heart... which Dostoyevsky is also playing with in Katerina. Of course all this is the view of several questionable men: Goethe and Dostoyevsky. How much is just wish fulfillment is a reasonable question.
Back to the popular nature of this book, it’s interesting what Dostoyevsky chooses to use to entertain his audience. Along with love and sex and debauchery, we also have a fair amount of theology here. The Christians would be interested in the debate between Pavel and Gregory, while the liberals would find Ivan of interest. Everyone gets something.
Book III. 7.
p144 [Story about a Russian soldier captured and "threatened with an immediate and agonizing death if he didn't renounce Christianity and follow the Mohammedan faith." The soldier refuses, is tortured and dies.]
...
"Well, my opinion is," Smeryakov began suddenly, and unexpectedly, in a loud voice, "that if that solder's exploit was so very great there would have been, to my thinking, no sin if he had in such an emergency renounced, so to speak, the name of Christ and his own christening. By doing this he would have saved his life, for good deeds. And through these good deeds he could, through the years, have atoned for his cowardice."
"How could it not be a sin? You're talking nonsense. For that you'll go straight to hell and be roasted like mutton," put in Fyodor Karamazov.
...
p145 "As for mutton, that's not so. There'll be nothing in hell . . . And there shouldn't be either, if it's according to justice," Smerdyakov maintained stoutly.
...
"...For as soon as I say to those enemies: 'No, I'm not a Christian, and I curse my true God,' then at once, by God's high judgement, I become accursed and am cut off from the Holy Church. It is exactly as though I were a heathen. At that very instant, not only when I say it aloud, but when I think of saying it, before a quarter of a second has passed, I am cut off. Is that so or not, Gregory?"
A variation on this line of reasoning will be central to the tragedy of Dmitri later on.
"Ivan," cried the old Karamazov suddenly, "stoop down, I want to whisper to you. . . . He's got this all up for your benefit. He wants you to praise him. Praise him."
...
"...For at the very moment I have become accursed, at that same highest moment... my christening is taken off me and becomes to no avail..."
...
"And if I've ceased to be a Christian, then I told no lie to the enemy when they asked whether I was a Christian or not a Christian. I had already been relieved by God Himself of my Christianity by reason of the thought alone... And if I have already been discharged, in what manner and with what sort of justice can I be held responsible as a Christian in the other world for having denied Christ... If I'm no longer a Christian, then I can't renounce Christ, for I've nothing then to renounce. Who will hold an unclean Tartar responsible, Gregory, even in heaven, for not having been born a Christian? And who would punish him for that... [and so on]
...
Book III. 8.
p149 [Fyodor] "...Smerdyakov always pokes himself in now, after dinner. It's you he's so interested in, Ivan. What have you done to fascinate him?" he added.
p150 "Nothing whatever," answered Ivan. "He likes to think well of me. He's a lackey and a low person. Raw material for revolution when the time comes."
"Revolution?"
"there will be others and better ones. But there will be some like him as well. His kind will come first, and better ones after."
"And when will the time come?"
"The rocket will go off and fizzle out. So far the peasants are not very interested in listening to these soup-makers."
"Ah, but a Balaam's ass like that thinks and thinks, and only the devil knows what he's thinking."
"He's storing up ideas," said Ivan smiling.
"You see, I know he can't stand me, nor anyone else, even you, Ivan, though you think he has a high opinion of you. Worse still with Alyosha. He despises Alyosha. But he doesn't steal, and that's one thing. And he's not a gossip. He holds his tongue and doesn't talk about us in public. He makes excellent fish pies too. But, damn him, is he worth talking about so much?"
"Of course he isn't."
"And as for the ideas he may be hatching, the Russian peasant, generally speaking, needs beating. That I've always maintained. Our peasants are swindlers, and don't deserve to be pitied, and it's a good thing they are still flogged sometimes. Russia is rich in birches... I stand up for the clever people. We've given up beating the peasants, we've grown so clever, but they go on beating themselves. And a good thing too..."
...
"...At Mokroe I was talking to an old man, and he told me 'There's nothing we like so much as sentencing girls to be whipped, and we always give young men the job of beating them. And the girl he has whipped today, the young man will marry tomorrow. So it suits the girls, too,' he said. There's a set of de Sades for you! But it's clever anyway... Alyosha, don't be angry that I offended your Superior this morning. I lost my temper. If there is a God, if He exists, then, of course, I'm to blame, and I will have to answer for it. But if there isn't a God at all, what do they deserve, your Fathers? It's not enough to cut their heads off, for they keep back progress. Would you believe it, Ivan, that idea torments me? No, I see from your eyes that you don't believe me. You believe what people say, that I'm nothing but a buffoon...
p151 "...Ivan's arrogant. . . . I'd make an end of your monks, though, all the same. I'd take all that mystic stuff and suppress it, once and for all, all over Russia, so as to bring all the fools to reason. And the gold and the silver that would flow into the mint!"
"But why suppress it?" asked Ivan.
"That Truth may prevail. That's why."
"Well, if Truth were to prevail, you know, you'd be the first to be robbed and suppressed."
"Ah! I daresay you're right. Ah, I'm an ass!" cried the old Karamazov striking himself lightly on the forehead.
"Well, your monastery may stand then, Alyosha, if that's how it is. And we clever people will sit snug and enjoy our brandy. You know, Ivan, it must have been so ordained by the Almighty Himself. Ivan, speak, is there a God or not? Speak the truth, speak seriously..."
...
p152 "No, there is no God."
"Alyosha, is there a God?"
"There is."
"Ivan, and is there immortality of some sort, just a little, just a tiny bit?"
"There is no immortality either."
...
"There's absolute nothingness then. Perhaps there is just something? Anything is better than nothing!"
"Absolute nothingness."
Alyosha, is there immortality?"
"There is."
...
"God and immortality. In God is immortality."
"H'm! It's more likely Ivan's right. Good God! To think that faith, what force of all kinds, man has lavished for nothing on that dream, and for how many thousands of years. Who is it laughing at man? ..."
...
"It must be the devil," answered Ivan smiling.
"And the devil? Does he exist?"
"No, there's no devil either."
"It's too bad. . . . Damn it all, what wouldn't I do to the man who first invented God! Hanging on a bitter aspen tree would be too good for him."
"There would have been no civilization if they hadn't invented God," said Ivan.
"Wouldn't there have been? Without God?"
“No. And there would have been no brandy either..."
...
p153 [Fyodor about Zossima (or possibly someone else)] "...He's a Jesuit, a Russian one, that is. But since he's an honorable person there's a hidden indignation boiling within him at having to pretend holiness."
"But he believes in God."
"No. Didn't you know? Why, he tells everyone himself..."
"... But I respect him. There's something of Mephistopheles about him, or rather of 'The hero of our time.' . . . Arbenin, or what's his name? . . . You see, he's sensual..."
[It seems that Arbenin is a character in the verse play Masquerade by Lermontov. From Wiki, "The hero of the drama, Arbenin, is a wealthy young man endowed with a rebellious spirit and a strong will. Born into high society, he strives in vain to gain independence and freedom. He lives by the laws of his society, and, in trying to defend his honor while blinded by jealousy and pride, ends up murdering his wife."
A quick search on “Arbenin” turns up this nest of things to look into from
A Fallen Idol is Still a God: Lermontov and the Quandaries of Cultural Transition by Elizabeth Allen:
Notes to Pages 124-135
26. Makogonenko, for instance, argues that, by the mid 1830s, Lermontov, having discovered "the distance and alienation of Romanticist ideals from reality," had begun to "overcome" Romanticism (123). Thus, in order to explain whence and why evil has appeared and triumphed," Lermontov followed in the path of Pushkin and turned to Realism because "only realism could fulfill this task," as it had already done for "Pushkin the realist" (138).
27. ...I would note that by exposing the dangers of what might be termed a cultural ideology -- that is, the rigid, exclusionary embrace of a set of reigning ideas and ideals of a culture during a particular era -- Masquerade anticipates what Gary Saul Morson has labeled the later nineteeth-century "tradition" of the "negatively philosophical" Russian novel. Exemplified by such works as Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, Dostoyevsky's The Devils, and Tolstoy's War and Peace, this tradition, Morson contends, assailed "the faith in abstract ideas and ideologies so common among intelligentsia in pre-revolutionary Russia" ("Philosophy," 151) Although Morson stresses the blindness to the realities of Russian life wrought by political, social, and religious ideologies that these renowned Russian authors depicted, Lermontov's play arguably prefigures the tradition they established by illustrating how an ideology born of Romantic culture could be as pernicious as ideologies born of any other source.
Wiki has this about Lermontov and Masquerade:
Arrested, jailed and sent to the Caucasus in 1837, Lermontov dropped "Princess Ligovskaya" and never got back to it. Much more important to him was The Masquerade; written in 1835, it got re-worked several times – the author tried desperately to publish it. Close to French melodrama and influenced by Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas (but also owing a lot to Shakespeare, Griboyedov and Pushkin), Masquerade featured another hero whose wont was to 'throw a gauntlet' to the unsympathetic society and then get tired of his own conflicting nature, but was interesting mostly for its realistic sketches of the high society life, which Lermontov was getting more and more critical of.
Lermontov's fascination with Byron has never waned. "Having made the English pessimism a brand of his own, he's imparted it a strong national favour to produce the very special Russian spleen, which has been there always in the Russian soul... Devoid of cold skepticism or icy irony, Lermontov's poetry is full instead of typically Russian contempt for life and material values. This mix of deep melancholy on the one hand and wild urge for freedom on the other, could be found only in Russian folk songs," biographer Skabichevsky wrote.]
Book III. 9-10.
[These are plot filled sections that I really am not that interested in so I'm skipping them.]
Book III. 11.
...
p178 “Wait, Alyosha, one more confession to you alone!” cried Dmitri, suddenly turning back. “Look at me... You see here, here -- there’s terrible disgrace in store for me.” (As he said, “here,” Dmitri struck his chest with his fist with a strange air, as though the dishonor lay precisely on his chest, in some spot, in a pocket, perhaps, or hanging around his neck.) “You know me now, a scoundrel, a sworn scoundrel. But let me tell you that I’ve never done anything before and never will again, anything that can compare in baseness with the dishonor which I bear now at this very minute on my breast. Here, here, a dishonor which will come to pass, though I’m perfectly free to stop it. I can stop it or carry it through. remember that. Well, let me tell you, I will carry it through. I won’t stop it. I told you everything just now, but I didn’t tell you this, because even I am not bold enough. I can still prevent it. If I do, I can give back the full half of my lost honor tomorrow. But I won’t prevent it. I will carry out my plan, and you can bear witness that I told you so beforehand. Darkness and destruction! ... The filthy back alley and the she-devil... don’t pray for me, I’m not worth it....”
It has been taking me forever to process this book because it is so different than the rest of the books I’ve been blogging about. The reason I included this passage above is that it is the key to validating and making some sense of something surprising that will follow many books in the future. I couldn’t let it slip by though I didn’t think it pertained to the ideas in the book.
But I was wrong. What Dmitri is talking about here is a mirror of the shame that will soon plague Ivan. Both of them fall victim of something very like what Pavel was talking about with the soldier denying God to save his life... in the instant that he considered doing such a thing, he was guilty of it in fact. Both Dmitri and Ivan feel themselves dishonored (and “disgraced” may be an even better word for this) not so much for what they do but for what they fail to do... for what they wish for in a moment of weakness.
This relates to the discussion of religion in general and Christianity in particular. This is from Wiki:
Thus God is nothing else than human: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of a human's inward nature. This projection is dubbed as a chimera by Feuerbach, that God and the idea of a higher being is dependent upon the aspect of benevolence. Feuerbach [1841] states that, “a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God,” and continues to say that qualities are not suddenly denoted as divine because of their godly association. The qualities themselves are divine therefore making God divine, indicating that humans are capable of understanding and applying meanings of divinity to religion and not that religion makes a human divine.”
The force of this attraction to religion though, giving divinity to a figure like God, is explained by Feuerbach as God is a being that acts throughout humans in all forms. God, “is the principle of [man's] salvation, of [man's] good dispositions and actions, consequently [man's] own good principle and nature.” It appeals to humankind to give qualities to the idol of their religion because without these qualities a figure such as God would become merely an object, its importance would become obsolete, there would no longer be a feeling of an existence for God. Therefore, Feuerbach says, when humans remove all qualities from God, “God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being.” Additionally, because humans are imaginative, God is given traits and there holds the appeal. God is a part of a human through the invention of a God. Equally though, humans are repulsed by God because, “God alone is the being who acts of himself.”
I think a less “moral” definition of “divine” could be used here. People see in God what ever divine qualities they wish to see and they aren’t all like puppies and flowers.
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